07/31/2011

Another July comes to an end, another month gone, another summer fading into unpleasant memories enveloped by the haze rising off the pavement. 

I’ve started re-reading “Atlas Shrugged.”  The first time I read it, it had a profound impact on my personal outlook, the way that 18-year-olds are so easily influenced by every new idea that floats across their psyche.  Always politely liberal, it had never occurred to me that I should work for my own benefit only.  The idea was so foreign, so shiny and new, that I was immediately taken with it and changed my facebook so it said that my political views were “libertarian.” (Although Ayn Rand was vehemently NOT libertarian…the similarities are definitely there.)

I am so incompetent at working for my own benefit only it is a joke. 

The book is over a thousand pages long, and I only read 200 today, so I’m sure I’ll have more profound thoughts as I progress.

The last time I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life was March 2010.  That was before I was rejected from my graduate program of choice, and picked up Library Science as a reluctant and unwanted second choice.

It has been over a year of aimless wandering, hoping that I’ll get a clue or something, but that’s not happened.  It’s not like I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it; almost every day I look at job postings, graduate schools, undergraduate programs, the Peace Corps, TEFL, all kinds of shit.  I think about it all the time. 

I am just so disappointed in myself.  I always imagined myself doing something great, and now I’m just a mediocre nothing with no real prospects.  It’s amazing how quickly those who sing your accolades forget about you.  A year ago, I wrote an award-winning senior thesis.  It was the last bit of decent writing I think I’ll ever do. 

I miss feeling…something.  Pride?  Maybe.  No.  Inspiration.  There is no pride in library school, no challenge, no difficulty.  No one has inspired me, has made me want do better, be better, try harder.  Library school is an exercise in mediocrity, filled with people too unmotivated or dim to pursue advanced degrees in history or anthropology or English.  Or, worse, people whose only goal in life is 50K a year with full benefits, who long to stop thinking and get paid.

I’m all for getting paid, really, but stop thinking?  Never.

So, my life is still shit.  I applied to community college, though, so I can take classes that might inspire me more than library school.  Maybe I’ll finish my MLIS, maybe not.  I really don’t care, and library school across the country are pumping out librarians like libraries AREN’T dying a slow, drawn-out death.  I don’t know that community college will be “challenging” but at the least it should be more interesting than classes like “abstracts and indexing” or “introduction to records management”—both of which I’m signed up for. 

Sigh.