This blog is currently taking yet another break while its owner determines a reason for its existence.
About three years ago, I made the hare-brained decision to go back to school. Through the years, I've accumulated a large number of credits, in quantity probably enough by now to have earned at least one advanced degree, but not the proper combination. It's a jumble of credits: art, science, technology, even some Japanese. Apparently I am indecisive and wary of commitment.
It makes an odd sort of sense that the twisty path would somehow lead me to a full-time position working for a public library. I'm a library assistant, hired out away from the City's I.T. department for my computer support/web skills. Everything was fine, is fine, and most likely I could do okay without a degree and retire someday as a municipal employee, maybe even bump up a level, but something really bothers me about not having a degree, and I don't know why. I admire those people who have direction, whether they have a formal education or not. Maybe I just need direction, and, lacking that, a degree, an accomplishment, is the next best thing?
Today, along with the library job, I'm enrolled half-time at the land grant university I'd enrolled in full-time just before the library hired me, although this time instead of commuting south, I'm attending at a distance. I think time-wise it works out to about the same. The commute time turns into a lot more reading time, interacting with the instructor and other students. There's no sitting in the back of the class, passively absorbing here: participation is a major part of the curriculum. To be sure, I feel as though the online courses change me just as much if not more than the traditional classroom offerings, although at times I really miss the human face-to-face interaction.
I spend so much of my time outside of work now reading for classes and writing for classes that it really feels like my brain is overflowing. By the end of a semester, I have a hard time forming cohesive sentences. The stuff that falls out is the surface, day to day stuff. The intelligent stuff is buried somewhere, or turned in to be graded. I cannot think beyond what I did, what I'm doing, what's coming next. I'd created this blog with the intent of a theme, but it has yet to come to me. My 5 year old LiveJournal account has become the site of this brain dump. It's not quite to the point where I discuss my breakfast, but it's an airing out of all the cobwebs, pretty formless, pretty random. There is otherwise no room to move around my head, to have a creative notion, feel inspired.
I'll graduate in December 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology/Human Development. I don't believe I will leave the library, but the education is giving me knowledge and skills that I'm hoping will help me make a difference, in issues of diversity, poverty, and human welfare in my community and beyond. While I'm incredibly fascinated by all the knowledge I'm gaining (very few classes have felt even remotely tedious), the all work and little play thing has very much been wearing on me. The human connections, while never massive, have dwindled, and a few very important ones are becoming increasingly strained. I feel like that kid stuck inside learning the violin while all the other kids are outside playing in the sprinkler. I willingly made this choice, and I'll see it through because I truly feel it will be worth it in the end, but god I'm exhausted, and I'm lonely, and it's going to be a long, long winter.
Perhaps, when I come back, all edumacated, with the free time to cook and create and read and travel again, this blog will have some sort of a purpose. 'Til then, I'm trimming back, shunting my resources. I can be found at Flickr (link over there somewhere to the right, I believe), and, if you're up for inane babble, at the LJ link above. Happy 2008!