Meet John Bourgeois

John Bourgeois
Library Manager, Webster Family Library 

1. How do you start your day?
   Looking out our bathroom window to see if bears have knocked down our beehives. One evening, a bear came through and tried to get to our bees but couldn’t (I had put them in a greenhouse). Instead it ripped off a wall of our chicken coop. So now I always check first thing in case any extra chores need tending to before work.

2. What is on your bucket list?
   I don’t have a bucket list. Instead, I set goals and work backward to figure out what needs to be done to achieve those goals, getting so granular that I know what I need to do on a daily basis. Then assessing if that daily goal is realistic or inevitable disappointment. Personally, I like to see how a light workload shakes out and works up as necessary.
   
   For example, for every dollar I don’t invest in retirement, I calculated that I have to work an additional 53 minutes and 27 seconds. This gives me pause before I buy a hot coffee refill at Cumberland Farms for $1.59. Will I derive enough enjoyment from this Machu Pichu blend with light cream and hazelnut flavoring to justify working an additional 1 hour, 24 minutes, 59 seconds? Not always.              

3. What three words best describe you?
   Pragmatic and succinct

4. If you could time travel, what year(s) would you visit?
   Assuming I’d be dead by then, 2100, so I could read my obituary. I dislike surprises.

5. What is your hidden talent?
   As a Southpaw, I can brush my teeth with my right hand.
   
   In second grade, Ms. Bearden read Tomie dePaola’s Now One Foot, Now the Other (1981), which is about a grandfather teaching a young boy to walk and then later the boy teaching the grandfather to walk after the latter has had a stroke. In middle school, I learned more about strokes and left/right brain strokes and decided to work on ambidextrousness.
   
   So every morning I brush my teeth with my right hand, in the evenings I brush with my left.

6. What book, movie, podcast, show would you recommend?
   NPR’s Hearts of Space (slow music for fast times).
   
   Using my local library’s Hoopla subscription, I read Sweet Tooth. It was so intense that I knew I wouldn’t watch the Netflix version.                     
   
   Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History is fantastic. Very readable style while being interesting. Far from being a true crime book, it’s full of examples of this behavior in nature, such as tadpole cannibalism. It also has etymological gems – for example the word sarcophagus “Gk. flesh eating” is named such because decomposition was thought to be a quality of the rock used for entombing, since germ-theory was not a concept in 2600 BCE. It is a charming book with a grisly title.
   
   For podcasts, try Hard Fork. The hosts make AI, and tech accessible.

7. What is your dream vacation?
   I'm really bad at vacations. I don't have a healthy work/life divide. I can't separate myself, so the perfect vacation is one-or two-day increments at home, taking care of chores, hanging out, and maybe making a super fussy dessert for after dinner. Maybe not. That's my perfect vacation.
   
   If I'm unplugged for too long while everyone else is working, then I get anxious. I know that there's a wall of emails, and once I know there's a wall of emails, I begin to countdown until the end of vacation when I can go back to work. The obsessive count down becomes fixed in my mind until returning to the library is a relief.
   
   …And that's why short, day-long increments, where I can more easily catch up, are better for me.

8. What or who has had the greatest impact on you?
   Having a speech impediment had a really big impact on me as a kid. I was in speech therapy at school for at least five years, maybe longer. It showed me that you might have shortcomings, but it's not impossible to overcome them. And learning that at such an early age, I think was helpful to have confidence in myself and what I could do.
   
   Shout out to Ms. Evelyn Ardoin - my speech therapist.

9. What’s the best advice you ever received?
   My first job out of grad school (MPH in Epidemiology) was with a pulmonologist’s lab in Boston as a study coordinator, and he told me “always say yes to projects”, which I took to heart.
   
   It’s good early career advice, but it's terrible advice once you get further along. You just become too burdened with projects. Now, I’m working on saying “no.”
   
   So best advice or worst, depending on where you are in your career, “always say yes to projects.”

10. What is your least favorite word or phrase?
    There are two I dislike.
    
    There's that. - Because it's one of those tautologically annoying phrases.
    
    “Yes, there is that. Thank you. That did nothing to move the conversation forward.”
    
    I'm just saying. - People act like saying “I'm just saying” absolves responsibility for what was said or is about to be said. That doesn't fly with me. This single phrase doesn’t make everything okay. It isn't some magical incantation. We have ownership of our words and their impacts. And “I'm just saying” subverts that. I think it is a manifestation of a lack of acceptance of responsibility.

11. What is your favorite junk food?
    It used to be all the variations of Mountain Dew. Mountain thunder, citrus holler, mountain holler, sugar lightning, mountain thunder, greased lightning – all names for a soda that arose from Prohibition as a mixer for moonshine. However, I've just gotten too old and don't have tolerance for that kind of sugar. One sip gives me a stomach ache.

12. What is your theme song?
    “Big Rock Candy Mountain” – The original version with cigarette trees and lakes of whiskey.

13. Dog or cat or ??
    Plants.
    
    They mostly want to be left alone and survive. Some have quirks, like watering African Violets at the base so that way their leaves don't get spotted. But it makes them a little bit more lovable, right?
    
    Plus, if they die on you, it’s usually not earth-shattering (though I do still hold onto the memory of a pitcher plant [Carmine] that my partner got for me over a decade ago. Carmine did not make the move up from Louisiana; that was a mistake.).

14. Who would play you in a movie?
    Bea Arthur.

15. What is your favorite season of the year?
    Yellow flower seasons –spring with the dandelions, narcissus bulbs, forsythia and then late summer with goldenrod and knotweed.

16. What is your favorite color?
    When the cloud shelf is low at dusk, it is a gray foil for forest foliage being illuminated as the setting sun winds between the clouds and the canopy, the leaves radiate verdancy. That’s my favorite color.

17. Early bird or night owl?
    Early bird.

18. What is your biggest pet peeve?
    The clink of utensils on people’s teeth when they are eating.

19. What is your favorite type of surprise?
    A jump scare, though I like them all equally.

20. What or who makes you smile?
    Babies and dogs. I get goofy around both. Ironically, I’m not fond of puppies.