Film Signs:

So, if you're in LA, it's not long before you'll see a yellow sign with some cryptic-looking words or letters and an arrow, or occasionally less cryptic ones that say things like "Trucks" or "Base Camp." These are signs for film sets, and here's some codes I've seen around:

APT 23 - "Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23" (Pilot)
B & B - ??
CASTLE - Castle. They aren't very subtle.
CM - Criminal Minds
CM SSP - Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior
CSI:NY* - They go one further than Castle and slap their logo on it.
J EDGAR*- "J. Edgar" (movie w/ Leonardo DiCaprio)
LOLA* Law & Order: LA
N-LA - NCIS: LA
NT - ??
RABBIT - ??
TRUE* - True Blood
TW* (Red on white) - Torchwood: Miracle Day
VOICE* - The Voice




A few more that I've heard of:
BAD WOLF - Rumor has it, this was the former name on the signs for Torchwood. However, since I can't imagine a better way to get every Whovian in a 10-mile radius to investigate something than slapping up signs that say "Bad Wolf" with an arrow on them all over the place, it's understandable why they may have changed this.
ARTEMIS - The Hunger Games, in a much better naming decision.
GROUP HUG - The Avengers movie.

*Confirmed through various interesting incidents.

Always carry your camera in LA.

As luck would have it, my final exams all fell on the first two days of finals week, leaving me with nearly two weeks of lovely 70+ degree weather and sunshine and nothing to do but explore LA.

The first day was Wednesday. This was the day that my brother had convinced me to download Minecraft, since I had recently needed to replace my laptop and the wonderful person at the Apple store forgot to tell me that Civilization V wouldn't run on their laptops when I bought it, so I needed a game, and Minecraft was only $20...

Let me say, it's some of the best $20 I've ever spent. That game is addicting. You've got a world made out of blocks of various types - ie, wood, dirt, store, various ores, trees, and a few animals - and you can take these blocks and build anything your heart desires. It got even better when I started playing on my brother's server, which had the misfortune of having snow and ice everywhere, and he eventually gave me "op privileges", which means I can give myself anything I want instead of having to go out and spend days collecting it. I didn't get anything spectacular done this first week, but here's one of my recent endeavours:



Yes, that's the TARDIS. I'm not going to bore you with the game details (unless you want them) but yes, it does contain a swimming pool and a library inside. For a sense of scale, a single minecraft "block" is the equivalent of 1 cubic meter in the game world.

The next day, it was St. Patrick's Day, which meant that the Young Dubliners were having a free concert in Pershing Square. I invited my friend Alex and his girlfriend Laura, who were visiting in town, and we sat on a blanket and drank Coke from glass bottles and generally enjoyed ourselves.

Oh, and the stage was made of palm trees.



Afterwards, there was a free exhibition of costumes from the "oustanding filsm of 2010" at FIDM, which was only blocks away. Since we were all movie fans, we headed there, and got to see costumes from films including Clash of the Titans, Alice in Wonderland, Inception, Burlesque, The Young Victoria, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and more. Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed, so I have no amazing photos to illustrate this with.

Then, that weekend, I went to Long Beach to whale watch and visit The Aquarium of the Pacific. Whale-watching was a resounding success, as we saw at least six whales, including a mother and a calf, and a pair that was apparently mating, not to mention hundreds of dolphins, some seals, and a bunch of sea lions, all with adorable babies.

Here are some sea lions sitting on a bouy:



There were many interesting things in the aquarium, which I couldn't all mention here so I will put them on Facebook instead, but among them was a giant fish, the ironically named "BP Sea Otter Habitat", some truly unusual-looking sharks, a tank full of clownfish and blue tang that was being monopolized by some asshole couple who had no idea of the difference between "professional studio for baby pictures" and "public aquarium on a Saturday afternoon", and many tanks full of brightly colored fish. I didn't look at the photos until now, and am quite surprised at how well they came out, given I basically own a glorified point-and-shoot digital camera.



At some point after that, I was just around the corner from my house when I saw some people filming a driving scene. Fortunately, I had my camera in my backpack, so if you've ever wondered about this but were too lazy to watch the DVD extras, here it is:



Later that week, I went to the natural history museum, saw a lama which I photographed for Jocelyn and tried to guess if the bones in the anthropology section were real or replicas before looking at the placards, went to the science center (the air and space part was disappointingly closed down for their not-so-disappointing arrival of the space shuttle Endeavour at some time in the future!), I saw a memorial to Liz Taylor on her star on Hollywood blvd, saw a huge pro-union (mostly, there were also people demonstrating for education reform, immigrant's rights, for both sides of action or inaction in Libya, and even protesting against SB 1070 from Arizona) that included a group of Native Americans dancing at the back - and it was awesome to see how different they were from the Iroquois where I grew up.

Then it was the weekend again. I went looking for showtimes for Sucker Punch on Google, and saw that Star Trek IV, more popularly known as "the one with the whales" or "The one where Spock tries to blend in in the 80's", was playing at a theater in Hollywood, and decided that I'd go since a student ticket was only $9.

Then, as the lights were about to go down, people were talking and it was all "blah blah blah thank this person and that organization and this person and Walter Koenig who will be joining us..." and at that point it was all I could to do not scream "WHAT?!?!" in the theater. Sure enough, Walter Koenig, aka Mr. Pavel Chekov, was there, taking audience questions and telling us funny stories. Things we learned include:

-He's actually got a perfect American accent, and "Nuclear Wessels" was from his father's Russian accent.
-There was supposed to be a scene in that movie where Sulu meets his great-great-grandfather as a child, but the child actor refused to cooperate.
-That he approves of the 2009 reboot.
-The casting directors weren't satisfied with his original, intense serious audition, but loved the more surprised, puzzled/clueless persona he did on his final attempt.
-That Leonard Nimoy does not give good feedback as a director
-On TV and film sets, actors are given a point to look at, so they're all delivering their lines in the same direction, ie, to the viewer (especially in TV). He holds that his best acting moment came when someone had taped a Playboy centerfold there, and his line was "Captain, I have no idea what that is!"
-The character of Chekov was not intended to foster Russian-American unity, but to attract viewers ages 8-14 with the Beatles haircut.

Also, he's really old now. Unfortunately, my photos didn't come out too well, but I had my camera with me at least.

And that was my spring break, and that's also why you should always carry a camera in this town.

The Hyperion Hotel.

Inspired by Allison's post on her apartment building, I decided to write a post on my apartment building, too. Since my building is a former hotel, I will henceforth refer to it as The Hyperion Hotel.

First off, I ended up with less than a day and a half to find an apartment somewhere in LA. Surprisingly, I did so, and with not a small amount of luck - it was the only building that was both priced as advertised and that didn't have, say, hordes of dead roaches in the kitchen when it was shown to me. I turned in a rental application only for this place, then left, not having the foggiest clue what I'd do if I didn't get accepted. Fortunately, I did, because as one will soon discover, The Hyperion is not very selective about their tenants.

So the Hyperion is old. 1920's old, and every once in a while, if the lighting is just right and you're at the perfect angle, you can almost get a glimpse of how awesome it must have been 80+ years ago. The rest of the time, however, the best way to describe it quite frankly is "falling apart." The first clue I had that it was in such a poor state came less than a week after I moved in, at which point the electricity went out. No big deal, right? It happened again, less than a week later, only this time it was only my apartment so I had to call the LA department of water and power and wait while they sent a repairman out to basically hit the electric meter until I got power back. (Literally. I had to show him where the meters were out back, so I watched him do it.) Not two weeks later, the hot water went out, just as I was about to dye my hair, as a previous blog post details.

Then there was the time a housing authority official had to inspect the apartments to make sure that we had working heat, working cold and hot water, and no overcrowding or other "unsuitable living conditions". Fortunately, my apartment seemed to be overlooked, probably because the management could assure her that it was only me in the apartment and I was mechanically inclined enough to not need a government official to help me determine if everything was in working order. However, the upside of someone having apparently reported our building for "unsuitable living conditions" (because I later discovered it's actually not routine for housing inspectors to randomly inspect apartment buildings) was that everything got fixed, fast. Even if it was only the blinds that had broken, I don't think it ever took more than 24 hours for something to get repaired. The downside is that there is near constant construction noise starting promptly at 8 AM, when quiet hours end, but no discernible improvement to the state of the building.

More recently, I found yellow liquid in the bathtub, and assumed my cat had decided to be either very dumb or very smart and decided to pee in there. Upon going to clean it up, however, I discovered that it was not cat urine, but water, tinted yellow from mold, that had somehow dripped into the bathtub. EW. Since then, I have regularly lysoled my bathroom nearly to death.

The Hyperion also has lots of insects. In fact, when Allison visited, she informed me that one particular species of insect was actually a cockroach. Icky. All this time I had thought they were beetles or Junebugs... fortunately, Orion likes to show off his hunting prowess by diligently stalking and killing upwards of 95% of all scurrying insects that venture into my apartment. Cats are good for more than just rodent control! (and I don't doubt for a second that adventurous rodents might have crawled into this place had they not smelled a cat and thought better of it) However, I've had a recent fruitfly infestation - after spending the last two days inexplicably crowding around my bathroom mirror, they've moved to Orion's food and water dishes. I guess they like shiny things?

Last, but most definitely not least, are the tenants. Some of them are OK, like the quiet middle-aged lady with the even quieter 15-year-old German Shepherd rescue, or "Cloud", who literally looks like he walked straight out of the Final Fantasy video games, or The Hipster Couple that lives upstairs on the other side. Others are not so OK. The tenants upstairs seem to entertain themselves by dropping bricks on the ceiling, which cause some of the lightbulbs in my light fixture to flick on and off. Some other tenants seem to be dealing marijuana. Still others have children whom they allow to play with recorders, vuvuzelas, whistles, kazoos, or other such noisemakers after quiet hours. Another constantly leaves things in the hallway.

Then there are the tenants across the hallway-ish. They're the awful ones. They frequently display a blatant disregard for quiet hours, sometimes by blasting obscene music so loudly I can hear it clearly in my room at 3 AM on a weeknight, and other times by having screaming domestic disputes, which are only not reported to the LAPD because the angry person always gets locked out of the apartment until he, or perhaps she, goes and finds a place to sober up and cool down. On top of all that, they got a pit bull puppy that has pooped all over the lobby, and tends to squeak loudly and pathetically at various times. They leave their trash to rot in the recycle bin in the lobby all week, and in general are some of the most abhorrent, awful people that I have ever had the misfortune of sharing a building with.

The worst experience ever living in this building, and the one that made me decide I had to move when my lease was up, was The Gun Incident. One night, as I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I heard another loud argument - apparently upstairs or maybe in the lobby? Fortunately, more distant than the hallway outside my room at any rate - and I was tuning it out as normal, when there was running and someone screaming "He's got it!" Within seconds, two shots rang out (from a .22 handgun if I had to guess) and there was more screaming and running. Someone else was actually alarmed enough to call the police to our building, but when they came to investigate, nobody answered their doors. I slept in the bathtub that night, as there was only a thin wooden door between my head and whatever was going on in the hallways outside, and I didn't trust the walls much more. The police ended up in our building at least once more in the following week, further confirming my decision that this was not a good place to live.

The strangest experience, however, happened just last night. I came home from class to find one of my belts hanging from my doorknob. Now, nobody in my building knows me very well, and I don't know if I've ever worn that belt in public, and I didn't think I'd even brought it to LA, and had definitely never possibly left it in the laundry room or anything like that, so I don't have the slightest clue how it escaped my apartment. Nevertheless, it does indeed appear to be the exact same belt that had come with the black skirt that I had bought to wear to my grandfather's funeral. Maybe there are some supernatural tenants living here, after all...

Oops.

See that part of the "About me" where it says I'm not planning on working in the entertainment industry in any way?

Uh...

...

...

you just can't escape it in this city, can you?

Hair.

I'm generally not a girly kind of girl, but I do a lot of things with my hair. And when I say "a lot", I'm really not kidding: it has, at some point or another, literally been every color of the rainbow (or at least parts of it have been) except white and every length between almost 3 feet and just over 3 inches.

So, when I moved to LA, I had what was then a pretty normal, somewhere-between-chin-and-shoulders, some-color-between-red-and-blonde style going on. Then on one bright, sunny, probably near-100-degree day, I decided to go hiking in Griffith Park. If you've been reading this blog, you know that the phrase "Griffith Park" should be prefaced by the word "misadventure", and if you know me very well, you probably also know that I'm not the most coordinated person in the world. I ended up hitting my head on a tree, and of course it was a pine tree with a big bit of sticky sap on it.

I turned to Google: since pine sap apparently cannot be easily removed with shampoo, and since I'm the type of person to choose the quickest, easiest, and most importantly, simplest (see: Murphy's Law) option available to me, I decided that the best course of action would be to cut it out. The only problem was that I didn't have money for a professional hairdresser, but I had scissors, right?

I ended up cutting the sap glob out of my hair, which left an awkward chunk on the side, so I chopped the rest of it off to match. This resulted in my hair being very short, and for a few days after I cut it, looking very much like it had been blindly attacked with scissors. But, as my hair does, it managed to look cute after a couple weeks - in fact, the girl working at the $4000-sparkly-purse-store (right around the corner from the $284,000-handcrafted-from-unicorn-horn-watch-store) was the one who used the word "cute".

Since I can't leave my hair alone for more than a month, I decided to dye it red again. I went down to the drugstore to pick out a shade of red that hopefully wouldn't fade out in two weeks' time. As fate would have it, the L'Oreal Feria "Power reds" was on sale and I had a coupon! I bought it, figuring that it looked like the best candidate for "not fading out".

So I mixed up the dye and put it on. Now, I've never actually tried to dye my hair with blood before, but if I was to ever become a serial killer and decide that would be a fun idea, putting this dye on was exactly what I imagine dying my hair with blood would be like. Not only was it the right shade of dark, opaque red, but there was some sort of exothermic reaction going on that made it warm, and I was wearing some of those blue nitrile gloves that I had swiped from a lab. The only thing that was off was that of all the colors that bloodstains can be, bright pink isn't quite one of them, although salmon, grey, brown, and even a kind of greenish shade are possibilities.

If you've dyed hair before, you probably have read the part where it says to put the dye on unwashed hair. In the excitement, I had entirely forgotten that the reason my hair was unwashed was because when I tried to turn the shower on earlier, there hadn't been any hot water. So, when it was time to wash the dye out and I turned on the shower again, I suddenly realized that what I had just done was probably not a smart idea. As it turned out, there had been a maintenance person desperately trying to fix the problem all day, and with no success, but I figured if he'd been at it all day, he'd have to be close to fixing it, right? An hour later, still no hot water, and it's been in for WAY too long, so I decide to suck it up and rinse it out in the freezing cold shower. Cold water, aside from being painfully unpleasant to shower in, also happens to cause dyes and stains to set into things, whereas hot water usually makes them fade.

So, after leaving the dye in for 3x as long as I should have and rinsing it out in a way that made it brighter, what the box described as "auburn" turned out to be something on the border of "blood red" and "magenta".


(imagine this in the sunlight, so it's more intense and more magenta-ish)

Despite this incident, there was one awesome thing that happened: I was riding a bus, and sitting across me was an adorable, rather flamboyant teenager with blue hair. When the person sitting next to me got off the bus, he got up and sat down next to me. We didn't need to say anything like "nice hair" - we just looked at each other, and smiled, and went back to listening to our respective mp3 players and happily being different than everyone else on the bus.

So guess what I'm going to do over winter break, since I'll have weeks for it to fade back to a work-acceptable color?

I'M GOING TO DO IT AGAIN! Only, with warm water this time...

I have a job!

And it's been in the 90's for pretty much the entire week so far! This makes me really happy! 98 degree weather in November is exactly why I moved to LA. Well, not exactly, it more had to do with the fact that I got accepted here and I could afford it, but it's the kind of weather that I was hoping for when I moved here. So far, it hasn't disappointed, and there's nothing quite like seeing Christmas decorations alongside palm trees. I actually think I prefer it to seeing Christmas decorations that are blanketed in snow.

So, now that I do have a job, I'll be checking into the possibility of getting a kitty as soon as I have enough time during the hours for the rescue! Also, I'll be seeing when I can get down to San Diego for a day or so. Why in the world does our high-speed rail go everywhere in Southern CA except for San Diego?

The only real downside is that this job involves lots of people speaking a language that I don't know at all, and that the dress code doesn't even allow me to have watches, jewelry, or nail polish that's not a "light" or "neutral" color, because we're supposed to look "professional". Seriously, when the person you're interviewing asks about the dress code because her hair is currently every color in between blood red and blond, wouldn't you think that "Oh, and no bright purple nail polish" might be a good thing to mention? Incidentally, the exact words used regarding the hair were "not a problem".

The hours right now are kind of tough, too, cause they go late enough in the day that nothing's open by the time I get out, but they still start early enough (compared to when everything opens at least) that I don't have time to go grocery shopping or whatever before going to work.

It's very frustating that after four years and tens of thousands of dollars and a degree in a hard science, that's STILL not enough to get me more than minimum wage. Ah, well, in 2 or 3 years I'll hopefully have a real career, and my career field will pay very comfortably =)

Things I will buy when I have a job.

I've been very busy lately, mostly applying at 20+ places, which so far have resulted in one interview and zero jobs. But, when I do get a job, here's what I'll buy, in no particular order:



Another warm, fuzzy blanket.

A small couch or love seat, because right now I just have a blanket and an extra pillow on the floor against the laundry hampers. If I were ever to get most of my laundry done at once, it would present a problem.

A TV stand, as mine is currently on the floor

A second set of color-coordinated towels.

Pierogies, even though I might have to buy them at Whole Foods.

At least one outfit that doesn't make me look entirely clueless about fashion.

A membership to the San Diego Zoo.

Bus tickets to San Diego, of course.

Christmas presents for my cousins and parents.

Nicer Christmas presents for my siblings.

Some sort of shelf thing to store my dishes or silverware (which are on an out-of-the-way corner of the floor).

A table for my microwave, which is in the same place as everything else in my apartment (ie, the floor).

Warm socks.

Combat boots.

A coffee table or end table, because who wants to guess where I put my dishes when I eat?

A DVD player.

Books.

CHOCOLATE!

Orville:

[unfortunately, the 3G on my phone appears to be broken, and so I cannot post a photo of him. He is an adorable orange-and-white cat that likes to stand or lie on people's shoulders, even while they're walking around a room.]

Well, I won't be buying him, but I will be paying the pet deposit, buying his food and dishes, his litterbox and litter, his bed or carrier, and his toys.

Exploring LA!

So, last week, I decided to take some time to explore the city. I started out by going to Santa Monica beach. I'd never been to the Pacific ocean before, but I was of the impression that it would generally be like the Atlantic Ocean. Actually, I haven't even been in the Atlantic that much, so 90% of my beach experience up to this point involved me frolicking in the warm, shallow waters of the Gulf Coast. So, when I visited the Pacific, I was surprised by a couple things.

First off, the water temperature was COLD! At the moment, the water off Santa Monica beach is a balmy 59 degrees. In addition, you can't walk out 50 feet and still be waist-deep here, but only a few feet from the water line you're knee-deep, and people were shark-fishing off the end of the pier (I didn't see anyone actually catch a shark, but they were using 10-inch-long fish as bait). Plus, there are lovely mountains along the coast.



Tuesday was the second Tuesday of the month, which means it was free admission day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art! This is a fantastically large museum, consisting of multiple buildings, and it houses an impressive art collection. They also have a "Children's Gallery", which is really for people of all ages, and a room in the Children's gallery contains supplies for the general public to make their own drawing or painting. It was pretty awesome to see an 80-year-old man at one table painstakingly working on something while at another table a dad helped his toddler girl finger-paint. My favorite parts of any art museum, though, are the ancient art exhibitions. The LACMA was no different, as they had ancient art from all kinds of different cultures. My favorite piece was a calendar wheel - if I had to carve one of those, there's no way I would've made it go even as far as 2012!



Later that week, someone recommended that I look around the Echo Park neighborhood. This is an almost painfully trendy little area, but as I came out of a used-book store, I saw this next to it!



Yes, that does say "Echo Park Time Travel Mart". Yes, if you walk inside, it sells everything from medieval helmets to "dinosaur eggs" to posters encouraging proper robot self-maintenance, or would that be robot hygiene? But, things get even cooler: The "Time Travel Mart" is actually a source of funding for a non-profit tutoring center, which runs out of the spacious back part of the building.

Then, on Saturday, I took the bus up to the observatory. Since I've already been there, I decided to take a hike instead, and right off the parking lot was a sign for the Mount Hollywood trail. I walked along it for a little while, saw warning signs about rattlesnakes, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes again, but fortunately didn't encounter any of those animals. From that high, it was painfully obvious that there was a temperature inversion going on, literally blanketing LA in smog. Here's a photo of Griffith Observatory with the smoggy Los Angeles skyline behind it:



Last but not least, as I was waiting at the observatory for the bus back, I noticed a humminbird. Then, another, and another. It turns out that there were at least six of them hanging around the area. It was hard to get a clear shot of them flying, although my camera's ISO 3200 setting came in really handy here, but I got some beautiful shots of them resting on branches.



That's pretty much it. I have a volunteer position at an animal rescue as of now, so I've got something to do other than wander around town and take photos and post them on this blog. On another note, I wound up getting a tiny bit lost in Beverly Hills today, and wound up walking by City Hall and down Rodeo Drive - the amount of wealth on display was mind-boggling. For a second I thought "Hey, lots of stores in a small area, this would be a good place to job-hunt" but then I figured that I'd need to be wearing fancy clothes and heels just for them to give me a job application.

The Library is Not Disappointing.

As you may have noticed if you read the previous post, I had figured out that all the people who patronize my local library branch read about is teenage vampires, teenagers at prep schools, or teenage vampires at prep schools, and decided to go to the downtown library at the next opportunity.

Well, the opportunity came, because I discovered I had to run some errands that would take me in the general direction of downtown, and I decided to stop at the library last so I didn't have to haul my books around all day. Along the way, I ran into not one, but two film crews - both of them filming outdoors, complete with bundles of wires across the sidewalk, big tents and catering trucks set up in parking lots so everyone was trying to parallel-park on nearby streets (including some guys whom I saw attempting to parallel-park a cargo van), and so on. Sadly, since my phone camera sometimes needs an excessively long exposure time, I couldn't get any non-blurry photos. The first set wasn't bad, since it was easy to avoid, so I was mildly amused. However, the second time I had to avoid all kinds of wires and little plastic ramps over the wires on the sidewalk (wires which didn't go to any visible equipment) while carrying books under one arm and navigating to the nearest metro station with my phone, so I was significantly less amused.

However, let me get to the topic of the library. Oh, the library. I've been in the New York Public Library before, and I was impressed, but this still seemed like heaven to me. As I was walking through, I heard a tour guide - yes, people actually sign up for tours of this place, or something - mention that the library system had almost 2.5 million books. I wondered if that wasn't an exaggeration, but as I kept going to more and more levels, and going further and further in, I noticed signs on the shelves that said only about 50% of their books were actually in the stacks, and I started to believe that number.

Then there's the science fiction section. Although as I mentioned, the sci-fi section in the other library was smaller than the sci-fi section in my bedroom, this was not the case here. The science fiction section, which appeared not to include fantasy, had to be at least the size of the cow-town library that I mentioned in my previous post, and that's not even to mention what's called the "popular library". Apparently, in an attempt not to scare off the public by making them walk through miles and miles of shelving, they've dedicated a section on the first level to recent bestsellers, CD's, and DVD's. It's literally a "normal"-sized library within the more massive library, which is just SO COOL!

Anyways, that's it for this blog post, as I have books to read. Hooray!

The Library is Disappointing.

So, it's been a little more than two weeks in Los Angeles, and ever since I got cable TV and internet, I've settled into a routine of eating, sleeping, showering, and killing time online and watching TV. It was at some point during this that I decided that it is good to read books, and as such I decided I would go to the library.

So, I looked up where the nearest library was, and headed out. I finally got there (after experiencing my ever-present difficulty with maps and things being further than they looked) and walked inside. Although the building was at least as big as the public library near my college apartment, and bigger than the one in my hometown of 1000 people and 34890 cows, it seemed to have very few books. Thinking this was odd, I wandered around until I found the sci-fi section. This consisted of four or five shelves of books, about 3 feet wide. The sci-fi section (large closet) in the used bookstore (back room of the historical society) in my aforementioned hometown was larger than this! In fact, if you were to eliminate all the Star Wars expanded universe novels in the library, I have more sci-fi in my BEDROOM!

I wandered around, in vague hope that wasn't all of it. I was somewhat right, because they had shelved authors such as Tolkien, Bradbury, and more in with the regular fiction. However, even that wasn't encouraging, as half the "fiction" was young adult vampire novels (I counted no fewer than five copies of each of the first three books in the Twilight saga), and much of the rest was Nicholas Sparks romance novels or 4 copies of recent easy-to-read bestsellers.

So, if the books are any reflection of supply and demand at this branch, I can assume that the demographics of my neighborhood consist primarily of dumb people who want to keep up with trends and 12-year-old girls with distorted perceptions of relationships.

To make matters worse, when I did finally find something worth checking out, specifically a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I went to get a library card only to discover that I don't have any identification with my current address on it. Now, I've got to obtain a copy of my lease or utility bill or something, and I'm going to go to the main library downtown to see if it's better.

Also, the libraries are closed on mondays because of budget cuts. REALLY? In a city with 9.75% sales tax, and in a state that's essentially legalized marijuana, HOW are they still so broke?