A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.  -Lemony Snicket

I had a nice long talk with my dad today. It seemed appropriate for my birthday to be talking about my future. So far all I have done is school, well and that one month working at the nursing home but we don’t talk about that. When I was in high school my parents, mostly my dad, didn’t want me to have to work. My dad worked in his father’s grocery store as long as he can remember and my mother remembers her high school days working in the hospitial where her mother was a nurse and, for some reason that I only vaguely understand yet, the didn’t want that for me. So I went to college and still didn’t work.

But now things are a little different, I graduate in December and I keep talking about looking for work but I’ve really made no motion to do so and then my dad asked if I would be coming home for Christmas. Perfect excuse, so the job path is deverted until the new year.

I think he may have wondered about me though because he asked me what I wanted to do. I know that he knows that I know I don’t want to work retail for the rest of my life. I have flirted with many jobs ideals, all of them involving something more than BA. Today my dad asked me about my most recent one, library science, and I was off and running. I told him all about the programs that I’ve looked into, what they require, why I like UW overall, and where I want to end up with the career.

“Wow, you’ve really researched this,” he said.

And that’s when it hit me, I have really researched this. I have never looked at a job and looked at schools and made decisions and visualized how I want to further those goals and what career path I would love forever. So even if finding a job proves difficult in the next few months, I’ve got a goal and the supportive parents who don’t think I’m at all weird for wanting to become a librarian.

For anyone who cares, I want to become an archivist eventually and I would love to work with digital collections specifically. Although I keep visualizing myself as that angry public librarian…