Finding clear air
You know how on takeoff, an airplane bumps and jolts and veers and careers and generally does stomach-turning stunts until it gets through the cloud layer and hits clear air?
Yeah. Welcome to my 2006. I knew it would be like this; the takeoff-phase of a new career can’t not be. Doesn’t soften the bumps, not really.
From a strict career-advancement point of view, tearing up my Honorary Guy membership card was pretty stupid; I threw away a lot of opportunity. From an accidental-techie point of view, it was even stupider; prompt, knowledgeable tech support is to be prized above rubies. From an inveterate-feminist point of view, who knows? I might well have made more of a difference if I hadn’t taken my toys and gone home.
But ulcers are not a career tool, and I proved to my own satisfaction some time before I became a librarian that I need to hang with people I trust to respect me. Not everybody needs that, and more power to the ones who don’t because they change the world, but I do need it. So, regrettably, the membership card had to go.
I wrote a fair bit this year (outside CavLec, which is more of the nature of a habit—take that however you please—than a professional duty). None of it was earthshaking. Some of it was competent professional writing. What’s clear from this year’s output is that I write too slowly to distinguish myself by the sheer quantity of my writing, and I write too poorly to distinguish myself by its quality or impact. This is an unhappy conundrum. I need to do better.
I also need to wake up and smell the rooibos: a podcast and two presentations did far more for me this year than all the writing I forced myself to do put together. I’m a solid speechifier already, and only getting better from observing extremely talented presenters like Jonathan Zittrain or the Adaptive Path crew. Next year, more talk proposals are in order.
There’s a conundrum there, too, though, because I have a curiously split reputation. At MPOW, I am regarded as uber-techie; some of my colleagues don’t believe I talk about anything else. The truth is, of course, that I rarely give techie-talks these days—the real truth is that I hardly ever have. The one I did do this year alongside Tim Donohue turned out quite well, and I’ve no objection to more tutorials and training sessions along those lines, but unfortunately DSpace-geekery is a fairly limited market, as is XML-document geekery, and the social-software beat (which is the other geekspace I can reasonably authoritatively inhabit) is quite full up.
Repository-rat space doesn’t need me either, which is a pity, but it’s the truth. I am going to Open Repositories 2007, and I did think about what I could possibly submit as a talk proposal, but I came up completely empty. I’m a decent rat. I do my job. I just don’t do it any differently from the other rats I know. I don’t have any particularly incisive technical or management or metadata or preservation insights. (Dublin Core sucks. We knew that already.) I have some moderately original suspicions about the social milieu IRs exist in, but I can’t support them (even anecdotally) well enough to hang a talk on them.
What that leaves, and where my real successes both written and spoken are pointing me, is big-picture crystal-ballism of various sorts. You have no idea how this irks me! I am a rat. I am a peasant. I properly ought to have my feet on the ground and my eyes on my feet. Landscape surveying, predictions, how-did-we-get-here, where-are-we-now, and where-are-we-going, that’s not for rats.
But I’m good at it. No two ways about it. I’m good at it. Good enough that I can pull it off outside my obvious area of expertise. Good enough that I can explain my area of expertise and its significance to those who don’t share it. Good enough that it’s what people are coming to me and asking for (hello, TLA ’07!). Good enough that when I see other people who are good at it, they remind me of, well, me.
So, hell, what can I do but play to my apparent strengths?
I didn’t just do worky-things this year. I got New Librarian out of her pity-party parade and into a job, and she’s doing just fine, and I’m proud of that. I got back into music, and I’ve remembered just how hard it is for me to sing well—good musical performance is an endless constellation of tiny pinprick details that have to be brought together all at once, and I’m really quite bad at getting them all correct because very few of them are as automatic for me as they ought to be—but I’m better than I was when I started, and I’m proud of that.
David’s deep in dissertation-funk, and it’s been a hard year on both of us because of that, but we’re still together in spite of it, and given what’s been happening in my circle of friends this year (as well as what I’ve seen dissertation-funk do to other marriages) I’m both proud and relieved. We’ll get through this. Do your worst, academia; you can’t break this pairing.
For next year… I’d like to find some clear air, if that’s not too much to ask.