Aspen Hill Library Advisory Committee, or,

Why I Don't Get Out Much

Dear Diary: Today I had yet-another experience of why I don't get out much... because usually when I go someplace, I seem to manage to convince people that autistics should be seen and not heard, and ideally not much seen, either.
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I have never been formally diagnosed as autistic, but I think it's the only thing that really explains me. I'm far from stupid, I have read piles and piles of books and remember the important facts and points of what the author intended to convey, whether or not I agree with all or part of their thesis and conclusions. Yet the fact is, there are parts of me that are, well, defective.

A lot of folks seem to read it as me not connecting with them, not observing the social norms, and many of these social norms have nothing to do with being law-abiding, with being courteous, with being considerate of other drivers or holding the door open for people carrying infants. It's more a case, at times, like I'm the proverbial talking dog. People are just so amazed that a dog is talking to them, or so the joke goes, that they don't listen to anything the dog says. The people go away marveling that they just heard a dog talking, and the dog goes away wondering why people can't seem to carry on a coherent conversation at a reasonable intellectual level.

When I was a little kid, I was often referred to by people as "little professor" and that sure fits in with a high-functioning case of Asperger Syndrome. To this day I have what I call "bibliographical memory", which is like "photographic memory", but rather than remembering images, I remember almost everything I read. And I don't remember it as I read it, by rote, I remember it as the summaries of what I understood. In recent years I have worked very hard to be able to summarize people's arguments and to remember those. And in the same way that when I do computer system administration and development, I parse the logic and data of these summaries and their facts one against the other, in part and in parcel. From the thesis and antithesis, may come synthesis, a change in kind more than in quantity, or perhaps I may be lucky enough to devise alternative approaches. And these too get thrown into the mixer, and become facts moving through logic.

I love the InterNet, both for the wealth of raw data and peer-reviewed interpretations of the data, but more than anything else, I love the fact that the interaction between me and other people on the internet is all words on a screen, pretty much. And all the better for me: on the internet, nobody knows that you're a talking dog. And hell, with my interests being what they are, the people I frequently find who have comparable interests on the same level of fascination and depth of study, well, they're talking dogs, too.

Talking dogs, so to speak, are just not very common and the chance that they'd run into each other, and have the opportunity to (so to speak) do the talking-dog equivalent of sniffing each other's butts and playing talking-dog tag, well, such opportunities are vanishingly rare.

In Real Life, having become accustomed to corresponding with all of the other (so to speak) talking dogs, I find myself trying to talk to Normal People as if they were my own kind.

And as in the old joke, the people walk away marveling -- frequently not in a very pleasant and often an evidently worried way -- that they just had a dog talk to them, and the dog walks away wondering why it is that people can't seem to have a coherent conversation.

A friend of mine once told me, waaaay back when I was young and cute and in really good shape, "you know, you are your own worst enemy", in the context of picking up ladies at bars. "What you really need to do, my friend," he told me, "is to just sit there and occasionally grunt non-commitally, and say things like 'yes,' 'no,' 'I dunno,' 'maybe,' and perhaps 'let us find out'."

I tried it. It worked like a charm:
Then I started running into gals who chided me for my lack of intellectual complexity and emotional sensitivity.

Well, the emotional sensitivity isn't something I can do much about. But I could start talking about what interested me: everything. And how it all relates.

And it turns out that that once having developed the habit of speaking my mind as if I had one, I couldn't shake that habit.

Well, Jesus the Nazirene said something to the effect of "what purpose can it serve, to hide a lamp under a bushel-basket?"

Well, for one thing, Jesus, it doesn't leave people marveling at you as if you were a talking dog.

But we are what we are:

And I digress.

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Librarians and their advocates, one might think, would understand that you cannot judge a book by its cover. Nor may one rely on reviews; the reviewer may very well have an axe to grind.

Then again, sometimes you have to wonder who exactly thought it might be a good idea to publish some titles... and once again, some books are interesting only to talking dogs.

Perhaps you'd like to play a nice game of "fetch"? I can do that, too.

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It seems that due to budget constraints imposed by the economic crisis and the budget woes of the County, funding for the libraries will overall be reduced by about $3-millions in the budget which must be proposed to the County Executive by December 1 2009. This comes on top of approximately $800K in cuts already slapped into place.

Program expenses for the libraries have been slashed by approximately one-third. A good point is raised that "smaller" libraries may tend to get short-sheeted (so to speak), and another point is raised: this year, the Aspen Hill Library has a circulation increase in aggregate of approximately 13 percent.

Retired State Senator Len Teitelbaum asks three questions. Why the rise in checkouts from the library, and what purpose does the library serve in the community... and what does the library need to be to better serve the community? (I humbly beg pardon if I have misrecorded this, I am working entirely from memory.)

Montgomery County Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett has proposed that there will be a "Library Summit" not unlike his putatively successful Senior Summit. Part of this will be the usual top-down MoCo approach of inviting "stakeholders" to a meeting at which they will be subjected to assorted speeches from keynote authorities selected primarily for their adherence to a previously articulated vision, and then the stakeholders will be split up into focus groups who will all brainstorm on how to make this happen; all dissent will be ignored unless and until they make an exceptionally solid point about why this intended approach is doomed to failure. Anyone capable of making such a point is highly unlikely to be invited.

(I speak from experience. In the "Creating Opportunities for Youth" summit in the Aspen Hill area, things came somewhat crashing to a halt when I summarized a lot of other people's observations that "we dare not move forward on these issues until we have done a lot of study on what programs will address the needs and problems of young-adult women". It turns out that in proposing proactive anti-crime and pro-success programs, the role of young women at risk of crime and of falling into criminal lifestyles had been left totally unaddressed. The decision was made that nobody knew how to proceed, and the best thing anyone could do for anyone at that time was to make sure kids -- especially crime-prone teens -- had enough to eat.)

Assuming for now -- despite SiteMeter's evidence to the contrary -- that anyone actually reads this, I propose to the local blogosphere that everyone who is anyone should start chiming in now, well in advance, about what is their vision of what the Library should be, what will be the meaning and function of the Libraries in particular and in general, and I will try to articulate some of that myself.

Look, as a talking dog -- so to speak -- there isn't any point in me going to meetings; I'll just walk away with hurt feelings and people who almost get what I'm trying to say will be wondering "now WTF was he going on about" and it'll be a rhetorical question, not anything to which they could reasonably expect an answer comprehensible to them. So I'll just try to put in some Quality Blogging on the subject, which as unread as this blog unquestionably is, will pretty much amount to a talking dog barking up the wrong tree in the wrong neck of the woods. This dog will hunt, what exactly nobody's sure, but they're mostly convinced that they'll understand it even less if I actually do catch it, again, so to speak.

I'll just try to make nice lists of links to writings by folks that regular people can understand.

Like I said, how about a nice game of fetch.

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More to come? At least this is more interesting than speculating about "Commoditized Death Obligations".

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