Career Conundrums

I have been working at my library for over a year now in an hourly capacity. The money is more than my other part time job, and I have been getting a fluctuating amount of hours. I love working at my library, so my overall work life tends to fluctuate with my hours. The more library hours, the better I feel about my career.

The problem (and I say this loosely, because it's all relative) is that due to recent events in my personal life, I am becoming less satisfied with my other part time "pay the bills" job. I recently got engaged to to my wonderful partner J, and we have been making plans for the future. We've been discussing the path of our careers, the possibility of the traditional house with 2.5 kids and a dog scenario. Knowing us, we may end up in a condo with one kid, a Delorean and a muppet, but that is beside the point.

Neither of us is in a financial place to roll the dice on a mortgage right now. He is freelance, and I am part-time hourly in two jobs, so while we could reasonably afford payments on an older or foreclosure home, down-payments and closing costs may be a problem. We also really like the apartment that we are in at the moment. So the house can wait.

As far as the one to two point five kids go, I am very committed to not having any until I can financially support them. Our work situations being what they are, neither J or I get benefits. Without a stable healthcare plan, I cannot justify having kids just yet.

My career conundrum comes down to this. I have been interviewing for full time positions in my library for about as long as I have been working there. Having got my foot in the door, I've been trying to wedge my whole body in. But at the moment, the job market is such that a lot of older more experienced candidates are  getting the jobs I apply for. I cannot begrudge them this. The library deserves the best, most qualified people in each position. However, it is hard to gain the experience to be competitive if all the jobs go to more experienced candidates. It's an old story.

My career situation is by no means dire in comparison to unemployed and much more underemployed Americans, many of them with families to support. Nonetheless, I am faced with the choice of seeking full-time employment outside my library, that may not be as fulfilling but pays benefits, or waiting it out. I do not want to abandon the dream that I've spent years of my life and thousands of dollars in student loans pursuing. It is just hard not to get discouraged when my interviewers and co-workers tell me that I am an ideal candidate for the library, but they keep finding others that are more ideal. I've just gotta decide whether to keep trucking or veer off the road.

RSS Spring Cleaning

Okay, so it isn't Spring yet, as evidenced by the now constant fall of snowflakes from the sky. But regardless I need to clean out my Google Reader feed. It has become a runaway train.

I have a tendency to Subscribe to any blog that I find intriguing (title, background, subject, etc.). This is especially true when others in the library world recommend them. I currently have over a hundred feeds coming through Google Reader and a good 60-70% are written by librarians or library staff.

The problem is that not all of them are relevant to my life, library or otherwise. Still less of them do I read on a regular basis. But my pack-rat tendencies kick in when I try to clear out the feeds.

I always think, "Oh but this one is so well written! That one had that humorous take on e-book publishers that one time! Certainly I cannot disrespect this blogger by throwing out her feed like yesterday's socks!"

I do respect each and every one of the bloggers whose feeds I subscribe to. But sometimes, it is so easy to get overloaded with ideas and career solidarity, and well ...life,  that I end up with 400 unread posts in a day and end up chucking them all. And so I have committed myself to clear out Google Reader like I would clear out my wardrobe.

Just like I would toss clothes that I have not worn in a year into a Goodwill bag, so I will UnSubscribe to feeds whose posts I have not actually sat down to read in a month. Please don't hate me all you wonderful bloggers!

Question of the Day 1/26/13

A patron came up asking how to spell "AmusementMonkeys.com" While I was happy to spell it for him, I thought I should check the website to make sure it was live, which it wasn't. Nor did Google return any results for "Amusement Monkeys".

The patron informed me that he was a carnival worker and that they called themselves Amusement Monkeys because they have to climb on the rides to take them apart and put them together. He was looking for work. He was very nice, and very inebriated. 

After a bit of a long search, I found one employment result for carnival employment with listings by state. I told him there were a number of different company listings and he yelled. "I only need one! Thanks honey!"

Sandy Children's Book Relief

If anyone like me is still looking for ways to help out victims of Hurricane Sandy, the organization Urban Librarians Unite is holding a book drive for children's books. Many public library collections were decimated. And since many NYC libraries are acting as community centers, and a safe haven for affected families, they could use help. Donating to the book fund is one way to get involved.

http://urbanlibrariansunite.org/2012/11/05/sandy-childrens-book-relief/

Hospital Stays are not my Cup of Tea

My partner J recently donated an organ to a family member for transplant, as a life saving measure. I was lucky enough to be able to stay with him in the hospital for the surgery and the hardest part of his recovery. Unfortunately, because the family member and hospital reside across the country from us, J needs to remain out of state for the next month or so for home based recovery.

I thank my lucky stars that J and his family member came through the surgery without a hitch. The nurse working in the OR kept their family and I updated every couple of hours as to the progress of the two patients. Everything went as planned.

J came out of surgery and slept much of the next 12 hours and was actually in good spirits the 12 hours after that. Then the anesthesia wore off, and despite intravenous pain medication, he was in a hellish amount of pain. Things were up and down for the next week. Sometimes, he would feel well enough to walk and eat a bit of "red" Jell-O. Other times, it was all I could do not to strangle the well-meaning staff for opening the door every 5 minutes to draw labs, take vital signs, and most infuriatingly of all, change the barely filled trash at 3AM.

This is how hospitals work. Everyone has their job to do and tasks to complete like any other job. But it is infuriating to see someone I love, who is in pain, only get a few moments of desperately needed sleep at a time because someone needs to check something off a To-Do list. Sometimes all I could do is hold his hand, kiss his forehead, and alternately lay siege to the nurse's station. Those were not my finest hours.

We had some angels with us. A few really caring staff members to help tend to the pain with dignity and compassion, and others to motivate (from gently prodding to full on reality checks). Those people are the one's that I really credit with the fact that J is now out of the hospital and recovering on his own. They got him to walk, and to eat, and told him that it was okay to relax in spite of it all.

To many of the doctors, though they did their jobs well, he just seemed to be an outcome. They pushed him too hard too fast and extended many of his hardships. So if any of our angels read this blog, however improbably, thank you. Thank you for being human and real and treating us the same. Thank you for the ice chips, the hot packs, the extra blankets and popsicles you did not have to give. Thank you for caring!

J is staying at his family's house and is now recovering nicely, a little bit closer to normal every day. His family, the transplant recipient, was released but following some setbacks was re-admitted to the hospital. His doctors believe they are minor/routine complications that are easily fixable. And he does seem to be improving with treatment. But the setbacks still wear on all our hearts, J's especially.

I am back at home now and several thousand miles from J. So I cannot be there to hold his hand through the hard times. Thank god for cell phones and video call apps. There is nothing to do now but for all of us to put one foot in front of the other and hope for the best. I cannot wait for J to come home safe.

To Knit the Fanboy Hat

I learned to knit in college. Neither of my grandmothers knit nor does anyone else in my family. My mother claims that my great-grandmother used to knit and crochet, and tried to teach her at one point but it didn't take. Unfortunately, great-gran died when I was a baby, so I was never able to reap her knowledge or even to find out if she really enjoyed it.

I am a self proclaimed nerd, geek, fan-girl, and gamer girl and I was lucky enough to find J who is all those things in male form. I was also lucky enough to find a kindred spirit in college who I could not only discuss my different scifi fandoms with, but who was willing to teach me to knit as well. I will always be greatful to her for this. She showed me the basic cast on/off, knit, and purl stitches and how I could make a really awesome Dr. Who scarf if it took my fancy.

Having been a frustrated painter for most of my angsty teen years, (fan art was hard to market in your teens without benefit of modern day Internet) I found that knitting satisfied my creative impulses. I could take it everywhere with me and it wasn't as messy as paint or bulky as a sketchbook. And past initial surprise at seeing such an "old-fashioned" activity, most people didn't ask me to explain myself past what item I was making.

As it seems to be with all my hobbies and artistic pursuits, I got away from knitting a while after I graduated college. I didn't pick it up again until I went to library school. That's when I discovered the knitter's haven, the yarn shop. My local shop had all kinds of soft and squeezy fibers to fall in love with and I developed a small stash.

I took another short break until I moved in with J, and we started having in-depth dialogues over the directing and writing merits of Joss Whedon. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer and he loves Firefly. Any friend of a Browncoat know that there is a very famous cunning hat that one of the main characters receives from his knitter mother. It is absolutely ridiculous and too fun for words.

So for Christmas, I will be knitting this for J. I took J to my local yarn store that I had never been to before, and my face lit up at the knitter's table and candy colored skeins of fiber. I could see a light bulb go on in his brain as I asked him to squeeze the yarn I bought. The yarn did not interest him personally, but I feel like he now understands a bit more about me. Now if only he'd start wearing a black leather duster.

E-book Demos at the Library

I have recently joined my library's e-book team. I spend a few hours each week showing patrons how they can check out free e-books and downloadable audiobooks from Overdrive on the library's website. We set up a table with various e-readers and tablet computers, to show people how to download the books onto their different devices.

The library staff has just recently taken over this project (it was previously done through contractors) and I think it is really taking off. Admittedly, most of the patrons that come up to our table think that we are advertising the devices themselves.

"Are you giving these away?" and "How much are you selling them for?" are frequent questions. I even had one patron complain that he did not think we should be advertising e-readers in the library because "people should be here to read books." When I explained to him the function of the e-book table and that it does promote reading books, he seemed mollified.

I've found that I really sort of love the e-book table. I get to learn how to promote the library's e-book collections and I get to play around with the different devices myself. I especially enjoy encountering patrons who either have no idea that the library offers e-books and are impressed, or patrons who are aware and disapprove.

A lot of people still believe that the Internet will be the death of libraries. That readership of books will go down because "that information can be found online easier." Many people believe that library staff should be the guardians at the gate, holding back the harmful onslaught of technology and the damage they think it will do to literacy. This is turning out, as many librarians have been saying for years, not to be true. Libraries are adapting as they always have. We are incorporating technology to provide a wider range of access to materials.

I enjoy explaining that current studies, (and certainly our own circ statistics) are baring out the fact that e-books actually increase paper text circulation. When a patron sees a title that may have 15 or 16 holds on the print text to 1 or none on the ebook, they'll often checkout the ebook. Conversely, say they search the catalog for an ebook from an obscure author. They find that the library does not own the ebook but does have it in print. In these cases, they will often travel to the library to pick it up. Then they'll often stay to browse the shelves when they find out that the library also offers CDs, DVDs, and internet access.

Books and promoting literacy are still mainstays of the library. But now, we can reach a wider audience with ebooks and downloadable audiobooks.