Why Jack Keruoac, Joel Osteen, and Marvel Comics can take all their books and shove them up their road-tripping, stupidly grinning, zombie asses.

AND LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE.

*ahem*

I worked yesterday. Supposedly in the cafe, and supposedly with people all day long, thus freeing me to drink free iced tea, play my cell phone, and debate the various shortcomings of UWM's Foreign Language Department. (And there are many, let me tell you. In one afternoon, Kim and I came up with like seventeen.)

But Pam was in a tasking mood, and instead I was pulled from the cafe and was shown to a display, handed a piece of paper with a bunch of titles on it, and told to redo it. Sounds easy, except there was no room on any shelves for the eighteen thousand titles currently on the display. Resolving that issue involved about an hour of me perched on top of a ladder up at the overstock shelves trying to alphabetize Jodi Picoult's thirty-second title (I swear to God, that woman is the most prolific not-that-great-author of our generation. Shelves and shelves have been devoted to her drivel.) while bemoaning the fact that Nicholas Sparks is allowed to live and write in our world.

Because Nicholas Sparks is evil.

He is everything that is wrong with women in general today. He is sappy, and mopey, and love-sick, but not in a good way, just in a way that makes me want to retch.

And I'm convinced he is a woman.

(Halfway through my hour-long internal tirade against Mr. Sparks, a sweet little girl who was probably about eleven or twelve came up and asked me where The Notebook was. I showed her the cheapest copy I could find, and tried desperately to find a way to let the clueless father accompanying her that this was a VERY adult book, with actual not just and-then-they-kissed sex scenes, and that perhaps a little girl dulled by the Ryan Gosling/Rachel McAdams cutsiness shouldn't be reading it, but there is no way to say that without sounding like a creep. So he's just going to have to deal with the questions later on...)

Finally, I got all the crap back on the shelves, and went off to find the new books that would fill the display instead of Nicholas an his ovaries.

This posed a problem. Because they were all graphic novels.

I don't read graphic novels.

When someone asks for one, I either pawn it off on somebody else or just point vaguely at the corner of the store that houses slim books whose names are in Japanese. I think that's where they are

Except now I was being asked to find twenty different, very specific titles in that scary section. And I almost cried.

And our graphic novels are not organized in a normal, alpha by author thing that I may conceivably have a chance of figuring out. No. They're organized by character. Character? You can't always tell the character by the title. Like something called Marvel Zombies. Not under Marvel. Or Zombies.

Two hours later, when I finished the damn thing, my tubes had tied themselves for fear that they would one day give life to something with a penis who liked to read graphic novels.

Task #2 was a 50th Anniversary of On the Road endcap. By Kerouac, whose last name none of us ignorant fools staffing the bookstore could pronounce.

Except we were out of all the books that were supposed to go on it.

Leaving me to come up with titles that go with it to fill the numerous empty spots.

Oh. Lord. No.

American lit is NOT my thing. French, Russian, British, sign me up. I can even tell you who liked whose writing and who thought who was a crock. But anything written by an American I probably haven't read and if I have I probably hated it.

So do you know what's on my Jack Kerouac endcap??? The two solitary copies of On the Road that we did actually have, travel journals, and Kurt Vonnegut, who has nothing to do with anything except he's also weird and dead.

When I go in on Tuesday, I really hope someone has taken it down.

In the last twenty minutes before I got to leave, I had to do a teensy tiny Joel Osteen display. Which wasn't too taxing, except that I really, really hate Joel Osteen and his smileyness and his hot wife. Although with the number of his crappy books I've sold I think I know why he has a hot wife. There's a lot of money in faux spiritualism, apparently.

Just one link today, because I'm sitting outside (yay for notebooks!!!) and it's starting to get windy. Also, my tirade against the publishing world has taken up about half of my battery power.

Holy Christmas on an ocean liner, Josh sings Ave Maria on Noel. *is dead now*

ETA: My quest for correct grammar may be going too far. Our neighbor is teaching his son-in-law to use the dirt bike (don't ask) and just said "You're doing very good." And I had the almost uncontrollable urge to yell across the lawn, "WELL!!! HE'S DOING WELL!!!" *sigh* As though we aren't unpopular enough.