I grew up dreaming of moving away. I was born in the midwest, but my family moved to the Gulf Coast of Florida just before I started kindergarten, and I spent my childhood living in, essentially, a retirement community. (The median age in my home county when I was growing up was something like 50 […]
Last week I attended ACRL in Minneapolis. It’s been six years since I last attended a “big” conference, by which I mean a professional gathering in a convention center with thousands of attendees and the accompanying mayhem. As I remarked to folks throughout the event, it felt, rather reassuringly, “like the before times.” Walking through
I’m writing this on a Friday afternoon. It’s been a tumultuous week, one that followed many other tumultuous weeks. And, honestly, it’s been a barrage of news for years now. It seems unending, and, somehow, we’re only just at the beginning of whatever’s next. Regarding the news, it’s been fairly stunning to see how ill-equipped
I picked up a move, circa late-2017 or early-2018, where I started prepping for my one-shots in the dark. (I think I picked this move up from my good friend and former colleague Rachel Stott? If she didn’t come up with it, we definitely compared notes about it.) When possible, I’d go one of my
I quit Twitter almost two years ago. It was a place where I had made so many friends and learned so much from them, but by December 2021 it just wasn’t the same. Maybe it was the algorithm, maybe it was who I followed, maybe it was a sign of the times, but I found
Here’s a story: I was at LOEX in Denver in May, 2015. I was still working at Colorado State University-Pueblo, but had just accepted a position at Auraria Library ten days earlier. During a break between sessions, I was chatting with a colleague from another library in the west, a person whom I admire tremendously,
As I wrote in my last post, I recently moved across the country, started in a new position, and am having a great time in Pennsylvania. I got the job I wanted, I live in a cool place, and I anticipate I will be here for a long, long while. That said, I did want
Today marks two months in my new job. I’ll publish something about my search process in the near future, but for now let me just say that while this move was a long time coming, I am thrilled to be where I am. Where I am is the suburbs north of Philadelphia, working at Penn
My sense of time has been obliterated. In the BeforeTimes, I would have a pretty good sense of how long things took. I would often know the time without having to check a clock. I used weekly and monthly timelines to help strategize at work, and would say things like “let’s wait until after week
I tried to keep my last post short because I knew that I needed just to get something out there to help break the writer’s block. But I’m also thinking a lot more about what I write, why I write, and how I share it. Do I really want to keep posting here? Why? Like
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