Kirsten 2.0

I am a Hurricane Katrina survivor. When I lost my job, my home, and indeed my city in August 2005, I decided to go back to graduate school, and get the degree I had been putting off for years. When you don't know what to do, you go to graduate school, right? So I'm studying library science, working toward my MLIS, Master's of Library and Information Science, and looking forward to my first professional library job.

In his current "Internet Librarian" column in American Libraries (it's here), Joseph Janes mentioned in a discussion of the "Library 2.0" concept, that the ALA Annual convention was upcoming "in New Orleans, a city coming to terms with a 2.0 of its own." This analogy stunned me with its appropriateness. New Orleans 2.0. That's it, that's what it is. The same entity, but a new iteration. It'll never be the same.

And I realized I was living a 2.0 of my own. Here I am: new city, new job, new apartment, back in school, living on my own really for the first time in my life, husband still back in NOLA, and me, alone, fending for myself. A whole new life that I never imagined, and didn't want. Yet here it is. Same woman, new world. Kirsten 2.0.

So, a new blog for the new life. Here I will post my thoughts on my studies in the field of library science, as well as developments in the recovery of New Orleans. Even at a distant remove it is still vitally important to me.

I still cry often. I mourn for the dead, for the city ruined, for all the waste and tragedy. Get over it? I can't. Hurricane Katrina is a part of me now. You never "get over" something like that. You learn to live with it, which is not the same.

Reinstall and reboot. K2.0. That's what it is.