Thursday Thirteen #23

Thirteen Research Projects Which Will Be Impacted By the Impending Library Closure.Part 1: General Subject Areas 1. Philosophy. Since my entrance into this field was instigated by my becoming aware at age 35 that I had never learned to think for myself, I first set out to learn what it meant to think and what it meant to know and how to judge the reliability of knowledge. I later learned that this was called epistemology. 2. Psychology. Thinking combined with behavior combined with inter-personal dynamics. A total playground for a novelist, right? I mean, a case could be made that the first novelists were the first psychologists. 3. Writing: Craft & Lifestyle & Business 4. Comparative Religion and Spiritual Traditions. 5. Geography (which for me is about much more than locating a place on a map. It is also about the inter-relations between nations and to understand that you have to know something of each ethnic group and nation's history, culture, government and economics.) 6. Civics (my catchall term that covers: politics, government, policy, elections and activism from local to global and includes sociology and theory of government, the American Constitution and civil rights.) 7. Economics: from Micro to Macro from personal to global (which is inextricably entwined with politics as it is a subclass of sociology.) I began studying this intensely in 2001 after the prediction my husband made before the 2000 presidential elections that if Gore did not win, investors would pull their money out of the tech industry and instead of cashing in his stock options he could be cashing a final paycheck before the first anniversary of the new president's inauguration. He said this in late summer of 2000. He cashed the final check in April of 2001 and we spent two weeks homeless on the streets of the Silicon Valley in August. A hard way to learn how much economics matters. Not to mention elections. 8. History. There are a lot of subcategories here. My favorites are Ancient History, History of Christianity, History of Western Civilization, Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean, American History and Russian History.. My most recent focus though has been on Middle Eastern History. And I was about to delve into India and the Orient. 9. Linguistics and Languages. The place where words come out to play in the field of the Logos. 10. Science (Physics, Geology, Biology, Chemistry, Environment, Evolution, Astronomy, Oceanography, Meteorology and Medicine are among those that I have immersed myself in for a period of weeks or months.) I read the books written for laymen. I am spooked by equations and formulas but good writers can get the concepts across without them. 11. Computer and Information technology, including Information Science, which is another Interdisciplinary study (see below). 12. Comparative Story: From ancient mythology to modern movies and TV series. 13. Several Interdisciplinary Studies,including Integral Thought and Futurology and Systems Theory. This is where my passion is as I was less than five years into my intensive autodidactism (which was instigated in 1992 by the traumatic break with the fundamentalist religion I was raised in) when I reached some kind of mental tipping point after which I could never again read in any subject without making multiple connections to other subjects. My essay expressing this experience, Emerson Whispering Sweet Somethings In Einstein's Ear, was written in 1998 to inaugurate the first debut of my Joyread web site. *************** Such dreams I had for Joyread and its sister sites Joywrite and Joystory. Next week in Part 2 I will list research projects on topics with a much narrower focus, several of which are directly related to realizing my original vision for these sites, including the intent to find a way to turn my passion into income. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. Mama Duck 2. amy 3. Susan Helene Gottfried 4. Rashenbo 5. Raggedy 6. Candy Minx 7. Gattina 8. Christine 9. Tink 10 L^2 11. scooper (leave your link in comments, I'll add you here!)

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