Zen and the Art of Interning

Recently, I was able to attend a library conference hosted by Big Corporate Internship held in our building. It was pretty interesting. Here’s a few things I noticed.

1) Librarians are really loud. People were complaining and slamming their office doors in protest and stuff. That made me giggle a little.
2) It was virtually all women- and the men were about ten years younger on average, though because there were literally only three men in the room if you discounted one of the company’s editors, and one of them couldn’t have been much older than myself.
3) Boy, they don’t mess around about what books they want people to push. They open with one book which also gets an author Q&A and was the focus of a big book giveaway, plus a special speech by the children’s publisher and one by the editor. The rest? Eh, who knows. Big thing here, come and get it. Hot off the press.
4) An interesting note about covers. I thought that book was some touchy-feely tragic teen romance. That’s not entirely inaccurate, but the author likened it to a Handmaiden’s Tale (an excellent, classic dystopian) and mentioned that the problem was that women only live to 20 and men to 25, creating a population problem which reminded me of Logan’s Run, and coincidentally, I actually just watched the movie version of Logan that very morning at like 4 AM. Because y’know. I lead a blessed existence. Without insomnia, I’d have no culture at all. Anyway, once I actually heard the premise of the book, I had to agree that it was a good cover, but I think that must be one of the hardest jobs in publishing- making a cover attractive, explain enough in so little space to outsiders to give them an idea of the contents and have something that resonates closely enough with the text to feel right to people who are actually reading it.
So, I moved some things around, but it was nothing compared to the heavy lifting and things I had done for the event earlier in the week. I had to pop out really early because time stands still for no man and I work for three different departments, so yeah. But it got my Friday started on a good note.
Naturally, Karma decided to crack me upside the head as soon as I got back to my desk. One of my three bosses wanted me to create a bunch of new lists for professional conventions of what books to send for display there. And the only interesting one: North East Political Science Association’s deadline was already past, so I wound up not doing it. I had to move straight on to Gerontology. Egh.
Naturally, every book was something like “Last Days” or “Mind Over Menopause” and I was starting to really hate myself. Then I remembered the Zen (Chan in China) tradition of masters asking answerless questions of their followers to meditate upon for hours at a time until it drives them absolutely ape shit. So I decided that if Karma had declared war on me, I’d fight back with everything I’ve got. I am not a number! I am student rc81201n! Anyway, I asked myself “What the hell is wrong with me?” and after about 3 seconds of quiet meditation sitting in the lotus position with my hands folded in a Mudra in the shape of Mt. Meru, I got a cramp and decided “Don’t Worry; Be Happy” was a good enough solution. That Lotus/Meru crap is too Tibetan for Zen anyway. And never mind that the exercise is supposed to be about the process of meditation and not the end result. Considering Zen Monks have been ordained for declaring that Buddha was a pound of Flax and then smashing urns filled with rice, my answer seemed good enough for a first try. They love that spontaneous nonsensical crap.
Not one to rest on my laurels or my lotus (?), I returned to work and saw my next title was “Dare to be 100.” I couldn’t help it. I immediately began composing a song titled “Dare to be Senile” hence parodying Weird Al parodying The Talking Heads and suddenly all was right with the world. Apart from the stares of colleagues.