Menu Close

Uncategorized

While we’re on the subject of maps…

How does this one look as a plan for the two weeks surrounding Christmas?

I’ve never spent any significant time in Texas (except for a little town called Fredericksburg, where I once spent far more time than I ever wanted) and winter is the only time I could probably stand to do it. To be honest, I feel like this might well be the only time I would ever do a major Texas trip, but it seems like something I should do at least once.

I had originally planned a California Christmas but I’m not sure my heart is in a long holiday flight, even though I have been a bit nostalgic since I’ve been reading this book on Highway 99. Longtime readers may remember I used to have something of an obsession with that particular road back in the 1990s.

But I’m really excited to see some territory I’ve never seen before, since it seems I almost never head south anymore. So if not this big trip, I may at least land in Miami. I haven’t been there in about fifty years, so it should at least seem new.

Or I may decide that I need my traditional “calm and restful” holiday vacation in Virginia Beach.

So many destinations. So little time.

Ten years in the profession

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the official start of my full-time career as a librarian. It also marks the midpoint of my career, as retirement becomes an option (and one I plan to pursue) at the twenty-year point.

I love my work. It’s essentially an extension of what I’d been doing as a hobby for more than a decade before I entered the profession; I create digital content from historical materials and share it with the world. As a librarian, backed by a university and a lot of grant funding, I just get to do it on a much larger scale, with more resources, and a much bigger content base to start from. It’s great; I was lucky enough to find a position doing exactly what I wanted to be doing when I decided to get my Master’s degree. Now I’m tenured university faculty with a pretty nice life and lots of job security. I think that’s pretty much the last thing most visitors to this site might have expected, say, twenty years ago.

My enthusiasm for my newfound career may literally have saved me from a  meltdown (or worse) in “the dark years” of 2011-2013 when I was simultaneously dealing with the end of my marriage, my mom’s startlingly rapid descent into dementia, and the loss of my dad. My career gave me something I could focus on and feel I had control over at a point when I didn’t really feel I had control over many other parts of my life. And the timing was good, as it coincided with the time I needed to be building up a beefy portfolio to make tenure. I became a bit of an overachiever in this one area, though I may have neglected some other areas in the process. My job, in short, became a bigger part of my life than I hd ever expected (or thought I wanted) it to be.

I’m at a little different point now. I still love my work and have no intention of giving it up, but the past two years (and especially the last few months) have been very challenging for me and really for everyone I work with. I’m finding myself reassessing what’s important to me, personally and professionally. After finally dealing with what was likely a longstanding case of depression a few years back, I learned how to enjoy other things again and stopped relying so much on my work for my happiness in life.

Now I’m once again thinking very seriously about what the next ten years will look like for me, both personally and professionally.

Literally.

This weekend.

It’s not really about the anniversary so much as about some recent issues at work, but this does seem to be an appropriate time to be thinking about this stuff. I’m 55 years old and whether I like it or not, I’m entering a new phase in my life that requires some contemplation. I need to start thinking about what’s important to me personally and then to make the things that are important to me professionally fit into that plan. That may be something of a reversal of the past ten years, or ot may just be a recognition of the fact that the two are not interchangeable.

Either way, I’ll let you know how it turns out. Maybe.

 

Decades

If you were to group my life into decades, I guess they would line up as follows:

  • The 1960s: The “I don’t really remember anything about this” years (not because of drugs but because I was kinda young)
  • The 1970s: The “I was a really weird kid” years
  • The 1980s: The “I remember this time less fondly than I thought I would” years
  • The 1990s: The “pop culture and I got along really well” years
  • The 2000s: The “married and domestic” years
  • The 2010s: The “gay divorcé” years

As the “gay divorcé” years end, I’d like to say that they were a lot more fun than I expected them to be early on, and I’m looking forward to whatever is next.

By the numbers

Things insomnia made me count. In my life I have:

  • Owned 3 houses and rented 5 apartments.
  • Lived in 3 states (4 if you count a vacation home).
  • Had 2 roommates (not counting a few temporary situations of less than a month).
  • Had 1 (common law) husband.
  • Owned 9 cars.
  • Had 6 traffic accidents, 2 of which were ruled my fault.
  • Spent time in 3 countries, including 45 U.S. states and 6 Canadian provinces.
  • Had sex in at least 24 states.
  • Had phone numbers with 5 area codes.
  • No brothers or sisters, but 14 first cousins (approximately 12 of whom are still alive).
  • Spent 2 nights in a hospital (not counting when I was born).
  • Been to 0 high school class reunions (with plans to attend 0 more).
  • Had 5 primary home computers (all Macs, which is why I had each one for so long).
  • Had 3 full-time employers (though I had multiple positions in multiple locations for the first two, plus a ton of part-time and freelance employers).
  • Had 4 medical procedures for which I was put completely under.

Another year closer to the “sell by” date

Another birthday celebration for Rosanna Arquette and Herbert Hoover is complete.

This year I celebrated the big day with schnitzel and beer at the Black Forest Inn in Hamilton, Ontario, as part of my first visit north of the border since the Before Times. It was a nice if uneventful trip. I opted to explore Hamilton and environs because I’ve been wanting to spend more time there and because I still plan to make my big Thanksgiving trip to Toronto in October. I explored, I bought books, I saw good friends along the way, and I even had some actual down time.

I think my “sell by” date will arrive when I no longer have the ability nor the desire to explore. Losing one of the two might even be sufficient.

That doesn’t mean I won’t stick around anyway. After all, look at this site. Its “sell by” date was years ago and yet here it still is…

The state of the stream

Social

I swore off Facebook almost three years ago. I’m pulling back a lot on Twitter nowadays too, using it for what it does best: providing me with a reading list of material on other sites. I do still use Twitter to push the other site, but that’s mainly reposted photos from flickr and pushes from the RSS feed. I use Mastodon for that too, but let’s be real. No one seems to care that much about Mastodon. That said, no one seems to care that much about Twitter anymore either except as argument fodder. Response to my stuff is way down over the past six months since the Muskrat came into power.

I don’t really use social media to forge relationships or (Great Pumpkin forbid) get into arguments. I use it to stay updated on topics of interest and to find other things to read.

I probably won’t be posting much on Twitter going forward, but I will probably keep using it as a reading list as long as it serves that purpose well.

Personal

All in all, things are good. I had my annual physical recently and my fat, sedentary butt remains far more healthy than it has any reason to be.

I’m having, um, a milestone birthday next year and I’m thinking of taking a really huge road trip in celebration thereof. Maybe cross-country even. Or something that would knock out those last three states I’ve never visited (Idaho, Montana, and Alaska). Then again, there’s a reason I’ve never visited them.

Work is good too, though budget cuts, declining university enrollment, and the current political climate in my home state are a little terrifying. I think tenure will protect me for the six or seven more years I need it to. We’ll see on that.

Almost three years in, I’ve managed to keep on maintaining my daily (private) audio journal. My life will be well documented when I die, though I’m not sure anyone would (or should) care that much. But the archivist in me feels like it’s required.

I continue to hate spring.

Writing

I want to write about things, really, but it just ain’t happening.

Last but not least

Does anyone want to buy a slightly used house?