I got so excited about all the symptoms that I did a really stupid thing. I took a pregnancy test. See, but I had heard that some tests could tell as early as 10 DPO! Honest! So I ignored all of the tests' directions that said to wait to test until the first day of your missed period. Naturally, it was negative. I don't know what else I expected. Bad girl, Carrie, be patient.

The interview went spectacularly.

The women who interviewed me didn't seem to be at all nervous about the fact that my degrees are in music, not library science. I think I was able to impress them with my views on the importance of youth in our culture. They also liked the fact that I've written children's music. I was able to answer all of their questions to at least my own satisfaction. The job pays better than my last job, the staff seems much more relaxed, and the job description sounds much more suited to me. God, I hope I get it!

One of the questions they asked me was this:

We'd like to know how you feel in general about the first amendment. Specifically, how would you handle it if a parent came up to you with a book, tossed it on the counter, and told you that it didn't belong in a library?

Wow. Good question. Because while I have very, very strong views regarding freedom of speech, that wasn't precisely what they wanted to know. What they wanted to know was how I would allow said views to color my reactions to the public...

I was lucky enough to escape my sheltered childhood with my beliefs still intact. While my mother would have illegalized any obscenity she could manage, and my father is the most Limbaugh-devoted Democrat on the planet, I managed to develop my own thoughts on the matter without them being founded in adolescent rebellion. It would have been easy to be "free speech, free love, free everything" just to spite them, but it would have lacked a certain integrity.

I'm a musician. The music I write does not please everybody. I've set poems about child abuse, about women's rights, about Hitler. If someone finds my music offensive, it's certainly their right to be offended. But it's my right to compose the music I hear in my head and feel in my soul. There have been times in history in which musicians have lacked the freedom that I embrace. We've felt the sting of censorship, just like writers of prose and writers of poetry.

I remember when I was younger, practicing the piano in my living room. I was playing a wonderful sonata by Hindemith, a twentieth-century German composer. If you know his music, then you know that it is by no means inaccessible. It's beautiful, lyrical stuff. As I came to the last cadence, my father entered the room and said, "Now play something pretty." I was incensed, not just because he had been critical, but because he had been critical out of ignorance.

To my beliefs, ignorance is the root of censorship...

But that wasn't the question. What the women wanted to know was how I would handle this ignorance coming from a patron, a parent. And there's really only one answer: tactfully. I would tactfully apologize for the fact that the parent had been offended. I would tactfully ask her to describe the offensive material. And I would tactfully tell her we would consider her suggestion of removal. Tactfully, I would bite my tongue in half.

They told me that it could take some time for the decision to be made. They've covered themselves so that they won't really need anybody to fill the position until January, though the person hired could start sooner. They said I probably wouldn't hear back in the next two weeks, so that's at least two weeks of nail biting.