(Repost) ASAN Statement on Media Reports Regarding Newtown, CT Shooting

The following is a repost of ASAN's press release from yesterday;  Quoted in full below.

 link is here: http://autisticadvocacy.org/2012/12/asan-statement-on-media-reports-regarding-newton-ct-shooting/

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ASAN Statement on Media Reports Regarding Newtown, CT Shooting

December 14, 2012

In response to recent media reports that the perpetrator of today’s shooting in Newtown, Connecticut may have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum or with a psychiatric disability, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) issued the following statement today:
“Our hearts go out to the victims of today’s shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and their families. Recent media reports have suggested that the perpetrator of this violence, Adam Lanza, may have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a diagnosis on the autism spectrum, or with another psychiatric disability. In either event, it is imperative that as we mourn the victims of this horrific tragedy that commentators and the media avoid drawing inappropriate and unfounded links between autism or other disabilities and violence. Autistic Americans and individuals with other disabilities are no more likely to commit violent crime than non-disabled people. In fact, people with disabilities of all kinds, including autism, are vastly more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. Should the shooter in today’s shooting prove to in fact be diagnosed on the autism spectrum or with another disability, the millions of Americans with disabilities should be no more implicated in his actions than the non-disabled population is responsible for those of non-disabled shooters.
Today’s violence was the act of an individual. We urge media, government and community leaders to speak out against any effort to spuriously link the Autistic or broader disability community with violent crime. Autistic Americans and other groups of people with disabilities persist in facing discrimination and segregation in school, the workplace and the general community. In this terrible time, our society should not further stigmatize our community. As our great nation has so many times in the past, let us come together to both mourn those killed by acts of heinous murder and defend all parts of our country from the scourge of stigma and prejudice.”

Media inquiries regarding this shooting may be directed to ASAN at info@autisticadvocacy.org.

A librarian takes a vacation.

I recently took a vacation to visit relatives in Southeastern Missouri over the Thanksgiving break; We did not dine together on the actual day but rather the Saturday following.  We traveled to SE Missouri from SE Texas on the Friday after Thanksgiving.  My library system was closed starting Thanksgiving Day and remaining closed through the weekend.

I had a good time visiting with and catching up with relatives in this rural small town in SE Missouri but eventually I decided to stretch my legs and take a walk around the neighborhood.  I mainly knew the place from driving around it over the years (or being driven around it as a kid), mainly at Christmastime and the Summer.  I was less sure about the terrain on foot.  With the help of my iPhone and GPS locator function, I was able to locate the local public library and navigate the few short blocks of my aunt's neighborhood to its location.  I assumed it would be closed, as my library was, but to my surprise, when I got there, I found that although they had been closed Thursday and Friday, the were indeed open for the weekend like usual.  After taking some photographs of the exterior, I ventured inside.

It was a nice library, albeit not very busy.  Besides the three library staffers (what appeared to be a librarian and two circulation clerks), there was one other patron in the children's section and that was about it.  I hit the YA section looking out for any Manga collections or other graphic novels...there were a few comic book graphic novels I think but absolutely no English-language translated Japanese Manga anywhere.  I was taken a bit aback by this and asked the librarian on duty if they had any Manga in their collection.  She stated they didn't and that it wasn't popular here so they don't carry it, but to try the local comic book store near the Wal-Mart.  I found this analysis dubious but kept my opinion to myself, and thanked her for trying to help.  I explained I was a library staffer from Texas and just visiting relatives in town for the weekend.

Having returned home, I looked up the library's webpage online.  It does indeed have one, but to my surprise, it does NOT have a web-accessible OPAC.  I was kind of shocked by this.  They do have a presence on Facebook, but no OPAC that is web-accessible.  I do think they had a site-based OPAC, but I did not actually browse the catalog during my visit, and I don't recall seeing a card catalog, so I do assume they had at least a rudimentary online catalog on site, even if not one that was remotely accessible.  Their website does have a kind of "dictionary catalog" in the form of downloadable PDFs of popular genres of fiction, with the titles in alphabetical order, but no listings for non-fiction works.

I know in the course of my ILL work I've encountered small-town Texas libraries with no identifiable link to their catalog on their webpage, so I know this is not unheard of, but I still find it a little shocking.  Perhaps internet access in this (largely) rural area is still not widely available and the funding authorities still don't see a web-accessible OPAC to be a worthwhile investment at this time.  I personally think a web accessible OPAC is almost a bare minimum requirement for any functional US library of any size, but perhaps that's my own idealism and naivete talking.  It's not as if this library was utterly bereft of technology; they had computers that patrons could sign up to use for blocks of time and surf the web, etc.  They did have a surprisingly large number of obsolete formats, like VHS tapes (my own library system finished weeding the last of our VHS tapes in the past year), and books on tape (now available only at our main branch)...but again, I wonder if adoption of DVD technology perhaps isn't as widespread here and if many older patrons still cling to their VHS players and are unwilling or financially unable to upgrade to DVD players, much less Blu-Ray players.  They did at least have DVDs in their collection, and music CDs and books on CD.

I was personally annoyed by the lack of Anime DVDs of any kind, on top of their being no Manga.  It would be one thing to add some test titles to a collection and then decide not to buy any more if they fail to circulate; But it's something else to declare from the outset that "nobody in this town is interested in Manga" and just refuse to buy any.  Perhaps they are just wanting to avoid courting controversy with the more conservative elements of the local community.  On the other hand, my library system collects quite a fair bit of manga and it is very popular among the YA crowd.

It's nice that they bothered to create a Facebook page to be able to better communicate with their patron base and wider community--kudos to them on that.  But the lack of a web-accessible OPAC still bothers me. But perhaps their funding is so precarious that it's all they can do just to keep the doors open...though if that were the case then why re-open on the weekend of a major holiday like Thanksgiving?  Seems like it would make more sense to keep the doors closed and heating & overhead costs down those two extra days than open up with very little patron foot traffic.

Still, I do figure they must have a shoestring budget because just a cursory scan of the nonfiction titles showed me that many of the books were old and would've already been weeded out of my home system.  Newer materials were few and far between.  The more a library neglects weeding and new acquisitions, the more it becomes a glorified "reading room" with maybe some computers thrown in and the less it fulfills its mission as a true library.  Perhaps the city fathers don't quite understand that, or else there really just isn't the money available right now.  It is a nice building, on the edge of what appears to be the former downtown area of this town.  It has a lot of potential and promise, but right now falls short, in my estimation.  The rest of this town, sadly, I think, combines the worst aspects of rural isolation and a replication of suburban sprawl.  It is an utterly car-dependent community.  It lacks (to my knowledge) a really identifiable center the way Texas towns like Denton or McKinney have clearly identifiable centers.  It has a few nice residential neighborhoods, but everything else are strung out in strip centers along the main road through town next to the main highway.  They even ripped up their railroad tracks that used to cut through the middle of this community.  This was not a wise move in the era of post Peak Oil, a decision I fear this community will one day sharply regret.  This is the sort of lack of community planning I suspect insightful authors like James Howard Kunstler would love to hate and ridicule.  Many who live in this community prefer to do their consumer shopping in larger neighboring towns, even across state lines, when they have wants and needs not met by the local big box store.

What is interesting is that the skeleton remains of the former downtown area and it actually looks nice, with recently re-paved cobblestone streets, very walkable blocks, etc...there are a few valiant little businesses here and there, and a few government buildings, but lots of empty buildings with lease signs, etc.  The seeds are there for community re-vitalization further into the future of the Long Emergency, but for now they lie dormant and will not be considered so long as the drive-in utopia remains the dominant paradigm of this community.

This is the former IOOF (International Order of Oddfellows) hall, founded circa 1908.  This sort of urban programming has potential for the kind of mixed use, residential-over-commercial arrangement that used to be a lot more prevalent in our country than today.  This area could be "re-programmed" into something hip and cool and that would make young adults in their 20s and 30s actually want to come here and spend time together, etc.  But it takes vision and a willingness to invest capital, proper government leadership and planning, perhaps revisions to existing ordinances and regulations, etc.  It's nice that the library butts up against this district, and I hope it bodes well for the library's future.  But like the library itself, this district is not at present living up to its full potential.

Go do it.

Change.org|The Proven Petition Site

Lost in (AV format) transition...

I am of a particular age that I really got vigorous use out of certain "books on tape", especially in the late 1990s up through the early 2000s, specifically the time period where I was actively considering becoming a librarian and finally made the move to go to library school.  Listening to nonfiction audiobooks, especially those of the Blackstone Audio collection, but also the courses on offer from The Teaching Company, were a very large part of my "Life of the Mind" of those years.  They kept me intellectually fresh and invigorated after I briefly departed academia in 1997 upon the completion of my "terminal" first Master's degree in German Studies.  I still read normal nonfiction books as well, of course.  I also kept alive a "Life of the Mind" through the comic-book format "(X) for Beginners" (published in NYC) and the UK produced "Introducing..(X)" series.  These are works I wish I'd had at my disposal during my first slog through graduate school.  I also wish I'd read David Harvey's The condition of postmodernity.  It was already in print by then but I knew nothing of it;  I knew that of all PoMo theorists I liked Fredric Jameson the best, insofar as I liked his Marxian leanings; But Harvey is more directly connected to the Marxist tradition and more readable generally than Jameson, I think.

But that aside, I also very much enjoyed more popular nonfiction titles in audiobook format, such as unabridged Blackstone audio productions of works by Arnold J. Toynbee, the famous British historian, as read by celebrated voice-actor narrator David Case.  Case was one of a kind and narrated many of my favorite audiobooks of that era.  I also enjoyed Edith Hamilton's The Roman Way and The Greek Way...very general historical/sociological overview examinations of the Classical world.  I also deeply enjoyed Neil Postman's works read by Jeff Riggenbach--also under the Blackstone Audio imprint.  I own most of Postman's major works in book form of course, but the audiobook format left a deep impression on me indeed, especially as these works were HUGE influences on me before, during, and after library school.

While the printed forms of these works of course remain in many academic libraries, this audio content will most likely be lost to recorded history as the cassette format continues to vanish and disappear from most library collections.  And unlike popular fiction titles, they are unlikely to be reproduced in CD format as there's just no profitability in it for publishers...even for digitization of the existing audio rather than re-recording the content with new voice talents.  It is my impression that most academic libraries do not collect audiobooks in any significant numbers, nor did they collect that many audio-cassettes either.  No, the audio-cassette based nonfiction "Book on tape" was almost always the exclusive purview of Public libraries, and Public libraries are not generally in the archival business and thus these "obsolete" formats are thoroughly weeded without a single tear being shed, to make space for updated formats...CD, DVD, MP3, Blu-Ray...and that is as it should be, for the most part.

But part of me can't help but feel a sense of loss for the material that falls into this unfortunate gap...which were a lavish publishing risk even in the time they were initially reproduced, relying heavily on library acquisitions sales more so than direct marketing to consumers, or propped up by large sales figures from more popular fiction titles offered....and that have next to zero chance of being converted to a more advanced format into the future.  They will simply vanish and all that will remain are the printed word versions.  At least there are those copies, for which we should be grateful.  Perhaps I'm simply being ridiculously nostalgic for a format that meant so much to me personally, in my own intellectual growth.  That is most likely the case.  I've held out for as long as I have because I had one of the last car models of the early 2000s that still came with a tape deck as the standard feature, and only this year have begun looking to replace it with a newer version that will finally have a dashboard CD player as the standard (and also MP3 hookups if I can swing it)...something countless thousands of other library patrons have been already enjoying for years and years.  My cassette player in my vehicle is on its last legs, it is hyper-sensitive to road conditions, spitting out the cassette on all but the smoothest of drive surfaces.  It's temperamental now and quite difficult to get it to play a full book on tape properly anymore, cassette after cassette.

I do look forward to getting an onboard CD player in my next vehicle...and there is still plenty of quality audiobook content out there for me to enjoy.  But some of the original experiences I had with earlier audiobook titles are an experience future generations of readers will simply never know...and that's a shame of sorts.  They will have to work harder and seek out the printed material, if so inclined. 

One thing I do lament about online audiobooks and ebooks is the currently shoddy state of bibliographic access for these special formats material, which are often housed separately online, away from the actual OPAC.  There is often a dearth of subject access---often one only gets a single dumb google-esque keyword searchbox and if one is lucky the ability to narrow one's search by some additional parameters later.  It's highly frustrating to a librarian like me who knows better, but is probably just accepted without complaint by the average patron who is unaware of the power of the OPAC to begin with, much less understands what it means to have a system without that power.

Anyway, those are my thoughts about Libraryland these days.  More later as the inspiration strikes.

Thoughts on our in-house Music Classification System

The county-level public library system that employs me utilizes a "home grown" classification system when it comes to categorizing music.  It's very rudimentary and simple...almost too simple.  We've had some vehement patron reaction to the way we don't distinguish between traditional "Blues" music (that we code with the three-letter designation BLU) and more contemporary music commonly called "R&B" or Rhythm & Blues, which, though derived from classical Blues, is indeed its own genre of music.  However, in our library system, it gets shoved under the BLU designation.  This has always rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning of my tenure there, and evidently some of our patrons feel the same, recently (in the past several months) commiting acts of 'helpful' vandalism, scratching out the BLU code and writing in by hand with permanent pen, "R&B", up to and including not only the front label on the insert but also the rear label, which takes some knowledge and effort to open and get to without damaging the jewel case.

This would give a thoughtful cataloger pause to consider perhaps overhauling the classification scheme going forward...maybe not to retroactively reclassify CDs, but at least all new purchases going forward falling under the new schemes.  Not my former boss, however.  She was determined to stick to the established scheme and not budge.

Also, our "home-grown" system distinguishes between Religious music, coded REL, and Christian Religious Music, or CREL.  I noted with interest that a CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was coded "REL" and *not* "CREL".  Such things are always up to cataloger judgement, of course...but the choice is revealing of a Protestant bias.  As an atheist, I would have no trouble according the Mormon Tabernacle Choir the "CREL" designator.  On the other hand, as an atheist, I would probably abolish the "CREL" designator entirely and just collapse everything under "REL".  I wondered to myself why this wasn't done from the get go, as it would be much simpler.  Then I remembered how conservative and predominantly Christian this area is and how no doubt Christian patrons and especially parents might complain if their little ones went looking for wholesome Christian music and had to wade through music of "heathen" religions and give them funny ideas that could lead to heresy, hellfire and perdition.  Or something.  Anyway, it dawned on me it was probably a conscious decision made early on, in order to head off precisely that kind of complaint.

One amusing aspect to this, however, is the inconsistency of Christian performers who merit the CREL designator while others only get REL.  Mainline Christianity is well represented in both designations, while Mormonism is specifically excluded from the CREL group.

There are some downright howlers in the system, too...the first breakout album by Bruce Hornsby & The Range is classified as "CTY" (Country music)...when it hilariously isn't; it's POP, after all.  This was one LAZY cataloger who looked at the group's name and just assumed it was Country instead of listening to a few sample tracks.

By the way, very Apropos of this discussion, there was a very interesting discussion of music genres recently on the Geologic Podcast by George Hrab in one of his latest episodes, in response to a fan mail question.

See the show notes here:
http://geologicpodcast.com/webpage/the-geologic-podcast-episode-276

Enjoy!  I love George Hrab & his work.

Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead. She's gone where the goblins go,
Below - below - below. Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong' the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know
The Wicked Witch is dead!

***

Translation:  my horrible workplace bully tyrant of a boss has been dismissed and we are free of her at last.  Everything tranquilo and modestly upbeat for now.

Quick Anime/Manga resources for YA librarians.

Especially perhaps to you new YA librarians who don't know much about Manga/Anime and who don't have teenage children to tell you, there are a couple of Podcasts out there that I find enhance my enjoyment as an otaku of these art forms.

First and foremost, you definitely want to familiarize yourself with Anime News Network, and their related podcast ANNcast. Chock full of valuable news and opinion about new and even classic anime. These guys definitely know their stuff. I don't always agree with them but I do respect their vast knowledge and well informed opinions.

A bit more edgy and controversial than ANNCast is the Anime World Order podcast, hosted by OtakuUSA magazine contributor Daryl Surat and others.

Speaking of, as many of you know, Shonen Jump is no longer in print and has gone 100% digital subscription. I know serials area pain in the arse in library land, I really do get that. But your patrons will love you forever if you are willing to spend the coin and replace or augment your Shonen Jump subscription with a print subscription to OtakuUSA. Trust me, the kids still want the physical media for this. Good ol' OtakuUSA is the last man standing, the last English language print serial publication devoted to Anime and Manga in North America. You are doing your YA patrons a disservice if you fail to subscribe to this periodical.

If you have an iPhone, you may want to download the Ani.me "app", which is a mobile application affiliated with the main Anim.me news website...you can browse new news articles daily via your iPhone at lunch, say. Always good to get breaking news on new releases, new licensing agreements, voice cast announcements, etc.

If you really like the English dubs and want to know more about the voice actors behind the shows, there's no better place to look than the "That Anime Show" podcast hosted by voice actor (and sometime ADR director and script writer) J. Michael Tatum and ADR director (and sometime voice actress) Terri Doty. About once a month, they interview their fellow English language voice actors, mostly FUNImation regulars but on occasion actors up from Houston that record more often with Sentai Filmworks. It's fun to listen to all the behind-the-scenes banter and backstory, and it's nice to know that many of the voice actors involved are also close personal friends in real life, with funny, sometimes embarrassing stories and always interesting opinions on life, culture, art, and sometimes politics as well. I finally got caught up on all the back episodes of TAS and I can say they definitely made my morning and evening commutes to and from my library workplace all the more livelier and interesting...there are many, many laugh-out-loud moments listening to this show. Not unlike the same reason I love the Rooster Teeth Podcast (aka "The Drunk Tank"), I feel like I'm back in High School or College staying up really late with my best friends cracking jokes and telling stories when I listen to this show.

Rooster Teeth are the geniuses behind the hit "Red versus Blue" action / comedy animation series based on pre-gen animation using the HALO game system on the XBOX. They also do comedic shorts, game reviews, etc. But I especially love their weekly podcast and the hilarious interaction between all the hosts, who are also all the voice actors for the principle characters of the RvB series. While these guys only touch on Anime/Manga tangentially, they are a good source for general gamer nerd culture, and there is indeed some cross-over. Their podcast so often makes me LOL and ROFL and ROFLMAO.

Lastly, Meetup.com; There is probably a local Anime/Manga meetup or club in your area, and if you are a YA librarian, it might behoove you to attend, to get a feel for the vibe and pulse of local Anime/Manga otaku culture. Get to know your patrons and potential patrons. Get the lowdown on what's hot, what's not, etc.

In other news, stepping down from PLG-CC

As a passing note, I made the decision to step down from my seat on the Coordinating Committee of the Progressive Librarians Guild and revert back to being just a general member. I sat on the CC for nearly 10 years, contributed to discussion, made some important votes on some resolutions, etc. It was fun, but my heart is just not into it anymore. The list activity really spiked in recent months and it was kind of like sensory overload for me and I backed out and shut down...violating a CC bylaw in the process. Rather than haggle over it or argue or seek to make amends by stepping up and redoubling my efforts, I just decided to make it easy on everyone and formally submit my resignation. It's hard to imagine the ultimatum coming at a worse time for me in my personal life, either.

I won't go into detail, but something came to light recently that I was much happier not knowing about, but now that I do know, I see how to go forward into the future acting as I had in the past transforms me from unwitting enabler to a co-conspirator with full knowledge, and that I refuse. I've decided to act on that front by doing nothing. Pulling back and withdrawing my material support. It sucks because the people involved were good friends and my decision to stick to what seems right and proper for myself on an ethical level will probably cost me those friendships and destroy one of my social support networks along with it.

Like I said, really shitty timing. Luckily, I've got other activities I put on the back burner that I can now move to the front, like the Houston Anime Meetup, or the local branch of the Houston Atheist Meetup for Sugar Land/Stafford area. My RPG buds are unable to play in April, but I look forward to resuming in May and especially look forward to summer when we will have extra players returning to us and maybe even pick up a new member, depending.

I look forward to just being a general PLG member again, hadn't realized I had dropped off the general mailing list either. Listservs just feel like such Web 1.0 tech...honestly I pay way more attention to Facebook than traditional email these days...as much as I love PLG, and as much as I'm sometimes a skeptical Luddite myself, sometimes change genuinely is good, sometimes the positives do outweigh the negatives, etc. I was totally wrong about blogs and happy to be wrong about them. I thought they were a silly idea, why wouldn't you just update a static website instead? *bonk* Because blogs are easier and user-friendlier, silly. Because the world isn't static, it's dynamic. Just how utterly wrong I was about the nature of blogs and blogging is just jaw-dropping. I appreciate Rory Litwin's early critique about early Library blog Culture; I think he was spot-on with that criticism, actually; but even Library Juice eventually transitioned to a blog format. There's something just kind of relentless about it. Blogs just structurally make so much sense and have been so powerful and transformative in our contemporary world since they made their debut. A local favorite progressive political site in my corner of the greater Houston Area, Juanita Jean's, still defiantly calls itself "not a blog", but it so painfully obviously is. Again, that reaction is actually in rebellion to early blog culture and less so about the nature of blogs themselves.

I'm also not blind to the highly problematic nature of Facebook. Yes, it makes social organizing incredibly easy and greatly facilitates communication compared to traditional mass email lists...but it also makes intelligence gathering incredibly easier for the alphabet soup agencies...NSA, FBI, CIA, DHS, et. al. Very much easier to map out social networks and the interconnections between people, all willingly supplied online by the participants themselves...lots of raw data for the most advanced AI software to munch on and build algorithms and formulae to parse out who is a threat to the National Security State...I still hope my file reads "Mostly harmless".

I miss having an active, intellectual life of the mind, where I read all the time, socialized when *I* wanted to, not when others expected me to...was able to keep contact and interaction with the parents to a basic minimum...back when I thought I really had some promise as a public intellectual. I'm a fop, and intellectual lightweight and a dandy. I like artsy movies, I listen to NPR and KPFT...as well as some engaging podcasts.

But I've also lightened up. I'm very very much into Anime and even Manga these days. Yesterday I read Vols. 1-2 of the manga series Bakuman, about two teen boys who resolve to become manga creators...one is the writer, the ideas man, while the other is the artist. I know there is already an anime out there of this series, don't recall if there's an English dub for it as well but I think so? Anyway, reading the manga, I imagined the characters speaking in different of my favorite voice actor's voices...In my head I cast Johnny Yong Bosch for Mashiro, and Chris Ayers for Tagaki. Still undecided on the female cast, but I kept reading Miho's friend who's into Tagaki with Brittney Karbowski's voice in my head and it kinda worked. I read Miho's voice sometimes with Luci Christian's voice in mind, other times with Monica Rial...also tested out Carrie Savage...with mixed results...that would be a much more difficult casting decision.

What's interesting is that I know actual FUNImation script writers like J. Michael Tatum actually do sometimes do their writing with a particular voice actor in mind. And sometimes the casting director picks up on that vibe and makes a casting decision that is in harmony with the writer's idea. Tatum tells of a time when he wrote a part with fellow actor Chris Ayers in mind; Director Chris Sabat picked up on that and gave the nod to Chris Ayres. As I recall, Ayres later approached Tatum, very enthusiastically, and said words to the effect of: "I feel like this was written just for me...!! I totally get this character!!", and I think Tatum told Ayres his guess was correct. I love hearing these little back stories on the That Anime Podcast Show.

Anyway, let me wrap this up for now as I'm wandering far afield and a fresh post is called for.

Blog re-named.

As you can see from the header above, I have formally re-launched this blog as "Aspie Aggie Librarian", since my discussion of the intersection of my Asperger's syndrome and my flagging library career will be the shifting focus of this blog until further notice.


I've always been what you could characterize as the "absent-minded professor" type of person. I also recently attended a conference featuring Temple Grandin and Sean Barron on Autism & Asperger's, aimed primarily at teachers but also with good general information. I learned that I fit into a specific sub-group of Aspergians who are versatile with languages/translations/words but have a corresponding deficit in having exceedingly poor drawing skills (that is very true, I can speak to that from personal experience) and we are "so-so" at math. Also, true dat.

Also, like Temple Grandin (though perhaps not as strongly), I was always definitely better at Geometry rather than Algebra, which was always my mathematical Achilles' heel. Trig and even parts of Calculus I understood, but my lack of facility with Algebra always weighed me down like a dead albatross.

Another deep personal regret? I was always good at Chemistry. In fact I aced High School Chemistry, but I lacked the courage to take Chemistry once I got to Texas A&M. I allowed myself to get "psyched out" and didn't take it, and that was a mistake, as I probably not only would have enjoyed it, I might have done very well...and, call me crazy, maybe even made it one of my majors. A double major in Chemistry and German would've given me a far more rewarding career path than my actual degree in History and German.

Also, in some ways, I was not Aspergian ENOUGH in some respects, especially when it came to History or German Studies...If I had been able to fixate on a select narrow topic in either field and really burrow into it, study it from all angles, etc, I might have found a rewarding career in academia. I probably couldn't teach worth a damn, but I would've potentially been a better researcher. While I do have some of that peculiar Aspie focus and obsessiveness, I also have a lot of diverse interests and can get quickly bored with a topic and want to move onto the next thing that tickles my fancy. I tend to like to study a lot of things only slightly deeper than a superficial level but no one thing in any particular depth, which isn't a formula for success in the Academic world.

I remember painfully how Rice University seemed able to manage to suck all the joy and life out of a subject I thought I loved, namely German Studies. My first semester back in Grad School at UNT, I spent a lot of free time ignoring my library coursework and doing personal research on German Studies pedagogy in Higher Ed and finding researchers who agreed with me about all my pet theories about what Rice U. was doing wrong during my period of study there and how German Studies ought properly be done in these United States (hint: by not trying to reproduce verbatim the standard Germanistik curriculum of German-speaking Europe--it does not work and only leads to frustration on the part of North American students).

I did shit like this all the time, by the way; Back at Rice U, I grew disillusioned with the actual canonical curriculum and instead developed a strange passion for all things Slavic Studies...especially Czech literature but also Polish lit/film, etc. Devoted days upon days I did not have to researching these things and blowing off my actual responsibilities because they bored me.

All of it, for better or works, makes so much more sense in the light of my Asperger's diagnosis...Hell, the very year I began as a newly minted German Studies graduate student, 1994, was the very year Asperger's syndrome was formally adopted into the DSM-IV as a distinct diagnosis...that it was recognized as a milder form of Autism.

And let me tell you, in 1994, back in Houston all alone and away from my social network supports I'd built up over my 5 years at Texas A&M, I felt like a fish out of water and utterly awkward as hell. My behavior was eccentric and Aspergian in the extreme...especially my multiple failed attempts at relationships with women during this time frame...comedically bad flops and gaffes in hindsight, all of which can be laid at Asperger's door. Stuff that would be regarded as textbook Aspergian missteps today...but there was no Asperger's textbook in the mid-1990s, so all I could call myself was an "introvert" and I was stumbling around in the dark trying to understand what I was doing wrong, etc.

I had also been awkward and a bit of a social outcast among the American ex-pat community during my study abroad year in Tübingen, Germany...something I only now understand may have been partly the fault of my (undiagnosed) Asperger's syndrome...that and regional differences, the TUFTS students being stuck up assholes who looked down their noses at someone from a mere state school in the American South, and a former A&M college at that.

I've always had a hard time "fitting in", but treasured the rare occasions where I did manage to, somehow...always few and far between. I relish the times I was able to have deep, meaningful conversations with interesting people who also took me and my ideas seriously as well. I abused alcohol as a means to suppress the anxiety caused by my inherent social awkwardness and overcome my inherent shyness and introversion. Alcohol and other drug abuse is definitely a risk factor for anyone on the Autism spectrum, probably more so than for the average NT.

Since I was too erratic and mood-dependent in my study habits and self-discipline to be a stable, reliable Academic, I hoped Librarianship would serve as a back-door into getting employed at the University level, but it only worked for painfully brief spans of time...fun while it lasted but alas....now I'm a public sector employee and while it's not bad, it does still feel like a waste of my true talents and abilities and knowledge base...

I had the idea for this post driving home from work today but delayed logging on to long and drew a blank at first, but I think in the course of composing this blog post I have covered all the major points I had wanted to raise earlier...at least jot them down *someplace*, and here is as good a place as any, I figure.

I've been meeting with other Asperger's people in my local area. We're trying to put together a podcast but we're still just learning and experimenting, nothing quite ready for "prime time" yet. I just enjoy their company, and I enjoy our open discussion forum on Facebook, where we can help each other overcome problems, issues, and challenges.

I wish there was a League of Autistic Library Workers or other focus-group or advocacy organization or something...there have to be others of us out there and I'm sure they face similar challenges and difficulties in the library workplace. If we could only connect and stand together somehow...carve out a niche for ourselves within ALA...maybe start an SRRT roundtable devoted to OUR issues, etc. That's where I'd envision things going in the future, with any hope.

Until then, keep struggling, my brothers and sisters.