Eclectic...

I love discovering new blogs, new authors, new music, new...but I also love the old, the familiar.

I have been told all my life that I'm good at writing the middle but I need to work on my introductions and conclusions. So-be-it.

I look at other people's blogs and see their blogrolls, all alphabetical, or in one format and think, oh, it looks so clean, so organized, and yet I know that while I might borrow some of what they do, I will probably have some that don't fit a format because I'm fairly eclectic.

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ec·lec·tic [i-klek-tik] –adjective
1. selecting or choosing from various sources.
2. made up of what is selected from different sources.
3. not following any one system, as of philosophy, medicine, etc., but selecting and using what are considered the best elements of all systems.
4. noting or pertaining to works of architecture, decoration, landscaping, etc., produced by a certain person or during a certain period, that derive from a wide range of historic styles, the style in each instance often being chosen for its fancied appropriateness to local tradition, local geography, the purpose to be served, or the cultural background of the client. –noun
5. Also, ec·lec·ti·cist [i-klek-tuh-sist] a person who follows an eclectic method, as in philosophy or architecture.

(from Dictionary.com)

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So, my taste in music, my taste in movies, my taste in books...all eclectic. I even have an eclectic taste in friends. I am a children's librarian and I love kid's books, but I love working half-time in Tech Serv where I get to work with AV (DVDs, CD-ROMs) and non-kids books ("adult books" somehow insinuates something else...)

Do I like Madonna? Yes. Do I like Patty Larkin? Yes. Do I like Martina McBride? Lucinda Williams? Christine Lavin? Yes, Yes, Yes. I love Johnny Cash. I own five Menudo LPs from the early 80s. I adore Carole King.

I like Home Alone, Twister, Enchanted April, A Knight's Tale, Metropolitan, Men in Black, and Flushed Away, to name a few movies.

So my blog doesn't fall easily into a category either. I'm not really a library blogger, though I am a librarian. I'm not really a kidlit blogger, though I am a children's librarian. I'm not really a literary blogger, but I do often write about books. I'm not a mom blogger, though many folks on my "roll" are. I have bipolar disorder, but this blog isn't really about that either. I love crafting, but it's not a craft blog... I'm Presbyterian/Emergent/Christian but my blog isn't just about that experience either. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Eclectic.

My life has been enriched by time spent in the Americas: Brazil, Honduras, and the U.S. (mainly Maryland, Virginia, and Pittsburgh, PA) and Europe: Germany, Poland, and traveling all over the Continent as well as a short trip to England when I was 8.

My life has been enriched by my siblings: born when I was 10 and 11, my world has expanded to include them and their eclectic tastes, although my sister is pretty straightforward in her reading: she likes Regency period romances, Jane Austen, and all the classics (she asked for The Hunchback of Notre Dame for her 13th birthday--the book, not the movie.) She watches old movies. My brother is into music and listens even to Bessie Smith. He loves Bob Dylan. They both are huge U2 fans.

My dad likes country music, and I do too. My dad reads the New York Times and at least two other papers online DAILY, and often will email articles that he thinks I'd be interested in, from obits of children's authors to articles about libraries.

My mother is a nature lover. She gardens. So I have tulips in front of my house in Pittsburgh, planted when I was in library school. For her birthday, I bought her a huge bag of bird seed.

My parents aren't big readers (of books for people their age) -- my mom knows a lot of kid's picture books as she currently teaches second grade but has also taught first, third, kindergarten and preschool. My dad, like the protagonist in the movie Metropolitan, reads book reviews, but not books. He'll tell you what a movie is about, but 9 times out of ten, he hasn't seen it. He is also well versed in children's books, and his favorite, if pressed, would probably be Daniel Pinkwater's The Big Orange Splot. "My house is me...it looks like all my dreams."

Um, so in conclusion, I'm eclectic. Or, as a card I once bought in college said, "I'm glad you like me. (inside:) I'm too wierd for anyone else."

On the bookshelf right now: The Restless Heart: Finding our spiritual home in times of loneliness. As a person who spends WAY too much time by herself, this book is incredibly insightful and in some ways like looking into a mirror that says, "You are okay. You are human."