Aggie Librarian returns from Gamecock Land.

I flew back into IAH from CAE yesterday on a bumpy regional jet, tired but profoundly satisfied with my business trip and glad to be home. The weather, actually, was beautiful for flying, both coming and going, but it's just with those smaller regional jets, you can feel even the slightest turbulence quite profoundly, and if you're like me, you're pretty much white-knuckling it shortly after takeoff until the plane hits cruising altitude and levels off, and also when you begin to start the final decent and bank hard to line up with the runway. Just unsettling--to me at least.

I don't fear flying any more than I fear driving, I just don't take any particular pleasure in either activity.

Anyway, the job interview went very well, and I guess I had rehearsed my presentation sufficiently, because it seemed to flow very smoothly, and was, per staff comments, "just right", timewise--neither too long nor too short. I also apparently inspired them with my ideas, many of them took careful notes and many agreed I touched on new concepts and ideas they hadn't considered before. The collection development library said out loud, "well, we have some posters to buy now." And the archives cataloger was really excited about my proposed use for the 653 field that I mentioned, and as he tells it, rushed over to tell his colleagues about it before coming back to the main library.

The staff, both the librarians and the paras, were very friendly, courteous, and knowledgeable. I did have to give a rigorously honest account of what went down at Texas A&M-Galveston. I owed up to what I did wrong, cited lessons learned, spelled out what I think THEY did wrong, and why I was glad to be outta there. I think I gave a fair and honest account, which they appreciated and seemed to accept. I had to tell the tale (with varying degrees of detail) a total of three times in fact...almost a ritual Mea Culpa, but good for the soul. Gets it out in the open and off my chest. My thanks to the search committee for asking that question first thing in the morning, to give me a dry run at it (they had to know it was going to pop up later from others).

It was a good, though tiring day. Aggie Librarian got to meet another former Aggie Librarian, too, who had worked on main campus (though not a TAMU alumna, whereas I am a TAMU alumnus). She expressed regret there was not better coordination between main campus at TAMUG during my brief employment there. I commented only that I was still grateful for MDW's workshop on NACO, which was positively excellent. This cataloger had also worked at the Naval Academy after leaving TAMU. Though she could not have been much older than me, I gathered she started out her library career much earlier in life than I did, and had a lot more experience to show for it, too. I admit, it took me a good many years to come to the decision on my own to go to Library school. The fact that mom is a retired school librarian (and was actually a working school librarian while I was in library school) did not make it easier to decide on librarianship as a career...if anything it delayed that decision and made it harder, as it was a path I had to choose for myself, to take ownership of, etc., and I had to be convinced that going for a Humanities PhD was utterly fruitless. So my thanks are also to Michael Berube and Cary Nelson, also, for unexpectedly nudging me in the direction of Librarianship, by first nudging me AWAY from the idea of picking up a PhD in either German Studies, Cinema Studies or Intellectual History along the way. I concluded (correctly, in my view) that Libraries were the best route to gainful university-level employment. A lot of unemployed PhDs are belatedly figuring this out as well, for good or ill.

Anyway, for now I remain an underemployed MLS working for a faceless corporation.
Come mid-May, everything could change, significantly and in a positive direction.

It's true that I once lived in Columbia, and on this trip I did go by my childhood home. My old Elementary school didn't look anything like it did in the 1970s, which is good, because in the 1970s it looked straight out of the 1950s.

I had a vague memory of the older USC Coliseum, where we used to watch a few Carolina Gamecocks basketball games (USC football in those days was utterly pathetic, nothing like the powerhouse it has become today). The Basketball team today has a new, completely modernized Coliseum, and the old Coliseum is used mainly for concerts, monster truck rallies (I shit you not), rock performances, etc.

Columbia is a nice, sleepy college town. It's laid back...maybe not as hip as Austin, but pretty darn good for South Carolina. The campus is a major part of the downtown landscape, and they definitely have "walkable communities" of the kind that the New Urbanist movement in architecture raves about (and which I am in agreement with as a desirable thing). If I end up moving there, I do plan to live downtown within walking/biking distance from work, driving only when I have to.

Columbia, SC is "Deep South", but it is just as profoundly "East", as in Eastern seaboard. It was one of the original 13 colonies, and this is unmistakable when you walk the city streets and absorb the history around you. It has a feeling of deeper tradition beyond Dixie that even Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana (and certainly NOT Texas) just don't have.

More thoughts / news later, perhaps.

Signing off for now.