god every time I look at a Library's website I desperately wish I was brave enough to leave my house to get a card lmao (my local branch only does walk-ins unforch). Just the e-resources alone are incredible, like we always fail to finish our genealogy searches bc Ancestry is a paid subscription, but I could literally get access through my library??? The free access to courses, languages, minor streaming, newspapers you usually have to pay for, a literal mobile hotspot for a low weekly fee, etc etc etc and we just. Pay for all those things when we *could* be using the libraries??????
idk I think a lot of my shut-in tendencies are how I was raised, bc I can't order takeout or go to a restaurant on a whim, or grab coffee/etc just because. asking for new books was always a stress bc on the one hand, yay my kid is a reader! on the other, we *must* talk about how much our child is costing us and stress the point that we will not spoil her! we were upper middle class living like we had nothing, like I wasn't allowed to get new clothes unless what I had was literally coming apart, constant "that's too expensive" commentary. We lived...less than a mile from a library. Make it make sense.
