Originally published at lib schooled.. You can comment here or there.

Last week, to put it succinctly, was the week from hell.

I left for St. Louis to present at a conference on Wednesday, came home mid-afternoon Friday only to immediately head to the Fox Theatre with Justin to see Bob Dylan play Friday night. Saturday morning, after dropping Wednesday off at the dog boarders, we drove to Kalamazoo to see our friends Lauren and Eric get married. Sunday, after a pit stop at IKEA, we headed home where I was able to finally couch for the first time, it seemed, in weeks.

I only checked email twice on Monday. Twice! Clearly, I was tired and overworked.

Justin and I have been having a lot of conversations on what’s going to happen with me when on-campus classes are done for me in May (I’ll still be doing a few online classes for the summer session): I’ll be out of a job (the graduate program kicks students off of student assistantships after 36 credit hours and I hit 42 or 44 May 2010), Justin and I are getting married (to get health benefits – srsly), we’re moving somewhere but we’re not sure where. And then there is the honeymoon to contend with (UK? Italy? For how long?). In a short amount of time, a lot of stuff is going to be happening and I can’t plan for it because it is all dependent on whether or not I get a job offer and if so, where I’m going. And on top of that, if I don’t get a job offer, where do we move to? Justin has the luxury of telecommuting, and I know that if I can’t find a job in X time, he will support me, but I don’t want to have to do that.

It’s called having to pay $900/month in student loans, muthafucker. (”Down with your bourgeois education,” Justin says.)

So then it goes back to, “What do you want to do! What do you want to do with your life!” and of course, “world domination” doesn’t necessarily pay the bills.

In all seriousness though, I stacked my interests and my work experience in the last two years to make myself as marketable as possible. I’ll have 18 months of academic librarianship under my belt, along with having presented at a conference, certification in archival work coupled with practicum experience, digital librarianship, special projects I’ve worked on with professors plus my own incredibly varied background.

I’m awesome and I know that.

One thing I keep musing on is just how far and to what extent I want to make librarianship and archival work my life — because I know me well enough to know that I will rabble rouse and want to change the world (I’ve already started that on campus here with the creation of a new student group that I did with three other students this summer), and while there are many incredibly awesome librarians and archivists out there who do similar rabble rousing things, the profession as a whole can be and is to some extent, incredibly backward and staid. As a student, looking at the work being done typically sums up one thing — that everything has to be committed to death and with that comes the death of innovation and moving forward.

But as par usual, I’m digressing.

As it stands, in addition to my course work and 20 hours of ref desk pimpin’, I currently am doing the following:

• President, ASIS&T,Wayne State student chapter.
• Vice President and co-founder, Progressive Librarians’ Guild, Wayne State student chapter.
• Communications chair, Graduate Employees’ Organizing Committee, Wayne State.
• Member, virtual reference committee for new technologies, Wayne State Library system.
• Digital technologies librarian liaison, various roles/responsibilities ¹.

I can see my life going in a variety of directions, and I know that I’m flexible enough with my skillset that if I don’t like how one way goes, I can totally switch it to another. The problem, however, is that I’m not quite sure if I want to be a rabble rouser anymore — my own work and interests seem to get pushed to the side because when I take on something, I like to think I give it 110% of my focus – and I know it is because of this that makes me so good at what I do.

Writing, for example, has gone to the way side. Not just missing a few days or a few weeks but it’s been since MAY since I’ve posted anything to this or my LiveJournal account, which I even barely check anymore. My other domain, biblyotheke.net is to represent my “professional portfolio” and that’s not even been tweaked with since I installed Indexhibit on it a few weeks ago.

The quandary I’m having is not only how I want to live my life, but how to live my life and make it meaningful. How do I balance a husband, a future family, a career and personal interests while giving myself Lisa-time? What type of jobs should I start looking for? Should I sell out? Consult? Write the “Great American Novel”? Do I want to work 60hrs a week and push family and personal life aside (like my mom)? And if my school involvement right now is any indicator, it can end up like that.

Because I find it incredibly difficult to say “No.”

1. I have not discussed with my freelance employers what I can and cannot post about my work for them, so for now, they remain anonymous.

Title says it all, pretty much.

Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.

When I moved back to Grand Rapids in December of 2002, I made a promise to myself that the only place I would want to live is in Eastown, a wonderfully hip and fun area that reminds me of Ann Arbor (in which A2 is always considered to be Michigan’s answer to Berkeley), just on a incredibly smaller scale. It took several years before I would end up living in Eastown, and for 3.5 years, I had a ramshakle apartment on Norwood Ave that gave me 5 minute walk to some of the better eateries, pubs/bars and shops in the whole of Grand Rapids area. In the last few years, other walkable neighborhoods have started popping up such as Cherry Hill, Diamond District, Downtown and the burgeoning midtown areas. But Eastown has always been my first love and it is here I always come to visit when I come back to visit the ‘rents. And if there is any chance of moving back to Grand Rapids, Eastown would be the first place we would look to live.

The one thing that Eastown has that I have not found duplicated anywhere I have traveled is Wolfgang’s, one of the (bar none) best breakfast places ever. And ever, I mean ever. There is nothing like Wolfgang’s anywhere — it is not their extensive breakfast menu, their awesome hazelnut coffee or the familiarity of their waitstaff who recognize me when I come in — it’s the whole attitude of breakfast that presented. It’s not some highfalutin, overly priced restaurant where one gets some “fusion” dish that fails horribly (Muse in Royal Oak, I’m looking at you) or has a limited sampling of breakfast entrees (most breakfast places), but over and over again, they have pages upon pages of delicous, artery hardening, weight gaining breakfast. It is no wonder they are consistently voted the number one breakfast place everywhere in the local “best of” polls.

My favorite, something I have tried to duplicate by ordering separate dishes at other places, is the Keane: Southern style biscuits and gravy, topped with corned beef hash and scrambled eggs. I think one of the reasons I could never go vegetarian is the promise of no more Keane, something that I would gladly travel hundreds of miles to have.

Wolfgang’s has become the staple to visit when I come into town, not a visit goes by where I’m here at least once. When Justin and I end up moving to our nesting spot and if that place ends up outside of Michigan, I’ll lament not missing friends and family, but I’ll lament missing out on Wolfgang’s.

Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been a bit lax on the whole “digitally document my life” thing, understandably due to heavy work and school load this past week that was unforeseen last Sunday. I’ve got a few days to fill in (and which they will be backdated so I’m not terribly sure how they will translate to updating Twitter and LiveJournal), but I’m really keen on getting these uploaded sometime soon. Also, interestingly enough, I brought everything with me to power/transfer my camera but not the camera itself. The camera on my phone takes fairly decent shots but the system of shooting, uploading and fixing is a bit more kludgy than I’d like.

This partial weekend, I’m in Grand Rapids visiting fam and heading to a few doctors appointments. Now that my insurance has changed, finally, from one job to the next, I’m honoring a few appointments I have left before I start the process of digging for a new set of doctors in Detroit.

With that being said, Mumsy and I went out to lunch today and on our way back to her house, we stopped at Biggby Coffee so that I could load up on caffeine. I ordered a 24oz iced Mocha Mocha, which contains copious amounts of espresso but also interestingly enough, while it is labeled as “Sugar Free,” my iced Mocha Mocha came with whipped topping and chocolate syrup. What would have made this even more priceless is if I had this made with skim milk.

Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.

Darcee, Mindy and myself went to Edinburgh for my 34th birthday a few years ago. While there, we made our home at the Haymarket Bar, where I made friends with a Kiwi bartender named Bryan who helped us liberate Tennent’s pint glasses a few days before we left.

Ever since then, this pint glass has become my de facto drinking glass for everything from coffee, to beer, to pop and even the occasional boring glass of water. It’s one of my favorite drinking glasses and it has served, for the last three years, as one of more memorable tributes of that trip more than anything else.

Originally published at digital biblyotheke.. You can comment here or there.

Recently Justin and I had a quasi-dinner party where 80% of the guests were Twittering the entirety of our night. [Rats! We never incorporated a hashtag for easy following!] Justin (1), the anti-2.0 zealot, later remarked we spent so much time social networking electronically, that we forgot to socialize in person. “You know it’s bad when I’m the social life of the party,” he quipped, which is true. When dealing with a man who balks at the idea of wearing “big boy shoes” when we go out, this is not someone you expect to be flittering about the room at any social event — and yet, to some extent that night, he was.

[Insert vaguely entertaining and interesting thought process on what it means to be digital in the 21st century, having been on the interwebs since 1994.]

I had recently been thinking about how to construct digital biblotyke. and was close coming to the decision that I wanted to record every day for the next year in photos, Tweets, journal entries and more. The conversation with Justin along with inspiration of some tweeps (Fee in particular of her near daily shots of Devon) pushed me to the direction I needed to go. At the very least, I wanted a photo of my world published everyday to keep track of the world around me. There may be more than one image/photo/tweet/video/podcast per day but I wanted at least one thing everyday.

And to appease my newly honed librarian-skillz, I’m cataloging my world by creating my own folksonomy that best compliments it. So take that!

1. My boyfriend, soon to be fiancée. Often referred to as “TheBF.”