Not a new year resolution

Quite a few months have passed since I have not written anything in this diary, or in any diary. These months have been quite interesting, and they, or rather my experience during them, would have been worth uttered, even vaguely, in this journal. But where does self-censorship begin, and, equally important, where does it end? Not that this so-called censorship would have been an impediment for me to write. At times, I asked myself whether I would have the will–and, perhaps, the strength–to resume writing, any kind of writing, after the MLIS graduation, or during the wearing job hunt. One could find any self-justification to give up.

Obviously, one does not have to write every day, but there has to be a commitment–the commitment to continue jotting thoughts here, on this electronic page. In  one of my readings, I encountered an interesting position, which, in the meanwhile, it became mine since I have most likely unconsciously changed it into a series of questions: is blogging a fashion– and, for some, it is– or some sort of exhibited drivelling with an intellectual pretence or, more popularly acceptable, an expressed need to discover oneself in one environment or another? In my case, I have started to blog because some of my colleagues at the library school were doing it, so I gave in to fashion. Not unusual, here. As for the second question, I do not know: I hope not, or not as far as I am concerned. Yes, I will go with the third one, which I can think of, metaphorically, as a mental seed that grew somewhere in some corners of my mind, and I found some answers while I was writing my previous entries. But I feel that I need to write again, and, I hope, not after significant gaps. Oh yes, I could always find a reason to avoid writing: in fact, finding reasons not to write is one of the easiest tasks, a sweet self-deception. Understandably, though, as writing is truly difficult.

And, although I can keep these entries to myself, I have decided to write in the open, as if an exhibition of this sort will almost force me to write. How else can I explain this?

Some thoughts

So, the real job hunting has begun—it had to. Caught in my daily activities (important, though, as they relate to my imminent move), I have almost forgotten what it means to persistently look for certain librarian positions, this search being a nerve-wracking game. From this distance, and from my experience, it seems that I will most likely find something through informal channels.

 

Will not forget an idea, or it is perhaps a combination of several ideas leading to one, derived from my mockery of social Darwinism: it’s not the smartest, or the most capable, who survives, but the one who can easily adapt. That would not pass in the elitist circles of our so-called meritocratic society. Or would it?

 

 Still, there is another thought I meant to put into writing these days, but it seemed so hard to pin down: I’m coining the discourse instability. To begin with, our thoughts are mostly built on words, so the more words we have stored through education, the finer is our capacity to express thoughts. Nothing new here, obviously. In writing, though, if we have the time and willingness to learn new words, we can almost perfectly tailor them to follow thoughts, since we can consult a dictionary, or a thesaurus, hoping to match words and sentences with our thoughts (at least, it is reasonable to hold this belief). What about speech? In this case, because we hardly have the capacity to remember, or remember to use, that lexical and syntactic variety that some of us can access, then we are prone to gross cognitive approximations (in the kind of societies where the written culture is so entrenched).  

 

With the exception of wishfully knowing as many concrete nouns and verbs as we can, which is already a prowess–the educated unilinguals’ one of the finest qualities–, we may feel almost helpless in trying to reach the rest of the words, if they exist, lying somewhere in a deep, almost inaccessible well. My take is that only constant reading and, especially, writing will refine our ability to effectively tap into, or fill, that well; otherwise, we resort for groping for the only few words residing in our short term memory, as if our body, or biological self,  tires if does not exercise–an apparent paradox here.  That is to say, the discourse instability may reflect a lack of practice, the opposite of which (that is, practicing to stabilize the speech) only a chosen few can afford regularly. Some of them may find the social Darwinism quite acceptable.