In sickness and celebration

Brief blog hiatus due to illness and daughter's graduation - congratulations!

Grandparents came to town for the ceremony and banquet. I had to teach during the ceremony, which sucked, but I was there for the banquet. Reverse of what happened for oldest daughter's grad, so I guess at least I'm being consistent in being 1 for 2 for both.

I feel reaffirmed in my belief that my students should get a lecture on social speaking situations in my Public speaking class, even though it isn't required in the curriculum. There were some people at the banquet - full grown adults, older than me by the looks of it - who have NO idea how to give a good toast! The teacher who toasted the grads strained my patience, and I've got a pretty good tolerance for long-windedness....

I anticipated the work disruption of guests and grad, but I didn't anticipate the illness (nothing serious, just made me totally unproductive for a while), so tomorrow's my only dissertation day this week. Bummer. I'll just have to make it a good one! Wish me luck...

Not sure what this one means...

You know how when you're anxious about an exam, or a new semester of teaching, you sometimes have those dreams where you're in the exam or the classroom and you're unprepared?*

I had a similar kind of anxiety dream last night, but it was all mixed up. I dreamt that I had signed up for a class on Monday afternoons, right after I teach. I was running around trying to get to the class. I had lost my schedule, but I'd been to it once, so I was trying to find the classroom. Oh, and for some reason, I had a lap dog with me and one of my own students kept following me trying to ask questions and he just wouldn't get it that I needed to find my own class!

Weird! I've never had one of these kinds of dreams where I mix up my roles as teacher and as student before... and what's with the lap dog?

*I had a unusual version of this kind of dream before my first husband and I renewed vows. I was sewing my own dress, and in the dream, I still had to finish sewing it an hour before the ceremony was supposed to take place!

Two great things that go good together

When in New Orleans, we spent the later part of an evening walking down the street, looking into store windows as we made our way to Walgreen's for some sunburn relief in a tube.

Along the way, we saw a place called The Melting Pot, that advertised itself as a fondue. It was closed, so all we could see were a couple of tables and a bar, and we thought what a nice little neighborhood restaurant it seemed. The next morning, one of those lovely booklets of "places to go, things to see" rated it quite highly, which surprised us, because based on the short store frontage, we hadn't thought it was that big a place to warrant a mention.

But it sounded like fun, so we made a reservation.

It was magnificent! (and much larger than it appeared!)

The meal is more than just food - it's a production in and of itself. We spent three hours there! If you go for their full experience package, you get a cheese appetizer fondue, a main course fondue, and a chocolate fondue for dessert! Sooo yummy!

Unfortunately they're only in the U.S., but since Ruth's Chris has now come to Canada, perhaps The Melting Pot will too. (If you're in the Boston area, there's one set to open this fall in Back Bay) I would definitely recommend trying the place out because the one in New Orleans was fabulous!

The title of the post does say there were two good things that go together. The other was the Conundrum white table wine. Yes, something labelled "white table wine" usually isn't worth mentioning, but the Conundrum table wine is named so because it's a blend of varietals that's very skillfully mixed to produce a white wine with an absolutely yummy smell and a complex of flavours that make you wish you could just gobble it all up!

The wine complemented the fondue very well, which is hard to do because a fondue has so many different flavours going on, but because the wine's a varietal mix, it's got so many fruits and scents, it actually worked really well. It would be an excellent patio wine, all on its own too.

I took a trip to my favourite wine store when we got home and grabbed their last two bottles of the 2006. It cost a bit more than I usually pay for wine, but I think this one will be worth it. If you can afford one wine splurge and you're looking for something unique in a white, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try. You probably haven't tasted a wine like it before!

One dollar short and one day late... a.k.a A room of one's own

This week, as I yet again squeeze in a bit of work here, a bit of work there, a bit of parenting here (and there), some household maintenance, putting out fires (not literally), trying to realize vacation plans, I realize that I either:

Want a wife

Want a room of one's own

After all, who wouldn't?

But then I thought about it, really thought about what it would be like. Which led me to the conclusion that I can't imagine what it would be like.

I don't literally mean having a room of my own or having a wife. I mean the idea that lies behind those phrases: to have the freedom from responsibility that would allow me to ignore everything else and just concentrate on the work I need to do. That's essentially what Woolf is saying in wanting a room of one's own - it's the desire for a space, behind a door, where no one knocks unless the house is on fire. When you, the person behind the door, are the one who decides when the door gets opened again.

I think I cannot imagine what it would be like because I've been working in a piecemeal fashion for so long that it's become a habit that I don't know I could break. Though since I haven't had the luxury of trying, I'm not going to say I couldn't. If I had the opportunity, I'd give it my best shot.

A few weeks back, when I was interviewed about being a single parent and student, the interviewer asked if I'd been accommodated when asking for extensions etc. and I'd replied I'd never asked for one then (and only once ever asked for one, but that was years later after I'd taken a battering during the qualifiers). I explained that since I'd never not been a parent while in school, I'd just developed the discipline to start projects early so they'd get done on time.

After all, when you've got kids that have got to be fed, washed, sent to school, supervised, whatever else, you can't just pull an all-nighter and expect the next day to be normal (or even survivable!) The discipline to start early became a necessity, and the habit stayed with me, even after the kids were old enough to fend for themselves if I had pulled an all-nighter. In fact, I was teased in graduate school for being the one who had the all the reading done all the time (not that I actually did, but I got teased that I did).

But I've always had this image in the back of my mind about how my child-less peers approached their work - writing and reading when the mood hit them, sometimes for days at a time, eating leftovers, or surviving on noodles and coffee, able to throw themselves into a project wholeheartedly and achieve a kind of intensity of scholarly activity that I could never hope for in the piecemeal I-can-read-this-one-article-while-I-cook-supper way that I studied.

But now I'm wondering. Would such intensity make me a better scholar? Would being able to ignore my family members and their bodily needs for food, clean clothes etc. have made me smarter than I am? Would I struggle as much as I do if I'd had that time to throw myself intensely into my work?

I always feel like that country song "one dollar short and one day late" and I gaze jealously at this image of freedom, where I can work on the dissertation for days on end, only emerging for the breaks *I* need, to eat the food *I'm* hungry for, to stop when *I* want to stop. Not when I have to make dinner, or pick someone up from somewhere. Not to have those thoughts intrude into my reading that I have to remember to pay that bill, or put the garbage out tonight, or pick up that item from the store before Friday.

Pathetic, ain't it? My fantasy is a life where I can work whenever I want to!

You don't own your body

Did you know that you don't own your own body? Legally speaking, that is. You have control over it, but you don't own it.

To me that's odd. Commonly speaking, we think that our bodies are ours to do with as we please. The idea that a woman's body is her own to decide what she does with it has been a cornerstone of feminist thought for decades now. And it's true, a woman does have the right to control her own body.

But she doesn't own it.

That's thanks to patent law. If tissues from your body are used to create a vaccine, or a treatment, or a cell line for research purposes, you no longer 'own' any part of that subsequent process. You might own the raw material i.e. your body, and you can control that raw material. But as soon as a bioscientist takes that raw material and applies a process to it, which the scientist patents, you no longer have any interest (legally speaking) in that technology and cannot control how it is used, or ask for compensation for it.

The way our legislation has been written, tissue that is removed from the body is considered waste, which means the person whose body it was removed from no longer has a claim over it.

I'm simplifying things significantly, but this is the general interpretation of the law as seen in John Moore vs. the Regents of the University of California. Having read segments of the judgment, I suspect this is the court case that Michael Crichton is referring to in Next, his novel about the patenting of human life. If you're looking for an airplane novel, this one's a good one. Though, then again, most Crichton novels are airplane novels.

But as you're reading the novel, just keep in mind that although you control the body that's reading it, you don't own it.

Is there a protocol for this?

Okay, so my dissertation supervisor has had my introductory chapter for about two months now. She indicated when I passed it off to her it would be a few weeks.

Ordinarily, I would not consider this a problem. But I've just finished drafting chapter 1 and I'm not sure what I should do. Should I wait to get the introduction back before sending the first chapter? Should I send it off anyway? Am I being annoying if she has two chapters at one time? Should I email (again)? (I emailed a week ago to say chapter 1 was in the final stages and to ask this very question - no response yet)

I can continue to work, but frankly, chapter 2 is also on the doorstep - that is, it needs one additional small section added and some serious trimming of the rest, but most of the content is there. If I don't send off chapter 1 soon, there's a very real possibility that chapter 2 will be sitting around as well, waiting to be sent off!

So, any ideas out there what the protocol for this kind of thing is?

Very excited!

Although teaching post-secondary is an activity that ostensibly is part of the "life of the mind", I find myself starving for real intellectual engagement. It's at times like this that I really regret having left the city of my doctoral program because that was at least one place to get that.

So you can imagine my delight at the prospect of a summer free from teaching in which I can live the "life of the mind" without also trying to explain to a student how 2 pages about how video gaming is so cool falls short of a 5 page argumentative essay!

I of course will still be doing my online work - and we've just been approved for a major project that's set to begin in about a month - but I also anticipate having much more time available for doing what I love.

Now I just have to get through the next 5 weeks...

A new distraction

I've found myself reading a couple of early twentieth century precursors of science fiction over the last couple of weeks. It's really quite fascinating stuff. It has me wondering if they two samples I read: The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle and Man's World by Charlotte Haldane (wife of J.B.S.) are representative of Edwardian and early twentieth century sf.

In the nineteenth century, the "scientific romance", what is commonly understood to be the precursor to the gee-whiz-bang rockets-and-mad-scientists science fiction of the mid twentieth century (when the genre really took off) was preoccupied with biology. If you think of the work of H.G. Wells - War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, or even Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde - they all employed ideas of evolution, devolution, and social Darwinianism in their subtexts.

The stuff we think of most often when we think science fiction - and the stuff Margaret Atwood thinks of when she defines herself as NOT a science fiction writer - really came into being in the 1940s and 1950s - the BEMs (bug eyed monsters) and rocket ships, Flash Gordon, and all that jazz. The sf of this period is really more about physics than it is about biology.

[which makes me wonder, will science fiction ever go through a phase where it's all about chemistry?... I can't imagine, but it seems a bit unfair for chemistry to not have its moment in the sun]

This stuff from the 1920s that I'm reading still retains a lot of that social Darwinism, but the new emphasis on physics is also creeping in as well. The narratives are a real sharp contrast with the modernist texts we usually think of from the period - Woolf, Joyce etc. and I would love to read more of it to figure out exactly how those differences play out.

Since I've not studied modernism extensively, it's a project that I'm not equipped to undertake right now, but I do think it might be an interesting avenue to pursue after the dissertation gets finished. See? I am working hard at keeping myself from getting distracted. It's just there are so many really interesting things to read!

This is why driving downtown is nasty

According to this news report, this weekend marked the longest continuous concrete pour in Canadian history. The pour is only second to one in Dubai and another in Vegas. Now that's an unusual event!

It also explains why it was IMPOSSIBLE to drive downtown this weekend. The Bow-Encana project has been wreaking havoc with Calgarians' driving patterns for many months already, but combined with the blocking off of additional streets for the Mother's Day run, it was impossible to get a car through the downtown core yesterday morning.

I know. I tried. I guess we should've taken the train down to the Tower for the Mother's Day run! On the bright side, it was finally *not* raining, and the sun was not overpowering, so it was a perfect day for running. I even finished the course about 2 minutes faster than I thought I would, so I'm happy with the results. (Daughter is less than happy with her performance, though I think it was stellar.)

But we should've taken the train!

2 down 5 to go

I've just finished the rough and dirty draft of chapter 1. Woohoo!

My word count actually went down - which is probably a good thing given how overly wordy I was getting, and it should drop even more as I edit chapter 2, which is also rough and dirty, but needs a section added as well as a bunch of stuff trimmed down or moved to footnotes.

So here's where I stand right now:

Introduction - is with advisor, who's had it for several months now, but since the BIG conference is this weekend, I'll start bugging her for comments in a couple of weeks.

Chapter 1 - rough and dirty draft - by that I mean all the arguments are there and all the sources I wish to use, but I've paid little attention to what it sounds like. I figure a couple of weeks of editing, adding missing pieces, reading a bit more, and it will be draft ready for advisor's eyes.

Chapter 2 - also rough and dirty draft - this was actually the first thing I wrote, last year, and so now that I'm getting a better sense of the layout of the whole thing, it needs some serious modification. But like chapter 1 most of the argument is there and the majority of the sources, so it should only require a few weeks to a month of editing to get it advisor-draft ready.

Chapter 3-6 - bits and pieces strewn across these - each chapter has about 3000 words that sketches some of the argument, but there will need to be a lot more reading before I can begin to write any of them.

So I should be on track to have 4 of the 7 chapters completely drafted by the end of the summer, which is my goal right now. I figure I can then complete edits and the remaining three chapters in the following year and be a doctor by this time next year! That would be a very gratifying feeling!

Right now my challenge is trying to balance the amount of paid work I can do during the next year against the need to get this stuff written. I'm really undecided about what to do. I enjoy both of my jobs, but one has been really slow lately, and other other is changing significantly in form, and I don't know if I can feel comfortable within that change. Right now I don't need to really make any decisions immediately, but I will need to make them in the next few months.

But in the meantime I'm going to go celebrate the completion of a draft with... oh, wait, I suppose catching up on the laundry, recycling, and exercising aren't really celebrations, are they?

Language-dependent reading

In my wanderings through the linkages of the interwebs I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal. "How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language" describes the research of Maryanne Wolf at Tufts.

The argument in this article is that the brain's activities during reading are different based on the language being read - the implication is that reading disabilities like dyslexia are more common in languages like English than Chinese, because the relationship between word and sign in English is more abstract. Interesting. Wolf's book, Proust and the Squid, is on my amazon list, and this article is making me think I have to move it up in priority, because it sounds absolutely fascinating.

People are idiotic in real life

Subtitle: Why I find Cloverfield annoying and will probably find Diary of the Dead annoying.

In real life, people say idiotic things when surprised, like "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Did you see that? ohmygodohmygodohmygod"*

Realistic? Yes. Entertaining? No.

Fiction film is still fiction. I like my fiction to be have a bit more intelligent dialogue than what we often spout in real life. Perhaps it's a bit of elitism. If writers are just going to write what people say, then they're just recorders. I expect writers to come up with more interesting lines than the kind of stuff that I say when I've not had time to think about it. I want to see the effort of a creative mind in my movie dialogue. Because lets face it, in real life, we say some really stupid stuff.

*I'm pretty sure this is a fairly accurate rendition of the dialogue in Cloverfield when everything starts to go bad.

Festival-ing

Jazzfest was an intense yet relaxing weekend of good food, good music and good company.

New Orleans still is recovering from Katrina, but it's made some really significant strides from what we could see. People told us stories of returning after the hurricane, and the French Quarter seems to have really recovered well - dozens of restaurants later, we could not get a table at 11:00 on a Saturday night and ended up retreating to the Garden District just to eat!

The festival itself was fabulous! We did get rained on Friday night during Stevie Wonder, but the rain ended by Saturday morning and we only had to contend with the mud at that point! The highlight for me was probably Santana on Sunday - he put on a fabulous show, the sun was out, and everyone around us was just chillin' and enjoying.

Maybe it was the weather - maybe just the Santana fans. When Stevie Wonder endorsed Obama on Friday in the rain, there were mostly cheers but some boos, but when Santana did on Sunday in the sunshine, there was nothing but cheers. I found that interesting.

It's a good thing Stevie got there. And it's a good thing we got there. On Thursday night when we left, we were delayed and so we were late coming into Dallas for our connection. We ended up sprinting the last 10 gates just to get there in time before they wanted to give away our seats to standbys. We were in such a rush to get in the plane, we didn't pay much attention to who or what we were passing as we made our way to our seats. Had we been looking, we would've realized that Stevie was waiting for us to make that flight too! And here I thought all these performers chartered their own planes!

I'd post some pictures, but I left my camera with my husband who's still there, so pictures will have to wait. I gotta say pictures would sure help me keep that warm sunny glow. Going from 25 + degrees over the weekend to single digits and overcast today has been a bit of a letdown...