Post-graduation, post-Boston

It’s hard to believe that the last two years went by so fast, but yes, I’m now an official, bona fide librarian. Not only have I graduated and received my MSLIS (yes, I’m a master of science), but I got a real librarian job, to boot. I will be the new Systems/Metadata Librarian at Whitman College, in Walla Walla, WA. It’s an exciting opportunity to do a lot of forward-looking things, and I’ll be working with a small staff of very supportive, intelligent, creative people, in an excellent educational environment. I can hardly believe it all happened so fast, but I can’t even express the relief I feel that I’m gainfully employed, and the excitement I feel about all the things I will get to learn and do in this new phase of my professional life.

Of course, now that a job has been secured and I know where I’m going when I leave Boston, the fact of leaving Boston is very real and very sad and very…sudden. I still have about five weeks here, but five weeks just doesn’t seem like enough time. I was always planning to leave June 29, but June 29 was just an abstract date to me. Now, it’s a solid and quickly approaching date. And I’m in awe at how life can push you into places and situations you never saw coming. When I moved to Boston, I never in my life would have through I would eventually move to a small, isolated town in the Pacific Northwest. Two years ago, when I enrolled in library school, it was with the certain knowledge I’d be returning to the Bay Area in 2009. And as it turns out, the Bay Area is once again eluding me. All I can tell myself is that it’s just not time for me to be there yet, and I have to wait a little while longer.

I don’t know what the next five weeks will bring, as I prepare to pack up my life of the last six years and say good bye to people I love and to a city that, while sometimes frustrating, has also given me many great experiences and introduced me to many wonderful people. I can just hope that the place I’m heading will be as good to me.