Weird Like Me

by Jasmine Odessa Rizer

I have been out of college for a whopping five years now, and I have spent most of them working in a library. I love working in a library, not so much because I love books or care about serving the public, but because I finally have a few kindred spirits in my office.

My first job after graduating with honors and a totally useless Engish degree was as a file clerk. If you've ever seen a file clerk's paycheck, you know that you can only go up in the world from there. Everyone in my office had seen my paycheck, because we worked in the payroll office of a college.

I would like to make it clear that my co-workers in the Payroll Department were not bad people by any means. They gave me their teenaged daughters’ castoff Gap clothing, and fed me crackers and soda when I nearly passed out from eating only a meal-and-a-half every day for days on end. They bought me a potted plant when my grandmother died. Not. Bad. People. I cannot stress their decency enough.

But they were not the same as me.

They lived in a different world. Most of them were married. Most of them had children. I simply could not join in their conversations about the wackiness of teenaged daughters, having been a teenaged daughter myself only three years before. Once, when my lack of cooking skills was revealed, I was asked what I planned on doing when I got married and found myself unable to cook for my husband. (Because they were basically not bad people, I did not reply, "Well, I'm twenty-two years old, so I imagine if I get married anytime soon, we’ll probably be too busy gettin' it on twenty-four hours a day to worry about meals.") Because I had once had a homosexual roommate, I was considered to be the resident authority on the subject of drag queens, sex change operations, and so on and so forth.

Eventually, I left the file clerk job for the glamorous world of secretarial work. As a secretary for an academic department at the same college where I had been working before, I got paid enough to live on, finally. I got paid this astonishing living wage for sitting around on my butt checking my Yahoo! mail, being polite to people on the telephone, unjamming the copier, and wrestling with the temperamental coffeemaker each morning.

Again, my superiors were nice enough people, but they seemed to have come from an entirely different planet from me. My office manager, a tall, striking woman, would come in declaring that her hair was a mess, and I, who had a crew cut at the time, would stare blankly at her perfect coiffure, wondering where the mess was. She regarded professors with a respect bordering on awe, and I regarded them as people who had more degrees than I did. I had a glimmer of kindred-spirit hope in the form of the other secretary (I was the Senior Secretary and she was the Administrative Secretary, whatever that meant). We were both broke. Still, in the end, the companionship of the Administrative Secretary was not enough to sustain me, and I fled into the waiting arms of the college's library.

At the library, I met a girl who sometimes wore a tiara just for kicks, another girl who had a vast stash of Harry Potter toys hidden in workstations around her area (some of you know her as Susan, our prolific columnist), another girl who would engage me in thirty-minute conversations about punk rock, and yet another girl who was not too proud to sing little songs about shakin' your book truck. One of my supervisors was inclined to burst into impromptu Beavis and Butt-Head imitations. My other new boss painted funky, abstract-y pictures of cats and gauzy, sparkly ribbon landscapes when she wasn't at work.

My new co-workers were clearly from the same strange planet that had dropped me to Earth. A whole lot of library workers–-I mean, like, seven of us, counting the bride and groom–-wound up in Susan's Christmastime wedding together. I don't think most weddings would have been as much fun as this one. I don't think most bridesmaids would repeatedly serenade the bride with Jagged Edge's "Let's Get Married" (which, if you haven't heard it, is basically a laundry list of all the worst imaginable reasons for getting married-–"We ain't gettin' no younger"–-and a gleeful celebration of materialism in which the narrator offers to buy his beloved "a rock that'll break [her] arm." I definitely don't think that most brides would still be as patient after the fifty-fifth refrain of "Let's Get Married" as Susan was.

Yessir, the folks who work at the library are weird. Weird like me. And I am as happy as a pig in slop.