Eulogia (eu-lo’-gi-a): Pronouncing a blessing for the goodness in a person.
“You are my sunshine. You’re everything I ever wanted. Baby, I love your ways, every day. I knew once we started kissin’ I found love. Nothing compares 2U. Can you feel the love tonight?”
I did my research. I put everything in quotation marks so you couldn’t accuse me of plagiarizing my love. That’s what I get for loving a librarian. It’s our first anniversary. I’ve been hanging out for 20 minutes at the circulation desk. Almost a half-hour. I feel love overflowing like an unmonitored kitchen sink, spilling its warm liquid all over the floor.
Put your phone away. Keep your mouth shut. I’m here to give you a thrill.
He ran the bar code scanner across her forehead. He said “Don’t worry, I won’t let you be overdue. I’d never make you pay a fine. They’re useless as an incentive anyway. I’ve had ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ checked out for 10 years. The fines are up to $10,000 but I will never pay or return the book.” He went on to say that alimony was a kind of fine he’s forced to pay by the State of New York—he had gotten caught cheating on his wife with the middle school crossing guard’s wife. He paid the price.
The librarian looked at him with nothing but hostility in her eyes—how could anybody demean library fines like he had? Most people apologized and paid. The ones who didn’t apologize still paid, recognizing that justice was in play.—that it was fair to pay the fine.
The maniac at her circulation desk had denigrated library fines. She thought: “It was like denigrating your mother’s birthday. It was immoral. It was insane. It was criminal. I’ve got to do something.”
Somebody had just returned David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” it was sitting on the circulation desk. It was one of the longest books in American history. Consequently, it was one of the heaviest. Wielded as a weapon, it could do some real damage.
The maniac yelled at her to put her hand flat on the circulation desk. He had a hard cover copy of “Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship” and was going to slam its spine on her fingers and break them all. Before he could hit her fingers, she picked up “Infinite Jest” and hit him square in the face.
He cried out in pain and dropped “Tom Swift.” His nose was bleeding and he fell over backwards, fracturing his skull on the well-polished wooden floor. He was unconscious and twitching all over. The librarian picked up her phone and called 911 for the police and an ambulance.
When her story was told, she was vindicated of all wrong-doing despite the fact that the maniac had died of a brain hemorrhage and she could’ve been charged with manslaughter. It was found that his threat with “Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship” constituted assault and could’ve crippled the librarian for life. Clearly, she had acted in self-defense, and was quite brave too.
For her valor in protecting the justness of library fines she was awarded “The Dewey Decimal System Award.” It was named after Melvil Dewey. The decimal system is used to organize the shelving of library books in public schools.
Dewey brought oder to chaos. Before the advent of his system, it could take weeks to find a book, buried in a corner somewhere. In order to manage the mess, there were twice as many librarians. Trustees all around the world complained about the cost. They hired Dewey, a third-rate mathematician, to solve the problem. Dewey was inspired by the library at Alexandria’s cataloguing system. It was extant in a singed fragment of the library’s remains that Dewey had discovered in an archive in Tokyo, Japan where a theme park was being constructed to replicate the library at Alexandria. Japan had just opened its doors to the West and there was a frenzy to replicate its architecture and literature.
Anyway, our librarian, Ms. Page, went on to become the Chief Librarian at the British Library where she keeps a copy of “Infinite Jest” on her desk.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu
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