I got to work this morning and realized that I haven't posted all week. I did my normal Sunday-before-bedtime piece, and then nothing. I didn't pay attention to what was happening this week. I didn't even read the comments to the last post until this morning. The AL has been far from my mind. I just ranted about a trend I saw as a sign of the end times and then went about my life. Only this morning did I read the comments. I still see microcontent as a sign of the end times, but so be it. The times have to end sometime.
One might very well ask why was the AL so unresponsive to the flux and jive of the library world. Fortunately or unfortunately, the AL has a personal life, and sometimes that personal life interferes with this blog. Most of the AL blogging takes place after work hours, which based on the statistics is not when most AL reading takes place. The thing is, after work hours other things sometimes happen, especially in nice weather. For example, one could blog, or one could go to the park. One could blog, or one could go out with a good friend. These things happen. I was reading in a blog this week (I think Meredith's, but I'm too lazy to check) that many popular library bloggers are very passionate about their work. I'm passionate about many things. Books. Music. Cocktails. But not the AL. So after I did my nighty-nite post on Sunday, I took a break.
To be honest, I've been spending my free time doing more than writing the AL. For example, I have a friend. We're just good friends, you understand. And yet, when I think of my good friend, I find it hard to get annoyed with librarianship or anything else. Librarianship is just a leitmotif in the pageant of experience, or so I once read on a fortune cookie. It's difficult to muster up even fake annoyance when I'm distracted by the good stuff in life. Smile and the world smiles with you; cry and your mascara smears.
During the week I also noticed that I didn't mind not posting. Perhaps I'm getting tired of the AL. She's so demanding, after all. I always find this happens when I take a break, even an unintentional one. The longer I go without posting, the easier it gets not to post. At least I don't have blog addiction. If there's one thing writing the AL has taught me, it's how to quickly write 500 words on just about anything. The downside is I'm getting to the point where I just crank out the posts without giving them much thought, and I think the blog suffers for it. Most of the time I can't even remember what I wrote about two posts ago.
Maybe I'll be able to find something annoying to post about next week. Until then, have a great weekend. I know I will.
About Me
- AL
- The Annoyed Librarian is possibly the most successful, respected, and desirable librarian of her generation. She has no other interest than to bring her wit and wisdom to the huddled librarian masses yearning to breathe free. The Annoyed Librarian is a free spirit and you are lucky to have her.
37 comments:
You have to enjoy your weekends and time to yourself once in a while. So go on, take your break and then come back and find some other annoyance. Believe me, the bozos in libraryland will always give us plenty of ammunition.
Maybe the idea is that you are not willing to "make the sacrifices" to advance (in this case, advancing the blog). I am just thinking of Steven B's latest in ACRL on leadership. There are reasons some of us don't want leadership (or rather management, a distinction his ilk usually fail to make). Maybe because some of us do have friends and our cocktails. And that is a good thing, librarianship (or at least it's annoyances) be damned.
If you stop blogging, I'm leaving the library world.
I hope it is a wonderful and stress free weekend for you--and that you are able to set aside the annoyance when away from the lib world :)
Congrats on a friend!
I think you have been annoyed long enough. It's time to start enjoying your personal life and make that "good friend" into someone meaningful. A job is a job, but a "good friend" will sustain you forever.
Problem of every aithor, I suppose - write long enough and you run out of new stuff to say...
Aat least you have an exit!
Friends (with benefits) makes even the best of us slack off.
Where do I sign up to be your friend?
I for one think you should go at the top of your game, leave the masses wanting more rather than become a caricature.
Go out the way Don Imus should have gone out... :)
You've raised some interesting topics and opened a safe forum for debate. Now it is time for you to have a life. The rest of us need to band together to change the library world. Instead of leadership seminars, let's offer Management 101 so people learn how to competently manage, not drive their staff nuts when they try to lead. Let's look beyond Library 2.0 propaganda. Let us fight what I see as the growing problem of ageism in the library world. Let us take over ALA. Action is what is now needed, not blog posts.
Why does it have to be all-or-nothing? Maybe you can wean yourself (and your loyal readers, of which I am one) off the AL slowly. Blog only once a week instead of two.
Or, don't search for things to be annoyed about. I'm certain that they will find you (there are just so many, after all). Forget the Sunday/Wednesday schedule, and just blog about annoying stuff when it pops up and really gets your goat. You'll have a forum to vent, we'll still have something to read, and in the meantime you can have your life back.
"Just good friends" is to me an oxymoron. Good friends can turn major annoyances into petty ponderings and turn frustrations into fun. You're definitely due a blogging break, but when you're not engaged in blissful friendship, please know that your expressions of major annoyance are engaging, entertaining, and most welcome to many of us.
RCN, San Francisco Bay Area
the Annoyed Librarian isn't annoyed??
my world is collapsing!
It looks like we are seeing another side of the AL...I like.
Where do you get fortune cookies that contain words like "leitmotif"? I want to eat in that restaurant.
---Kurt
I think it’s great that AL is drifting or flowing elsewhere. It made me think of the astonishing freedom of letting go. I’ve been reading a lot of Buddhist teachings lately and let me share this.
“Meditation isn't really about getting rid of thoughts, it's about changing the pattern of grasping on to things, which in our everyday experience is our thoughts.”
“The habit of the human race is to always, out of fear, grasp onto little parts of it. And that is called ego and ego is grasping on to the content of our thoughts. That is also the root of suffering, because there is something in narrowing it down which inherently causes us a lot of pain because it is then that we are always in a relationship of wanting or not wanting. We are always in a struggle with other people, with situations, even with our own being. That's what we call stress. That's what we experience as continual, on-going stress. Even in the most healthy, unneurotic of us, there's some kind of slight or very profound anxiety of some kind, some kind of uneasiness or dissatisfaction.”
“The thoughts are fine if they are seen as transparent, but we get so caught up judging thoughts as right or wrong, for and against, yes and no, needing it to be this way and not that way. And even that might be okay except that is accompanied by strong, strong emotions. So we just start ballooning out more and more. With this grasping onto thoughts we just get more caught, more and more hooked. All of us. Every single one of us.”
Be free AL and enjoy life!
Enjoy yourself AL!
Come back to the blog when you have to, or just to say hello once in a while, but don't go searching for irritants.
Those of us who are just lazy chroniclers salute you for the discussions you've provoked.
dude ... what? hahahahahhahaha!
Well, there IS one never-ending ALA conundrum - - the ability for tired, worn out and radical Councilors to keep being elected, reelected and re-reelected to Council.
All they do is to drag the reputation of ALA further into the slime by advancing Resolution after Resolution concerning left wing objectives that have noting to do with either being a librarian or advancing the craft of librarianship. They just clutter up the mid-year and annual meetings with "mice nuts" political diatribes that are only of interest to themselves.
No wonder that the occasional and thoughful Resolution that had both meaning and clout has been replaced with streams of Resolutions to the President and the Congress that will never see the light of day in the real world political arena.
ALA Council has lost its bearings, those bearing having been replaced by utterances made by the political extremists of libraryland.
A few minutes, once a week for a wry chuckle at the pseudo seriousness of the library world with you is just fine with me.
Like you, I also have a life which I enjoy.
Life's pretty good, eh?
Have a good one. See ya next week.
Cheers
Pete
Well I just find you and you find someone else the story of my life. :) I wish you the best. "Friends" make library land so much easier to take. Take care.
AL, good to hear you're happily whiling away your non-library hours. I while away a good many myself.
Maybe this will perk you up: an AT&T dude is predicting that the Internet will hit capacity in 2010, thanks to, yes, can I hear an AMEN, HD video. And, according to this dude, 8 hours of intellectual brilliance is loaded onto YouTube every minute.
Of course, others think this is just a "the sky is falling" thing.
Me? I'm going to say everything I have to say, ever, within the next two years. You just never know.
Internet will hit capacity in 2010, thanks to, yes, can I hear an AMEN, HD video.<<
It was predicted that the internet would hit capacity in 1994 due to people using it to order pizzas online.
I'm with soren faust. Thank you god! A break from the whinefest. But I'm glad you have a real life, AL, and one that makes you happy. Seriously. A steady diet of negativity sucks the joy from one's soul.
I am happy you are happy. It is good to be joyful and content. Perhaps we could form an Irritable Librarians Collective to rant and discuss at whim (and as the irritation arises, rather than on schedule) which would stop it from being a burden to any particular psyche? Irritable Librarians Unite, and save the Annoyed Librarian's fun time.
Swell, just swell. So my master plan of whisking the AL away like at the end of a James Bond movie is now for naught. I hope I can get my deposit back for the helicopter.
Your friend had best appreciate *all* that is the AL. Leitmotif and aperitifs.
Now where will I go for verve?
Don't worry. I won't miss you that much.
Just for the record, I don't think I'll be retiring completely or anything. It's just I'm no longer forcing myself to come up with things to post. When I find something annoying, I'll most likely post about it.
Just for the record, I don't think I'll be retiring completely or anything. It's just I'm no longer forcing myself to come up with things to post. When I find something annoying, I'll most likely post about it.
That annoys me.
>>AL said...
Just for the record, I don't think I'll be retiring completely or anything<<
Yeah, we wannabe librarians been hearing about you all "retiring" for years now and still haven't seen it happen...
A Romance? How nice, when is the musical coming out?
Whatever happened to that book you were writing?
Written. Submitted last September. Still sitting with editors and publishers.
Oh OK. Because it wouldn't be smart to stop the blog until after you do your tour around the country. Gotta cash in on your blog.
Now I'm going to have to find something else to do at the reference desk. harumph.
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