The once and future librarian, teacher, and writer

Once upon a time, in 2000, I had a job, a live-in boyfriend, a list of standardized tests that I was steadily knocking off, and two graduate school applications in the mail for my teaching credential and Masters. I’d been home a year afer a year of teaching abroad, something I loved and hated but loved enough to keep working on getting better at it. I also had a lot of fighting at home, a martial art I was enjoying less and less, and enough wiggle room in my job that I found myself experimenting with online publishing, which I enjoyed hugely. Nothing major but enough to quite radically alter the course of my life. I stopped practicing Taekwondo and lost a whole social/support network. My boyfriend dumped me and after some acrimony about who would keep the apartment, moved out leaving me with doubled bills and no spare money for tuition. And the online publishing led to two serial publications, several resource pages, and at least one department manual and a few user guides. Which made me think that perhaps collating and providing information was really where I needed to be, and what I needed to do. I was twenty-five.

Once upon a time in 2004, I was planning my wedding, finishing my MLIS program, and sending out resume after resume. I understood that technical services librarianship, like writing and teaching, required a deep understanding of the materials in a collection, and the ability to present those materials in an accessible and enticing manner. I felt ready to fall headlong into a job and immerse myself into a collection, to do my best to serve patrons through catalogs and finding aids. I was also very tired from my long drives to my beloved internship in San Jose and my late nights trying to do XML programming homework, and worried about the odd dizzy spells I had been experiencing off and on for three years at that point. I would turn thirty that winter, and find work as a consultant, a role that gave me a lot of anxiety. Consultants were experts who wore awesome suits, I thought, whereas I had some nice off the rack stuff and I new degreee and really wanted some mentoring. I got comfortable enough with the role to do it, but not enough to sell it.

Patrick and I have been talking a lot lately about work. What we want to do, how our past and current work figures into how to get the work we’d like to do (and get paid for it), where and how to live. I have tabled my idea of going back into consulting, and am thinking more about teaching and writing. In the meantime, I create DIY preschool lessons, consider a resource blog and maybe a zine, and help plan Patrick’s website. I just turned thirty-five.