A (quiet) Room of Her Own

I’ll say it plainly: now I am just adding to the noise, I know. I am just adding to the data deluge, the echo chamber, and so on. I’m linking to the article, The Joy of Quiet, which was published nearly two months ago but one I found just today. It is an article that encapsulates many of the trends I’ve noticed and spoken of before, as many others have: this need to get away from the electricity.

When Derek and I drove across the country to get to Madison, I purposefully looked for a non-wifi Bed & Breakfast off the beaten path (and oh boy, did we find it in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming). When I studied abroad in London in even 2007, I already loved how my phone plan was too expensive to text or call often, so I just left it in our flat. I felt not only free from this pull to remark on things I saw to a friend through a text (“omg! a man is selling roasted chestnuts in front of the British Museum!”) but I loved that without it I didn’t have a clock at all either. It felt like a very, very quiet and timid jab at the modern world, ever so scripted and scheduled.

On Pinterest, I find myself pinning images that exude quiet and contemplation, simplicity and thoughtfulness. Friends planning weddings (or most often not) love to pin farm-like ones, with rustic barns and a simple spread on a wooden table under a tree. Fascination with good cooking is partly a fascination with being not distracted while you focus directly on the beautiful, tasty meal YOU are going to create with your own hands — your own hands! Is this getting too Marxist, a desperate desire for us to be shaping the world around us through the materials we shape?

So there’s these trends, for the wholesome and pure. Just bread. Just olive oil. Just wine. A lot of my 25 Before 26 goals and then general changes to my life I wanted to make had to do with being more selective, to slow down, to focus. I’m pretty sure part of my new lust for living in Maine mostly comes from just this idea of it in my head, that it would be slower there (maybe because everyone is frozen …).

These trends are a backlash to the information overload idea, the idea that so many books are being written about these days. We do more at our jobs because budgets are crunched, we do more in school because the competition is so fierce. Even relaxation has competition: do I watch a movie or TV show on Netflix, do I play with the Wii, do I play a game on my computer, do I listen to music, do I listen to a podcast, do I read blogs, do I read The New Yorker, do I read a book that’s not related to school, do I partake in some arts ‘n crafts, do I explore my new town more, do I go out to dinner with my boyfriend or friends, do I go to a bar, do I go to a cafe, do I repeatedly cycle through Twitter Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn Gmail WiscMail Yahoo!Mail … Boredom is not an option. Distraction is the way of life.

Is there even a point to a vacation from it? I went to the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, where we barely had cell phone reception and no Internet. But then we went to bed, got up, and drove back into town. Our brains didn’t feel magically refreshed. They wouldn’t have after a week either — I am almost always more tired after a week of “vacation,” mostly because 1) I know I have to face a lot of work and 2) I usually feel like I should use the vacation time wisely by either cleaning up after a mess or preparing the deluge to come.

I don’t think I can sustain this lifestyle without going crazy and I don’t think a vacation would work. So a lifestyle change, then?

Here’s the crux for me: if you remove yourself from having an online presence, it is suspect these days. I used to work at the Career Counseling Library and we gave workshops to staff members of UC Berkeley about job searching. Social networking was, of course, hounded into them. If you don’t create a presence for yourself, perhaps you’re not fit for the organization. And they notice if you created a LinkedIn profile on the fly that took 5 minutes and then never checked it again. Everyone wants you to be engaged and dynamic. Presence “proves” this.

In library school, there’s constant suggestions for an active professional Twitter account, a blog (hi there!), or other social media networks (a new one devoted to LIS students just opened or perhaps Mendeley is right for you). Librarians and archivists have to embrace social networking just as much as other businesses to advocate for their services — they have to do so to be heard above the others. And we as students are expected to juggle the classes with hundreds of pages of reading per week plus papers/projects to boot, at the very least one internship (but most likely two or more jobs and some other volunteering), student groups for organizations like ALA or SAA, and be on the look out for interesting articles/tweets/status updates related to our field. Even better if you can talk about it eloquently.

It’s a bit of a catch 22. Activity is good because supposedly, it shows you are engaged with the profession. But is that true? If you’re always posting, when are you doing? “Don’t confuse passion with competence.”

Maybe I can’t do an abrupt lifestyle change — as much as I say just living in a small farmhouse in rural Maine with a raspberry patch sounds nice, I would probably go crazy after a week — but I can do other things to combat it. I’ve been slowly downsizing the amount of people I connect with on Facebook, moving acquaintances into that category, unsubscribing from acquaintances’ statuses, asking for just “important life updates.” Some of the people or organizations I felt obligated to follow on Twitter? I realized that’s frankly whack — I am not obligated. I am not obligated to follow all of the library/archive bloggers; everything is a suggestion. I’ve been slowly unsubscribing from more. The articles that are truly interesting, I want to give my full attention to. If I share an article on any platform, it has to be one that isn’t a passing interest — a headline that looks good and relevant to my field — but one that resonates with me on a deeper level, that is written well, and so on. I read recently that most websites are only visited for 10 seconds. I’m in that statistic; with how much I felt like I needed to read or look at or watch out for, I would try to zoom through websites. It’s a bit like skimming an article too quickly though just in case the professor asks a question: after class, I will never remember that article, and what’s the use in that?

I can’t see myself anytime soon breaking off to go live in rural Japan without any cell phone reception, Internet, or other means of communication. But I can see myself focusing in on what really interests me. If all goes as planned, the extra noise I contribute to the Internet will be more like a well written melody.

après moi le déluge

Well, if my year “goal” was to get to bed by 11pm, I already failed. :) But it’s not! So I’m in the clear. I am, however, drinking some sort of calming/sleepy loose leaf tea from Berkeley (no, not marijuana) to help me get to sleep. I don’t really know how I can feel so wired right now when I only last had a chai latte at 7pm, but thus is life.

I am actually feeling much more in balance than I was. I went into my calendar and scheduled days to go over my next semester plans, possibly getting another archiving gig (about 5 hours a week), and planning for papers and projects coming up. I also set up a date to study with my classmates next Tuesday … I do hope it becomes a regular thing! Because I really like being around them. The other day I actually had an almost uncontrollable urge to hug everyone around me; obviously, I controlled it.

Tonight I spent a couple of hours with the Madison student chapter of ALA, brainstorming for the homecoming parade that we will be in. We’re going to do a book cart drill team! The theme for the parade is music across the century, so each of us future-librarians will be dressing up for each decade. We didn’t want to go deeply into the land of librarian stereotypes, and just dress up as “bun-y shushers” (direct quote from one of my professors) to make people on the sidelines laugh. We really wanted to showcase our spunk, creativity, and the ability to have fun. It helps to not perpetuate the idea that we aren’t approachable, mean, or uncaring. We want to help people! Isn’t that why most of us are here?

I chose the 40s to highlight. I get to pick some iconic book covers/titles from the 40s and we’ll be putting them on our carts. In a week we’re meeting for a fun crafting session. Right when I got home, I started spending way too much time looking at vintage clothing sites. It was a lot more expensive than I imagined, and costumes were usually quite provocative extremes of our conceptions of even pin-up girls, so I went with a dress I already own. Now I just want to get  a few finishing touches and perhaps get a wig, because I can’t get my hair to do this anymore:

The day after my super-short hair cut, my hair curled quite nicely.

It is exciting to be a part of something — and not just eating out for brunch (don’t get me wrong, I still love it) — but something that helps to advocate for libraries. We are literally parading the wealth of knowledge we have to give to the public.

Downside of this 40s outfit search? I started to look too much at clothes I want to buy in general, for me, for winter. I do need a winter coat and winter boots because my California gear won’t cut it, but probably not 3 or 4. I think I can convince myself that I need more cardigans though. For layering, you know.

–

I wanted to show you all a recent blogpost by Stephen’s Lighthouse I found very interesting: Is Google Memory? I have thought of this so much. One time, when I worked at the Bancroft Library, I came across the word “holograph” and since the document was so old, I was pretty sure it couldn’t be from the technique “holography” (or, a hologram). I decided to go to every one of my coworkers to ask what it was before using Wikipedia or Google. It took a long time (and a lot of “Why don’t you just Google it?”) before I finally found someone who knew that it’s something handwritten by the same person who wrote the signature, so not something like a secretary writing something dictated to her. It was my boss who knew the answer, which made me feel even better about working there. :)

I know I wrote a fairly anti-technology post a little while ago, so you’d assume I’d absolutely agree with the horrible state of our minds, but I have to admit my mind is changing the more I’m in school. One way my professor pounded into our heads about how much easier it is to use the databases with advanced searches now is we had to find abstracts in a large book of abstracts from 1973, and then find similar titles with the same subject. It sounds so easy to us now, but all of us got very frustrated working on the assignment with the big book. We also all came up with very different new titles.

I am still not, however, a “cyberprophet” or a “technophiliac.” I do not find it worth my time or money to buy and try the next latest computer, laptop, tablet, phone, whatever. I didn’t grow up with constantly getting new technology in our house (except when we bought new computers because they didn’t last very long between the three of us). Derek and his family were probably appalled to see my tiny, tiny TV that I used (Derek diplomatically suggested that, when we moved, we sell my TV and just use his). I don’t think I will ever find it not-rude for people to bring out their phones and start browsing the Internet. I don’t think my eyes will ever get used to screens.

Mostly, I don’t think I will ever attain that balance I so desperately want if I keep focusing so much effort and time into something like browsing the web. Constantly having something to look at and never truly being bored makes me feel so busy, so full, and so lacking in a space where I can just breathe and ponder. Technology erases silence.

That said — I don’t find it too fair of this graphic to have such a tone about something like writing things down in the Google calendar to remember an appointment. We’ve been writing appointments down for  … how long now? And how is it that much different from something like Outlook’s calendar, besides being much more convenient because you can access it from anywhere?

Google Reader also just makes sense for most people. There are two sides to this that I’m personally conflicted with: one being maybe those sites I follow on Google Reader, that I think are important for me to keep up on and read, maybe I should just … breathe and let go. For example, Pinterest seems like a great way to collect all sorts of inspiring images we see from across the Internet, but maybe we should just let go. However, I think for many people, myself included, that feeling of knowing all of the things you’re missing and knowing all of the pretty pictures of decor or fashion you saw that you can’t have around anymore for inspiration can simply cause a sort of silent anxiety. In some ways I think that when I see a simplistic kitchen that I just love, and know I can’t have, I will forget about the image eventually but that feeling of WANT! stays. Which fuels our consumerist nature more: an extended, vague feeling of WANT! or direct images up on a bulletin board that we will probably get bored of?

Google Reader is a way to keep up on things without that vague, silent anxiety coming up. I feel like I have to follow 50 library blogs to be In the Know, but as I read them, I realize I can easily unsubscribe from a lot of them because actually, they’re boring or not applicable to me. Also, Google Reader helps me with what I spoke about in the last entry, about feeling overwhelmed and unbalanced. I am a deeply curious person who has always gobbled up new learning experiences like they were candy and who never felt satisfied. The Internet became so big that I could no longer be that 12-year-old using small specific parts of AOL chat boards that easily related to me.

I do lament the use of Google Maps or other map apps. I think it’s sad that almost none of my peers understand the geography around them anymore, and laugh as if they are uniquely bad with directions. No, it’s a generational thing; we know we can just be led with GPS. I still always resist Derek’s insistence to use his GPS if I feel like I can do it with my mind. I feel much more accomplished that way. And if I get lost, then we can use the GPS. :)

The graphic’s point about our memories pre-Google and post-Google are way too simplistic. It is as if pre-Google we lived in a completely unbiased, objective world in which people clearly remembered detailed facts. No one spun things to go their way or held up what they remembered to be as facts. Information has never been something that we merely read or experienced and then saved, to be plucked later as if from an untouched archive. And our minds aren’t empty now — I think if anything, they are more filled, because we have more stimuli to interact with. And a harsher thing to contemplate is the very fact that it’s difficult now for people to sit in a space that isn’t demanding every ounce of their attention as they just, well, contemplate. The graphic artist makes this point, and rightly so. The new world I’ve inhabited in the last decade is one that has sped up, and one that is more concerned with breadth than depth.

The graphic artist also points out that we are very much evolving with the technologies around us — however, is that not the story of humanity? Our culture changed with every new tool that came to us. I think the bigger question now is how we deal with the avalanche of information.

Smile and breathe

I come to this blank white text box tonight feeling so out of balance. I’d like to chalk it up to an off day, but I think it’s more than that; and if it’s not more than that now, it will be soon.

I want to do well in Madison’s SLIS program. I respect it and the people in it. I want to fully engage with it and give it as much as I can of myself, to make me and hopefully the profession itself better. But it’s really hard to do that when this night seems like just an extension of other nights: a little bit of heartburn, a big headache, strained eyes, a tight jaw, tired but it takes forever to go to sleep. I don’t feel at the end of my rope in any way, so I don’t want you to get that impression. This was pretty normal for me in my undergraduate years, too. (The heartburn? I’m pretty sure it’s from this one paper that caused me to drink more iced coffees in one semester than I ever would have in my life.)

Every day I am completely swamped with information I want to sort thoughtfully through to theorize about and remember in a helpful way. I am behind with my New Yorkers and even behind with my Vegetarian Times, which is unusual since by now I’ve usually at least tried one recipe even if I never made it again. Maybe stupidly, I just added Vogue Magazine to the mix of subscriptions. I use Google Reader to take in all of the blogs and websites I want to follow that might be funny webcomics, random cool things, BBC news headlines, NYT news headlines, library blogs, friends’ blogs, and more. RSS feeds are extremely helpful, but I’m way too often for my liking simply marking “All” as read to clear the list. Then, every night before bed, I love to listen to podcasts … Stuff You Missed in History Class, This American Life, Radiolab, Planet Money, and others. Those are the hardest to keep up on because I can’t skim, flip pages, or mark “All” as read. And then there’s keeping up with friends and family through email, LiveJournal, coffee dates, phone calls, and, of course, Facebook (I don’t think I need to link to that one). Oh, but wait: my guilty pleasure that I didn’t want to mention but should. When I’m doing tasks that don’t need a fully engaged mind, I love to watch Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model; I also have a very full instant Netflix queue. Now am I missing something?

Oh, grad school.

When I was an undergrad, I did … a majority of the readings, turned in A-B papers, and liked my professors. I loved to study history and historiography. I loved to learn about Slavic or most other cultures. I wanted to write damn good papers on the Dada movement. And I am stepping lightly here, because I do not want to imply that all of these studies were useless — no, they are not, because they completely shaped my adult life, they helped me see the world in a completely new light, and they were topics that could get 15 people in a room talking to each other with their hearts pounding about something other than who won what Emmy. And on top of all of my studies, I did a lot of activities directly related to my future career as a librarian or archivist.

Never, however, did I directly study librarianship, which is obviously why I’m here. In my past jobs, I was one of those bright young things who Would Go Places, and I flowed along happily with the work given to me. In my past studies, I thought about what a statue says about a society’s collective memory or dialectical materialism, but never did I say, “And that’s what I will become a professional expert in!” I wanted to be caught up and do well, but I didn’t have the pressure on me that everything here will count. I had no personal expectations of writing a paper to be published at a conference to go on my resume. I didn’t worry that much about taking or refusing leadership roles. I never read a 40+ page study on how people look for information.

It’s not just that all of it counts for a career, which sounds so far away and sterile to me. The work I do cannot be separated from the life I live. I know that if I don’t finish this article or that paper that my entire career won’t disappear before my eyes, but I still have very high expectations. I deeply admire projects like TLAM and want to emulate the work done. As I said, I want to do well, I want to achieve, I want to make this profession (and myself) better. I want to take a course that creates something like the TLAM project and be able to give it a majority of my attention because I really do believe in the good it provides.

If the above was tl;dr for you:

To achieve this, I really need to find balance. Whatever I’m doing isn’t working. This is where I ask for some of your input!

I thought about giving myself a “one year” project — perhaps like the woman in Julie & Julia or even the goal of taking one photograph a day. I want the essence of the project to be one of balance: working hard and well but stopping to smell the roses. I want to balance things that make me not go crazy because I am so insanely curious, like the New Yorkers and podcasts, with social life and grad school. I want to sleep more. I want to exercise and get out of this weight plateau. I want to organize my recipes and have a better idea of the good things to cook for the coming week so I know what damn vegetable to buy. I want to keep learning; I don’t want to stagnate. I want to take a walk and think of a really fricking good idea.

If you have ever felt this way, and I’m sure you have, what sort of project would you give yourself? What tools do you use? What project do you think I should give myself, or should I be letting go?

For example, perhaps a project-goal would be to go to sleep by 11pm every weeknight. This seems absolutely impossible to me, but isn’t that why goals are set?

 

edit: I realized that what it sounded like was I was constantly working without a break so I wanted ideas on how to take a breather. What I’m really looking for is useful tips on how to just get to work, in a routine sort of way. For instance, do you go to sleep at 10pm, get up at 8am, have a cup of tea and some yogurt, then sit down on an armchair for a while reading in the morning? Do you come home from work and classes to have dinner with loved ones (including kitty cats), then just simply go right back to reading/studying?

I think what I tend to do is because I have so much I want to do/look through, I extend my “studying” time way too far out. I’ll check things out or take breaks before, during, and after reading, instead of setting myself far away from the podcasts, magazines, TV shows, and web. So I sit down with the goal to finish reading after dinner (which is usually 10pm by that time), and don’t get back up until like, 3am. Then I speed-read, go to sleep for a few hours, get up early to speed-read some more. It becomes a cycle that I don’t want to live anymore.

Everyone has a lot to say.

Library school these days is a lot about how our professional job is to manage information overload.

Library school is information overload.

I was in 4 classes, 3 of which were requirements. The last one was about managing electronic resources in a library setting, which you must agree is an important skill to learn! I had to drop the class, though, once week two of school was already a week of caffeine overload. I tend to be a goody two-shoes when it comes to school, and hate to quit, so my mom told me to think of it like “postponing.” I also think that when I am a professional librarian or archivist, if there are a lot of copyright and licensing questions going around, I will most likely be able to turn to my peers. My peers have so far proven to be some of the most nicest, most welcoming, most informational people I’ve met in a program.

My peers are actually part of the reason I wanted to drop a class, so I could devote more time to student chapters in ALA, SAA, and possibly SLA (American Libraries Association, Society of American Archivists, and Special Libraries Association). Technically, the chapters involve “just” a lot of social gatherings, but a friend pointed out how important these groups can be in the future. As a … non-hired? professional, it’s easy to hear the “networking” buzzword and think it means getting a job through the people you know. It is also another form of collaboration between libraries and their respective professionals. And all in all, I trust in my future professional peers to help me through the difficulties of electronic resource management. I also have all of the materials from the class still! (though is it Fair Use to use the electronic ones if I am not part of the educational space …? Hm)

I now have a little more than two weeks of grad school under my belt, and a long list of musings to write about here. I have homework to finish and organize, so I’ll choose this: imposter syndrome.

My very close friend Sarah, who this year went onto graduate school for a PhD in English at Tufts, said she read about it a lot in her grad school forums. When I was struggling to keep up, chugging the tea and 5-hour energy drinks, and looking at my peers who all seemed to be working close to full time, were happy, well-adjusted, and in students clubs to boot, Sarah would mention imposter syndrome again.

What is it to me?

I think what I do is catch snippets of the successes of others and put it into a collage in my head of What Greatness Looks Like. Many people have had amazing, unique work experiences — including much more archiving experience with direct contact in processing collections. Some are working full-time jobs or two part-time jobs, and not all of those hardworking folks are taking two classes, but three. We get into class and I forget everyone’s specific story; instead, all of the hardships others bear meld together. Someone else brings up a point from the readings I hadn’t thought of, and I can’t help but think, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

I compare myself next to this large group of highly successful, extremely hard-working group, who all somehow read everything with every important part highlighted and well-noted, write fantastic papers, get enough sleep without needing caffeine, make fabulous dinners every night, exercise daily, spend quality time with friends and family, take on important tasks in the student groups, work at the very least 10 hours, and probably knit (that seems to be a big theme here). This is what I want for myself. This is the life I want: balanced, healthy, (seemingly) effortless.

I am not an imposter in this program because I made it here (and even won a scholarship!). I have experience the others do not, just as they have experience I do not, and the point of being together is to share these experiences. A program like this means we are all coming from very different points in our lives, some right out of college, some with kids at home, some commuting in from far away. This isn’t the same for all of us and I can’t keep clumping them together to make myself not feel “good enough” to be here.

Perhaps that’s the first thing to learn from graduate school: how to make it work for your lifestyle, so you no longer feel like an imposter.