Happy Michele

Michele is happy, happy today! (despite road work and an unexpected phone call this morning)

Happy Birthday to my birthday girl!

The Flames won game 5 last night, and I reconnected with a friend who I'd lost contact with when I moved. She changed workplaces and emails, and I just rediscovered where she's at. Yeah!

I felt really bad about losing touch too, 'cause the last time I talked to her, she called to ask if we could meet for coffee one last time before I left, and I was pulling the moving truck out of a Tim Horton's on Seventeenth Ave S.E. heading out to the #1. And after I left, I never was able to reconnect - I figured she was probably pissed at me.

But she replied to my email, and now we'll talk (at least electronically), and I can find out what's happening in her life, and she can read this and talk to me on email and find out about the bits of my life that don't make it onto this page. And I won't have lost another friend to moving 'cause losing good friends when you move sucks.

If I knew how to do cartwheels or a handstand or something else equally expressive/impressive, I would do so. I am so, so, so happy to rediscover my friend. *big smile*

The new Me Generation

Is it just me, or does it also strike you that there's something really screwed up about this student who "wanted some time without stress"?

This student disappeared for three weeks after skipping graduation and even though he heard through the media that his family was worried about him, he didn't call home because he didn't want the stress?

Did I miss something? What about the stress to his family? Did he just not care that they were worried? Having survived an undergraduate degree that included a divorce and periods of time where I was also the sole provider for three kids, I think I have the experience to say that the stress of this student's degree was by no means greater than the stress he would have inspired in those people who were wondering whether he was alive or dead.

When people you love are missing, regardless of how capable you think they are, or how likely it is that the rational part of your brain that says they're all right is correct, you can imagine some of the worst possible things.

Granted, this student has got to be at least 22, 23 years old - old enough that his parents shouldn't have to worry about him not being able to take care of himself, but I still read this story in utter amazement at the selfishness that seems to lie behind this student's actions.

I must admit I'm curious about the story that must be behind this - what kind of a relationship did they have? Why didn't he call, when the report says he hugged his parents when reunited with them? What kind of stress could someone be living under that would warrant such behaviour? Was this a case of parents who are too involved in their children's lives?

Very odd.

Working stiff

Yeah! My work permission arrived!

Now I just need to see if there are any decent summer jobs left - wish me luck.

Ebay

I have mixed feelings about the whole ebay phenomena. I first discovered it/used it in March when I needed to replace the hard drive to my computer and found the same hard drive for 1/4 the price the dealer wanted.

I've already ranted here about the idiot who sent the hard drive because he sent a different model number than the one advertised. It had the same specifications, so it worked, but I thought it rather sloppy of the seller.

Okay, so as a first experience, it was so-so. But I've had ebay cancel a transaction because it wasn't listed in the correct category, and I've also not received merchandise I've paid for.

In one case, I needed a book for my book club, and since I was really busy and was having problems getting to the bookstore, I went onto ebay. Imagine my delight to find someone selling an e-book version for only $0.99! I would pay almost nothing for the book, there would be no delivery time, and I would get the chance to try reading an e-book, something I've never done before.

So I put in my bid, waited, won it, and sent my money - within about three hours of the bid closing. And then I waited some more. I sent emails asking where it was. I sent emails asking when I could expect it. I sent emails asking for a refund. I finally borrowed the book from a friend.

The seller was booted off of ebay, so I guess that's a good thing, and it was only a dollar, but I'm still annoyed.

In the meantime, I've had several successful interactions and been pretty much satisfied with the whole process. Until I bid on a semi-hard-to-find Victorian book that I was happy to find at less than $5. So again, I sent off the money right away and nothing happened. I sent two emails asking what was up and got nothing. I figured it was the same kind of whatever it is attitude that the previous bad seller had, but then it got interesting.

I got an email from the seller asking why I had given him a bad rating when he was the one who had never received payment from me. He said he could understand how I thought I'd paid him and never done so and could I please remove the bad rating.

My reply e-mail included a copy of the paypal record of my payment, which I confirmed with the bank, and I told him that if he would send me the book, I would remove the rating. He indicated he would send the book in the interests of good customer service, even though he made it sound like he thought I was scamming him. That was three weeks ago. I'm not getting my book, am I?

Jerk!

Do they congregate on ebay, or just in the bookselling section?

Mundane is beautiful

My god that post on Saturday was long! Congrats if you actually read the whole thing!

I'm amused at myself - that post was probably the most academic thing I did all weekend. But man oh man did the weekend feel good! It felt so normal and weekend-ish. On Friday we did grocery shopping, saw a movie and picked up transit passes for this week. Saturday was full of soccer game, cleaning (my) house and then going to a housewarming party - which was highly amusing - nice mix of people.

Sunday we went out to Walden Pond for a picnic (just Ange, Dwayne & I since the other two were 'working'), did some soccer drills/goofing around (okay, truth be told, it was mostly just goofing around), and watched movies. Today, the girls and I went shopping, I refilled the propane tank on the BBQ, planted the rest of the bedding plants and will watch game 4 tonight.

So I know you're bored by the description of my weekend, but to me it was an absolute delight! There was no intellectual work involved (okay, except for marking student papers that I squeezed in here or there, but that takes more patience than brain power).

Sweet!

The truth is stranger than fiction

This has got to be the oddest story I've heard in a long time - a boy plotting his own murder. Why would he do this, you ask? Good question! Seems to me that more than one player in this story has a screw loose.

I'm makin' a list...

...and checking it twice, and then a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a... well, you get the idea.

This list generating stuff is gonna drive me insane! I feel like I've just been thrown out into library stacks and told "pick good stuff" without any sense of rhyme or reason.

The stacks of books around my desk are piling up as I pull them off my shelves, or borrow them from the library, trying to figure out if they need to be included on a 'comprehensive' list that, if I read it, will presumably make me an expert in three clearly defined areas and give me permission to go on to the dissertation. [And I don't even want to think about the headaches that process will bring with it.]

You know, most of the time, I'm not at all jealous of Dwayne's work - the volume he has to read (and memorize! something I never have to worry about) is prodigious. But at times like this, I am jealous. He may have a lot to read, but at least he knows WHAT he's got to read to pass exams. I've not only got to read and respond to the questions at the end of this year, but I've got to guess right about what I need to read in order to make things profitable.

Grrrrrr. I've felt really unsupported by the department/faculty before, but this really feels like I'm being thrown to the lions.

There is one lining in the cloud - I won't call it silver, 'cause it's probably more like a kind of graphite-grey color (you know, the color of silver when it gets tarnished? or maybe the color of a new car?).

When I first sat down with these lists, I had no clue what to put on them. I would look at the topic and think "I know nothing about this", but then I would start with a title or two, or an author or two, which would lead to another, and then another, and then another,... which was kinda cool 'cause it made me feel smart (or at least well read). But after about a hundred 'anothers', I started to panic again. How do I whittle this huge list down to size? Ideally, I figure about 20 primary texts plus the same number of secondary sources in each of the three areas is going to be the maximum I can read while still taking my exams by next summer.

...Okay, so I checked and the list is actually only about 46, not a hundred... but that's still twice as big as it should be.

And I figure I should have a list of only about 12-15 when I submit it to my supervisor, 'cause I know she'll add to it. And if I give her a list with 30 things on it, I'll get a list with 50 back! [I learnt that lesson with that monster reading course I did last term.]

Speaking of which, I finally got an email back from the prof - something to the effect of "I just read through all of your bibliography and I'm glad I gave you an A 'cause this is good work" - note the past tense of the verb: "gave". Nice to know I'm getting good marks after careful consideration... or maybe he was just impressed by the number of pages I turned in...

There's three lists. The Victorian one, I'm pretty cool with - my supervisor for that area gave me some good suggestions, and with my own interests, I think I've rounded out the list of primary texts. I'll still need to read/re-read them, find secondary sources, read them to decide if they need to go on, and then compile that half of the list, but that will just be time-consuming. I at least know what I've got to do there.

The Narrative theory list will be fairly basic also, though it will take me a lot more time since I've only read a couple of the theoretical works. But I've got a clear plan of action. I'm going to read excerpts of the key writers from two anthologies, and then decide whether I need to read their full book, or just an article - that will then become my list. Straightforward, but a lot of time - even more than the Victorian I figure.

It's the third list that's got me buggered. I want to read and test in twentieth century British prose fiction.

Problem is, there's a helluva lot of British prose fiction written in the last hundred years. Even trying to fashion an area based on a potential thesis on the failures of realism in the British novel still leaves me a lot of categories to cover. I need to include the big names of the post-war period, Amis (both of them), Sinclair, McEwan, Swift, Banks, Barker, Rushdie, Byatt, etc. to name a few, but also can't totally gloss over the modernists like Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, and for continuity-sake with the Victorian, should include the Edwardian period (though I may try to shoehorn them into Victorian to balance out the lists, if I can figure out a way to justify that).

But I also want to look at sf, magic realism, and fantasy... something necessary if I'm going to discuss realist and non-realist text. So okay, maybe I include Lewis Carroll and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (but you notice the children's lit angle beginning here? not a path I want to go down), but then I also want to include sf, which in some ways is fairly straightforward Aldis, Wyndham Lewis, Lessing,... but do I then also go into utopian/dystopian by including Orwell, Huxley etc.? I'm thinking of putting William Morris on the Victorian list, so if I include a Victorian utopic, do I need to include the twentieth century ones? After all, utopia/dystopia starts to leak into the political, which really has nothing to do with realism [anything you read into that is fully intended...]

But then with the magic realism you get into the thorny question of defining it, and when you start to define it, you start to define a postcolonial/colonial reading list, and then the list really does grow, because you start including Commonwealth stuff like Hulme, Carey, Achebe, Okri, Ishiguro, Lowry, Naipaul etc.... and that could be a list all on its own.

I suppose someone wise might advise me to go talk to my supervisor about all this, right? Right! That would be great advice!

Problem is, I've already talked to her twice about setting up this reading list. The first time, I got the distinct impression she was suggesting I find someone else to supervise this area. Second time, she told me that I needed to decide what I wanted on the list. Umm.. yeah,... that's kinda what I'm trying to do and having problems. Can you help?

Grrrr... for the second time in one post.

Perhaps something fantastical will happen and make this all a moot point... like a jet engine falling through the roof of my bedroom....

Cold

It's 64F in the Writing Centre where I'm working. That's 18C for the rest of the world.

A nice temperature if you're going for a run, or you've just come in from the beach in summer.

Not a nice temperature when you are sitting in it for hours inactive. It's May and I'm shivering.

Time Warp?

There may be a wormhole somewhere over the Charles River.

Today I left home 5 minutes later than usual... and got to work a half hour late.

Wormhole. Definitely. Or space alien abduction... and I just don't want to go there.

Hockey night in Boston

Nope, it doesn't have quite the right ring.

But it will be hockey night in Boston as we watch the Flames and Lightning begin their respective quests for the cup.

The New York Times sports writers filled a page and a half in anticipation of the series beginning tonight. From their article, they discuss the economics of a league that's grown radically in the last 30 odd years: "[Ignila's] team with a relatively low payroll in a relatively small city, is one of the 12 clubs to have made the conference finals in the last three seasons. More than some sports, hockey's competitive balance offers championship possibilities even for frugal teams in small markets.
On the other had, franchises in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles failed to make the playoffs this season. For the Rangers, it was the seventh consecutive season without postseason exposure..." The Rangers? Where do they belong in an article about the playoffs? I mean, I realize this is the New York Times, but its the Boston version - if they want to at least mention a team that made it to the post season, they could mention the Bruins (even if they didn't last long). There's more to hockey than the Rangers.

But wait, it gets better...."Although neither the Lightning nor the Flames are familiar to the sports world at large..." What? Which sports world? Oh, right, the sports world of the Yankees and the Knicks. In Hockey world, rest assured, the Flames are well known. You know, the Hockey world that supplies half of the NHL's players.

New Link

So instead of boring you if you don't give a damn what I'm reading, I've included it as a link on the left. If you're curious about what I read and what I think of it, you can read it.

If you're not curious, you can avoid scrolling through the periodic, and sometimes long, posts about books I've read.

Because I intend to continue rambling on about books.

Kinda makes sense given the sheer volume of time I spend "with my nose in a book" as my family puts it. Personally, I don't think that's a terribly dignified description of what I do, but I can only argue with the semantics, not the sentiment, of the phrase.

Morning music

Okay, so for the last couple of weeks, I have occasionally woken up with a song running through my head.

Why might I make note of this?

Because I realized that the song that has played in my head this week in the early morning is off an album that I listened to on the weekend. And I know it's from the album because the one this week is from an old album and there's no way that song got airtime or I heard it from somewhere else.

Weird. Of course I like the songs - I wouldn't have listened to them otherwise, but it's awfully weird.

Pictures finally

The girls at Niagara falls during our cross-continental trek.

Obsession

Still waiting for my work permission. I'm almost obsessive about it. Ok, well, yeah, I am obsessive about it. I'm like a dog when I hear the mailbox lid clang. I almost run to the door.

I'm starting to wonder if I'll even get the permission. I'm starting to lose hope.

And even if I get permission, can I get a job?

The really good jobs, the teaching ones, are all gone by now. That's bad 'cause they pay real good and that's what this whole thing is about. But since I teach all year, it would be kinda neat to get a different job.

The other kinds of jobs that I might like to do are starting to dry up as well though. Pretty soon it's gonna be nothing but landscaping and retail, neither of which really float my boat. Or I'm really very good at.

Did I mention I'm not a very patient person?

I like English, but...

I'm not trained in teaching English as a Second Language. As a native speaker of the language (despite having to provide the secret "eyebrow" password to be allowed to teach last year), I know how to use it, but I'm not always good at explaining why the phrase is "obligated to" and not "obligated for", and other such interesting ESL confusions.

My university, in its infinite wisdom, and despite complaints from our department, has decided to integrate ALL freshmen, including ESL students into the regular English classroom. And since the English courses I teach are both required courses for EVERY undergrad, that means they're landing in our classrooms. I just spent an hour and half trying to figure out what this student was trying to say, when I only spent 15 to 20 minutes reading everyone else's papers.

It's gonna be a long semester... even if it is a condensed one. I need a drink.

Same-sex marriage

Yesterday, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in the U.S. - not civil unions, but marriage.

Protests seemed rather tepid - perhaps people just expect that this is inevitable. But this is from the same state that only just this year made it legal to purchase alcohol on a Sunday.

And that's about as political as I'll probably ever get on this blog.

Time

Time really annoys me some days.

The worst part about it is that something that is so abstract can actually be so annoying. Rude drivers are annoying, pop cans that spray when opened are annoying, screaming children are annoying, junk mail is annoying. These are all very tangible things.

Time is not tangible. Yet we treat it as if it is. We talk about spending it, saving it, stealing it, "clocking" it, having it (whether good or bad), marking it; it can both fly and crawl, it heals all things, we designate particular segments of it to die, to live, to reap, to mourn, to sow, we divide it and multiply it, add and subtract it... we even average it. We try to match it, to beat it, and usually are unhappy with the amount we have - we either want more or less of it.

Right now, I have too much... so I blog.

It's gonna be a hot summer

Ack! We hit 31 c today but I can't find the storage bin with my shorts or summer tops. I'm gonna cook this summer if I can't find them soon!

Dilemmas

I know it's not really a dilemma, since my guilt-ridden-mother conscience would never allow me to stop doing it, but I am sorely tempted to quit driving my kids to stuff.

I've spent about ten hours in the last couple of days driving people places...and the weekend calls for even more. I'm sorely tempted to hand them each a bus pass and say 'go for it'.

But I of course won't do that. It is taking a huge chunk out of my week just spending time chauffering people around - it's going to become a problem if it continues. I can't keep up this chauffering pace and still do all the studying I need to do. But it feels selfish to tell the kids they can't go to stuff because I have to study.

In all fairness, they've done a pretty good job of getting rides etc. when necessary and it's probably just the out-of-the-ordinary nature of the things I have to drive them to that's got me freaked out. One has three soccer practices and the other has a bunch of activities all having to do with her trip to Colorado this summer, most of which take place in a part of boston that is far away from our end of the world. Yesterday, it was driving 45 minutes each way in rush hour traffic, only to find out the group we were supposed to meet weren't there.

I hope this is the last busy driving week... *sigh* though I suspect it won't be.

Still waiting

I'm still waiting to find out if I'll have permission to work this summer. Which isn't a positive thing since the longer I wait, the harder it will be to find a good job. I was expecting to hear back in the middle of April, which was late enough. [I had problems getting information from the Alberta government that I needed with my application, so I submitted it much later than I had planned.]

I heard from them, but it was a request for more information. They said it could be as little as two weeks and as long as two months before I hear back. I'm getting edgy. Summer jobs are hard enough to find around here, but if I can't even put myself in the running for another month, I'm gonna end up scooping ice cream for tourists for $5/hr.

Working for peanuts in an unchallenging job seems hardly worth it. In that case, it might be better to spend the summer studying and try to shorten up the time it will take me to finish this degree so I can find (hopefully) a real job!

Subliminal messaging?

I found this photo while conducting a search for 'genre theory', so I don't exactly recall the connection that got me there... not that it's important.

At first I had no idea what the image was supposed to be showing, probably because I was thinking lit theory, and the title didn't really make sense to me at first, but then I realized the French writing was longer than the English on the tag and also realized that it wasn't exactly washing instructions in the last few lines. My French isn't so good, but I think I got the gist of the message.

I am amused.

Good food & energetic kids

Went to the Summer Search spring event last night. What is Summer Search you ask? It's a scholarship program that sends eager, good students with leadership potential on wilderness expeditions that usually involve a human service component.

Sandy's going through them to Colorado this summer.

We're still waiting to hear which program she'll attend, so we don't know the dates or the sequence of activities, but she'll be in Colorado or surrounding areas in the backcountry for somewhere around a month.

Scarier sending her away for a month to someplace I've never been than sending her and her sisters back home for a visit last summer.

But last night was a potluck dinner for the students and their families. Some of the students have some amazing stories. One student who spoke after the dinner was the first in his family to graduate high school, let alone go to college (which he's doing on a full scholarship). Another student was a former gang member who now attends Harvard Business school. Amazing kids...and mine is one of them.

Funders also attend the event, and students were encouraged to go talk to them and thank them for attending. Sandy's response to this? "No problem, I learned how to talk to adults because of all the parties you've thrown". Hmmm...is that actually a good thing? *grin*

Had lots of great food and heard some neat stories. I'm looking forward to Sandy's stories when she gets back home.

Happy Mother's Day

Don't know what I'll be doing for the rest of today. I was sick yesterday, so I still feel a bit shaky and it's raining so the outdoor plans the girls had made are out, so we'll see what is new.

Got breakfast, which was nice. But they were fighting about how to make the pancakes, which was not nice.

I know it sounds so sappy (and perhaps is unrealistic, but hey, it's my day and I can engage in flights of fancy if I like) but I think I would be thrilled to get a day at home where everyone tries really hard to get along. That would be a great mother's day gift!

The blind leading the blind

There's an institute for the blind that I pass on my way to school most days. Today, I saw two people heading toward it, both sporting white canes.

You know the saying "the blind leading the blind"? There's always the implication that the people or situation it's applied to is rootless, uncoordinated, or otherwise a useless, or ill-advised venture.

After seeing this couple, I don't think that saying 'means what it thinks it means'. They had a system that worked fabulously from what I could see, and seemed to work better with two of them than singly. The man was leading, sweeping his cane from side to side, as usual. The woman, because she was grasping his elbow (as she might another other person guiding her), was a half a pace behind, and she swung her cane in a half-arc, from the middle to the outside, away from the side her guide was walking on.

This way, they increased the width of sidewalk they were able to gather information about, and ran less of a chance of running into stuff. And with her half arc, she kept him from underestimating how much room she had between herself and obstacles without constantly hitting him in the process.

Looked pretty efficient to me. That saying is going to mean something different to me now everytime I hear it.

Body needs

My body needs food and rest. I think I can manage the first one pretty quick, but the second one will be a long time coming. Summer classes have begun, and NU is hosting the Cultural Studies Association conference here starting today, so I'm pretty busy.

I am NOT a morning person - these 8 am classes feel really brutal... and yesterday's felt especially brutal since I stayed up till the early morning hours watching the Flames kick the Wings collective asses with that fabuous last minute goal in overtime play. Sweet!

You know, the best thing about hockey is being able to share it with other people. I tell someone around here about the game and they just look at me with puzzled looks on their faces. Maybe its just English geeks, maybe its because its not the Bruins, maybe hockey culture is just that much more pervasive in Canada. Who knows - the result though is that I had nobody to share the excitement of the game with.

Since I can't get sleep, and can't find someone to talk hockey with, I think I'll go get food...

While I mess around with pictures

I've been trying to find a place to put pictures so you can see them ('cause I'm cheap and don't want to pay for the FTP version).

While I mess around and get more frustrated, I thought you might as well be entertained. I was highly amused by this summary of The Simarillion. Boiled down to 1000 words, it still captures the essence of a very long and detailed book!

Language adjustment

I was searching through archives for an event that I was hoping I'd blogged about so I could figure out the date when I noticed that the language I use in my blog varies considerably from month to month and even from day to day.

Sometimes I avoid swearing either by choosing other words or inserting those annoying symbols, and other times I just let it rip.

I suppose it comes from trying to imagine who will read that particular entry. Some of the people who I know have access to the blog detest profanity, others probably wonder why my language is so sanitary, when it isn't in real life.

My language in general is far cleaner than it used to be. I don't know whether that's because a) I'm getting older; b) I have kids; or c) I'm entering a profession that frowns on swearing (especially in front of the students!). Perhaps it's all three. With the kids, you know, I've given up on trying to suppress all my swearing because I know its a lost cause.

Besides, they'll probably all experiment with swearing at one point or another. Growing up in a house that was squeakly clean, I remember clearly the thrill of how illicit it felt the first time I swore... and that's probably why I got to sounding like a sailor at one point (working in an all-male auto body shop probably had something to do with it as well). If I can teach my kids judicious swearing... as something that must be used sparingly for finely-timed emphasis, then maybe they'll be better off. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

So what does that have to do with my blog? Probably nothing. But I'll likely continue to waver between sanitary and gutter.

You've been warned.

More books

See? Titles... so you can decide whether you want to read the rest of the post. But I should warn you that just because I've felt the need to add titles does not mean I feel the need to strictly adhere to them and not wander off into talking about other things.

Having said that, I haven't written about books for a long time - over a month, so here's what I've been reading:

Finished:

The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
Walking on Glass - Iain Banks
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
How the Dead Live - Will Self
The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - R. L. Stevenson
Five Children and It - E. Nesbit

Reading:

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle

On Deck:

[Ha! This is actually a very long list, but I think I'll start with the following:]

Dracula - Bram Stoker
Narrative/theory - David Richter
Lullaby - Chuck Palanhiuk

So, The DaVinci Code was interesting, but it's definitely plane-material. It's got some cool ideas, but doesn't make you think to hard about them. And even though it's long, it's also a really quick read. That some of the far out stuff mentioned in the book actually takes place outside literature (i.e. the real world) is slightly disturbing in a fascinating kind of way.

Walking on Glass was cool in a alternate-world-intersects-with-thought-process-of-insane-person kind of way. A neat premise and also a fun read. Quick too because it's short. Only problem is that I think I had to special order this one if I remember right because it's out of print. Maybe I could do a documentary about it in a kind of Stones of Summer (which is also on that summer list, but I'll read it later when the pool opens) way and get it back in print!

The Victorian stuff, Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde, Tess, are actually not very Victorian (i.e. they weigh in at less than the usual 800 pages) and I have a newfound respect for Hardy that I had lost reading Jude the Obscure. I actually found myself empathisizing with Tess and really getting involved in her problems, feeling the injustice of her position and such, something that I rarely lose myself to in Victorian lit, so I was duly impressed by the book.

I did not feel that How the Dead Live or Day of the Triffids wasted my time, but unless you want to read a lot of obscure sf, don't bother. If you are into obscure sf and you like old sf film, then you definitely need to read Triffids and then see the movie adaptation.

I'm looking forward to rereading Dracula, since its been a very long time and too many film adaptation screenings since I read it to really remember it well. Hopefully I'll get it done before next weekend when Van Helsing opens, since I'm DEFINITELY going to see that.

I can't believe my week is almost over. I had so many things that I wanted to get done. Not that I didn't get them done, I actually scratched a lot of stuff off the to do list, but most of it was the boring stuff. And I go back to teaching on Tuesday with assignments still waiting to be written. UGH!

I'm also feeling really sleepy - I think I got too much sun yesterday... yes, the weather's gorgeous here this week. I spent most of the early afternoon cleaning the weeds out of the garden at the back door. It's not very big, about 10x12, and there are some shrubs and the A/C ground unit that I can't move or replace, but it will do for growing some veggies, herbs and maybe even some nice flowers. I like digging in the dirt - I haven't had a garden for about four years, so I had great fun cleaning it out and dreaming about what I'll put in there. Now I just need to go get the plants - maybe we'll do that this weekend.

I also got lots of sun while playing basketball. In playing with my friends, I've come to the conclusion that it was probably a really good thing that I wasn't into sports as a kid. I'm clumsy enough as an adult, but as a kid, I would've just been one big messed up body of injuries. Only yesterdays scrapes and bruises weren't my fault... no, honestly. We played next to the track field here in Watertown since Sandy & Steph were both there at a meet (Steph) and practice (Sandy). I even managed to surreptitiously watch Steph's high jump without messing up my own game, but then as I went for the ball, Sandy called to me and I got distracted. I rolled. But basketball courts are pretty hard. At first I thought the scraped up knee was the worst part of it, but then a couple hours later I saw the bruise, and now that leg from knee to ankle aches. Dammit. I don't like injuring myself, but I do like the games. Sucker for punishment I guess.

Oh, and before all this, before the distraction and my lovely rolling, when we first got there, I said hi to Sandy as she walked past. She looked a bit puzzled because I don't think she'd expected to see me and then looked over my shoulder toward the basketball court and said, "Oh! It's the old people!"

I think it was Alex said I should ground her for the comment. I'm seriously considering it.

I guess after all that, I can't complain about not getting fun stuff on my to do list done, since I had a really good day yesterday, but that leaves me with mostly boring stuff to do today. Which I of course am procrastinating about.

I've had coffee on my mind for a while I guess. Must be the Tim Horton's I got! I like coffee a lot. I often get energetic and make my own capuccino at home, or Irish coffee *mmmm*, which is especially good with a quality whiskey (or scotch, though then I suppose it's scottish, not irish coffee) and lots of whip cream. Just writing about it makes me want to got get one. Anyway, took one of those ubiquitous quizzes that tell you what kind of all sorts of things you might be.

Turns out that I'm Plain.

You Are a Plain Ole Cup of Joe But don't think plain - instead think, uncomplicated You're a low maintenance kind of girl... who can hang with the guys Down to earth, easy going, and fun! Yup, that's you: the friend everyone invites. And your dependable too. Both for a laugh and a sympathetic ear. What Kind Of Coffee Are You? Take This Quiz :-)

Ever wonder about the word "plain"? Say it three or four times. It starts to lose its meaning doesn't it? Odd how you can take a word for granted and then when you really focus on it, repeat it over and over, you sort of unhook it from its usual meaning and it seems alien and strange. Plain. It kinda is a weird word.... and its a homonym (which is another weird word). So, today's weird word of the day is plain.

I had such an odd weekend.

On Friday night I came home from school, did the dinner thing, read some of my book, The Iceman Cometh (okay, its actually a play) for the Book club last night, cleaned up some stuff, watched some tv.

On Saturday, I helped friends move, went to see The Punisher, and had dinner at the Elephant Walk (mmm, very good) with another friend to celebrate her birthday. On Sunday, I finished reading the play, cleaned up some more (since the book club was meeting at my place this month), met with them and then read the last couple of weeks of The New Yorker, which I'd put aside because I didn't have time.

What was so odd about that, you ask?

It was so bloody lovely ordinary! That's what was odd. I cannot remember the last time I had such a wonderfully mundane weekend.

I have to do this more often!

I had such yummy coffee this morning! It was Tim Horton's coffee and it was absolutely fabulous!

A friend who was in Maine last week had heard (from me, of course) that there was a Tim Horton's there and she bought me a tin of coffee. Ah! Tim Horton's coffee. Beats Dunkin Donuts hands down any day of the week. What a great way to start a Sunday!

I feel a little lost.

I have no deadlines hanging over me... well, other than having to read the book for the Book club (which I'm also hosting this week, so I can't just bag it). It's a weird feeling - I haven't not had some kind of deadline looming for a couple of years now.

And since it looks like I'll have July & August off, I'll not have anything to do then either.

Good news is that the pool opens Memorial day! Yeah!

So since I have nothing pressing, I was surfing - since I'm always looking for film adaptations, well, okay, in this case, a condensation, I just had to share. The possessed bunnies are quite amusing.

Done the papers! Yeah!
Now I have to mark student papers to submit final marks before tomorrow. Boo!

It really is a small world you know. One of my students wrote a paper on home schooling and quoted an article from a couple of weeks ago in the Calgary Herald. Cool! Mixed feelings. Happy memories & homesickness.

Speaking of which, I had a dream the other night that I came home and all my very bestest friends were there. I woke up happy.

Since my brain is dead right now, I was doing a little mindless searching when I came across this on Book TV from one of my favorite authors. I knew there was a reason he was one of my favorite authors!

I'd put in a profanity warning on this, but its no worse that what you might get reading this blog, so fuck it.

Halfway through the last papers I will ever have to write... yeah, yeah, I know I have to write the dissertation and I have to write the proposals for my exam areas and I have to write the prospectus, but leave me my fantasy that these are the last papers I'll ever have to write.

One down, one to go. Man! Will it be nice to finish this!

Been reading lots of disaster fiction lately, you know end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it kind of stuff. Where something happens and most of the population is gone and people have to start all over. Got me thinking how useful I'd be if everything came crashing down. I think I'd fall into at most a moderately useful range.

My friends and family who would be really useful: the mechanic, the dentist, the engineer, the veterinarian. Those of my friends and family are teachers, well, we'd be useful for the next generation but not immediately. The social workers, political scientists, computer programmers and us teachers would presumably have other skills though - at least I know how to grow vegetables and then how to preserve them, how to sew clothing and how to bake bread. All rather domestic skills, but necessary. Not unique though - many other people have the same kinds of skills.

How would you fare?

So I have the dubious distinction of winning the Graduate student essay prize this year for an essay titled "Indelible Ink of the Palimpsest: Language, Myth and Narrative in H.D.s Trilogy". Did that title mean anything to you? No? That's okay - probably doesn't mean much of anything to most people. Though the metaphor of the palimpsest is interesting. It's based on the early, early practice when people were writing on vellum (sheepskin) before they imported paper from the Chinese, of reusing vellum by scraping off the top layer with the ink and rewriting on it. [It would have been a bit like writing on your leather coat and then scraping away the top layer - by the way, that's where we get the term 'sheepskin' when referring to degrees because they were written on it. In fact, there are some schools in Britain that still use sheepskin and being a calligrapher is an actual profession over there - I know, I sat in a lecture with a bunch of them] The problem with this practice (or in the case of people who study manuscripts, the cool part about it) is that sometimes the indentations made by the first writer as they scratched across the vellum with their styluses were left behind after the ink was scraped off, so you could see shadows of the earlier writing through the later writing on top. So the metaphor refers to literary situations where you find echoes of earlier writing in later writing.

Cool, eh?

Anyway, the distinction is rather dubious, not because the cash prize is paltry (nothing like the Laurence Decor - now that was a nice cash prize, AND I didn't know about it ahead of time and was terribly/delightfully surprised when they called my name), but because it requires me to present a 10 minute precis of the paper at the graduate end of year reception this afternoon. I spent three hours last night trying to condense 30 pages of writing down to 4 - I still only made it to 5 - they'll have to sit through 12 minutes. And it wasn't because I was procrastinating - I didn't find out till noon yesterday that I'd won. Ergh!

Taxes. Ugh. And I have two sets to complete.

Luckily they're both pretty basic... 'cause I don't have any money! Hehe

Unlike in Canada, where the government only cares if you file on time when you owe them money, here you have to file...and the deadline's tomorrow. I don't know what the penalty is... maybe for non-residents its deportation. Who knows? I don't want to find out, so I've been dutifully doing my taxes.

Actually, I started them in February when I got my W-2 (= T4) ... [sounds like some strange robot language]. But I put it aside when I realized they took Social Security and Medicare off, which of course they're not supposed to do since I can't access either of those resources. It took me a while to find out how to get it back - I don't get it from the government, but instead I have to yell at my employer. Normally, international TAs don't have it deducted, but when I worked last summer, I was classified as part-time staff, so they processed me the same as everyone else.

So, okay, I get the form and photocopy my I.D. etc. and take it back to payroll so that I'll get my $200 back. And me, thinking it would be smart to avoid this mess next year, asks what we can do to keep this from happening again this year. Good idea, no? No. The answer: there's nothing they can do to avoid taking taxes off of me again this year when I work part-time in the summer. And I'll have to submit a new form next year to get the money back again.

So, does this strike you as a bit asinine? Maybe I'm just being picky...

But computers are supposed to be such wonderful tools to help us make paperwork so much easier....

It's raining again.
I think I'm going to cry.

Spring is here - my nose and cheeks are pink from standing outside for a couple of hours yesterday watching Angela's first soccer game. I guess the sun was strong, but I was still wearing a tee, sweatshirt & fleece. Hope it continues nice - would like to get out and enjoy some sun!

Happy Easter!

...in whatever way you want to take that. Whether you celebrate the holiday as a chance to have an extra day off, or as that week when you have to find something to do with the school-age kids 'cause they aren't in school, or as a chance to spend time with family, or as a deeply religious celebration. Happy Easter to you.

Since I don't get any extra days off, my kids are old enough to take care of themselves for their week off of school, my extended family is far, far away, and I'm not particularly religious, I'm not sure what to think of the holiday. But you do get chocolate if you've been good, right? (Actually, I bought chocolate for myself... I had bought bunnies for the kids, but then on my next grocery trip thought 'well, no one else is going to get you chocolate, so if you want it, get it yourself - why should the kids have all the fun?' So I did.)

Chocolate is good.

So is coloring Easter eggs. I suspect this year it will only be Ange & I. But that's okay - all the more for us!

Hmmm... maybe I should make the chocolate a reward for participating in the egg hunt... acting like a kid is always good - especially for teenagers I think. They tend to take themselves WAY too seriously!

Hehehe... I think I will! New house rule: You don't get your chocolate until you've hunted for eggs. Beauty!

Having children is a bit like having ghosts. Either way, you live in a house full of strange noises where your things never stay where you left them.

yesterday I wanted to poke a pen in my eye - if only to take my mind off other things

today I want to stick it in someon else's eye... anyone else's

after all, sticking it in my own eye would HURT!

60 litres.

Little did I know when I added Watertown weather to my blog that water and weather would become central components in my day today. I just vaccuumed up three gallons of water that have leaked into the basement. And since the forecast is for rain (90% chance +) till Saturday, looks like I'll be doing more of the same for a while to come.

So you can assume as long as my weather block says its still raining here, that I'm vaccuuming! Grrr!

I got very wet today. I made a choice, what I thought was a reasoned decision, to leave my umbrella at home because I had too many other things to carry. My rationale was that I only had a ten minute walk from the house to the bus and vice versa (if I took the south route). Little did I know that my impromptu discussion with a professor would lead to the necessity of walking blocks through the rain to get books.

So to enlighten you about my environment, I've now included the weather here - for your enjoyment!

[p.s. I've you've never experienced it before, wet wool is really gross!]

Three weeks till the language exam in German. I'm a bit nervous about it, since my German isn't as strong as my Spanish, though I managed to muddle through that one okay last year.

And four weeks until the end of the semester and all my work has to be done as well as student papers marked. The good news is that I have only one of those big 25-30 page papers to write (though I have to read pretty much all the primary and secondary material yet) and a presentation week after next. The other course, the one where I'm doing all the reading, I only have to submit a summary to finish it up. I will likely write a conference paper out of the course as well, but to get the credit, I just have to do summaries, which I've been doing all along anyway, so I should be set pretty good for that.

I still have lots of student work to do though - I have two sets of drafts to comment on yet as well as two final papers for each of the eighteen in the class. Ugh! I'm trying something new this time. I'm having them submit the drafts by email (or Blackboard) and by tracking changes in word and adding comment boxes, I'm going to give them back my comments electronically as well. My hope is that this method will be slightly more effecient than printing everything out and handwriting is, since my typing is faster than my writing (at least legibly!). We'll see how it goes. You may be amused to read the story my students are writing about. I like it alot. Its by Jorge Luis Borges and is called the Library of Babel. I was surprised at how many of my students had absolutely no idea what the Babel of the title referred to.

Played our first official spring basketball game yesterday. Not too sore today, but I need to develop some callouses or get some of those funky anti-blister socks. They're not bad, but I don't want blisters to get in the way of fun.

We actually have 8 people playing. That's more than we've ever had before. If we can get a couple more, it might be worthwhile thinking about playing full court instead of half court....not that I'm really that eager to work even harder at it, but it IS a really good workout. And we have fun, the best part of all!

I cannot wait until the day when I can again afford to drive my own car to work. I hate public transit, particularly the buses.

It's not actually the vehicle or the driver that's the problem (though I've met some that are great and others that really must hate their job), even though its loud, bumpy and sometimes smelly. Its the other passengers that annoy me the most....come to think of it, the ones who are annoying are loud, bumpy and smelly too.

Had a guy sit next to me who could not keep still today. So, that's his problem, right? No - not when he's stomping on my feet and elbowing me because he can't sit still. If it wasn't fussing with his bag, or his newspaper, or his drink or his tissue, or his hat, it was twisting and turning in the seat to talk to his girlfriend in the next seat. My toes also got stomped by a group of girls who thought it was funny to stand without holding onto anything and see whether they could keep their balance (which they absolutely couldn't). Put me in a very bad mood for the day... and I hadn't even gotten to work yet.

How sweet it is to have your own car... I can't wait to stop riding these buses.

I've been wasting lots of time surfing through ebay since the hard drive experience. There's a lot of weird and wacky stuff on there and its amazing what kinds of things you come up with when you punch in a keyword. One of the tamer ones: I punched in "narrative" looking for a book on narrative theory, and got Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, which makes some sense I suppose, but really wasn't what I was expecting.

Spring has yet to emerge here - it's gotten nasty over the last few weeks...snow, cold, windy... feels a bit like home. The spring was feeling really nice a couple of weeks ago. I remember driving Sandy back from her wrestling tournament (three hour drive away - she won third place - yeah!) thinking about how much nicer this place looks in the spring. But that's gone now. It just looks and feels like home in March and that makes me miss home all over again. My homesickness is not near as acute as it was, and I think some of my missing home could be alleviated by at least being able to visit, but all the same, I still don't feel really comfortable here.

I'm sure my ongoing interactions with INS have something to do with that as well - their bureaucracy seems to be designed to make you feel like a carbuncle on Uncle Sam's bottom.

So last night Dwayne asks everyone how their weekend went. The best answer?

Angela: "Lots of Shakespeare, Offspring... and Sponge Bob!"

What a mix!

Haven't written about books for a while... well, haven't written period (funny how quickly I actually got out of the habit of blogging when I didn't have my own computer to do it on). What have I read since last noted?

Currently reading:
Ghoul - Michael Slade
The Time Machine and War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells

On deck:
The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
Walking on Glass - Iain Banks
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Just finished:
King Rat - China Mieville
The Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King
Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing
Weaveworld - Clive Barker
Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The way Ghoul is put together is really interesting. Michael Slade is actually a pseudonym for three Vancouver area lawyers who write detective/horror fiction, which is what this novel's about, obviously. I find myself wondering who wrote what. I mean, how did they collaborate? I can't really detect a difference in writing style from chapter to chapter, so I can only assume they didn't split it up but worked on it all together. I wonder if they all sit in the same room, or if one person starts a chapter then hands it round for changes/additions? I'd love to know.
But what's interesting about the story is the way it moves between Rhode Island (mostly Providence - which I finally visited when I went to an Oscar party that was held out there - but also Newport) and Vancouver and London. I'm impressed that the characters seem to differ according to nationality, and that they speak and act differently - even seem to have different expectations. My only caveat to that would be that the RCMP officer in the Vancouver sequence seems a bit more American than Canadian (and the character grew up in Duck Lake Sask, so he should be very Canadian), but maybe that's a hazard of working in law enforcement... interesting thought.... Anyway, its a fun book. It's almost twenty five years old now, which makes the descriptions of cutting edge UNIX systems etc. quaint echoes of the past, but I'm finding it a good read.

Other stuff? Well, Mieville is just as good in King Rat as he was in Perdido Street Station (which is also on my must-read-again list), in fact, maybe more so since its an earlier book and maybe a little less ambitious than the subsequent one. He's definitely a writer that I want to keep an eye on (along with Neil Gaiman & William Gibson). It's a fairly short & easy read and Mieville doesn't spend an excessive amount of time describing things just because he wants to stretch his literary muscles, unlike Mr. King, who spent most of Wolves describing a lot of minutiae and an even greater amount of time referring back to earlier events in the series (as well as his usual penchant for plugging his own books). Not that I didn't enjoy Wolves, it just took a lot of time to get through the extras to the diagesis.

The Lessing and Pynchon books were harder to get through. I didn't really care for the obscuring of Lessing's book - its difficult at times to tell what's going on in the narrator's head and what's actually happening in the world. Pynchon does the same thing, only most of the characters exhibit some kind of neurosis (which I suppose is reasonable considering they are all involved in the race to build rockets during WWII) so its difficult even when you can tell what's fantasy/neurosis and what's real to understand what's actually happening because each character's view of the world is warped in some really fundamental way.

Burgess and Orwell are of course classic and I'd read each of those books before, but the reread was necessary for the course. The other (usually) horror master Barker wrote a fascinating book when he sat down to write Weaveworld. Its fairly wide ranging, even though the geography is limited, and even when some of the character's motivations are unclear, it still tells a damn interesting story. It would make a fascinating movie. Its not horror at all, more fantasy of the elves-living-among-us type, and both the fantastical characters and the mundane ones are well portrayed.

If you're looking for one book to read, well, I don't know if I could recommend just one. But if you want more details, e-mail me and I'll try harder.

Yeah! Dwayne brought home a working computer... with new hard drive yesterday - he's my hero!

My God! Do I have a lot of work to catch up on now... my fingers are going to fall off from typing... but that at least will be a break from the writer's bump that was redeveloping on my right hand - you ever had one of those? I did when I was younger, you know, B.C. (before computers) - writing a lot gave me a odd bump on my right middle finger from gripping the pen. It disappeared many years ago when I left school and even when I went back, I was typing so much that if never really reappeared. Well, it's back... after almost a month of having to handwrite everything I usually type, my middle finger is now deformed.

Heh - I guess it will just make my greetings to fellow commuters that much more bent! Teehee - hey - don't knock it if you've never driven in a Boston rush hour!

So, a gazillion things need to be transferred from paper to electronica... that is, if I want them to be useful later on. The good news is that I met with the prof who is overseeing that massive reading project/directed study that I'm doing this term and he'll be happy with a summary of everything I've read as fulfilling the course requirement - SWEET! The great thing is, I've been doing book summaries all the way along (well except for the last two 'cause I was waiting for the computer to come back), so I'm halfway done the final requirement. It's almost too good to be true! [The thing is, I know I'm gonna end up writing up something that's at least conference paper length 'cause I want to present it... or... god forbid... even publish it, but the nice thing is that I won't have a deadline for that project hanging over my head!]

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.

Overall, life is incredibly busy, but good.

Still no computer - may know later today. So, ebay guy sends us a hard drive, but its the wrong model - what a moron! The model he sent us runs at the same speed and the same specifications, so we took it to IT guys who will see if it will do... if not, I'll have to spend the next week returning this one and waiting for the proper one.

Am I annoyed? YES!

Do I have many other things to worry about? YES

Are those other things also important? YES

Good news is that academics are going better these last few months than they have been for the last couple of years. Will fill in the details when I have my own computer back and I'm not trying to grab a few minutes of blogging at work.

I am so computer dependent I feel like I've been going through withdrawal over the last week. Ugh!

The hard drive on my computer is toast... apparently it has been producting bad sector data for quite some time and the funny stuff it was doing last november was just the start of it. Funny how the same guys who looked at it then said it was a software problem and they'd removed the offending software and a few months later they look at it again and realize its hardware. I'd kinda suspected it was, 'cause it made the kind of mechanical noises that electronic things aren't supposed to make.

Good news is thanks to my wonderful husband, it'll only cost $100 to replace - I went on Compaq's original site, got the part number and cost ($400) that they recommended and still couldn't find that part for much less. Meanwhile, Dwayne goes to the IT guys who pull the hard drive out and discover the one that it came with was a cheaper model... hmmm...sounds like Compaq isn't quite honest with its customers when it tells you what you're missing now doesn't it? Anyway, thanks to ebay, it should arrive early next week and I will be up and running again by this time next week.

The thing that sucks the most about this timing is that its spring break this week, which means I have extra time - during which I could be working on my computer - instead of saving all my computer work up. I'm using Dwayne's computer, but the software I work the most with isn't loaded onto his machine & since it's database software, I can't really replicate it elsewhere without a lot of extra fiddling. Ergh!

But it will be good to be connected again & then you'll hear more from me... I promise!

The computer is still in diagnosis - I'm hoping we'll hear later today that they've fixed it. Right now it's with the BU IT guys, who can fix any software problem it's having, but if it's hardware, then we'll have to go elsewhere. Frankly, I think it is a hardware thing 'cause it all of a sudden started doing the same grinding, mechanical noise thing before shutting down that it was doing before. And it had been working so good for the last two months.

When I told a friend about the computer he suggested that my computer and my car should quit talking to each other! I agree, and hopefully the computer will come home this week especially since I have to do minor car repairs this Saturday - maybe the car repair will fill my things breaking down quota for the month. Having the computer back for next week would be great since it's spring break here and since I'm not jetting off to some warm, tropical haven of hedonism, I was hoping to get lots of work done.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

In other news, I got my BCIS application sent off last week, so I'll know in a couple of months if I can work off campus this summer. I'm going to keep my eye open for positions in the meantime - hopefully I'll know if I have the permission before I would got to any job interviews. It would be kinda neat to do some work other than teaching, even if just for this summer, and we need the money because we've both hit the cap on student loans and have to find funds elsewhere.

My computer is down again. Posts will likely be infrequent, but hang in there - I need the damn thing so I'll have to figure out how to fix it or replace it... though neither of those options excites me.

I had a great teaching day today!

What an excellent feeling it is when you feel like the discussion in a classroom was productive, interesting and actually *gasp* educational! I've taught this text four times before this and I have never had such a good preliminary discussion of it. And I have to wonder if it has to do with the conscious choice I made this time to structure the beginning of the class period by talking about something that was in many ways actually peripheral to the text. I started talking about a theme that is only dealt with in about a tenth of the essay, mostly just because I felt like I needed to put some more structure into what are usually more loose discussions in class. But the strategy seemed to work. It gave us a language with which to contrast the important parts of the essay, and I think more importantly, the students felt more comfortable talking about the text after they had sat through a traditional style 'lecture' full of unfamiliar terms and concepts.

It's odd, this psychological dimension to class planning. Many times, I can't always put myself into the head of a freshman undergrad - I would find it boring to get a lecture about Marxism when what I'm supposed to eventually write about is Requiem for a Dream, but they seemed to actually like it. At one point, I just stood back and let them discuss it among themselves - they really engaged with it.

So I guess the lesson I've learned is to lecture at them for a bit, as much as I dislike doing so, and then get a discussion going. Who would've thought a seminar would run best with a lecture component? I always thought of them as two different things. If you've taught before, maybe you know what I mean... or maybe I just have a weird group of freshmen... or maybe it was a fluke. Regardless, I felt like it was worth going to school today to teach, and that makes some of the disappointments of the last week seem less intensely important.

Unusual week. I was at school all five days, which is unusual - I can usually count on one uninterrupted day of studying at home (well, as uninterrupted as it can be when I've usually got family running back & forth while I try to concentrate). Now I know you might be thinking I'm complaining about doing something that most people actually do in a week, but with a 2 1/2 to 3 hour round trip commute, going to school two more days out of the week than I usually do chopped a significant chunk out of my week. And the reason I was there so much was to go to a bunch of meetings, presentations, appointments etc., so that ate time too.

Now I feel behind yet again. Ergh!

Oh, yeah, Happy Valentines Day!

Obviously, this day of love and sweetness is not the first thing on my mind. I had to ask the piano tuner the date this morning for his cheque. Duh! It's the 14th! But if you know me, my lack of enthusiasm for a holiday that seems to be all about spending as much money as possible to say things that you really should be saying all the time, not just on one day, isn't too uncharacteristic. And my cynicism grows each year - not about love, but about the holiday. Love I do believe in.

What else?

Oh, yes - Sandy's going to Colorado this summer - she's got a scholarship to go on one of those experiential/human service junkets out West (more than just Colorado). Only 150 high school students in the greater Boston area are selected, and she's one of them! Cool, eh? She's just gotta decide which tour she wants to go on. She seems pretty cool with the whole thing - I think right now I'm the one who's more nervous about it. But she's highly capable and will manage well - they wouldn't have chosen her otherwise.

Perhaps there's some cosmic message that I'm just not getting. The events of the last week seem to have multiplied.

I had a conversation with my advisor that began with her saying, while smiling, "So, we're meeting to plan the rest of your life"... which would be an accurate assessment of the conversation if by my life you mean my academic career. The meeting ending with me having the distinct impression that I need a new advisor. Not because I would not be able to get along with this one, no, certainly not - I have been drinking with the woman and it was all fine & good. No, the reason that I got this impression is because the areas where my interests lie, and more importantly, the areas that I might market myself under, don't really lie in any of her areas of expertise.

In part that saddens me, because I've liked working with her.

In part it scares me because I feel very cut loose. There's a piece of my brain that says I should celebrate such freedom - at least my advisor hasn't planned out my dissertation for me like a colleague's has (down to the title!) - but it's also a bit scary because I'm not sure who to turn to for advice now. Or who to approach as a supervisor. I have some suggestions, but I still feel like they're quite vague and not terribly helpful.

I also feel a bit out of my element - like I don't know anything.

I had gone into the meeting with a series of questions. I guess you could say that I got answers to those questions, but they weren't answers within the realm of what I had imagined they might be, and they generated as many, if not even more, questions in turn.

But I think the part that really gets me is that - I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

It's very humbling when you realize that you've been blind to something that has been in front of you all the time... particularly when the reason you didn't see it is because you were running on an assumption... a cherished assumption.

I have been humbled. I am sad to have to abandon that cherished assumption, but I guess I deserve to be sad at letting go when I was the ass who held onto it in the first place.

I suppose this is how one eventually gets older and wiser, but there's a little part of me that would rather still be blissfully unaware rather than wiser.

Hmm... what to say about the weekend. It has been a full one. It has also been a crazy, frustrating, funny, annoying one. But thank god its over! Betcha haven't heard anyone say that about the weekend for a long time!

Something deep down inside me suspects that it has something to do with my birthday. Last year I hated the day and this year, the miserableness seemed to extend through the following three days. I'm suspicious. Perhaps I'll need to conduct an experiment next year to test this hypothesis.

On the plus side, I have a good friend who was very understanding and empathetic when he found out about my weekend. And because his family is going through a rough spot right now, I'm wishing good karma back on someone who deserves it.

*good karma wish*

In fact, I'm wishing good karma throughout all the places that this post will be read... it may not be much, but a broad karma spread has to be better than just my localized good karma wish, right?

I've been very busy in rather odd ways in the last couple of days. Monday started off rather ordinarily with a visit to the library, workout at the gym, teaching a class, heading home, doing the dinner thing, reading... usual kind of stuff.

It got unusual about 1:30 in the morning when Dwayne informed me that the basement was flooding. My first thought was one of confusion because we hadn't had any rain or snow in a week. It was not nature invading our home however, but the water tank. Nature had invaded our home with basement flooding earlier - minor compared to this outbreak! - so the landlord had left a wet/dry vac. Fortuituous, is that not?

But spending three hours in the middle of the night sucking water out of carpet was painful...not at the time, but even now my muscles are aching with the combined effort of a gym workout and then the workout of the bent-over-pressing-the-vac-nozzle-down-hard-to-create-suction for three hours in the middle of the night. OUCH!

So I rescheduled my Tuesday morning in an attempt to regain some of that lost sleep. But it was pretty much in vain. I called to request a cash release on that loan that I was having problems with, and they STILL had not released the money - needless to say, I need it pretty bad by now. And then the library lost my photocopy card - that was just adding insult to injury. They had my card in the first place because it stopped working in the middle of a copy job and took it telling me it would take a week to fix. And the only reason I have a card is because half the time the photocopiers in the library don't accept cash [as a canuck, it amazes me that people actually would expect a machine that has to accept papers bills to work]. By the time I got home, with waiting longer than usual for buses, I was cold, hungry, tired, and getting wet since we had this weird kind of snow-rain-sleet thing happening.

I get home, and someone has already put the chain on the door, so I can't get in. And there's no food (its 8 pm), and everything that was stored in the entry is getting wet in the snow because it got pulled out so the water heater could enter. I'm afraid I was awfully grouchy. And I had to say I was sorry later.

But, at least we had hot water.

Today was much better. I called to harass the loan people again, and this time they had my money! - now I just have to wait for them to cut a cheque and mail it. And the library actually found my card! And I found out that I have (some) summer work on campus.

Now I just need to finish all these little paperwork things and get back to my reading and meet with the profs I was supposed to meet with yesterday. But that's okay.

You know, my husband is a fabulous man. He's taken care of all this hot water heater thing so well. He's great!

The New England Patriots win the 38th Superbowl in the last 9 seconds of the game and only by a field goal. Well.

An interesting game - the Pats outran and outthrew the Panthers, but they made some bad plays in the second half and by the fourth quarter I was thinking that if they lost, no one should think it an outrage because they were starting to lose it.

I think I like the CFL better though. With one less down, there's more passing and kicking and less of that mishmash huddled up-the-center rushing. Okay, yeah, I know, I'm sure there are proper terms for all of it, but I only watch infrequently and these are the most descriptive terms I can think of. There were a couple of tries at a 2 point conversion during this game, which I think is more interesting, though overall, I like 3 downs better than four. Having said that, I've never mastered the skills of the game myself, and my comments are not meant to be critiques but expressions of my own preferences for amusement. Did that CMA enough?

Attended a Chinese New Year's party last night - emphasis on the getting-together aspect of party and light on Chinese New Year's. I enjoyed myself and saw quite a few people who I hadn't seen since last year. Met a couple of new people too. Got invited to a SuperBowl party tomorrow. I'd like to go - it would be neat to watch with a bunch of other people, but I don't think Dwayne wants to go, and I'd like to watch with him. So since I can't be in two places at one time, I guess I'll have to decide.

Good news: My budget increase was approved, so I will get all the loan I need for this year.
Bad news: They still haven't released the funds even though we're creeping up on a month since they were supposed to be disbursed.

I HAVE SO MUCH READING THIS TERM! I can't believe how much I have yet to read, and how quickly I'm falling behind. It's not even that I've been busy with other things 'cause I'm only teaching one section this term, I haven't gone out since New Years (unless you count stopping in at IHOP during a grocery shopping trip), and I've put a hold on all my other writing. And I still can't keep up! Over the last year I've gotten better and better at reading quickly, reading later at night without falling asleep, staying focused and getting more out of what I'm reading, but it still isn't helping. Right now it's all Critical social theory (a.k.a. Marxism), which is one of my least favorite theoretical approaches - I'd rather be reading Jung even! So my strategy is just to keep reading as much as I can whenever I can and hope it'll work out in the end... either that, or I take an incomplete in one class - which I did last spring and I regretted it for months after. Humfph.

*Sigh* I've spent much of my weekend doing paperwork - a necessary evil you say? In this case, NO. An evil, yes; necessary, no.

I've been trying to get a hold of my loan money since the beginning of the month. I have a loan from a private lender (one of the only lenders who will provide loans to Canadians studying abroad) that is supposed to be disbursed to the University at the beginning of each term. Each term so far I've had to usually wait for a couple of weeks before the University pushes enough paper around to satisfy the whim of some paper-eating demigod - hidden in the basement of the library most likely - before they credit my tuition account and then I can request a cheque for any positive balance in my account. The loan I am awaiting is private - did I mention that? - and has NOTHING to do with the University. This is how I pay my rent, since the stipend - there's an understatement of the term! - barely covers groceries, insurance, utilities etc.

But as of Friday it still wasn't in my account, and I'm starting to run out of cash. I've been calling & leaving messages for people all over the place, but not getting responses. Finally on Friday morning, I got one of my calls returned...

Well, it seems that the University is always looking out for its students, making sure they don't fall down elevator shafts while in custody oops, registered, or spend their money unwisely on healthy food at a non-university eatery, or just plain don't have too much money. Yes, the university has a budget line for me - and I am not to have too much money it seems. Being in the home of capitalism, it's fine for me to work 50+ hours a week outside the university and make what paltry money one can as a student (not me of course since they hate us here), BUT they cannot handle more money for me than they deem appropriate for a student. If they give me my loan, they will be giving me $4000 more than they think appropriate. ("Give" is the wrong word, since they only "give" me the stipend and the rest is loan - which incidentally is accruing interest at this moment and will ALL need to be paid back - no student loan forgiveness here!)

I told her I could not support a family of five on the paltry figure she quoted (I have a hard enough time with the little bit more that I do survive on and even then, they are reluctant to give that to me). The long & short of it is that I have to submit a budget, bills (thank god I've been anal about actually keeping receipts), credit card receipts etc. to prove that it does take more than $23000 a year to support a family of 5 in Boston! No shit - my rent is $18,000 a year - you do the math...

So, I have to prove that is costs more than that to live here, and then MAYBE they'll increase my budget line to allow me to get all the loan money that the private loan company HAS ALREADY APPROVED ME FOR AND DOES NOT COME OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY COFFERS in any way shape or form.

Does this system strike anyone else as asinine?

Countries I've travelled/lived in:



create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Lots of world left to explore!

Sandy kicked ass at wrestling today. She got 12 points for the team - yeah Sandy!

The part of Bush's State of the Union address that made me laugh out loud:

"A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription. (Applause.) By keeping costs under control, expanding access, and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America's health care the best in the world. (Applause.)"

Ha! As far as my experience has been - the service is the same but costs 4X as much... maybe it's different when you're a rich fat cat.

Interesting things

Sir Winston Churchill had a parrot (among other pets) that is still alive! It's 108 years old and still repeats the phrases he taught it including "F*** the Nazis!"

tergiversation \tuhr-jiv-uhr-SAY-shuhn\, noun:
1. The act of practicing evasion or of being deliberately ambiguous.
2. The act of abandoning a party or cause.

"Doodlebug" in addition to being the larva of an insect was the nickname given to V1 bombs that fell on London (most heavily in July/Aug 1944). The bombs' engine would cut out just before it would hit, so people would hear it coming and then nervously wait until they heard it hit, knowing that it had missed them. You can hear it about half way down the page under V1 'Doodlebug'

That big exam Dwayne wrote in December? He aced it! Yeah!

Currently reading:
Mother London - Michael Moorcock
Tithe - Holly Black

On deck:
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Wicked - Gregory Maguire

Just finished:
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
London under London - Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman

If you've been keeping track, Ulysses has dropped off the list for a while. I'll get back to it, but I only have so much time in a day. You can obviously tell which books I have to read for the Victorian lit class, though it might be harder to spot the independent study books.

The Red tent was an interesting book - it retells the biblical story of Dinah, the ony daughter of Jacob from her point of view, including her mothers' histories and Joseph's rise to power in Egypt later. It's an interesting take on a minor event in the bible, but if you decide to pick it up, you might find the first third of it rather slow - I know I did and had to be encouraged to keep reading before it got good. And yes, it made me both laugh and cry.
David Copperfield, well, it's Dickens. I like Dickens a lot - his characters seem so real, and hence likeable, even when they're scoundrels - but you have to have a bit of fortitude to get through the length (as with most Victorian novels). I think I enjoyed it more than Great Expectations, but less than others.
And Neil Gaiman? Just fabulous! I definitely have to read American Gods now. What was fascinating about this book was the way it imagined the London underground, and I read it along with the Trench and Hillman book, which was a fascinating non-fiction history of how everything under London - and there's LOTS of stuff under it - got there in the first place.

The Michael Moorcock is also interesting, though I must admit it's not a page turner. It's a bit too obscure in some places to keep me up at night reading, but the way he shapes the narrative through the lives of the characters is interesting. The chronology is messed up though, and it means I'm constantly having to make mental (or actual) notes about where things are at during any given chapter. It can be annoying, and is (I'm about half way through), but sometimes those chronological displacements are what end up pulling a story together in the end.

If you like fantasy - try the Gaiman. If you'd like a light read (even though a bit slow at first) pick the Diamant (and no, you don't need to know the biblical references, but if you do, it makes it a richer read). If you're in a blizzard, trapped in the house for four days... well, maybe then the Dickens would carry you through best! *wink*

School was cancelled yesterday because it was cold. BECAUSE IT WAS COLD. Yikes!

So the kids are bored, getting in each other's hair, and it feels like today is the last day of the weekend. But there's still three (!) more days to go because Monday is a holiday and Tuesday a PD Day. And because it's cold, there's not much to do outside. Ugh!

I am drowning in stuff... okay, specifically books & papers, but I'm drowning nonetheless. I pack up boxes of the stuff but it seems like I never get any more space in which to work. I know I tend toward pack-ratness, but over the years, I've gotten pretty good at discerning what I truly will need and what I won't. The big purge last summer sure helped pare things down into the critical and the non-critical. And although I make mistakes about what to keep and what to throw occasionally, overall I think I'm pretty good at it.

But I still have no space. I have to pile books on the floor in order to have a desk to work at. I am drowning.

Okay, this is nuts. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the coffee maker, whose element is on. The cup of coffe was cold because the machine sits next to the kitchen window. WTF!

Cold

Cold is very much on my mind. I come from Canada. I grew up in Saskatchewan. I know cold.

But I don't like it. Why do people here think I would get jolly in the cold? Just because I've lived in it, doesn't mean I like it any better than they do. It just means I think it's less fruitful to complain about the cold. Now, complaining about stereotypes about how I must love the cold, that's something to complain about!

It is cold here. Somehow, this coastal cold is colder than dry prairie cold. It feels that way.

I think I'm also colder here because I have to take transit everywhere (and no, I don't take an underground subway - which would be very nice in this weather). I also have yet to be in a home that is properly insulated. I don't doubt such buildings exist, but in the kinds of homes my colleagues and I can afford to live in, the wind sneaks in through windows and doors at an alarming rate. I see $$ float by everytime the temperature drops and dread getting the gas bill. And the kind of building that English departments get put into is the same kind - it is either exceedingly hot (and you're wearing a turtleneck) or frigid and you have wear gloves to type.

I don't understand why these places aren't properly insulated. We have the technology. Maybe this is why they need to go to war to keep fuel prices low. Hmmmmm.

I went to school yesterday not wanting to teach this semester. I walked into the classroom feeling that way. I walked out of the classroom feeling that way. I contemplated taking their first assignments home to read feeling that way. I answered e-mail from one of my students still feeling that way.

I'm sure that I remained entirely professional in the execution of my duties, but I had no enthusiasm for the task. Usually I do. Perhaps I have a bit more enthusiasm today, but it's hard to say.

I think mostly I would just love to have one semester...one little semester...out of the multitude of semesters I have completed in the last decade where all I had to worry about was being a student. Not trying to balance student and employee. I think that's why I loved the summer session I taught - because there was no conflict with a student schedule - I could just be instructor without feeling like I was stealing time away from my own studies to do so. I want to feel just like student without stealing time away from that to be the teacher.

I know I'll never be purely a student...I doubt many students ever are just that... because I have a family to also take care of, but it would be nice just to worry about family and student stuff without working-type stuff too. It's great experience, but I feel like I neither do my own work well, or my teaching well, because I'm always dividing up too little time between them.

Currently reading:
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Just finished:
The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing
(odd, creepy, but interesting)

On deck:
Tithe, A Modern Fairy tale - Holly Black
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Just in case you're curious.

Some of these last posts have been pretty dull. Probably 'cause I've been feeling off - feeling sorry for myself not getting to go home for the holidays - scared to take the car anywhere far in case it decides to stop running. Ugh! Apologies to all who have fallen asleep or other unpleasant sensations when reading them...

Have been watching lots & lots of movies - it's interesting how your impressions of a movie can change due to intervening experiences. I first watched Spike Lee's Clockers about two years ago. It was the Lee film I had ever seen, and it was in an academic context where we were focusing on the director's oeuvre, tracing favorite scene set-ups, themes, camera angles and movements etc. I watched it last night, and in the intervening years have become much more aware of the music of Seal (which figures prominently in the film), lived across the street from some "projects" (though small) and ridden transit with many people who talked and acted like some of the characters of the film. If you have never seen this film - you should - and if you have the opportunity, watch it back to back with American History X - guaranteed conversation starters and no easy answers in either (well, okay, maybe not really easy answers - I think Lee does cop out a bit at the end and the brother's fate is a bit too unrealistic).

[Seal is also one of Dwayne's favorite performers & his North American engagements are few and far between - he had the opportunity of seeing him live at the Avalon nightclub here last month (while I sat in a lecture!) :( ]

Also watched Y tu mama tambien which is well worth sitting through subtitles for, though I can't say the same for Andre Bresson's Lancelot of the Lake, which won at Cannes, but its faults far outweigh the unusual camera work.

Also watched Amityville Horror. I had seen it before, but had forgotten much of it, and coming back to the movie, I really found myself respecting the decision to leave the ending fairly realistic - there are no clear cut winners - the house is left as is, but the family escapes to start again. Many times in life, there isn't a clear winner, and you have to make concessions and leave things less than satisfactory, but you're still standing - the movie seems to say the same thing.

Watched a bunch of other stuff - Terminator 3 - mostly what I expected except the special effects were pretty wild - Attack of the Clones, Finding Nemo etc,... but nothing else that I'd highly recommend. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to get to the theatre in the next little while, which is a shame 'cause there's lots of neat stuff playing right now.

Happy New Year!

Spent last night with a few friends (who we'd actually spent the evening with the day before too) just hanging out - then over to the local Irish pub for the midnight countdown. It was nice, casual, good evening. We weren't sure if we wanted t to head out because we weren't sure about getting home again (it would've been at least $50 for a cab from their place back here), but with new year's, they were running extra transit of all sorts and we took the commuter train home (something I've never done before). Reminded me of the train rides across England when we were there, only in this case, most of the people on the train were in some stage of inebriation. But it was quiet, with everyone saying happy new year and all. The train was kinda the coolest part of the whole thing.

Happy holidays to everyone. I wish I could be seeing everyone in person who reads this (or at least all the people I know read regularly). So have a great holiday!

I just finished making sugar cookie batter and starting the egg nog (one for Dwayne & I - yum... - and one for the girls). The cookies should be chilled and ready to roll by the time the girls get back from last minute christmas shopping (and who says the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!)

We're considering seeing LOTR in the next couple of days, but there's also a big rainstorm rolling in and the car doesn't like rain, so we'll play it by ear. I also want to see Gus van Sant's Elephant and Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, so I'm hoping both of them will continue to play until the new year. We've also got 17 videos from the library to work through, and I've got more books than I can count that I want to read (including one for each book club). The mother-daughter book club is starting a fantasy cycle, so I'm sure there'll be plenty of interesting books to read. Looking forward to it.

It will be nice to do nothing - no pressure - well, at least for a week!

Gonna go for a run since the temp's in the teens. Yeah! Unfortunately, after Christmas it gets nasty cold round here, but I'll take advantage of it till then.

Happy Holidays!

Have finished papers, marking (including flunking a student who really could've passed, he just didn't get it together and hand in the final assignment) and am now starting to relax.

Had lunch today with Dwayne and a friend from school, got some shopping done, got a huge pile of videos to last us for the week. Now just need to go shopping for food and beverages (another commodity that gets ignored during the end of term rush). It will be nice to have nothing serious to do for a while... well, okay, there's lots to do for next term, but I'm gonna try not to think about it for a while yet....

Big push today to try to finish the first paper. I am halfway there - yeah! - but because we've switched to semesters, and because I'm PhD, instructors have assumed that we have more time (and more brains I guess) to say more, so both papers are a good 50% bigger than they would've been last year. And while I never have a problem saying things, it's saying something useful and intelligent that's the problem!

On a positive note, the meeting on Monday went fairly well on both counts. We had our department get together last night, and it was a casual situation in which I took the opportunity (only once, 'cause I didn't want to only talk shop, and we didn't) to ask how the presentation was received by the committee after I left. It seems to have generated some discussion, which is good, though whether anything will actually change is another story. I also had my directed study approved conditionally if I agreed to add 5 additional books to the bibliography. I agreed, but man! am I gonna have lots of reading to do next term!

Still keeping my fingers crossed that my computer keeps working while I finish off these final papers. Keep your fingers crossed for me too!

I have realized I hate the end-of-term-need-to-write-papers-on-short-schedule. I'm glad next term will be my last one for taking classes and the end of term push to finish writing will be over (at least I hope) in my career.

I am trying to put together a directed study (thanks to everyone who provided suggestions for texts to use), but I am also the GSC rep and am bringing an issue before the committee at the next meeting, which will probably be the same one where they will decide whether or not to approve the directed study - an iffy situation at the best of times.

Wish me good luck!

Computer is finally working again (I hope) - it seems to be working better, but being the cynic that I am when it comes to technology, I'm thinking that I'll keep my fingers crossed and be backing up to disc every five minutes for the next little while.

So since nothing much is happening with me, here's news about everybody else...

Dwayne survived his monster certification exam, though he won't know the results for months. He doesn't think he did very well, but I have faith that he did much better than he thinks he did. It was a rather dull thanksgiving weekend with both of us studying our tails off and my computer not working, but it is over, and now that it's gotten really cold here (we're getting a nasty wind from the northwest...hmmm....wondering where THAT might be coming from!), we're all trying to stay indoors as much as possible.

Black ice on the roads yesterday meant that it took very long to get anywhere, but at least on the bus, you don't have to worry about the driving...just the standing around in the cold waiting...

Wrestling season has started again, but Sandy hasn't gone to many practices 'cause she's also stage manager for the high school production this weekend, so she's been spending lots of time on that. Steph's been managing basketball and homework (her math mark on the last report card was a big improvement) and Angie has gotten used to having mom as her piano teacher (though I'm not sure I have! there's been a few times where I've really had to strain to remember correct terminology etc.).

And me? Trying to figure out how I"ll write papers.... not much more.

I feel like an arm has been cut off. I still don't know what's wrong with my computer. I tried wiping it clean hoping it was a soft problem, but it isn't, so I will need to spend money on having someone crack it open. *expletive*

The good news is that I could get it to run for about 15 minutes at a time, so I at least got all the critical files off it, and have only lost minor, incidental data.

The bad news is, I have a project and two substantial papers to write in the next two weeks. And that's gonna be hard to manage without a computer. Yes, I know it's possible, but it's definitely not what I'm used to, and the adjustment will detract from my efficiency. It already has, just in compiling notes from what I've been reading.