Filed under school …

12.08.31 [Friday]
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games, library, school, travel, vancouver, winnipeg

i have a new job (on vancouver island)

Today I finish up my last bit of work for my MLIS degree (my professional experience moderating TeenRC.ca) and a couple of hours ago I got a phone call offering me a job as a librarian in Campbell River BC, out on Vancouver Island. It’s been a good day.

So Campbell River is a small town on the eastern side of the island. The branch there is a hub for five surrounding very small libraries whose collections we also manage. My job is as a Children’s/Youth librarian and they really want to develop their teen programming and services so I’m being given an almost blank slate to be working with. They already have a Teen Advisory Council set up, and my boss is really proud of the teens up there. So it should be a good time.

The branch is small and I’ll get on-desk time covering both Adult and Children’s services, which is great. I know that another library in the library system does D&D nights so there’s precedent for me to get some gaming into this library if the members are into that.

Morning ferry

I’ve never lived in a small town before so we’ll see how that part of everything works, but it’ll be somewhere new and hopefully means I’ll have more to write about. It’s going to be so nice to unsubscribe from all my jobfeeds.

Thank you everyone who’s been nice to me while I’ve been kind of down this summer. I’ve complained a lot about the soul-grinding nature of jobhunting, but I have been lucky enough to get interviews, and now I’m going into full-time work. Which is weird. My plan is to save money for doing the Trans-Siberian trip in the next couple of years since I’ll be making money and won’t be in a big city to spend it.

A week from today I’m going to go to Winnipeg for a week. It’s been a year and a half since I was there for my grandma’s funeral. I planned this a while ago as a break from the accursed hunt, but now it’ll be much more fun without my lack of income to pay October’s rent looming.

I’ll also try to write more now that I’m no longer wasting all my energy on cover-letters.

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12.07.30 [Monday]
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library, school, vancouver, whining

job hunting (or: a quarter of my waking life)

I have not been posting much this month because I have become crazy busy with my last bit of school and with trying unsuccessfully to find a job. Last year I got a co-op job really easily so I guess I shouldn’t be complaining too much yet.

But man, there were 50 applicants for a Casual Children’s Librarian position. Casual. No guaranteed hours. I got an interview for that job, my only one so far in Vancouver, and I kind of sort of knew the head of Youth Services there. The job went to someone with much more experience than me. Because there are so many librarians out there looking for work.

I knew this would suck, but I thought I was pretty good at this librarian thing and I’d be okay. I still hope that. In 2006 it was four months before I got my job at the library, which wasn’t so bad. But my rent then was a third of what I pay now.

Since I don’t actually have to live anywhere specific, it’s going to be increasingly stupid for me to stay in Vancouver with no income. I wish I’d been able to live here as an employed person. It probably would have been more fun. Though it’s not like anywhere else is some librarian promised land. (I have applied in Calgary.)

I figure that once this month of too much work is done I guess I’ll start looking at jobs in the land of no healthcare and shittier wages. I have enough airmiles to do two North American return flights so I could even do a couple of non-Skype interviews before traversing the continent. Hooray.

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12.04.06 [Friday]
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school, travel, vancouver

opening week

My mom is off to France, heck, she might even be there soon, and I am done school for the term. Many of my classmates are now done school for good, which is a little weird. Weird that we don’t all finish together, I mean. I don’t have the great cathartic sighs of relief, since I’ve still got two and a third classes over the next four months. Plus doing interviews for a book we’re working on.

The good thing is that remaining a student leaves me able to work in Graduate Research Assistant positions over the next few months. I’ll hopefully be doing a bunch of video production work for one of my profs, and right now I’m doing a whack of content management stuff for SLAIS’ new MA in Children’s Literature website (which isn’t up yet).

The wonderful bit about this kind of work is that I can do it on my own with a baseball game on. The Jays have new uniforms and hey, maybe this is the year they’ll play meaningful September ball. I enjoyed the hell out of their first victory of the season yesterday, but really, I just like watching games.

I was looking at my history of being here in Vancouver and I noticed that this month till the summer classes begin is my first time I’ve really spent in Vancouver without school going on. I ran off to China and Australia at the ends of my previous semesters, so I’m going to have to remember that there isn’t any meeting with people in my classes that will just happen because I’m sitting in a chair near somewhere they are going. If I’m going to see my friends I have to contact them. Which will be difficult but I’ll do my best. It’s a time for hope.

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12.03.24 [Saturday]
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books, library, school, vancouver

disposition in the sun

One of the quirks of the building I live in is how the lock on the front door is like a magic-eye poster. For the key to turn and grant you access to the wondrous 3D interior you have to insert it and then enter a zen trance enabling you to pull the key out just the very tiniest amount and apply the precise amount of delicate pressure. It’s a good way of measuring my state of mind when I return home on foot (when I bike I use a different door to the building which is much less finicky). How easy has it been to slough off the day’s events and enter that way of thinking?

It was sunny today, not warm exactly, but it felt spring-like. So I went out to the water to read and look at the mountains. I’ve written a draft of my last paper for the term and it’s turned from something I was ready to abandon into a piece of writing that actually has some interesting combinations of ideas (about irreverence towards books and how China Mieville should influence a youth services librarian). It must have been a very excellent day because for the first time ever I opened the front door on the first try.

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12.03.19 [Monday]
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comics, music, school

march is not a terrible month

It was my birthday last week though I didn’t do anything special for it. Earlier in the week I went to see Fred Penner perform at UBC. I went with library school classmates and afterwards Jamie and Nicholle got him to sign their ukeleles. I didn’t join in the picture taking because I’ve seen Fred Penner in enough situations over the years where he’s just another guy (high school, Quinzmas, church) that treating him like a celebrity seemed weird.

Getting close to being done my homework for the term. My best assignment is undoubtedly my book trailer (see above) but I’ve had a few other things to finish as well. I saw a sentence on my Twitterfeed the other day saying “If you aren’t doing something you love, you’re wasting your time” In no way did I feel I was wasting my time making that video. The rest of my homework is not quite so inspiring.

I’ve applied for a job in New York to be a librarian at DC Comics, which would be crazy neat. It’d be a special library where I’d help research the first appearance of minor characters and do interlibrary loans with the studios in Burbank. It’d be a bit different from being a teen librarian but it’d be all sorts of cool. Probably won’t get it, but would have kicked myself for ages if I hadn’t applied.

And it gave me a reason to talk to people at the comic publisher booths when Jamie and I head down to Emerald City Comic Con in a couple of weeks. I wonder what kind of library a place like Oni or Dark Horse has, and how they get used. I’m the kind of person who can’t just go up to people and start talking, but having a real question I’d like to answer will be a way to kick myself into it.

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12.03.04 [Sunday]
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books, library, photography, school

plastic people buckling their swashes

I have had a busy weekend making stuff, which is a pretty good way to spend my time, even if it is technically for homework.

I’m doing a video booktalk/trailer for an excellent YA pirate novel (A.S. King’s The Dust of 100 Dogs), and I own a bunch of pirate Lego, so using that Lego to illustrate the trailer seemed like a great idea. A few weeks ago I supplemented my Lego collection with extra hairpieces and some less masculine torsos and I was good to go.

Now, everybody in class has to make a video, but you can also just do a video booktalk. Getting out the Lego and building sets and taking umpty million macro shots isn’t a course requirement. But I’ve realized this term that what I’m really excited about in librarianship is doing cool stuff with young people. Playing with Lego and making something cool to show people is something I’d actually like to do professionally (and doing media-creation YA programs is something libraries can get into). This was completely the kind of project I can get lost in. If only all homework was like this (I’m sorry to my friends in cataloguing this term).

As of now I’ve got 30 pictures for my 90 second trailer and I’ve figured out exactly what gaps need filling. I need to do at least one more action sequence, a leaving home sequence that’ll recall the one already shot in the other timeline and a handful more Lego dogs (so I can turn them into 100).

I also appear to have left my phone in my jacket pocket with the ringer off since Friday night and never even thought about looking for it, so engrossed was I in Lego. Apologies to the person who tried to call me.

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12.02.28 [Tuesday]
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food, school, writing

leap-day eve resolutions

This afternoon I baked cookies. I got a recipe from the internet and bought as many baking ingredients as I could carry home (I didn’t have things like flour, sugar or baking powder until today) and then mixed them up and baked them. Woo.

Cookies

Part of doing that baking was obligation. In our 6-9pm Children’s Literature class on Wednesdays people generally bring food to keep our blood sugar up, and I’d volunteered for tomorrow. But more generally, I have to do these things sometimes to remember that I can and kind of enjoy turning ingredients into finished products.

I was thinking about that after reading Jessie Thorn’s big thing on being successful doing what you love that was making its way around the intertubes yesterday.

I spent my reading week getting schoolwork out of the way so now I’ve only got a very manageable amount of that left to do before the term is done. My summer is going to have some classes and lots of conferences and interviews and writing for this big IFLA project I’m working on, but nothing terribly overwhelming on the schoolfront. (Aileen notes that really, none of my schoolwork should be overwhelming, and as always I have to agree. It’s not like I’m doing theoretical physics that undermines our understanding of the universe over here.)

Having the school stuff pretty much handled means its time to make cool things. Sometimes those things may be cookies. Most times those things will be word-based. I’m going to make some comics. One of the school things I have left to do is to create a book trailer. I have ideas for that, and if it goes well it might lead to more video-type projects.

No more laziness. Or at least, laziness only in measured doses.

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12.02.18 [Saturday]
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school, sports, vancouver

biking and the inevitable decay of all flesh

I neglected to ride my bike to school on Wednesday. No, not neglected. I chose not to, because I wanted to finish the book I was reading on the bus. Which worked out, but man oh man I get frustrated waiting for overcrowded buses to get me home when I could be moving. I decided to bike on Friday to my 8am class to make up for the frustration (even though my schedule works well for comfortable Friday busing).

Part of not biking on Wednesday was because I failed to make it the whole way up the hill on Monday. Now, I was never really in shape as a younger man, so I don’t have any real notion of being past my peak. I have friends who complain about being sore after playing sports that they used to do without ill effects. I have always had ill effects from sports, so I don’t have some better time to compare things to. Due solely to never pushing my physical limits when I was younger, I still feel like I have room to improve my strength and fitness and whatever. Anything I did yesterday I should be able to do tomorrow.

So on Monday when I had to stop and walk my bike up the last 10 metres to my normal “pause to survey the city” point, it sucked. And because it sucked I was scared that maybe that had been it, and I’d never be able to climb that hill again. But on Friday at sometime after 7am I did climb it in my normal fashion, and it was a bit of a relief.

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12.02.10 [Friday]
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school, travel, vancouver

what passes for contemplative geography

One of my profs is in Toronto for the iConference this week (where people from the iSchools get together and do informationy kinds of things) so I didn’t have to go to my normal 8am class today, which I appreciated, but it’s making me feel like school is entirely an illusion. And since that means unlike every other library school student in the history of the world apparently, I have lots of free time (still being unemployed) I got a good pile of stuff done the last couple of days (most of it very boring, like catching up on my book reviews).

Looking west
This afternoon though, I went walking up the seawall and looked at the cargo ships sitting out in the Burrard Inlet (or Salish Sea or possibly all the way out to the Strait of Georgia). I like being able to do that. It’s some sort of connection to the world in terms of physical objects that’ll be crossing the ocean and I get to see them as they leave. I guess a lot of them just have oil or some other planet-killing thing in them. Or they’re just going down to Seattle and not on a real voyage at all. But still.

Another thing I love here is how the mix of hills and water give you great views of the city. When I bike home from school I get to fly down the terrible hill I’ve fought my way up already once that day, and there’s this gap created by English Bay that lets me see all the lights of downtown, and up in North Vancouver and way out east. I don’t have to pedal and I can just look at the city as I speed down into it again (well, into Kits, but close enough). And then when I’m climbing up over the Burrard Bridge you feel right in and above all the lights. It’s these bits of perspective before getting swallowed up in the urban canyons that I love.

I don’t know if I’m staying in Vancouver past my degree’s end, but if I leave these are things I’ll miss.

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12.01.24 [Tuesday]
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journalism, library, school, tech, vancouver

a job i am totally applying for

Today, moments after I hung up from Skyping with my mom, I found a job I really want. I mention Skyping with my mom because in that conversation I’d been talking about how when I graduate I’ll be looking for work all over the place, and how one of the upsides of being unattached is being able to be mobile, and all that jazz, but also how I’d only try working in the U.S. if it was a great job. We talked about places I’d be more or less interested in. At no point in this conversation did Alaska come up.

Of course, Alaska is where this job I found is.

But I think I’d be a pretty excellent New Media Producer for the Juneau NPR affiliate. Here’s a snippet of the job description:

… an individual with experience and skills in journalism and online content management, including writing and editing for the web, graphic design and site management.

I could completely do that. And do that really well. And it would actually integrate my journalism side with my digital librarianish side (you know, content management kinds of things).

Anyway, I’m putting together an application for them. It’s probably a bit of a long shot (I am a foreigner and all), and it’d mean I’d have to finish my MLIS with a couple of web-delivered courses (which wouldn’t be a big deal), but it could be neat.

Sorry this didn’t happen an hour before you called, Mom. I might have been more excitable.

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