A Second Chance to Make a First Impression

Today I think I will fill you in on my experience in New Orleans. We made this trip so that I could attend the American Library Association’s Annual conference. For a week, more than 20,000 librarians converged on the city. Everywhere you looked you could see determined and sensibly dressed women (and men!)  carrying red ALA tote bags, and checking schedules on their smart phones. I’m sure the city, which has a huge convention center, is used to large professional conferences, but New Orleans has a special appreciation for librarians.

The ALA plans its conference years in advance, and in 2006, the Annual (as it is known) was scheduled to be in New Orleans. After Katrina hit, the ALA debated moving the conference but ultimately decided to proceed as planned. I spoke with people who’d attended the Annual that year, which was the first conference to be held in New Orleans after the hurricane.  One librarian told me that most of the stores were closed, and whole city blocks stood empty. She said that the city had bussed people in to work in the restaurants and hotels. Another woman told me how she would sit in a café reading and would be approached again and again by locals asking for her magazines. At that point, almost a year after the storm, nothing but essential mail was being delivered by the post office.  “Some people didn’t want to come to the conference,” she said, “but I thought it was our duty to come and just spend as much money as we could.” At the opening ceremony this year, Mayor Mitch Landrieu personally thanked the ALA for all it had done to support the city.

I didn’t attend that conference in 2006 because I was in England getting ready to start working at the prison. Though I had followed the news closely when it happened, it was hard for me to imagine the level of destruction and devastation Katrina had wrought on the gulf. And I’d sort of assumed it had been rebuilt by now. Certainly that was my first impression of the city, from the downtown area where we stayed on the edge of the French Quarter. From the pictures my mother posted yesterday, there was little evidence of the storm. The beautiful houses in the garden district all had a freshly painted look to them –as did the buildings in the French quarter. Aside from the slightly “new” look on old buildings, everything looked perfect.

As part of the conference, I spent one day volunteering in a school library. It was downtown, just off Canal street and a group of us were bussed there from the conference center. The bus driver either misunderstood our destination or decided to deliberately take us the long way, but we wound up taking what the school director called “The Misery Tour.” The bus headed uptown, beyond where the street cars stopped and drove through a lower-income residential neighborhood. These homes, though smaller than the Garden District mansions, were still average sized older family homes, with porches and yards and playground sets. It would have looked like a nice place to live except that half of the homes stood vacant, boarded up and caved in. On many doors and walls it was still easy to read the spray-painted code used by rescue teams in the days following the storm: an X with the date the home was searched, and number of dead or living inhabitants. 

 

I understand why it was necessary to rebuild the tourist areas first. New Orleans relies on the convention center and the tourist industry to fuel its economy, which has also been harmed by last year’s oil spill. And everywhere I looked in that damaged neighborhood, I saw signs of construction – houses had been lifted onto cinder blocks or simply rebuilt high off the ground. While we were there, local news reported the final safeguard to prevent another breech of the levies had just been put in place. A lot has happened in five years, just not as much as I’d expected. The ALA Annual is not currently scheduled to return to New Orleans, but no doubt we’ll get back there eventually. I hope I will  see more houses like this:

*This post was originally published at The Daily Theme on June 30, 2011

Networking for (Insecure) Dummies

I suppose, on a social level,  most people consider themselves worth knowing. I certainly do. I’ve said before that it takes some effort to get to know me. As is probably the case with a lot of writers, I’m more confident on paper than I am in person. I find small talk with strangers excruciating. I’m trying to work on that because I hate being the person at the party alone in the corner or hovering around the one person I know. I don’t want to stand around with the other outsiders; I want to participate. As usual though, I’m starting slow. I made a joke with the barista at my regular coffee house. I comment on the weather with my softball teammates (most of whom I don’t know). By the end of the season, I might ask about their weekend.

But there’s another way to look at this topic, and that is being worth knowing career-wise. I’m talking about professional networking.

To aid in my job search, I have “liked” and subscribed to a number of advice columns and library list-servs. I followed the advice about “branding” myself and establishing a professional presence online. I joined relevant groups on LinkedIn and followed big names in the library profession on Twitter. I made business cards.

What I haven’t done is joined in the conversation. In the job seeking circles there are numerous threads and discussions about the effectiveness of personal branding etc. There are also a lot of complaints about the economy, library closures and long-term unemployment. I find these topics depressing and unhelpful. If I sit around participating in the whining circle, I start to remember that in addition to being unemployed,  I’m turning 30 in a few months, I live with my parents and I am single. The male version of this cliche would be playing video games in the basement. But I’m writing blog posts in the shed about how I have nothing to contribute.

This is all the more frustrating for me because I used to be worth knowing. The community of prison librarians in the UK is  small, but  active. When I worked at the prison, I was on the national committee. I was a person other people called for help, for advice, and for information. I helped plan and execute training days and annual conferences. Professionally, I had a lot of potential and I was ambitious and … I totally burned out. But that was because of the prison, not the job.

Anyway, next week I’m going to New Orleans for the ALA annual conference. I will be volunteering in a school library and attending a job fair. I will make jokes and talk about the weather. I will go armed with a fistful of resumes and business cards and if anyone follows the address to my website they’ll be directed here.

Um.  I may not have thought this through. 

 

*This post was originally published at The Daily Theme on June 17, 2011

I worry about Intellectual Property Theft

This is going to be a fun topic. I associate holding one's tongue with keeping something secret. What examples can I give of keeping a secret without failing to keep the secret? We have a lot of family reading these essays, and the biggest secrets and dramas often happen within families.  To avoid any potential for hurt feelings,  what I’m going to do is tell you about something without telling you what the something is, that way the conundrum can be revealed without giving away the bank. You’ll see what I mean.

The conference I attended in San Diego ended last Sunday, and then I stayed with Kelly (as I‘ve mentioned). During that time I came up with 3 truly brilliant ideas – ideas that will make money and contribute to the information profession. I’m serious. These ideas will be revolutionary. But I need to do some research. The ideas are so great they might already have been invented. If they have, then too bad, but I will purchase one from whoever did the inventing because now that I’ve thought about it, these new things are going to be absolutely indispensible. And if my great ideas haven’t already been invented, then I am going to need to find a partner because I do not have the technical skills to create the prototypes. It is also possible that my great ideas are impractical or impossible to create in real life.

 I may have seen The Social Network a few times too many. I have relationships with people who have the skills to construct my great ideas, who might make excellent business partners, but what if they turn out to be the worst business partners in the world? It’s not a good idea to mix money with friendship. But we could be the next great partnership, like all the other great partnerships everyone could get rich and contribute to the profession at the same time. Or something like that. I am conflicted.  I just don’t want to be the person who’s sits around bitter and telling everyone that I was actually the inventor of “The Greatest Library Related iPhone App ever” (TM).

I think I’ve already figured out what I’m going to do. I’ll do some research, sketch out the instructional designs, and objectives and find out if they would work. Then I will approach my friends with contracts and confidentiality and non-competition clauses.  Worst case scenario, I have to take classes and learn to do the coding and data base construction myself. It will take longer but I should learn how to do it anyway.

So, I would say the conference was a success. I remember after the prison library conferences, I would always return to work so excited and full of ideas, and over time the place would wear down my enthusiasm, but I always got the most ideas after spending time with colleagues.  Eventually I may reveal the great ideas, after  I've determined if they are viable. I once came up with a plan to raise children using only sock puppets and I told everyone about it before I'd fully thought it through. Big mistake.

 

*This post was originally published at The Daily Theme on January14, 2011

On Discovering Myself

I may owe Eckhart Tolle an apology. I haven’t decided yet. I still fall asleep if I read more than  3 pages of The Power of Now at a time but the dreams, they are peaceful. I’m kidding (sort of), but people I respect recommend this book – people who have opened their hearts and minds to new ideas that I have shared so maybe I owe them, and maybe I’ll learn something, if I can just shed my automatic and cynical revulsion towards New Age vocabulary. I’m not sure why, but I resist terms like “self-actualisation” and the expression “inner peace” creates for me an inner storm of  bitter and sarcastic retorts. Yet, I envy the lifestyle and secretly want for myself the calm these crazies claim to have achieved.

For Christmas this year, I received Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I had already seen the movie and didn’t find Julia Roberts’ character to be particularly likeable. And I felt the same about the book really, except again for the envy and attraction to the lifestyle that this woman experimented with for a year. How nice for you, I thought, that you could take a year off to run away from everything you had screwed up for yourself and a publisher was basically going to pay for your pursuit of pleasure and … see the bitter, jealous side of me bursting out? I wish someone would pay ME to do that. I want to hang out in Bali and learn how to meditate in an Ashram in India. I would even settle for a weekend retreat at the Buddhist center near my house.

So, at the same time I’m thinking about all of this, I’ve just come from the ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in San Diego where I did not find a job, but got a lot of useful advice about job hunting. I’ve even come up with a quarter-of-a-million dollar idea, that I don’t think will make me rich, but might take my career in a new direction assuming I don’t lose interest.

The key-note speaker at this conference was, of all people, Ted Danson (promoting his book Oceana) and he summed up his interview with a brief explanation of his belief in the Law of Attraction (another theory I have both dismissed and secretly been drawn to) and how any changes we might want to see in the world or in ourselves must be approached from a positive angle, from a place of joy and delight instead of fear or disgust. Fear and Disgust have always fueled my sense of humor (in which I take joy and delight) but I recognize truth in Mr. Danson’s words. And Mr. Tolle said (just before I fell asleep) something about how he wasn’t saying anything new in his books, instead was just reminding us of truths we had forgotten.

What surprises me is that I am actually open to these ideas. Maybe it’s a developmental stage. In both Tolle and Gilbert’s books they were roughly my age when the desire to make a profound, spiritual change came over them. Maybe that explains why I felt drawn back to Church. I’m not looking for God really, I just need to calm the hell down and learn to sit quietly by myself. That’s the appeal: To learn something about myself that I’ve forgotten that I always knew.

I'm including this picture because I have it on my phone.

*This post was originally published at The Daily Theme on January 10, 2011