If you are taking the time to read this page, I'm going to assume I'm preaching to one of at least two kinds of readers.  Either you are a fellow librarian, prepared to toast another eloquent diatribe about how librarians are no longer old spinsters owned by cats, or you are a hard-core Net Surfer reading this at 3:00am, smoking a pack of cigs with or without your parents permission and jacked up on Diet Coke.  In any case, this means I don't have to defend myself against accusations of Nerdom.  I'll either be preaching to the converted, or asking the Pot, "Hey, why do you have to talk down to the Kettle like that?"

Anyone who still sees librarians as repressed, blue-haired old maids with a fixation on Silence! hasn't really known any librarians.  I don't have to tell any of you about how tattooed, gay, straight, male, female-empowered, enlightened, New-Aged, Conservative, cool, uncool, soft, tough, grouchy, friendly, crazy, sane, and just damn-well educated we all are.  (insert golf-clap here)

We're a complicated people, and no one understands us but our lovers.

But I would like to point out one thing for any of you who haven't actually heard about this:  Librarians supposedly have the highest job satisfaction rate of any other profession.  How cool is that?  Think about it.  How many librarians do you know who would trade their profession for anything other than actually being paid huge amounts of money?  Bearing that in mind, I wonder how many of these money-makers end up going back to their first love after they've made enough to retire?  I would.

We are in this profession because we have an innate love of personal and societal freedom, and express this in our dress, our writings, our philosophies, and our lifestyles.  We think about these prosaic things far too much than is good for our salaries.  By that I mean, rather than stand up or walk out when the budget cuts come as they inevitably do -- fiscally justifying and promoting ourselves in ways both the financial committees and our professional organizations can understand -- we suck in our guts and take the cuts.  We find ways to creatively dodge the bullets as best we can because we feel that the survival of education and freedom of knowledge rests on our shoulders.  We're not too wrong about that, as anyone who has read Jefferson would know, but I personally feel we could communicate this self-evident truth a little more effectively than our starting wages, and our paraprofessional wages reflect.  No, I don't think I'm being an infidel to say we need to know how to speak the language of the bottom-line in order to accomplish our ideals.  I'm saying it's possible to do so.  (This from someone who has done both collection development and acquisitions.)

Does this make me a nerd?  Probably.  A nerd among nerds.  But only if being a nerd means hiding my hard-bitten individuality and off-beat humor behind a thin facade of sweet chick-next-doorness.

So.  If you can get blood from a turnip ... sue me.