This past summer I traveled to Chicago to hang out with librarians who were attending ALA Annual, but I took one day to ride the train out to the suburb I’d lived and danced in while living my previous life as teacher at the Academy of Movement and Music and a dancer and occasional choreographer for Momenta.

I’ve spent years trying desperately not to think about what life would have been like if I’d decided to pursue dance as a career, missing it so much that I didn’t even attend live dance performances for years. But I was finally ready to go back and immerse myself in the familiar sounds and smells of the old building, dig through the archived performance videos for hours and hours, and trace my favorite barre with my fingers (it was wobbly, and therefore forced me not to rely on it for balance).

Digging through archived performance videos is kind of a hit-or-miss affair. They’re labeled, helpfully, “summer dance festival 1999″ and “Evening 7/21/2001″ and the like, with no cataloging. (The librarian in me wanted to apply for a leave of absence to spend a few months making finding aids for them!) But in the end I was able to find three pieces that I’d choreographed. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent some time making them sharable online. And here’s one of them, choreographed in 2000 for some of the group of teachers and alumni who gather every summer to put on their own show. Some were and are professional dancers. Others (like me at the time) hadn’t danced in a long while, but still made yearly pilgrimages back to the Momenta studios to participate in this show.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Thank you for indulging me.

It crossed my mind that maybe I should just put this thing out of its misery, but I don’t think I’m ready to follow in CavLec’s footsteps yet. So here I am again, and here’s a bit of what I’ve been up to since last I thought much about blogging.

We had an unusually busy Spring term at Carleton. Budgetary adventures, a new initiative to archive digital versions of all senior capstone projects, revising our strategic plan, and some internal restructuring took up a lot of time and brain space.

My sister got married, my cousin got married, and my youngest brother graduated from college (with honors!), all in the space of a month.

Then I took two weeks off of work to do as much of Nothing At All as I could. In case you missed it, that was TWO WHOLE WEEKS off. In a row. Bliss. During that time, I became a big fan of sitting on the porch with a book, a laptop, and some iced tea. (In fact, I’m reprising my role as a porch-sitter right now, thanks to early observance of Independence Day.) Coming back to work was kind of a shock to the system after that, let me tell you.

It’s been a weird few months in which many individual good things happened but the whole felt kind of awful. I was tired. I am tired. But I think things are starting to turn around. And while I’m not sure how frequently I’ll post or what I’ll write about, it’s nice to see this space sitting here and waiting for me.

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First there was high school. I’d decided to continue being home schooled, which terrified me. How could I be sure that I’d learn enough to get into college if I stayed home? I couldn’t. So I learned absolutely as much as I could, fueled by a deep smoldering panic that I’d be horribly under-prepared for college. As it turns out, I wasn’t under-prepared. So I graduated from high school and went to college.

Then there was college. That terrified me. How could I possibly both figure out what I wanted to do with The Rest Of My Life (in my head that phrase was always in capital letters) and also learn enough to do whatever-that-was in only four years? As it turns out, I didn’t. And as it turns out, this is normal. So I graduated from college and, since I still didn’t quite know what I wanted to do for The Rest Of My Life, I went to grad school.

Grad school terrified me. All these smart people, all this work, all this pressure. I had no idea how I’d make it through the reading assignments, let alone the term papers that were twice as long as any I’d written before (with the exception of my college senior thesis). After two years of that, I’d learned enough to decide that English Professor was not going to be my title for The Rest Of My Life, so I skipped out with a masters and moved over to the School of Library and Information Science… which terrified me for a whole different set of reasons. The classes didn’t inspire me, and I’d never worked in a library, so I wondered what people did beyond sit at a desk and answer questions all day, which seemed like it could be unendingly dull. But just as I was going to quit and go back to the English Professor idea (the program had said I could come back any time), I got a job in a library and decided that this might suit me after all. As it turns out, it does suit me. So, after 2 years in English and 2 years in library school, I left graduate school and started my first job.

This Carleton job terrified me, so when I took it I promised myself that it need only be for four years. (After that, I planned to find a job closer to my family.) It was a job full of all kinds of opportunity, but also all kinds of responsibility. The people here were wonderful, but I worried that I’d be the weak link in their exhilarating, intense, and creative chain. As it turns out, our individual strengths and weaknesses seem to complement each other pretty well, so the job quickly grew to become my dream job. And so, as it turns out, I’m not looking for a job after my allotted four years.

And now, on this, the anniversary of the day I started here, I feel nearly qualified to hold the position I have. I’ve done a lot (started this blog, taught dozens of classes, met with hundreds of students, given conference talks, written articles and a book chapter). I’ve learned to negotiate tricky situations with at least outward confidence. And I’ve made fast friends for whom I’m continually grateful. These friends have talked me into confidence I’d never have found on my own, and they’ve talked me down when things seemed to be too much to handle. If it takes a village to raise a child, it apparently takes a sizable chunk of the internet and fair few face-to-face friends to raise a librarian, or at least this librarian.

I wonder what the next four years hold.

P.S. If 4 years seems about long enough to train up a librarian, I wonder how people like presidents feel.

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I realize this isn’t actually so hard. I’ve done it before. Which left me wondering why I’m rather obsessively going back over details, shuffling things around, thinking up better examples, and then reworking things over and over and over and over. And as odd as it seems, I think it’s because I’m nervous.

I’m not nervous about presenting to the workshop attendees. Goodness, I do that nearly every day. I’m not nervous about my content, though I do think it’s probably of a different tone than most people will be expecting. No, I’m nervous about my co-presenters seeing me present. These are people I’ve looked up to for years. These are people that I look to for inspiration, for clarity, for affirmation. These are people I’ve come to consider friends. Who wouldn’t be nervous revealing their public-speaking selves to such an audience?

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I can’t wait to see what the other authors wrote about, but I can tell you that Ann and I wrote about individual student consultations, how they fit into a research service alongside reference and instruction, and why we think they’re pretty amazing.

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To be fair, the story started back in college, where I majored in English. English majors are eminently qualified to do just about anything, right? And besides, they get to earn degrees for reading and thinking about good writing. What was there to lose?

By the time I graduated, I still hadn’t figured out which part of “just about anything” I wanted to inhabit, though I was pretty sure I wanted to teach literature, so I managed to simultaneously stall and prepare myself for a possible future by going to grad school, where I got to earn another degree by reading and thinking about good writing. Not bad, right? Right. But I studied more than literature and literary theory while I was in grad school. I also studied the job of a professor of English, and I learned that I probably wasn’t cut out for that job as it exists in the real world. My personal Xanadu crumbled little by little as I watched my professors go about their lives.

I remember lying on the living room floor, stroking Toby the family dog, and talking to my mom about how I didn’t feel I’d fit well into my own future if I continued on as I was. Then, from her position near the kitchen sink and the dishes she was methodically washing, she said, “You know, you might consider being a librarian.”

Don’t laugh (too hard), but up until that day I hadn’t known that librarians needed special degrees to do what they did. Nor had I ever worked in a library, even as a shelver. Nor had I ever asked a librarian for help. The children’s librarian at the public library we’d used when I was very young had always been kind, and had saved new books about ballerinas for me whenever they arrived. But that was the extent of my interaction with librarians. (And remember, by this point I was nearly done with a masters degree.) And yet, I found myself applying to the LIS school at Milwaukee and beginning work on my degree there as soon as I’d successfully defended my masters thesis across campus. The next summer (and half-way into my degree program), I applied for part time work at a public library and an academic library, just to see what working in a library was actually like.

The one bump in the road was that public library. It’s toxic atmosphere nearly caused me to drop out of library school and cash in on the promise from the English department that they’d take me back into the Ph.D program there if I ever wanted to return. I spent sleepless nights wondering if I could just run away to New Zealand to help with the filming of the Lord of the Rings or something… anything to get out of what I was pretty sure was the worst decision of my life. Luckily for me, I’m too stubborn to quit something once I’ve invested that much time, energy, and money into it. So I decided to at least finish my degree, however miserable I was with the job and my classes. I could never have known at that point how lucky I would be just a year later, when I graduated and stumbled mostly blindly into the best job I could ever have wished for.

And here I am.

Now I want to know how Steve, Laura, Laura, and Dorothea got into library work.

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My family’s dog died suddenly today. I’ve never known another dog like him, and I’m sure I never will again. Until he came along, I thought the stories about dogs who understand full sentences and spend all their time trying to be good were myths. Well, I was wrong. And now I can’t stop crying.

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It’s not a vacation where I’m doing anything special. I’m mostly sitting on the couch, reading (I have a supply of fiction and a whole stack of New Yorker magazines to read), petting the kitty, watching episodes of Rosemary & Thyme on DVD, and generally being a slug. Today I even took a nap (not one of my talents, and not something I’d planned on doing, but something that ended up being really nice). And you know what? After a full work week spent not working, I’m starting to feel a little bit more like myself again! Maybe this means that next week I’ll have my brains back enough to start my Japanese lessons back up.

Oh! And I’m really excited to learn that we’ll be getting clickers for our library classroom! I’ll have to read up on Knowledge Surveys and see if I can combine what I’ve learned about clicker pedagogy with that kind of assessment. The ideas are bubbling!

Which reminds me, I still need to write about Knowledge Surveys, which I heard discussed very compellingly at the NITLE Moodle meeting I went to earlier this month. Hmmm…. and that reminds me that I still haven’t written much about Moodle and the crossroads I think it’s reached, and there are one or two other topics I haven’t covered yet from last month’s conferences. Maybe next week will be a week of blogging as well as Japanese lessons. Maybe. If I’m not too busy being a slug.

(Image credit: “Hammock” by Listen Missy shared under Creative Commons)

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Well, this morning there were eggs EVERYWHERE at the portfolio reading. They had scrambled eggs available all morning. They served egg salad for lunch. They also served chicken salad for lunch, which is loaded with egg-y mayonnaise. So yeah, I’m pretty much doomed. Here come four days of dyslexia, headaches, and mood swings. Yippee.

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When I originally took this job, I secretly promised myself I could have another job after I’d stayed here for four years. I was terrified and lonely and felt under-qualified, but I knew I could stick almost anything out for four years. After all, college had been scary, but I’d made it through. Grad school had been scary, but four years later I’d finished a couple degrees. My secret plans have been foiled, though, because the people here are so great and the stuff I get to do here is so amazing that I’ve decided four years isn’t nearly enough. So if they’ll have me, I’d like to stay for a few more, please.

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