I’ve tried to start writing this twice, today. I’m just trying to get my thoughts in order…but writing also helps me where it comes to stress reduction. I haven’t been writing manually too much, though I did manage to get a record down about my more recent beadwork trials. The beadwork is also stress-relieving.

What is not stress-relieving, is this class. At this point, I’ve done everything I needed to do, for this week. I am seeing more clearly that Information Science, where it merges into Computer Science, is not something that comes easily to me; whereas Writing, does.

I have been able to name a number of classes in which I struggled like this: one was Fundamentals of (Computer) Programming; another was Database Management; a third was Introduction to Computer Science. I also attempted Calculus for a short time, but ended up bailing on the day of the first test (I understood the concepts, but in practicality, I had no idea how I was doing).

If I look back on the classes I was interested in and did well in, a lot of them relate back to culture, art, and writing. Although I did for a time attempt the Social Sciences, in reality I saw no future in Sociology or Ethnic Studies. I did not plan to become a Professor, and I may have been too socially withdrawn to be functional within Social Science, so I ended up majoring in the only thing (besides my home life) which was a constant: Writing.

Writing is a practical skill, which is a very large benefit…but I haven’t sought out everything I can do with it, yet. Why? There are a number of reasons I could supply in response, but it doesn’t change the reality that I just haven’t tried to get a job in Writing.

I think that part of it is fear of being honest in public. The fact that fear even exists, however, is proof that my voice is needed — because it means that, somewhere within me, I sense someone wants to silence voices like mine. And I have spent a large amount of my lifetime, being silent. Writing has been my way out of silence.

As I look back on it…there are a lot of ways I’ve tried to skirt social taboos, though I don’t feel quite at license to get into all of them, here. When I was younger, I was more rebellious; at this point, I just don’t want to deal with other people having issues about my existence. Their issues shouldn’t be my problem, but I think it boils down to an ideology thing, and thus to a sociopolitical thing, that affects economic things.

One of the reasons to choose Librarianship as a field, in fact, is wishing to avoid people telling me for the rest of my life that I shouldn’t be there (as I suspected would happen if, say, I tried becoming an Electrician). But then I get into the Library world, and I experience sexism and misogyny (with racism) — noticeably. I shouldn’t have to deal with this.

But dwelling on that, is what leads people into despair.

I also didn’t realize to what extent Libraries — in the US, at least — are a battleground, where it comes to trying to remove boundaries; to keep people able to be aware of the wider world, and educated. Liberal democracies can’t function with an ignorant polity; they degrade. Their degradation means that the people being ruled are more easily controlled — and a lot of people want to wield power over others who are easily controlled.

That, however, is the death of a liberal democracy. By, “liberal,” I mean to refer to living up to an assertion that human rights are fundamental, and that an individual should have the right to guide their own life and destiny. I may not be naming this precisely to the “T” where it comes to shared definitions (I haven’t done a Literature Review on this): but there are a number of books out on the decline of “democracy.”

In contrast, “illiberal democracy,” a term which I believe Fareed Zakaria coined in 1997, occurs when we elect our leaders, but our leaders don’t care about preserving our human rights — or willfully violate them. Allied with this, in my mind, is the idea of preserving the human rights only of those people which those in power, grant the full status of “humanity.”

Of course, “in power,” is debatable: at this point in history, different “leaders” have different factions, and power is not universally recognized. However, structural inequality and history, together, make fairly clear contextual pointers as to why we even entertain some of this stuff.

I could get deeper into this, but I’m not feeling well-read enough, at the moment. I’ve been pouring my time into technical things in order to try and stay afloat. Looking back over this blog, it was indeed much more interesting when I was consistently reading!

And there is a lot, that I want to read. Further, if I want to ever become a Professor, or ever write on these topics and become Published (more than self-published, that is), I’ll need to be reading a lot more than I am.

Maybe in that way, I could come to some kind of decision on just where I want my focus to be. I don’t think I’m afraid of becoming Faculty, anymore. 🙂 But there is still only a limited amount of time in which arranging time and resources for learning will be relatively painless. I have the skill to write; I have been trained how to research. The topic, the field, is the issue…and maybe it wouldn’t really be such an issue, if I had access to a brick-and-mortar University library and could read, in-depth, over time…