I DO Know How to Quit You

I am going to write a whole post advocating something that not a lot of people are advocating. I don't care! I am taking a stand! I am all rebellious like that. Koo-koo-cah-choo. (I don't know why the walrus and the eggman have anything to do with being rebellious and taking a stand. It just seemed like the right time to say koo-koo-cah-choo. Just roll with it).

Here's one of the cornerstones of my life, as I am living it, all happy and tra la la and dancing around the mulberry bush. Quitting. I am 100% behind the idea of being a big ol' quitter. Dissatisfied? Unhappy? Pissed off? Here's the answer: QUIT. Recuse thyself. I'm not just talking about jobs. I'm talking about all sorts of stuff. You know how everyone is always telling you you have to finish stuff? Horse pucky, I say! And furthermore- nuh-UH! ("Horse pucky." Apparently I am a 92 year old coot all of a sudden). Up and quit! Join the quitter's revolution!

Ok, ok, let me clarify. There are plenty of things in life that are worth working on. Don't get me wrong. I work on stuff all the time. I work on my hair in the morning. I work on, um, work stuff. Both worthy endeavors, to be sure. But here's what I think. I think that we live in a culture that is defined by the concept of WORK. Everything has become work. We work on our relationships, we work on our friendships, we work on our asses. Here is my highly intellectualized theory about that. Screw THAT. Screw it! It's a total load.

I totally don't believe in relationships being work. WORK? While I am trying to get my smooch on? Hell to the nizzy. If I get to a place where being around my date feels like work, that is a sure sign for me to check OUT. Bye, sucker. I gots a job and it ain't you. Same with friends. Once the friendship starts to feel like work, it's curtains. There's too much in life that is hard by definition. My dad in the hospital? Hard. Wondering if you still want to be my friend? Not hard. Not hard, because I'm not doing it. Sorry. Ok, not really that sorry.

I can go on and on about the joys of quitting, the many levels, the many different ways it has set me free. I am a quitting evangelist, really. But today's quitter's sermon has a focus. The focus is on feeling ok about the act of quitting in the middle of a story. Narrative interruptus. A surprising number of people have trouble with this. I know, because I see them in the library every day, reading stuff that they don't like and persisently, unhappily, wasting time finishing it, grinding their teeth and hating it the entire time. Don't do that, people! There's lots out there you will like. Don't flush your reading time down the terlet. (And yes, yes, I KNOW that Nancy Pearl, the most famous librarian ever, has said something to this effect in her reader's advisory classes and talks. I KNOW. But I'm saying it too, totally independent of Nancy Pearl. I love Nancy just as much as you all do, but I was a student of quittology long before I knew about Nancy Pearl. So BACK OFF.)

This goes the same for movies. Do you watch a movie long after it has started to go south? Do you know the exact moment it goes south and still sit there until the end? I understand this more if you are actually at the theater. You have paid a hefty price to sit there and watch that movie, and I am cheap enough to understand the idea that we want to get what we paid for, even if we paid for a pile of doo-doo butter. But dvds? Cut your losses. Turn it off.

I turned off a movie last night, and almost started to feel guilty about doing so. But the thing was, it had started to get depressing, and not in a way that I felt was GOOD for me. You know, like when I watched Who Stole the Electric Car, it was depressing, but I felt like I was learning about something I didn't know about and so the educationalness of the interestingness was palpable (god I am eloquent. I just have to soak in what I just said). This one was not only depressing, but it was a surprise depressing. The worst kind of depressing, right? It's like you're having a nice chat with a promising dude, and all of a sudden he tells you about how proud he is of his hairy back. AWWWW! I thought this was going to be good, and now you went and sucker-punched me with the Hairy Back Pride. Damn. (By the way, that totally happened to me. I did not make that one up). The movie that I was watching was a documentary on the Sundance Channel called "Gay Sex in the 70s." Whoo! Post-Stonewall, disco, free love, happiness time! I'm down with that! Pass the popcorn! Except, halfway into the movie, it got depressing. Which brings me to life lesson number two: movies about the 70s are great about being surprisingly depressing. Not movies made IN the 70s, necessarily. Movies that are fundamentally about the 70s. Exhibit A: Saturday Night Fever. You think it's all John Travolta dancing around in a white jumpsuit to the Gibb brothers. And it is, at first. But then you get smacked in the mouth with suicide and non-consensual sex and horrible horrible non-dancey times. Exhibit B: the movie "54." Again, you think you're going in for Ryan Phillippe and Neve Campbell shaking their groove thing around the club, but no. It's Mike Myers, being all disgusting and creepy and you getting to feel really dirty when the movie is over.

So remember,
Lesson one: quitting is ok.
Lesson two: relationships should not be work.
Lesson three: beware of disco movies.

Especially number three. Number three is the one I'm most sure about.

Kiss the rings, I'm out.
Librarian Girl

P.S. Do any of you guys do MySpace? If you do, email me. I resurrected my page, and I can't figure something out and I need help. Because apparently I am old and decrepit and don't understand the innernets any more.