full of beans

Ever want to just walk up to someone and ask them how, if you've never had sex with them, or even ever seen them before in your life, you are supposed to be the mother of their child?
There's this little boy, who seemingly came out of nowhere, running around the library, climbing on tables, wearing a footy pajama one-piece dealie (it's 2:30 PM), and generally being a pain in my ass. Part of the problem, too, is that my natural inclination in these situations is to ignore the kid. This becomes difficult when it becomes obvious that that's what certain patrons expect from their library.
Also, this is why I avoided all of those YA and children's librarian jobs, so I could just deal with the group of people I wanted to deal with.
This isn't the only irritating small child. There are also all of the kids who, bored with looking for their movie and unattended to by parents more interested in finding that DVD of Garfield: The Movie, wander into the teenhole and scrawl all over the graffiti/survey boards I've set up. Quickest way to keep a 14 year old from something or somewhere? Throw a bunch of 4 year olds there.
***
So who's read this? Part of me is thinking I should read the book in question there, but you know that Dorothy Parker quote about books that should not be put down, they should be thrown against a wall? Yeah, I do that. And I have crappy aim and a lot of fragile things. Reading a book that I know will make me angry is just going to endanger those fragile things. My main complaint with the woman, without reading her book (yes, I'm pretentious enough to do that--wanna hear my arguments against Neil Postman's theories that come from only reading a chapter of one of his books in a course packet?), is when she apparently lists A Tree Grows In Brooklyn as an antidote to the more-or-less modern YA problem novel. Fuck, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is bleak. At least, I thought so. And the librarian is mean. And people die left and right. And it's so nineteenth century philanthropic: like, we as upper class WASPs must help these poor working class immigrants, for they do not know any better.
I've been holding in a lot of my bitterness towards A Tree Grows In Brooklyn since I happened to read it only because it was a roommate's favorite book. And you can't exactly diss someone's favorite book.