i can confidently state i did NOT molest the virgin queen('s words)

So I got this email from the head reflib:

Tammye,

In future, if you must use those tiny sticky tabs to mark pages in one of our books, as you apparently did to the following:

AUTHOR    Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533-1603.
TITLE    Elizabeth I : collected works / edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose.
CALL NUMBER    DA350 .A25 2000

would you please have the courtesy to remove them before returning the book.

OUCH.  If that's not a punch to the book-loving face.

I feel just like the meanest girl in the class pointed out my spelling error and cut me down over it.  And now everyone makes fun of me so the mean girl will like them and help them with the Dewey Decimal system.
I made an outline of all the reasons why librarians and I should be friends:

• I LOVE librarians.
• They are the best.  They are like human computers of knowledge.  They PROBABLY know the answer, and if they do not, they know exactly which database in which to find the primary source, some anachronistic pics or artist renderings, and inspirational notes in the author's own hand.  Librarians are awesome.
• My big sister is a librarian.
• She travels all over the country to big-name universities, teaching big-name universities how to do research better. We would be stuck in the Dark Ages of technology without her reflib expertise.  Et al.
• You know what else is great?  THE LIBRARY.
• Librarians in libraries can help me find any book in the world, and if they don't have it in their own personal library they will seek it out and bring it directly. to. my. carrel.

So I felt pretty sad about how the librarians hate me.

But then I thought "WAIT A HOLY FRIGGIN GODTOPUS.
"Have I just been schooled over respectful use of the library?"

Here's the thing, you guys.  This is a MAIN CAMPUS LIBRARY at a RESEARCH UNIVERSITY.  Library books always suffer inevitable pencil and dog-ear abuse with all the notes and the scribbles and the whatnot.  Surely my sticky tabs lie at the "not at all that big of a deal" end of the spectrum.  Sometimes, there are even permanent highlights and pen marks bastardizing the text before it reaches your researcher hands.  Where, inevitably, you subject it to your own leaden assault.  It's horrifying.

I mean, Virginia Woolf would seize in her watery grave (too soon?) if she could see what I've done to "To the Lighthouse."  I wait with bated breath for the day I contract lead poisoning from my copies of her stuff.  And it's impossible to tell which dog-ears of all the dog-ears are the important ones, as all the passages are relevant by now.

But those books are MINE.  I own them and therefore own the rights to their physical bodies (too soon?).  I will mark them the eff up because they are mine and I am conducting research.  But I hate checking out a book with someone else's brainless comments scrawled all over the margins, and I won't subject someone else to mine.  And I will not be passive-aggressively demeaned by a snooty librarian that doesn't even have a copy of Going Rogue for me to "read" (too soon?).

So I dug up my library records and said librarian can suck it.

• This past semester I checked out 42 books.  FORTY. TWO. BOOKS.
• 8 of them made the "2010 Reading List," because wow did I overestimate how much reading time I would sacrifice last semester.
• Thus 34 books were checked out for coursework and research.
• 7 were requested from other libraries in the area.
• Because my library isn't good enough for queer theory, but PENN'S IS.
• That leaves 27 of my library's own books, for research purposes, in my hot little hands over the course of an entire semester.
• These titles included Derrida, Barthes, Zeigler, Tatar, Levi-Strauss, Benjamin, and other soul-sucking works.
• In other words:
• NOT PLEASURE READING.
• Things that I need to NOTE, CITE, and otherwise INDICATE passages from.
• So of those 27 books in my library's personal book collection lent to me:
• JUST ONE ended up with sticky tabs in the pages.

I'm not saying what I did was right.  I'm not saying I wasn't being insensitive, returning a borrowed item not in the condition that it came in.

But I AM saying that I choose to use tabs. Also, Elizabeth I: Collected Works is a great text I found interesting enough to tab. I did NOT use pen, dog-ear pages, or otherwise molest the Virgin Queen's words.

I tabbed, mean librarian.  Out of respect.  And I hope it burned your fingers as you pulled each of those three sticky tabs out of your whining book.
COURTESY OF ME.