Some things never change

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those how have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, has this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those as home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.

Written by Sigfried Sassoon and read to the House of Commons, July 30, 1917


By putting my weapon down, I chose to reassert myself as a human being. I have not deserted the military nor been disloyal to the men and women of the military. I have not been disloyal to a country. I have only been loyal to my principles.

When I turned myself in, with all my fears and doubts, it did it not only for myself. I did it for the people of Iraq, even for those who fired upon me – they were just on the other side of a battleground where war itself was the only enemy. I did it for the Iraqi children, who are victims of mines and depleted uranium. I did it for the thousands of unknown civilians killed in war. My time in prison is a small price compared to the price Iraqis and Americans have paid with their lives. Mine is a small price compared to the price humanity has paid for war.

To those who have called me a coward I say that they are wrong, and that without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that fear was there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill, there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself to my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, the man I wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me.
I say without any pride that I did my job as a soldier. I commanded an infantry squad in combat and we never failed to accomplish our mission. But those who called me a coward, without knowing it, are also right. I was a coward not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place. Refusing and resisting this war was my moral duty, a moral duty that called me to take a principled action. I failed to fulfill my moral duty as a human being and instead I chose to fulfill my duty as a soldier. All because I was afraid. I was terrified; I did not want to stand up to the government and the army – I was afraid of punishment and humiliation. I went to war because at the moment I was a coward, and for that I apologize to my soldiers for not being the type of leader I should have been.

Written by Camilo Mejia, February 28, 2005 at Full article at Alternet

It's amazing how these two statements resonate with each other. Although they don't sound the same, and they aren't directed at military engagements that remotely resemble each other, they express a similar sentiment. Sometimes I think it's very easy to forget that human beings are the ones who fight wars AND are the ones who decide to start wars. Regardless of how it starts, the damage to those human beings remains the same.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

My fingers aren't working

I can't seem to type straight. My fingers feel like insensitive lumps of flesh at the end of my hand and they can't seem to translate what I am thinking into words on a page. They feel numb and fat. I keep having to go back and correct words that I've mis-typed and I'm feeling very frustrated by it.

I thought maybe I needed to limber them up, get them moving, get the blood flowing, and that would solve the problem. So I went down to the piano, thinking a half hour of playing would help.

I pulled out the bench.

It fell apart in my hands.

By the time I fixed it, I was even more frustrated, but tried to play anyway.

Didn't work. Can't type... can't play piano either.

This is going to be a very long day.

Perhaps I worry too much

In the neverending saga of the comprehensive exams - will it ever end? - I might have to rethink my schedule yet again. Last summer, I had hoped I would be ready to write by the end of this year. Then around Christmas I revised that to fall next year.

Now I'm scared it might be even later than next fall. I'm trying to figure out how Dwayne's schedule is going to impact mine. He was hoping for the summer externship slot, but instead got the fall one: Oct-Dec. It's out in Holyoke, which is about an hour and a half west of here. A long commute, so we're thinking he would go out Monday, come back Friday (there's an apartment available for the students).

So, you can guess why I'm wondering if fall is the best time for me to write. During the week, I'll be playing the single parent game again - not as hard as it would be with little kids, after all, I mostly need to make sure they eat (healthy) food and go to bed before midnight - but I still will be the only one around to field questions, dole out money, mediate endless arguments about who took who's shirt/shoes/keys, help with homework, give permission to go places etc.

And then when Dwayne comes home on the weekend, I'll want to spend time with him, so it'll be difficult to keep to a study schedule then.

Not to mention how weird it will feel to sleep alone.

Or that I'll be vehicle-less during the week.

Or that I'll just plain miss him.

I know it's a great opportunity for him (the Holyoke clinic is trés up-to-date technologically), but I can't help but feel that writing my exams under such conditions is going to just be harder than it would be otherwise.

But maybe I just worry too much - after all, I might want to write in fall, but that doesn't mean my committee will agree with me that I'm ready by then. After all, I don't even have any reading lists approved yet... unlike SOME people!

Constantine

...and then he pulled out the sacred brass knuckles...

This game has 240 hours...

When you can't get hockey on a regular basis, I guess the next best thing is to get an awful lot of it.

Which is it?

I just spent 6 hours putting together documents for a scholarship application.

Was this:
a) time well spent?
or
b) a colossal waste of time?

I suppose the answer will depend on whether I get the scholarship or not (don't hold you're breath, it's a bit of a long shot)

Wow! Did I understimate that or what?!

While looking for something else, I came across this entry where I write: "I also got a few things straightened out about next year's comprehensive exam proposals (3), but I still have to meet with at least four more people (hopefully no more than that) before I can even think about beginning to read up on the areas before writing the proposals."

Proposals? I was talking proposals back in March?

I SO did not understand what I was getting into - I haven't even started thinking about proposals... I haven't even figured out primary reading lists yet, let alone secondary ones or rationale for a proposal!

Dammit! This process is taking WAY too long! And I'm not getting any younger!

Updating

I've been working to update my Books list - I've got all but one book (that I've finished that is) now listed in case you're interested.

My favorite recent quote? It's from Fire and Ice: “…we Canadians sometimes find our neighbours baffling. Between their rhetoric and our own (the left’s admonitions about the dangers of convergence with the gun-toting free marketers to the south, the right’s insistence that we shed our outdated national differences like garments on a long-awaited wedding night and join our industrious, innovative Yankee friends in an orgy of free trade and economic growth), Americans are reflected in so many funhouse mirrors that it would be remarkable if we saw them, collectively, as anything other than caricatures” (20).

Living here does however help smash some of those funhouse mirrors.

Sharing is caring

...and cleanliness is next to godliness... blah, blah, blah

Posts have been/will be sparse for the next little while. D and I have to share a computer now because his went kaput on the weekend and with the amount we both use a computer, this one's getting a workout! So blogging is low on my list of stuff-I-need-to-do-when-I-have-the-computer.

In the meantime, in the interest of updating the aphorism in this blog post title, I give you a twenty-first century list of aphorisms:

Home is where you hang your @.
The email of the species is more deadly than the mail.
A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.
You can't teach a new mouse old clicks.
Don't put all your hypes in one home page.
Pentium wise; pen and paper foolish.
The modem is the message.
Too many clicks spoil the browse.
The geek shall inherit the earth.
A chat has nine lives.
Don't byte off more than you can view.
Fax is stranger than fiction.
What boots up must come down.
Windows will never cease.
Virtual reality is its own reward.
Modulation in all things.
A user and his leisure time are soon parted.
There's no place like http://www.home.com
Oh, what a tangled website we weave when first we practice.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to surf the Net, and he won't bother you for months on end.

Courtesy the nice people over at River Deep. (It you're trying to figure out the oh-so-twentieth-century versions these came from, check out their page)

Happy Valentine's Day!

Cartoons & Poetry

Plopping yourself in from of the television and watching cartoons for hours and hours until your mind is numb is a long established Saturday tradition in childhood.

I just walked past the tv where a cartoon character is discussing poetic form in William Blake.

I don't ever remember the Roadrunner or Bug Bunny discussing art, do you?

Implicit patriotism?

I have noticed over the last two years that when people ask where we will go when we are finished school, the Americans assume we will remain in America and the Canadians assume we will return to Canada.

I, however, assume we will go where ever we can find jobs!

Playing Games

Weird coincidence today.

Bookmarked a chapter on "Games as Narrative Play" in a textbook that I want to read before I return it to the library later this week.

But while taking a break, see this article about how video games shouldn't include narrative pieces, or "cutscenes".

In the article, Thompson guesses at why games are incorporating more and longer cutscenes: These Hollywood flourishes are good for dazzling mainstream journalists and pundits. That's because there's still a weird anxiety about adults playing games. Most people still think that video games are sophomoric kid stuff; the ones that have a narrative and emulate the movies seem more serious and, well, mature.

But movie watching (especially obsessive movie watching) is still the province of the young. That's why there are so many annoying teen movies out there... and why the scripts of so many other (potentially) good movies are riddled with easy answers, implausibly happy endings, and other story killers. But I digress.

Thompson explains his objection to cutscenes as one arising directly out of their narrativity, something he implies is antithetical to the pleasure of gaming itself: Playing a game, any kind of game, is inherently open-ended and interactive. Whether you're playing chess, Go, or Super Mario Bros., you don't really know how things will wind up or what will happen along the way. Narrative, on the other hand, is neither open-ended nor interactive. When you're watching a story, you surrender masochistically to the storyteller. The fun is in not having control, in sitting still and going "Yeah? And then what happened? And then?"
That's why cut scenes are such a massive pain in the neck—they enforce passivity. There's nothing more annoying than going on a shooting spree, then having to break the rhythm of play by putting your game pad down for minutes at a time.

He does have a point. Cutscenes do require the player to sit back and stop bashing at the buttons for a few moments. But sometimes that respite is necessary. In their discussion of games, the authors of Rules of Play propose some rationales for including cutscenes: surveillance or planning tool (provide information about upcoming events), game play catapult (where the cut scene explains, or hints at the upcoming action), scene and mood setting (introducing changes to scene or increases in a particular mood as the game progresses), choice and consequence (increases 'real life' feel), rhythm and pacing (rest from intense action), and player reward (visual delight or punishment) (Salen and Zimmerman).

What Thompson is complaining about (at least in GTA San Andreas) is the last, the enforced pause in play that interrupts intense action. This complaint addresses the difference in styles of play and desire for cutscenes between novice and experienced players that Salen and Zimmerman recognize. Experienced players have built up such a familiarity with the conventions of game playing (as Thompson says, there are few 'new' games), that they do not require planning, scene setting, a break from play or a cutscene as reward for successful play. Novice players do enjoy them.

The cutscenes were the parts that I was most fascinated by with The Getaway in part simply because they were cinematic, and I found it interesting to note how my play during the active parts of the game coincided or clashed with the cutscene. Often what I was experiencing during play had very little to do with the narrative of the game, but by structuring the game around the narrative, there was a unity to the play that transcended the repetitive nature of the game. I might be shooting people and driving while playing the game, but there was a reason why I was shooting at them (or chasing them). My 'motivation' for shooting and driving within the game is not simply to complete a level and ultimately win the game, but my character in the game is shooting and chasing these people because they've wronged him. So my player motivation (getting to the next level) is reinforced by my character's motivation (to avenge himself).

I would think that this kind of narrative support for player action inherent in the creation of cutscenes would actually enhance the gaming experience because you would be playing similar games for different reasons (at least according to why your character is doing what he/she is doing). Theoretically, wouldn't the presence of narrative accentuate the uniqueness of each game within a particular genre by providing a different motivation?

But I'm a novice gamer (very novice!), so perhaps there is some part of my argument that is missing because I lack the experience to see it. Thoughts?

Good weekend

Well, it's not over yet, but I think it's fair to say this has been a pretty good weekend. I am trying to get a lot of work done today (hence giving up on invitations to Superbowl parties), but getting a lot done will feel good too.

Yesterday was fun - spent the afternoon with good friends and the evening with my family. Ate way too much. Drank not too much. Just a really, comfortable, happy, good time. (Much, much better than last year's birtday - in fact, I kept this year pretty low key mostly because I was paranoid that my plans would all fall apart again this year - part of my satisfaction with the day was that they didn't.)

Today, much work. It seems the more I accomplish, the more I think I still need to do. Will it ever end? Something similar to what's going on here with Cecilia keeps me coming back to the work though... time's winged chariot and all that.

Odd theme developed in my gift receiving however: received four movies: Quills, Identity, The Secret Window, and Eddie Izzard's Unrepeatable. First one: crazy guy. Second one: crazy people. Third one: Crazy guy. Fourth one: (up till a few decades ago, the DSM III would've labelled) crazy guy.

Meaning?

Maybe I don't want to know!

The ol' nature vs nurture scuffle

Got an email telling me how my cousin's adopted son has been having violent episodes and they are becoming frustrated. Okay, so I can understand that. Parenting is hard. Parenting someone else's kids is even harder (I've seen both sides of that one). Parenting someone else's kids who no longer wants them and you've adopted/fostered must be even harder.

But what got me was the part of the email where she describes the "issues" that might account for why her foster son has violent episodes: "abandonment, illegitimate birth, birth parents are both of a violent nature/violent lifestyle"

???

Okay, so I can see abandonment and witnessing a violent home life ("lifestyle") as reasons why a child might be acting violent. But how does the absence of a piece of paper conferring certain rights and responsibilities upon his parents, a piece of paper that is simply a social convention, account for a violent child? Does the child know this? Is his violence a rebellion against his parents's disregard for this cultural norm? Did he as a fetus recognize that he was in the womb of a woman who did not possess such a paper? What was it?

I'd like to be generous and explain that perhaps she meant something else and it was just a case of bad wording... but having grown up in the kind of environment that she lives in, I doubt it was meant as anything than what it sounds like: a moral judgment of someone else's choices in life, a blaming of the 'sins of the father' on the child. An essentialist notion that does nothing to address the issues her adopted son is facing right now.

Reminds me of the comments made a couple of weeks ago by Harvard University president Summers who seemed to imply in his address at an economics conference that women aren't genetically capable of filling his shoes. Nice refutations: Pharyngula and Michael Berube.

All I can say? Wow. I thought this was the twenty-first century.

Finally!

Finished a 922 page book today.

Sad part is, I began it in September.

But in all fairness to my feeble brain power (as evidenced by such a slow rate of reading) it was ALL lit theory and included this quotation as well as other similar mind-numb-ers.

Uninteresting stuff

I don't really have anything interesting to say, but there are some things that are happening... all rather mundane.

We rearranged our living room/dining room area - it feels like we have more room, but I lost about a shelf of book space. We'll see if it improves living in cramped quarters at all.
The girls now have a computer than can access the internet - and it even has an ethernet card, so they don't have to dial up anymore.
I'm behind in my reading... again!
I got invited to two superbowl parties. Now I not only have to decide if I want to watch the game, but whether I want to watch it with other people, and then, which people I want to watch it with.
So far, my only birthday plans are to go out for lunch.

truth or fiction?

So I heard this lawyer talking about protecting yourself against lawsuits today. Why, you might ask, do you need to protect yourself against frivolous lawsuits, Michele? Not me! But my wonderful hubby will need malpractic insurance when he gets done. (I can't possibly think of anything in my line of work that could get me sued AND be covered by an insurance policy - if you think of something, let me know though, okay?)

During the talk he tells us of the Stella awards... they're named for Stella Liebeck, the woman who sued McDonald's over the heat of their coffee.

BUT what he told us was about an urban myth. He told us about a plaintiff who sued Winnebago because she (he) thought 'cruise control' was like 'autopilot' and left the driver's seat of the moving vehicle to go to the back and make coffee. Looks like that never happened... but it makes a great story.

Frivolous lawsuits are filed all the time, but they're often thrown out before they even go to trial (a good thing) and the ones that actually take up court time are usually a bit less dramatic (and frequently don't involve individuals), like the following:

Allstate sued Kraft Foods, the maker of the Toastette toaster pastry, and Pop-Tart creator Kellogg to avoid having to pay homeowners' fire claims. Allstate claimed Kraft and Kellogg were responsible for the fires by making dangerous, flammable toaster pastries.

Caterpillar sued the Walt Disney company for portraying bulldozers in a bad light. Caterpillar tried to block the release of "George of the Jungle 2," claiming that the film gave the company a bad name because its machines are used to attack the jungle. A judge found that "even the most credulous viewer" would understand that the people operating the machinery, and not the machinery itself, intended to destroy the jungle.

Mattel sued artist Tom Forsythe for his photographs of Barbie in poses the toymaker claimed defamed her character. The toymaker also sued recording label MCA when musical group Aqua released the song "Barbie Girl" that the company claimed defamed the doll with sexual innuendo. Both suits were dismissed, and Mattel had to pay $1.8 million to the artist in attorney fees, for trying to intimidate him into not using Barbie's image in his art.

Kellogg's sued the owners of Toucan Golf for trademark infringement. The cereal maker claimed that its Toucan Sam logo for the Froot Loops cereal would be damaged by Toucan Golf's golf-playing bird. A court found that no one could possibly confuse breakfast cereal and golfing.

Amway and Proctor & Gamble are engaged in an ongoing fight -- which has encompassed 20 years and has stretched to the courts -- over rumors that P&G is in league with Satan. P&G claims that Amway is accusing it of ties to Lucifer. A judge dismissed the fight's most recent incarnation in court, and expressed her hope that the corporate giants would continue their fight at the commercial level, and stop wasting judicial resources.
From the Foundation for Consumer and Taxpayer Rights

The urban myth includes such eye-poppers as the following (you'll see the Winnebago at the bottom):
The Stella Award

It's once again time to review the winners of the annual Stella Awards. The Stellas' are named! after 81 year old Stella Liebeck who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald's.

That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States. Unfortunately the most recent lawsuit implicating McDonald's, the teens who allege that eating at McDonald's has made them fat, was filed after the 2003 award voting was closed. This suit will top the 2004 awards list without question.
THIS YEAR'S AWARDS GO TO ...

5TH PLACE(TIED): Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas was awarded $780,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving toddler was Ms. Robertson's Son.

5TH PLACE(TIED): 19 year old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently did not notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal the hubcaps.

5TH PLACE(TIED): Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door Opener was malfunctioning. He could not re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation and Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for 8 days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue ! mental anguish. The Jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.

4TH PLACE: Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor's Beagle dog. The Beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been a little provoked at the time as Mr. Williams, who had climbed over the fence into the yard, was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

3RD PLACE: A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier, during an argument.

2ND PLACE: Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware sued the owner of a Night Club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out two of her front teeth. This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak in the window of the Ladies Room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.

1ST PLACE: This year's runaway winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new Winnebago Motor home. On his trip home from an OU football game, having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner's manual that he could not actually do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago Motor home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit just in case there were any other complete morons buying their recreational vehicles.

BUT, snopes.com (which I have a great deal of trust for) indicates that these stories are false. They do have some interesting real stories at the bottom of their page about the Stella Awards though.

Blocked blogger

Haven't blogged in what, a week?
Very busy.
Nothing interesting to say.
Maybe better luck tomorrow.

Chronology of a crisis, Vancouver Island-style

5:35 pm. Environment Canada predicts two to five centimetres of snow will fall on Victoria within a 24-hour period. Ed Bain reads the forecast on-air , turns white and faints.
5:40 pm. Victoria Mayor Alan Lowe issues immediate appeal for federal assistance. Prime Minister Paul Martin promises to send in the army.
8:45 pm. Victorians begin queuing at tire stores, leaving vehicles in line overnight to be first served in morning.
10:15 pm. It turns out B.C.'s last army base, CFB Chilliwack,closed in 1998. Martin promises to send in the navy instead.
10:20 pm. Navy announces deployment to San Diego and Hawaii for "security reasons." Leader Stephen Harper suggests prime minister call Quebec advertising agencies to shovel snow, "since that's where the Liberals are spending all our money anyway."
6:22 am. Temperature plunges. Word spreads that Saanich man found ice on windshield. Curious neighbours gather to watch him scrape it off with credit card. One motorist, a former Albertan, claims use of mysterious "defrost" switch on dashboard can aid in process.
8:15 am. Terrified downtown skateboarders lose toques to menacing mob of balding, middle-aged men. "We tried to run," they say, "but those stupid baggy-assed pants made us fall down."
9:30 am. Hardware stores sell both of the snow shovels. Islanders begin cobbling together implements made from kayak paddles, umbrellas, plywood, cookie sheets and boogie boards.
10:00 am. Golfers switch to orange balls. Beacon Hill Park cricket players, anxious not to repeat the ugly "snow-blower incident" of the Blizzard of '96, switch to orange uniforms.
Noon. Word of impending West Coast snowfall tops newscasts across Canada. Saskatoon hospitals report epidemic of sprained wrists related to viewers high-fiving one another.
1:20 pm. Elementary schools call in grief counselors. Grief counselors refuse to go, citing lack of snow tires.
2:30 pm. Rush hour begins an hour early as office workers come down with mysterious illness and bolt for home. Usual traffic snarl is compounded by large number of four-wheel-drives abandoned by side of road.
2:50 pm. Airplanes grounded and ferries docked. No way to travel between Island and rest of the world. Times Colonist headline: Mainland Cut Off From Civilization.
3:22 pm. Prime Minister Martin announces Canada's DART rapid response team can be on the ground within six months. "We can't leave Victoria to deal with 225 centimetres of snow on its own," he tells Lowe."Um, that's two-to-five centimetres, not two-two-five," replies the mayor. The prime minister hangs up.
3:33 pm. Provincial government responds to crisis by installing slot machines in homeless shelters.
3:45 pm. Builders of new arena announce weather-related delays will push completion date back to July 2008.
4:10 pm. At behest of Provincial Emergency Program, authorities begin adding Prozac to drinking water.
4:15 pm. Fears of food shortage lead to alarming scenes of violence and looting. Grocery shoppers riot across the city, except in Oak Bay, where residents hire caterers to do the rioting for them.
4:30 pm. Bracing for the arrival of snow, the city is gripped by an eerie stillness reminiscent of Baghdad on the eve of the invasion. Searchlights comb darkening sky for first sign of precipitation.
4:48 pm. Panic ripples across region as word comes in that first flakes have fallen on Malahat. False alarm. "Flakes" turn out to be nothing more than anthrax spores released by terrorists. An uneasy calm returns to city.
5:40 pm. Ed Bain, shaking uncontrollably, tells viewers that snow warning has been extended. This weather pattern could go on for days. Mercury plummets to Calgary-in-August levels. Martial law is declared. Victoria-area politicians announce plans to establish emergency command centre aboard HMCS Regina once it reaches Oahu.

*Thanks to Rob for the forward

A PhD is a desert wasteland

So much of my work is solitary. I like talking to other people about stuff I've read (that'd be why I belong to a couple of book clubs), but there's only so much talking that you can do as a student of literature. Conferences are cool in that they're a chance not only to talk about things you've been working on, but also hear what other people are doing.
Much more of your time is spent reading...all alone. Before you can talk about a book, you have to have read it, right? And sometimes after you've read it, you need to write about it...another solitary activity.
The worst part? All that sedentariness tends to make your ass grow on top of everything. I actually have found I need to get out and go to the gym - my legs will start twitching and aching when I don't. I suppose that's a good thing (the exercise, that is).
But it's a lot of hard work done without the benefit of coworkers or companions like you might have in any other line of work.
So when I see an article like this, that describes how one senior employee in the government managed to get a six figure position by earning a PhD that took five hours and a 2,000 (yes, two thousand) word dissertation to complete, it gets really depressing.
[To put it in context, that dissertation is eight times longer than this post] Hmmmm, I seem to be doing a whole lot more than that for mine!

Sad news

My grandmother died about a half hour ago. She was sick for a long time.

My mother has been with her for the last three days, but my father may have difficulty joining them because the weather is very bad. I hope all my relatives can safely travel for the funeral.

I now have no grandparents left.

I am still luckier than many people I know to have so many in my family still with us and in good health.

Clueless about my birthday

During dinner tonight, my kids were talking about when people turn fifty.

They then turned to me and asked, "what do you want for your birthday?"

Ouch!

[Actually, they were talking about their dad turning 50, and since our birthdays are only 2 days apart, it's natural they would next think of me... but I didn't catch the bit about it being their dad that they were talking about...]

Ah! there's nothing like a little Marxism in the morning!

I've come to the conclusion that I am Marxist-illiterate. It's the only possible explanation for my seeming inability to understand anything that a Marxist critic says.

Okay, maybe I should qualify that: I can't seem to follow the arguments of Marxist literary critics. I'll be reading and find myself thinking 'he's talking about the author here...but I thought we were talking about books. Where did that change?' and other such moments of disorientation. It's as if my brain takes a vacation each time there's a change in example, attention, or focus within a given section.

With other theorists, I can usually see (at least vaguely) where they are going, and can connect what I'm reading at the moment to what came earlier. But with Marxists, I find myself repeatedly unable to follow the shifts. It feels like a series of unconnected paragraphs strung together - I can usually understand what's going on within a given paragraph, but it's relationship to the previous one is a complete mystery.

Hence I take these long, huge pages of notes, hoping to make sense of it in the end.

But it rarely happens.

I always feel like there's something I'm missing - that I've simplified things too much and I'm missing a more subtle argument somehow. Everything I write down feels like soundbites, or just random bits of information that don't cohere around a single (or even multiple) unifying points in the work. Even whole books (and I read two whole books by Marxist theorists last year) seem to evade my intelletual grasp.

Perhaps I'm too deeply indoctrinated into the fascist ideology of capitalism to ever understand!

I am so boring

I'd say the most interesting thing I did today was book my flight to San Diego in March. The rest of the day, I sat and read, and read, and read, and now I feel cross-eyed. It's time to do something else.

I got the flight for a VERY good price though, which makes me happy. I've been checking prices since before Christmas, and basically getting the same thing every time. Then today, I checked and I found a fare at LESS THAN HALF the fares I'd been seeing - so I figured I should jump on it. The flight down is timed really nice, but the one back is non-stop and starts at 7 am - blech - I'm not a morning person. But at least it's on the way home, and I can be all comfy-at-home at the end of it. Better than a flight that sucks when you're going someplace strange.

I also found the program for the conference, which has some very cool sessions...can you find mine?

Some of my favorite titles so far:

Dead Rebs, Magical Realism, and the Blue Plate Special: Burke’s Electric Mist
Mickey and Minnie Aren’t Married?!: Disney Scholarship and the Culture Wars
Strange Bedfellows: Mikhail Bakhtin and Alanis Morissette, Strange Bedfellows
Essential Contradiction: Perceptions of the Spiritual and the Absolute in John Coltrane's Love Supreme and Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast

Deliberate Obscurity

I understand that in a theoretical discussion (just as in law and other generalizing disciplines), there is a certain vagueness that can creep into the language because you are trying to use words that would encompass the broadest range of categories as you write. You are not talking about a specific phenomenon, but rather a class of phenomena, and in order to accurately represent every element in that class, you must be very general, which can lead to a vagueness that borders on uselessness. That's where example becomes useful. BUT, it also is the responsibility of the writer to make those generalities as easily understood as possible while allowing for all the possibilities they might refer to. But this following passage of lit theory is just ridiculous:

"In epistemological terms, the realist internalization of precept within example only sophisticates the anti-naturalizing pedagogy of more traditional exemplarity. Here the gendering of realims as feminine expresses less the reality principle over against male fantasy and romance than the subtle indirection of realist pedagogy, which internalizes precept within example as the domestic pedagogue accommodates the outspoken rationality of the law to the interiority of the domestic virtues"

It took me about fifteen minutes to get it fully square in my head what the author was trying to say here. I would figure out part of it, but then the next part would be confusing and by the time I'd puzzled through it, I had to go back to the previous part and try to remember what it translated to.

AND, I had to read about ten pages further (where the subject comes up again) and then come back to this quote to really understand what it was saying.

Now that's just bad writing.

50 Book Challenge

So, all the rage this year is the 50 Book Challenge. The idea is that you commit to read 50 books over the year. Opinions vary about what's required, but the basic elements are: 1) read 50 books, and 2) blog about them (either on a hosted site or on your own). I went over to my book site and counted about 25 books blogged about since May when I started keeping track... pretty close to a 50 book a year count (and I didn't include any poetry, criticism, or theory in the list).

So I figured, what the heck! It's a good goal to shoot for - so I'm officially beginning a 50 book a year challenge.

On your mark, get set, READ!

Soggy toes

soggy toes...oh I have soggy toes... 'cause there's water, water everywhere!

The little weather thingy at the bottom of the page says there's 'light rain' - which I suppose technically is correct. But when that light rain is falling on top of an earlier dousing of freezing rain and snow, that means slush up to your knees... hence the soggy toes!

Resolution? What is this word "resolution"?

Five days in and I'm still avoiding thinking of new year's resolutions. I suppose that has something to do with the fact that I made three last year and only made good on one of them.

So... the question is: do I just import last year's resolutions, or invent new ones? I still want to do both of the things on the list, but am afraid I will jinx them by putting them on again. On the other hand, I can't think of anything new that I want to commit to this year, so putting the old stuff on the new list would just be expedient, wouldn't it?

I've had mixed luck with resolutions - sometimes I've stuck with them, and sometimes they've pretty much fallen by the wayside. I've been most successful when I've made the kind that start "sometime this year I will..." smoking and divorcing my first husband come to mind... but the ones that are more vague "I would like to be more..." tend to be so amorphous that they are not only difficult to implement (am I actually being more... right now?) but it is also difficult to know whether or not I have achieved them (was I actually more... at any point this year?)

Part of the problem is that I'm not feeling particularly resolute right now. That would imply that I'm feeling pro-active, not the passive mood that I'm currently entertaining (which partially arises out of a feeling of depression looking at the pile of books I have to read sometime soon).

I've also wondered if new year's resolutions are supposed to be like birthday wishes... do they only come true/happen if you don't tell anyone? Or is it the reverse and they only happnen IF you tell someone? I've never really shared mine with anyone before, so I have no empirical evidence either way. If anyone knows whether there's a rule for this, let me know.

I suppose you could argue that publicizing them would allow your friends and family to call you on it, but that could also be really annoying.

So, right now, all I've got for resolutions is to recycle the leftovers from last year. What remains to be seen is whether I actually get around to them this year!

Music

Filled the CD changer with new music to enjoy while reading today:

Forty Licks Rolling Stones
Something Beautiful Great Big Sea
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb U2
Flugrekorder Nicht Offnen Rammstein

Nice mix... thanks to my wonderful husband and kids

Luxurious is a synonym for a good vacation

How absolutely wonderful to do nothing AT ALL for a week and a half. It has been so very long since I've had a break like that, which made it all that much sweeter!

I visited friends (some twice!) who I hadn't seen in a long time, ate, drank, watched movies and not much else - okay, so maybe for you that ain't heaven, but for me, that's downright celestial bliss.

My brother in law and I took the kids to the Leisure Center on Christmas eve [note: going to the Leisure Center on Christmas eve was a brainstorm - we had the place almost to ourselves!] The kids loved the waves and waterslide - I spent much of the time following my 7 year old nephew through the complex and waiting at the bottom of waterslides to catch him... which was cool!

Our whole family was together for Christmas and Boxing Day - something that hasn't happened for probably four years... longer than we've been gone even. My nieces and nephews are getting big! My far-away sister and I braved the shopping malls on Boxing Day and I was rewarded by finding a Board Doctor jacket for Angie at half price - guaranteed to -35C - not that we have those kinds of temps here! but she'll be warm anyway.

We also drove out to Banff for the one day that Dwayne was with us and it rose above -15! The wind was chilly, so we ducked quickly into our favorite candy store and the Cow store, but the wind was blocked up at the Hot Springs and the contrast between the air temp (about -12) and the water (41!) was very, very relaxing... I was glad Dwayne was driving 'cause my muscles felt like putty after all that heat!

Coming home was a bit depressing - I know we've only been here for a little more than 2 years, so I can't expect to be as familiar with the city as I am with Calgary, but I felt more comfortable with the familiar surroundings of Calgary (even though I was staying in my sister's house and my niece's bedroom - surrounded by Avril Lavine posters) than I do in my own house here in Boston. I think one of the things that makes me feel uncomfortable here is the whole visa thing at the border every time we come back - it reminds me that I don't belong here, I'm only a visitor... an "alien"... and that my stay is only temporary... at least under our current status. I suppose comfort comes with time. I just hope that some day I'll feel just as comfortable here as I do there.

Great vacation! just wish it had lasted even longer...

426 Emails

Sometimes, going away sucks... at least, the coming back part does...

End of vacation

"So coming back from a journey or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's ease."

Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse

Happy New Year!

Boy! was it nice to sleep in my own bed last night!

Not that my vacation was horrible, or the bed a bad one (actually quite nice) but it was really nice to just be at home again.

My head aches today - hangover? no - I wish! - head cold - and my ears still haven't unplugged from the last airplane descent... *sigh* I hope they do soon.

And now it's a new year - I suppose I should spend some time today thinking about resolutions... Hope you had a good holiday and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Scurry... Christmas... Scurry

Christmas came early to our house - almost a week early - since we opened gifts this morning. I got some cool stuff, some stuff I wanted, and some stuff I totally didn't expect - which is a pretty nice combination, don't you think?

We opened presents from mom & dad, even though we're seeing them in a few days. They didn't know we were coming home for Christmas (neither did we) when they were here at Thanksgiving (the Canadian one), so they left gifts at that time.

My mom is very organized.

So is my dad come to think of it.

Hmmm... so what mutant gene did I get? Shouldn't organization be (at least in part) genetic?

So now this afternoon everyone is frantically doing laundry and packing, while I'm heading out to my book club to discuss... how right is this?... A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

God bless us, everyone!

Hard at work, or hardly working?

I suppose from an external view, someone watching me working (writing) might think it doesn't like very hard - no sweating, no blisters, no painful personality clashes with office mates...

But I find it hard. I get anxious. I find it hard to sit still. I rewrite the same sentence again and again. Other sentences I completely gloss over because I don't even want to look at them, I'm convinced they're just that bad, beyond redemption. I wonder if what I'm writing right now fits with the rest of the paper. I wander off in tangents and start talking about things that detract from my central point... I mean, really detract. I wonder how I'm going to explain myself (especially hard when I don't know what I'm talking about!) I think of all the things I could be doing instead.

Writing is the absolute worst part of my job - especially when I'm under a time constraint.

And I just heard the "good" news that another paper was accepted. So that's two definites and a maybe for this year.

Pathetic thing is, it's the maybe that's driving me nuts right now.

Sprechen Sie Englisch? Nein!

Studies show that the Chinese and Japanese both consume a low fat diet and fewer die of heart attacks than Americans or the British.

The French eat a relatively high fat diet but still have fewer die of heart attacks than Americans or the British.

Drinking red wine has been shown to be good for your heart. The Italians drink a good deal of red wine and fewer die of heart attacks than Americans or the British.

Japanese people do not drink much red wine, but they still have fewer die of heart attacks than Americans or the British.

The moral of the story?

It doesn't matter what you eat or drink. It's speaking English that kills you!

How small can you go?

Five years ago when I last bought a cell phone, I picked the smallest one available.

It looks monstrously huge beside my new phone - I'm afraid I'm gonna lose the thing - it's that small - makes me wonder how much smaller they can get - it really is just slightly larger than a man's sports watch.

Goddamn FedEx!

Sitting here perched on the edge of my couch trying to get work done while I wait for the sound of the FedEx truck that's supposed to deliver new cellphones (Christmas present to ourselves).

Why am I perched here, watching the reflections from the street in the blank tv screen out of the corner of my eye while listening for the slightest rumble that would indicate a truck is pulling up? Because yesterday they claimed that no one was home when they tried to deliver when someone was indeed home and the delivery guy was too lazy to ring the doorbell or something. So I'm poised to pounce on him when he arrives so that I don't have to go through this bullshit again tomorrow.

I wouldn't even mind missing the guy and going to pick up the package at the depot, but its way the fuck out in Needham, which is a good half hour away - probably more like an hour if I tried it during rush hour.

I'm extra bitchy 'cause I have too much work - though that's mostly my fault. Monday night, my neighbor reminded me of the village christmas party, so I went (won a cool origami kit - hehe), but that transmuted into checking out 'the best wings in Watertown' - which were pretty damn good I must admit - and continuing with the Merlot. Then last night, I was at the department thing - which migrated to a dive bar near campus - four beer taps : two of which were Budweiser *shudder* - so I didn't get home till late. Maybe now that the afternoon is starting to trickle away, I'll actually get started on this week's work.

Or then again, maybe not...

But what are we without bodies?

Reading an essay by Brian Aldiss on machines in SF when he describes a novel as follows: "In Tom Maddox's novel Halo, several characters are ingested by Aleph, a controlling artificail super-intelligence installed on an orbiting satellit. Jerry Chapman is one such character. He asks Aleph what became of his body. 'It was...recycled. A robot tended your remains...'"

How is Jerry Chapman a character? He exists, presumably, as a series of memories, ones that belonged to him when his body was living. But he owes his existence to a machine. Even when he tries to recall those memories, he needs the machine to do so since he doesn't exist outside the machine. Even if his memories are 'his', they belong to a 'him' that existed with a body. Once they are stored in a machine, can he really be said to be different from the machine? Isn't claiming that Jerry is a character a bit like reducing him to the level of a computer program? He can "run" while he's in the computer - talk, remember, reason - but without the computer, he can't do anything, can he? He's not independent. Can he be considered a character if he doesn't have an independent existence? If he can't do anything, in essence, can't be detected as existing outside the computer, is he not then just one dimension of that computer?

Does any character exist without a body? Or is it just the characters with bodies that make the most interesting characters - otherwise it's just all self-involved stream of consciousness drivel...

Small increments

I just spent five minutes waiting for the scanner to finish so that I could unplug the scanner cord and move the computer over 5 inches - yes, five! - so I could plug into the printer to print what I just scanned. Sheesh!

Just when you thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket...

...there comes a woman like this - amazing!

I know I would've been very, very tempted. My student loans are at least twice that right now, and the thought of not having to work till I'm 80 to pay them off would've tempted me bad... though I also have a fully functioning guilt complex, so I guess I wouldn't have kept it either.

Reading about that lady makes up for the penny-pinching jerks today at Old Navy - I hate Old Navy - why did I even go into the store? But I did. And I found something I actually liked (christmas shopping don't you know) so that forced me to actually locate a cash register at the front in order to pay for it... but, as is usually my luck, I end up behind someone who starts pulling everything BACK out of her bag, checking tags because she thinks the cashier is ripping her off.

So I go to the next line, 'cause I can see it's gonna take a while. Then the lady at the front of that line starts whining about how she can't use both of her discount cards on one purchase and insists on separating her items into two purchases... after they've already been rung in! Grrrrr. Geez lady, its Old Navy, whatcha gonna save $2? Tell you what, I'll buy you a latte and we'll call it even, k?

Bah humbug!

I hate New England

well, at least during weather like this - rain in winter - wtf is that all about anyway?

the worst isn't even the cold, or the fact that my house and car both leak when it rains... what sucks the most is this cheap-ass town doesn't have street lighting and I found myself stomping through puddles that I couldn't even see on the way home...

grrrrrrrrr

Boston and St. John's

Listening to GBS's "Boston and St. John's" and feeling homesick, even if I come from the other end of the country.

Hear it.

Boston and St. John’s
Released June 1999
(written by Doyle)

Girl, don’t tell me that it’s morning
Can we keep the curtains drawn
I haven’t given you fair warning
But our ship, she sails at dawn

Chorus
It’s true I must be going but I swear I won’t be long
There isn’t that much ocean between Boston and St. John’s
I’m a rover and I’m bound to sail away
I’m a rover can you love me anyway?

And if some suitor comes approaching
Will you let him through your door
And what if I return half broken
Will you still want me anymore?

Chorus

Bridge
Close your eyes and dream
Tell me what you see
Tell me what you want
Just tell me that you’ll wait for me

Chorus
From GBS site

Happy Holidays?

ack! I just realized there are only two more weekends till Christmas... and not only have I only bought 1 - one! - gift, but I also have to prepare for international travel right after the second weekend.

Oh, no, not so jolly a thought, this is... not so jolly at all!

Please don't get my hopes up for nothing

Please, please, please, don't get me excited and still not resolve the lockout. Please.
The NHLPA says it's ready to go back to the bargaining table - I'm almost afraid to watch....
If they talk and then it breaks down again anyway, it would be almost as bad as it was to watch the Flames lose the cup last year.

Post turkey blues

I figured I could take advantage of the long weekend we have to make some progress on not only reading, but rationalizing my lists for the comps. After all, aside from spending Thursday cooking, then eating and hanging out with friends who were nice enough to invite us to their Thanskgiving dinner, I had nothing planned for the weekend.

So, this is what I've got:

Things I need to do:
Develop a primary text reading list
Research secondary sources
Gather secondary sources from multiple places
Read primary and secondary texts
Submit a proposal (including reading list)
Get the proposal back with suggested changes
Resubmit proposal
If lucky, get proposal back with only minor changes
If unlucky, repeast proposal submission and changes multiple times
Do this for all three areas
Submit final proposal
Study!
Write the tests (4)

I could put a checkmark next to the first item on the list for one area, but not much more. *sigh* No wonder it's so difficult to do this in a year. Why they officially require us to do all this in a single year is beyond my comprehension.

It depresses me just thinking about it.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Some folks in California got worried a while back about a substance in their community - dihydrogen monoxide - and took efforts at banning use of it in their city. According to news reports, city councillors in Aliso Viejo in Orange County almost passed a bill to ban the substance but stopped short of doing so when someone pointed out that dihydrogen monoxide was also known by another name: H20 a.k.a water.

Apparently someone in the legal department found this website calling for a ban on the material. What is funniest about the site is that aside from not providing the easily recognizable H20 formula, what they say on the site is absolutely true. For example, in a section outlining the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, the following dangers are described:

Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
Contributes to soil erosion.
Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere.
Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.

Sounds dangerous, doesn't it? I especially like the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) attached to the site.
Thanks to Rob for the tip.

Once upon a time....

...long, long ago and far, far away, Michele used to go out and have fun.

At least, that's what it feels like - long ago and far away. Tried to change that last night - my supervisor's boyfriend is in a band and she invited us to hear them. They're a good bar band - played a nice mix of covers and original stuff, though my friend is convinced I was getting hit on by another band member since we of course were introduced to all of them.
She might be right.
Now there's something else that last happened long ago and far away!

Progress vs. productivity

So my output for today, even though I pretty much worked most of the day resulted in about a quarter of a page of writing. Not much in volume but I'm hoping it will help me focus and save time and energy in this whole comps exam process.

What did I write, you wonder? I'll tell you. I wrote about twenty lines which consist of two potential chapter outlines for the disseration. The dissertation! you ask, how can you be outlining your disseration already? Well, I don't quite know how, but I came to the realization that I've been reading pretty randomly and getting distracted by reading all kinds of other stuff - a bit of this, need to know some more about that, need to read more of this author, ooh that looks interesting... etc. - and at this rate, it will take me years to prepare for the comps. I need to get more organized.

So I need to focus - which is why I wrote two outlines - one would be 5 chapters and the other 8.

Have I written anything that could go into them? No! Have I read the things I'd need to to write them? Hell, no! But maybe, just maybe, I can keep my head on straight and start to make some progress on compiling a reading list. If not, well, I guess I just wasted most of today.

At least there's turkey to look forward to tomorrow.

More Good Bad

Bought a wireless card for my computer (to go with the wireless router we bought a few weeks ago when the old one went kaput) so it is super cool to be able to access internet anywhere in the house! I wonder if it extends out into the yard too? Sit in the shade, drinkin' a margarita and surfing next summer? That even beats out the grading papers by the pool!

BUT damn thing loses connection every once in a while and has to reestablish - it cut out just as I was publishing the last post. Poof! No more post.

And I'm too miffed to rewrite it, so you will forever be without my musings on its subject... not that that's a big loss or anything...

Good Bad

Bad is that I'm sick. Ugh. Makes it difficult to work or play!

Good... well, there's lots of good, but the one that I'm most impressed with is that my students are finally coming around to the third project that I assigned, the one that asks if blogging is literature, and if so, is it also art? I got their final papers yesterday, and from flipping through them, I'd say they've at least got some interesting things to say about it and it made them have to think - which is the whole point of the course!

I always give the students three options for the final project - two of the options are standard 'revise an earlier paper' kind of options, but the third one I usually try to base on one of the sequences, something that I would've had them all do if we'd had the time. This time, the third option is for them to create their own blog and then critically analyse what's going on in it (including comments) from one of the critical points of view we discussed during this last sequence. About half the class has chosen this option, so it should make for some interesting final projects at least. Interesting is good when it comes to first year papers since they all tend to sound a bit the same.

Well, she did ask for it....

Today during a meeting for all the instructors of introductory writing, the director of the writing program began by commenting that this was one of the few times we had everyone in the same room and were there any general questions, concerns or comments before we began?

One of the T.A.s stuck up his hand and said, "There are cockroaches in Holmes Hall"

It doesn't have anything to do with teaching English, but she did ask for it.

(and yes, there are cockroaches in our building - Holmes Hall - and some good stories to go with, but that's another post)

Playing with Irony

Does this post from a discussion listserv strike anyone else as ironic?

Mikel, your critique of anti-essentialism is way too
simplistic.
Ben

Good eats and seats

Had brunch at Fenway Park today in the .406 club. The food was very good (it included smoked salmon and some fabuous rolled french toast) and the view of the field was awesome (even if it is being torn up to put in a new drainage system). The guest speaker has led a very interesting life, even if sometimes he described it in a bit too much detail, but I felt a special affinity with a dentist who became VP of PR for the Red Sox, since my career has certainly taken a few right-angle turns like that as well.

Pretty nice way to spend a Sunday morning.

Book club in the evening was really nice too - I made deviled eggs (for the first time) since the women in the book brought deviled egss to their book club. (though ours of course is way cooler!)

We're going to read Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol for next month, and maybe even catch a touring players group that's also putting it on - sounds like fun! Since it's Victorian, I can read it guilt free by also putting it on my comps reading list - so I don't have to feel like I'm taking time away from the things I have to read.

I have great friends

Just got the most fabulous email from a friend a couple of hours ago, and it picked me up after trudging home in the sleet and cold after a semi-frustrating day teaching. It was so perceptive and articulate and entertaining (and the compliment at the end was nice!) that it made my day.

Thanks! (you know who you are)

Wouldn't it be great?

Went running today for the first time in the last, oh, probably three weeks. No doubt I'll feel like an old woman tomorrow; which made the lyrics of the Great Big Sea song I was listening to even more relevant.

Consequence Free
(written by Alan Doyle / Séan McCann)

Na na na, na na neh ah na na
Oh, Na na na, na na neh ah na na

Wouldn't it be great, if no one ever got offended
Wouldn't it be great to say what's really on your mind
And I have always said, "All the rules are made for bending"
And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?

CHORUS:
I wanna be consequence free
I wanna be where nothing needs to matter
I wanna be consequence free
Just sing - Na na na, na na neh ah na na
Oh, Na na na, na na neh ah na na

I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience
'Cause I'm getting sick of feeling guilty all the time
I won't abuse it, yeah I've got the best intentions
For a little bit of anarchy but not the hurting kind

CHORUS

I couldn't sleep at all last night 'cause I had so much on my mind
I'd like to leave it all behind, but you know it's not that easy
Oh, for just one night

Wouldn't it be great, if the band just never ended
We could stay out late and we would never hear last call.
We wouldn't need to worry about approval or permission,
We could slip off the edge and never worry about the fall

CHORUS

What a fabulous fantasy for adults, is it not? I mean, I'm pretty sure the last time I felt consequence free was when I was about five... maybe six.

Wouldn't it be great...?

I am far too Canadian

Was told today I'm far too polite on my blog - not enough dirt or something like that.

'Fraid to say that's cause I have very little curiosity and imagination, which means I'm not usually part of any rumor mill... or if someone tells me something, I usually don't think of passing it on, which kind of defeats the purpose of scandalous rumor, doesn't it? My lack of imagination also makes my creative writing endeavours something more akin to pathetic drivel than engaging storytelling.

Those who can't... critique.

Would bitchier help? I can do bitchy. I just need to turn the self-censor off.

For example, I'm going to Calgary for Christmas but that mostly just pisses me off instead of making me glow with joy and delight because of the way I fucked up getting us there.

I'm pissed with airlines, banks, credit card companies, online booking software, and my apparent inability to pay attention when I need to. Fuckin' Air Canada, fuckin' broke ass bank account, fuckin' useless computer, fuckin' dumb ass scheduling.

How's that? Less Canadian?

It's that time again

No, not THAT time. [I have a one cramp-related post a year limit]

That is, it's that time of the semester again - the time when we have made it past the halfway mark, but there seems to be so much to do that it feels like it's impossible and you are tempted to respond to the overwhelming workload by crawing into a hole with a big bottle of vodka and not coming out till spring... or wait, maybe that's just me who would drag a bottle of vodka along... but I think the crawling into a hole part is an accurate way of describing how all students feel at this point.

I know my students are feeling it. Hell, I'm even feeling it and I'm not registered in any courses, just dealing with my own self-imposed deadlines.

The exhaustion that comes at the ten week mark isn't physical - well, at least not only physical - and it can't be solved by more coffee. Or more beer/wine/hard liquor/other mood-altering substances. Even the healthier option of exercise and plenty of water doesn't seem to do the trick. A swift kick in the ass might work. But I suspect even that would only be a temporary remedy.

Why? Why, oh why, oh why does student life have to feel like this? What perverse mind decided that fifteen weeks was an optimal time frame for educating adults? Hmmmm? It just don't work. At least not for me.

Thing is, it's really hard for me to motivate my students when I feel like my own motivation level is dragging in the dirt. How can I convince them that they need to keep at it even when they don't feel like it, when all I want to do is crawl into a hole (sans bottle even if necessary)?

ARGH!

I am SO stupid!

Okay, so, title like that, you're thinking I'm gonna tell you how I missed a deadline because I wrote down the wrong date, or walked into a door and broke a toe or something, right?

Wrong - it's much more invidious than that. Stupid might not be quite the right word, but dense or slow might do just as well.

Over a year ago, I read this book Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye. In it (or at least part of it), he argues that you can understand literature only by creating a theory of literature that arises from itself, not borrowed from other disciplines like psychoanalysis, history etc. (Well, part of his argument anyway) What he finds when he turns to literature to develop a theory is that literature falls into various "modes": tragic, comic, ironic, mythic and romantic. These are ways that the story gets told. For example, a tragedy written in romantic mode will have the god/supernatural hero die (e.g. Beowulf, Roland - yes, the one I'm writing about). Seemed pretty straightforward to me. Even used the book in, not one, but TWO papers last year. Always read other people's work that talked about Frye's "modes" as different from other writer's use of "genres".

Just now, as I was reading an excerpt from The Rise of the Novel, it finally dawned on me HOW modes are different from genres. A year after reading Frye. Only after reading someone else (who doesn't even mention Frye). After using his work in two papers. NOW I finally get it. DUH! How stupid is that? Modes are more about what happens, and genres about how it happens (not necessarily just structurally, but the details through which the author presents the story) - roughly speaking.

apology If that didn't make sense to you, it's okay. Hell, it took me a year to get it, and I was reading someone who knows how to write. It was just such an epiphanic moment, I had to write it down.

More election response - I am amused

Got this in an email yesterday - I think it's just all around better this way, don't you (well, except for the part about declaring war on Quebec - a bit too close to home for me)?

Notice to Americans of Revocation of Independence from the Government of
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II



To the citizens of the United States of America: In the light of your
failure to elect a sane President of the USA and thus to govern
yourselves with consideration for the rest of world, we hereby give
notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties
over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which
she does not fancy.

Your new prime minister (The Rt Hon, Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of
you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your
borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for
further elections.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be
circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following
rules are introduced with immediate effect

You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then
look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed
at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. Generally, you should
raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary". Using
the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as
"like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of
communication. Look up interspersed".

There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on
your behalf.
Arrest Mel Gibson for treason.
You should relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen",
but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get
confused and give up half way through.

You should stop playing American "football". There is only one kind of
football. What you refer to as American "football" is not a very good
game.

The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your
borders may have noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You
will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper
football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It
is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be
allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does
not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full
Kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at
least a US rugby sevens side by 2005.
Stop referring to the "World Series" of Baseball and instead call it the
"USA, Cuba and Japan Championship."
Learn to enjoy warm flat beer and steak and kidney pudding. Train
waitresses to be more aggressive with customers and not to tell you
their names before you eat.

You should declare war on Quebec and France, using nuclear weapons if
they give you any merde.

The 98.85% of you who were not aware that there is a world outside your
borders should count yourselves lucky. The Russians have never been the
bad guys. "Merde" is French for "sh*t". July 4th is no longer a public
holiday. November 2nd will be a new national holiday, but only in
England. It will be called "Indecisive Day." Driving on the left is now
compulsory - recall all cars to effect the change immediately.

Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy.
Tax collectors from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to

ensure the acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).
Thank you for your cooperation and...Have a nice day!


And while we're at it, we should redraw the map of North America:

Who wants to marry an American?

Okay, so I'll admit it. Even though my students might be thoroughly disgusted with their weblog paper, their reports have provided me with some very amusing links.

Apparently, some concerned and generous Canadians are willing to save liberal Americans by marrying them and bringing them north of the border - check out the pledge!

Woes

Woes list:
1. Blogger hates me... at least it has for the last few days. This is the first time I've been able to access my blog recently. Hence, no posts lately.
2. My freshmen class began a writing project on blogs. They seem to be alternately hating it/confused by it. I don't know why.
3. The crazy man is back for another 4 years.
4. This might be a bad thing for international students.
5. There's a cold wind blowing today that reminds me that the windows in my house suck ass. And it's gonna be a cold winter.
6. Daylight savings kicked in which means it's now dark at 4 pm. Depressing for those of us who prefer evenings to mornings.
7. After getting so close to catching up that I could taste victory, I am again two weeks behind in my reading list.
8. I still haven't made any progress on the paper that I started revising in April.
9. I also still have 2 of the 3 things on my New Year's resolution list to accomplish - and it's now November.
10. Did I mention that the crazy man is back for another four years? That's not only depressing, but a little scary.

My feelings exactly!

Today's Piled Higher and Deeper comic is pretty much right on in expressing my own feelings as an alien in the U.S. during election week.

I was talking to a friend about the undecided voters and we were wondering why people were having a difficult time making up their minds since the candidates are so diametrically opposed on almost every point. Even I know who I would be voting for - and I can't even vote!

crazy busy crazy busy crazy busy

So much going on.

We're hosting a Halloween party this Saturday... well, actually two parties. I sent out invites to an evening party and realized that the people who weren't saying whether they were coming or not all had kids.
So my kids decided they would like to throw a party for the kids before the adult party.
Interesting how I've ended up with most of the preparation!
But it's fun to plan parties, so I'm not complaining... just busy.

We need costumes if we're hosting a party, so the sewing machine got pulled out and dusted off and now I'm struggling with yards of muslin - the angel and garden (yes, she's dressing as a garden) are done, the dead bride needs just some minor touches, the wench is almost complete, but the pirate still needs most of his costume... crazy.

My reading list is looming large. Bleak House took WAY longer to read than I estimated (well, it is 1000 pages long) and now I need to catch up... more busy.

To top it, the Red Sox are in a position to win their first World Series (don't get me started about the misnomer!) in 80 some years. Pretty much a 'must see'... crazy!

Reversal

Was it all a dream? Did this last year really happen?
I thought I saw the Red Sox win the ALS. Was I dreaming?

Michael Bérubé reports that the Yankees actually won the ALS.

And apparently the Astros won the NLS as well.

Amusing!

Guess who's going to San Diego?

Okay, so it's not for a while yet, but that's good, because that way I'll have time to write the paper that I've proposed to present at the 2005 PCA/ACA Conference. But I'm psyched anyway! It's always cool when you get a paper accepted, even when you know the competition wasn't that stiff.

This was the abstract I submitted:

Roland the Gungslinger’s Generic Transformation

In the Afterword of The Gunslinger, Stephen King describes how Robert Browning’s poem “Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came” was his inspiration for Roland the Gunslinger. In the Dark Tower series, King transposes Roland from this eighteenth-century Romantic poem to a twentieth-century dark fantasy. Across genres, the details of the story change as do Roland’s responses to those elements, and thus the character himself changes as he moves from one genre to the next. While the family resemblance may be indefinite at times, Roland is old; the knight Roland in the eleventh century French epic The Song of Roland is a stalwart knight, whose actions speak louder than his words. In Orlando Furioso in the fourteenth-century, he follows conventions of the Romance to become a chivalrous but love-stricken madman.

Through each change, Roland’s character is transformed. These changes as Roland is transposed from genre to genre reflect the demands and conventions of those genres, the expectations of their audiences across the centuries, and the changing values that the hero embodies in each culture. Heroes of stories are heroes because they embody particular characteristics and it is these characteristics that the culture relating the story values most. The hero of the story is a model and performs a pedagogical function in holding up a mirror of what that culture values. In Stephen King’s incarnation of Roland, the character reflects the values of contemporary Western culture, just as each Roland before has embodied his culture.

[This does however mean that I should read the last two novels in the series, The Talisman (which explains about the levels of the tower) and maybe even Black House before writing the paper. !!! ]

Not only am I presenting a paper, but because I'm presenting a paper, I can get funding to offset the cost of the trip. If I can get a hostel and crash as many 'hospitality' suites as possible, my only out of pocket expenses might be souveniers. Bonus!

The best part about doing this is that the paper will give me a venue to make a kind of trial run with some of the theories I've been reading this year in Narrative Theory (a study that I haven't really had much experience with before) - I'm hoping the paper will let me get my sea legs so to speak in this area. Particularly since I'm trying to revise a paper I wrote for a class last year, with narrative theory in mind, for publication - which is a far bigger challenge than presenting at a conference.

Either way, it's probably a good bet that the weather in California for that weekend in March will be nicer than in New England!

Word of the Day

maunder \MON-duhr\, intransitive verb:
1. To talk incoherently; to speak in a rambling manner.
2. To wander aimlessly or confusedly.

As in, it isn't the mumbling as much as the maundering that makes my teenage daughter's speech near impossible to understand.

Is that allowed?

Are you allowed to call someone a dick on national tv?

I was so disappointed last week when I tuned into the Daily Show (sometimes the most reliable source for news) and found that the episode was a rerun, from way, way back. I wondered where Jon Stewart was? Was he sick? Abducted by aliens? Recovering from being mugged?

No, he was on Crossfire and challenging the integrity of that 'news' show. The transcript of the program as well as audio and/or video clips are available here. Jon attempts to ask some serious questions, even as he gets the laughs, and they just evade, evade, evade. It's an amazing display of journalistic maneouvering.

I especially like the part where he calls his host a dick. Classic!

Ball drop

Watertown, MA (AP UNR*)

Tragically this week, the balls were dropped in Michele's Fabulous High Flying Juggling Act.

While attempting to juggle work, school, and family life, a trick the Marvelous Michele has performed effortlessly over the past few years, Michele seemed to lose control of the situation when the fourth ball was thrown into the mix. It was as if she somehow had not expected to have to juggle four balls and was totally unprepared for it.

Consequently, Michele not only dropped the fourth ball, but the previous three as well, leaving her running across the stage floor trying to recapture the balls.

This reporter would like to remind everyone that this incident underscores the importance of only allowing highly trained jugglers to handle more than three balls at a time. Safety while juggling is of paramount importance.

*unimportant news release

We spent a really, really nice weekend with my parents, who had come down from their month long tour of the Maritimes to visit us.

We had turkey for a Canadian thanksgiving and we did all kinds of touristy things, including taking in the history of the Freedom Trail, a ferry boat ride (a first for the girls) and a Duck Tour (which is far less tacky and a lot more fun than it sounds).

But now I have even more work to catch up on!

The latest micro trend

Seems to be that blogging about the monthlies is a hot topic of late. I can empathize having just been down that road myself.

My friend Allie describes her own Over-Reaction-Day every month. And this rant is absolutely superb!

I have to say, I really have mixed feelings about the whole business. Part of me understands the frustration of having your emotions messed up every month by something that is so powerful, its damn near impossible to control. But that just pisses me off more, 'cause I know that the next time I'm truly and righteously angry, there's a good chance that some guy's gonna dismiss it as 'she's on the rag' which of course just verifies that he was a douchebag to cause my righteous anger in the first place!

It's hard to keep on top of PMS and not let it absolutely ruin your day (and that of everyone around you). I used to know that the time to bleed was right around the corner when I would inexplicably feel like throwing the salt shaker across the dinner table at my husband while he was talking.

Then I started running and that feeling came less and less often. So I suppose it is true that exercise helps - just don't ask me to give up my caffeine - far nastier things than PMS would happen if Michele doesn't have caffeine.

Though come to think of it, I also left my husband, so maybe it wasn't all PMS doing the talkin' when I had those homicidal urges...

Electronic mail from beyond

Now you can send email when you're dead.

This strikes me as just a little bit eerie. Can you imagine how it would feel to receive an email from someone who has just died?

Or even sending email to people when you die is just plain odd. Why send a death email? Why not tell people what you think right now? What purpose could delaying saying something serve? What would you need to say at your death that you wouldn't say before? Confess a crime, a passion, a sin that you couldn't bear to tell while alive?

Obviously, I can't see any need to sign up for this service, but I'm very curious about how people might use it. I'd love to know what people who set up the service are thinking when they sign up for it (and what they write about to whom) and how it feels to people who receive those emails. I'd love to be an electronic fly on the wall of that email server!

Never thought the muppets would make me think

... but I guess I'm more of an egg head than I thought....


You are Dr. Bunson Honeydew.You love to analyse things and further the cause of
science, even if you do tend to blow things up
more often than not.
HOBBIES:Scientific inquiry, Looking through microscopes,
Recombining DNA to create decorative art.QUOTE:"Now, Beakie, we'll just flip this switch and
60,000 refreshing volts of electricity will
surge through your body. Ready?"
FAVORITE MUSICAL ARTIST:John Cougar Melonhead
LAST BOOK READ:"Quantum Physics: 101 Easy Microwave
Recipes"
NEVER LEAVES HOME WITHOUT:An atom smasher and plenty of extra atoms.

What Muppet are you?



Or maybe this quizilla stuff is just arbitrary (but highly amusing) fluff as I've frequently suspected.

Next week is Banned Books Week

Hearing about banned books always shocks me in the way that sticking a knife in a toaster might. For me, the thought that a book, any book, should not be read, shocks me in the way that you would be shocked if your grandmother told you she was an international spy - not in the past, but right now. It's the kind of thing that doesn't even enter into my imagination.
Sure, there's lots of books that I don't like (see my description of She under Books that I'm reading), and other books that I think are really a waste of paper. There are books that bore me to death (I never have finished Moby Dick, though I've tried more than once), or that I don't understand (Gravity's Rainbow) and consequently make my head hurt. But I never doubt that there's someone in the world who loves these books... hell, for these two examples, I know people personally who love them.
But just because I'm disgusted, or bored, or confused by a book, is no reason to try to impose my taste on someone else. So banning books always puzzles me - I can't understand the motivation.
Most challenges to books come from parents who think their kids shouldn't read them.
Yes, there are plenty of books that should only be read in an age-appropriate context - kids have to be ready for the themes of some young adult and adult fiction (no, not "adult" but for-people-over-ten kind of adult fiction).
But some of the challenges go beyond questions of age appropriateness. One, a challenge brought by a mother on behalf of her daughter who asked to ban Huck Finn because of its rampant use of 'nigger' produced an interesting discussion on the part of the court justices who set down their decision. The excerpt follows:

We close this part of our discussion with two observations.First, we view with considerable skepticism charges that read-ing books causes evil conduct. It is all too easy to allegecause-and-effect when one event follows another. Here, forexample, Monteiro alleges that racial harassment, includingverbal insults, increased "as a result of" the assignment ofHuckleberry Finn and A Rose for Emily. The "as a result" linkis wholly unsupported by any factual allegations. If racialharassment indeed increased during the school term, there aremany other more likely causes that all of the interested partiesmight do well to explore. Second, the function of books andother literary materials, as well as of education itself, is tostimulate thought, to explore ideas, to engender intellectualexchanges. Bad ideas should be countered with good ones,not banned by the courts. One of the roles of teachers is toguide students through the difficult process of becoming edu-cated, to help them learn how to discriminate between goodconcepts and bad, to benefit from the errors society has madein the past, to improve their minds and characters. Those whochoose the books and literature that will influence the mindsand hearts of our nation's youth and those who teach youngpeople in our schools bear an awesome responsibility. We canonly encourage them to exercise their authority wisely andwell, and to be sensitive to the needs and concerns of all oftheir students.

I especially like what they say about good and bad ideas. After all, that's what education is all about, isn't it?
Last year, our department fielded a complaint from the parent of a student about an essay written by Edward Said from States asking us not to teach the essay because of controversy surrounding Said, his political beliefs, and questions regarding the validity of his facts. We were told that if we want to teach the piece, we should warn our students and discuss the issue with them in class.
Well of course we should! Just as I warned students about the controversy provoked in Smith's Dogma about his depiction of the church - it produced some interesting talk and I think the controversy made the whole experience much more valuable for the students... at least for that discussion period. Makes me want to use Said's essay simply because it will get students thinking and talking.
You can find a list of the top ten challenged books last year at the ALA website.

Rain

Poetry slumbers within the busy soul.

Or in other words:

In his discussion about how stories are passed on, oral stories that are rapidly disappearing from our culture in favor instead of the printed word, the novel, information, Walter Benjamin describes how the listener makes the story her own:
This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. This nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.

Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" Illuminations (1955)

Drowning

I was so delighted when I found that I had a two day a week teaching schedule this term. I imagined how much work toward my exams I would get done the other three days of the week - three days! luxurious time! - but as with all dreams, reality is much different.

Last week I went into Boston five days of the week - that's 5 times the 3 hour round trip - 15 hours of walking to the bus, waiting for the bus, riding the bus, walking from the bus.... well, you get the idea. But I consoled myself that I would have three whole days of study to look forward to this week.

Ha!

Things that are stealing away my study time:
groceries
auto inspection (due by Thursday)
soccer game
dentist appointment (2 - one for me and one for a child)
wine transferring (it will be vinegar if I don't deal with it soon)
haircut (DESPERATELY overdue!)
winterizing supplies
mandatory (extremely annoying) and long teaching meeting
marking papers
weeding the garden before the rain forecast for the rest of the week
laundry
covering someone else's class

That doesn't even include the things that I would enjoy having cut into my study time like going to the gym, watching movies, watching my kids' sports, writing, answering email from friends who must think I'm dead, spending time with my great husband....

All I can do is hope that next week I have my three days free.

Now here's a question...

I'm on the bus coming home when I hear sirens. My book is pretty boring anyway, so I look up to see a fire truck coming toward us on the street.

Then I realize an ambulance is coming up behind us.

My question: Who gets the right of way?

Answer: I still don't know, but in this case, the fire truck went first.
Is that just 'cause he's bigger, or because he had his lights and siren going and the ambulance only had lights on?

How do they decide?

Something to ponder next time you're stuck in line at the DMV.

Spelling woes

Forwarded to me via email:

John Kerry said that the W. in George W. Bush stands for "Wrong" -- "wrong choices, wrong judgment, wrong priorities, wrong direction for our country." The Bush campaign responded saying that it was just the opposite, that the W. actually stands for "Write".

Ouch!

You can test whether you're a better speller than Dubya at the Guardian's spelling quiz

I'm afraid I have to admit I didn't get them all right... I guess I, like many others, have gotten way too dependent on spellcheck.

What the hell?

I dreamt about doing laundry last night... It wasn't even my laundry, or anything that I would recognize as something that I own, and for some reason I spilled water all over the floor when I opened the machine.

What the hell was that about?

Mood: Good

I realize "good" is a pretty plain word, but as I tried to insert other words, they all fell short of what I was feeling. I'm just feeling good.

Spent most of yesterday surrounded by the smell of ripe grapes (not the sterile, tasteless and odorless kind you get in the supermarket) that I first picked, then destemmed, and finally crushed. It's a heady scent.

Guess why?

Wine, of course!

First time I'm trying to make grape wine from scratch, so wish me luck...

And the night before, I felt at least partially vindicated for losing the Stanley cup with Canada winning the Worlds! Really fun game to watch too - mostly fair calls, no dirty fights (well, no fights at all), and some really good skill-work and a couple of dynamic checks. A great game!

Today, I get down to work. I'm hoping to put a big dent in my schedule this week and maybe recoup some of the speed I lost this summer and the early part of the month.

Weird part is, I'm actually looking forward to it!