on committees

tweet saying "I'm a librarian and I'm not currently on any committees. AMA."

This Pandamnit holding pattern can seem a little like a time loop some days so I guess I wasn’t surprised that it’s September. I just had a very nice birthday (as good as could be expected) and am circling back to a list I was going to make one of these days, when that was maybe a month ago. I looked at this tweet that Tasha made and thought HOW. And the answer is “Hey that is someone with better boundaries than me, maybe.” Because it’s a challenge, right? I am a little underemployed. I am a helper-type person. There is always work to be done. I can do some of it. But, as I learned maybe in March, if you’re giving fractional time to a ton of little organizations, when things get tough and you’re asked to give a little more, that can quickly snowball.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere (thought it was here but it was not) about the Discardia model, of trying to only have 5-6 “buckets” of stuff in your life. For many people work and family are two of those buckets and then you can have one for hobbies, one for civics, whatever. I go back and forth between feeling like I have too many and then too few. So, I decided to make a list of “buckets” that aren’t my usual work and family buckets.

  • VT Humanities Council Finance Committee (I am good with numbers)
  • VT Humanities Council Membership and Governance Committee (helping get a more diverse board)
  • VT Humanities Council Technology and Access Committee (who better than me?)
  • 251 Club Board (obvs.)
  • Vermont Library Association Technology Person (a natural fit!)
  • Vermont Library Association Diversity and Inclusion Committee (of course)
  • VT State Library Committee on Mailing List Etiquette (don’t laugh!)
  • VT Mutual Aid Society Qualifying Authority for Print Disabled Access at the Internet Archive (helpful!)
  • American Library Association VT Chapter Councilor (someone had to)
  • Town of Randolph Conservation Commission (I do the website)
  • Town of Randolph Board of Civil Authority (comes with my JP role)
  • Town of Randolph Board of Abatement (likewise)
  • Learned League Official Rules Committee
  • Learned League Official Rules Committee Leadership
  • Learned League League Naming Committee (for choosing new League names)
  • Wikipedia Library resource application approver

Most of these are pretty low-engagement commitments. A meeting a a month, maybe some homework in-between. Some of them are more busy generally–the Archive work is a mini-job–and some get busy at certain times. During election times, there’s at least one whole day of poll work and a few meetings. And right before Humanities Council board meetings all the committees try to meet and touch base. I’m pretty sensitive to “This meeting could have been an email” situations and I’m lucky not to get into them too often.

All this is to say, I haven’t felt isolated, even as my in-person contacts are few and far between (and masked and distanced). At the same time, I just now finally sewed those three buttons back on my duvet cover, a project I’d been meaning to work on since March (Three buttons! It took 15 minutes!). So part of my “prepping for the colder months” is going to be trying to carve out some time for the Keep Jessamyn’s Nonsense Running Smoothly Committee and the Think about Vacuuming Once in a While Committee and the Make More Food From Scratch Working Group. Which nominally means I should probably pick a few other things to remove from that list. But let’s be honest, I probably won’t. Happy Fake Labor Day, dont’ work too hard.

summering

It’s been very nice to have a summer that isn’t mostly spent managing my and other people’s grief (with exceptions for the untimely demises of Boo Radley and Fred November) or my and other people’s broken ankles. I feel like I went at this summer with an aggressive zeal that is really not my usual tack but has been working out okay. As I wrote earlier, I did a lot of hiking. Now I’m a little worn out by hiking and have been doing a bunch of socializing. At some point in the past five years I have been slowly shifting from being more extroverted (I get energized by being with people, I get ootchy when I am alone) to introverted (I lose energy by being with people, I recharge batteries by being alone). This is probably a side effect of having an internet job and a steady boyfriend but also of just getting older. Time speeds up, I have more things on my own that I want to do and the places that I want to do them are not on anyone else’s beaten path (see also: hiking). But in any case, there’s been a lot going on.

– My friends from college are now at the point where their kids are old enough to happily travel. My dad’s place is sort of the perfect destination resort for the under-12 set, so we had a great weekend having a cookout, playing kid-bocce and making the best use of the giant beanbag imaginable. Two photos of the crew are on Flickr (1,2). The bulletin board here is covered with kid drawings and the patio is covered with cryptic chalk scribbles (is that a bat? a spider? a spiderbat?).
– My friend from high school (has it been 28 years? wowie!) and her wife were up in Vermont for their annual lake trip and I got to hang out and play robots with their son, toss tennis balls with the pup and learn all about bread ears. Our quiet evening together was interrupted by a badly sprained wrist (not mine!) so I got to hang out with Mr. 9 while everyone else took a trip to the emergency room.
– My sister and I decided to play Grown Up Ladies and we bought a couch together to put at Dad’s place and I finally got to go to Jordan’s Furniture after a lifetime of hearing their radio and TV ads.
– I performed my first wedding, for Rich Fairbanks and Rachel Westbrook. It went totally well. When I was a little kid one of the first non-family non-parents-of-friends couples I knew was the couple that lived next door in our two-family house: Rich and Rachel. When Rachel told me she’d met a guy she liked and told me his name, I had a good feeling about it. I included a photo and the service on my Vermont JP blog. If anyone wants to get married in Vermont and needs an officiant, I’ve got two and a half more years before I need to run for re-election and I think now I know what I’m doing.

Upcoming excitement includes a trip to Nebraska (shut up!) to talk to librarians about technology and then some friends visiting from far away (North Carolina via Maine) and then the usual People Up For Labor Day. If you’re reading this and you’re in the South Coast area and you’d like to have a hot dog with me, drop me a note (email preferred) and I can send details. I hope to do one more update before the Virgo Month of Leisure, but if the past few months are any indicator, I may be a bit busy.

Oh and a note about this image. I came back from a walk with Jim to find this little set of drawers and five wine glasses on my steps. I thought it was maybe from Rachel but it turns out it was from my landlady Ronni who has been deaccessioning some things. She tossed in this wonderful gigantic dictionary, remembering just where she got it on the Lower East Side some 40-50 years ago. I’m not sure where I’ll put it, but I just love the way it looks.