Monday, January 13, 2014

Same Old Auld Lang Syne*

It seems only fitting that I end 2013 with this title, one of my favorites by Dan Fogelberg.  As I stated in my last post, I was on my back with excruciating back pain, muscle spasms, and honestly wondered if I was ever going to be pain free again.

Well, three weeks and two trips to the ER later (along with massive amounts of painkillers and physical therapy), I'm at least able to work for short periods of time. By turns it's been gratifying (the family gets along without me) and maddening (the family gets along without me) and I'm trying to get ready for the ALA mid-winter meeting in Philadelphia in 10 days to begin my job hunting in earnest.

Some thoughts on job-hunting:

1) I'm 53 (54 next month) and I realize that whoever hires me will do so at considerable cost.  I taught school for the better part of 16 years, have run a successful business, played and sung a dizzying array of music at an even more dizzying level, and received my MSLS degree last month with a 3.916 GPA.  Quality doesn't come cheap.

2) My dear wife and three teenage children  don't see moving with dad's every job change as the adventure that they used to. Son has a girlfriend, and daughters are involved in many facets of their school's lives.

3) To quote Jon Lovitz's character in A League of Their Own, "How it works is, the train moves from town to town, not the station".  Truer words were never spoken. While it would be really great if a job opened up in greater Philadelphia for which I was the perfect candidate and it was the perfect job with the perfect compensation package, chances are good that my next library job will be out of the area, and, to quote Patricia Wettig in City Slickers, "We'll jump off that bridge when we get to it".

4) It would be tempting to take a part-time reference or circulation position at a local library, or even a library managership at a public library.   But that wasn't why I went to library school.

More later.  Cheers

*--Dan Fogelberg, The Innocent Age, 1981.

No comments: