The tide is high

Finished the short story yesterday on the commute to Simmons, just over the 15,000 word mark. I'm excited that I can return to "Confessions" now, as I feel like I've been away from it for far too long. I probably would have gotten right back to the novel had I not shared the train ride home from class with a fellow denizen of the North Shore who just happens to live within a stone's throw of our townhouse! After a gruelling first class in the required "Principles of Management" course that went on for close to four hours - each three-hour class has been extended by a half-hour to make up for the cancellation of last week of Summer School so as to avoid the madness that will inevitable accompany the Democratic National Convention; and we ran long last night, to boot! - it was nice to unwind with a classmate and talk about what lured us into persuing fabulous careers in librarianship.

The nice thing about the people in my classes is that most of them seem to be making second (or third or fourth) starts in their careers, which means I find myself fitting right in. I must be letting my guard down, because during the part of last night's class when we were asked to interview the person sitting next to us in order to introduce him or her to the rest of the group, I let slip that I like to write in my spare time. Never in the past would I have copped to being an aspiring writer! But after a solid year of work, with five short stories, three quarters of a novel, and an ever-growing pile of rejection slips, it's probably as good a time as ever for me to come out of the closet.

But so far I'm pleased as punch with library school. It's definitely what I should be doing with my life right now - hell, it's what I should have done with my life a long, long time ago! - and I think I'll be much happier as a librarian than I would as a professional academic, though I will in the long run try and fuse my academic interests with my professional goals. Try as I did, I just couldn't get over the squishiness that was inherent to "pure" academia, the feeling that all the seminars, papers, and presentations didn't really add up to anything; that making a career out of the humanities without learning any real skills in the process was like trying to subsist on a diet of cotton candy. Just as I found something tangible in my knowledge of Ancient Greek after I left school and began teaching at the The Greek Institute, so too do I feel that I will acquire real honest-to-goodness skills by going to Simmons.

(Even from the management course!)