Embrace your instability - the purpose of this blog

My younger brother told me to "embrace my instability" one night as we sat together in a nearly empty hookah bar.

I don't know what it was about he said to me that seemed so particularly profound, or why it stuck inside my head that night. Maybe it was because of the unfamiliar surroundings in the bar, the smoke and swirling neon lights, the darkly painted hookahs with their tentacle-like appendages, the glowing red coal like an eye emerging out of the fog. Maybe it was the clonazepam the doctor with the sleepy voice prescribed to me - and the way it made everything slow down, seem far away, how it destroyed my sense of balance and transformed my limbs into trainwrecks. Or maybe it just seemed like a strange statement to come from my brother - a 5'6, stocky ex-wrestler Nascar fan (but only for the entertaining escapades in the racing track's parking lot.) who only reads books with titles like "The Cellar Door" and "Night of Blood."

Whatever the reason - the idea to "embrace my instability," though it's probably an idea older than psychology itself, something akin to the Buddhist idea of Non-Resistance, gave me renewed hope and led me to realize exactly why I was writing this blog.

It isn't because all the freelance writing experts told me to write a blog, or because it showcases my writing abilities. (Though both are compelling reasons, especially for a female twenty-something who doesn't have the kind of social contacts or experience a more seasoned professional would.) If I simply wanted to do those two things, I could have written another blog about grammar or book reviews, the freelance life, or the frustrations of unanswered queries and book proposals. Hell, I could have just taken cute pictures of animals and paired them with snatches of witty dialogue. (Which I do actually, sort of, over at my Christian Cheese blog.)

But the purpose of this blog is to "embrace my instability", to bring light into the corners of the everyday strange, to show the weird and the idiosyncratic that follow us throughout life, those unknown and wondrous worlds that sprout up out of the dark. Because the anomalous is interesting, and because these often overlooked places can bring a fresh perspective to the schema of human activity.

Yes, I am a writer and I spend most of my time writing or thinking about writing, so there will be some blog posts covering this topic. But I also wish to write about mental disorders, overlooked parts of history, alternative philosophies, strange speculations, living on just this side of socially acceptable, preparation for the zombie apocalypse, and interviews with vampires.

Okay, there may be a book review on "Night of Blood," but I'll try to keep it brief.

Embrace your instability - the purpose of this blog

Becoming Educated Without College, Part 3

For more posts in this series, see Becoming Educated Without College, Part 1, and Becoming Educated Without College, Part 2.

Free Classes

There are several ways to get an education that doesn't require a deal with the devil. So your first born child will thank you if you skip the costly university courses and take advantage of these free resources available.

Websites like Textbook Revolution, Project Gutenberg, and Freeload Press offer free or cheap textbooks and textbooks from university courses that have become available in the public domain. This is a good way to catch up on your Dostoevsky or read first person accounts of the American Civil War.

Several universities also offer free online classes to the general public. Education Portal has compiled a list of Universities with the best free online courses. And for those who tend to listen to music or audio books while completing chores, there's iTunesU, which compiles together lectures, language lessons, and instructional videos that can be transported straight to the iPod or burned onto a CD.

If you miss the classroom setting, there are a few anarchist free schools operating in Canada and the United States, including The Seattle Free School in Washington and AnarchistU in Toronto. You won't earn a degree, but you can gain valuable education in a democratic, non-hierarchical collective that hosts workshops, lectures, and several arts and sciences courses.

If you want to check out a particular class at a university, many universities have sit in policies that allow guests to come in and participate in class or watch a lecture. Oftentimes the policies state you'll have to sit in the back row, or inform the teacher that you're sitting in, but most university classes, especially freshmen classes, are so big that the teacher wouldn't recognize a new face anyways.

Communities

Before the Internet, you were pretty much stuck in whatever community you happened to find yourself in. You had to make friends with the boy next door even if he had a creepy bug collection, and come time for prom you had a rather incestuous dating pool to choose from. Now communities can spring up around common interests through groups like Meetup, the fan pages on Facebook, and various artist and writer community websites such as DeviantART and the water cooler at Absolute Write. If you have an interest, there's probably a community for it, full of experts more than willing to share information with others.

Most experts and writers don't become reclusive misanthropes like J.D Salinger - they tend to create community pages, message boards, and interactive websites featuring live chats and flash robot fights. I've sent emails to popular writers and received thoughtful responses in return.

Exploration

Not all the education we need to be happy, productive human beings can be learned in a classroom setting, in workshops, seminars, message-boards, or DIY videos. We are creatures who thrive on stimuli, direct experience - living vicariously through a computer screen or the pages of a book can leave us feeling hollow. While new technology has been a boon to the human race, allowing us access to information that was once sacred and allowing us communication that was once forbidden, it can also be highly addicting and isolating. Our world has become somewhat privatized, and we stay inside because that's where we're hooked up. I think of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where Guy Montag's wife, Mildred Montag, is completely obsessed with interactive television until her personality is almost completely eradicated.

Oftentimes I find myself surfing the internet seeking stimulus, seeking information, simply because I am bored and my mind has been trained to seek entertainment on my computer. Yet a vast arsenal of information exists outside the Internet. I used to surf the Internet for up to eight hours a day in a near hypnotic state, seeking stimulus and novelty where there wasn't any to be found because that was all I knew how to do.

The most important thing I have learned in recent years is how to turn off the computer when I am becoming bored. After a certain number of hours, I think surfing the internet makes you become over saturated with knowledge, to the point where you are browsing Wikipedia articles to figure out the exact shade of fried tilapia fish or searching news archives trying to figure whether or not Colonel Sanders was once accused of being a serial killer. (He wasn't, don't worry.)

When this happens, it's time to explore. You can learn more from wandering outside in the nighttime than following back links about a game you played back in 1997 through The Wayback Machine. To become educated, we must not only seek out academic knowledge, but sensory knowledge. As humans we crave the novelty of new experiences. And the more we read about other people's adventures, the more we want our own.

If you fear becoming a character like Ray Bradbury's Mildred Montag, sitting at home having fake adventures with people on the television, then think of Clarisse Mclellan, the girl Guy Montag meets in the streets who is "sixteen and crazy" who is strange and full of life, who stops to watch things even as everyone else is speeding up.

So leave the computer. Fight perpetual boredom and lack of stimulus. Go outside. Go to the park. Roll in the grass and count the stars. Go backpacking across the country. Visit a commune or an old friend across the country. Attend meetings with revolutionaries. Go to parties you weren't invited to. Fall in love half a dozen times a day. Get into conversations with strangers. Put on your boots and go creek hiking. Build a boat and see how far you can row away from shore. Become educated because of your direct contact with the world, and continue to learn in the moments that books and classes cannot fill.

Becoming Educated Without College, Part 3

Becoming Educated Without College, Part 2

In Becoming Educated Without College, Part 1, I discussed several reasons why I dropped out of college. In Part 2, I discuss a few ways for people to get an education outside of the traditional academic setting.

I don't suggest that dropping out of college is the best route for everyone - going to college should be a personal choice, not a prerequisite to the only acceptable civilized form of life. Unfortunately, college is shoved upon those who who could learn better in different settings. I was not given a choice of whether or not I should go to college, and neither were many other students in my high school graduating class. Even if we did not know what we wanted to pursue in college, we were told to go anyways, to find ourselves and learn about growing up - at the cost of incredible expenses and long lasting debt. There are many people who believe that taking time off before going to college, or deciding not to go all together, is an enormous waste of time. However, instead of wasting time and money on campus and studying courses they may not be interested in, young adults can seek an education independently by utilizing the tools around them.

Thanks largely to the Internet and it's useful informational and communicative capabilities, universities are no longer the bastions of higher learning that they once were. There are several options for people who wish to educate themselves, and develop a passion for learning by being able to pursue the subjects that interest them.


The Library

The library was the original resource archive, excluding the village shaman. And you usually don't have to bribe libraries with pipe tobacco to get them to share their wisdom with you. Libraries tend to vary in quality of material, but they're free sources of knowledge for anyone who wishes to access them. And unlike attending college courses, a library allows you to go at your own study pace and study the material you're most interested in.

Now we're often no longer confined to the selection provided by the local library. Many libraries also have large online research databases such as EBSCOhost or Questia which contain vast archives of journals, press releases, newspaper articles, and academic studies. Some states have programs which allow state residents to check out books from any public library that participates in the program, such as the TexShare program in Texas. And there are always interlibrary loans so you can request books to be shipped to your library from another library.

Did I mention all this was free?

Libraries are also great community centers, and often feature readings by local authors or productions by local theaters. They are also, according to Ray Bradbury, good places to meet girls.

Check out this video of Ray Bradbury, regarded as one of most brilliant science-fiction writers of his time, discussing how he educated himself using the library:

DIY

We are no longer in the age of overly-complicated technical manuals. It is no longer required to have a master's in engineering to put together an easy bake oven. There is now a vast network of videos, audio recordings, and books available for the do it yourself culture - learn how to do your own plumbing, fix your car, butcher a hog, or psychoanalyze your neighbor.

Specialization tends to limit a person's experience and make them dependent upon other people to complete simple tasks. In Jamestown, the fledgling English settlement established in America, most of the colonists were upper class gentlemen who had such highly specialized professions (including one particular gentlemen who happened to make perfume) that they were clueless as to how to operate a colony for day to day survival. Most of them ended up dying of starvation or sickness, and some turned to cannibalism. Many colonists ended up running off to live with the Native Americans who were more equipped for survival in that particular climate.

It's easy to allow other people to complete tasks for us in our convenience culture -we buy prepared food instead of learning how to make it and hire a repairman to fix broken appliances instead of taking a swing at that malfunctioning psychotic refrigerator - but this kind of specialization leaves us lacking knowledge that might provide valuable insight into our world, and keeps us totally unprepared for the zombie apocalypse.

So the next time you need to change the oil in the car, or need to fix a leak in the roof, look up a video or read instructions, then attempt the task yourself. You'll save money, and possibly learn a valuable skill - even if you fail you will probably learn how to improve the next time around.

In Becoming Educated Without College, Part 3, I discuss more ways in how to become educated without college

Becoming Educated Without College, Part 2

Becoming Educated Without College, Part 1

I dropped out of college last fall.

Dropping out of college never seemed like an option to me before my freshman year. Dropping out of college was for slackers, burnouts, and losers who couldn't cope with the stress of academia or stop partying long enough to study. My image of the typical college drop-out was the person stuck in a dead-end job, slowly growing angrier and more disillusioned as the years passed. Maybe she watched Mexican soap operas on television when she wasn't beating her children, nursing a beer along with all her dead hopes and dreams.

I remembered sitting in freshman orientation with the rest of my class when the speaker told us that one of the people sitting next to us wouldn't graduate. I knew damn well that person wouldn't be me. I was an intelligent, motivated girl who had been labeled gifted and talented by the school system since kindergarten, and I wasn't about to throw my life away like all the girls who stayed home after high school to raise junior prom babies and work at Subway.

And despite what high school teachers and concerned mothers had told me about how difficult the curriculum was, I found my college classes ridiculously easy. I made a 4.0 my first semester despite skipping classes every other day. I figured out quickly enough that most of my professors taught straight from the textbook. Instead of attending nauseously boring lectures I could just sleep in, take a leisurely walk to the cafeteria, and eat breakfast while reading the chapter on that day's syllabus.

Far from being the pinnacle of learning that I'd been taught to believe it was, my college experience was a monotonous, sepia-colored haze of endless routine and empty days. People would ask me what my major was and when I said "English literature" they'd give me a bug-eyed, sideways glance like they were watching a woman who just lit herself on fire.

"English," they always said, "what are you going to do with that? Are you going to like, teach?"
Either I would shrug and tell them I had no idea what I was going to do with that degree, or I'd look at my shoes and tell them I wanted to be a writer. If I told them I was going to be a writer, they'd usually chuckle and tell me maybe I'd be the next J.K Rowling, then walk off.
I preferred to shrug.

I found myself realizing that many successful writers did not go to college, and that many of the professors with writing degrees were only published in obscure, erudite venues. It seemed that much like genetically engineered plants created to survive only on expensive fertilizers, many writers taught by universities could only write in the incestuous structure provided by universities.

As I was dreaming of heading out for the open road like Jack Kerouac in "Dharma Bums," I stayed up late at night to write stories, read books, and research. I felt awkward in the college atmosphere - as an extreme introvert, I became overstimulated by the parties, the girls running down the hallways at all hours of the night, and the boys who didn't know that 'no' did not mean 'try harder.' I didn't enjoy drinking, drugs, or putting soap in the water fountains outside the library. I was out of place at college, and not just because I had no reason to be there.

Everyone told me what a huge mistake I would be making without a college degree. Everyone had an anecdote about their dim-witted cousin who lived in a trailer park out on a swamp, or the chain smoking woman who always regretted not going to college after marrying her bread winning husband. Yet no matter how many horror stories people told me about the people who became huge failures because they didn't go to college, I heard equal amount of horror stories about people who were class valedictorians, athletic champions, 4.0 out of 4.0 ivy league scholars, and saviors of mankind who ended up having to take a job grooming animals or pushing shopping carts.

Success didn't seem so much to be about whether or not someone went to college, but seemed to have more to do with motivation, tenacity, intelligence, and luck. Even as the college of my choice emptied my pockets and the pockets of my parents, they kept repeating there was no guarantee that college would determine if you would land a job or not.

I endured for two more semesters, then I dropped out of my third. I haven't regretted the decision. Though college education wasn't for me or for the goals I wanted to accomplish, I am still receiving an education everyday. Instead of learning until I'm 22 and then stopping once I obtain a degree, I have dedicated myself to continuous, life-long learning.

In Becoming Educated Without College, Part 2, I discuss ways that people can learn and grow outside of an academic setting.

Becoming Educated Without College, Part 1