Six months and . . .

Forecast: COLD, getting COLDER

My dear Seneca LIT hopefuls (and fellow grads),

How’s grades? Gettin’ those As you thought you would? (I already know how “things” are, so let’s skip to what matters: passing or pack’n your bags).

Actually, what really matters, the only reason to jump through those hoops: getting a job.

To that end, updating my previous post, here’s the short hairs:

• Almost six months, 28 30 33 applications later, not a single interview. Not one.
• I await confirmation on a request to postpone the start of my student loan payments. Confirmed. Payments postponed until April 30, 2010.
• I may have found seasonal work at the LCBO.

The two responses I did receive: One from a university where twenty “qualified applicants” were considered (I’m on file). The other from an arts centre where 88 hopefuls applied for one position, “library clerk” (i.e. degree not required). I later found out the position lacked funding.* So, 88 hopefuls applied for a non-existent post.**

Daunting times. I’m studying French to increase my profile – i.e. government work/work, period.

As previously noted, most (well over 90%) of current job postings require a MLS/MLIS. (Two graduates I know of started at UT this fall. Smart, costly, necessary if you’re serious about work in the field. Masters is the new bachelors.)

As for library technicians: over 95% of these REQUIRE 2-5 years minimum previous library work experience, emphasis given to automated systems. (Field placements, while a nice reprieve from the chicanery and toils at Newnham, and the most valuable/instructive part of the program, simply don’t add up.) There were only two overnight staffing jobs (in Scarborough) that I recall without some such minimum requirement. These appeared to be “entry level,” not requiring a technician’s diploma.

As a cherished mentor of mine use to say, “What you’re telling us is that we’re screwed… I’ll take mine lying down, thank you.”

Meanwhile, undaunted, knowing I’ve got “the goods,” I’ll keep pounding the pavement along with a plethora of earnest, job-seeking colleagues. Believe me, you’ll be the first to know (after my mom, of course).

Photo: seneca college, newnham campus, originally uploaded by -August-.

_____

*This cut in funding is, sadly, short-sightedly, rampant in our field. Another colleague was contracted for a year, only to suffer job loss in cut backs, but a few months into it. My final field placement, the department I was assigned to had suddenly been handed its notice (after 17 years of service) closing shop the two weeks I was there. And while everything, entire collections, are indeed going automated (which you would think might favour technicians) we’re not there yet. Besides, Seneca is hardly the bastion of the new (are you still using Access, Dialog, and Microsoft Office ‘03?).

**Recently, a new posting went up for a short (3-month) contract version of the same job, reduced to part-time at lesser pay (I guess the added work proved taxing).

It Changes You: Seneca in Ten Takes

Take 1

“Next Stop Seneca Hill Drive, Seneca College.”

The first four weeks we the students petition

regarding an instructor who is incapable

of holding class. She passes out the Quill & Quire :

“Here, see if you can learn something.”

Week five (of seven), she is, indeed, fired.

“We’re sorry,” says the department head.

(To think we thought at the time,

we’d seen the worst of it).



Take 2

We are required to take an online course in computer skills.

Word. Powerpoint. Excel. (Something else? I forget.)

During other classes held in computer labs,

most are either on Facebook or playing online “bingo”

that is, running through time and time again

the practice tests to recognise what clicks reward you

with the desired green box, “Correct”. Repeat this

ad nauseam and you’re likely to get the 70%

necessary to “pass”.

Excel? Haven’t a clue. But I’m great at bingo.

Take 3

“You need to go to school for that?”

I’m in a “library and information technician” program

in the School of Business. Long, largely unused term for

all the grunt work, little/no recognition, half the salary.

“What’ya wanna be called?”

(Yes, example of a real question

posed and not responded to in yet another dumbstruck,

mind-numbing, painfully senseless hour).

Stupid, signing up for the wrong

lousy waste of fucking time and money program

(and stay—ing).

Take 4

a) There are three signs (ads) that predominate the halls at Seneca (particularly the Men’s rooms) other than the SenecaRED that screams EVERYWHERE you look in an obvious attempt to distract one from their actual bleeding. One encourages you to find work where nobody would ever consider or want to go (Edmonton). Another advertises careers in the Canadian Armed Forces (if you’re dire enough be standing at a urinal at Seneca, why not join the Forces?), and, my favourite, signage reminding and instructing individuals how to wash their hands (in case you’ve forgotten just where you are at the moment—epidemic at Seneca).

b) I received more encouragement and instruction/feedback in any single given minute at my field placements than in my entire year/course at Seneca. (If not for these positive experiences off-campus, I would’ve been long gone. They were such a reprieve and “reality check” from Seneca Hill Drive).

Take 5

Cataloguing. Something relatively simple made extremely difficult.

Why so hard? Because cataloguing should not be taught by a cataloguer.

Cataloguers should never leave their cataloguing cubicles. Cataloguers

are apparently dumbfounded by cataloguing and therefore not the best

explainers of what there is to actually do, be done.

One thing I do know for certain:

A cataloguer must have the material in hand in order to catalogue it properly.

How many times did we as students hold/have the actual item “in hand”?

Zero.

(wtf?)

Take 6

Bozenna is a godsend.

We’re coming up with terms for our search strategy

regarding children who are “gifted”.

“We used to be called special,” I offered.

“O, darling, you still are special,” she smiles.

I owe that woman a bottle of good Polish vodka.

(p.s. Nobody uses Dialog anymore. p.s.s. Delia “gets it”, too.)

Take 7

Are we here to learn? Or

are we here just to be tested?

“It’s almost over…”

“You’ll get through.”

Getting through.

That’s all that matters.

Twenty (overwrought, silly-ass) exams.

Sink or swim.

That’s all.

That’s all anyone is here to do.

( “Let’s check-out the bookstore and see if Aaron’s working.”)

8

MomthisistheworstfuckingmistakeIhaveevermadeinmy

entirefuckinglifeIcan’tevenbegintotellyoujusthow

fuckingbadthisisitmayfuckingkillmenoI’mnotexaggera-

tingthismayjustfuckingkillmesoifIdiebeforeitsthroughlet

everybodyknow “She died trying.”

9

The cost of the book for Ibby’s class is $130 (wtf?!).*

“I can’t imagine you getting through the class

without buying the book. They’ll be a [multiple guess] quiz

on the readings every Wednesday which

will count for 15% (?) of your grade. Are there

any questions?”

“Do you have any questions about the [fuck-all] assignment/s?”

“Any questions?”

Yeah, why the fuck did you choose this inexcusably expensive textbook

other than the fact that it comes with an instructional CD-rom with

already prepared lesson plans?

I, and everyone I know, passed

without purchasing the book.

Ten

“Seneca changes you.”

Yep.

I am not a better person

for ever having stepped off the TTC

at Seneca Hill Drive,

for having ”gotten through.”

I will never be a proud alumni,

nor will I ever credit them

with any promising future

I will undoubtedly carve.

As one instructor,

so eloquently admonished

in a huff,

“Why do I bother?”

or to echo

one of the most famous

lines in movie history—

“Forget it Jake,

it’s Seneca.”

_____

Note: Only two colleagues I know of got hired since graduation:
one whose mom is also a library technician (this is not how/why
she got the job, and I’m sure it didn’t hurt her odds),
the other where she has already worked for the past eight years.

(I understand a few have taken jobs as pages, but you don’t
need to attend college or university to fill these positions).

Over 90% of the current job postings in the field require an
MLIS or it’s equivalent.

Don’t make my sorry-ass mistake. Fuck Seneca. Become a librarian. Go for your masters. There’s a one-year Master’s Degree program (much cheaper than UT) here.

_____

*Note: This was not a book on librarianship, nor did it make any reference to actual library work (the class hardly did itself). It was a textbook (on reserve in the library) on supervisory skills in the workplace, for which very few in the class expressed any interest/desire to pursue. A 14-week class which could have been taught more effectively as a half-day workshop (same goes for well over half of the other courses).

Suffice it to say there are many like stories with details far, far worse than the ones selected here. Some will say “he didn’t follow instructions”; others, that I was the “brightest light in the program.” Guilty, on both counts. I’ve always said, “If it’s void of humour, make another choice.” And this place, this poured concrete embankment excuse for a suitable educational environment (which considers itself five “buildings” when it is really only one butt-ugly-god-awful fortress smack in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere)—though a god damn laugh riot—is utterly humourless.

Photo: Cover of a book I received as a gift from one of my placements, something I esteem far greater than any piece of paper earned at Seneca. To my peers and classmates, we carried each to the other side—a deservedly brighter future to all. Thank you.

Simply put.

Beautiful boy.

thx Don.

Where is your Self to be found?

Always in the deepest enchantment
that you have experienced.

-Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Why are we together?

In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne attempted to understand the reasons that move us to be together, whether we be frighteningly different or attractively similar. In the Municipal Library of Bordeaux is a copy of Montaigne’s Essays annotated in his hand, with corrections for the printer, which Montaigne kept by his bedside to revise it at his leisure. In the first book, in Essay 28, he had written about his relationship with Etienne de la Boetie, a dear friend who had died in 1563 at the age of thirty-three, and whose loss Montaigne had felt so deeply. “In the friendship of which I’m speaking,” Montaigne says, “souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.” According to Montaigne, in this kind of relationship the separation between “I” and “the other” is not denied: each preserves intact his individuality and uniqueness; only that the “seam” that unites them, and which is consequently what divides one human being from the other, “cannot be found” in the eyes of the observer: it remains undetected and therefore unlabelled, free from the possibility of prejudice. This distinct invisibility, this evident but indefinable “separateness” that links two individuals in affectionate concern for one another, is what a fluid, multifaceted may strive for, not only between two but between all of its members. Before jumping to the conclusion that such relationships are impossible on so large a scale, let us ask: in what does it consist, exactly, this as-if seamless relationship? Montaigne confesses that he finds it impossible to give an answer: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed.” This is how the paragraph ends in the text of all editions of the Essays, up to 1588. But then, in 1592, shortly before his death, Montaigne found a sort of an answer and scribbled it on the right hand margin of the printed book. After “it cannot be expressed,” he wrote in his elegant script, “except by replying, because it was him.” That is to say, because of those qualities that identified his friend and yet remained ineffable, because of what lent him existence not because of their perceived difference but because of his intrinsic qualities. And then, a few days or months later, as if the full notion had suddenly been revealed to him, Montaigne added five more words in a hurried hand and in a different ink, so that today we can read the whole sentence as one single thought, luminous in its wisdom: “If you pressed me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed, except by replying, because it was him and because it was me.”

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words

I want the above read at my funeral.

The Two Merrys

Me & Joseph