cygnoir.net

I had this idea during dinner that I would get out my laptop and write something about the Big News, but I don’t know exactly what to say. Forgive my befuddled rambling.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard, I was one of the 15,000 City and County of San Francisco employees to receive a pink slip on Friday. Only I was on vacation and, in an effort to unplug, had not checked work email or RSS feeds all week. We returned home late Friday night, and my pink slip arrived in the mail on Saturday.

To say that I was shocked in that moment … well, I was shocked, but I was also a mess of other emotions. I opened the envelope, expecting a direct deposit slip, and received something very different. (It wasn’t pink at all, if you’re curious.) Because I hadn’t read the news, I thought I was one of a small number of layoffs — you see, I still believed all the “no, there won’t be layoffs” so heartily bandied about before this whole thing. Silly, naïve me.

FunkyPlaid and I sat in my study for a while, awash in disbelief and anger and who knows what else. Then I thought to call the library, and I asked a colleague what was going on. She informed me that she, too, had been laid off, that we all had been, library-wide, and then she related the 15,000 number, which blew my mind. I thought it couldn’t possibly be legal, but of course there are loopholes for any behavior.

I know I am hardly unique in this experience, especially now while our country suffers such economic turmoil. Last year, the union had dealt with the budget shortfall by arranging furlough days in order to stave off layoffs, so I know what it means to make sacrifices so that everyone can keep their jobs. But here we are, and with such a vague promise of rehiring at a shorter work-week, combined with my lack of seniority in the system … well, it looks bleak for me, if not during this round of layoffs then during the inevitable next.

This is hardly personal, but its personal impact is massive. My job is a complex and troubling one, but one I have grown to love with a fierce heart. I had so hoped we — and here I use “we” despite feeling cast aside by this city — would find a way to work together to provide our services to the public without losing anyone. Sometimes that is impossible, I am now told.

I hate that word “impossible”.

My gratitude for your compassion and your patience cannot fully be expressed by a mere “thank you” but I will still say it. I fully realize how despised civil servants are — I regularly hear comments to this effect — and yet you have only shown me kindness. Thank you. No matter what the outcome, I am humbled by your friendship.

The best stories in my life right now are the ones I cannot tell.

Working at the library provides me with many things. A steady paycheck is one, and let’s hope I am not jinxing anything by stating that, as the city budget right now is highly contested territory.

Another thing the library provides me with is a plethora of life lessons. Sometimes these life lessons are neatly packaged within a patron interaction or two, and sometimes they are spread out over a series of days, weeks, or months.

I met someone last week who changed my life, and I can’t even tell you any of the specifics. To say I am frustrated by this boundary is an understatement, but I love my job more than I love writing here, so this is the decision I make.

What I can tell you is that I helped this patron who needed some unconventional help. As we parted, a rush of clarity came over me, sudden dizziness forcing me to sit down. This is what I was meant to do, not specifically within the context of a library, but in the general sense: I was meant to help people, directly, without levels of abstraction. My fascination with sifting and categorizing information led me to library science, but it might have been another field, had I differing interests, and no less fulfilling.

The second part of my epiphany was how dangerous this purpose has been for me, how much damage it can do and has already done. I associate helping people with who I am instead of what I do, and when I am not immediately being “useful” I lose my sense of self. This is evidenced by some of what I write here: I am less and less able to express myself in this format, hyper-focused as I am on bringing interesting or valuable content with every piece I write, as if this has ever been anything more than a digital diary.

Leaving work that evening, I skipped my usual route in order to take the main staircase. As I descended, I tried to visualize myself apart from the library, the building itself, focusing on where it stops and where I begin. My rumination was interrupted by a coworker calling my name, waving goodbye, and I was glad for the interruption because of the truth stepping out of the shadows.

I have lost myself, and I do not know where to look.

Last night the moon slipped slate-blue behind silver clouds, and although I could see it from the overstuffed leather recliner I did not fumble for a camera. I watched it, and it looked full, though my astigmatism makes me a poor judge of such things.

Past midnight, sometime over the weekend, we were sitting with snacks, twin bowls of cereal, savoring the wee hours with no early alarm the next morning. Just outside our bedroom, my cat walked past his cat very, very slowly, and then carefully put her paw out to touch the very tip of his cat’s tail. We lost it; my mouth happened to be full of cereal.  I wanted to take a photo of the moment I started thinking of my cat and his cat as our cats, but instead I cleaned the cereal off my face.

Someone in the library today learned how to scan a photograph and email it to himself so he could upload it to the Web.  As he thanked me for the third time, I wished for a meta-photo moment, something I could carry with me to remind me that although the objects of learning may be different, intellectual curiosity still exists. Where it exists, hope creeps in around the edges.

Right before closing yesterday, I helped a patron and the series of answers we found had led to a pretty interesting discussion on race and socio-economics in San Francisco. I mentioned that this topic was particularly interesting to me because my father is a sociology professor, but I didn’t think that the patron even heard me because he was pretty far deep into his own rant.

A few minutes later, he suddenly busts out with, “So why didn’t you decide to get a real job like your father? Too hard?”

It was so blatant that I thought it was a joke, so I laughed. My laughing slowly tapered off as I realized that he was completely serious. We stared at each other for a few moments, because I truly had no idea what to say that wouldn’t cost me my job.

Before yesterday, no one had ever called librarianship unimportant to my face.  Sure, I’ve overheard people making fun of librarians, and I’ve read plenty of SF hipster criticism on the Main, but in the twelve years since I’ve first held a library job, no one has ever told me that it wasn’t real.

He went on to assert that he understood that women weren’t up to challenging occupations like men were, so he understood why I hadn’t followed my father’s footsteps, or “become a lawyer or a social worker, something that makes a difference”.  He filled in his own sexist blanks for me, and left.

What galls me about the whole situation is that this patron is a regular who often takes up my time on the reference desks to ask me questions that I then duly research for him without complaint or editorializing. Even when he, on occasion, veers off into his political diatribes, I try to listen and sort out his questions from pure vitriol.  In my six months at the Main, I have helped him at least twenty times.

And yet what I do isn’t real, isn’t important, isn’t making a difference?

I can’t even bring myself to address the sexism angle here.  This coming from a San Franciscan who touts himself as “educated and refined” in the year 2008: “Women tend to avoid difficult careers because they just aren’t as good at handling confrontation and aggression as men are.”

Plenty of people think that librarians sit around and read books all day. If you are reading this, you probably know that that stereotype is complete fiction, no pun intended. You also probably know that I deal with confrontation and aggression every single day I am at work, and no, I don’t mean in meetings. You may not know that I do this because I love it, because I believe in it, and because I am fighting for a part of our culture that is sagging under the weight of apathy.  Anyone who doesn’t think that is a real job is plain wrong.

— Halsted M. Bernard

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)