running behind the crowd

catching up, catch up, ketchup, caught up

I left my meeting, down on the waterfront. It didn’t last quite as long as I thought it would, and there was no point in going back to campus so late in the day. I should go home, and catch up on emails. I should write my lists and send my messages that I promised to send. Read the items I promised to read, write the documents I promised to write.

There is always something I promised to do and something I haven’t done yet.

Instead, I turned the opposite direction from the bus stop and steered myself along the boardwalk on the waterfront. It’s change significantly since I lived here the last time, and I’m a bit perturbed to realize the new buildings lie exactly where my favourite spot was, the summer I worked in Duke Tower. I would come down to the waterfront, get a hot dog from the cart, and sit at one of the tables, open for the public to do whatever they liked. This spot is now full of private businesses, and I grieve.

There’s a joke in there somewhere, about how there are two locations of Cows Ice Cream about 400m apart on the Halifax waterfront.

I go to the “new” Cable Wharf one - it used to be a gift shop and place where you could buy tickets for Theodore Tugboat. It has been transformed into an ice cream palace, with rows of Cows merch. Foolishly, I have chosen to come here on a hot afternoon and the place is full of tourists. My memory of tourists is smaller-scale; I was in Miramichi for so long, and my recent Haligonian memories are trapped in COVID time.

Patiently, I wait. I get my single scoop - Cows serves all ice cream in a waffle cone by default. I happily eat it as I trail down a bit further, dodging people taking pictures and trying not to look too purposeful in my walking, lest a tourist ask me for directions. I used to come down here to be swept up in the anonymity of the city, ten years ago. Now, I feel faintly disappointed.

My ice cream is delicious, though, and I walk back up the hill to Granville Street, where the temporary Bay 1 of Scotia Square is. I could walk home, but it’s uphill from here and it’s 81% humidity and feels like 36°C out. I have an unlimited bus pass, I’ll wait in the shade for the next of half-a-dozen buses that will get me home.

As I crunch the last of my ice cream cone, I think about how I did end up catching up on things (more ice cream eating, wandering the city, trysting with my memories), just not the things I had listed.

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When I moved to Miramichi, it was the first time I realized that I didn’t really use ketchup. I bought ketchup for my fridge, but it sat, unused, for months.

I mostly used ketchup to cover the flavours of things I didn’t like. In a house for one, there’s no need to eat food you don’t like. So I never needed to mask any flavours.

I used ketchup in barbeque sauce sometimes. And when I had hot dogs. I’ve never been much of a sauce girl, it turns out.

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There are only two times you will ever feel caught up with your email: when you start a job and when you finish a job. Are all jobs email? My dad, who retired in 2022, had one of those elusive jobs that didn’t involve email, and in fact declined a company email. He could do that because of the nature of his work. I’m trapped in an abusive relationship with email, like so many of us. My inbox fills with questions and requests. Meeting invites. Earnest appeals. Webinar recordings I won’t watch.

When I quit my last job, I felt relief because it meant there was going to be an ending with that email address. I was going to leave it permanently, and it would be shut down by my former employer. What did I need to do about the piles of emails, waiting for me? Not much. I handed some things off, sent a few more to say I was leaving forever, bye, and then I confidently walked out the door on my last day, never to log in again.

I also created my new email for work around that time. It remained pristine and empty for a bit - before I started forwarding emails to myself. I ruined my peace.

I also didn’t actually leave my old email behind, I took large chunks of it with me, every email I was going to need that referred to things I was still going to be doing. There’s a second ghost email in my Outlook, the remnants of this old one which doesn’t exist anymore except in a set of folders I refer to a couple times a week.

There are 75 emails in my inbox right now. In the eight months I’ve been here, I’ve sent nearly 1600 emails. I had sent somewhere in the realm of more than 16 000 in my old job (I don’t have a solid number because I used to have to regularly clean out my email due to our abysmally tiny storage limit of 280MB. In 2015). Someday these 75 emails will be dealt with. 75 new ones will take their place. I could file them now, since I’m a fastidious email organizer - things must go! - but I can’t, I need them.

I don’t remember the slow drip of becoming an email person, but I think it was sometime during undergrad.

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One of the more puzzling parts of my life right now is being a new academic librarian, but not a new librarian. I am mid-career now, but new to a system which ostensibly allows these jumps but not in practice. In practice, you arrive as a new grad on contract and later become permanent, or with but a couple years of experience, then you advance the ranks. I showed up on the third rank of a four level scale. I have one promotion to do and then I’m done. The university librarian told me that she has to remember I don’t need as much, or in fact need very different things from her than my fellow newbie librarians to the institution, because I arrived already formed as a librarian.

The things I need are less career-oriented and more about the unspoken rules I was free to ignore as adjunct faculty, one of the hats I wore in my last position. I’m navigating the strangeness of academia as someone who went away and came back later, dragging the weight of baggage of my experiences. I don’t need all the publications and the committees because I already have them. I do need the guidance through a maze of rules I don’t understand.

I wonder if I’ll ever begin to think these things are normal. Likely no, but someday I’ll be able to navigate them by myself. As a tenured librarian IV, probably, I’ll still be stumbling through like a newer librarian. I think I’m fine with that.