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Steven Chabot

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The Librarian - The Hilarious House of Frightenstein

The Librarian - The Hilarious House of Frightenstein

Well… hello…

Look at all this dust. What are you people doing there in the dark?

Feedburner tells me there are 51 of you left. Some of you are bots in the corner, but that is ok. There has to be a warm body amongst you.

One of my favourite Canadian kids shows was The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. The dusty Librarian who unsuccessfully tried to scare the children with playful nursery rhymes was was of my favourite characters. His books were always dusty.

These posts are dusty.

It is hard to explain why I haven’t been interested in writing about professional librarian and information issues for almost two years. Much of it has to do with a difficult first-job search. A lot of it had to do with coming to this government information professional job which didn’t satisfy me.

And, to be honest, my personal life was a struggle for two of those years, with another year to try to get over it.

Working alone is difficult. I felt like I wasn’t tied to the profession. For a year I thought of doing something else. I took Editorial classes, maybe wanting to work with writing more directly. I didn’t think those classes were a waste of my time, I still do editorial work on the side and I really enjoy it.

What brought be back was attending a one-day symposium “Academic Librarianship – A Crisis or An Opportunity?” (Fillipino Librarian has slides) inspired round the brewhaha happening at the McMaster Libraries. More on that in another post.

Years bring maturity. I love what I do, even if I don’t love where I am doing it. And I guess I have dust to start clearing.

In One End and Out the Other

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Steven Chabot cutting a mango Cramming jerk chicken last minute by Xuan-Yen C.

Both of the above pictures are from our recent trip to the Caribbean. That is me eating jerk chicken in Jamaica and a mango in Grand Cayman.

Steven at the computer by Steven ChabotI post these only because I was looking at an old image of myself from when I was last in school. In many respects I don’t really like the way I look here.   I am unkempt and a bit overweight. And in many respects I am not happy in this picture.   Sure, I am sitting writing in front of a pile of books, but in public I am curt and dispassionate about what was going on around me.

The last year has been so much about forgetting my time in school. I haven’t really written anything beyond a simple blog post, and for a while I wasn’t writing in my notebook. I spent the spring and summer this year, after I finally got a job, reading random science fiction and whatever else I happened to stumble across and add to my library ILL queue.

I was so unhappy with the last year of my Master’s degree–mostly because of the fact that there were no courses in my last year because of a mass exodus of new professors hired to teach more theoretical courses. So I really ran away from the faculty. I turned in my papers and refused to think about what was before was an important part of my personality:  my scholarly side.

This summer, however, I began to feel listless. One day I took an intoxicated trip to Christie Pitts park, and something drove me to bring my final term papers from my Master’s. And they are very good, even if I don’t necessarily believe the ideas in them.

Three times in my degree teachers encouraged me to publish, complete research, or apply for a PhD. Mainly because of my original failure to attend graduate school in Philosophy (although I was accepted to one school), I really was overly critical about my own skills and attitude towards study.

Reading those papers, however, made me realize what I actually love to do. Not since my undergraduate have I actually had a chance to talk to people who read Habermas for fun. I look up Theses, for pleasure, on my own time. I have many friends but I still feel very much alone because I don’t get a chance to share this with people.

So, I’ve decided, I think, that I have to go back to school. I really have to take what I have learned over the last year about myself and apply it. I have no formal plans, and I don’t want any. I am not going to do this with ambition or a plan on where I am going to end up. I want to do it for me for the pure love of reading and writing what I enjoy. To prove this for myself I have decided to audit a class, and do the work, without concern for money being spent or the mark I will get in the end. I am just doing it for me.

So watch out, I am coming to get you with a new found strength and vigour. And just a little more fun than I had before. Because I sincerely feel like a different person.

hee hee by BethMacdonell