An update from my last post to begin:
First, I did not get that job I mentioned I'd applied for toward the end. I did apparently do well enough to get an in-person interview and for them to ask me to consent to a background check, but it was just another case of "close but nothing," and as we know, close doesn't count for anything. All nothings are equal, no matter how close to something that nothing was.
But the "good news" is that I actually do have a section of my usual job to teach after all; a section got added three days before the start of the semester, so I got it. It's not going well for various reasons that I suppose would be tangential to get into, so I won't.
What I will get into is another reason I said "good news" in quotation marks above: namely, the fact that this job is no longer a sustainable option for me.
Now that they got rid of one of the two courses I'm qualified to teach, I can no longer count on this job to keep me in the black. Time was that I could usually count on two sections per semester, and now I'm lucky if I get one. Getting one is by no means guaranteed at all, and even if I were lucky enough to get just one per semester, that does not keep me in the black if I want any kind of entertainment budget.
I still have enough savings that I can keep this rate of pay up for quite a while, but I really don't want to see myself hemorrhaging all the safety net money I've worked so long to shore up.
So this brings me back to that age old question I've been asking myself ever since I began this blog in 2012: when do I finally stop throwing good years after bad, accept that it's time to walk away, and find some crap low-pay job that at least pays better than the job in my field I have now so I can join the ranks of the working poor where I clearly belong, according to the library profession that will not have me?
If I were smart, clearly I would have done this years ago. But here's the thing.
I'm going to take you back to a time long ago, when I was in high school. I don't like going back to this time, so I will try not to stay long. But here's a story that relates to the problem I have today.
In high school, I had a friend. I know, I'm surprised too. Let's keep going. I'd walk home from school with this friend every day. I was about a 12 minute walk from home, and for him tack on another minute or so.
This friend started dating someone. So it goes. One day he told me he'd be out soon, that I could wait for him. He was going to make out with this person in the cafeteria, where people cooler than me often hung out at the end of the day. I didn't understand why the cool kids wanted to hang out at school of all places when the day was done, but whatever.
So I'm sitting at my locker, non-existent butt aching from the hard tile floor, staring at the very ugly wall in front of me. For 15 minutes. 20. 30. 45. An hour. Longer.
I don't remember how long I ended up waiting, but it was long enough for me to be justifiably mad. He never came out to tell me, "just go on without me," because he figured that after 10 minutes I'd have figured that out for myself.
The problem wasn't that I was "too stupid" to figure out myself that I should just walk the 12 minutes home alone, like that's a big deal. The problem was that I was always afraid that if I left, it could be literally three seconds after I walked away that he might have come back out of the cafeteria. And every second longer I stayed, the more likely it was that the next second would finally be the one. It wasn't that staying was the "smart" move, it was just the fear that, after having invested so much time into waiting, I could be throwing that away when just one more second might have made all of that waiting, while a waste, at least not a complete waste. At least all of the time I'd spent staring at the wall wouldn't be for nothing.
That's where I am now. I'm 34. I've lost. I'm too old to accomplish the non-career goals I had in life (which were more important that my career goals to me). It's over. My life is ruined because of all of this waiting for my MLIS to pay off so I could finally pursue those goals. At this point I should probably just cut my losses, join the working poor, and while away the end of my life because there's fuck else for me to do.
Yet here I sit staring at an ugly wall, because if I walk away now, I'll never know if waiting just one more month would have finally made all of these years something less than a complete waste.
