Cranky Bodhisattva in a Long Black Dress: How I Got Here, Why I Stay (Pt. I)

March 15, 2010 at 5:55 pm (blogging, creativity, personal, philosophizing, professional development, Uncategorized)

This series may be where I lose some of you, and that’s fine.  I’ve been meaning to write a collection development policy for Alchemy, and I’ll almost certainly need one if anything comes of my nomination for the Salem Press Library Blog Awards.   You should know right up front what kind of library madness you’re dealing with.

[Many thanks to whomever nominated me, by the way.  The notion that one relatively obscure, somewhat odd, librarian's philosophical ramblings might have pleased one or two of you at some point warms the cockles of what's left of my heart.  And Mr. Tobey, if you're still reading along, I'm sure you get a lot of e-mail, but I wanted to remind you again that I'd be delighted to respond to that biography questionnaire as soon as you send it, if the nomination still holds.]

In that spirit, a bit about spirit.  Or, to put it another way, librarianship as vocation.

Part the First:  How I Got Here

Once upon a time I was a doctoral student at a respectable institution of higher learning.  My grades were good, my papers were being accepted at conferences, and — based on their responses on post-course evaluations — my students were loving me to pieces, even the ones who got stuck in my 8 a.m. Intro to Lit courses because they’d dilly-dallied on registration day.  With only one or two classes to finish, and a doctoral exam reading list well under way, I was on the fast track to the PhD.  There was just one small problem.

I was really unhappy.

Not in a visible way, of course.  I really did love a lot of what I was doing, especially the teaching.  There’s nothing like explaining to impressionable young minds that there’s more to life than getting a well-paying job, and demonstrating in fun, concrete ways why fiction, poetry and plays still matter.  But there was something missing, and I had no idea what it was — just that there was something else I was supposed to be doing.

[I know!  What a fortunate problem to have.  We'll discuss that in greater depth in part two.]

If that sounds crazy to you, you can imagine how it sounded to my parents and friends when I told them I was going to take a sabbatical from my program and figure it out.  They thought I’d gone barking mad, and their suspicions were confirmed when, after a year of soul-searching [and adjunct teaching, a trial by fire if ever there was one], I left the PhD program altogether and became a receptionist for a firm in a field about which I knew absolutely nothing whatsoever.

See if you can guess how I then made it to library science from there:

a)  I had an epiphany in which I realized that I’d been using libraries since I was a child, and loved books and reading, so, I should go do that!

b)  I read a lot of books on choosing a career and finding your true purpose in life, and took a lot of fun quizzes that helped me realize I should become a librarian.

c)  I became roommates with a library school student.

Everybody who picked “c,” go to the head of the class.

But it wasn’t an overt thing, either.  C., bless her, never gave me a career pep talk.  She simply went about the business of being awesome.  By which I mean, recommending books she thought I might like, and speaking candidly about things she was passionate about.  Service to teens.  Intellectual freedom.  How to find affordable shoes that were both cute AND comfortable!  Er, research skills.

After we’d lived together for a while, and I’d learned a lot about librarianship through osmosis, I thought it was a career I could get excited about.  I even had a faint glimmer of hope that perhaps I was on the right track to finding whatever it is I’d been lacking in a work situation because librarianship, as C. practiced it, resonated with what my notion of a meaningful career should be.

Pragmatically, however, I was already on the hook for quite a bit in student loans.   Therefore, my cunning plan was to go get a job in library to see if the additional time and expense were justified.  So I bookmarked the “careers” page at my local library system and checked back every day until there was a job posting.  In the meantime, I socked away as much money as I could at my day job.

[If you are currently in library school, please go back and re-read that paragraph until it is imprinted on your brain.  Think of me as the Relatively Ancient Mariner who stoppeth one student of three:  before you finish your degree, get yourself into a library to find out if it's really for you.  Endure the low (or no) wages, the possible scorn of your classmates, and the concern of your family.  Trust me.]

The story of my application and interview would make an amusing tale in and of itself–let’s meet for drinks in NoLa at Annual 2011, shall we?– but for now we’ll skip on ahead to the part where I was offered, and accepted, the clerk job.  I resigned from my full-time corporate America job, picked up a few more adjunct classes (never, ever, ever burn your bridges) and started off on my zany new madcap glorious path to library science.

More about that, and about why I want to work in a public library for the rest of my life, later this week.