I want Diana Rosenberger to know that I actually enjoy helping with coding and that I hope I make sense when I try to help. As she knows, that’s the whole thing about teaching is that anxiety when you know a thing but am unsure of if you can effectively articulate it so that another person can know a thing.

I enjoy coding a lot and wish I had kept up with it more as an adult. My father was a COBOL programmer for the Air Force and I knew he was a “computer programmer” but never knew what that meant, so I asked him when I was twelve and we sat at the table for an hour as he tried to explain it in his programer-ese language but I didn’t get it. Finally, I was like, “so how would you make the letter ‘A’ appear on the screen?” On our old-ass MS-DOS text-graphics-only no-hard-drive-have-to-boot-off-a-floppy computer, he pulled up GW-BASIC and wrote 10 PRINT “A” and ran it. Then he showed me a few other commands and I was hooked. I made a few coose-your-own-adventure games and, when we finally got a computer capable of graphics, I made programs that just made abstract art on the screen. I wanted to get into making games with graphics, but I needed something more powerful than BASIC and I needed a better understanding of math, which wasn’t my forte.

Still, it makes sense to me on a level that few things do. When I took a symbolic logic class as an undergrad, I realized that all those operators “If, and, or, xor” etc, were not radically different from what Aristotle was doing back in his day. I got a higher grade in that class than I did in any class I took as an undergrad. It made me decide to be a philosophy major, until I had an unfortunate accident with a philosophy of language class and realized that analytic philosophy was too rigid for my tastes.

None of that is to brag but to say that the coding is very enjoyanble but it also makes me think more about my anxieties/imposter-syndrome/insecurities as an English PhD student. I feel like theory should come to me as easily as making a ball move on the x-axis and y-axis simultaneously. I wonder if my dad had exposed me to Derrida as a 12 year old, if I wouldn’t be having a much easier time with the theory half of this class and my other classes. (Actually, exposing a 12 year old to Derrida is probably something that should put your custody rights at risk.)

Wow, this got really self-pitying really fast, didn’t it?

In my other post, I talked about how I might be a closet positivist. The thing is, it’s hard to be comfortable in the logics of coding and not start to look at the world in deductive ways, and once you’re looking at things deductively, then you notice how some stuff is inductive, and then you’re in the empiricist club.

But, simultaneously, I know that, just because it’s more comfortable to think of everything as a really complicated boolean operation, that comfort belies an intellectual laziness. In other words, if we choose our world views based on how warm and cozy they make us feel, and how little anxiety they present, then it would appear we aren’t being intellectually rigorous but instead, we are taking an epistemological anesthetic.

So, out of some sort of masochism, I decided that I would be an English major and try to see past logic. That has led me to ideology critique and identity politicsd, though I see a few cracks in both of those now too. So, now I find myself on unsure ground as far as my theoretical framework goes, which makes the coding all the more comforting and reminds me even more of the distance between that comfort and my job as an English student.

Damn, there goes the self-pitying again.