Day #244: I Have a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science

This isn't going to be an Election Day blog. I have been trying very hard to stay away from election news coverage tonight...it's only 6:30...the night is young...but I am NOT expecting there to be complete results tonight (that's not a bad thing, that's just a thing that happens,) and I can't imagine that it would be good for my mental health to sit there and watch pundits talk and talk about everybody's predictions. Like they haven't been doing that for over a year. 

So this isn't that post. This is a post about me...about how I came to get a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science and how I turned from that person into a person who is doing her level best to avoid anything resembling election news coverage on Election Night 2020.

I did not go to college with a plan. In fact, I feel like I can say this with some confidence now, 20+ years later, my college years were something of a bust. I don't think I was willing to admit that at the time, given how important college is supposed to be in a person's life, but I can see it now although I think this is the first time I've really admitted it.

I stumbled backwards into college. I used to save every college brochure that came to my house and look at them...for fancy private schools on the East Coast, with flashy brochures and student bodies smaller than my high school. I used to think that was my destiny. But as high school went on, there was family stuff...my mother died between my sophomore and junior years of high school...and somehow it became I wasn't going to go to a college that required me to take extra tests or...be able to plan that kind of life that East coast private colleges require. My dad and I went on one visit to a private college on the other side of the state and I did apply to, get accepted by, and consider it...but somehow it wasn't what I wanted and what I did want I didn't feel like I could get where I was at that time in my life. 

Two years after graduating college, I was in New Hampshire for the summer and went on a road trip to Hanover, walking around the campus of Dartmouth College. Which I couldn't have gotten into on a BET, by the way, even in my headiest moments the Ivy League was beyond me. But it was the first time I'd ever actually stepped onto the campus of a small town East Coast college. And I did wonder. What it would have been like if my journey had been different.

Life only moves one way and there's a whole lot of my journey in college and post college that I wouldn't want to have missed, so no regrets. Just wonder.

Anyway, I ended up following my sister to a medium sized state school that she loved and our mom had also attended. And there was nothing really wrong with it. Good size, beautiful campus...and DREADFUL advising. I mean, really bad. Just awful. If you talked to an advisor or even a student helper at all about your future while you were there it was mostly about how hard the classes you thought you needed would be to get into because the school was overcrowded and basically, good luck, here's your registration time. I still have the telephone number to registration memorized because you'd have to sit there and just keep dialing. They were working towards online registration at that time...but mostly it was just find someone who had a computer in their dorm room (it wasn't me) and use the computer to refresh and look up and see what classes had spaces and then call to see if you could get them. I was registered for Economics 206 (which was the introductory class, I know that doesn't make sense, but everyone told me take 206 and not 101, because 101 is horrid and 206 is the intro class. Like I said, bad advising) 4 times...even went to the first day a couple of those to hold my slot. But it was the class I was registered for so I could have enough credits I was carrying until the first week of class when I would finally get the classes I wanted and could drop it.

I don't want to make it sound like my education was a bust because it wasn't. I took some interesting classes, including one on world music that was great. I sang in the choir. I somehow ended up volunteering at the prop shop and ended up getting some credits building opera scenery. And I found out that college P.E. doesn't suck and took classes in lacrosse, sailing, kayaking, and windsurfing. I wasn't good at any of them, but I had a good time.

I never knew what I wanted to study. I didn't have a grand plan even when I was looking at small East coast liberal arts colleges. I liked multidisciplinary things. The only thing I ever really wanted to be when I was growing up was a writer but I didn't want to be an English or journalism major. My mom had always wanted me to be an engineer because I was good at math but somehow that faded. I wonder what would have happened if she had been around encouraging it more. I sometimes thought about law school.

Can we talk for a minute about the idea of majors for undergraduate study? Is this still a thing we need in this world? I kind of feel like college is a collision course between the 20-25% of people who really need an undergraduate major because they are going into science and tech fields and need those foundational skills...and the rest of us who need a piece of paper so we go into the world without blank resumes and then build on them. The idea of "major" is not well suited to that 75%. It never served me well.

At my college, you had to declare a major by the time you had received a certain number of credits or they put a freeze on your registration. When I got to the end of my sophomore year, I was one quarter away from that. So I quit.

I want to be clear. I never *really* dropped out of college. I always planned to go back. And I did go back. But in order to take Fall Quarter of 1999 off, I had to completely withdraw. If I reenrolled within a calendar year, I could do so without having to reapply, but I had to completely withdraw from the college when I left it. And I did. My dad, God love him, was so upset. He hated the whole idea of it. My sister had just graduated and was off to teach in China and I got on a Greyhound bus to take a seasonal job in Iowa with no degree...and no major.

In some ways, that seasonal job in Iowa set me up for life better than any college class could, because it taught me I could do it. I could travel on my own. I could make friends and a life and a community in a new place. In a lot of ways, camp in Iowa was my East Coast liberal arts college. And it DEFINITELY set me up for life in the rest of my 20s. (I turned 21 in Iowa. Actually, that's only partially true. I turned 21 at a Bette Midler concert in St. Louis with my friend Kim and her two college gay best friends. This was the 90s, everyone had a college gay best friend.)

In 2002, after walking away from my first post-college job not long before they would have walked away from me, I drove to New Hampshire with a friend who offered me an assistant camp director's job. If I had never gone to Iowa, I would never have gone to New Hampshire. And the year after that, I spent 6 months on working holiday in New Zealand, something I never would have done without having gone to Iowa and New Hampshire. I had in my early 20s what a lot of people have in college...those defining adventurous moments where you figure out who you actually are. And if I had stayed in Bellingham and declared a major like I was supposed to, I probably wouldn't have done any of it. So it's probably good for me that I had to declare a major, because it forced me to...not.

Of course, I eventually came home, and I reenrolled at Western and I had the one quarter left to decide what I was going to major in. So I did the most logical thing I could think of: I picked four classes and I decided at the end of the quarter I would major in my favorite class.

I can't remember what all four were. I know one of them was Theater Arts because of my opera set building experience and my stepmother was terrified that I would end up majoring in Theater Arts. Theater Arts 101...not so fun. I *think* one of them was probably English because, well, English just follows me. And I can't for the life of me remember the fourth. Environmental Education, maybe? Or that might have been an earlier phase. I know I took a Speech Pathology class at some point but don't know if it was then. But whatever it was, it was a class that I obviously cared a lot about. And then I took Political Science 250, American Politics, and loved that professor. He reminded me of a great high school teacher. And it turned out a Political Science major was only 60 credits, meaning I could do it and still graduate on time even after my quarter away. So in the spring of 2000, I declared a major in Political Science and like generations of Political Science majors before me I thought, hell, if all else fails, I'll go to law school. 

What do I remember about Political Science? Honestly...a little more than you'd get from a good high school social studies test. I know I took a class on the Constitution, so I'm sure more knowledge of the Constitution is stuck in my brain than the average non-lawyer...but probably not a ton. I remember our World Politics professor was generally annoyed by us and said we had know way of understanding world politics because our life experience was too limited and too American. I remember thinking...kay...then why am I here?

My favorite class was The American Presidency, which I took in the fall of 2000. Are you SEEING where I am going with this? The professor was great...I think she became department head not long after this time. She had the best laid plans for this class...from the beginning of the class until election night we would study Presidential elections and then when the election was over we would look at the presidency as a whole.

Who could have imagined the election would never be over?

I came to think of that class as my election support group. It was a Tuesday night class, so our first class was the night of the first debate, which we got to watch live and then discuss (West coast time, man, can't beat it.) Election night was, of course, also a class. Political Science majors are often campaign volunteers for different things so I remember her telling us if you have somewhere to be on election night, be there, but if you don't be here with us and we will watch it together. And we did. For a long time.

Class was over at 8. I think I left at 9, which would have been midnight East coast time. There were a dozen or so people still there. I didn't see them again until the following week. Every chair in that 50 seat classroom was full. Everyone wanted to know what this prof would say. Everyone said this was a class they couldn't miss. Not that week.

She walked in and the room went quiet. We all stared at her. I don't know what we expected her to say or do to make sense of it all, but she just looked at us and said..."Okay, so when I left last week a few of you said you wanted to stay until the results were final. I just wanna know...is everyone okay? Did everyone eventually go home? No one has been here all week, right?"

We tried to move on and study things besides the election and I actually learned a ton in that class...it was also season 2 of the West Wing, which I wasn't a religious watcher of yet in that phase of my life but knew enough about and had seen and that class gave me more context of it. And our last class...was the night the Supreme Court decision came down about votes in Florida that sealed the election for Bush. So at no point during the run of that class was the election over.

And that spring I got released into the world as a newly graduated Bachelor of Arts in Political Science...and no idea what to do with myself.

I took a job as a case manager working with high risk teens for a nonprofit...which sounds fancy, but really wasn't that different from what I had done at camp during the summer when I was in college. And a year later I was at camp, and then in New Zealand...and then in late 2003 I answered an ad in the newspaper to go work at a library on an island...and that was that. Masters degree in library science and on with life.

As for the political science piece of me....I'm a really terrible political science major. I've never worked on a campaign, not even as a volunteer. I know how sad that sounds. I've donated to political campaigns, but not often. I'm more likely to donate to nonprofits. I don't really like to talk politics...I have opinions, but I always can see the nuances of both sides and end up arguing about unpopular opinions I don't even have. I probably should have gone to law school. But I went to library school instead.

Until 2012, I was always a big news watcher/election night watcher. I also would always get irritated at how much people devalued midterm and "minor" elections and would try to follow those as well. Part of that is being a public servant. I know what a failed bond issue means. I've been there.

I think I'm more interested in the systems than the debates. I'm fascinated by how political systems work...the process of whipping votes, how things are written and voted on, the whole "how the sausage gets made" of lawmaking and politics. And how it is framed and written into the Constitution and founding documents...like how we got from THERE (there are less than 5,000 words in the Constitution, the document that determines everything)...to here.

In 2016, I was done. It didn't make sense anymore. Everything I had learned in studying political science went out the window with Trump-ism. He couldn't win. It wasn't possible based on all I knew for him to get the nomination. And it was just really unpleasant to watch. For the first time, I tuned out of the debates. I knew how I was going to vote. They were just theater.

And it was so very sad. In January of 2009 I visited my sister in Denver and we watched the Obama inauguration with mimosas. I remember cheering. I remember feeling so good about the future in that moment, and to get from there, to...well, to 2016, it was brutal. 

So here I am now. I have a degree in Political Science so I in theory understand how this works. I have a master's degree in library science so I understand fact checking and research. And fat lot of good either of them does me now.

This is the depressing election night blog I swore I wouldn't write, but I will make zero predictions. Nothing I know of political science equips me (or really anyone, despite what they will tell you,) to predict anything in 2020.

Here's what I do know: there are a lot of people getting a lot of power and making a lot of money by keeping America very divided. And it is working for them. And while I think people are entitled to their feelings and opinions, I don't wish to play into the hands of that group.

So we're gonna go watch Clue because we didn't watch it on Halloween...if Max ever goes to bed because he napped until 5. And tomorrow we will wake up...and then I don't know what happens. The only way around is through.

Media consumption: finished Ally McBeal...felt like that took forever. The late seasons, not awesome, but I watched them anyway. I started the movie I,Tonya, which I've never seen but I adore Allison Janney, but Max was in the room and not for him to watch so I will go back to that at some point. And we ended up watching Saved by the Bell the College years, because, well, I don't know why.

For reading, I've been reading some Grimm's fairy tales, which is interesting. I read a picture book about the 9/11 memorial which was sweet but corny. James and I read a superhero book that was terrible and I just started a middle grade graphic novel about a kid growing up in the 1970s who wants to be a reporter. Should be lovely and Watergate era an interesting. Really digging reading about time periods not this one just now.

Today I'm grateful that media devices have off switches, for talking to my dad and that he is feeling better today and whatever this political mess is he's still my dad, for napping with Max, and for pumpkin pie.