liv asked questions, I provide answers.

liv asked me some questions, and I think they are a delightful mix of things to get to know someone with. Here we go.

1. If you had substantially more leisure time, what would you do with it?
   
   Right now, I would probably be burning a significant amount of that time playing video games, which seems like a terrible answer, but there are a lot of games with narrative elements worth enjoying, and there are some games that I really enjoy that decide that the grind is an important part of the game, so you have to raise your characters to ridiculously high levels before parts of the postgame content become anything near unlockable. So if I had a lot more time, and a space to do it in without repercussions, I'd probably spend a lot of it getting through more of my games library and seeing if any of them are any good.
   
   I'd also probably be reading more books and listening to more media like podcasts while I was at it, because the grind is the sort of thing where you do it and you want to get caught up on other things in your life while you're at it.


2. What gives you hope at the moment?
   
   Hope is not a feeling that I'm accustomed to having, even though I use the word and its derivatives as a regular verbal tic. On a macro scale, there's some political hopes that I have in relation to the power arrangements in the United States, and perhaps a very big hope pinned on the concept that powerful people cannot evade the justice they will receive, even if it is not as immediate or as definitive as I would like it to be. I have some smaller hopes in regard to The Organization, in that as the older generation phases out and retires, we can start to get people in who have been learning about making the library space better for all people from the beginning. We're still not as good as we could be about implementing practices toward a much more diverse workplace, but perhaps as we get the older persons out, we can also get better practices in place. It's a very small hope, but it's there. Personally, there are some small hopese in my life, too - a hope that the moat does its job effectively and well, so I don't have to worry about basement water, that at some point in the future, I will not have all of my current home ownership debts hanging over my head, but new and exciting ones (or pehaps even for a small bit, none at all), and that things will work out in the end regarding my aspirations to what I want my household to be. But I don't usually let any of those hopes out to play for very long, because I'm not inclined to believe in any of them. I think I lost a lot of my hope some time ago, or I put it away somewhere for safekeeping, and the way back requires a certain amount of having enough experience of things going well for me to start believing that hope is a useful thing to have around for more than whether or not the next die roll will be something other than terrible.


3. What was the path that led you to become such a strong advocate for teenagers?
   
   Spite and malice, mostly. But not against the teenagers. Against the staff of my location. and the managers of the same. The circumstances of my arrival were certainly unique, in that my location was in a temporary locale that had been a commercial space, and as such didn't have a dedicated teen space or area. Enter someone who's taken a class or two while in college about the developing brain and the ways in which adolescents are doing things that make evolutionary sense, even if they don't appear to be making common sense to the adults around them. I also happened to have similar interests to the teenagers that were hanging around and was planning on adopting gaming in libraries, having seen how well it worked at my internships. Which led to some great relationships with the teens. And some noise, too. Which led to some complaints, too, about the noise and about the inappropriateness of the activities with the teenagers. Whom I stood by, even as I was trying to keep the noise to an appropriately dull roar, and I was getting to know them pretty well, by name, and by interest, and by skill, and all the rest. The stuff I thought I was supposed to be doing for teen services. But then came restrictions on the amount of programming, and then came the new building and new teenagers and basically things shifted. Not so much of "these teens are Silver's department, since they're so eager to work with them" -- that's always been so, but "these teens are loud and annoying and none of them have any idea how to behave inside the library," which set up the adversarial relationships that I have not been able to budge people on for a significant amount of time now. And that people might only be budging on now because they've tried it their way, and it hasn't worked, and so perhaps they'll try it my way. If I'm the one in charge of it and doing the most work on it, and otherwise being the person they can blame for it should it fall for reasons that aren't related at all to the amount of effort I'm putting into it.
   
   Plenty of things I read about teen "problems" say that a concerted effort by all the staff to get to know people by name, and ask how they are, and build appropriate relationships with them, is really a good way of getting rid of most of the "problems" that you're going to have, because you become someone other than the Authority Figure that only swoops in to deliver discipline. We shall see whether the rest of the staff is as on board with solutions as I am.
   
   So yes, a large lot of spite and malice directed at my organization is one of the ways that my advocacy stays strong. The other is that it's a lot easier and harder to be a teen in these days and ages than it was when I was younger. There's greater amounts of representation across the board of in media properties now (although how deftly and well those representations happen is still something that needs work --there's still far too many people in publishing and media that are writing or acting in cultures they're not part of, when there are perfectly good people who are part of that culture who could write, direct, act, and otherwise for those stories, but for the gatekeeping that happens and patently, demonstrably untrue "conventional wisdom" about what will sell and who can make successful media properties) and there is a greater diversity of topics that young adult and new adult literature is willing to tackle in ways that aren't the After-School Special variety. It is easier than it ever has been to find yourself in literature, in movies, in television, or on tumblr and in the AO3. What used to be the province of zines and highly coded groups with requirements of making absolutely sure that the person looking for entry is part of the group is now openly available to any child that has access to unfiltered Internet, knows how to evade the filters, or knows what to look for that will not engage the filters. With that expansion of the ability to find yourself, however, comes the ease for others to find you, and then express their opinion about whether or not you should be allowed to exist as you are, and the entirely incorrect assumption that you want such attention pushed to your devices as soon as they arrive, so that any sort of negative opinion about you can follow you through the entirety of your day.
   
   If this were only their peers doing this to them, teens might be able to find respite by sealing themselves off from their peers and existing in the company of adults who know better and will be supportive, but for more than enough of our teens, this is not the case, and they have adults who really should know better, or who were charged with their care and upbringing into adult society, contributing to the torment and misery that those teens experience. Libraries are often rated very highly as a safe place to be who you are because the adults in the library care about what you're doing in the library instead of who you are. That's important. Because the library is also often a place for teenagers to test out what sorts of people they might like to be before committing to them in adult society, or in other places in their lives.
   
   So it's a significant part spite and malice against those who don't want to give teens a place to be themselves, and a significant part of wanting to make the path for teens of this era much more smooth than the path that I went through in my own teen years, and the paths that I saw my friends go through, and the paths that I see teens of this age go through, about friendship, identity, and about having someone to talk to. If I can make their journey easier and be, if not a Sage, a shoulder, then I'm doing something right.


4. Out of all your wide reading, what are your top three sources of analysis and fascinating information?
   
   That's a good question. I'm going to be deliberately broad about this when I answer, because if I'm not, I don't get to capture everything I want to describe. First is going to be the cultivated subscription list of my Dreamwidth Circle, and that's extremely broad because each of the individual parts of that subscription list has their interests and ideas that often drill down into specifics of one sort or another. There are librarians and archivists and researchers and doctoral candidates (and actual Doctors) and scientists and clergy and practitioners of one sort or another. Some people focus on their fandoms, others on Fandom, some are really interested in politics and its permutations, some people talk about what it's like to be disabled and navigating a world that rarely gives a damn about disability of any sort. There are parents and children, caregivers of both the young and the old, found families, monogamy and polyamory, most likely some very kinky folk around, to greater and lesser publicities about it, and people for whom kink is not interesting at all. Pronouns and gender identities of infinite permutations. It blends nicely and it's all interesting and it feeds into my desire to learn more about people so that I can be better at treating everyone as people. Even if they're clearly espousing beliefs that deserve to be ground into dust beneath the bootheel of all the people affected by those beliefs.
   
   A second source of analysis and fascinating information, although it requires a bit more of filtering and source-chasing and being willing to brave the parts that are there to be reactionary and dismissive instead of trying to contribute to understanding in good faith is the Tweet-machine. But that's used more as a barometer for trends with specific points of interest rather than as the primary source for just about anything, because that space is full of people being righteously upset and critical about everything all at once, and it's sometimes an issue of being all signal all the time about important things. I had to follow a couple of cute cat picture streams just so that I could get some scheduled or unscheduled cute to give the brain a break from seeing all the terrible things all at once, one after another after another.
   
   Number three is a very small loop of blogs of various people doing media deconstruction, whose eloquence and analysis I aspire to being able to do while I'm mostly rehashing plot and pointing out things that don't make sense on Pern. Ana Mardoll, Dr. Elizabeth Sandifer, Froborr, and others provide insight into a lot of popular media and how their intended messages weren't always that great to start with and that some of them have gotten worse or have been twisted severely when viewed further away from their publication or broadcast. There's a good community around in some of those places that I enjoy being part of, and in their open threads or off-topic jaunts, there are some very interesting pieces written by the contributors or shared by the commenters to each other. If the upvotes are anything to go by, I say useful things in some of those places on occasion.


5. Teleportation or telepathy?
   
   Teleportation, hands-down. I already have enough anxieties about what people think about me that I don't really want the ability to know and remove all doubt about those things. Sure, the benefits of communication with someone at a distance over a reasonably secure line are pretty good, but I'd much rather have the ability to cover the distance in a very short amount of time and talk to them and hang out wih them in person, or to be able to do things like go home on a regular basis without having to spend the intervening time in an airplane. It would be really helpful for maintaining friendships and relationships in multiple places. And the ability to explore the world and visit places, again, without the plane time and the relative slowness of our transport would be pretty cool. Of course, this is assuming that I can be reasonably-to-pinpoint accurate with the teleporting. If it's something like "you'll aim for this spot and appear in a 50 mile radius of that spot", it's way less helpful to have the ability to teleport.
   
   Having telepathy would be good, I suppose, if everyone's opinion of me were positive, which it isn't, and perpetually positive, which it wouldn't be, because then I have to absorb the unvoiced negative things that people would think about me, and while they could be useful catalysts for change, there's still plenty more of that out there that wouldn't be with the intention of making me into a better person that would be present as well. Even with the ability to turn the telepathy on and off at will, there's still a lot of possible bad outcomes from having that particular ability that would make it a difficult gift to have.

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