Feeling 2022

Hello friends,

These end of year/beginning of new one posts generally take a couple of forms…

Here’s everything I wrote/accomplished! 

Well, I mean, I’m alive. I kept my Dad alive. I started a new job and feel like I’m making some good contributions there, even though many days feel like this:

Here are my resolutions for 2022!

Listen, man, the last time I made a resolution was January 2020 and I said “I don’t want to eat out as much and cook more for my dad when he visits.”

(In case you don’t know, my dad pretty much moved in with me in March 2020 and….I ended up cooking for him a lot.)

So, anyway, clearly my wishes are too powerful and for the sake of all involved I’m just going to keep quiet.

Here’s the things I’ve learned/some advice I’d like to give.

On one hand, I feel like, as we say back home, that I don’t know shit from Apple butter. It’s a cliche but it’s true: the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. On the other, although I do still have an inflated ego and think I have some pretty good things to share, I don’t feel like I have the capacity for the vulnerability needed to learn and think publicly right now.

So what else is there to say?

I recently realized that I’m entering my third decade of professional life.

2001-2011: Law school, grad school, and getting started in career as an Academic Law Librarian. I loved it, seemed to be pretty successful at it by many different metrics, and the awkward period that I had been in from age 12-27 had passed and life was great. Then in 2011 I blew it all up.

2021-present: Things are good. I feel pretty comfortable personally and professionally. I know my worth and I’m not going to waste it on people and situations that don’t see it. The past two years have been terrible on most levels, but I have also benefited from the slow down. (It’s a shame The Great Reset has been taken over by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists because I do feel like it’s the best description for how I feel.) I have fixed a lot of mistakes, gotten closure, tied up loose ends, and otherwise have a good foundation laid for whatever I next choose to tackle. I also just passed six months at New Job - which I guess it means that I can now just call it My Job - and although it’s very intellectually challenging and uses up most of my available CPUs, I am starting to settle in and feel like I’m ready to do some non-paycheck intellectual activity. Writing, talking, videos, educational content…I’m not entirely sure what form it will take but it’s nice to feel like doing something again.

Not tik-tok, though. Many things make me feel my age but I swear to God tik-tok makes me feel ancient. Why the dancing? Why the pointing? Why so many cuts? I officially apologize to anyone in one of my introduction to social media talks circa 2007-2012 that I made feel old and out of touch because I AM GETTING MY COMEUPPANCE NOW.

2011-2021…

Oh yeah, that step two decade.

That was a rough decade. I thought I was doing okay at the time, but in retrospect I often felt lost and unsure if I was headed in the right direction or if I had made a terrible mistake in diverting from the path I was on in 2011. It was a lot of transition in every part of life.

There aren’t many people like me in my professional circles. Not enough of a technologist, not quite a lawyer, not really a librarian anymore…

I needed to figure out where I fit in and if there was even a place for me at the professional table. There was a meme going around Twitter at the end of 2016 - WHEN WE WERE STILL SUMMER CHILDREN - about how that year affected us and since Twitter has broken my brain and I only think in memes now, that sums up how I was in that decade before I realized I was ready to stop reacting and start…acting.

So what’s next?

It’s really weird to feel like things are better than they have been in a long time while knowing that society as we know it may be collapsing.

Its funny, when I started my blog back in 2007 or whenever it was, I used the R.E.M. line “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)” as my sub-head to reflect that “yes, librarianship and librarians are undergoing profound changes, and it’s really scary, but I think it’s all going to work out okay in the end and it’s desperately needed.” That’s the vibe I tried to bring when I started to concentrate more on legal industry rather than libraries, but I guess it was also applicable to me too.

Be well.