Decisions, decisions (or, Thoughts on Enumerating Embryonic Poultry.)

Despite the upcoming interview with "Westover College", I find myself intrigued by a few of the library positions I've seen advertised recently. One is at my undergraduate alma mater "Thee University". It would be interesting, I suppose, to return to the scene of my inglorious undergraduate days from the other side of the Great Divide between faculty and students, like some kind of academic Ouroboros chomping into its own hinder parts. I would already have a degree of background knowledge of the area, the local history, and the university that other candidates might take years to acquire, and I would be relatively close to friends and family whom I haven't seen in a long while. On the other hand, I found Thee University's spoken and unspoken rules to be vaguely irritating as an undergraduate, and I'm not sure how wise it would be to take a position where I would be continually surrounded by the kind of conformist-conservatives who I recall as being prevalent there. (As opposed to other kinds of conservatives, who might be quite interesting.)

Another advertised position is at a place I'll call the "University of Midwestia at Oldburg", an engineering-intensive state university located in a very rural area where my father attended yea these many years ago. It's in a pretty part of the country, and its special collections include some of the archives of one of my favorite railroads, with two or three comparably excellent archives on similar subjects located within a half-days' drive. The presence of many, many relatives in the area could be good or bad, though, and my father's recollection of the place is that it had little use for the humanities or social sciences

News flash!

As I was composing this entry, I got a call from a small downstate public library where I had applied, on a whim, for the directorship. Guess I'll be interviewing there later this month, although I find it difficult to believe that I'll be taken terribly seriously, having no managerial experience and a demeanor that a small-town library board might find unusual. But heck, if they're willing to pay for the gas, why not?