I spent the weekend on a planet far, far away

In honor of attending Boskone this weekend, I took the "which sci-fi crew would I fit best in" quiz:

You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes. Moya (Farscape) 88% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 81% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 75% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 75% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 69% Serenity (Firefly) 69% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 63% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 50% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 50% SG-1 (Stargate) 50% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 31% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 6% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

The con was better than I had hoped for - there were some very intelligent people there - Cory Doctorow and Ken MacLeod were the guest speakers. I'd met Ken MacLeod once before at the PanCanadian Wordfest when as a volunteer for the festival, I picked him up at the airport and delivered him to his hotel. I remember him being very generous and a good conversationalist, and watching him speak here reinforced that sense.

In addition, the panels for the most part managed to avoid the infection of 'fan-speak' where fans celebrate their geekness by declaiming their difference from mainstream, denouncing the rest of the planet - the "mundanes" - as shortsighted and narrowminded, and generally raving about their favorite books. That was kept to a minimum, as were the number of costumes and several academics from the sciences, technology fields and literature were in attendance.

hockey hockey hockey hockey

The Olympics are here, the Olympics are here, the Olympics are here, the Olympics are here!

I've been having fun watching Team Canada's hockey performances. No, I didn't get up for the 5 am match earlier this week, and I did have to teach during another one, but I enjoyed the women's tournament play earlier this week as well as the men's victory over Germany this afternoon. The German penalty killing of a Canada 5-3 advantage was impressive, but didn't change the final score of 5-1 for Canada.

I will miss the women's semi-final tomorrow because of other commitments, and might miss the men's next game Saturday am, but that's what the VCR is still good for, right?

Go Team Canada!

Miscellany

So I've been neck deep in reading for a conference paper I'm putting together. The conference isn't till April, but I want to get a draft of the paper done by next week, and overall, the reading/writing of it is going pretty well. But there's only so many hours I can look at it, so I take breaks.

I cleaned the oven during one.

I did some laundry and cleaned up some receipts that had been piling up during another break. I found interesting things during both activities. In among the receipts I found some unused stamps and $10 (stupid monochromatic money - I would've seen a purple $10). In the laundry, when I pulled pants out of the dryer, I found an x-ray. Betcha you can't say you've found an x-ray in your dryer before! They're really durable - the image was still as clear as when it was first taken.

But this break I'm trying to write a letter that has to get written and finding it really, really hard. I've never written a letter like this before, so I'm trying out different tones and levels of formality, but mostly I'm not sure what to include or whether it's getting too long or is actually too short and needs to be more detailed. Grrrrrr. Guess I'll have to sleep on this one... maybe for a week!

D-I-S-S-E-R-T-A-T-I-O-N

It still seems unreal. I was typing the word today when it hit me that it's no longer something "out there" that I'll have to do "eventually" - it's here, and I'll be working on it for the next couple of years. It's scary in a way, committing myself to one project for several years... and what I write will dictate the kind of job I am qualified to apply for when I'm done.

I think I'm beginning to understand how easy it would be to get bogged down at this stage because it just seems so hugely intimidating! It's certainly bigger than anything I've ever undertaken before, and even though I've probably written a dissertation-sized amount of seminar papers in my coursework, all this writing has to hang together in a way that seminar papers never had to.

On the other hand, I HAVE written this much before, so I know I can write that much. The quality of this work needs to be better. The chapters need to be connected in some way to each other as well. But it's also the opportunity to explore something interesting to its farthest extent, which is something not possible in a seminar. In seminars, the paper comes at the end of the term whether you're ready for it or not. Here, I can spend as much time as I want on what is interesting me, without a deadline hanging over my head.

BUT I also have to find something that is original. In the words of the university's regulations, "Each doctoral student must complete a dissertation that embodies the results of extended research and makes an original contribution to the field.This work should give evidence of the candidate ’s ability to carry out independent investigation and interpret in a logical manner the results of the research". In other words, it has to sound smart. Not to mention, it has to be something that interests me enough to work on it for the next four or five years as I write it and then (hopefully) turn it into a book (presuming I get that far...) It seems like a tall order right now. I'm trying not to despair.

Lazy blogger

From the archives:

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Cartoons & Poetry

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

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

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

Thursday, February 12, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny how two years later, I'm still feeling like I did in 2004 - cut loose, too many questions, afraid of the answers, and not knowing quite where to turn to for advice. You'd think after two years, things would change...

WMDs

Math teacher arrested at JFK.

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered
to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight
while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide
rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said
he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement.
The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Gonzalez said. "They desire average
solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in
a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and
'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined
they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with
coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used
to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'."

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had
wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have
given us more fingers and toes".

yeah, I know, this post IS pretty long...

So Slate has this interesting article about testing for bias. According to the researchers, it's impossible to lie on the test because it measures unconscious responses, and even a test taker who implicitly tries to throw the test will only marginally change the results because the test rejects time scores that are too low (which would indicate the test subject is thinking about the answers and trying to override unconscious associations).

The results are extremely interesting. The researchers found that

88 percent of the white subjects who take her test show some bias against blacks. The majority of all subjects also test anti-gay, anti-elderly, and anti-Arab Muslim. Many people also exhibit bias against their own group: About half of blacks test anti-black; 36 percent of Arab Muslims test anti-Arab Muslim; and 38 percent of gays show an automatic preference for heterosexuals.

The Slate article focuses on race bias, but if you follow the link to the test site itself, there are many more categories (14 in all) including sexuality, weight, gender-career, and even weapons bias. So I got curious and took a couple.

I found my results interesting:
You have completed the Gender-Science IAT.

Your data suggest little or no association between Female and Male with Science and Liberal Arts.

Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. The interpretation shown above is described as 'automatic association between Science and Male' if you responded faster when Science and Male words were classified with the same key as opposed to Liberal Arts and Male items. It is marked 'automatic association between Liberal Arts and Male' if you were faster when giving the same response to Liberal Arts and Male items. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic preference may be described as 'slight', 'moderate', 'strong', or 'little to no preference'.

You have completed the Race-Weapons IAT.

Your data suggest a moderate association of African American with Harmless Objects and European American with Weapons compared to European American with Harmless Objects and African American with Weapons.

Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. Racial profiling as a term, has been introduced in recent years to capture an old practice among law enforcement agents, especially police and immigration and customs officials: the selective stopping, searching, and interrogating of individuals who hold membership in groups that are believed to be more likely to commit particular crimes. In a sense, when psychologists study the nature of stereotypes, they are studying exactly this process in general terms: the degree to which knowledge about a group influences judgments of individual members of the group.

The various mental abilities that underlie the function of identifying that x is a member of category X, and remembering what Category X does and represents are vital – the ability to perceive and categorize, to learn and remember are essential features of human intelligence. But these very same processes so fundamental to our daily mental functioning can be implicated in the denial of equally fundamental rights to people who are innocent bearers of markers of their social group. The many instances of people who are wrongly suspected and accused is too great to mention. We point to only one case that has come to represent the sad consequences of well-intentioned profiling. Police officers in New York, shot and killed a citizen, Amadou Diallo, who they believed was reaching for a weapon. In fact, Amadou Diallo, was reaching for his wallet to provide identification to the police officers.

Our position, perhaps an unpopular one, is that the unconscious roots of profiling lie in every mind. In the Race-Weapons test you completed, we provide the occasion for recognizing the automatic association between racial groups and weapons relative to harmless objects. The result of this test probably underestimates the true extent of this association. In order to give every benefit to obtaining the alternative association (African American and harmless objects), we explicitly included examples of weapons that are not associated with that group (e.g., bayonets, swords, bombs, axes). When we demonstrate the bias nevertheless, we are revealing the strong association between African Americans and harmful weapons.

Racial profiling is first and foremost a mental act that can, given a supportive environment, result in errors that were unintended by those who perform them. The protections against such errors, given its automatic nature, will need to be more serious than requesting individual citizens and especially agents of the state to "just say no" to profiling

The second one I was really surprised by! The first - between gender and science - didn't surprise me. I figure that since I did science and I have a daughter interested in a science-based career as well as a husband in the sciences, that I wouldn't have any specific gendered associations with one or the other.

But the second one, the one where I associate (slightly) European Americans with weapons is interesting, since it seems to go against representations of bias in the media. The only thing I can figure is that because they used some images of weapons that traditionally aren't associated with African Americans (a canon, bayonetted rifle, hand grenade, mace) that I was drawing upon my enjoyment of medieval stories and movies rather than MTV in making my associations. I guess if I didn't like movies about chicks with swords, I might have scored differently!

All this thinking and reading about bias got me thinking about something that happened yesterday. (It might also be my opportunity to redeem myself, at least slightly, for that rambling post last week)

I went to lunch with several other grad students and a candidate for a Chair that our department is trying to fill. The candidate was curious about us and asked what we were doing, which meant I had to give a pithy one-sentence-in-ten-seconds kind of description of my potential dissertation. Not having thought through what it would sound like to other people, I described it as 'cyborgs and clones' - which doesn't really do it justice. As a shorthand in my own thinking, it works, because I know what I want to talk about, but to others it just sounds... what's the word for it?... oh, yeah, "crazy".

Certainly when I begin to think about who I will work with, it does sound crazy, but I'm starting to see some possibilities that I wasn't seeing last week when I rambled depressively about not knowing how I could pull this off.

If I had to answer that question now, I would say something like 'effects of late twentieth century technological developments on embodied identity in science fiction' which would at least get a bit closer (and sounds a bit more valid as a field of study).

Embodiment has long been a staple of literary criticism and discussions of gender, race, or disability in literature and culture inevitably at some point draw attention to the way our bodies are markers for these categories. This is what bias draws upon as well - associations of particular characteristics with particular visual images. When it is applied to people, it is often the visual image of the body that is half of the equation. Our bodies go a long way toward creating our identity and the identity other people ascribe to us. Some postcolonial theorists point to the way the body is used as a site on which categories of 'otherness' are imposed (as do feminists and anti-racism activists etc).

Cyborgs and clones have different bodies than we like to imagine humans as having - cyborg bodies are often marked by intrusions of machines
- think Star Trek borgs, which of course are very creepy, but that's the point, it's all about the anxiety produced by the "close coupling" of machines with our flesh - but can also have their marks of difference hidden - think Keanu Reeves character in Johnny Mnemonic (based on the short story written by the creator of cyberpunk, William Gibson who also wrote the screenplay).

Clones are more like Johnny Mnemonic in that the technology they incorporate - genetic engineering - isn't always visible. To put it simply (too simply perhaps), clones are threatening because they look like us, just like fair skinned African Americans who were able to "pass" for white even though their genetic heritage was different.

Both clones and cyborgs then represent figures onto which we can project our fears about the destruction of the body, the question of what makes a human a human, about fears of contamination, and fears of categorization. This is the kind of thing I want to work on.

I know my description here is very loose, and doesn't do justice to the complexities of some of the issues I've only briefly mentioned, but it's the kind of project I could see myself working on for at least two years, and the kind of project that I'd like to showcase when shopping myself around when it comes time to hit the job market. I haven't decided yet if I want to pigeonhole myself into the 'literature and science' field, but there certainly is plenty of overlap between what I'm envisioning and the kinds of projects that fall within its scope.

You can wake up now.

Along with payphones and water fountains...

...let's add photo albums to the list of disappearing things. I've been organizing photos that have been sitting in boxes over the last few days and having a bitch of a time finding the kind of photo album I want.

Sure, with digital photos you no longer need negatives - I can understand having difficulty finding negative pages (though I've had no problem finding pages for slides... which I didn't think *anyone* used anymore). But people still make prints of their digital photos, don't they?

Scrapbooking seems to be all the rage, but I don't want all kinds of other crap. I just want a photo album that will hold photos and allow me to add extra pages when I want to. Is that too much to ask? All the stores I've checked that I would expect to have them don't carry albums like this anymore, and even a web search came up empty.

It occured to me that I haven't bought a photo album since coming to this country. Maybe I'll have to wait till March when I go back across the border to find the more of the same kind of photo album I've been using. Different photo albums in different nations? Strikes me that's an awfully weird thing to be different in different countries, but who knows?

I am astounded!

So, every week I check out what days the Flames are playing. Then I check my local listings only to find that they're showing a different game. (the Bruins and the Flames often play the same day, which means I'm usually SOL)

But tonight? Tonight is different. Tonight, for some reason I cannot fathom BUT am not about to question, OLN is broadcasting the Sharks-Flames game! There is a hockey god!

Rambling...

So, going into the oral exam, I expected I would be asked three kinds of questions: to clarify things in the written exam that weren't clear or only partially developed, to answer questions that I was prepared to answer but hadn't for the exam, and to explain how this all works towards my dissertation.

The first type of question I certainly got, and think I answered the three or four that were clarification questions okay. The second, where I answer questions I was prepared for but didn't write about, I did mostly okay, but one of the questions given to me asked me to reference a specific author, and I spent too much time (at least it felt like too much) trying to create an argument about that specific author.

The third question, about the dissertation, really didn't get discussed at all. Our only discussion of the dissertation came after they congratulated me on passing the exam and told me to keep working and prepare a prospectus right away. When I outlined what I had in mind - in about 30 seconds - suddenly the composition of the dissertation committee, which I thought was pretty set - unravelled. They did tell me to stay away from a transatlantic treatment of the subject, but anything more than that is up in the air right now.

I'm living with it. But it does make me question whether I should undertake the project I'm considering.

(I know that was all rather vague, but if you're really interested in it, well, I guess you'll have to wait till I have a better idea myself - sorry)

I just can't win

I gave up going to the gym at school in favor of the one near home. Now that we have a second vehicle, I can get there easier and it costs the same. And I figured it could only be good for my ego to no longer be running on a track next to people twenty years younger than me.

I just came back from my grown-up gym. The place was crawling with Bentley students.

I just can't win.

I have resumed breathing

ABD

All But Dissertation

Three Beautiful words!

Meme tag

Tagged by Jimbo, who was right, I did need something mindless to do tonight... which is why I was on his site in the first place!

Four jobs I've had:

1. Photographer
2. Food Bank director
3. Windshield installer
4. Day home operator

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. The Princess Bride - inconceivable!
2. The Lord of the Rings (yes, I'm a geek)
3. The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
4. Dogma

Four places I've lived:

1. Sao Paulo, Brazil
2. Regina, Saskatchewan
3. Calgary, Alberta
4. Watertown, Massachusetts

Four TV shows I love:
(this one's hard 'cause I don't watch a lot of TV... movies, yes... TV, not so much)

1. The Daily Show
2. South Park
3. Family Guy
4. hmmm... actually, looks like pretty much anything on Comedy Central

Four places I've vacationed:

1. Hollywood, Florida
2. Puerta Vallarta, Mexico
3. Lima, Peru
4. Jasper Park, Alberta

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Pluma Wareneki
2. Monte Cristo
3. Cheeseburgers (my downfall!)
4. Nachos loaded with everything

Four sites I visit daily:

1. This is your Brain
2. Summer's Daydreams
3. Weather Underground
4. Yahoo webpage

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. anyplace where the sun's shining and the temps in the 20s (celsius)
2. tomorrow - yes, if I say it's a place, it's a place
3. Calgary
4. Vancouver

Four bloggers I am tagging: Beck, Al, Duncan, Alex

Nerves

I am working very hard right now to calm my nervousness. My (final) oral exam is set for two days time. The exam itself makes me nervous.
The fact I haven't heard whether I passed the last written also makes me nervous because I don't think I performed as well on it as I did on the previous two... and I suspect it's just enough that I'm having nightmares of getting to the oral only to turned away and told I'll have to retake the third exam first. I know good preparation is the best solution, but I find myself having difficulty articulating what I want to say and making connections between the exams I just wrote and where I want to go next. I'm sure everything will be fine... I'm just having problems convincing myself right now.

UPDATE: I got the results back - although the one question was a bare pass, the second was strong so I passed the whole thing! Wahoo! Now for the oral I just need to be "specific" and "smart" in the words of one of my examiners.

The response

Apparently, according to a right wing think tank, Canadians are too liberal and hedonistic. Okay, so the liberal I'm not surprised about, coming from the right wing, but hedonistic? I always have considered a little hedonism a good thing.

The thing that really seems to chap the writer's ass is that "Harper could do almost nothing to encourage the Country to adopt a more reasonable view of the United States and to correct some premises of Cultural Marxism, which Canadians have espoused, such as same-sex marriage and abortion-on-demand"

So now, I get my dictionary out, 'cause I'm thinking I don't know what some of these key words mean and I find:

hedonism: "The ethical doctrine holding that only what is pleasant or has pleasant consequences is intrinsically good" Pleasant = Good. No argument there from me.

Cultural Marxism is a bit harder to pin down. It's connected to political correctness and seems to be a fairly recently coined phrase. After surfing a bit and reading what's out there, I come to the conclusion that the SPL center sums up best what it is and does: ""Cultural Marxism," described as a conspiratorial attempt to wreck American culture and morality, is the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right" and Pat Robertson claims it is being used to "de-Christianize" the right. So now I guess the reference makes more sense to me. Glad to know that I do really know the meaning of *some* words! But if I have to choose, I'll choose Cultural Marxism if it means that I provide others with the greatest possible range of choices without inflicting my own beliefs upon them... and maybe that will lead to pleasant consequences, so I guess that makes me hedonistic as well.

I'm surprised the original article didn't mention the possibility of legalizing polygamy along with same-sex marriage and abortion on demand. Now there's a bugbear!

Drained

I feel drained after finishing the last written exam yesterday.


Part of it I'm sure is because I have a chest cold. I dosed myself with vitamins echinacea etc since I felt it coming on last week, and got through the exam okay, but today I feel horrible. Maybe because my immune system was actually boosted while I was still worrying about it. I know a TA I had in undergrad was doing work like these guys about the effects of acute stress on illness. Chronic stress is bad for your immune system, but researchers hypothesize that acute stress actually preps the immune system in anticipation of injury that could follow a short term stressor.

Long & the short of it? I feel icky today. Good about finishing the exam, but icky.

Also a little disappointed but mostly not surprised by the election results Monday. My candidate lost, which I kinda expected, but I'm not a strategic voter and go with the person I think will do the best job for my riding. I'm sure there will be some interesting alliances come out of this configuration, though I also hope that the things I value about Canada and look forward to returning to are not eroded by this new government.

Best line in election night coverage? Peter Mansbridge coming back from an interview with Stephen Page saying with a deadpan straight face "we all like the bare naked ladies" (there's a possibility I just found it funny because of the Nyquil though)

Just don't eat it

Happy Election Day Canucks! Enjoy marking your ballot... I'll be trying to catch some coverage on CSPAN here (they say they're covering it) but I'm also cramming for that huge exam, so my attention will primarily be elsewhere. Enjoy your right.

Not since 1913

has a bottle-nosed whale swum up the Thames. But there's one swimming in the river right now. You can also watch video footage of it at the site. Unfortunately, swimming in a river only 6-8 meters deep is not the most brilliant whale idea, so they're trying to coax it back out.

Minor adjustments

During the last few weeks, oldest daughter has been cleaning up her room. She's organizing her possessions under the overall category of 'what will I take with me to college?' (which strikes me as a bit early to worry about, but what the heck, at least she's cleaning up)

I get that she's planning to go to university next year, and I'm doing whatever she needs me to do to get her there, but it hasn't quite sunk in yet. I get that she's moving on to the next step in her life, becoming even more independent (it's highly unlikely given the schools she's looking at that she'll live at home) and starting to figure out what she wants her life to look like.

She'll be responsible for choosing her own meals, she'll need to get along with roomates instead of sisters, she'll be responsible for keeping a larger part of her living space clean, she'll have to make her own decisions about watching tv or doing homework without someone to remind her that homework's more important (yes, I'm baffled by it, but sometimes I still have to remind her), she won't be answerable to anyone for where she goes, how long she goes there or who she hangs out with, she'll need to figure out how to get around (possibly a new city) and how long it will take, she'll need to budget her money for things more important than just CDs and clothes, and the list goes on.

She'll do it. She'll make mistakes. She'll blow the grocery money on something trivial and eat Ramen noodles for a week. But she'll manage. I just have to keep telling myself that. She'll manage. We all did this at one time in one form or another. She's probably better prepared to care for herself than I was at the same age. Very soon it will be an awfully exciting/scary time for her.

The thing I don't think I've wrapped my head around is the idea that our family will look a little different next year. Of course she's always part of us, but if she's not living with us on a daily basis, then the day to day family interactions are going to look much different than they do now. Her mail won't come here anymore, I won't make dinner for 5 every day, each remaining sister only has one other person to yell at (yes, they get into three way 'arguments'), the chores list will need to change with fewer people here doing chores, I won't be able to talk to her everyday, I'll know less about what's up in her life. We've talked about how her life will change, but I haven't thought much about how our lives will change - those of us left behind. It's not empty-nest - there's two more at home who'll be here for a while, but it will require an adjustment that I just haven't thought out yet.

Maybe I'll wait to think it all through after we know where she'll be going (and where we're going to be as well!) Right now, I'm just going to enjoy the time we do have.

Feeling stretched thin

Not much new to report - pretty good weekend: great birthday party (as was last year's), good book club (though wish I'd been able to stay longer), good 'date' with hubby... well, some might think it weird for a date, but we went to see Hostel - nobody fainted so I was mildly disappointed, though I also couldn't see why people are fainting in this thing. There is a sequence where the camera moves with the character, rocking back & forth & I could see that making you queasy, but not fainting. Got lots of work done though, which was the point - all the social stuff was good motivation to get work done so I could reward myself.

Lots of work to be doing soon as I finish this. Furnace guys come to replace our old (and potentially leaky) furnace - thank god the temp is going up a bit more tomorrow, but I'm really hoping the house stays warm enough to work in. The department's in the middle of job talks for two positions - I like going to these - I went to the round last year - but timing might make it iffy that I make it for all of them this time round.

One week to go!

This Just In

January 25th - last written exam
February 1st - oral exam

Provided I don't mess up either of them, I'll be ABD by birthday time. Wish me (good) luck!

Florida

Traditionally (at least when there's been enough of the white stuff) I've made a snowman during the Christmas holidays. Not having any snow whatsoever this year, I resorted to making a Sand-man instead. Do you like him?

We enjoyed the sunshine (we were far enough west and south of where we live to gain an extra hour of daylight each day) and the sand of course. The water wasn't warm, but frankly, it was about the same temp as the ocean is up here in New England during the summer, so we went in anyway!

We also watched a dance group - Urban Dance - from New York, who performed on the beach on Friday night, which was a nice treat ('specially since it was free).


While we were in Florida, we attended a game of Jai Alai, which was very interesting to watch. The game originated in the Basque region of Spain and France and is a strange mixture of fast and slow paces. Watching it reminded me a bit of tennis, but also a bit of squash, though the intensity and speed at which the ball is played is much more intense, and the cesta ("basket") used to propel the ball is unlike any other sports equipment I've ever seen. Apparently in the US, Florida is the only state that still has frontons (the arenas in which it is played) thought the sport used to be much more popular.

We explored a mangrove forest by canoe, but suffered for a few days after from lots of bug bites. Of course we didn't have bug spray with us - I remembered the sunscreen, but really wasn't thinking bugs at Christmas time... I've had tropical Christmases before, but even then, we didn't have much for bugs (other than cockroaches, and they don't bite... or at least, I've never been bit by one...) so it never occurred to me we might need bug spray. The preserve's webpage never mentioned them either. But who am I to complain? We saw some interesting wildlife, and it was a nice way to spend the day.

No, the girls didn't go surfing. We spent New Year's Day at the Universal Studios theme parks. I woke in the morning not feeling well, which disappointed me because I was looking forward to the day, but luckily as the day went on, I felt better and was able to enjoy. We spent the whole day there, then drove a few hours before stopping for a hotel at the beginning of our trip back. The consensus was that the Spiderman, T2, Twister, and Hulk rides were the best, with the live Fear Factor show getting honorable mention.

The weirdest part of the trip? Apparently Hollywood, FL is some kind of huge francophone magnet because every third car in the parking lot had Quebec plates and you heard almost as much French being spoken on the beach as you did English. You could buy Quebec and Canadian newspapers, Canadian cigarettes and Quebecois cuisine all up and down the boardwalk. I had to wash my beach towel when I got home because I spilt poutine on in the last day there - poutine on the beach! - can you imagine?

Catching Up

So... lots of stuff's been happening & I haven't been blogging - mostly because I took a holiday from the computer, which frankly, was a really good idea for me. But now I'm back.

We bought a new car - finally! Well, it's not 'new' but 'new-to-us' so now we have a second car - wheee! - at least I won't feel so cooped up on days I'm at home, it'll be easier to motivate myself to the gym if I don't have to walk through snowbanks to get there, and we won't have those strangely-timed days trying to share one car. It has a standard transmission - which I generally prefer - though it's weird getting used to the odometer since it's in miles and I've been converting from kms the whole time I've been here.

Speaking of kms, we had some trouble puzzling out things like 83kms and 59kms chalked on the windows of some of the used cars we looked at until we figured out that it wasn't km for kilometer, but k for 1000 and m for miles! I'm sure Americans wouldn't think twice about it, but I had to puzzle it out the first time I saw it, cause when you write 'km' I don't think 'thousand miles' I think 'kilometers'!

My Dad is doing much better. I know I didn't blog this, but my Dad had a heart attack just before the holidays. He had some severe chest pain, and although his heart didn't stop (it actually stopped during the angioplasty procedure though), when they took him to the hospital to be checked out, tests showed that he had indeed had a heart attack. He came home just after Christmas and although says he feels weak (and doesn't like the restricted diet) he's getting better. It was a lesson is socialist medicine (of which Saskatchewan is one of the most socialist) that he waited about two weeks for the angioplasty, BUT he was kept in hospital the whole time so that if something did go wrong, help would be right there, which is good 'cause they live about forty minutes away from the nearest hospital.

We heard about his heart attack only a few days before we went on vacation, and although his condition was stable and there was no reason to postpone our plans, I did run around getting our visas updated and carried them and passports with us for the trip just in case. As much as I would've loved to see my family, I'm glad I didn't NEED to!

I was warned that driving in Florida might be annoying because Florida drivers are bad, but from what I could see, they still weren't as bad as Bostonians. We did run into some real idiots in the Carolinas though.

I gotta say, I love having teenagers when it comes to road trips. They now have the tolerance to sit in a car for three or four hours at a time without whining (like most adults are capable - note that I said "most") and they only need to blow off minimal amounts of stored up energy at the end of the day. Soooooo different from when they were younger! So the trip itself was pretty good - the only thing that would've made it better was if the two who are old enough to hold licenses had actually gotten off their keesters and gotten them, they could've taken a couple of hours a day and we could've driven less.

Since we were spending money on a vacation this year, we spent very little on gifts, but we did buy a Playstation2 as a family gift. I've never owned a gaming system before, in part because I'm not very good at video games (I never developed the hand-eye coordination when I was a teen because I was forbidden to go to arcades) and then when the kids were younger, I was concerned they'd spend too much time on it. So far, they've been pretty good about limiting their time on it - I think they've developed enough other interests that it won't take over their lives - but we've only bought two games for it, so it might just be that they don't like the two we have. I'm trying to avoid getting sucked into it as well, at least until my exams are done, but that might also depend on what games we get. So far, it seems to have been a good choice.

I read somewhere that the average American gains 7 lbs between Thanksgiving and New Years. I managed to actually lose 1 lb. which is good 'cause I put on some over this last year sitting on my butt doing all this reading. Maybe I avoided gaining weight 'cause I was in the sun & am solar-powered... yeah, I like that idea. If I'm really a solar-powered model, that would mean I would "need" to recharge in the sun every winter. I could go with that - a vacation in a warm place every winter would suit me just fine!

The warranty on the car ran out around Georgia

What a road trip! I haven't driven that far in I don't know how long... oh, wait,... I guess it was only four months ago... scratch that first statement. A summer's drive to Nebraska and a winter's drive to Florida are two different creatures, even if they do cover the same kind of ground.

But we're back. We've actually been back for a little more than a day, but coming back has felt way too overwhelming to sit down & blog. I decided to take an electronic holiday (except for a really quick peek at my email on the 23rd to check to see if I passed my exam - I did), which was really nice while it lasted. But now I'm sloggin through a huge pile of emails... 1100... and that's NOT including spam.

Too many listservs.

But they all have interesting discussions... at least some of the time.

Good news is that I've read everything up until yesterday, so I'm making headway. Now I need to go finish the rest & then blog the trip and a holiday report. Stay tuned.

Devious, yet depressing

So, youngest daughter walked into the room while hubby & I were talking & I said to her, "Tell D what you and your sister's got for me for Christmas so he doesn't get the same stuff" and she almost did! hehehe... she caught herself in time though. I guess that's one of the problems with them growing up - it's harder to catch them up on these things!

Apparently I'm a rather depressing book though....

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four. You are the
classic warning against the threat of
totalitarianism. To you, politics and
philosophy are inseparable, auchtorities suck
and the reality might not exist outside our
imaginations.


Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Inadvertent gift

Just got an email from the woman who does class scheduling for us - she's taken away my 8 am class and replaced it with a noon class for next term. How nice.

He's got a point

We need to begin by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the notion of literature. The mere fact that the word exists, or that an academic institution has been built around it, does not mean that the thing itself is self-evident.

Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse

Saved from embarassment... again!

So I went to a holiday party last night, even though it was the only night ALL season long that I was gonna get to see the Flames on tv ('cause they were playing the Bruins of course). The party was so worth it!

I joked that I would only come to the party if I could turn the tv on, but once there (with daughter at home watching & taping the game for me after hubby persevered in figuring out why the VCR wasn't taping - moment of panic!) I decided it would certainly be better to avoid sharing with all my friends my hockey watching behaviour.

Let's just say, I make many non-linguistic vocalizations.

Oldest daughter has threatened to tape me and play it back for my her amusement. I watch her very carefully anytime she comes into the room while I'm watching in order to detect any suspicious bulges in her pockets, you can be sure!

But what a game! OMG! That 2 minute window in the first period was amazing! 3 goals in less than 2 minutes - what a way to start the game! Sure, the second period lagged, but the fast pace of the third one made up for it. And what a nice way to start a Sunday morning, watching hockey. I think they should change hockey games to Sunday mornings just for that reason, because it's really rather a delightful way to start your day.

And thanks to my patience, it is only my family who heard me "cheer" the game last night.

Partial reporting

According to this recent study, I'm right on track - although I drink on a fairly regular basis, it's usually not more than a couple of drinks in any given day.

But, I really have got to say it's an awful report. I don't know whether it was the researchers, or the reporter, but the "news" isn't very well researched. It left me with a lot of questions. Like whether or not they considered sociological or psychological factors.

The report indicates that moderate drinkers were 54% less likely to be obese than teetotalers. But heavy drinkers are 46% more likely to be obese than non-drinkers, with binge drinkers even more likely to be obese.

Ummm, I'm no scientist, but I hardly find it surprising that someone who engages in binge drinking might also be obese, particularly since overeating and binge behaviors are both strongly correlated with low self esteem and even depression. But there's no mention whatsoever in the report about potential social or psychological factors contributing to the trend. It's written as if the writer (again, I don't know if it's the reporter or the authors of the report) believed that our bodies are nothing but machines that respond to what we put into them and that's all. Like, "put in X amount of Y and you will get Z result" which ignores the "H" factor in human physiology.

And yes, I'm still reading that book about computers and cyborgs and human bodies, why do you ask?

Should I be panicking?

Today's a weird day.

I feel like I should feel much busier and panicked about time because we leave for vacation in a week. But I don't.

I do feel sad. But that's only 'cause I had this really vivid dream that the place I was living (nowhere I recognize) was flooded, the whole area was in fact, but it was kinda beautiful with the water all around (that's weird). The flooding separated me from my family, and although I 'knew' in the dream they were fine, I felt alone and adrift (couldn't resist that pun) and I woke up feeling incredibly sad about the whole thing.

I'm jealous of people who say they don't remember their dreams. I don't always remember all the details of my dreams, and sometimes the things that happen in them don't make any sense at all, but I often awake in the grip of very powerful emotions that they've evoked. (It's a bit like the way a good movie or book can affect you by eliciting an emotion that then stays with you, even after you put the book down or the movie stops.) These emotions are often very powerful though, and it colours the rest of my day.

Anyway, I've got a list of things to do over this next week. It's not long, which I think is why I'm not panicking about it, but some of the things on it, like shopping, could take a very long time to do, which is why I feel like I should be panicking. But like I said, I'm not, which makes me feel like I'm forgetting something important that will give me good reason to panic.

That's just perverse.

And why do I always look at the "panicking" and think it's misspelled?

This isn't putting me in the holiday spirit

I'm getting sick. After being sick only three weeks ago, I'm starting to feel horrible again.

I can only assume it has to do with the stress of the exams.

And maybe with being dragged out of the house in the middle of the night. Night before last, I awoke at 4:30 am to the sound of my neighbor yelling her head off. Her toilet sprung a leak and she couldn't figure out how to make it stop, so she just started yelling (all it needed was to turn off the knob at the back to stop the water). Disturbing part was that she didn't recognize me as the neighbor when I went over but dragged me in anyway to fix it. I don't think someone who is getting that old, who becomes immobilized at the sight of damaged plumbing and isn't capable of remembering what the neighbors look like even after several encounters, should necessarily be living all alone. And sharing a wall with other people. This time it was water, what if next time it's fire?

I know assisted living isn't an inexpensive option, but it exists for a reason. There at least, the person who has to come turn the water off in the middle of the night is hired for the job based on their qualifications to handle the situation. I'm just the neighbor trying to sleep.

Wandering through the maze also known as the junkheap of my mind

I've been reading this interesting book, How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles but I must admit that it's really slow going, because I keep stopping to think about the implications of her argument. Now, I know that sounds weird - of course I realize that one of the aims of this academic game is to think about the stuff we read - I drill this into my students for gods' sakes! But this one is getting me thinking after every second or third page, often involving long digressions into thinking about past research projects, current ones, and even my teaching (which feels REALLY odd since all I get to teach is Comp!)

For example, this comparison of books and the human body stopped me for a while:

Once encoding in the material base has taken place, it cannot easily be changed. Print and proteins in this sense have more in common with each other than with magnetic encodings, which can be erased and rewritten simply by changing the polarities.

It reminded me of a favored argument that my students liked to make the couple of times I taught Jorge Louis Borges' short story, "The Library of Babel". If you don't want to read the story, the premise is that the entire world is a library and that within this library, there are an infinite number of books. From this a 'librarian' observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols. You can already see how this starts to sound like DNA and people, right? Well, it continues on with fanatics destroying books, pilgimages, the rumors of the perfect librarian, "The Man of the Book" and such. My students loved the idea that the books were people and though it's a slightly reductive argument (what then are the librarians for example?), it got them thinking, which frankly, is sometimes hard to generate in these classes!

The other thing that quotation got me thinking about is translation or adaptation, you know, when books get made into movies, movies into books, movies into video games, video games into comics, comics into movies... well, the list goes on and on, right? That's another thing we worked on a bit in the class that's just wrapped up at the end of the term here: "Constructing Narratives Across Media". Although we didn't look specifically at any adaptations, we did question the way the structure or form of a narrative affected the possibilities for representation.

One of the most effective ways of getting students to think about how the media in which art is created affects the kinds of stories it can tell (or at least the way it can tell them) is to get them to talk through how a scene from a book would look if you had to put it to film, or vice versa. The translation of a film scene to writing is actually slightly easier for them to envisage, so I often get them to write out a scene from the film we watch. It gets them thinking about how the media structures the kind of story they can tell.

Which of course led me to one of my current/former projects (I haven't decided whether I'm going to follow up on it or drop it) about the palimpsest. When texts used to be written on vellum, if you wanted to reuse the piece of sheep skin for something else, you had to actually scrape off the top layer where the ink penetrated to get a clean surface. Problem is, it's pretty much impossible to do that (try scraping the ink off a thick piece of paper) - you get most of it, but there are still often shadows or impressions left by the previous writing. The palimpsest. I used the image to argue in a paper that a writer trying to rewrite myth for new purposes had to contend with these shadows that cannot be fully erased.

What does this have to do with becoming posthuman? In the quote, Hayles talks about the magnetic strip that can be erased and re-recorded. As far as I know, there is no kind of ghost in the machine thing that happens with erasing a disk and rewriting it - it's a complete wipe and no trace of what was once on there is left to contaminate whatever is overwritten in the way the palimpsest affects subsequent writing. Even the language makes that evident - simply reverse the polarity - the orientation one might say - and everything that came before is now gone.

This kind of complete erasure is unique in the history of human development both of print and within the human body itself. The palimpsest of early written texts shows through when you try to do something new with the vellum. The human body isn't a perfect system built custom made from the ground up - we're an accumulation of mutations that modified already existing systems, thus, as well as the human body does work for us, there are parts of it that certainly could be more efficient if one were to start from the beginning - knee caps for example, do a good enough job in most cases of protecting the joint they're supposed to, but the number of ACL reconstructive surgeries performed every year leads one to wonder what a custom designed knee could look like. That's a flight of fantasy now, isn't it? Not used to thinking of the human body as custom made.

Or erasable. Which is why the idea of the magnetic recording device is so alien, so posthuman. Hayles argument moves into a discussion of signification in Neuromancer which now makes me want to reread the book, and also leads me into considering Pattern Recognition and some of the discussions we've been having over at Read, Think, Write, particularly Beatrice's question about Cayce's Sartrean type of nausea (which I'm still trying to fully suss out myself).

You see why it's taking me forever to read this book? A simple statement noting the difference between embodiment and the electronic text has me wandering through pedagogical technique, a revisionist archetypal critique paper, evolutionary theory (I just did finish reading parts of The Origin of Species last month) and finally to book club and cyberpunk. At this rate, I'll get to my next exam sometime in 2007.

Still getting by

So, what's been happening you wonder?

Well, I wrote my exam - it's over, but I'm not feeling as confident about it as I did the first one, which I hope does not mean problems for me.

I've done absolutely nothing intellectually stimulating since Friday.

I've marked all my students' papers - and while it requires concentration, I wouldn't classify it as intellectual, hence I am not contradicting myself.

Not much else going on around here. I'm looking forward to the break, but for it to really feel like a break, I think I'll need to get some serious work done before then, so that it actually feels like a break from work.

Pathetic post really.

I wonder where this will go?

Got lots of questions, and I'll be curious to see what happens after this event:

US air marshalls kill bomb alert passenger

Killing a mentally ill man, for making a bomb threat strikes me as a bit extreme. Incapacitating a man who might have a bomb: yes. Firing 4-5 shots, at least one of which is fatal: necessary? I wonder. Considering that "The air marshals say they are held to higher standards of handgun accuracy than officers of any other federal law enforcement agency. "Historically, the air marshals have been known as the best shots," said Joseph Gutheinz, a former military pilot and retired agent in NASA's inspector general office" one would assume that the fatal shots were indeed intentional. Which makes me wonder whether such deadly force was necessary in this case.

I'm not at the scene. I'm not trained in these kinds of things. There may be details that aren't being reported right now that will emerge later. But my first reaction is shock at the level of response in this incident.

It's the little things

Yep, as predicted, all those little things I had to get done have worn me out. Probably doesn't help that I ate shitty take-out food for lunch because I went suddenly from content to ravenous in about fifteen minutes. Which is why I made the mistake of thinking spicy food would be a good idea - usually, not a problem - when I'm worried, yes, it becomes a problem.

I cannot wait for Friday afternoon to arrive!

Brain drain

I just finished writing out a practice question for the exam on Friday. I hit most of the points I had on my outline - but forgot a couple of books and one character's name (I called him Alex instead of Rex... probably 'cause Alex is a much nicer name), so if I spend the next couple of days tweaking the outline and memorizing it, I'll be good for that one question.

There are three more though. I had hoped to practice write one more tonight, but I'm feeling really drained right now, so I'm going to put it off till tomorrow. Which means I'll need to practice at least two of them tomorrow. Which usually wouldn't be a problem, but in addition to going in to teach, I also have a bunch of stupid little errands that can't be put off till next week, so I'll be walking around to them as well tomorrow. Which sucks. I hope it doesn't snow or rain tomorrow since I have to do this, but I guess looking on the bright side, it doesn't matter that I don't have time for the gym 'cause at least I'll be doing a bunch of walking.

I'm a bad blogger

I've thought of so many blog posts over the last week that I just haven't posted. And I really should blog the kick-ass Disturbed concert on Saturday.

But I'm so anxious about this exam, worried I'll run out of time... or brain cells... It's a different kind of anxiety than the first one. The first one, I was just anxious because I wasn't sure what to expect. This one, I'm anxious because I know what to expect and don't think I'm up to it.

Hey, you know, that's about how I felt about childbirth. The first one, I didn't know what labour would be like, so I was nervous. The second one, I knew what it was like and was nervous because of that! But that means good news for the third exam - during third labour I felt like I was getting the hang of it... and I had nitrous! ooohhhh wouldn't comprehensive exams go so much better with nitrous? ... maybe I'll need to find someone who can prescribe it... hey, wait a sec! I think I know just the person!

Sometimes I just need some f2f time

Today, I was in a right royally annoyed mood arriving at school. Nope, nothing spectacularly horrible happened - that was the problem - it was just the usual too much to do, having to do things the hard way, lots of little things to keep track of, waiting for other people to do their thing, kind of stuff. Annoyed. Not pissed off, just annoyed.

But then I spoke to two friends who I saw while I was there.

And I went home feeling happy, and yes, I'll say it, near blissful. ahhhhhhhhh

I apparently lean both to the left and to the right

...or something like that.

I lean to the left politically - okay, probably didn't have to tell you that.

But I seem to lean to the right hockey-ally.

I'll explain.

I've been listening this year - on and off - to Flames games on internet radio, since there's no way they'll broadcast them here... there's only one game that I know I'm gonna get to see on tv during the season. Anyway, listening rather than watching a hockey game requires a level of concentration I was at first unused to, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. But I did. What I realized, just tonight though, is that when I'm visualizing the game in my head, the Flames are always to the right. Kiprusoff is always tending net on the right side of the rink. Every time. Weird, eh?

Wonder what that means?

Brains and viscera

I am so fuzzy headed today! No, my hair isn't frizzy... but it feels like my brain is. I don't know why - today should be a day where I get a kick ass amount of work done. Instead, I'm finding it almost impossible to concentrate on anything... and my exam is only ten days away!

I got a good amount of sleep, am not dehydrated, and have had several cups of coffee - physiologically, there's nothing wrong. But I'm still having great difficulty concentrating.

All I can say I've accomplished all morning is to pay bills (with money I don't have) and register for a remote ballot for the next federal election. Hopefully they won't take two months to process it, or the registration will be for nought. I did find myself disturbed in a strange way by the part of the application that says that if I've been out of the country for five years, I lose my right to vote. Why? Is it presumed that I am too out of touch with the politics of the land that I have no right to decide my country's fate? Does being gone so long hurt my nation's feelings and thus it withdraws any affiliation with me? (I'm sure it will still require me to pay my taxes though...) But the idea that I'll no longer be able to participate in the political process if I stay away too long rocked my boat a bit. It's not like I lose citizenship, but I lose one of the responsibilities that citizenship entails, and that feels like a part of me is being cut off from my national identity.

Maybe I'm just overthinking this... maybe I've been reading too much about nationalism in general in preparation for these exams... but it's not just a thought experiment that's disturbing me - the thought of not being able to vote (whether I exercise that right/responsibility or not) struck me a little more viscerally. Not being a particularly political person, I wonder why it bothers me?

Nothing between the ears

I have nothing to say. With a long weekend, and all the things I've done (none terribly exciting though) you'd think I'd have something to say. But I don't. I keep thinking about how long it's been since I posted, and feeling like I should post something for the three of you who visit regularly. But there's just nothing going on upstairs and I have nothing useful to say. Maybe this week. But nothing right now.

Yep, I'm a geek

Although I can only lay claim to reading 11 of the 20 books on the "Top 20 Geek Novels" list, I can say I've read the top 8, you know, the ones that got the highest percentage of votes... and 2 others on the list are on my shelf, waiting for the day that I pick them up and read them.

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85%
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79%
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69%
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64%
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59%
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53%
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52%
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47%
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46%
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43%
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37%
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38%
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36%
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34%
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33%
16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick 34%
17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman 31%
18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson 27%
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23%
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21%

As an aside, I also own - not just have seen - 5 movies based on books on the list.

Any other geek's out there? How'd you fare?

Sometimes there's just no other good way of saying it

I've been reading a lot about Victorian poetry lately (that exam thingy's to blame) and realized that I really like these two poems; mostly its their poetry, but I also like the speaker's perception and use of imagery to convey what is, after all, a rather bleak outlook. Even though they were written almost a hundred years apart, they really do say the same thing... and it seems to me that this apocalyptic vision still appeals to me today in my bleaker moments.

The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
- 1830

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony steep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- 1920

Don't think the idea of putting these two together is solely mine. I've been reading Carol Christ's Victorian and Modern Poets, and although she doesn't juxtapose these two particular poems, she does talk about Yeats' relationship to Tennyson, something I think is certainly evident in these two poems.

Feelin' special

My friend who's getting married this summer (and I thought we were done with weddings!) just asked me to be the piano player for her wedding. Cool! I'm excited. I'm also a little nervous about it (and I think it showed in my yes) cause I don't want to mess it up. But it will be a really good excuse to dust off the keys & practice up. And it also makes me feel special and honored and all that, just to be asked.

Prophetic?

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
- H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920.

I'm a Dwarf?!

Dwarvish


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla


Yes, I am working very hard... why do you ask?

Just another example of how daytime tv sucks

Last week, I had a half hour to kill and since I wasn't at home, there was really only daytime tv to amuse me... turning it on, there's Dr. Phil and I think, "this might at least be interesting".

Dr. Phil is an ass.

During a segment on dating, he had a picky woman blindfolded while she talked to three guys who she then had to decide upon - without seeing them of course. Then they brought each of the men out so she could see what they look like. But of course she's not just picky about good looks or anything - apparently she doesn't date black men and she kept trying to trip up the men she was talking to into revealing whether they were black by saying certain things (two of the guys were white and another black, as she was). When she met the black guy and said sorry you're not my type, Dr. Phil grabbed each of their hands, laid them side by side for the camera, and said "you've got something in common"

??????!

Like I said, Dr. Phil is an ass.

Here we go again

Just set the date for my second exam in early December. I'll now disappear into a hole until a desperate need for procrastination drives me back.... prob'ly won't be long!

You know the thing about the 20 words for snow that the Inuit have?

This is just too funny

You can call me Pavlov's dog

Everytime I sit down to mark papers, my head starts to ache and I start to feel sick... can you say psychosomatic kids?

Gas and Wind

Furnace inspecting guy just left - said he was surprised our furnace even ran at all 'cause it's so old. Also warned us of CO levels. But we've already got that one under control.

The shelf tag for the CO detector we bought last week speaks to either the sad lack of science education in North America, or to the rather carefree use of the English language by its users, because it identified the device we were about to purchase as a CO2 detector.

I really don't think I need to be alerted each time a detector senses CO2 in the air, though perhaps some people might like that.

Presumably the same people who would like an alarm that went off everytime it detected CO2 in the air are the same people who might like hearing car alarms that go off all night long. At one point in my life, I lived down the street from a car dealership. This was in the early days of car alarms, when many of them were overly sensitive and everytime there was a major windstorm (and this was on the prairies after all) all the car alarms would go off. Got to be a nightmare during storm season. This was also the place where the most convenient road for accessing the parking lot was steep enough that at choice times in the winter, the car simply could not make it all the way up before losing traction and sliding back down the hill. Looking back, I wonder what in the hell was the attraction of the place... oh yeah... right... the rent was cheap. Ahhhh, the good ol' days of cheap rent and shabby houses. Wait a second....

Death of an Author

John Fowles has died. That's sad. I liked A Maggot, which is the only thing of his I've read (no, I haven't read The French Lieutenant's Woman) but there will be no more books from John Fowles.

However, Salman Rushdie does have a new book, and he's managed to stay alive despite all that fatwah nonsense after The Satanic Verses. It's not just media propoganda either - I can vouch that he's alive and sounding very articulate with a polished speaking voice and really quite sensible answers to audience questions... or at least he was two hours ago when I left the reading/signing for Shalimar the Clown. Now I just need time to read the book, but it looks and sounds very interesting!

Figures

You are a Social Liberal (83% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (18% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

You should not be the least surprised.

A Virtually Nice Day

Even though I have spoken to no other (adult) human being yet today - which, let's face it, is pretty odd for me - I've had a nice virtual day. I opened my inbox to find an email from a friend wondering how I'm doing, another from someone I haven't seen in absolutely years (which was cool), read through two sequences of emails regarding upcoming social events... one of which made me laugh right out loud... and tried composing another email to a friend who needs an answer (though it's still in draft form, 'cause it's gonna be a long one!)

I also got about 3/4 of a book of criticism read (skimmed), which makes me feel productive, and had fun burning a series of CDs of favorite songs that I've been wanting to put together for months now.

Productive and pretty fun day given that I've been squirreled away in my room... but now I need movement and fun and people or my brain & body will start to decompose right where I sit!

Continue

I passed.

This makes me feel better

Apparently, being a mother has made me smarter... gee, I'd hate to think what a dumbkoff I would've been if I hadn't had kids!

Happy Halloween!

This weekend was so nicely restful... perhaps a bit too much because today it seems like there's lots of little things that I've been putting off for the last two weeks that urgently need to be done. *sigh* But that's life, right?

I've started obsessively checking my email as of last night. When I wrote my exam on Friday, my supervisor said to email it so she'd get it before Monday, which I took to mean she intended to look at it before Monday. But I haven't heard from her and it's Monday. So I'm starting to worry that this is a bad sign. I'm hoping she just had a busy weekend.

But it is certainly on my mind.

Maybe I'll go have lunch and try to take my mind off it.

Done and done

Well, obviously, the big exam is over and I survived. I actually felt pretty good while I was writing it and after (though I think feeling good after was just the lingering influence of adrenaline caused by the stress of not having enough time to say everything that I felt like I could have said).

I did almost nothing on Friday night afterwards, and then Saturday was filled with running around to soccer, SAT class, shopping, prepping food, hauling stuff over to the house where the party was actually going to be held, picking up family members from all over town and then finally starting to relax during the Halloween party itself.

Overall, it went fairly well, but we had a freak snowstorm here last night that kept a lot of people from farther away from attempting to drive in - understandably so. And my tropical costume ended up a bit chilly by the end of the night and I started putting layers on so that my costume didn't much look like a costume by the end of the night. The snow also meant that the kids couldn't do some of the activities we'd planned outside, though I think my two oldest daughters who organized and ran the kids activities did a great job of it. Kudos to them!

Now I have to mark papers that I've put aside while prepping for the test and the party - ugh - though I must say the drafts that I saw were fairly well done, so it should go quickly. Oh, and I guess I'd better buy more candy for tomorrow night too.

Countdown

Down to the last day before this exam. My memory improved slightly overnight and I've been able to remember the characters as I think of them, which is good. Now I'm trying not to worry that what I do remember will not be enough to pass the exam.

Spent the morning studying and was feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything, so I decided I would take a break (sort of) and go in to school, do some more work there before teaching, then come home and do some more - my theory is that breaks are good and necessary.

Problem is, because of the MBTA's complete and utter inability to adhere to anything remotely approaching their published schedules, it took me over two hours to get to school - thank god I'd left early! But now I've only got a few minutes between now & heading over to start up class. My plan to write out one of the questions before I teach (in about an hour, since that's the time I'll have allocated to do it during the exam) is shot. I studied the whole two hours, but the thing that pisses me off is that had I not left early, I would've been late for wherever I was going.

Riding the bus around here is an absolutely demeaning experience - there seems to be an attitude with the transit company that only low-life losers ride it. Not adhering to published schedules, which means you either wait around a lot, leave early for places because you can't trust that you'll get there in the advertised time, or be late for stuff isn't the only problem. Frankly, I really resent what this implies - that I am not worthy of the respect or consideration of the transit company. As a customer, I'm not important. My time is not important. My comfort is not important. Getting my money's worth is not important.

I've had bus drivers close the door in my face as I run up and refuse to re-open, even though I am right there and they are not moving (what's the rush, you're not on some kind of schedule or something, are you?). I've been on a bus where the air conditioning system leaked all over the rear half of the bus, and continued to leak onto the passengers who were trying to squeeze into the clean spaces - two waiters, in their white shirts who were heading to work had less-than-white crap all over their uniforms before escaping that bus. This doesn't include the countless missed transfers, missed stops, late arrivals, and even non-existent buses.

No wonder this is the land of the car - no one can trust anyone else to get them where they need to go on time.

This can't be good

I just spent twenty minutes trying to remember the first name of an author whose book I will need to quote in all three of my exam questions. I really hope this doesn't happen during the exam!

Stress management

Okay, just keep repeating "stress avoidance is not the same as stress management... stress avoidance is not the same as stress management... stress avoidance is not the same as stress management"

Okay, now back to work....

Exam fever

So, if you've been reading for a while, you know I started this blog while preparing to write the preliminary comprehensive exams a two years ago. Now I'm preparing for the big ones, the REAL comprehensive exams, and although it feels great to say, "I think I've read enough books that I can write this exam" the anxiety has cranked up a notch (or two or three or twenty) now that I've set a date.

Yep, this time, a week from now, I'll be frantically trying to remember everything I'm trying to review between now and then.

I'm very nervous.

I've started having trouble getting to sleep - not insomnia per se - but just trouble clearing my mind of everything to the point where I can sleep. My body's tired. My eyes are tired. But my brain's still going 100 miles an hour thinking about all the stuff I just read and worrying about whether I can put it all together during the exam. I'm seriously considering picking up drugs that will help me fall asleep, but I'm also worried about trying a drug I've never taken before at a critical time like this in case my body doesn't respond well to it.

Last night I managed to sleep without drugs through a combination of actually having someone beside me as I went to sleep (not having him around is no doubt exacerbating the not-sleeping problem) and watching the 'extras' on Land of the Dead until 12:30 in the morning. Did you know that Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) had a cameo in the movie? I didn't. Never would've figured out it was him either, if they hadn't put it on the DVD.

Watching movies sure reduces the stress... at least while I'm watching. When I stop and realize how much time I just spent staring at the tv, the panic comes back though. And who said grad school couldn't be exciting?!

He's everywhere!

Dracula, that is... I just finished reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which is about a hunt for Dracula, and I've been reading Stoker's Dracula online as a blog.

Just now on the bus, I saw a guy with two puncture wounds complete with droplets of blood tatooed on his neck... now that's just weird!

I actually miss this life

A good friend forwarded me this article "Meet the Life Hackers" which at first glance, sounds kind of threatening since hacking disrupts the integrity of the program. But the article is all about how our work lives are 'hacked' up by interruptions in the workplace.

All this made me feel much better. I've obviously been watching too many zombie movies lately, and reading too many novels about Dracula because the title spooked me at first!

I realized as I read it, that it wasn't psychotic or strange that I missed the job I held before I started this doctoral program, even though it drove me nuts sometimes because there was just so much to do! The article explains what multitasking does to us:

The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls "continuous partial attention": we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging [from incoming email messages] makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.

"It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It's what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected." Sanity lies on the path down the center - if only there was some way to find it.

The article focuses on Microsoft, because it is some of their programmers who they interviewed for the article, but it notes later that many of the 'life hackers', people trying to reduce the chaos in their working lives, actually prefer Apple because of its simpler, more user-friendly designs. Microsoft has focused on performance, but from the standpoint of the program, not the user.

Microsoft had sold tens of millions of copies of its software but had never closely studied its users' rhythms of work and interruption. How long did they linger on a single document? What interrupted them while they were working, and why?

To figure this out, [Mary Czerwinski] took a handful of volunteers and installed software on their computers that would virtually shadow them all day long, recording every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbirds. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time - a few e-mail messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.

Why the constant shifting? In part it was because of the basic way that today's computers are laid out. A computer screen offers very little visual real estate. It is like working at a desk so small that you can look at only a single sheet of paper at a time. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop very quickly becomes buried in detritus.

This is part of the reason that, when someone is interrupted, it takes 25 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. We do not like to think we are this flighty: we might expect that if we are, say, busily filling out some forms and are suddenly distracted by a phone call, we would quickly return to finish the job. But we don't. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?

How many times have you asked yourself that question? I know I have more times than I can count. So, interruptions are okay, they make us feel vitalized and in charge, but they're also inefficient, causing us to forget what it was that we were doing before we were interrupted. Part of that disruption arises because of how and when we are disrupted.

In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.

Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are "co-located" - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly.

So why don't computers work this way? Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up - to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed.

One afternoon I drove across the Microsoft campus to visit a man who is trying to achieve precisely that: a computer that can read your mind. His name is Eric Horvitz, and he is one of Czerwinski's closest colleagues in the lab. For the last eight years, he has been building networks equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that carefully observes a computer user's behavior and then tries to predict that sweet spot - the moment when the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.

Some of the programs they're working on are really interesting, and seem to promise to maximize a worker's productivity at his or her individually attuned screen, though it appears that much of the testing has involved employees in technologically-heavy workplaces, who are very savvy about computers and probably use them quite efficiently in the first place. I'd be curious to see how that might change in a less technologically savvy workplace (such as the last one I was at - many employees did not turn their computers on till half way through the day, and there was only one machine isolated from the internal network that connected to the internet - yeah, they were paranoid and not willing to spend money on protecting the whole system).

But I still actually miss the busy office life, where I interacted with dozens of other people every day, either electronically, or in person. These days, I'm lucky if I talk to three people all day who aren't family or students (not quite the same kind of interaction). Being a grad student is such a solitary activity, I'd actually relish some interruptions once in a while!

There I go, scaring myself again

Just sent off a message to my supervisor requesting a date for the first comprehensive exam. Ack! I don't know that I'm ready for it, but I've read everything, made some questions, and my supervisor says go for it, so here I go!

Things that go bump in the night

Heard the strangest sound last night at about 1 o'clock in the morning.

You the sound that a bug zapper makes when a bug flies into it? Well, that sound, but multiplied by about 100. The sound happened twice in a row, and since it reminded me of a bug zapper, it made me wonder just pests my neighbors might be trying to get rid of.

The challenges of inside out

Right now I'm trying to talk about Americana with my freshmen students and getting them to try to step outside of their own country to take a look at it from another perspective. I suppose subjecting them to Jean Baudrillard's "Utopia Achieved" chapter from America might be a difficult way to do that, but with the requirements for the course, it's one of the few options that I can use to do so.

I'm discovering in part, that some of it is really hard for the usual reasons, that it's hard to see your own country for what it is, but also because many of my students know so little about their own country.

We were talking about American icons and symbols today (they watched Pulp Fiction last week, which at least gave us a starting point) and it struck me that although they're finding the Baudrillard reading difficult, an outsider's view is what it just might take to get them stretching themselves ouside their comfort zones to critically look at these icons. I've been trying to convey to them the use of the outsider's view for getting you to look beyond your assumptions, but some of them aren't buying it.

Speaking of the outsider's point of view, I ran across an interview with Neil Gaiman (and Susannah Clarke) in which he talks about how he came up with some of the ideas for American Gods, and I think he summarized the experience well.

For me, my previous adult novel, "American Gods," was very much about what happens when you're English and you come to stay in a country that you've seen in movies and on TV and think you know everything about, and suddenly you're noticing these odd little bits that nobody else notices because they grew up with it. And you think it's weird....The English grow up with pickle-flavored potato chips, so I probably wouldn't think to put them in a story.

I know for myself, even coming from a country whose popular culture is often indistinguishable from that of the U.S., that there have been times when I've been surprised by little differences, and other times when I've said something, or made reference to something that I thought was a common cultural reference, only to find out that people here don't know what I'm talking about.

Of course, most of my cultural references mean nothing to my students since I'm almost a generation older than they are, but I still think they can only begin to understand the Baudrillard essay by stepping out of their own comfortable space in order to engage with it in a way that doesn't take umbrage at the things he says in the essay. There is one student in the class who was born elsewhere, and the majority have travelled outside of the U.S., so I have hope that it will be possible to get them out of the headspace in which they simply assume that their way of life is universal, but it's just very difficult.

It will be interesting to see whether they manage to accomplish this when I get their drafts next week.

I'm such a lit geek

I'm so excited! I just got a ticket to go hear Salman Rushdie discuss his new book, Shalimar the Clown... and guess who's interviewing him... guess... Homi K. Bhabha! I almost can't believe it!

I may pay through the nose for rent living in this place, but there are compensations about living near to Harvard, like listening to these two guys together... it makes it almost worth it!