2 posts tagged “dreams”
I didn't get to start college until I was 25. For some reason, before the age of 25 if you are not married or a parent, you are considered dependent upon your parents for the purposed of educational financial aid. This means that at the very least, you need a parental signature and financial information on the forms to get any kind of grants or loans. I hope this has changed since then. During those years, neither parent was willing to do so - dad was still in and out of rehab and mom was, apparently, on another planet. I left home when I was 15 and supported myself by shoveling horse poo for ten years (not nearly as bad as it sounds - I was up to stable manager after a few years, which means less poo-shoveling, and those kinds of jobs come with housing, and - whee, ponies! - but the pay is awful and it's a dead end.) When I turned 25 I moved to the city and signed up for college classes right after my 25th birthday.
For most of my life, work was where I went to get enough money to
continue surviving, and more recently to survive and pay for books and for the next class. It hasn't always been easy, but
simple survival is no longer such an issue. I'm not rich by any means but I
have learned my way around the world well enough that I find I have the
luxury of thinking about doing what I want to do rather than doing what
I have to do.
After finishing undergrad I signed up right away for an MLIS - Master's in Library and Information Science. I thought I wanted to be a librarian. I had good reasons for thinking so - I like books, I like libraries, I have a passion for putting things in neat order, and hey, I already have the wardrobe. My closet if full of cardigans, all my shoes are sensible, and I totally rock a bun.
In the meantime, one of those survival jobs I took on in college suddenly transformed into an actual career. The little company I was freelance copyediting for didn't have quite enough for me to do, so the nice lady I worked for recommended me for a Real Job on the staff of a medical series put out by a Major Publishing Corporation. I now have my very own cubicle, a decent salary, and for the first time ever, fabulous medical and dental coverage. I get paid sickdays and holidays. I have a 401(k) and a Roth IRA. I'm practically a grownup. The people I work with are pleasant but not bothersomely friendly (yeah, I'm not a people person). I adore my boss. Nobody cares what I do with my time as long as all the work gets done. But the work... the work is mind-numbingly dull. I look at medical journal articles all day. Sometimes something entertaining comes along, like the issue we did by a bunch of Brazilian plastic surgeons on the subject of cosmetic butt implants. Mostly, though, it's just dull.
So what about the librarian thing? I haven't taken a class towards my degree in six months. I haven't decided what I want to do with it. I already make more money in publishing than many people with years of experience in library work get, and I'm on the low end for salary in my field. And, to be honest, I didn't like much of what I found in library school. I loved the research techniques classes, and technical services classes, and anything to do with the nuts-and-bolts of library work. What I couldn't stand was the "careerist" speeches all my teachers gave. Apparently, librarians are a ferociously insecure lot. It's not all about cardigans and shushing people, they said, librarians can be hip and young, too! So hip and young that they can talk endlessly about how misunderstood they are as a profession, and how underpaid, and how unappreciated their work is, how librarians have an image problem... really, bitter and unpleasant stuff.
Well, I like the cardigans, and I was looking forward to shushing people, and I am neither hip nor young. I am also not bitter and unpleasant most of the time. In publishing, I work around cheerful, comeptent, hardworking people. We might be underappreciated and I have no idea what our professional image is, but we don't actually care, because we get paid instead. I think that we don't have a professional image because there is no journal out there dedicated to journal publishing. No one pretends that this is an academic discipline, and we're all just fine with that.
However - I like library work. I got to do some technical services work in school, and I loved it. I also got to work in a museum archive and would happily go live there if I could - provide me with food, housing and medical care and I would sign myself over as a slave . It feeds my soul in a way that my current career does not. The idea of doing what I do now for the rest of my life feels wretched.
My real goal in life is to get out of the city and back where I belong. I belong in the middle of nowhere, with a flock of sheep and some horses and a few big woofy dogs and a garden. Library jobs are scarce in those places. Publishing work can be done from any place with a live Internet connection. I tell myself that from every practical perspective, publishing is the right choice and it would be a waste of a LOT of money to finish the library degree. This is what I tell myself. Repeatedly.
If I had two lives, though, in one of them I would get my MLIS, get a job at Penn and work towards my PhD in Classics while working in Van Pelt library. I would then be set as a subject specialist bibliographer, and could find work in a quiet academic setting handling a serious research collection on the ancient world. Meanwhile, the other me would move to a big spread in New England, raise Icelandic sheep and ride her horse while reaching new heights of genius in composting and self-sufficiency. Which me is me?
What did you dream about last night?
It was kind of vague, something to do with my sister. I'd rather write about the dream I had a few nights ago.
I was a princess. At least, I thought I was a princess. My parents died suddenly and I was thrust into power. I invesigated my parents' death because something was odd about it, and in the process uncovered a nefarious plot. I wasn't a princess at all. I was an NPC in a role-playing game. Some of the people around me were real, but most were not. I got a terrifying glimpse out of the game and saw the players, those I had thought of as friends or courtiers or servants, as all-powerful god forms living in a bizarre world that looked sort of like a suburban living room. I realized, in a dreamlike way, that I and some of the other NPCs had been endowed with free will to make the game more interesting, and that we were the important gamepieces - the goal was to manipulate particular NPCs in key positions of power in order to help the player's chosen faction. The death of my parents had been a game move, and I was in constant danger. Every time I met someone, I had to figure out if they were PC or NPC.
There was no resolution to this dream - dreams, sadly, rarely have story arcs. I'd kind of like to know how it ends, though it seems like it can't end well for the princess; the game will end no matter what and there is no possible way she can win because she's not even one of the players.
