This makes me feel better

Apparently, being a mother has made me smarter... gee, I'd hate to think what a dumbkoff I would've been if I hadn't had kids!

Happy Halloween!

This weekend was so nicely restful... perhaps a bit too much because today it seems like there's lots of little things that I've been putting off for the last two weeks that urgently need to be done. *sigh* But that's life, right?

I've started obsessively checking my email as of last night. When I wrote my exam on Friday, my supervisor said to email it so she'd get it before Monday, which I took to mean she intended to look at it before Monday. But I haven't heard from her and it's Monday. So I'm starting to worry that this is a bad sign. I'm hoping she just had a busy weekend.

But it is certainly on my mind.

Maybe I'll go have lunch and try to take my mind off it.

Done and done

Well, obviously, the big exam is over and I survived. I actually felt pretty good while I was writing it and after (though I think feeling good after was just the lingering influence of adrenaline caused by the stress of not having enough time to say everything that I felt like I could have said).

I did almost nothing on Friday night afterwards, and then Saturday was filled with running around to soccer, SAT class, shopping, prepping food, hauling stuff over to the house where the party was actually going to be held, picking up family members from all over town and then finally starting to relax during the Halloween party itself.

Overall, it went fairly well, but we had a freak snowstorm here last night that kept a lot of people from farther away from attempting to drive in - understandably so. And my tropical costume ended up a bit chilly by the end of the night and I started putting layers on so that my costume didn't much look like a costume by the end of the night. The snow also meant that the kids couldn't do some of the activities we'd planned outside, though I think my two oldest daughters who organized and ran the kids activities did a great job of it. Kudos to them!

Now I have to mark papers that I've put aside while prepping for the test and the party - ugh - though I must say the drafts that I saw were fairly well done, so it should go quickly. Oh, and I guess I'd better buy more candy for tomorrow night too.

Countdown

Down to the last day before this exam. My memory improved slightly overnight and I've been able to remember the characters as I think of them, which is good. Now I'm trying not to worry that what I do remember will not be enough to pass the exam.

Spent the morning studying and was feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything, so I decided I would take a break (sort of) and go in to school, do some more work there before teaching, then come home and do some more - my theory is that breaks are good and necessary.

Problem is, because of the MBTA's complete and utter inability to adhere to anything remotely approaching their published schedules, it took me over two hours to get to school - thank god I'd left early! But now I've only got a few minutes between now & heading over to start up class. My plan to write out one of the questions before I teach (in about an hour, since that's the time I'll have allocated to do it during the exam) is shot. I studied the whole two hours, but the thing that pisses me off is that had I not left early, I would've been late for wherever I was going.

Riding the bus around here is an absolutely demeaning experience - there seems to be an attitude with the transit company that only low-life losers ride it. Not adhering to published schedules, which means you either wait around a lot, leave early for places because you can't trust that you'll get there in the advertised time, or be late for stuff isn't the only problem. Frankly, I really resent what this implies - that I am not worthy of the respect or consideration of the transit company. As a customer, I'm not important. My time is not important. My comfort is not important. Getting my money's worth is not important.

I've had bus drivers close the door in my face as I run up and refuse to re-open, even though I am right there and they are not moving (what's the rush, you're not on some kind of schedule or something, are you?). I've been on a bus where the air conditioning system leaked all over the rear half of the bus, and continued to leak onto the passengers who were trying to squeeze into the clean spaces - two waiters, in their white shirts who were heading to work had less-than-white crap all over their uniforms before escaping that bus. This doesn't include the countless missed transfers, missed stops, late arrivals, and even non-existent buses.

No wonder this is the land of the car - no one can trust anyone else to get them where they need to go on time.

This can't be good

I just spent twenty minutes trying to remember the first name of an author whose book I will need to quote in all three of my exam questions. I really hope this doesn't happen during the exam!

Stress management

Okay, just keep repeating "stress avoidance is not the same as stress management... stress avoidance is not the same as stress management... stress avoidance is not the same as stress management"

Okay, now back to work....

Exam fever

So, if you've been reading for a while, you know I started this blog while preparing to write the preliminary comprehensive exams a two years ago. Now I'm preparing for the big ones, the REAL comprehensive exams, and although it feels great to say, "I think I've read enough books that I can write this exam" the anxiety has cranked up a notch (or two or three or twenty) now that I've set a date.

Yep, this time, a week from now, I'll be frantically trying to remember everything I'm trying to review between now and then.

I'm very nervous.

I've started having trouble getting to sleep - not insomnia per se - but just trouble clearing my mind of everything to the point where I can sleep. My body's tired. My eyes are tired. But my brain's still going 100 miles an hour thinking about all the stuff I just read and worrying about whether I can put it all together during the exam. I'm seriously considering picking up drugs that will help me fall asleep, but I'm also worried about trying a drug I've never taken before at a critical time like this in case my body doesn't respond well to it.

Last night I managed to sleep without drugs through a combination of actually having someone beside me as I went to sleep (not having him around is no doubt exacerbating the not-sleeping problem) and watching the 'extras' on Land of the Dead until 12:30 in the morning. Did you know that Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) had a cameo in the movie? I didn't. Never would've figured out it was him either, if they hadn't put it on the DVD.

Watching movies sure reduces the stress... at least while I'm watching. When I stop and realize how much time I just spent staring at the tv, the panic comes back though. And who said grad school couldn't be exciting?!

He's everywhere!

Dracula, that is... I just finished reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which is about a hunt for Dracula, and I've been reading Stoker's Dracula online as a blog.

Just now on the bus, I saw a guy with two puncture wounds complete with droplets of blood tatooed on his neck... now that's just weird!

I actually miss this life

A good friend forwarded me this article "Meet the Life Hackers" which at first glance, sounds kind of threatening since hacking disrupts the integrity of the program. But the article is all about how our work lives are 'hacked' up by interruptions in the workplace.

All this made me feel much better. I've obviously been watching too many zombie movies lately, and reading too many novels about Dracula because the title spooked me at first!

I realized as I read it, that it wasn't psychotic or strange that I missed the job I held before I started this doctoral program, even though it drove me nuts sometimes because there was just so much to do! The article explains what multitasking does to us:

The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging [from incoming email messages] makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.

"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.

The article focuses on Microsoft, because it is some of their programmers who they interviewed for the article, but it notes later that many of the 'life hackers', people trying to reduce the chaos in their working lives, actually prefer Apple because of its simpler, more user-friendly designs. Microsoft has focused on performance, but from the standpoint of the program, not the user.

Microsoft had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they were working, and why?

To figure this out, [Mary Czerwinski] took a handful of volunteers and installed software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day long, recording every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.

Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.

This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

How many times have you asked yourself that question? I know I have more times than I can count. So, interruptions are okay, they make us feel vitalized and in charge, but they're also inefficient, causing us to forget what it was that we were doing before we were interrupted. Part of that disruption arises because of how and when we are disrupted.

In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.

Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are "co-located" - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly.

So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up - to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed.

One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot - the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.

Some of the programs they're working on are really interesting, and seem to promise to maximize a worker's productivity at his or her individually attuned screen, though it appears that much of the testing has involved employees in technologically-heavy workplaces, who are very savvy about computers and probably use them quite efficiently in the first place. I'd be curious to see how that might change in a less technologically savvy workplace (such as the last one I was at - many employees did not turn their computers on till half way through the day, and there was only one machine isolated from the internal network that connected to the internet - yeah, they were paranoid and not willing to spend money on protecting the whole system).

But I still actually miss the busy office life, where I interacted with dozens of other people every day, either electronically, or in person. These days, I'm lucky if I talk to three people all day who aren't family or students (not quite the same kind of interaction). Being a grad student is such a solitary activity, I'd actually relish some interruptions once in a while!

There I go, scaring myself again

Just sent off a message to my supervisor requesting a date for the first comprehensive exam. Ack! I don't know that I'm ready for it, but I've read everything, made some questions, and my supervisor says go for it, so here I go!

Things that go bump in the night

Heard the strangest sound last night at about 1 o'clock in the morning.

You the sound that a bug zapper makes when a bug flies into it? Well, that sound, but multiplied by about 100. The sound happened twice in a row, and since it reminded me of a bug zapper, it made me wonder just pests my neighbors might be trying to get rid of.

The challenges of inside out

Right now I'm trying to talk about Americana with my freshmen students and getting them to try to step outside of their own country to take a look at it from another perspective. I suppose subjecting them to Jean Baudrillard's "Utopia Achieved" chapter from America might be a difficult way to do that, but with the requirements for the course, it's one of the few options that I can use to do so.

I'm discovering in part, that some of it is really hard for the usual reasons, that it's hard to see your own country for what it is, but also because many of my students know so little about their own country.

We were talking about American icons and symbols today (they watched Pulp Fiction last week, which at least gave us a starting point) and it struck me that although they're finding the Baudrillard reading difficult, an outsider's view is what it just might take to get them stretching themselves ouside their comfort zones to critically look at these icons. I've been trying to convey to them the use of the outsider's view for getting you to look beyond your assumptions, but some of them aren't buying it.

Speaking of the outsider's point of view, I ran across an interview with Neil Gaiman (and Susannah Clarke) in which he talks about how he came up with some of the ideas for American Gods, and I think he summarized the experience well.

For me, my previous adult novel, "American Gods," was very much about what happens when you're English and you come to stay in a country that you've seen in movies and on TV and think you know everything about, and suddenly you're noticing these odd little bits that nobody else notices because they grew up with it. And you think it's weird....The English grow up with pickle-flavored potato chips, so I probably wouldn't think to put them in a story.

I know for myself, even coming from a country whose popular culture is often indistinguishable from that of the U.S., that there have been times when I've been surprised by little differences, and other times when I've said something, or made reference to something that I thought was a common cultural reference, only to find out that people here don't know what I'm talking about.

Of course, most of my cultural references mean nothing to my students since I'm almost a generation older than they are, but I still think they can only begin to understand the Baudrillard essay by stepping out of their own comfortable space in order to engage with it in a way that doesn't take umbrage at the things he says in the essay. There is one student in the class who was born elsewhere, and the majority have travelled outside of the U.S., so I have hope that it will be possible to get them out of the headspace in which they simply assume that their way of life is universal, but it's just very difficult.

It will be interesting to see whether they manage to accomplish this when I get their drafts next week.

I'm such a lit geek

I'm so excited! I just got a ticket to go hear Salman Rushdie discuss his new book, Shalimar the Clown... and guess who's interviewing him... guess... Homi K. Bhabha! I almost can't believe it!

I may pay through the nose for rent living in this place, but there are compensations about living near to Harvard, like listening to these two guys together... it makes it almost worth it!

Horror-ific weekend

Spent much of the weekend at Rock and Shock, more for the shock than the rock. Neither of us recognized any of the bands playing, and the kind of music that usually accompanies horror conventioneers isn't usually my style anyway.

It was definitely a Romero-fest, which why I was surprised that I didn't see my zombi-phile buddy there, because I first heard about it from him.

Since I've never been to a horror convention before, I was interested, not only in the offerings of the convention, but in fan watching as well. There's something about genre fans that fascinates me - the whole identificatory emulation/adoration that seems to be driven by a desire for power. What's interesting about horror fans, is that unlike sf/f fans, who identify with the hero, in order to identify with the power, the horror fan must identify with the monster. If you know me in real life, I've probably yakked about genre fans before, but this up-close and personal view gave it a new twist.

There were definitely some fun bits - we went to a few Q&A's - Day of the Dead cast, The Fog cast (original) and Land of the Dead cast + Romero, where the man said some very interesting things about the politics of Land (you can catch them on the extras section of the upcoming DVD), and the philosophy of, and I quote, "You stop killing us and we'll stop eating you" that drives the ending of the movie. And yes, he left it open ended in the hopes that there would be demand for a sequel, though the box office numbers have likely ruled that out.

We also watched the original The Fog introduced by Adrienne Barbeau (which yes, I realize I could've just gone and rented), the unrated original version (not the sanitized DVD version) of Re-Animator, which had a couple of shocking extra scenes, and the slightly longer than theatre-version of Land of the Dead that will be available on DVD next week. So overall, it was worth it. I especially appreciated being able to see Land, because when it came out, I was busy enough in the two? weeks that it actually played around here, that I didn't get to see it before it was gone.

A fun weekend, considering the weather was horrific the whole time!

Yeah, it sucks

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs. Some of the things being poor is about:

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn't bought first.
Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America North America that's worth a damn.
Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.
Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.
Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.
Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

I would add a couple of other things to the list:

Being poor is walking home from the grocery store with a backpack instead of paying $3 for a cab ride 'cause you need that money for more food.
Being poor is hating television because it's free, but it's depressing because no one on it seems to have the problems you do.
Being poor is knowing the kids will be disappointed with the gift you could afford.
Being poor means saying no to invitations because you don't want to ask how much it will cost.
Being poor is hoping the kids don't get sick enough to stay home from school.

Good friends

There's been a song running through my head for much of the day, which goes like this:

Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold

Yes it's short. I learnt it at camp when I was younger and we used to sing it as a round (you know, where half the people start singing the first line and the other half start the first line after the first group reaches the second one). It's nice as a round, though when it's stuck in your head, it gets a touch annoying because it's so short.

But it got me thinking about friends and being very happy for the ones I have. In the last three days, I've been offered a ride (twice), been taken out for lunch, gotten a long email detailing my friend's life, gotten invited to dinner, and had one really, funny forward sent to me.

Maybe not monumentous occasions or events, but really nice gestures from friends, of both the new and old type.

A bit of silver and a bit of gold.

To my friends, thanks for being you.

The joys of graduate school

Not only are we stacked 5 or 6 deep in our tiny offices, but now someone in an office nearby is playing some of the most god awful sentimental music and it's making it hard to concentrate.

And to think I took my walkman out of my bag this morning to make room because I didn't think I'd need it to drown out annoying noises - yeah, right...

New Language developments at the EU

A European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English"..

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German lik zey vunted in ze forst plas.