My sister’s a librarian, and so are some of my favorite people I’ve never met (thank you, interwebz!), so when I found out the American Library Association was holding their national convention in little old New Orleans, I was pretty excited, hoping everybody would show up; then budgets and schedules and my surprise loss of my apartment conspired to keep quite a few folks away. But that’s no reason for me to stay home! After riding around doing this errand and that, I ended up at the Morial Convention Center with thousands of librarians, all with their badges and red tote bags and 300 page program books. I don’t have the $200 to get in to the thing, but I can roam the halls and see librarians in their Annual habitat. After New Orleans flooded after Katrina, ALA was the first convention to honor their contract and come here. ALA has been on the front lines of protecting us against the prying eyes of the Homeland Security state. Librarians are the guardians of one of our last shared public resources. I mean, they get a copy and then let us all read it, one at a time? That’s pretty flipping radical in this moment where everybody needs their very own one of everything. Yeah, I can’t afford to go to their show, but I’m happy to sit here and watch them march along, figuring out how to help the rest of us find what we want to find, read what we want to read, and ask questions we didn’t know we wanted to ask. I hope they all have a wonderful time this weekend. And that the Convention Center gets some damn bicycle racks.