Month: March 2016

Gratitudes: March 7 – March 13, 2016

epbab-header-gratitude
Dear Internet,
Gratitudes and things that make me happy are a part of my carding coursework, and I track them everyday and I’ll post them here every Sunday. (And I also acknowledge this is going to take me a few weeks to go beyond “I have killer hair.”) You can also find the a list of all my gratitudes here.
gratitude

  1. The deluge of places wanting to, or have an interest in, interviewing me
  2. Publishers because without them I would have no books
  3. I am grateful for yoga keeping me centered and balanced
  4. The ability to make choices that is best for me not for someone else
  5. For my internal strength. I may get knocked a lot but I always come back swinging
  6. For learning compassion for myself and for others
  7. For learning forgiveness and letting go
  8. For Wellabutrin seemingly working #fingerscrossed
  9. The kindness of others towards me
  10. Continuing to take accountability for my actions

happy

  1. Rugby
  2. Mermaid blue in my hair
  3. My pug in a mug tea infuser
  4. Hotel Chocolat
  5. My collection of Chucks
  6. Hugs
  7. All kinds of kisses (not just the ones from a new lover)
  8. Glitter pens
  9. Jane Austen retellings
  10. Sudoku

xoxo,
Lisa

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2014,

Collection of Cunning Curiosities – March 13, 2016

A WEEKLY COMPENDIUM OF THINGS THAT DELIGHT MY FANCY.

Dear Internet, You can follow this collection on Pinterest. x0x0, lisa

Writing

Cunning Tales from a Systems Librarian
þ How To: Become a Library Future(ist) – part i
þ LibUX interviewed me on unicorn librarian jobs and more for their podcast and it went live this week! If you have 30 minutes, go take a listen!
þ personal anacdotes on misc

Fanciful Delights

þ A few months I went on OKCupid out of pure curiosity. With a only a photo and blank profile, I received half a dozen “hey baby” messages within 5 minutes. Nope nope nope and deactivated my account. When I read My First 48 hours As An OkCupid Moderator, it confirmed why I’m only dating myself and I like to keep it that way
þ I am growing warmer to the Brontë’s and I have to concede Jane Eyre and the Invention of the Self is a great nod to that argument
þ By answering a few questions, Bright Cellars will pinpoint the perfect wine for you
þ Another rock star writer named Jonathan cannot keep his dick in his pants
þ At least one person asked me if helped empty the world’s supply of scotch, but I can’t stand the stuff (or bourbon, rye, or whisky). Trust me. I’ve tried. I’m a vodka girl through and through.
þ Matthew Rhys (Phillip in The Americans) in his glorious Welsh self and Matthew Goode, because he’s Matthew Goode, have a tv series coming out called, The Wine Show. Sign me up!
þ My body is a quirky son of a bitch. Once it gets used to something, it decides it doesn’t like it anymore. See: crazy drugs. While the same happened with the Mirena IUD, it still remains the most popular contraceptive I advocate. I was thrilled to learn Thanks to IUDs, Unintended Pregnancies Are Falling for the First Time in Decades
þ Relevant to my interests, a podcast discussing nothing but Icelandic saga
þ Mormons and non-Mormons are having it out via Amazon reviews over a 1981 edition of the The Book of Mormon
þ Believe it or not, the Prohibition Party still exists
þ Things you learn when playing rugby
þ I am totally looking forward to being 60 and rocking jeans, pop culture tshirts, Chucks, and cardigans so this listicle makes me pretty happy. #14 of the lady and her tattoo sleeves? That will so be me.
þ If you’ve seen Star Wars VII, you’re away the adorableness that is BB-8. Well now someone has made him — out of LEGOs
þ Mr. Darcy’s Shirt Is Coming to America: “A half-serious proposal to keep the shirt wet and molded to its display dummy by using misters like those in grocery store produce sections was deemed ‘curatorially unsound…'”.
þ aaastateofplay.com, using Social Security birth registered records, have calculated the top ten male and female names for every decade going back to the 1880s. “Lisa” shows up only once, in the 1970s, and is never seen again. Growing up, there were always at least three Lisas in my classes. As I got older, went to college, getting adult jobs — I can rarely find a Lisa anywhere. I don’t think I even know a Lisa up to my extended schedule. Now, where the hell are the other Lisa’s?? Are they being hunted down? Am I next?? It remains a mystery of the age.
þ Miniature milestone as Russian claims new record for world’s tiniest book
 

This day in Lisa-Universe: 2014, 2012, 2003, 1999

So now you’ve got that in-person interview!

Dear Internet,
Another institution contacted me today to schedule an interview. #fistpump Once I confirmed I was still interested, I started researching the location to see if it would be a good fit for me. Now you may be wondering why I’m doing this as it’s the “get to know you” interview. Simple: I applied for the position as it seemed like a good fit and now I need to see if the location fits me too.
Here are the questions I ask myself and how I obtain my answers:

  • How much are they paying me? You have a good chance of finding your potential salary on the call of applications and it will usually have a range. Because of my experience, I place what I should be commending between the median and high end of the range to give me a rough idea of what to expect. If I fall below that, I negotiate like heck. If they don’t advertise it on the call for applications, you can do one of two things:  The institution may require you meet the meet all the requirements of the union, whose website they gave me, to obtain tenure. I checked the union’s website and it gave the list of the pay ranges for each track of position, in this instance, full, associate, or assistant professor. Often, instead the pay ranges via the union, they will have a pay band, usually associated with a number or letter, so this job may fall into pay band of A21 which the pay is between $55K-$70K. University / college websites are so convoluted you’ll not be able to find this information easily so in google I use the search “salary site:nameofcollege.edu” to find the info. (As a rule, I do not use the college’s search box because it’s always terrible.) If none of this works, email HR to get the salary range. (One of my pet peeves is when institutions want you to provide your salary range. Don’t. This gives them the idea of what they can pay you versus what is available plus that number, for you, might be flexible. If you can live on $60K in one city, the cost of living in another might be low enough for you to live on $45K. So don’t tell them and it’s none of their business.)
  • Holy cats! Can I afford to move to XXX? Cost of living rules our daily lives. For example, we know living on the East Coast is more expensive than living in the Midwest. But just how much more expensive is it and can I use this knowledge to negotiate a higher salary? Let’s start by comparing your current location with the prospective one. For this I use Sperling’s Best Places to get that answer. For this example, I’m comparing moving from Grand Rapids, MI to Louisville, KY with a salary of $60,000. The increase to move is only 2%, which to me is negligible but depending on the pay range of the new institution, if I was near the middle, I’d probably negotiate higher.  If I were to move from Grand Rapids, MI to NYC, the increase is 90% and heck yeah would I be negotiating that salary. Remember this is an estimate and not an absolute number.
  • How much rent can I afford? Now that you have a rough idea of pay, and you have a rough idea of cost of living, let’s take a look at the biggest chunk of your paycheck: rent. To get this number, I head to Zillow’s rent calculator and use the following equation: $X (salary) x .75 (I am generous with taxes/SSDI and usually go 25%) / 12 = monthly take-home. For this example: $60K x .75 = $45K / 12 = take home of $3750. I plug that number in and leave monthly expenses at $0 to get your max amount of rent you can afford each month. (I leave the monthly expenses at $0 as they shift too much to get a minimum and I’m more interested in the max of affordability.)
  • Make an effing budget Now that you have a general idea of how much you’re making and what it will cost for you to live, how are you going to pay your bills? In December I had scored two second interviews with two institutions and I had to be prepared to make a decision so I needed an idea of what i’m looking for. I knew some things were constant (cell phone bill, car insurance) but others were going to be variable (gas, food, internet). I figured out what I was spending in Louisville and amped it up by at least 25% to give me an idea of what my disposable income would be. Make an effing budget.

You have your average salary, cost of living, and what you can afford for rent, the next step is to figure out where you want to live.
Let’s assume you’re moving to a new city and you don’t know anyone, so finding an area that fits your needs is going to be rough going but it’s not impossible. Just like the list I gave the other day on my requirements, for location virtual scouting these are the tools I use:

  • Walkability score  I am not and never have been by any stretch of the imagination a suburbs girl, so I always check the walkability of places I’m interested in. What this also gives you a good idea where neighborhood markets, coffee shops, bookstores, and the like are located. Check out Walk Score to see where your neighborhood lands and Walk Score also allows you to sort by the most walkable areas.
  • Google Maps  for anything I am interested in (coffee shops, trader joe’s, comic book stores, whatever), I use the search string “coffee shops near name of city” in google maps. Up pops a lovely map of all the coffee shops in that city, which I cross reference with my other requirements. Now I have a general idea of where I want to be
  • Google I use search strings like “best bars in X” or “best whatever in X” to also get a good idea of locations. This should also pull up local magazines, newspapers, and websites dedicated to the area since they typically run these type of listicles.
  • Wikipedia I use wikipedia to get an idea of what the town, overall, is like and get an idea of culture.
    Is this a lot of work? Yes — I can spend an afternoon or two just doing research but remember, you’re interviewing the city as much as you’re interviewing the instituion.

Good luck and may the gods be with you in your job search.

personal anacdotes on misc

(Edit: I totally spaced that LibUX interviewed me for their podcast and it went live this week! If you have 30 minutes, go take a listen!)
Dear Internet,
Wednesday is job hunt day and right now I’m up to slightly over 20 positions I need to apply for in the next week or so. I’m now breaking them down by deadline rather than when they were posted so I don’t miss the cut off. There have been a few cases where I’ve applied for positions past their prime and got interviews, but I like to be on top of things. On being thorough: once a librarian, always a librarian, and all of that rot.

This past Monday I had interview with an institution and I’m feeling pretty sure the interview did not go well, which sucks because this may be the interview that breaks my streak on going from phone to in person interviews. (This I realised was very true. There has not been a phone interview that did not end up in an in person interview. Getting the job, obviously, was a whole different matter.)
What went wrong? Several things, I believe, did not bode well. I also worried I wasn’t clear on my points, which TheExHusband (who works from home and thus heard my side of the conversation) thinks I’m being too hard on myself and that I sounded fine. Despite this, the one thing that I wasn’t keen on was the scripted questions. Three of which were so close to the other, I inadvertently answered them all in one go and had to reformulate my answer for questions two and three. I was also not thrilled to see they didn’t have back-up questions when it became evident several of the questions were repetitive.
Recommendation for search committees: I get you’re have constricted time for phone interviews but please, from a candidate’s point of view, consider having back up questions in case a main question does not apply or has already been answered in another form. Also the candidate is interviewing you as well, so please allot time for that to happen.
(I’m also super glad I did research on the school and prepped typical and often potential questions with answers before the interview so I wasn’t fumbling. I was also a girl scout.)
(I made the decision during this cycle of job applications my final question for the search committee is going to be, “Do you have any questions about my resume, web sites, or the case?” What’s happening is I feel I’m getting jerked around going into the in-person interview when I know they’ve been hammering and combing through my sites before the second interview and they’ve already made the decision I’m not the incumbent before the second interview even takes place. You’ll be hard pressed to dissuade me from that thought since I’ve had two job offers rescinded due to their probing of the sites AFTER extending the position. So let’s just get the elephant out in the open shall we?)
This position was one of my top choices due to the school’s reputation, the location, it’s alumni (yep!), and what the job would entail. If I don’t get called back for the second interview, I’ll be super bummed but life goes on and all that jazz.
(Thank you to everyone who is being super supportive of me during these job hunt cycles and telling me a place will be lucky to have me. Your support really keeps me pushing forward!)

If you have been to lisa.rabey.net  before, you may notice I’ve changed the design of the site. As I’m spending more time in keeping the content current, I choose this particular theme because I wanted something clean and easy to use but with a touch of pizazz. I adore the Commodore 64 and TI-99 4/a old computer and gaming images because they juxtapose what it stands for (computers) and what is perceived of my profession (books)  so rightly gives where my interests and skills lay and it seemed apropos. Get it? (Sometimes when I think I’m being clever it could be construed I take it a bit too far.) In addition to the theme, I also liked that it had my beloved right sidebar and the font was easy on the eyes. All in all, I’m really digging the new look.

I’m constantly tweaking my resume as I need to clean up or add new things. In recent interviews I’ve been talking a lot about the courses I’ve been taking at Team Treehouse like Front End Web Development / Full Stack JavaScript and I also recently started a class at Library Juice Academy on Introduction to GIS and GeoWeb technologies, so instead of just talking about them I wanted to illustrate them on ye olde resume.
(The LJA course is a month long while the TeamTreehouse classes are collectively 50-70 hours to be completed (not required but as a challenge) before the cohort starts in May. THEN it’ll be 50-70 hours of work over 12 weeks. Phew.)
(Recently I talked about GIS as a futures of libraries subject so when the opportunity came to take a course, I jumped on it. Hack Library School predicted it as an upcoming trend / requirement in 2012 for those wanting to get into Digital Humanities or continue the tech track so it’s not necessarily a super new thing. While HLS saw this coming, I didn’t see any positions requiring and preferring GIS skills until the last year. I know when I hunted in 2010 and partially in 2014, it was pretty rare where now it’s not. It’s also becoming a standard class in library schools.)
Where were we? The resume!  I updated the digital version and carried on to the site (I’ve also got one with redacted contact information available if you are in desire of downloading such things). As I’ve been talking about the classes I’m taking, new interests, and shifting and emphasizing on previous job duties, it seemed wise to make everything across the web and digital spheres cohesive. MY CV is now five pages long. (TheExHusband commented wasn’t that too long and I quipped making it two pages was nay impossible even if I cut it down to the bare bones. Oh. Youths.)

In addition to all of this, I recently took on a job of building a site for a friend with about 100 hours of projected work, give or take about 25 hours. The client and I thought it would be a simple knock up with a few pages here and there but as I interviewed her more on what she and her partner wanted, the more complex the site became. I’m close to the website owner’s husband, and they as a family have been wonderful to me, so I easily said yes about the job. The payment is going to be in chocolate (you’ve read that correctly) with half due now and half due on delivery.
I know a lot of you are grumbling that I’m possibly screwing myself by doing it for exposure BUT this will allow me to use current skills and learn new ones and while I have experience in knocking websites up it’s not something I do for a job but would like to (hence the Team Treehouse classes). If it were anyone else, I’d require minimal per hour free (by designer standards). I’m pretty comfortable with this arrangement. (To be fair, they have asked me to track hours so hopefully some cash may be coming down the pipeline in the future, even if it is a token amount.)

I know I’ve talked about professional development in the past and when I sat down to organize my education, I knew I was pushing myself too thin to do full stack (front and back end development) and GIS with taking on other areas of interest. I’m currently in the weeding process to not overextend myself but it’s hard when I genuinely have a lot of interests. What needs to happen is figure out a better cohesiveness of my career and those concentrations while using the secondary interests for pleasure. It has to be the right combination of in the now skills with enough cutting edge interests to make you seem forward thinking.

In the realm of forward thinking, the draft post I have on the future of libraries part ii will more than likely be broken out to individual posts for each topic. The first piece in the series with the summary of a few futurisms clocked in at nearly 2000 words and this piece, just an update on my life, is closing in on 1500 words. I’m verbose and if you read my personal blog, you know I do not take umbrage on being succinct.
I obviously have a lot to say.

Gratitudes: February 29 – March 7, 2016

epbab-header-gratitude
Dear Internet,
Gratitudes and things that make me happy are a part of my carding coursework, and I track them everyday and I’ll post them here every Sunday. (And I also acknowledge this is going to take me a few weeks to go beyond “I have killer hair.”)
gratitude

  1. Ms. Lizzie Locks for her amazing kindness towards me and Thursday the Pug (She sent Thursday toys and snacks from her dogs, Sophia and Stormy. The dog is going insane.)
  2. The internet, without whom I would not be the person I am today that is how important it is in my life
  3. TheExHusband for everything he has done and will do to keep me moving forward
  4. Potential employers who extend an interview request to me
  5. The pug simply because her silliness makes me smile
  6. Being biologically in excellent health
  7. For people who do not like me for it reminds me that standing by what I think is right and true is the sacrifice I am willing to make over pleasing everyone
  8. That we all want to love and be loved
  9. Friends whom I haven’t spoke to in months and we can pick up just where we left off
  10. I’ve said this numerous times across my site but it needs to be on the list — TheBassist for breaking up with me. It was perhaps the greatest gift he could have given me for it helped deter a terrible crash, deal with my issues, get the help I need, and make me a better person. Thank you.

happy

  1. Freshly washed hair
  2. Bubble baths
  3. Hot cup of tea
  4. Iced coffee
  5. New office supplies
  6. Sharpies
  7. Planning fantasy vacation
  8. Reading
  9. Writing
  10. My collection of fountain pens

xoxo,
Lisa

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2003

micacious

Dear Internet,
Housekeeping:

  • I’ve been keeping up with my Silly Pictures goal
  • I’ve meditated for 236 consecutive days
  • Wednesday 3/9 marks my 7th week of smoke freeness
  • I’m making some headway into my 50 Things project
  • I am still exercising, of some sort mainly yoga, a few times a week since November
  • Job application status (Start date: January 24, 2016)
    • Total: 25
      • Academia: 21
      • Public: 3
      • Other: 1
    • Rejections: 4
    • Interest: 2 3 (As I’m writing this, I got an offer to do a video interview. Hell fuck yeah.)

I’m keeping better stats on my job hunt, mainly for my own edification. As for the “interest” bit, the “other,” which was a corporate gig, called me on Friday and left a message to talk about the position in question. I returned the call and two days later, nothing. The other interest was from a public library system that wanted me to complete a civil service test which would last an hour. THEN if I passed the civil service test, I would get a call back for an interview, however, there is no known time from the test to the interview. It’s a 10 hour drive, one way, to the city so I had to politely decline.1
But hey! It’s keeping up with my above average of 1ish in 10 on interest/interviews to applications submitted.
(I have been expecting the deluge of rejections / interviews to start happening around this time. The jobs I applied for at the end of January / beginning of February, closed near the tail end of February so decisions are coming out now.)

I drew up a plan for what I’m going to do on a M-F schedule to keep up with all of my projects. Part of that plan was to write once a week over at the profesh site and in addition to the weekly gratitudes, write here twice a week. We see how well that’s going, but for once I am not beating myself up because things are not on a tight schedule, which is a huge difference from where I was even a few months ago.

Speaking of ThePlan, I had a breakthrough with my therapist this week. For the first time in four months, I sat down and said, “These are the issues I am having and these are the things I want to change.” I know you’re thinking, “Okay, Lisa, you’ve been seeing a therapist for that long of time and you’re just getting to the meat of your crazy?” Au contraire my friend, I’ve been spending the last four months pulling my ass out of the giant hole that exploded back in October. Couple that bullshit with jobs, family, lack of money, and other large topics of discussion, I haven’t had a time to really think about that kind of stuff or really how to fix me. I was more interested in putting out fires.
Along with job hunting process, being crazy is a full-time gig.
I broke down to my shrink about this plan, telling her I was sorting out what I needed to do on a weekly basis (work on TeamTreeHouse, job hunt, DBT, journaling to name a few) into daily chunks and she said, “Lisa. You do understand you’re spreading yourself thin, right?”
Honestly? I thought I wasn’t doing enough. That sounds a reasonable thought, doesn’t it? If you look at my newly planned calendar, I have, on average, six things assigned to each day. Two of them I approximated two to three hours each (and I was being generous). The other four? No idea on time. Just glancing at the remaining objectives, they could last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour each and that is not including time to yoga, meditate, eat, shower, and housekeeping duties that add-on the daily lists.
My argument to her is, “Look. I need to apply for jobs. I need to work on refreshing / learning new skills using TeamTreeHouse. I need to check my email on a regular basis and I need to keep up with my RSS feeds to keep abreast of library trends. I can not not do these things.” “Maybe something has to go?” “Okay, what?” “That’s for you to figure out and prioritize.”
(This is not a verbatim conversation but you get the general gist.)
When I came home from the session, I gave TheExHusband the tl;dr and he agreed with my shrink. “You’re spreading yourself too thin. You don’t have to do everything right this second and at the exact same time.”
I agree.
Obviously the job hunt is top of that list and it buttresses neatly with the day to day stuff mentioned above. That’s the given.  But as for the rest of it? I have no idea, right now, how to stagger it so I’m not overwhelmed. As I explained above, I don’t have TeamTreeHouse set for everyday, it’s for twice a week. Writing on my profesh blog is only once a week. Writing here is twice a week.
This type of balancing act is what’s been keeping me in my thoughts this week. I’ve been pretty motivated to keep pushing forward because I’ve now got a history of not giving up on projects. The exercise, the meditation, the quitting smoking, and the on going stuff for 50 Things. I am not as susceptible to starting projects and abandoning them as I once was. I’m not saying I’ve perfected the best balance for home / work, as that’s bullshit, but I have a better control on my life than a year ago.
I’ve always been a fighter, that pretty strongly evident through the course of my life, so it’s never been a big concern that I would not pick myself up by my Chucks. I’ve never thought I wouldn’t get out of here. I may have been pissed it was taking so long, but if anything this last 18 months has shown me, I can do this.
Where as before I would think myself as a loser or failure for not following ThePlan or the calendar or whatever I’ve concocted to a T, I get that I’m not perfect, life is not perfect, and if I want to be happy, I need to be fluid on many of my plans.
And if you read anything prior to the last six months on ThePlan, you know to be true.
So all in all, how I’m handling this makes me proud and gives me the hope I can get an even better grip on my life.

After that, “Go get’m girl!” speech, it seems a little spurious to switch gears, but that’s how I roll.
I’ve been pretty open I’ve been having bouts of depression these last few months or so. It’s different from the blow up in October (manic depression) where I was crying on the couch for hours on end, binge eating (skip breakfast, lunch, splurge on dinner or some variant), sporadically showering. No, this was subtle. Quieter. I wasn’t having suicidal feelings. I was able to do things that I needed to do without feeling much issues. I would feel, “Huh. It’s gray outside. I’m gray inside. Whatevs.” and continue on with my day.
It was super frustrating to know this was depression happening and I couldn’t meditate, yoga, or whatever my way out of it.
So when I saw my medicating shrink a few weeks ago, I gave him the above and told him I felt my depression was around 8 out of 10. He put me on Cymbalta, which is fast acting (takes a few days to kick in instead of a few weeks) and hoping this would be enough.
If you’ve been reading my site for a few years now, you know I’m super sensitive to drugs. I’ve had psychotic breaks on ADHD meds, suicidal thoughts on SSRIs, and a whole host of other problems. The currently bipolar cocktail (Lamtical (400mg) and Risperdone (not sure of the amount of but it’s the beginning dose)) works really, really well. The symptoms are in control and I am so fucking aware of my triggers it’s insane. (“You’re one of the most self-aware people I know!”) The anxiety is kept in check with Klonopin and Hydroxyzine, but depression, however, is a whole ‘nother ball of wax based on the aforementioned problems.
I won’t go into too much specifics but anti-depressant drugs fall into three classes: SSRIs, SNRIs, and Atypical. SSRIs are the ones most people know about (effexor, paxil, etc) and the ones that make me, honestly, psychotic. SNRIs is where Cymbalta lives and last week it showed that after metabolizing it for a few days, I felt awesome (3 out of 10) for a few days, and then the rage hit so hard, I would have beaten up the couch if given a chance. Atypicals, where Latuda and Wellbutrin live, are pretty much my last shots. I was on Wellbutrin ages and ages ago and I don’t remember how I reacted to it, but then again, I was on a whole different bipolar cocktail. Latuda, I’ve never been on.
So to finally put this to some kind of ending, the doc put me on Wellbutrin, which I started today, and I should see some kind of result in a few weeks. (And hopefully not in some kind of psychotic rage. 😀 )
Viva la crazy drugs!
xoxo,
Lisa

1. My clearly out of state address was on the app and the follow up email. I half expected they would reject me based on that information. But nope. Go figure.

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2013, 2004, 2003, 2001