Blog Post to a Young Librarian

[I'm rehabbing my personal blog and ran across this post from 2010 which I've decided to re-home here.]

Dear me.

Wait, let me clarify.

Dear me-10-yrs-ago-on-Aug-21-2000-my-1st-day-at-my-first-job-as-a-professional-librarian.

There are a lot of things I’d love to tell you – some about things I wish you’d done or tried (or simply done or tried earlier), some about things I wish you’d avoided (a couple of research projects come to mind).

Mostly I’d like to tell you:

Everything’s going to be OK.

Articles will get written, committee appointments … appointed, jobs found, apartments improve, awkwardness lessen visible awkwardness decrease, and greater skill at your job be achieved. At some point you’ll start doing something called 'tweeting' about all of this, which boils down to assuming the world cares to read 140 char blurbs about your doings and thinkings … this belief of course is based on the rock-solid foundation of the wide and enduring readership of your influential long-format blog to which you regularly post. Ahem.

On the down side, you’ll spend a fair amount of time bored, feeling mistreated, misunderstood, insecure or like you don’t know what you’re doing, fussing your budget, battling bureaucracy and politics, and doing things you don’t really want to do but know you should (e.g., show up on time, clean your house, go to the gym, and hold your tongue in meetings) – in other words, you’ll have to grow up. I’m sorry, there’s no way around it. You’ll also start thinking in terms of “get to go to bed at 10” instead of “have to go to bed at 10.”

Even worse, a pestilential evil called Facebook will emerge and, like millions of others, you will find yourself unable to quit, despite constant flare-ups over privacy of information, a crushing deluge of meaningless status updates about ridiculous games from people you’re not sure you know, and …. photos of you, tagged for easy retrieval. Sigh. [Post Script from the future: You will quit, eventually, and you'll never look back.] We won't even talk about Second Life.

But no matter. 10 years from now you’ll be feeling mildly nostalgic. And a little congested, but that’s just circumstantial.

Oh – one last thing. DON’T get the mustard for the hot dog you are going to have for lunch on the first Friday of your professional working life. That’s not going to work out well for your white shirt.

Love,
Future You