Tagged by a meme a.k.a. 15 things I've done you probably haven't

Fifteen things? I don't know that I can get to 15... or that I want to publicly tell all the things I've done that you probably haven't. But here goes...

• I've lived in Brasil
• I've had a turtle for a pet.
• I prepared and filed my own divorce papers without needing a lawyer.
• I moved 3000 miles without knowing where I was gonna live when I got there.
• I got married 36 hours after the proposal.
• The only wedding invitation I gave out was written on a Post-It note.
• I shook hands with Charles, Prince of Wales.
• I've stood with one foot on each side of the equator.
• I ran away from home at the age of 6 because I didn't want to eat my vegetables.
• I've conducted research at the British Library.
• I've made Kiwi wine.
• I got my first cavity when I was 26.
• I've played flashlight tag in Paraguay.
• I've driven 1000 km roundtrip in one day just to see a band play.
• I've cooked a month's worth of food in one day.

Ha! I did it! Took a while though...

Striking more things off the list

I drank Honduran coffee this morning, compliments of my lovely daughter who arrived safely back from Central America with all limbs intact, a craving for chocolate, and her passport!

*whew*

I have nothing to say

But I have spent a little time playing around with the blog itself. The "What I've been reading lately" link (on your left) has been updated - 34 out of those 50 books I challenged myself to read this year - looking good!

Just below you might notice a similar link "What I've been writing lately", which is new of course. I hope you enjoy! (lemme know what you think)

Booker Prize

Today the longlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced.

The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw
The Sea by John Banville
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee
In the Fold by Rachel Cusk
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
All For Love by Dan Jacobson
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
Saturday by Ian McEwan
The People’s Act of Love by James Meek
Shalimar The Clown by Salman Rushdie
The Accidental by Ali Smith
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
This Thing Of Darkness by Harry Thompson
This Is The Country by William Wall

As a would-be scholar in contemporary Brit lit, I'm a little disturbed to discover: a) I don't recognize/know anything about some of these authors; b) I wasn't even aware that two of my favorite authors who are on the list had books coming out this year; and c) so far, I've only read one of these books.

In all fairness, several of the books on the list haven't been released yet (September or later for the hardcover), and although I've only read one on the list, another is coming in the mail (ordered before this announcement). But still, I really should at least have a passing familiarity with Booker nominated authors/books to call myself a contemporary Brit lit scholar.

Then again, I have so little time to read my comps stuff, let alone anything else, that maybe I'll just wait for the shortlist to be published and read that.

Such a klutz!

I awoke this morning to reasonable summer temperatures and the intention of going running. But first, I was going to walk over the mailbox and send off the applications I had filled out last night.

Klutz that I am, I stepped of the curb wrong, twisted my ankle, and took about four layers of skin off my knee... yes, I know there's only three layers, and yes, I probably only penetrated to the second one, but it feels like more!

And it hurts like a SOB. The skin will heal, that I'm not worried about, it's the twisted ankle that I worry about. It's on the leg that I tore a muscle on two years ago, which is still stiff sometimes. At least it's not swollen - that's probably a good sign that there' no permanent damage.

But dammit! I hate being a klutz!

Striking things off the list

Thanks to my supervisor (who's my hero), I can strike 2 preps for fall off my worry list.

• Teaching - seem to be getting stuck with 2 preps for the fall, which means extra pressure on the get them written when I want to part of exam worry.

Which means that I can also ratchet down a notch the exam worry, which is all good 'cause it was getting up there into the realm of getting-really-tough-to-handle. I also had an idea about dissertation - I don't know whether my hypothesis has any weight to it - I'd have to do a LOT of reading - but it's a potential approach to the material that could at least get me started.

"Reading"

Since Dracula is on my reading list, and I haven't read it for a few years (no, I didn't read it for the Victorian class I audited last year 'cause I wasn't going to be at those classes anyway), I figure I should read it. What a better way to read it than the way it was written - by the day?

So I've been reading along on the Dracula Blogged site. It's not only an interesting way to experience the book - following along as the story unfolds day after day - but it's also really interesting to read a Victorian novel as a blog. [Dracula arrives in England next week, so the action will really start heating up soon!]

Blog reading is different than reading a novel (it's one of the topics for discussion with my students when we do the weblog sequence), in part because of its chronological nature. You read entries in reverse chronology, so the first time you reach a site, you read the newest posts first, eventually working your way back in time. Of course you can jump around in the archives, but that's another feature of the weblog that's different from novels. You could read a novel by jumping around from chapter to chapter, but it might not make sense, and a mystery novel will be entirely ruined by reading it this way, whereas the posts of a blog are discreet entries, even when they refer to earlier posts (whether directly linked or simply as parts of the story that the reader should already know).

The hyperlinks and division into posts make it possible for the reader to 'create' the text during the act of reading by selecting which parts of the blog to read, or which links to follow, but the reader also has the opportunity of creating the blog by responding to it in the comments section. In Dracula Blogged, there's also a comments section, which includes not only the blogger's comments on the book, but other's comments about the action of the story. There have been some interesting discussions of Dracula's sexuality, character motivations, and even close textual reading that reveals (or doesn't) the reactions of characters. I find the comments section, while sometimes not revealing anything I wasn't aware of, is an interesting pedagogical tool in this case, with the blogger drawing attention to details that will later be important, or playing devil's advocate about received criticism about the book, or even posing questions for other commenters to respond to.

It's definitely a different way to read a Victorian novel!

The worry list

Thought it was time to update my worry list. Some of it's old, but some of it's new.

• Exams - what isn't there to worry about this? I'm not smart enough, my field statements won't be comprehensive enough, I'll get questions I can't answer, I'll fail the exams, I won't write them when I want to, I'll get kicked out of the program (because I failed them) etc.
• Daughter in Honduras - strange customs/food/fauna, homesickness, illness... lots of stuff could be going wrong here.
• Teaching - seem to be getting stuck with 2 preps for the fall, which means extra pressure on the get them written when I want to part of exam worry
• Daughter in NH - she's not in Honduras, but it's her first long stint alone, and she's working, and I hope she's liking it and not missing home too much.
• Tuition - not mine, his. We don't know where this is coming from yet.
• Daughter who graduates high school next year - marks this year weren't so good, which means scholarships are out the window (see "tuition" above)
• Daughter who has decided not to read this summer - worth worrying about? maybe not - but it's unusual, and I'm hoping it's just a summer thing and not indicative of a bigger attitude thing.

On the bright side, a chat with a friend, while not actually eliminating any of the things that I'm worrying about, cheered me up and made me think that I just worry too much!

Like a football (or maybe a soccer ball)

I've always suspected that the book publishing industry has a logic all its own, and Neil's post about publishing confirms this. He describes how book contracts have divided up English-language publishing into 'territories' that really have little or only archaic relationships to the political territories they correspond to.

For bookselling purposes Australia is normally a UK territory (unless the UK edition doesn't come out within 30 days of the US edition, in which case it becomes an Open Territory), Canada is always a battleground claimed by one side or the other (Good Omens had Canada as UK territory, but all my novels since have had it as US territory)and sometimes it even gets to be Canadian Territory, Singapore regards itself as an open territory and is listed in US contracts as being open territory, but tends to turn up in UK contracts as UK territory (as does most of the Commonwealth and former Commonwealth). Ireland is a UK territory too.

I like how my country gets tossed around between the US, UK and its own autonomous publishing sovereignty when it comes to book rights. I also wonder what difference this makes in price, since it always seems that buying any book in US dollars instead of CDN is always cheaper, even with a favorable exchange rate.

I never buy books when I go home - it's not worth it, even if they're hard to find here, though I did pick up two CDs last trip - the Rush makes #10 (yeah, it's an old one, but we didn't have it) and the Nelly was inexpensive. I hadn't heard any of it before picking it up, but I'm glad I did 'cause I'm liking it even better than her first album. I probably could've gotten them both here, but it was fun to do the browsing on the other side of the border.

Skirmishes on the playground

Apparently my country is now posturing with the Danes over a small island between Greenland and Ellesmere Island - why are we doing this? I don't know. But each side is staking its claim...repeatedly. Frankly, I think it's kinda interesting how this disagreement has been going on for three decades now, with each side routinely claiming the 1.3 km island and I'm pretty impressed that the solution has been to agree to disagree.

I'm particularly amused by the Ottawa Citizen cartoon depicting how Canada might stake its claim to the island.

They're ba-ack!

It's good to have at least two kids back. They enjoyed their time away. We enjoyed their time away. Now we enjoy our time together. This is the beauty of families - you love them when they're gone, and you love them when you get together again. My only regret is that I didn't get to take a month off and go with them and hang out at home again!

And the fridge is full again, but it won't be for long!

Our reunion is short lived though since one daughter leaves again tomorrow to go be a vacation nanny for two weeks in NH, so we'll get the joy of seeing her return home again - probably about the same time her older sister gets back from Honduras. That'll be a busy weekend too.

I love my family.

I hate days like this

Today has been one of those days that creep up on you and ruin all your plans. I knew when I got up this morning I had some errands and small stuff to do - I just didn't realize it would take all day, and I had expected to get several hours of reading done as well.

Needless to say, I haven't read anything but email so far today. And since the two youngest get home in a couple of hours, I'm sure I won't get anything done later today either.

I wouldn't mind so much if I felt like I'd accomplished something, but so far, my hands just ache, and I still didn't finish the minor car repairs that need to be done - mostly because I have wrong parts/not enough parts/not enough brains to figure out why what I'm doing isn't working.

I guess I can take solace in the fact that there's food in the house for when the kids get back...

Montreal

I really liked our visit to Montreal - I'd never been there before and at one point, we turned to each other and said things along the lines of 'If McGill has a program/job that one of us could take, we should consider it'. That's how much we liked the city.

The thing that really fascinated me about Montreal was the bilingualism. The official two languages of Canada are pretty much invisible in most of the rest of the country (government signage and packaging contain both, but not much else is evidence that there are two official languages). In Montreal, all signage is in French with only occasional English subtitles, and everyone who works retails seems to be fluent in both languages. Which is really kinda cool!

Language was the thing that had me worried about going on this trip - well, that and border crossing (but that always has me a bit nervous these days) - my French is not good - signs, packages, simple directions I'm okay on (you know, lots of nouns) but with longer things like a newspaper, and speech, I'm at a loss. I'm pretty sure I've forgotten almost everything I learnt in school. But we managed just fine - although I didn't attempt much French because I've retained so little of it, we got through fine. I did worry that we would find ourselves in a situation where we'd get stuck, but we were in the tourist areas, so it was never a problem. There was one salesclerk who walked away from us when we talked to her, but after watching her for a moment, I think the reason wasn't the language but just that she was a bitch.

It's also a very clean city - even the panhandlers seemed polite. Old Montreal is really neat, as is the shoreline and the view from the hills just above downtown (where we were staying) was beautiful. We rented an apartment for the weekend, that cost less than a hotel and had a kitchenette as well as including continental breakfast (a nice one too - no skimping there) in what our landlord informed us was the 'McGill ghetto', presumably because we were four blocks from the university and lots of students lived there. Really nice place - not quite what I think of when I think ghetto - but then again, can't say I've ever seen a Canadian ghetto before, so maybe there are more ghettos down east that are just as pretty.

Eddie was great! He made all kinds of jokes about the Queen - I'll never again be able to listen to 'God save the Queen' in quite the same way as before - and he showed us how to make the queen smile by creasing the $20 bill. He made an impromptu airplane which didn't fly and therefor prompted the only heckle of the night. He had told the audience just before his failed paper airplane that he was now a pilot, and the heckle was obviously something to that effect, since he replied in typical Eddie style, "but madam, I don't have to fold my airplane before I fly it". He was the perfect entertainer for that audience - fluent in French (though the show was mostly in English) and cracking jokes that he wouldn't be able to do in a show in America 'cause no one would get them.

We also saw 'The Daily Show: Secrets Revealed' with Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee which was a kind of roundtable with question period afterwards. It was also amusing. I wanted to try to get into the new Family Guy DVD screening (it doesn't get released till September), but the timing was too close to a show that we already had tickets for and we didn't want to miss out on the second one.

I'm glad we went, and I hope I can catch the festival again next year. The kids also want to go, so maybe we can take them up there over one of the fall holidays or something, so they can see it too.

We spent an extra night after the festival camping in northern Vermont before heading all the way back home. I'm happy to say that all three border encounters were just fine. Although the line was longer at St. Armand than it ever is at St. Stephens (in NB), we were waved right through. At the NB crossing, we've had to pull over and go into the office each time. We even went through the border patrol at the VT/NH border without any problems, though what or who they were looking for there, we couldn't tell. We at first thought drugs because there was a dog, but there was only a dog on the one line, and then we thought some other kind of smuggling because the only vehicle in front of us to produce ID was a guy in a truck, but then we thought they must've been looking for someone, because the only question they asked was where we were born and our citizenship. Odd. Does this happen often I wonder? We were already about 100 miles away from the border when this patrol stopped us, so I wonder what the purpose was.

Speaking of mileage, the car rolled over on the way back - 200,000 kms ! and it's still ticking... though I wonder for how much longer that will last...

Going to Canada from here always feels a bit weird. I feel like I'm going home when I go up there, and I feel like I'm coming home when I come back across the border. It's very strange to feel that you're going home both ways.

Isn't language fabulous?

Consider the phrase "The sun never sets on the British Empire".

If you type that phrase into google, among the results you'll the following two hits: one that proposes that America step down as a superpower, and the other which celebrates and encourages even greater "superpower" efforts in the world.

Notice how neither of them are about Britain? They've just appropriated the phrase from Christopher North's editorial in 1829 and applied it to another nation. It's also interesting to see how one phrase can become so loaded with meaning that it can not only be transposed entirely out of context, but can also be used within two diametrically opposed pieces.

The flexibility within language to bend and be shaped by such different wills and to such different purposes is fascinating - reminds me why I'm in this business.

There and back again

Loved the weekend in Montreal - can't promise as much description and pictures as my good friend's TO trip, but I'll blog soon.

She's alive* I survived** It's all good

*Honduras daughter called - she has all her limbs still in place.
**I marked 14 AWD third drafts today. That's my record and I never want to repeat it again!

But now I can leave for the weekend feeling good!

good news... more (unexpected) good news... lots of boring work... more good stuff

What more could a girl want?

Yesterday started out so horribly and ended so wonderfully that it kinda feels like it was a week's worth of stuff. I was so tired in the morning that I totally forgot it was my anniversary and so I didn't say anything to D before we left, which kinda bummed me when I realized it, and then teaching didn't go so good, and then I had some quick errands that ate up time and the day was shaping up to be pretty normal.

But then when I got to the department, I went to a dissertation defense (and actually understood some of it 'cause it was late nineteenth century stuff) where I saw not only the comps supervisor who I was expecting to talk to, but one who I have been emailing for a couple of weeks, nagging her to read my list. She seemed a bit surprised to see me, but being the professional that she is, recovered well and promised to chat. Hooray!

I must admit I did have difficulty concentrating in the defense because I kept wondering whether the two comps conversations I was going to have by the end of the day were going to be good or just get worse. Obviously from the title of this post, they went good. One list is entirely approved - wahoo! and the other is pretty much approved, with some minor changes, and, AND, the stuff that I'd earlier been told to scrap because I didn't need it, is now back on (with those minor changes), so I didn't waste all that time!

This is cool beans in local (teen) parlance.

Now I have another 11 or 12 hours of third draft marking - ugh, ugh, ugh! (I might have to finish the champagne we opened last night before making it through them all)

But then it's off to Montreal for the weekend! The comedy festival and my first visit to the city at the same time... can't get any better... just as long as losing your passport isn't a genetic thing...

So why can some people do it, and not others?

I've been taking the reading that doesn't have me tied to a computer out to the pool on occasion, which is just really nice. I read for a bit, and then I hop in the pool, floating there, thinking about the stuff I've just read - it's really a pretty ideal way to study.

But it's not an ideal way to study when there's too much else going on around me. I don't mean the kids playing and splashing in that pool - that's ambient background noise, and having three of my own, I've gotten pretty good at ignoring that stuff. It's conversations that distract me. Probably 'cause they're words. And I like words. A lot.

Now, I don't expect the pool to be a study place - if I want absolute silence, I should stay home (these days with the kids gone, that's possible), or go to the library. So I always bring my walkman. I usually select a seat that's far away from any groups that are already there when I arrive, so that I don't catch conversations, but sometimes people come in after I've settled in and start talking.

But some of them are alone.

That's what got me thinking. Are some people simply incapable of sitting - either sunning themselves or watching kids - without talking? The cell phone has made it possible for a person to never really have to be alone, and there are some people who seem to need their cell phone for that reason. There's one woman who regularly comes to the pool whose cell phone is constantly going off, and she usually comes with another friend, so either way, she's talking the whole time she's there.

Today when I arrived, I chose a spot at the far end - there were two people already there, but they were both regulars. One just lies quietly, not really doing much, and the other guy likes to talk, but after we've exchanged pleasantries, if I pick up my book, he gets the hint and lets me read.

Then a woman and her two children arrived. The kids hopped in the pool right away and she whipped out her cell phone. In response to the callee's response, she said, "Oh, well then I won't keep you long." (Which is why I didn't initially reach for the walkman) But then she proceeded to talk for another ten minutes. When she finally hung up, she immediately dialed someone else and was talking to a third when she called her kids out of the pool and left only a half hour later. She didn't strike me as a business woman trying to multitask by taking her kids to the pool while working the phone, since the conversations were pitched at a loud enough level for me to discern they were of a personal nature, not professional.

I wondered if I see this woman again, will she again be on the phone for the whole pool visit?

I've seen enough bus people and enough students to observe how some people can't seem to sit without doing something at all times, and therefor have to whip out their phone either to call someone or play games anytime they are required to sit still for a while.

I know not everyone likes to read and I suppose my early enforced religious education taught me to sit still and quiet for long periods of time - oh so very long to a young child! - but I wonder if some people just take to quiet activities better than others, who need the greater stimulation of a voice on the other end of the line. And, what did those people do before the invention of the cell phone?

Easy living

I gotta say, I'm loving these weekends that involve parties, beaches, bridal showers, watching movies, sleeping in, etc.

Eleven or so years of post secondary education made me forget that weekends can actually be fun - the last several years, they've just been opportunities to get work done, which, when you think of it, is kinda a suck-ass way to spend your weekends.

You know you live in a small town when...

... you pick up the local paper with the headline "Store 24 Robbed Again" and they don't have to say which Store 24 because there is only one.

At least I have something to look forward to in fall

The week has been a rather lacklustre one - a lot of work, some of it dull, some of it just busywork, and some of it just plain screwed up. I feel like I've done too much walking, too much waiting in lines, too much running around (including making sure that I still get a paycheque this week). Part of the problem also is that I'm trying to sift through the comments generated by submitting a list last week and finding the task daunting.

There have been highlights, like booking our weekend in Montreal, the writing group, and the news that there will be hockey next year - about time, guys! My weekend looks like it will be fun - now I just need to finish this week's work before I can enjoy it!

Hahahahaha

I'm going to see Eddie Izzard! Yes!

Food for Thought

Ran across this article about the dangers of blogging in academia at the Chronicle of Higher Education (courtesy Bitch. Ph.D.).

Of course I know all about being dooced, and I'd certainly wondered about my own potential position once I seriously re-enter the job market (I don't count packing textbooks into boxes last summer as a serious foray into workspace).

But now this Chronicle article has got me wondering yet again whether I should keep doing this or not. I began the blog frankly, because I'm lazy. I found after I moved, that I wanted to keep in touch with my friends back home, but would also get tired of writing the same things in emails to different people. And when I would try and change things up, I'd try to write about something different in my life to everyone I was emailing. But then I would forget who I had told what, and sometimes I'd get these confused responses because I'd tell the sequel to a story to someone who hadn't heard the first part of it!

So I started blogging thinking that everyone could just read about what I'm doing and I wouldn't a) repeat myself, b) tell someone only half a story, or c) be a delinquent emailer and only send an email once a year because I got tired of repeating myself etc. Now I just do it 'cause I like it. And I also think it's helped me loosen up in my academic writing, like all this blogging just lets me play with words so often that it's much easier to sit down and try to write serious ones.

Not many people read this thing (check out the statmeter), which is cool with me - the people who want to know (or who might be mildly amused at my so called life) read. Those who don't want to, don't. Their loss. So, I don't have a wide presence out there in the world wide gossip-monger. And I've tried to be fairly non-descript. Sure, you know some stuff about me. But chances are that's 'cause you know me in person (or think you do!), not because of what I say here. Even if you didn't know me in person, you're probably mostly going to know general things - even my recent rant about my university is probably pretty innocuous since I live in the greater Boston area and there's something like a gajillion schools here.

But this is the part of the article that gets me thinking:

Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author's credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer's current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process....

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

Huh?!

Okay, so I've worked in HR before - small company/non-profit - but I think I've interviewed enough people and screened enough applicants to know that past behaviour IS a good predictor of future behaviour - it's the whole idea behind Behavioral Descriptive interviewing. Note: 70% of the time BDI finds the behaviors employers want as opposed to 20% for traditional inteviews.

Believe me, BDI works. It's pretty hard to lie to a BDI question unless the candidate has prepared a script ahead of time. The questions are generally broadly enough based that you can evaluate almost any behavior or attitude type you need for the job at hand (what's sometimes actually less accurate is figuring out what kind of behaviors you value for a given position). The lesson? Past behaviour IS a good indicator of future behavior. Someone who is professional and discrete enough before being hired will continue to be professional and discrete after they sign the contract.

Also makes a good case for people in academia who have non-academia-type skills, you know, who might know that BDI works... like me!

What also disturbs me is the writer's admission that they Googled candidate's names. Now, the article does point out that several people included their blog URLs in their CV or even cover letter. That invites a look-see. BUT, not everyone did, and it sounds like this hiring committee decided to Google everyone they interviewed whether they were invited to or not.

This is the part where it gets dodgey. I wouldn't include this blog in a cover letter or CV - it's not professional in any way, and really just for my friends, so I don't think anyone else would be interested in it. But do I have to worry about potential employers snooping it out? (Not that a Google search will do you much good - it doesn't turn up this site - though it does turn up a woman with my name who saw a UFO and another who advertises on an adult page (at least she doesn't look like me))*

I'm not really worried about it - if a search committee wants to find out things about me, they can, whether I invite them to or not. I just don't think it's terribly ethical of them to do so without me being aware of it - sounds a bit like the Patriot Act then.

*I did however find out in my google search that something I wrote for a book review was quoted on another website, which was kinda cool 'cause it was an academic book review after all. I think it makes me sound kinda smart too (unlike this sentence!)

Well! That just feels like a big mistake

So, I was whining yesterday about how unmotivated I feel, and I decided that the best thing to do would be to push myself through to the next level.

I decided that I needed to get off my fanny and email off the second and third reading lists to their respective supervisors. I've been sitting on them for probably two weeks, hesitating to send them off because I wasn't sure they were ready, and I figured one way to shake myself out of the doldrums would be to scare myself (and the thought of actually sending them off was scaring me, hence, it seemed perfect).

Bad move.

I heard back from the first person only two hours after sending it off! - in an email with a two page attachment. She had some very good suggestions for wording the field statement part, which was excellent, since it was that part that I'd been fucking around with for the last two weeks trying to get it right and still not being satisfied with it. That was good and is easy to deal with. She also explained a bit more/better what she was looking for in the secondary source list, which was good, because now I have a clearer idea about what I need to do for it, but a bit bad because it gives me a lot more books to read - which might throw off my hoped for schedule (especially if I continue to have difficulty motivating myself - which will continue if the kind of things like the stuff to follow keeps happening).

The very first thing in her response - the thing that really was the most depressing even though I'm trying to just let it roll off and not bug me - was that she asked why I had a whole huge section of literature on my list. She said it didn't seem that I was interested in this literature, and wouldn't deal with it in my dissertation, so why was it on there? Why? WHY? Well, 'cause you told me to put it on there! You even lent me a book to help me compile that part of the list. No, I don't want to study it, but I put it on there because you told me to. AND. This is the big part. And, I spent about two solid months reading much of the material in that section - two months I could have spent reading other things.

*a wailing, gnashing of teeth, and growling ensues*

Two months (and I think that's conservative) spent on reading stuff that won't be on my list. I'm not talking an article or two, or even one book. I'm talking several books as well as many shorter pieces.

It's just depressing.

But it gets better.

Because I'm a trooper - or an idiot - take your pick - I go for a long walk, burning off some steam and return home with the plan to try to forget that I wasted so very much time on useless research and just try to focus on moving forward. What I need to do is focus on the books she's told me to go find - I don't know what books yet - I just know I have to read them. I'm an hour and a half away from the library, but I have DSL and the library has a slough of useful online databases. So, the logical thing to do is to do some research. Look up books that we have in the library, find their tables of contents, their indexes, figure out what's in them, then compile a list and physically go into the library, take them off the shelves (or order them from other libraries) and figure out if I should read them. I can do all this online too.

It sounds like a good plan, doesn't it? I thought it did.

I begin to make some progress; I'm finding stuff in the regular catalogs as well as in databases and online resources outside the university. I compile a list of about 40 books, but there are some books the university doesn't have, so I want to order them through interlibrary loan. I go to login. "Your patron privileges have been revoked" Crap! I took them the letter they needed last month, and I still got booted off. And it's 4:25 on Thursday. Offices close in 5 minutes, and most aren't open on Fridays.

But aha! I'll be sneaky. I have a faculty account as well as a student account. I'll get into the secure databases that way. "Your patron privileges have been revoked" Damn! I betcha this has something to do with getting kicked off Blackboard last week.

Yes, I seem to be persona non grata at the university these days. They don't have a record of me paying for gym privileges over the summer, so I have to carry my receipt with me at all times (yeah, I know, I'm not doing that one again!). And even then, some of the 'brilliant' work study people behind the counter are still suspicious about whether they should let me in or not.

And last week, I couldn't log on to Blackboard (the course management site for the course I'm teaching), because someone told them I was no longer working for the university. I wouldn't have minded not working for the university for the rest of the summer if it meant I still didn't have to go in and teach.

That was a pain in the ass to track down, because whoever did it, did it the Friday before the long weekend, and there was almost no one around over the weekend to fix it. Took till the next Wednesday to get back on. And of course I look like a dufus to my students because I can't get ahold of them 'cause their email addresses are all locked away on the site. As soon as I got access, I enrolled myself through my student account in my own course that I'm teaching, so at least if they decide to do this again, I'll at least have access to the email list, even though I won't be able to access the gradebook or any of the other instructor features.

But I'm kinda stuck till Monday in my research efforts. And I just realized I have yet to hear back from the other advisor - I'm not looking forward to that one.

Is this some subtle form of messaging? "Aliens go home"? Why not just send me a memo? If you don't want me here, just come right out and say it. I'm a big girl. I can take it. But right now you're just confusing me. You invited me to come here. I came from another country. I travelled 3210 miles, without a place to live at the end of the line to get here. That was faith. And you seemed to want me. You gave me an assistantship. And then you even renewed it - twice. If you didn't want me here, all you had to do was not offer me money. I would've got the hint. In fact, I would've had to leave - I couldn't have afforded to stay. But you gave me assistantships during the year, and even offered me a part time job in the summer. You're confusing me. Do you want me or not?

Makes my problems seem really rather irrelevant

So, I've been reading about the bombing in London. I'm not really gonna blog about the politics of it, and I'm not going to second guess whether the group that claims to have done it did it.

The thing that impresses me the most about all the accounts I've been reading about it is the attitude of those who have been involved, either responding to the crisis, or living through it. Londoners' attitudes have been compared to those of the Blitz, and they seem to be rallying together in a way that I'm sure is reminiscent of that previous bombing. And as commentators (particularly the British papers) have noted, they've always had the IRA to deal with.

I still however find myself feeling very remote from it all - perhaps in part because I haven't taken transit in the last couple of days and probably won't have to till next week (mostly 'cause I'm not working till then and have no need to stir from the nest of misery that's my life right now).

But I think even then I will find my attitude to my commute unchanged. It's hard to get worked up about a bunch of weirdos in some far away country maybe deciding to attack the transit system I ride, and even then, maybe attacking on the day I'm on it, and maybe on the bus I'm on. You see the odds? Whereas I've been at a station when they stopped the trains because someone was shot, and I've been on a bus where a man grabbed a woman but ran away before the cops could show up, even though he continued to make threatening gestures at her (and I think more generally at the other women on the bus as well). So, yeah, it's hard to get anxious about it. I think there's a far greater chance of my senile neighbor leaving the stove on and burning us all to a crisp in the middle of the night than me getting blown up on a subway ride.

But perhaps now that I've said that, I'm bringing such a fate upon myself.

Is that too fatalistic? Perhaps it is a bit dark. But I guess I figure there's not much that I can do about the things that happen in life other than how I respond to them. How I respond personally to the events in London is not to fear for myself, but to feel empathy for those people who are there, for those people who were injured, and for those people who had someone they care about die. I know that there are many people in London (and beyond) for whom this is a personal matter, and for them, I feel sympathy and wish them strength and the compassion of those nearest them.

I also am concerned on a more general level about the purpose of the attack - terror-ism - it is the desire to terrify an enemy, and it is that ratcheting up a notch of the terror everyone in the world feels everytime an act of terrorism is committed that I worry about. It feeds into a bunker mentality. Not always right away, but later on it does, as people continue to worry about it. At first, everyone pulls together, but then once the crisis is over, suspicion sets in. It's not just of unattended packages though, it extends to anyone acting a little weird, or maybe looking angry, or "suspicious" in some other way. And the worst of it comes when people start to be suspicious of anyone who doesn't look like them, or conversely, who looks like a terrorist (whatever terrorists look like in your dreams). That's the thing that worries me the most about these kinds of terrorist attacks. They make the world a more dangerous place for me and my kids. When everyone starts to look over their shoulder, when we start eroding civil liberties in the name of security, when ordinary people start to mistrust their neighbors and the people they meet everyday, the world gets to be a little bit scarier.

It gets scarier because when you don't trust anyone, you start just looking out for yourself. Which is a good thing (it's something that it's SO hard to get teenagers to do, or at least my teenager). But because my teen has so little worry about her own safety, she may find herself in a situation where she needs the help of a stranger. And that stranger might be unwilling to help her because he/she has retreated from society, has let the terror and suspicion get to him/her. And then my daughter suffers. To hell with society suffering. I worry about her suffering. And THAT's what I worry about whenever terror is used against ordinary people - that the world is becoming less safe not just because of the terrorists, but because of what it does to us all.

I'm in a slump

I can't seem to get any work done today... haven't really worked since the beginning of last week... at least not in any concerted manner that will move me through this program at anything but a snail's pace.

It all just seems so overwhelming right now. Too much I don't know. Too much I'm worried I need to know. Too much to read. Too much to pay attention to. I'm ready to give up. I want to give up. I want to sit on the couch and watch movies all day. I want to go out and go shopping, or visit friends, or just wander down to the nearest coffee shop (a good mile away, so 'wander' doesn't quite seem the right word). In short, I want to be doing just about anything that doesn't involve school.

Help!

Ahhh...New England in the summer

It has been raining most of the day - during the trek in to school, it was raining 'wicked haahd', which made travel difficult (and extremely soggy). You don't get rain like that on the prairies. It rains hard, but for a brief time (and usually only late in the evening or overnight), so it doesn't affect you unless you're a night owl or work overnights.

Here, this hard rain just kept coming and coming. Even with an umbrella, you're soaked quickly. Worst part today was that my sandals got so wet, and my feet inside them, that my feet started sliding around in them, and within about three blocks, I had a wicked blister on one foot - and this is from sandals that usually are the most comfy things around. Ouch. Takes all the fun outta meeting a friend on Newbury Street and having lunch together, though we made it a long lunch and by the time we'd dried out, the rain had let up a bit and we could walk without being entirely soaked. The good food and great company made up for the soggy weather though.

Now the weekend is over though...

Overall, this long weekend was one of the better weekends I've had since starting this doctoral program. In part, it's likely been good because I did virtually no work whatsoever - which of course makes today a day for a lot of work to get done.

The Canada Day bbq went off fairly well I think. I enjoyed myself (more than last year for sure), and I think if I play with things next year, I can get it down to spending even less time in front of the grill and enjoying myself even more. Most everyone seemed to enjoy themselves - there was one person who was really tired and left early, and another who felt sick (not my fault, honest!), and maybe a couple of dates who felt a bit out of place, but there's not much you can do about that after you've chatted them up for a bit.

We had a birthday party the next day to go to - which was fun - I think if I start hanging around with this family much more, they'll have to consider adoption, but if they don't mind, I don't mind! No, really, it was a really pretty neat party, and I haven't gone to a kid party that I haven't hosted in a long time, so it was nice to be on the other side of the fence for a while.

We talked about spending Sunday lying around the pool and then watching movies, but decided we'd be more active and drove out to Mt. Monadnock for a bit of hiking. My hips still hurt! We decided (perhaps a touch foolishly) to pick the straight up, straight down route up the mountain - on the map, we went up White Dot and down White Cross, which are apparently the most direct way up and back the 3,165 ft. elevation gain. The trail is rated 'moderately steep' which means it's not supposed to go above a 45 degree angle slope, but there are a couple of places where it exceeds that. And not many that go below about 25 - it's pretty much a straight scramble up what is likely a stream/waterfall bed during runoff. We've been to the White Mountains area of New Hampshire, which is much more scenic, but also a little farther away, so we decided to try Monadnock (and daughter 2 was excited to hear we'd gone to it since she'd been there with the school last year). Much more energetic day than staying home by the pool though!

Yesterday, we drove almost out to Rhode Island to a 4th of July bbq (sure, why not hit both holidays, right?) though we came back a bit early because we (well, not so much me) needed to get ready for a busy week ahead. The traditional kickball game was unevenly matched, but we had fun with it (even though I apparently can't catch a ball to save my life - something the other team worked very hard to exploit by kicking it toward me each time!)

But now it's back to work.

Happy Canada Day!

I'm taking a short break from prepping food for the BBQ to say Happy Canada Day to everyone (whether you're Canadian or not).

In honor of the day, I'm including a brief interview with the International Canadian Hide and Seek team. (Apparently, some people will believe almost anything a Canadian tells them - our reputation comes in handy sometimes)

And my favorite Molson commercial - Office Glen.

I'm sure I'll adjust quickly

When I get off the bus and start walking home from school, my thoughts turn to home. I tend to think about what to make for dinner, who will be home, who has what sports practice, wonder how much homework needs to be done etc.

Today, I got off the bus and wondered to myself which children would be home already.

Answer? None. That was a momentary shock.

It was reinforced when I walked into an empty house. I wonder if I'll remember tomorrow?

Laps around Logan a.k.a. Logan Run

I don't like Logan airport at the best of times, and having to go there early in the morning two days in a row just confirmed that fact for me. The two visits couldn't have been more different.

The first, an international flight for 2 unaccompanied minors, was painless. There was no one in the line at the ticket counter, we checked in right away (including all the UM paperwork), I accompanied them through security, which was hassle free, and then we just had to wait till they boarded, which was also hassle free.

The second, a domestic flight for my oldest daughter, was painful. We arrived within the suggested 90 minute early arrival and still had to sprint to the security checkpoint. We came in at one end of the desginated terminal, noted the line, and followed it. And followed it, and followed it, till we finally came to the end on the other side of the terminal. But there was an agent walking the line, assuring us we would get through the line in time to make our flight. Well she was right, sorta. We got the boarding pass twenty minutes before take-off (hence the sprint to the long security line).

But then the fun began. You see, when asked for her passport at the front of the security line, my daughter discovered she no longer had it. She must have dropped it. So, being the loving mother I am, I sprinted back down the length of the terminal to the ticket agent, only to find when I got there, that another agent had picked it up and run it out to her. So I sprinted back to try to at least say goodbye properly only to discover she'd already progressed through the first screening to the machines.

Did I mention she LOST HER PASSPORT?!
Within ten minutes of pulling it out, she lost it.

Before today, I had talked myself into being cool with her summer plans.
Now I am nervous.

And tired from Logan's run.

There's good news, good news, and bad news

Well, I think I licked those nasty bugs 'cause I've been feeling better over the last couple of days. To celebrate, I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in ages and now I hurt again (but in a good way).

I also got some excellent plotting ideas from the writing group last night - I was really kinda stuck in the concept stage, and now, I've got an idea where the story is going to go. It also clearly sets the story in the sf genre more than the social fiction/alternative chick lit/whatever that it was stuck in before. I suppose I shouldn't be that concerned about genre, but hey, let's face it, genre drives fiction sales these days - knowing your niche might be a good thing.

Bad news is, I'm up to my eyeballs in getting kids ready to fly away for summer, BBQ next week, and sending off reading list drafts (hopefully by the end of the month) - I don't have a lot of time to spare for plotting out the suggested changes, but I'm psyched to get it done, so I'm gonna steal the time from somewhere else.

Maybe I'll even have the guts to post some of it for you... maybe.

Feeding the mind (you know, laughter's the best medicine)

I've always loved this poem, and while reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland again, I was delighted not only with the poems, but also by the original drawings by John Tenniel included in my copy.

You are old, Father William

"You are old, Father William" the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head -
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door -
Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment - one shilling the box -
Allow me to see you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak -
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balance an eel on the end of your nose -
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father, "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"

How strong is that mind/body connection?

This is my question for the week, in part, because I think my body is trying to fend off the nasty whatever that laid D out last week. I am exhausted. And it is only 2 pm.
It must be one of these little buggers who's messing with me:



From giantmicrobes

My mind is trying to tell my body to kick the bug's ass and get on with life, but my body is trying to tell my mind to direct its muscles to the bed, crawl in and spend this gorgeous day napping. I'm rooting for the mind to win this one. This week's WAY too busy with the girls going away next week, the Canada Day BBQ to prepare for, a set of drafts coming in, as well as my usual reading schedule.

We are consumers

There's no way to get around it - we're consumers - we buy and buy and buy. And I'm one of those people who actually dislikes shopping most of the time. Actually, it's not the act of looking at merchandise, trying things on, comparing prices etc., it's the other people who are doing the same thing at the same time that I mostly can't stand.

I really am rather anti-social in that way. So when D came home today and asked if I needed something to wear for the wedding this weekend, I was confused and a bit frustrated. I thought we had talked about it and decide our money was a bit too tight to afford new clothing wear, so I had dug around in the closet trying to put something together (I had found an outfit - I wasn't crazy about it, but I thought it would get me by). But then he suggested going shopping tomorrow afternoon to get something specifically wedding-like, which I totally vetoed because I HATE Saturday afternoon at the mall - anytime but Saturday afternoon, PLEASE! (On the flip side, I certainly wanted something more appropriate to wear - a quandry to be sure.)

So we went tonight, and I found a cute top to go with an already owned skirt - a compromise between the desire to wear something new and nice, and the need to watch my pennies.

But then I had to blow the equivalent of a nice outfit at the pharmacy anyway.

When oldest daughter goes off to Honduras, we don't want her to get malaria, so she'll take quinine as a prophylactic a week before she leaves, for the duration of her trip, and four weeks after - that's 11 weeks worth of medication.

I went to the pharmacy this afternoon, submitted the prescription, paid for it (was happy it wasn't too steep), took it home and thought nothing else of it. When she got home, she opened and said, 'mom, there's only four here'. Sure enough, they'd only given us enough for four weeks.

Now, when I go through the McDonalds drive through, I know enough to double check the bag before I drive away. After all, the job only pays minimum wage and anybody can work there (they gave me a job after all!), but when I go to the pharmacy, I figure I shouldn't have to double check the bag. Apparently, I'm wrong on that count.

So we go back, and the pharmacist tells us we only got a month's worth because that's all the insurance company will cover per lot and we'd have renewals for the rest.

Hello! The girl's in Honduras. She can't just hop a flight back up here to renew the prescription.

So, okay. I don't want my kid to get malaria, so I fork out full price for the second month's worth. And then when she gets back, we can get the final three weeks (and insurance will cover it again). *sigh* Good thing I was frugal on the outfit - turns out I needed that money to pay for drugs.

Having to choose between clothing and drugs - what am I, in Hollywood?

I'm Coleridge!

You are Samuel Taylor Coleridge! The infamous
"archangel a little damaged!" You
took drugs and talked for hours, it's true, but
you also made a conscious choice to cultivate
the image of the deranged poet in a frenzy of
genius. You claimed you wrote "Kubla
Khan" in an afternoon after a laudanum,
when you pretty manifestly did no such thing.
You and your flashing eyes and floating hair.
And your brilliant scholarship and obvious
genius.


Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?
brought to you by Quizilla

And I'm trusting these guys to get my 911 call through?

Just got an email from my phone company telling me my phone has been shipped...

... an hour and a half after the phone had already been delivered to the house.

Sheesh!

Condo living: Drawback #27

The window painters don't care that you have a splitting headache and would rather not smell paint fumes all day since that will undoubtedly aggravate it.

And the one at my house doesn't seem to care/know that the Spanish love song he is singing outside my bedroom window is off-key.

Since the windows are the old, single pane kind that let-in-cold-air-in-winter, let-in-every-smell-and-sound-outside, I can only hope they finish early and the paint dries quickly.

I've been tagged

I've been tagged by Duncan (who designed this lovely site thank you very much) with my first meme and it seems awfully appropriate that it's a book tag. So here it is:

Number of books I own

Ouch! Now this one's a sore one - we just had a 'family' discussion about the piles that are developing. Although I have five bookcases, there are still books piled on top of them (precariously), on the floor in select places, and in boxes in the attic. So I would guess that I shouldn't be counting hundreds, but have probably topped a thousand. *sigh* I love books - which is why I'm in this gig - but it sure is gonna be a pain in the ass to move all of them when we do so again. Thanks for remining me Duncan!

Last Book I Bought

Last time I bought books, I bought a few at one time, but since they were online, I can list them in the order they came, last to arrive listed first:

Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Book club book that I need to read by the end of the month.

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
The subtitle for this book is 'Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism'. It isn't political, but rather a study on the reasons why people identify themselves in the context of a nation and how these imagined communities sprung up out of the effects of religion, geography, ethnicity and imperialism.

Rule of Darkness by Patrick Brantlinger
The book looks at the way imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (the height of the British empire) affected its literature.

Last books I read

I just finished Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel - by Robyn Warhol which was a bit repetitive and could have been argued in one or two well placed journal articles.

Before that, I read The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells and was delighted with the adventure story (though I kept seeing Marlon Brando as Moreau, which spoiled the effect somewhat).

I also recently finished Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which was well written, nicely constructed, and got me thinking about all kinds of connections to other things.

5 books that mean a lot to me

(this one's real hard, in part because I'm not sure how to interpret what 'means' a lot to me - I'm going to interpret it as books that I think about alot, have enjoyed, and have reread at least once)

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkein
Not Wanted on the Voyage - Timothy Findley
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
1984 - George Orwell

I tag Beckler, Jim, and Jen.

The physicality of acting

Watched The Machinist this weekend, which turned out to be a really fascinating movie.

Christian Bale, who I've never been overly impressed with, impressed me in this movie, both through his acting, and the body changes he went through to do it. IMDB has some great copies of the stills: here and here that show what he looked like throughout the majority of the movie. They are downright creepy, as they are in the movie. I've never seen anyone in person look this bad - the friend with anorexia didn't even look this emaciated - and only ever seen images of people suffering from AIDS or Holocaust survivors looking this thin. I'm amazed at the body-modifying lengths Bale went to for this role (the scoop is that he lost 60 odd pounds for the role).

What impressed me even more than the body modification is the changes the character goes through within the story, changes that Bale pulls off expertly. At times, Trevor Reznik is a lovable, sensitive, humorous guy, and you can understand why the women in the movie like to talk to him. At other times, when the sleep deprivation seems to be at its height, he is the creepy kind of guy that you definitely do not want to meet in a back alley. His rage and paranoia are one thing, but when he's in the factory and at other key moments in the story, he looks downright malevolent. And then in the next scene he's this cute guy who'd you'd like to date (even if it's just once) to get to know him.

I'd never heard of this movie before it was a trailer for another (relatively) obscure movie that I watched recently, but I don't understand why. The storyline makes you think, makes you guess, confuses you, delights you, while mesmerizing you as you watch Bale interacting with the other characters (including Jennifer Jason Leigh's good performance as well). If you get the chance, I would recommend you watch this movie.

Blonde moment

I've been operating all week under the mistaken impression that tomorrow was father's day.

*wink* Good thing I found out before I spoiled any of the men in my family!

Word of the day

loquacious adj. from the Latin loquax 'to speak'
means 'very talkative; garrulous'

garrulous adj. from the Latin garrulus 'to chatter'
means 'Given to excessive and often trivial or rambling talk; tiresomely talkative.
Wordy and rambling: a garrulous speech'

[okay, words of the day]

Excited about academics!?

I'm actually pretty excited about academic-type stuff right now. Yesterday, a group of us got together to talk about a graduate student colloquium for the upcoming year. We're hoping to meet once a month to exchange papers, share the work that we're doing, and hear what other people are doing. I think it's a great idea (which is why I was a bit of a pain in the ass about bugging people to have this meeting) and we're just trying to arrange when we might meet over the summer, you know, kind of a dry run type of thing, get us up to speed before the term actually starts.

I'm looking forward to hearing/reading what other people are writing, and if I ever get around to doing some more revision on the paper I've been working on, then I'll be excited to get feedback on that too. Makes me think it's kinda cool being an academic-type person!

Second class citizen

I spent a lot of energy convincing myself to go to the gym today - I was really not feeling motivated to go, even though my energy level is totally in the toilet and could use some energetic activity to give it a boost. Finally, I convinced myself to go by promising myself I only had to go to the gym, I didn't have to commit to anything extravagant, just get in there and move.

Then I get to the gym and have to stand around for ten minutes while the "supervisor" checked that I did indeed have a membership at the school facility. He asked if I was registered for classes - which I'm not - there's none offered during summer by my department - and I told him 'no' but I'd paid money to have access. Finally I did get in, but by that time, I was so annoyed and deflated by the futility of my anger that I really didn't have a very good workout.

Now, I'm not enough of a hothead that a minor inconvenience like this will ruin my day, but as I stood there awkwardly in the entrance trying to avoid the people with legitimate cards (i.e. undergrads) trying to get past me while my card was checked, I had time to remember all the other times this kind of thing has happened at this university. This is probably the sixth or seventh time I've had problems getting into the gym - in each case, somehow, it's the registrar's fault - they eliminate all the graduate students off the approved list they send updating the gym on who's registered and who's not.

Same thing regularly happens at the library. Apparently, it's bizarre for a graduate student to want to access the library outside of registered classes, like over the summer. Hello! We're graduate students. You know, scholars in the making? Some of us actually take what we do pretty seriously and like to learn new things (i.e. read books) when we're not actually 'forced' to by classes. Yet every summer if I want to access the library while I'm not registered in classes, I have to chase around for a special letter from the dean/department head/supervisor (it seems to change every year) saying I need access. Oh, and it has to be on letterhead - email won't do.

And forget the fact that grad students who want to use the health facilities on campus not only have to buy insurance, but shell out a couple hundred extra dollars just to have access to the health clinic. On top of that, the insurance is some of the most expensive I've ever seen if you need to add spouses or dependents (which some grad students actually do have).

I'm getting tired of being the second class citizen on campus. Bad enough I'm an alien and have to run around doing a whole bunch of SEVIS stuff every term, but I get a double whammy as a grad student because the registrar continually cuts off my access to services that I've come to expect from a university.

Maybe I was spoiled at the last university I was at - as a grad student there, I was treated the same as the undergrads, if not better in some cases.

I can only assume this 'difficulty' with grad students at the registrar stems from the fact that I don't shell out $40K/yr like the undergrads to attend. That's true. I don't pay that in tuition (though I shell out about that much just to live in this place). BUT. They also get work out of me. Work that they would otherwise have to pay someone else to do. And frankly, the tuition waiver and the stipend that they give me is about equal to what they would pay someone else to teach the courses I teach. In other words, they break even.

What they're supposed to get out of supporting grad students is good PR. We're supposed to go out there and represent them at conferences (and later in the job market), showing how brilliant the students who come out of this university are. We're supposed to get great jobs and drive up their retention records. Oh, and maybe even down the road when we've made it big, we'll send a cheque to the Alumni Assoc. (Ha!) We're supposed to make the university look good. And we do. Which should count for something.

At the very least, I think I should be able to access things that I've paid for or that will help me succeed as a student. Is that asking too much?

Not again!

Just discovered that I am missing another file. Drat!

Wonder how many more I will discover missing over the next few months.

Another first

Watching Angie's soccer game yesterday, I got a good blast of sun. Now my kneecaps are sunburnt. How the hell does that happen?

New genre of fiction

I like this infernokrusher genre - where do I find an anthology?

Triptych

At writing group, the question of attraction and sexual desire was one of the big nature/nurture questions we argued (see yesterday's post).

I watched Dopamine on IFC over the weekend. (Unlike the one reviewer, I thought Sabrina Lloyd was well cast and the acting finely done.) It's a story about love, but also about our relationship to such a complex human emotion, using a computer-generated pet and a mother with Alzheimer's to explore the question. I would recommend the film.

I ran across this NYTimes article about the chemistry of romantic love, saying that in its initial stages, new love resembles several mental illnesses in its effects in the brain.

Busy blogger

Not that I've been busy blogging, but that this blogger has been busy. We finally broke down over a disastrous weekend of fighting over the one computer and purchased a second one. It's actually a bit disappointing since a new computer should be fun, and all I can think about is how much I didn't want to spend that much money. But I need it.

I know dissertations were written in the days before the computer, and I'm sure there were some wonderful dissertations produced. But those people may also have had better organization skills, because without my database of notes, I'd be totally screwed.

Why, just a couple of weeks ago, I trucked over to a nearby university to get a couple of articles. After I'd wandered around the really oogy stacks, found a non-defunct photocopier, and finally made my way home, I opened up my bag and found myself thinking that the title of one of the articles sounded familiar. Know why? 'Cause I'd already read it. At least I figured that out before I reread it and wondered why it sounded so familiar, but without that database, I wouldn't have figured it out till much later. Wasted photocopy money though.

So, I've been spending the last couple of days trying to reload (yet again!) software and backed-up files onto a computer - I think I'm at #5 for the times I've had to do this on various computers this year, that is, start all over from scratch.

It's no raving beauty of a computer, but it should do the job - and it has a warranty, which is a VERY good thing at this point in the game.

I also went to our first writing group meeting last night which was WAY COOL! We talked and talked and talked - I got home very late, but much earlier than I might have thanks to a wonderful friend's offer of a ride. I have some incredibly talented friends! Wow! There are lots of 'problems' with my chapters that we talked about, but they're not insurmountable. The story is an alternate reality kind of story where human biology (specifically reproduction) has changed. My premise is that this would change society. We had a really good discussion of what direction to take it in, and resurrected the old nature/nurture debate in trying to figure out whether biology or society would be more influential. I'm a little nervous about the story now - in part because I think I made some assumptions that I'll have to rethink - and I'm not sure that I can pull it off. But I'll give it a try. If it goes in the dustbin, I've got another one in the wings anyway.

So, busy life - but it's all good.

REALLY freaking hard!

The newest protocol for the comprehensive exams has replaced the proposal (traditionally about 12-15 pages, though some people have exceeded 30!) with the "field statement". Why? Well, for one thing, they probably don't want to read those long proposals anymore, but even more disturbingly, because a field statement leaves them far more room to maneouver in asking questions. If your field is Victorian Literature, for example, any text that could be considered Victorian literature is fair game, as is any of the major critical approaches to those texts.

Big area! Really. Freaking. Big.

Okay, so here's where it stands: they decide to make this change this year. Not next year, for the class of smart kids. This year. When I'm the one who has to try to pass these exams.

Being a guinea pig profoundly disturbs me. It makes my innards feel like I just went off a cliff.

At least I won't set the bar too high for anyone who follows!

So, okay, I've got to deal with this change, and although I think it spells bad news for me, I'll have to suck it up and deal with it, right/eh? My problem is that I took a stab at the field statement this weekend. Now usually, my problem with writing stuff is that I don't have anything intelligent to say, or that I don't actually understand the stuff that I'm supposed to be writing about. I've spent the last eight or nine years trying to fill up page requirements!

For the field statement, it goes one further. I have to summarize the entirety of a theoretical field, or a century (and more) in 250 words.

If you haven't had to word count lately, to give you an idea of what 250 words is, go to Word (or another word processing program), open a new document, and start writing about your favorite subject - Star Wars, gardening, scuba diving, soccer, poetry, photography, comics, you name it - stop at half a page (about the equivalent of ten minutes of typing, depending on your speed). Now give it to an expert, someone who gets paid based on the subject matter you wrote about.

Did you cover everything having to do with your subject? No? What do you mean no? There's too much to say? Posh! You should be able to encompass everything within that field in a half a page. What? No, it is not a ridiculous request! Easy-peasy. What? Have I ever done it? Well, no, but there's no reason why it can't be done. Such is the rationale.

I've written for the newspaper - I know how to be succinct (no, don't look to my blogging for conciseness - here's where I get to cut lose and yabber away), but this?

This is really freaking hard!

I have arrived!

I have officially joined the ranks of the neurotic and insecure doctoral student! Well, at least that's what I'm calling it.

I had the strangest experience yesterday morning. I dreamt that a professor (who I'll probably never see again) had me (and my family - that was odd) come over to his house for dinner. [Not that odd, it does occasionally happen with people who you work closely with.] But during the course of the evening, he asked me what my fields were for the comprehensives and I was trying to articulate them, thinking on my feet, and having the sense that for the first time, I was trying to clearly spell out what it was that I was doing. Okay, so the weird part was, I'm telling him this in my dream and I wake up thinking the rest of what I was saying. No clear transition - one moment I'm talking in my dream, the next, I'm awake and thinking about the comps.

Now, there's something just a little bit creepy about waking up thinking the comps. Let alone the freakiness of dreaming about it - I've dreamt about tests before, but never about the actual content of what I study.

So, I was really a little weirded out by this experience, thinking that I'd finally stepped off the edge into the gorge of absolute academic geekiness but then I talked to two other students who have survived the comps and they told me they experienced the same thing! One even starting keeping a notebook at the side of the bed for that reason.

So I guess I've arrived. Where it is that I am, I still do not know. All I know is that I'm in good company!

Sheesh!

See that date? May 25th. The twenty-fifth day of May. June is only a week away.

Now, traditionally, in northern parts of the continent, May is heralded as the beginning of spring, with the ritualistic doffing of clothing accompanied by the first stirrings of sun worship.

However, something terribly wrong is happening this year. There's a hush at the swimming pools and beaches that remain empty of visitors, the Swimco sales staff nervously peer out their windows, hoping someone, anyone, will enter the store, and even the old ladies with their stands of petunias and tomatoes are wondering where there customers are.

What has happened? Where are the spring celebrations? Have the terrorists declared war on the celebratory return of life and greenery to the region? Has Bill Gates finally taken over not only the virtual world, but the natural one as well, painting everything that godawful Microsoft blue?

No one knows.

All I know is that I was wearing my winter coat and gloves today and still felt cold, wet and miserable.

At least Star Wars last night was cool!

Boredom

I'm getting tired of reading today - but with the rain and no car, there's not much else that I feel justified in doing, so I'm still slogging at it. And I hate going out in the rain. But I wish I had something really kick-ass interesting booked for this week to look forward to. I do next week, but not this one. So I've been rather distracted and find myself thinking about other things when I should be reading.

I was thinking about how much I miss the movie afternoons we were doing last term - we went through a Christopher Guest phase with Waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, and even The Princess Bride - and then I opened my email (it's been piling up over the last few days) and found this wonderful tidbit from a friend:

From Salon.com:
Ron Wood on the Rolling Stones' most "Spinal Tap" moment: "We were doing drugs in the dressing room [at a concert in the early '80s]. Suddenly the tour manager stuck his head around the door and said, 'The police are here!' We all panicked and threw our drugs in the toilet. Then Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland walked in." (Guitar World magazine via Rush & Molloy)

Just a series of associations relevant for a thirty-something (I can still say that!) from movie watching last month back through one of my favorite bands in the 80s... and please note: I said, ONE, not THE ONE!

Happy Victoria Day!

Yeah if you had today off - celebrate! (whatever you're supposed to celebrate on Victoria Day - a dead queen for a dead political affiliation... but whatever)

Good thing is you have the day off! I on the other hand worked today - very early - ugh! But I get next Monday off, so I'll hang in there till then.

I've been a bad blogger, I know, I know... and right now I'm just in a funk even though I'm also pleased. I'm pleased because we reformatted the hard drive on this things and it's working better now - knock on wood - and in a funk because although I backed up everything - or thought I had - I can't find one file... one single solitary file... which is very weird, and if I don't ever find it, it'll take me about four hours to reconstruct it. Which isn't so bad, but I'm behind yet again - in part because I now have a fabulous and comfy new bed (which makes that getting out of bed to work in the morning even harder now!) which required an entire rearrangement of the bedroom/study to accommodate it (and we have LOTS of papers and books that had to be shuffled out and then back in) but the other part is just 'cause it seems like all of a sudden everybody needs to be driven everywhere and all kinds of non-student things seem to be demanding my attention - which is a fabulous break from the academic stuff, but tends to screw with my reading schedule. Oh! and I went to this entirely mind-numbing eight hour meeting last week that amazed me in that I had never truly experienced hypnosis before - took me two beers just to feel normal again after that one - yikes!

So you take the good with the bad when you're getting by, right?
*sigh* but I will be a better blogger... soon...

In the meantime, check out two new blogs on my blogroll - both by friends and fellow lit geeks who have nothing better to do than blog (um, yeah, sure): Jumbotron6000 and this is your brain on grad school.

Twinkle twinkle little star

Six + hours on buses/train today.
Man! Do I wish we had a second car.

Fits and Starts

My life feels a bit unreal right now. I think it's because I'm doing things that I haven't done in years - liking it - but have got out of the habit of doing, so it feels a bit odd. I actually did very little studying this weekend. In fact, I've done very little reading for about a week.

What have I been doing instead?

Well, on Thursday afternoon, I drove up to New Hampshire to meet with a woman who's working on her PhD in educational psychology. She's researching and writing about Americanization programs in the early part of the century. I met with her because I answered an ad for an academic writing group, and even though most people would only join such a group if they were already working on the dissertation, I thought it would be worth checking out a group while I'm still slogging through the comps proposals. Of course, now that the comps proposals have been scrapped, I have no need to write anything till at least next spring, which makes joining the group a bit of a moot point. But her chapter that I read was very interesting, and we found a lot of points of intersection to talk about. And she gave me some great feedback about a paper that I've been working on sporadically for the last year. Gave me a good reason to get off my ass and do some work on it too - which is part of the reason why writing groups work! Don't know if we'll keep working together (right now, the group is pretty much non-existent with just the two of us), but I enjoyed hearing about someone else's experience in academia - particularly because it was from someone in a different discipline and at a different institution.

Friday was just messed up because I spent most of the day tagging along behind D - I certainly didn't expect the day to go to waste the way it did.

Saturday was cool though 'cause I went with some friends to see a soccer game. The Revolution were playing D.C. United, and although the game was "lacklustre" (good word use, R) I enjoyed myself immensely. I had intended to go home and get a whole bunch of reading done in the evening, but one of the kids ended up grounded by the end of the night, and the circumstances surrounding that grounding made it pretty much impossible for me to concentrate on reading that night.

Then on Sunday, some good friends introduced us to a great little pub in JP - I had steak & eggs, something I haven't eaten since the last century, so it was about time I had some - and they were fabulous. We had a good time, though I felt a little distracted by all the crap the night before, so I'm afraid I wasn't terribly good company. Then you'd think I'd go home and read, but instead I spent the night making room for our new bed - we still have to arrange for delivery, but we found a really good place to get it from, and we're hoping to get it brought by in the next couple of days.

Weird part about the whole weekend is that I did very few student kind of things, which is something I haven't done in a long time... or at least feels like a long time.

But now I need to get back to work!

Running around

It's been a busy couple of days and the weekend is going to be fairly busy as well. I knew this would happen once D finished all his exams, 'cause there's been a bunch of family- house-related stuff we've needed to do, so that's part of it. But it also is just a bunch of things kinda coming together at the same time.

Which always makes me a little edgy, even if I'm enjoying myself, because I worry that I'm going to fall even farther behind than the position I already seem to be slipping into.

I'm also worried about when I'll actually get around to writing these exams, because I didn't get anything remotely like what I wanted for teaching assignment this fall. In fact, if you had given me the exact opposite of what I wanted, you'd be accurately describing my schedule. I asked for: two days a week, one course, no 8 am. I got: three days a week, two courses, and 8 am. I mean, really, if you're not going to pay any attention to my preferences, why ask for them?

The three day a week - two courses schedule is also for a new course that I've never taught before. AND, of the three new courses being introduced this year, I indicated I would be interested in teaching two of them. Guess which one I got assigned to though?

So maybe I'll have to be squeakly wheel, because teaching two sections of a brand new course three days a week will not be conducive to writing my exams as I plan to in the fall. That is, if I actually get to the point where I could realistically write these exams by then.

Ouch!

Have you ever gotten a shock from a piece of electronic equipment? A stereo, a television etc.?

My walkman just shocked me... through the headphones. I wonder if extra bits of electricity travelling between my ears is really terribly good for me?

I'm developing an allergy to health

or at least, to making health care appointments. I've just spent a half hour on the phone trying to book immunizations for oldest daughter when she goes to Honduras.

Last time I booked immunizations, I did it for all three children at one time. I made one phone call, which took about ten minutes, directly to the Health Clinic.

This time, I had to call the PCP, the Travel Clinic, the insurance company, and then the PCP again, to find out where she needed to go, make the appointment, find out if we're covered for it, and request a physician referral authorizing the immunizations.

Can you match the story to the country?

I suppose if I ever need a team of highly trained specialists to put my body back together after some horrific accident, that I will be grateful for the thousands of dollars I'm spending on insurance. But for the little stuff, it's an effing pain in the ass to stay healthy.

Mom's late

which actually doesn't happen too often, but I realize I'm two days behind on blogging Mother's Day.

That's not to say I won't mention it.

Got a lovely email (that I just opened today - give you three guesses why I haven't checked email in two days - first two don't count) from a colleague that said that being a mom and a grad student was amazing, wonderful etc. (to which I agree, of course).

What I didn't say in my reply is that I don't know that it's that great, since I suspect that I do neither job terribly well.

Regardless of how well I do it, my family was appreciative on Sunday, and the girls even managed to limit their fighting to a mere ten minutes each in honor of my (rapidly diminishing) sanity. As punishment, I made them go with me to see Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which I saw for the second time), though at least one enjoyed it, so it wasn't much of a punishment. I can't recall ever seeing any other movie twice while it was in the theatre and I think this movie thus has the honor of being a Michele's first. Congratulations HHGTTG!

Relative Pleasure

No, not the pleasure of relatives, but the relativities of pleasure.

The first soccer game of the season that I was able to get to was this morning in the wind, rain, and cold. By the time I'd been there for twenty minutes, I was thoroughly chilled. Kiddo managed slightly better since she was the one running around.

We decide on hot chocolate when we get home, but find that there's none left in the house, so we embark on the experiment of making it the old fashioned way - from chocolate. Wow! I have never tasted such a delicious, creamy mug of hot chocolate. Hang the extra time it takes, I think I'll only drink real hot chocolate from now on. And being thoroughly chilled and soaked made the warmth of the house and the drink that much more heavenly.

And oldest child reports that she thinks she did well on her SAT exam this morning, even though she ran out of time for the writing sample. I'm glad she feels positive about it - now we just have to wait to see if her feeling matches her score.

Metal

Angela got braces today. She's not thrilled, but she did admit that it's not as bad as she thought it would be.

Don't get excited

about this blog post 'cause I have nothing interesting to say. I am back on my laptop again - the one I thought was entirely pooched - and which I'm still really, really leery about using 'cause I know it's gonna crash on me again.

[nice computer, *stroke* nice computer]

It was a month ago that I first took it in to be 'repaired', just after that conferencing spree, and then they brought it back, and then in crashed again. At that point, I stopped using it and spent a day setting up a profile for myself and transferring all my software and files over to D's computer which I've been using since then. But last night, he brought it back from a final go round to the IT guys and they can't find a single thing wrong with it. I suppose when it freezes up suddenly in the middle of a sentence, it is my imagination? I don't think so! A bit like taking your car to the mechanic and he can't get it to make that godawful sound it makes everytime YOU drive it...

Most annoying part is getting used to this keyboard again. Mine is set up with shortcuts for äccénts, but they're keyed through the " key, which means I need to differentiate between an accent and a " - I have to hit the space bar after entering a quotation mark if I want to quote somebody rather than accentuate the next letter. Most other computers don't have that shortcut, and it's always an adjustment moving from one to another (not that I don't love the accent shortcut - I do, and wouldn't change the keyboard set up for the world).

If you made it to the end of this boring and really inconsequential post - congratulations! You're ready to sit through the most boring B&B lecture conceivable!

On a not so boring note - I did one of those getting-to-know your friends things the other day and sent it to people who I haven't heard from in a while (or who I'm pretty sure I've never sent one of them to) and got some great responses - it was wicked cool to hear from people far away... and I learnt something about my friends too. And okay, I'll admit it - brown is not boring - but for the record, I've always thought it was a good school - don't confuse me with my offspring!

Is Spring actually here?

In a supersitious effort to spur on the full-blown arrival of spring - it's been kinda here one day gone the next for the last month - I started digging in the garden today. I didn't get far - there's an awful lot of weeds and crap in there, but at least it looks like someone is taking care of it, which hopefully means that the idiots who do the landscaping around here will realize that and stay out. [Last year, they came in and ended up pulling out all the alysum when they trimmed one of the bushes, which really pissed me off, since I was having problems coaxing it to grow in the first place]

I'm hoping it will be more successful than last year - though I'm not feeling super enthusiastic about it like I did last year. I'm hoping the simple act of working on it will get me excited about it again. Last year, I only got a couple of things out of it, and the one thing I was so proud of growing - a green pepper plant - had its only fruit eaten by an animal - I can only assume one of the squirrels that my neighbor feeds, and thus encourages to hang around the house. Grrrrr.

I also started peppers and tomatoes from seed in the house - I haven't done this in ages, and often haven't had success with it, but I figure it's worth a shot - I can always buy bedding plants if mine won't grow. I don't doubt that I know what I'm doing, but our place really is quite dark, and I don't have a good window that gets more than a few hours of sunshine every day, so I'm not holding my breath about the seedlings. I'm also chalking up the relatively poor performance of the garden last year not only to the fact that it is under a tree (so not a lot of sun) but also because I was still on the learning curve of what and when to grow things in New England.

And if you come to my house and see nothing but some spindly, pathetic plants growing by the back door, please be kind enough to not laugh in my face, okay?

Pretending to be all grown up

First day of summer semester.

I already have developed a disliking for the class. Mostly because it's at 8 am. If you know me from real life, you know I don't like mornings. I do them, but I don't like it.

Youngest daughter said I looked like a teacher this morning, and since the look matches what I was supposed to be doing, I figured that was a good thing. I asked her, "If I told you to do your homework looking like this, would you do it?" She said "yes". Perhaps I'll need to keep this outfit on till she gets home, since I might need to tell her that when she gets home.

Last time I taught summer upperclassmen, it went really well... much better than teaching freshmen during summer, so I'm hoping for a repeat. It is a bit weird however that all my class are the same major and they all have the same schedule this summer. I've already been told that they won't come to my office hours since they have class then. I'm thinking that's just fine with me...

I also had a 'request' from one of the students that I do what all their other instructors 'might' do this summer and give them a week off in the middle of the term. Then they could just make up the week at the end of the term. Nuhuh! I am in no mood to spend an extra week on this class, particularly feeling the way I am now - that the break between last term and this was waaaaay too short! I know I had almost two weeks, but that was still too short. I was looking forward to the month off between summer and next fall and damned if I feel like giving it up because some other instructors all decide they don't have lives. I mean really, if all the other instructors jumped off a bridge, do you think I would too?

Blackboard is forcing me to use a new user ID and account now with my courses, which is a bit annoying, because now I have two different email addresses to keep track of, and I know I'm gonna forget one of the passwords sooner or later. Why did they give me one email address (as a student) if they were just going to force me to use a different one (as an instructor)? And why now, three years later, is it suddenly a problem? I tell you, the right hand has no clue what the left hand is doing in this place (and it's not just the IT department either... don't get me started about student ID numbers...)

Coffee!

thanks to my wonderful partner, we now have coffee! and it's a very funky space-agey looking coffee machine that now matches my cappuccino maker - yeah for coffee!

Ghetto coffee

I arose from bed, dressed, wandered downstairs and into the kitchen. Filled the coffee pot with water, measured out coffee, inserted water and coffee into the machine. Pressed the button. Sat down. Stared vacantly into space, trying to remember what needed to be done today. Remembered. Gradually became aware that the beloved gurgling sounds and fragrant aroma of coffee brewing were not coming from the kitchen. Walked into kitchen. Turned machine off, then on again. Checked breaker. Turned machine off and on again. Plugged machine into another outlet. Stared at empty pot with something like incredulity. It gradually dawned on me. The coffee maker isn't working. But I want coffee. I like coffee in the morning. I need coffee in the morning. Making coffee usually requires a machine. I want some coffee. The machine that would usually make my beloved coffee isn't working. Which means no coffee. I would really like some coffee this morning. But wait, all the machine really does is heat the water and pump it through the grounds. I really, really want coffee this morning. There are other ways to heat water and pour it through grounds. They involve waiting. I don't want to wait. I want coffee. I hate instant coffee. I hate waiting. But I hate instant coffee more. I turn on the kettle. Eons later, I finally have a cup of brewed coffee. Where's that coupon for 20% off my next purchase at Linens and Things?