Subject/Object

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.

I 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.

Just coincidentally, I was looking at my old posts, and I discovered that tomorrow it will be three years to the day that I started this blog.  Not the actual start, because I do have some imported posts from an early Blogger site, but with my post about Thomas Mann and the Library of Congress.

I stayed up all night reading that report, and then writing that post.  And I think that was the time I was sure I was going to be a Librarian.  I think I was already accepted to the University of Toronto then, and from that moment I knew that librarianship was what I wanted to be passionate about. I was so interested in the process of going through the library and doing research, and how this would change in the future.

Anyone who has followed my posts since then will know that this passion was slowly killed by that Information Studies program.  The story of the disaster has yet to be written.  If you had been watching me over the last year you wouldn’t even suspect that I cared about libraries any more.  And that is because I didn’t.

The struggle of having to deal with what Bill Crowley calls the “cognitive dissonance” of librarianship versus the information professions in our education.  The agony of realizing that I actually got no professional experience while in school.  The defeat of having no true mentorship in my so-called practicum.  And then the depression of not finding my first professional gig for eight months.  All this killed my interest and desire to be a librarian.

I haven’t mentioned it, but since February I have been working as the Coordinator of Information & Knowledge Management at the Office of the Worker Adviser, within the Ontario Ministry of Labour.  So despite my love of libraries and distaste for the discourse of “information,” I am more of an information professional than a librarian.  I take the problems of the economy in stride:  due to the policies of the government I am employed as a temp (through an actual temp agency).  While I am being paid less then I should, I look and see that people all around me are without work.  Six months ago I myself was without work.

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the position.  I went to so many interviews in academic libraries, and had one particularly shocking experience that I feel like I am ready to tell.  But every time I am introduced as the “tech guy” at my office I cringe.  I insist on describing my self as the librarian. I love my computer, and I am a computer nerd, but this is more of my hobby.  I might like model trains, but I don’t necessarily want to do it for eight hours a day every day. There hasn’t been a Master’s level professional here for some years, so getting people back into the habit of seeing this position as a professional has been rewarding.  After showing people that their reference questions would be answered, with care and timeliness, I got a standing ovation at the all staff conference a few months ago.

And yet, I am still more of a book nerd, even though books may or may not be dying.  At least I want to be passionate again about what books represent: introspection, transcendence from one’s daily life, education,  empowerment, and knowledge over information.

I was ready to give up on libraries altogether.  I did so well in school, I had amazing people who were willing to attest to my passion and commitment, and I served through various professional activities.  So I didn’t have professional experience like some others, so what.  When I didn’t get a job for four months, six months, eight months I was down. And parts of this job get me down every day, to the point where I was ready to quit being an information professional.  I realized I am not an information professional.

Should I work a while then leave the profession altogether, I thought.  I even thought that I should focus my efforts on hooking children onto reading while they were young (inspired more than a bit by my partner Xuan-Yen’s work with Green Thumbs Growing Kids, who’ve won a Green Toronto Award for 2009). And I still would love to work with kids more.

While I am still unsure whether what I am doing now will count if I want to try again at academic libraries, I think I’ve come home to my path with a whole new set of ideals and priorities.  Over this year I’ve been searching for something to be passionate about again, and I feel like something is starting.  At least I am writing more.