Tiny Memoir: #002

When your life plan runs out of life.

This is the second in an ongoing series of Tiny Memoirs. (The first is here.) It’s an area of interest for me, obviously, as I’m flogging a memoir in a time when every lit agent on Planet Earth says “memoir is hard.” Ooooookay, Agentbot. Also life is hard. To quote myself (quoting DFW):

David Foster Wallace spoke to Elle Magazine about writing as “one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.” He filled out his list with poetry, music, sex, and religion. I’d go further and say that writing — memoir in particular — not only attenuates loneliness but brings us compatriots in the struggle. There is meaning in a shared labor. Think about comrades who survived a war, or even high school.

These are weird times. Memoirs — sharing a personal struggle — give us courage.

I solicited YOUR Tiny Memoirs and you delivered. (True, I had to prod some of you.) I now have a half-dozen Tiny Memoirs in the pipeline. Some are harrowing. Some are joyous. Some are crushingly sad. Some are whimsical. All of them are inspiring.

(Start your Tiny Memoir here, by following a few prompts.)

Anonymity is always an option in publishing these Tiny Memoirs but today’s is bylined by Tina Plottel. It was a joy to collaborate with her on it.

Share your thoughts / feelings / limericks in the comment section, below.

(Kim Coletta photo by Thom Bock)

Educate and Inform the Mass of the People

By Tina Plottel

Secretly, I wanted to get fired.

In 2002, I’d just turned 30. I was an aging It-Girl, a punk rock Parker Posey (in my mind, anyway). The epicenter of my existence was the D.C. music scene. Bands on labels like Simple Machines, Teenbeat, Dischord Records. It was an amazing milieu, egalitarian, a lot of “Girls to the front!” energy. I’d stand in front of the stage when Jawbox played, just to soak up Kim Coletta’s bassist badassery. Here’s a woman, in a band with three dudes, whose muscular basslines propel the entire chugging machine of post-hardcore skronk. So rad. I mean, technically she was a neighbor and a peer, like someone’s older sister, but I admired (okay, worshipped) her.

This job, though. Before Facebook, or Tinder, or OK Cupid, or, yes, even Grindr, the only way to make remote romantic connections was in the classified ads at the back of free weekly newspapers. Alternative Weeklies, they were called. Like the Village Voice. The Chicago Reader. And in D.C., the City Paper. These were the gritty, scrappy, upstart little siblings to more august publications like The Washington Post or the New York Times. In the 1990s, this was where the real journalism was (allegedly) happening. As my first job out of college, I answered phones at the City Paper. Then I compiled the events calendar, i.e. the center of the cultural universe (back then). It took years to get promoted to editor of the personal ads. I considered myself lucky.

Need a roommate? An apartment? A flop in a vegan collective? A blender? You could find those things in the weekly classifieds. The personal ad section was called Matches. They could be platonic (“Just Friends”). Or romantic (M → W, W→M, M → M, or W → W; just four categories seems so quaint). Or experimental (“None of the Above”). There was also “I Saw You” (“I saw you squeezing melon at the Soviet Safeway around 11pm on Tuesday.”) Did you want to date or just hook up? Curious about a threesome? Or maybe looking for another stamp collector?

At the dawn of the millennium, people still hand-wrote their want ads. I would type them in. Once people could email want ads, I would still type them in—because our ancient DOS-based database did not speak the language of copy / paste. But I got to work with my friends. And once a month, the City Paper sponsored live events to mingle and place ads—which I would type in back at the office. These events usually happened at rock clubs, dive bars, or fancy cocktail lounges where I would have gone anyway (well, maybe not the fancy cocktail lounge…). So I got to pursue my main passion: hang out and look bored. Because it was my job!

It got a little dicey when I had to call a paying advertiser to explain their ad crossed a line. “So, you can’t say you’re into golden showers in the ad but certainly bring it up when you meet in person.” But in return for all the wrangling and endless typing, I got use the paper’s fancy new internet thing—a website. No one thought it would ever amount to anything. So I got to write 500 words per week about whatever the fuck I wanted—a band, indie culture, Kim Coletta—as long as it tied into the local punk scene. Youth always has cachet and I worked where it all came together. Heavy-hitting cultural critique in the front of the paper, and the community bulletin board in the back. Which is probably why no one, including me, saw it coming…

Craigslist.

Suddenly, people could write their own ads, post them, and receive replies to their own inbox. City Paper management whinged that our ads were proofread by humans, ours were vetted, ours were artisinally typeset and that meant quality! Management’s answer was more live Matches events. More mingling. More typing. The pace became unsustainable. Inevitably, my typing got sloppy. Too many typos. I was warned a few times. Then the publisher called me into her office to “have a talk.” I apologized. I swore I’d do better. But I didn’t realize my constant mistakes were a sign of burnout. I needed a change.

So I went after a new job… doing the same thing.

The Library of Congress needed data entry for their monthly calendar. Where did I find the job listing? In the City Paper classifieds, of course. I ran the idea by my mom—who ignored the actual opening. Instead, she said, “You know what? Judy from water aerobics, her daughter Barbara works there. You should call her.” I’m like, “Whatever, Ma, you don’t know. What, I’ll just call her??” I called her.

Barbara turned out to be a librarian. A badass librarian in the Rare Books division. The most dazzling rare books collection in the country. Impressive, one-of-a-kind, spectacular works of literary art. When I met Barbara at her office, she showed me the item she was cataloging: a book created for the children of a Russian Czar, its cover fashioned from his army uniform.

She gave me a tour of the Library’s three buildings. First, the grand Jefferson, with its iconic reading room. Second, the modern Madison, where you can play a century-old Edison cylinder from the Recorded Sound collection. This is where the Copyright Office is housed and where the Congressional Research Service crafts the basis of all new legislation. But my favorite was the third, the delightfully Deco Adams, with its Science and Business reading room, reading lamps of gray steel and industrial green glass, and inspirational quotes by Thomas Jefferson carved on the walls. One stood out: Educate and Inform the Mass of the People. A most punk message. More punk than the bands I covered on my blog. More punk than, you know, just typing. In a blue side stairwell, I had an epiphany: I could be a librarian.

(Photo by Ted Mills)

It was good timing. I had no clear plan. All I knew how to do was type. And the City Paper’s publisher was pushing me out the door. I had that feeling of being punched in the thrat, the dizzying tears that gush involuntarily, the shame of failure.

I walked home. As I turned the corner at Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant, it hit me that my life was about to change—and, I shit you not, the clouds parted. Literally. The rainy May afternoon gave way to full-on sunshine. That sealed it.

But that would mean Library School. Seemingly, It Girls of a certain age gravitated to a Masters in Library Science. At least according to Parker Posey in Party Girl—which, it must be said, is awesome but only a movie. Then I discovered that after Jawbox was finished, my hero herself, Kim Coletta, had gone to Library School. In D.C. there were no rock stars. So I just called her. And maybe freaked out a little with worry about whether I could even get into Library School. “Oh, don’t worry… you’ll get in,” she said. Well, if Kim Coletta said so…

My whole life I wanted to live in a city, work at a newspaper, and write about music. It was everything I wanted. Then… I was about to get fired. It was weird. You never think about what you’ll do when you reach the end of your plan. Once your eyes are no longer dazzled by the bright shiny lights, what do you do? Your eyes adjust, you refocus, and you look for the next hill to climb.

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