Unread books meme

Since I'm stalling out on the dissertation writing, I thought I might cheer myself up with the following meme. Whether I'm cheered up will depend on the numbers I suppose. So, the meme is to identify which of the top 106 books most often marked "unread" by members on Library Thing that you've read.

The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1 The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams*
2 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3 The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
4 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5 Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
6 Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
7 Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8 One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9 Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11 Ulysses by James Joyce
12 War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
13 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
14 The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15 Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
16 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
18 Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
19 A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
20 The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
21 Middlemarch by George Eliot
22 Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
23 The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
24 The Kor'an by Anonymous
25 Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26 The Odyssey by Homer
27 The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
28 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29 The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30 The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
31 Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
32 Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
33 The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
34 The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
35 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
36 The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
37 The Iliad by Homer
38 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
39 Emma by Jane Austen
40 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
41 Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
42 Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift
43 The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44 Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
45 Dracula by Bram Stoker*
46 Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
47 A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
48 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
49 The once and future king by T. H. White
50 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
51 To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
52 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
53 Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
54 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
55 Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
56 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
57 Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
58 The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
59 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
60 Underworld by Don DeLillo
61 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
62 The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
63 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
64 The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
65 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells*
66 Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
67 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
68 Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
69 A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
70 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
71 The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
72 The inferno by Dante Alighieri
73 Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
74 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75 Swann's way by Marcel Proust
76 The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
77 The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
78 Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
79 The portrait of a lady by Henry James
80 Silas Marner by George Eliot
81 The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*
82 The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas
83 The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
84 The book thief by Markus Zusak
85 The confusion by Neal Stephenson
86 One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
87 Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley*
88 Bleak House by Charles Dickens
89 The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
90 The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
91 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
92 The known world by Edward P. Jones
93 The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
94 The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
95 The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
96 Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
97 Dubliners by James Joyce
98 Les misérables by Victor Hugo
99 The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
100 Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
101 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
102 Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
103 Persuasion by Jane Austen
104 A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
105 The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
106 Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller

39 read; 2 bought but not read; 2 started but never finished.
I do find it interesting that of the ones with * that I've read more once, the multiple readings have happened because I was studying them, not because I necessarily wanted to reread except in one instance. The other interesting thing is that aside from the Neal Stephenson, there's not much on the list that I haven't read that I really have a desire to read. That must be why these books are on an 'unread' list.

I'm going to be all annoying netizen and tag rebeckler, thirdworstpoet, and unacademic advisor for this meme.

Lists

Since my good friend was on a list-making binge lately, and I have nothing really intelligent to say, sharing lists ought to easy... Although none of my lists are complete, here's some samples:

This week's list:
Buy groceries and birthday cake
Pick up oldest daughter & cook birthday dinner for her
Teach 3x
Mark English papers
Write up Speech evaluations
Meet with boss for lunch
Attend client meeting regarding potential project
Prepare different project summary before lunch meeting
Mail chapter to advisor
Go to university library
Go for 6km run
Finish Wordfest book review

Things I want to learn how to do/take up as activities (money and time are of course objects to consider for many of these):
Get motorcycle license and buy a bike
Learn to dance the Salsa
Scuba diving
Build a decent wine cellar
Visit Australia
Learn how to fly an airplane

There's a lot of distance between those two lists, isn't there...?

In sickness and celebration

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

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

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

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

Not sure what this one means...

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

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

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

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

Two great things that go good together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want a wife

Want a room of one's own

After all, who wouldn't?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don't own your body

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

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

But she doesn't own it.

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

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

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

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

Is there a protocol for this?

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

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

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

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

Very excited!

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

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

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

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

A new distraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why driving downtown is nasty

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

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

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

But we should've taken the train!

2 down 5 to go

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

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

So here's where I stand right now:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language-dependent reading

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

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

People are idiotic in real life

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

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

Realistic? Yes. Entertaining? No.

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

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

Festival-ing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snippets

The poster presentation went fairly well. Good questions, some interesting conversations. Lots to think about.

One of my neighbors is putting in a submerged pool. Didn't really think of this neighborhood as being upscale enough for a pool, but there it is.

Going to New Orleans to the jazz festival tomorrow. I suspect this jazz fest will spoil me for all others... Mostly, I'm looking forward to warm temps and sunshine!

Two friends in as many weeks have asked me about my Smart because they/family are thinking of buying one. A sign of spring? Or just of rising gas prices?

I'm experiencing a lull in academic feedback and in work projects. Which is fine right now, but I'm starting to fear they'll all come at me at the same time...

We started going to the gym a few weeks ago - before then we didn't have memberships anywhere. It's actually a bit depressing to see the scale go up as you gain muscle before it comes back down!

Memory lane (and its back alley)

Memory is a funny thing. There are those events, images, and sensations that are burned into our memory, even when they're trivial, and then there are those events that seem impossible to recall in any detail.

I've spent a lot of time being drawn back into a period in my life that wasn't really so long ago, but feels like a lifetime.

This week I went to my Alma Mater three times: drop off poster, proof poster, pick up poster and spend a day in special collections. I also stopped in at the department to see if they had an openings for sessionals.

I took the stairs.

I didn't take the stairs for my health, though I could feel the work of 10 flights, but rather to see how Leon is doing.

Leon first appeared in the 1970s (the exact date eludes me, but there is a footnote on one of the stairs referencing it). Obviously, Leon has fallen on hard times when his caregivers can only manage to pay attention to him in a spelling-challenged drunken state. Luckily for Leon, his last restorer was either too out of shape or too drunk to "restore" him past the sixth floor, so that upper floors are still pretty much the same as I remember them.

Leon's story begins in the basement, where he sees a light above that he's determined to reach. As he hops up each flight of stairs, his adventures reflect the departments he's passing. Some of the events don't match the floors anymore, since the university has grown significantly since his first inception. For example, his English department adventure only covers two flights/one floor, but the department had grown to one and a half floors by the time I started there, and I noticed now fully occupies two floors.

The restorations certainly reflect the times as well (aside from the orthographic challenges of new curses). "Indians" is scratched out and "Aboriginal" put in its place (though on the stair, it isn't capitalized, which it should be) and the last drunken caregiver got a bit too liberal with the annotations.

Curiously, he/she mis-spells bitch more than once, adding a 't' at the end, which I can only assume is an attempt to combine the older form and its newer one. Perhaps Leon should contemplate that one as he goes past the linguistics department...

I wonder how many current students know or care about Leon? When I ponder that question, that's when I realize how large that gap is between where I was when I first encountered him and where I am now. Leon is one of those common knowledge kinds of things that float around in undergrad circles, casually, as if they'd always been there. Knowing about Leon is one of those things that mark whether you're a newbie or not and being able to nod knowingly when someone tells you about this cool story on the stairs that they discovered meant you belonged. I am glad to see that Leon is being cared for, but the purist in me was a bit disturbed by the editorial revision and annotation that he's gone through.

I also participated in a sociology research project about single parents in post-secondary institutions earlier this week. It too reminded me of those days, but the memories there were a mixed bag. The interview asked a lot of questions about support and what the university could do to make the experience better for single mothers. The thing is, I'd never really thought to include the university itself in my attempts to meet the challenges of being a mother and a student at the same time. In fact, I remember feeling reluctant to speak of my parental status, especially to profs and other administrators because I didn't want pity and I didn't want special treatment. I wanted my academic accomplishments to stand for themselves and to be evaluated exactly the same as any of the 18 year olds in the class.

Not that that was easy! I really struggled through first year chemistry. Even though I'd taken it in high school and actually gotten a decent mark, the first year chemistry course looked like Greek to me. I struggled mightily with stoichiometry, which I swear wasn't invented when I was in high school!

But that's the kind of memories all this week has been dredging up. It also reminds me that I have no way of knowing what the future will bring either. If you had told me what my life looks like now back then I would've found it hard to believe. Which makes me realize how futile it is to try to imagine what kind of life I'll have in another 5, 10 years. I just have to take it as it comes, which is all that any of us can do really when it comes down to it.

7 days

I know I live in Canada.

But 7 days of snow in spring is a bit much, even for Calgary. Where's the sunshine and flowers???

Squeezing into a shoe that isn't supposed to fit

This poster has been a real challenge to complete. Not that there's anything particularly insightful on it, but just trying to arrange the kind of argument that I would spend 20 pages of text writing into a more visual format.

And you can tell that I'm not used to making graphs or even charts, because it took me the better part of yesterday just to produce those two little graphics you see on the poster!

English literature definitely is a qualitative kind of discipline, where our arguments are built on comparisons of what is contained within the texts we use as our sources, not how many of them there are. Quantitative analysis really doesn't show up in English (except for a few structuralists and come cultural critics), so trying to come up with a graphic representation of my argument was difficult indeed.

But it is finished. Now I just need to get it to a printer that can produce it poster-sized, finish off the actual paper that will go with it (if anyone is interested in the rest of the argument), print off information cards and write up my 5 minute blurb for the judges who will be coming around to all the posters to analyze them. So there's lots yet to do! But it's been interesting so far.

[Clicking on the poster should give you a bigger version of it]

My new boyfriend

At least that's what he tells me every night.

"I'm George Stroumboulopoulos. And I'm your boyfriend"

I am enchanted. I will admit that.

Imagine my surprise at leaving the country for four years only to return and find a CBC program I like! George has some of the most interesting guests on the show, and although his attempts at comedy sometimes fall flat (no flatter than Letterman or Leno though), there's competition with The Daily Show in my house for the late night slot.

Chuck Norris?

So apparently, Chuck Norris jokes are all the thing now. Why? I don't know.

My students were comparing their favourites during our lab period today, and at first, I thought I was mis-hearing them. But no. These students, who weren't even alive when Chuck Norris movies were cool, are suddenly all over him.

I don't get it. I've probably seen every Chuck Norris movie ever made - I dated a guy who was a huge Norris fan - but the cinephile in me has erased most of those memories. Despite that, I have to say, I find the Norris websites confusing...

Intellectual stimulation (or lack thereof)

I've been feeling the isolation of being in a place NOT the same as the university that will grant me my degree when all is said and done.

I knew it would be a tradeoff coming here - that work, life, kids education etc. would be easier, but writing the dissertation would be harder. But it's felt particularly poignant over the last few days because:
a) I received email notice about a workshop that I'd badly love to attend but can't since it's 3000 miles away
b) A friend and colleague is defending and I won't be there for it.
c) I'm realizing that with the end of the semester (for most people) that everyone is busy and I should not expect responses to the various queries I have sent over the last few weeks.

I've tried to alleviate some of the isolation by attending events at the local university, but with the term winding down, those will also dry up over the summer. We did go to the local sciencecafe last month, and I hope to go again this month, but that's only one evening every four weeks or so, and doesn't really satisfy in the way that attending a lecture or defense would.

I'm taking summer off from one of my jobs, so I'll have more time for writing, but with the summer also come even fewer opportunities for intellectual stimulation. At least the internet is a (poor) substitute, that will hopefully keep me going till I get through the writing!

Patience

Everytime I start a new academic or work project, I label a new file folder. I'm going to either have to go buy more folders, or stop beginning new projects because I've only got one left now. I'll give you three guesses which option I'll choose, and the first two don't count!

I'm a rather impatient person. I've been trying to get better at it, but I do tend to want things to happen faster than they tend to. I'm thinking that might be why I keep taking on so many projects. While I'm waiting for other people to do their part of a project, I get impatient and go start a new one. Then all of a sudden I've got a huge number of projects on the go!

Patience is a virtue.
Virtue is a grace.
Grace is a little girl,
Who doesn't wash her face.

I recently worked on a project for a government client. Talk about slow! Everything has to be approved by many people at many different levels, and just getting an answer to a question can take a week! That was hard to get used to.

But academia really isn't any better. I find myself getting a bit annoyed at the seasons of academia. Last spring/summer, I sent off three proposals for book chapters or articles to various places, all of which were conditionally accepted (to my surprise!) Each indicated they would respond and send revision requests by the fall. It's now April and I've yet to see those revision notes. I also know I won't see them till May since it's the end of the term, but I find myself a bit annoyed that none of these projects seem to have happened on schedule. I'm suspecting that's the norm in academia, but it doesn't make it any easier while I wait.

I'd just really love to finish these projects off, file them away, and concentrate on the current ones. *sigh* But I'll just have to wait till I hear back from the people who have the power to publish them.

Have patience. Have patience.
Don't be in such a hurry.
When you get impatient,
You only start to worry.
Remember, remember,
that God is patient too.
And think of all the times
when others have to wait for you*.

I am hopeful that someday I'll learn patience. I have been learning to be a more patient driver over the last few years. Perhaps I'll be able to do the same for the rest of my life as well. It's just that there's so much I want to do that I don't want to wait in order to be able to do it! That includes academic projects, which is my challenge: to focus on what's happening right now, and leave everyone else's schedules to them.

*These are the lyrics to a children's song the girls would listen to on one of their favorite tapes. For the full effect, you'd have to be able to imagine a turtle singing them in a slow, low voice that sounds like a record being played too slow.

New genre

I'm venturing into a new scholarly genre in three weeks time - the poster paper.

The genre is primarily used by scientists (including social scientists) so those of us in the humanities usually don't have the experience of publishing this way. But I submitted an abstract to a conference on genomics (the science of genetic information), specifically to their section on "liberal democracy and genomics" and it was picked up as a poster paper.

So now I have to figure this genre out!

Looks very different from the kind of writing/publishing I'm used to doing, that's for sure!

It does offer me the opportunity to think beyond just words to describe the work that I'm doing, which is not only a novelty, but something I've been wanting to do for a while now. (I've been thinking about creating a dissertation-based website where I can include dissertation-related material that wouldn't necessarily make it into the dissertation itself)

I think producing this poster presentation will actually be very productive as I work to adapt my research to this kind of format. I'm expecting that in the act of translating my work into this new genre, it will reveal things about my research that I haven't really thought about before.

Certainly, thinking about my research into the novel I'll be discussing - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - as a scientific project, with a background discussion, methodology, results and discussion, will require me to approach the novel and my work on it from a different angle than I have to this point.

I realize what I'm doing might be construed by some as a kind of "disloyalty" to the discipline. After all, the 2006 presidential address by Marjorie Perloff to the MLA called for a return to a more conventional definition of the English department, with less cultural studies and perhaps even less interdisciplinary work and more literary work. The debate of whether this is a good idea or a bad one is too large for me to engage with right now, but the point is that presenting a poster paper certainly isn't staying faithful to the (original) "literary" nature of the discipline.

But I'm looking forward to it. Wish me luck as I try to remember what a science poster presentation is supposed to look like!

Happy Blogversary

Five years.

I don't think I necessarily had any notions of how long this blog would last when I first began, but I probably wouldn't have guessed it would be going five years later.

During the time, many things have changed. Pictures and video are much easier to embed now and the whole Blogger interface has changed. But mostly I think things have stayed the same. I still seem to blog about the same kinds of stuff, maybe I blog a bit more about my dissertation work, but considering its LARGE role in my life, that seems natural.

When I first began, I thought the blog would be a way for friends who were far away to keep up with what was going on in my life, instead of having to write the same email over and over. But it very quickly changed, partly because I realized that the people who I email are not necessarily the same people who read the blog. So as a kind of mass email, it has failed.

But the blog is just the medium, and its purpose (at least for me has changed). One of the things I really have found useful about blogging, particularly as I blog about the dissertation, is that it has taught me how to talk about my academic work in a way that is less formal, and a bit more approachable. Now, before you protest, know that I do recognize that I've still got a long way to go before my writing about the dissertation really becomes approachable, but I'm starting to see differences, and if for nothing else, the blog has been instrumental in making that happen.

So here's to five years - who knows what's yet to come?

The horror, the horror...

Okay, "horror" is probably too strong a word for it. But the inability of so many people to use language to effectively express themselves is really starting to get to me.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old.

Maybe it's because I'm marking first year composition papers.

Maybe it's because while taking a break from marking first year composition papers I tried reading the letters to the editor section of the newspaper.

Maybe it's because I started reading favorite blogs during another break from marking first year composition papers and came across my buddy Jim's comment that BostonNow is limiting its reader-generated section because

Thankfully, the paper seems to have realized that most people who would blog for free in this situation are either terrible, desperate, or a little crazy, so they've cut down on the amount of space given to re-printing them.

Together, these events have conspired to convince me that the number of people capable of using language to accurately convey a coherent, well thought out argument (about anything!) is drastically falling. And it's not just people who have an excuse. About a third of my class are ESL students, which means they often say things I can't understand, but I do understand why they're having difficulty expressing themselves. Another 10% of my students write like I would expect high school graduates to write.

But it's the other half of the class whose inability to manipulate the language with any dexterity that (collectively) convince me we're in serious trouble. They grew up here, speaking the language since they learned to talk, writing it all through their formal education so far, and yet they could not write an argument to save their lives because they can't grasp simple concepts like "every sentence needs a subject and a verb". They prattle on in their writing like they do when they speak. And although I've yet to see someone type out "you know what I'm sayin'?"*, they're coming real damn close.

It gets really frustrating, because there's just so much that they have not learnt to this point, that even covering the basics would take far more time than I'm allotted to teach them. I'm supposed to be teaching them the higher writing functions, but I feel like I only teach those functions to that 10%. The rest I'm just trying to get caught up. It's exhausting and depressing at the same time.

*the answer to this query is usually "no" since the phrase is used to avoid actually saying what it is that the speaker is convinced he/she is saying.

Big Dog

I've seen a much shorter clip of Big Dog before, but this one shows some really interesting scenarios that the robot works through - hills, ice, being knocked off balance. You might want to play it with the sound off (or down) because Big Dog does make a rather annoying sound while operating.

Big Dog was produced by Boston Dynamics.

Best $30 I ever spent

This week I made an appointment at my old hair salon. I haven't been to it since I moved away five years ago - partly because I was gone, and then once we came back, there was little need since I was wearing my hair long. Not to mention, it's location isn't very convenient.

This week I made an appointment and when I got there said "My hair is a disorganized mess. Make it better" or something along those lines.

I wish I had done this months ago. Although I've lost some of the length I had last week, my hair can't by any stretch of the imagination be called short. My stylist didn't recognize me, but hey, last time I saw her, my hair was about 3" long, so I can understand. But she is just as fabulous with long hair as with short. I cannot believe how different that cut has made me feel!

It isn't just the hair. I look in the mirror and feel like I look younger, more beautiful, happier. I know it's not just the cut, but eliminating the frustration I sometimes felt when it was a couple of inches longer has worked wonders. I never would've thought a haircut could do that, but it did. Amazing!

Sunshine and wine

The sunshine in California was absolutely wonderful! I adored being able to sit out on a patio, drinking wine, having great conversation with good friends, then eating barbecue, more wine, and a tour of some really gorgeous country. Life could be fun if every weekend included a day like that...

I suppose if I really did get my wish, I *could* get bored of it after a while. Not the sunshine or the wine. But I suspect I'd run out of interesting things to say to interesting people.

I guess it's a bit like what my mother told me when I complained that I couldn't have my favourite meal every night. She told me that if I did, it wouldn't be my favourite anymore and I'd get tired of it night after night. What made it special was that it was so rare.

So I suppose a Saturday afternoon in Napa/Sonoma with good friends (and wine) could fall into that category. But I'm also pretty sure that it would take a lot of Saturdays for me to tire of it! Such generous and wonderful friends I have!

San Francisco

Conferencing is going well - We're about half way through the conference, and so far everything that I wanted to do or to see has gone off without a hitch.

I saw my advisor yesterday - gave her a chapter (which she seemed genuinely glad to receive), listened to her paper (fabulous!) and had dinner together with a number of her colleagues, which was fun. I don't quite think of them as my colleagues, but I suppose if I want to joint their ranks soon, I'll have to get used to that!

My paper went off fairly well this morning too. We had a miscellany of papers on the panel, and I wasn't quite sure how they would all fit together, but it turned out that they fit very nice - and that's always a good thing when that happens. I'm moderating a panel later this afternoon, which promises to be a lot of fun as well if the conversations I've been having with people are any indication, so I'm looking forward to that. Here's hoping the rest of the conference comes off without a hitch too!

Sleepy and fat

I'm not surprised by the latest finding that sleep deprivation leads to weight gain. I've always known that when I'm the most tired is when I feel like I just want to eat! And the more tired I am, the more fat I want in what I'm eating. Though I also tend to drink more when I'm sleep deprived. Not intensely tired, just not getting enough sleep.

It makes sense I suppose that when the body hasn't had enough sleep, it needs extra energy during the day and you feel hungrier. Good thing I've been (mostly) getting enough sleep - otherwise I'd be ballooning!

(Un)forgettable

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were laughing when we figured out that our boss was confusing the two of us. Before we figured it out, we'd both been confused at various times because he would tell one of us something and think the other one knew it. We had a good laugh.

But I don't feel like laughing any more. Today my boss mistook me for someone else! Now there are three of us who he is confusing... or maybe just confusing me with two other people. I've often been mistaken for someone else before, but this strikes me as a tad ridiculous.

I guess I haven't made a good impression, or at least haven't made a memorable one.

This day in (blog) history

March 13th must be a good blogging day. Since I began this blog, I've written a post each March 13th, so I suppose now is not the time to stop posting...

On March 13, 2007, I wondered what the world needs with another English major. The answer was "a lot!"

On March 13, 2006, I introduced yawp.

On March 13, 2005, I struggled with figuring out what of the mountain of things that needed to get done I would do first. Coincidentally, I'm struggling with the same thing today, except the list of things that HAVE to get done first - the urgentnotimportant - is longer than it was that day.

On March 13, 2004, I celebrated the return of a working computer and the easing of academic requirements for a particular course.

So, what's going on today?

Well, I've got way too much marking to do. We're only in the second week, and I feel a little overwhelmed. Already. I think it's mostly because I didn't get a break between the last term and the start of this new modified term. And I've got to create a podcast for one class next week that I'll be missing for the PCA conference.

At least the conference paper is mostly there. It needs some theory in the middle, and I'll need to trim up the plot descriptions in order to stay under the time limit, but I think it's doing what I want it to - that is, to provoke conversation about the definition of the vampire. At least I hope it will. The conference schedule itself is getting really hectic with meetings, dinners etc., so my down time will be minimal, but if it's at all like other PCA's I've attended, I'll enjoy myself immensely.

The good news is that I think I circumvented the virus that was trying to take me down earlier this week. On Monday I started feeling that heat and itchiness around the eyes that usually signals a cold and on Tuesday, my cheeks (sinuses) started aching too. Today, neither area is feeling any worse, and if I can take good care of my body for the next few days, I may have dodged the worse of the bug. Here's keeping my fingers crossed.

So this March 13th post is pretty boring. But it's not like it's the first time I've posted a boring post. Thanks for suffering through oh my faithful reader.

I have no idea what to title this post

Writing has been very challenging for me lately. I've felt the absence of writing peers desperately lately and could really use some encouragement as I slog through my current phase of writing.

It's not that the writing's bad. It's just that there's so much going on right now that prioritizing is becoming a problem. You know, that feeling when you have so much to do that you don't know where to start? There are just so many things that are "urgent" and "important" or even just "urgent" and "not important".

I really do try to categorize things according to that cross section, where urgent+important gets done first, urgent+notimportant and important+noturgent get done in various combinations next, and noturgent+notimportant get done last. But it's interesting how both noturgent and notimportant can so quickly change into urgent and important when you don't get to them.

Lately,

• a job application
• taxes

have been urgent+important

with

• student marking

always taking up the urgent+notimportant category.

Yes, you heard what I said. My student's writing is not as important as mine. Mine will dictate what kind of job prospects I have. Theirs is loose, casually constructed and sometimes done under duress because they have to take the course. But I am paid to respond to their writing and they need that feedback in order to complete the course in time, so it gets categorized as urgent. But it takes away time from what's really important to me.

I've actually made some progress, but most of it has been of the rearranging/editing kind for the dissertation, so it isn't really growing. Harder to see the progress when you're shuffling things around, though the shuffling is a really good thing. I was trying to pack way too much stuff into my introduction, and by distributing key sections of it to other chapters, I managed to chop its monstrous size in half. Now I can build up the parts that need building without feeling like the introduction's becoming a two headed monster!

But before that oh-so-important task of dissertation editing, I need to finish writing the conference paper for next week. It's about half there, but it's really unstructured right now and needs some form to hold its bagginess together.

The Tomorrow's Professor blog has had some interesting posts on writing lately, particularly about how to unclutter your writing, but I find that much of their advice is to do things I already find myself doing. No help there. Apparently I know what to do, and I'm doing it fairly efficiently. I'm just not doing enough of it. Simple.

Sometimes I think the frustrations I have writing the dissertation are similar to the frustrations dieters or smokers have. I can read all kinds of books, get all kinds of advice, but when it really comes down to it, I just have to write. When you're trying to lose weight or quit smoking, you can spend all the time in the world talking about it or reading about it, but it really comes down to action. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you take in. If you want to quit smoking, stop putting cigarettes into your mouth and lighting them.

If you want to write a dissertation, quit whining and start putting words on paper.

There. That's my advice to myself. Do you think I'll take my own advice?

Being mom

The other day I walked past a storefront at the mall called "The Mom Store" and although I didn't look in, as I walked past, it didn't seem like it was a store for moms per se, but for babies because it was filled with strollers, cribs, toys, bath aids etc. And I found myself thinking what a misnomer the store was - it should've been called "The Baby Store" (though I suspect that name had already been trademarked, hence The Mom Store).

Then this week, I came to the realization that the gradebook I'm using is running out of room and I'll need a new one.

Yes, I know there are online gradebooks, but I prefer to record attendance and grades on the spot in an actual book. And if you're going to accuse me of being a luddite for doing so, you haven't been paying attention to this blog.

My point is, I've been searching for a replacement and every place I look, the only record books I can find have little hearts, or teddy bears, or stars plastered all over them. Ugh! What do high school teachers use? Are you seriously telling me that they ALL just use Excel? Nobody uses paper anymore? In not being able to find a plain record book suitable for adults, I'm a little offended that "teacher" seems to equal "grade-school teacher" only. Just like the "mom" in the store name mentioned above really translates as "woman with a baby".

-----

There have been several times over the last few years... okay, actually, the last couple decades... when I've come across various arguments about being a mother and identity.

Often the article (or more lately, blog post) has been written by a woman who is about to become a mother, or who has recently become one. These writers often worry that their careers will be damaged, that they will talk endlessly of their children (much to the boredom of others around them), or that they will somehow lose their identity.

Their arguments all just feel so disconnected from the reality I live in.

I've been trying to work out why. Am I defective? If everyone else feels their identity is forever changed by having kids, why don't I feel the same way? Did I miss something? Does that make me a bad mother?

The nearest I've been able to figure out is that having children when I was young meant that I skipped over all that worrying about identity and careers and such. Not that I'm advocating having children young. Or advocating not having children young. It's just that I think having children young inherently skips over this question. After all, when you're in your early twenties, you have yet to establish the career that could be potentially damaged by having children. Not having had a career before the kids came along, meant that my worklife post-kids couldn't really be compared to worklife pre-kids since the pre-kids part was so short (and was what I would define as "work" as opposed to "career").

And how do you worry about eroding your "identity" when you've barely begun to develop it yourself? I can see how living as an adult for a decade or more before having children, could make the decision to have children feel like an entire change of identity. I understand those kinds of changes that make you wonder who you will be without ____ [fill in the blank with whatever is relevant] I suppose when you've only been an adult yourself for a few years, becoming a parent gets mixed up a bit with becoming an adult, so that being a parent seems like a natural extension of adulthood. No traumatic change here, just part of the package. Not that mixing up adulthood and parenthood isn't without its (potential) pitfalls, since separating them again after the children grow up could create problems.

I think it's telling that whenever I might try to do so, I have great difficulty imagining myself as not-parent. Some people can remember not being a parent. For me, there never really was an adult me that wasn't a parent - what adult years I had that were childless were short and so close to adolescence that they sometimes don't even seem to be adult. Adulthood and parenthood are really one and the same thing for me - they're synonymous in my vocabulary. Again, not a good/bad thing, just the way it worked out.

All this isn't to say that having children at a young age is a good thing. On the contrary. There are a lot of things that I did the hard(er) way because I was doing them with the kids. For instance, it would've been nice to be an adult student without balancing family life the whole way through. And I know there are things that more financial stability (which older parents usually have) would've provided my children that they didn't get. Then again, we simply lived the lives of a family living at or below the poverty line. There were plenty of other people in that boat with us, both with and without kids.

So it's not a matter of good or bad, just that for me, I never experienced an identity crisis in becoming a mom. But I do feel like we generally forget that "mom" isn't a cookie-cutter label. It isn't just "woman with a baby" or "woman who gives up career" or "soccer mom" or any of the other labels we so easily slap on it. I'm still a mom even after my kids can get their own breakfast (ah! sleeping in again on the weekend), dress themselves, drive a car, fall in love, live with their boyfried, have kids of their own etc.... It never ends. My mom is not only a grandmother but still a mother as well.

So why do I feel like I'm being pushed out of the category of "mother" now that mine are growing up? If there's an identity crisis here, it will be learning to be an adult without being viewed by society as a mother at the same time.

Articulating a teaching philosophy

I've been trying to write a teaching philosophy over the past few days. It's an interesting exercise fraught with what seem like numerous pitfalls. Advice ranges all over the place and the lists of "do's" and "don'ts" seems endless. I've decided the only real solution is to focus on what I do and let the advice go its own way.

But when I think about how I teach and why I teach the way I do, I find that my teaching philosophy seems to be a result of negotiating between contradictions.

On the one hand, it's important for students to see the relevance of what they do in the classroom to their lives.
On the other hand, they need to learn basic terms, ideas, and critical habits whether or not they're "relevant" to their lives.

On the one hand, post-secondary students are adults.
On the other hand, especially junior post-secondary students are not experts in the conventions of their field or the academy and they need to be taught the behaviours expected within the post-secondary educational setting.

On the one hand, I am not an entertainer.
On the other hand, I need to gain and keep the attention of my students if they are to learn what I am trying to teach them.

On the one hand, I am the one expert in the room.
On the other hand, collaboration with peers can be a powerful way of learning.

On the one hand, students need to know how to use available technology in order to succeed in their fields.
On the other hand, I need to use the best tool available to convey an idea, even it its one of the simplest tools available (like say a pen and piece of paper).

On the one hand, course objectives are there to set ou the minimum expectations for everyone in the class to achieve.
On the other hand, each student comes into the class with their own strengths, experiences, weaknesses, and goals, and I need to be able to recognize and respond to those differences.

On the one hand, the semester is very short.
On the other hand, what I teach can last a lifetime.

See what I mean? The way I teach and the reasons that I teach the way I do seem to arise out of these conflicts. I use technology, but only when I think it will be the best way to convey information or to facilitate learning. For example, I've always like to teach film. But films are between 1 1/2 and 2 hours long usually, and unless you have a three hour time block, it's difficult to show a film in its entirety in one session and then have a significant discussion about it. But showing a film and then discussing it several days later also tends to be less dynamic because the students don't have the experience of watching it immediate to mind. But the last time I taught a film, I required the students to log onto a threaded discussion and continue discussing a film we watched earlier that day, which provided an immediacy that you can't get by waiting for the next class meeting and generated a good conversation. In this case, the technology is a tool that helps me provide the students with a richer learning environment.

But at the same time, I also often use a comprehension exercise with my students that requires them to graphically represent one of the readings they've done. I supply the markers and colored paper - they supply the interpretation. It's simple, but students regularly tell me that having to visually represent a written text helps them understand the text better.

So where do I stand on technology in the classroom? Well, it's nice to have (when it works!) but it isn't the solution to every pedagogical problem.

So what do I write in the teaching philosophy about technology? I suppose I'll just have to say "it depends". But I think the tension produced by all these conflicting ideals is what produces my explanation of how I teach and why I teach the way I do.

It just seems unsatisfying to say that my teaching philosophy emerges out of contradictory impulses.

Church Bulletins

Thank God for the Church ladies who type them. These sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced in church services:
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The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.
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The sermon this morning:
"Jesus Walks on the Water."
The sermon tonight:
"Searching for Jesus."
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Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.
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The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been cancelled due to a conflict.
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Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say "Hell" to someone who doesn't care much about you.
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Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.
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Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way again," giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.
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For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery down stairs.
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Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir.
They need all the help they can get.
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The Rector will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing: "Break Forth Into Joy."
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Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.
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At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What Is Hell?"
Come early and listen to our choir practice.
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Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.
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Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.
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Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.
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The church will host an evening of fine dining, wuper entertainment and gracious hostility.
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Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and medication to follow.
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Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10 AM. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B. S. is done.
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The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.
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The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.
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The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
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Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.
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The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: "I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours”

Out of control

Stress is most often caused by a person's feeling that they are not in control of the events in their life.

I am currently struggling mightily to re-gain control of my life from people who have taken it, while simultaneously letting go of the things that I can so that I don't feel like I'm out of control.

It's not easy.

I've been having troubles with a particular company that holds one of my student loans (okay, actually two - that's where the problem lies). They have in general been uncommunicative, and have lost at least two key forms over the last couple of years. This has created problems. I have had to solve these problems.

Their latest communication with me was to indicate they had sent one of my loans to collections. This was a big surprise to me, since I had been paying the loan regularly over the last year. I suspect this might surprise any other person in my position.

I made many phone calls to many different departments. I even went to my local office. Near as I can figure out, they sent the 2 payments I was making on 2 accounts to only 1 account. So even though I have receipts saying I've paid into both accounts, they think I've only been paying one account. The other account of course became delinquent.

Now, a reasonable person would think "Oh, that was a mistake. This customer was making double payments on one account and no payments on the other. That makes no sense. And this customer says she was paying both accounts. So we made a mistake. We'll fix it".

Nope.

No one who I have talked to has been willing to take responsibility for making this mistake. No one. So I have had to request a formal investigation be launched. Meanwhile, a credit agency is calling trying to collect on the account it has been forwarded.

Right now, I've done all that I can. All I can do is hope the "investigation" department isn't just a whitewash department. But I'm not holding my breath. At this point, I've received nothing but belligerance from the responsible department, which doesn't inspire confidence that their "investigation" people will be, what shall we call it,... human?

I'm experiencing a tenuous peace about the whole process. After all, I've now done all I can, and the results lie in someone else's hands. But it is tenuous at best.

But just after I launched the claim, I ran into another autonomy-stripping event.

The school I teach at uses an LMS for course management, as do most post-secondary (and even some secondary) schools. [LMS stands for "learning management system" and in its most simple form is a web portal that allows teachers and students to exchange files, post content, and manage grades] This term I'm switching from teaching full semesters to condensed ones, which means the courses are also switching from fully face to face to hybrid - half online/half classroom.

I like the idea of hybrid classes. I've always enjoyed teaching them, and one of the things that I find difficult in the online work that I do is that there is no face to face interaction to supplement it. So I've actually been looking forward to delivering these hybrid courses.

With the changeover, there's no break between terms though. I proctor my last exam Friday morning and distribute the syllabus for a new class on Monday morning. So being human, I worked hard to clear the exam week of any additional duties other than exams. In other words, for the new courses, I translated all the course content to hybrid format, created a coursepak, and wrote the syllabi and schedules all last week.

Foolish me.

I created all this material and uploaded it into the generic "inventory" shell for the course. We keep inventory shells so that you don't have to roll over the course in the next term, instead you just reload the inventory shell for a new class.

Unbeknownst to me, the powers that be decided I needed the content for the online version of the course (not the hybrid one I'm set to teach) and replaced my inventory shell with the online one.

Poof! There goes all my advanced preparation.

My first thought was "WTF!?!" Followed by "?Am I supposed to use this stuff instead?" Followed by "Is there anything useful here I can pilfer use as I erase all this content I don't want and RE-upload my stuff?" (btw: the answer is pretty much "no")

So now I'm erasing all that stuff that isn't useful but is in my course on the LMS, while having to re-load all the stuff I do want there.

To top it off, I have no control over access to the site, so 2 students have already sent confused emails saying they can't find the textbook listed on the site (you know, the online one, not the one I selected AND ordered) in the bookstore.

It's gonna be a long semester...

First IT Professional

In Bruges

Sometimes the trailer of a movie just doesn't really do it justice. Sometimes this is because the trailer consists entirely of the good parts of the movie, leading you to think (erroneously) there are more good parts in the whole thing. Sometimes it's because the trailer seems to be for a different movie than the one that is actually made. Sometimes it's because the trailer works so hard at not giving anything away that it actually tells you nothing at all.

The trailer for In Bruges doesn't give anything away - which is good - but it also highlights only a small part of the film. That small part captures the characters in the film very well. But it doesn't capture the delightful black comedy that that the film consists of.

I went to see the film because of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Ferrell. And they were great. But the film itself is more than just a couple of great acting performances. It has you laughing and gasping in horror at your laughter, and then just somberly contemplating the horror, then laughing again. It's an intelligent film with realistic and witty dialogue, but it's the nonverbal acting abilities of its characters that carry it beyond just witty to a truly fascinating film. It's not the most intelligent film I've ever seen, and there are some scenes that left me feeling a bit hollow. But it was definitely worth the price of the ticket (not like Jumper last week that was a slick, swiss cheese plotted affair).

But don't go see it if you don' like black humour.

And don't go see it if you're American and are easily insulted (not that the Canadians fare any better - in fact, I think they come off as much less savory characters than the Americans, but they're at least taken seriously).

Blood sucking creatures

My reading over the last several days has consisted of vampire lore and theory. It's been productive, and even impressed one of my daughters who had trouble believing that I was actually studying vampires.

You might remember my question last month about what constitutes a vampire and the excellent responses I got. I was asking the question because I have a conference paper to deliver next month on vampires and posthumans. The argument I will be making is that essentially their similarities outweigh their differences and that vampires haven't cornered the market on the biological need for blood in order to reproduce.

I'm still working through the argument, which I now realize is going to be far more complex than a 15 minute conference presentation is really designed to handle. I suspect I'll end up with a seminar length paper that will have to be chopped in half to make it work.

One of the books I read - Blood Obsessions - makes an interesting argument that the serial killer and the vampire perform similar literary functions. The repetitive nature of the vampire's continuous need to feed and the serial killer's continuous need to kill are cyclical in nature and represent the Freudian 'compulsion to repeat'. Usually I'm not big on Freudian theory, at least as it is applied to literature, but I do find the argument that the serial killer and the vampire are figures performing similar functions quite compelling. I would suggest that instead of Freud's compulsion to repeat though, that the compelling nature of the two figures lies in their unhuman activities. Not only do both undertake activities not considered human(e), but they both also represent the threat that any human might become one of them - either through the bite, or through trauma, bad genes, atavism, or whatever other reason one might use to explain the production of serial killers.

Not that I'll be talking serial killers in the paper, but posthumans do tend to embody a similar threat to the human - that any human might become one of them and that they are unhuman in their activities. In that way, the posthuman challenges the vampire on its own turf, threatening to become the monster-du-jour and displace the vampire from that position.

Or at least that's the argument.

Not that you really wanted to know, but I need to start writing out the argument to work it out - as you can tell, it's pretty sketchy at this point.

Tired and wired

I just got an email from the tech people at an organization I'm a member of saying essentially "we had problems with our internet connection this morning, but now it's fixed. If you continue to have problems, please contact us"

An email.

And I thought my brain was scrambled from the weekend!

Last week was busy as I prepared to go to Boston for our second annual! grad conference. The weather last week was great, as is the weather this week, but on Friday, as I was preparing to leave, a storm blew in. It didn't seem like that bad a storm, and when I got to the airport, my flight was listed as delayed by only 15 minutes. No problem. I had two hours to connect in Toronto.

Two hours later, we finally lifted off, and even though the pilots made up time in the air, we got to TO airport with only a half hour to spare. I would've made the connection too if customs hadn't decided to close five minutes early that night. Yep, I missed my connection because the border closes at 9 pm in Toronto.

So I spent a mostly sleepless night on the Toronto airport floor. But I arrived in Boston about 45 minutes before the conference began, so at least I made it.

Travelling always tires me out, but spending the night in an airport really did me in. In my twenties, it would've been no problem. Even through most of my thirties I think it wouldn't have been a problem. But this time, it killed me.

I think I finally caught up on sleep last night!

Good news is that my paper went over quite well, and I had some great questions, which is always a lot of fun. And I got to have dinner with friends who I hadn't seen for a very long time. I have some really wonderful friends who helped out by adjusting their schedules to my wacky travel schedule and by driving me places. You know who you are and I appreciate it!

The icing on the cake? When I walked into Logan Sunday morning to come home, the first thing I see is that my flight has been cancelled! I thought I was in for the whole rigamarole all over again and was tempted to scream. Luckily they found a way to get me where I needed to go so I still got home at a decent time so that I could crawl into bed and finally sleep!

Hi, ho, the merry-o, a conferencing we will go

This conference is probably the worst timing possible! But of course I can't really complain since I was part of the committee when we set the date. For someone on a regular semester system, it's probably absolutely ideal. But with our wacky term schedule, we're in crunch mode.

In two writing classes, there was an assignment due this last week and 1/5 of each class just hasn't turned it in. I really gotta wonder what they're thinking, since the drop date has passed and they're stuck in the course now.... It's really hard as the conscientious-student-type to understand what other students are thinking of when they do stuff like this.

Good news is my conference paper is all there - in fact it's too much there. I need to trim at least 3, ideally 4 minutes off of it. I've trimmed it down considerably to this point, but it's still over the time limit. Problem is, I may have to fundamentally change (damage?) the argument to squeeze it into the time limit.

The other option to decrease speaking time might be to create a powerpoint to go with it. I can offload some of the explanation to visual images instead, you know, a picture's worth a thousand words and so on. But that will require probably more time than I have. I can imagine how a powerpoint would look, it's just that storyboarding it, finding images, designing slides, and timing it would probably take more time than I can afford. If I did it, I'd want to do it right after all...

Ah, well. The end of the week will come whether I'm ready or not, and the conference paper will get delivered one way or the other. I just wish I had an extra day to work on it. *sigh*

New rules for living

NEW RULES FOR ENTERING ALBERTA :
1. Bring your own house.
2. If you are going to the Oil Sands, bring your own house, school, and hospital.
3. If you are going to Edmonton, wear your flak jacket. This is the murder capital of Canada .
4. If you are driving to Edmonton , note that it is also the auto theft center of Canada .
5. If you are bringing drugs, head straight to Fort McMurray, the drug capital of Canada ..
6. If you are looking for work, look no further. Minimum wage is $5.60 per hour.
7. If you work downtown, note that parking costs $5.00 per hour or more.
8. If you are able to buy a house in Edmonton or Calgary , why not spend the money on a 15 year holiday.
9. If you drive a Hummer, look out. Alberta has the highest gas prices in Canada [The Alberta Advantage].
10. In Edmonton we have 5 hospitals. 10 years ago we had 7. Don't come here sick.
11. In Calgary the population has exploded. The last road was paved 12 years ago. Calgary is a no parking zone.


NEW CALGARY RULES OF THE ROAD:
1. You must first learn to pronounce the name correctly -- it is: "CAL-GREE". The second 'A' is redundant.
2. The morning rush hour is from 5:00am to noon. The evening rush hour is from noon to 8:00pm. Friday's rush hour starts on Thursday morning and ends on Saturday night.
3. The minimum acceptable speed on most freeways is 130 kph. On the Deerfoot 500, you are expected to match the speed of the airplanes coming in for a landing at the airport. Anything less is considered "Wussy".
4. Forget the traffic rules you learned elsewhere. Calgary now has its own version of traffic rules. For example, cars/trucks with the loudest muffler go first at a four-way stop; the trucks with the biggest tires go second. However, Calgary , SUV-driving, cell phone-talking moms ALWAYS have the right of way.
5. If you actually stop at a yellow light, you will be rear ended, cussed out, and possibly shot.
6. Never honk at anyone. Ever. Seriously. It's another offense that can get you shot.
7. Road construction is permanent and continuous in Calgary . . . Detour barrels are moved around each night to make the next day's driving a bit more exciting, but nothing ever gets finished, and more new construction starts everyday.
8. Watch carefully for road hazards such as drunks, skunks, dogs, cats, deer, barrels, cones, cows, horses, cats, mattresses, shredded tires, garbage, squirrels, rabbits, crows, and coyotes feeding on any of these items.
9. In Calgary, 16th Avenue, TransCanada, and "Hwy #1" are all the same road.
10. If someone actually has their turn signal on, wave them to the shoulder immediately to let them know it has been "accidentally activated."
11. If you are in the left lane and only driving 110 in a 80-90 kph zone, you are considered a road hazard and will be "flipped off" accordingly.
If you return the flip, you will be shot.
12. For winter driving, it is advisable to wear your parka, toque, fur lined mittens and mukluks. Make sure you have a shovel, food, candles and blankets in the vehicle, as snow removal from the city streets is virtually non-existent until the spring thaw.