Why I Want to Be a Librarian

These past two weeks have been brimming with anxiety for me. Why? My job prospects are growing dim since I arrived back from my trip.

I still have a job; I'm still employed as a substitute teacher. Yet, it won't be until late August that substitute teaching gigs will start coming back up. In the meantime I've been desperately searching for full time job opportunities. I don't expect $30K but I'd like something that makes over $15,000. My next step is to get out of the house. I stayed with my mom during her breast cancer but now that my trip is over and now that she is fine it is time to head out.

It's also time to think about my career again.

Sometime around May I realized that the master's degree I wanted was the Master's of Library and Information Science. The stress I had, prior to the trip, about where to take my career goal was fairly substantial. I was denied by all the MFA's and that led me to reconsider if I was truly into the MFA. Would I do a MFA if I wasn't fully funded? Honestly, no. It's hard to get a job with a MFA. I applied and was accepted into the MA in English, but it was more literary and less rhetoric or writing focused. Right now those jobs are biting the dust and frankly...I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be a scholar. I didn't want to be at that particular school in that particular city that I didn't particularly care for.

My goal when I graduated was to take two years to figure out what I wanted to do. I want to write. Great. What else? What to do about a job? MFA? Technical Writing? Then I thought about what I had done in the past year. I substitute taught; I liked it but I've grown distant with teaching for now. Yet, I like the idea of increasing literacy, of making a community impact that is tangible. I felt that working with the library. With a moment of clarity I realized that a Master's of Library and Information Science was my degree. I knew this was true because for the first time I thought about how I didn't care for paying for the degree. As a miser, I've turned away from the MAT because of expense, realized I didn't want to pay for the MFA, but for some reason--as if through instinct--I felt ok paying for the MLIS.

Hmm.

But why? Why be a librarian, archivist, etc? This is a question I've been trying to answer as I've applied to different jobs. So why?

Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges.

The prospect of being a librarian wasn't always there for me. As an aspiring writer I looked at what other writers worked at for their day jobs. Most were MFA professors, but honestly I didn't care for their writing. Some were great like the gloriously beautiful Natasha Trethewey or George Saunders or Fred Chappell. Some were not. There were technical writers, like Ted Chiang, one of my favorite science fiction writers. There were journalists like Orwell and David Simon. Then I came across Borges.

Borges was a librarian.

As I read Borges I discovered how much libraries informed his writing and really his life. To him, paradise was a library, a house of knowledge and books. He was an individual not only captivated by artistic writing but by data, information. There's a quote I've been using in my cover letters; when Borges was interviewed and asked about if he knew his fate in literature Borges said "Yes, I always knew...my fate...was a literary one."

That's exactly how I felt...well, feel.

Like Borges, I love artistic writing, poetry and narrative. I devour poetry and pay attention to films in order to break down how their story was told.

Like Borges, I love information. I started off as a science major and didn't continue because of my love of books, but I still have an affection for science. I firmly believe in technology, accessibility of information and science as a mechanism of upward mobility in accordance with transhumanism.

This in part was due to my love of reading. Not just reading stories and books but encyclopedias and textbooks. Like poetry to me now, I would devour books like "The American Pageant" and my grandmother's old set of 1964 World Book Encyclopedias. At age 4 I was reading about Lincoln in my house in the encyclopedia. When I discovered Wikipedia...oh God...did my life erupt into seeking knowledge. So many blue links...so little time.

That's why I enjoy archives, libraries, etc. The work with data, the work with books; libraries, archives, etc--they are houses of information. They are my places of worship almost. I could kill time if I needed by going into a library.

At my graduation our speaker talked about how we need to find a place of musing. As the director of the High Museum of Art, his place was any art museum. I thought about where my place of musing was, my place of tranquility. There's nature but that's too obvious. As a film lover there's the movie cinema, but as a writer why wasn't it the bookstore? Because it is the library. The library is my temple; it has been since I was 3. If it wasn't for the library I wouldn't have gained the knowledge I did because our internet connection was always dial up, because we didn't have internet until I was 12, because we couldn't afford a ton of books. In high school, I would come in at least once every week and check out movies, books and educate myself. It was imperative as a writer to be immersed like this in the library.

I love knowledge, information, facts. I love working with them. I could work in health informatics and librarianship and be fine because of how it deals with data and information. Data is like my blanket.

Maybe that's a bit too much.

I knew the library was my place when I discovered it when I was 3. It is a special place for me. In South America I loved going into the libraries and archives. I relish this "literary life" like Borges. Paradise is a library to me. So I want to work in something similar.

Plus, no fines.