…but today I must echo her in singing, “I’m the happiest girl in the whole USA.”

That’s because today was my last day at my job. I’ve been bitching and venting about how belittling and soul-destroying and just plain damaging my job was for years now—heck, practically since I started there—but I don’t think I really knew just how bad the job was for me until I walked out of there for the last time today. Driving home, I felt literally like a different person: a person with hope, energy, enthusiasm. (Despite my inescapable optimism, these are not feelings that I’m accustomed to even in good times, because of my ever-present depression—even when it’s at a very low level as it is now, it’s always with me, and energy in particular is something I very rarely feel.) It was as though I had had a makeover and been to a spa and gotten a decade’s worth of birthday presents all in one day. More than anything,what was gone was a pervasive sense of dread that I’m not even sure I was aware of before.

And now that there’s no more jinxing that can be done—at least I hope not!—I can talk a little bit about the new job. (Not too much, because I am the very soul of discretion and I don’t like revealing too many personal details anyway, even though the people who read this blog are all friends of mine as far as I know.) In brief, I’ll be an “experience architect” at an advertising/marketing/branding agency; in my particular case, the work I’ll be doing will be on the information architecture side of things, with a lot of specialization in my favorite parts of IA: what the experts call “little IA,” which is the library-science-based stuff such as taxonomy and metadata creation.

This is exactly what I went to grad school to do, and to get to do it for a successful company fresh out of grad school (or not even—I’ve still got a few weeks to go) is an opportunity that I couldn’t even have dreamed of. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged, especially because I’m already crazy about my boss, and I’ll be working with a former co-worker who’s a great person and a friend (and was instrumental in my getting the job—I’ll be buying her lunch every day for, I dunno, ten years or so), and though I’ve heard stories about super long weeks and crazy schedules, I like everything I’ve heard and observed about the company so far. The benefits are great, the salary is fine, and I never object to working hard and putting in long hours when I’m doing work that interests and challenges me. It’s an incredible opportunity, and I can’t wait to get started (although I wish I’d been able to take a few days off between jobs, but somehow I never seem to get to do that, and it’s really no big deal).

A funny thing happened to me while I was in school: I fell in love with cataloging, somewhat but not entirely to my surprise. It appeals to the same part of my brain that doing crossword puzzles and learning foreign languages do, and those are two of my few genuine talents. I had begun to think seriously about pursuing a job as a cataloger in a public library (an academic library would have been okay too, but I’m a huge fan of public libraries and would have preferred to work in that atmosphere than in the ivy tower), and there’s a tiny little part of me that’s disappointed that I won’t be going in that direction after all. But cataloging is a threatened profession—not by any means a dying one, but one that’s threatened by the ignorance of library administrators and local governments who think that now that we have Google, we don’t need library cataloging anymore. (Don’t even get me started…) And IA is in many ways like cataloging: both are related to the organization of information, which turns out to be my true passion in life. I’m a naturally disorganized person, at least in the visible ways—my house is a mess, I’m drowning in clutter, and some days it’s all I can do to remember where my head is. (It’s that big redheaded blob attached to my shoulders, I think.) But that doesn’t mean I have a disorganized mind, I guess, and for whatever reasons, I love making order out of chaos. So I think my new line of work will suit me well. It will be the first time since 1988 that editing and writing won’t be major parts of my job description, which will be weird, but in a good way.

And with that, I’m officially putting the blog on hiatus for a few weeks, while I attempt to finish my classes and graduate. I might sneak in an entry here or there, but it’s been unofficially on hiatus during the insanity of the last few weeks (illness, schoolwork, and doing almost the equivalent of two full-time jobs because I was consulting for my new employer), and now I’m making it official. I’ll be back in May—master’s degree in hand, I hope.