Some thoughts

As regular readers have likely inferred, Mystery Library has been a bit of a struggle for me. That's almost entirely due to things other than the work itself, but I still have a lot of stressful days and as a result the blog has been kind of negative lately.

You see a lot of librarians writing on various forums about the frustrations of library work: how they are underpaid, lack professional respect, are asked to do an impossibly varied set of tasks from tech support to storytime, etc. I definitely don't want to say those things aren't true or that it isn't important to try to change them. However, I also want to say that, despite those things and despite the recent tone of the blog, I love being a librarian. I love coming in to work and only having a vague outline of what I am going to be asked to do that day. I love being part of the breakthrough that someone needs to get something important done, whether it's finding them a template to write their own lease agreement or getting a paper printed out that's due in two hours. I love eavesdropping on people telling each other about their favorite books and movies, and I even love eavesdropping on people telling each other about the stories that they hated. I love getting to tell people that a library card is free and that so are all our programs.

Above all, I love having a job where my natural dilettantism is an asset rather than a liability, where knowing who wrote The Dork Diaries off the top of your head and being good at un-jamming a printer are abilities of roughly equal value. I think a lot of what people in high school or college are afraid of about entering the working world is being reduced to just one aspect of all their interests and skills, being stuck only being about to think or talk about, say, accounting, for the rest of their lives, when they think of themselves as a multidimensional person who has so much more going on than that. I really appreciate that my job makes you squash yourself down a lot less than most other jobs do.

On that note, I gotta go. I'm trying to figure out how to work the logistics of a speed dating event that is open to people of all sexual orientations, and a deadline is looming.