New beginnings perhaps. Being so close to the end, I find it difficult to be patient. My mind is chaotic with all these possibilities of what I might do when my time, energy, and finances are no longer tied up with school.
I might...
travel
build things
create
activate
Thinking:
My degree won't change my career. I like the library, like that I am surrounded by books and get to play with technology. The degree will allow me to step up a rung perhaps, but the information I'm gaining...it's for me, really. It's an attempt to gather tools to engage, make a difference if it's possible in those areas that matter to me: poverty & diversity
I'm going to need to rediscover those things that were important to me before I started all this, the interests and hobbies. Cooking real food, tending plants, reading books just for the pleasure of them. Technology: Feeling inspired to build things, mix art and technology. My thinking's been so narrow, that if I can't draw (and in all honesty I can't) I can never really be creative.
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Hiatus
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!
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!
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Enough Said? But then again...
The old cat is terminal. ($48, office visit + antibiotic to stave off infection, delay the inevitable).
I hit some unidentified metal object on the highway which cracked my bumper, pierced the grill, dented and pushed back the A/C condenser ($500 deductible).
Discovered a flat tire leaving work on my late night (Free @ Les Schwab, remove nail, patch tire).
Fall Semester began ($1924, tuition for 6 credits--Child Abuse & Neglect, Methods in Behavioral Research, textbooks purchased/paid for last month).
The gist? It's been ONE expensive, crappy week. I wanna take my marbles and go home.
=====
It's a late August night and the sounds of Hawaiian music are blowing up from the river. This town, out of the blue, decided it was time to acknowledge its Hawaiian roots...Homework is calling my name. So's e-mail that I promised weeks ago. So's a ukulele melody carried on the breeze. The only call I'll answer, likely, is that of sleep.
Stress has left me a little addled. I had the house to myself (sort of) and thought I might actually COOK, for real. I was whipping up some yogurt tahini sauce, a recipe I hadn't tried...thought, hmmm, it's not bad, but kind of ODD. Didn't dawn on me even then that the Plain Yogurt I thought I'd bought--I always buy--was not plain, but Vanilla. I didn't let it crush me...thought about it, yes, but then put my shoes on, went down to the store, the only one in town, the one that calls itself the shopping center. Little town. And half the town seems to be milling in front of the dairy section. My patience did not pay off...they have yogurt, but no plain yogurt. Isn't plain always an option?
My head feels as though it's been packed in fiberglass insulation.
I visited the ORG this evening specifically to pack up my corner of the pond, paddle off for good, I've no time to play, make no time to do anything more than snapshots, write only research papers and essays for class...but recent modifications meant things to see on the welcome page... Somewhere between some kid spewing cinnamon and lukku cairi's Axl Rose I was laughing out loud and I really, really needed that. And then there's other new toys...
Time's wasting away, though, and I must produce something commensurate with that passage.
I hit some unidentified metal object on the highway which cracked my bumper, pierced the grill, dented and pushed back the A/C condenser ($500 deductible).
Discovered a flat tire leaving work on my late night (Free @ Les Schwab, remove nail, patch tire).
Fall Semester began ($1924, tuition for 6 credits--Child Abuse & Neglect, Methods in Behavioral Research, textbooks purchased/paid for last month).
The gist? It's been ONE expensive, crappy week. I wanna take my marbles and go home.
=====
It's a late August night and the sounds of Hawaiian music are blowing up from the river. This town, out of the blue, decided it was time to acknowledge its Hawaiian roots...Homework is calling my name. So's e-mail that I promised weeks ago. So's a ukulele melody carried on the breeze. The only call I'll answer, likely, is that of sleep.
Stress has left me a little addled. I had the house to myself (sort of) and thought I might actually COOK, for real. I was whipping up some yogurt tahini sauce, a recipe I hadn't tried...thought, hmmm, it's not bad, but kind of ODD. Didn't dawn on me even then that the Plain Yogurt I thought I'd bought--I always buy--was not plain, but Vanilla. I didn't let it crush me...thought about it, yes, but then put my shoes on, went down to the store, the only one in town, the one that calls itself the shopping center. Little town. And half the town seems to be milling in front of the dairy section. My patience did not pay off...they have yogurt, but no plain yogurt. Isn't plain always an option?
My head feels as though it's been packed in fiberglass insulation.
I visited the ORG this evening specifically to pack up my corner of the pond, paddle off for good, I've no time to play, make no time to do anything more than snapshots, write only research papers and essays for class...but recent modifications meant things to see on the welcome page... Somewhere between some kid spewing cinnamon and lukku cairi's Axl Rose I was laughing out loud and I really, really needed that. And then there's other new toys...
Time's wasting away, though, and I must produce something commensurate with that passage.
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