Passing

Living in a foreign country, where you don't look like a foreigner, and (for the most part) don't sound like a foreigner, can be a very frustrating experience.

One of the frustrations oldest daughter and I have both been experiencing in the last few months arises from our ability to "pass" in this country. What I mean is that many of the people we encounter, who know she is intending to go to university, make assumptions about the choices we have available and thus continually express surprise at the choices we have made.

The mother of one of her friends simply cannot grasp the idea that oldest daughter (or any of us for that matter) does not qualify for federal (U.S.) student aid. She repeatedly expresses the opinion that oldest daughter should apply to wherever she wants and worry about the funding later because "there's always money to be had". (The fact that their family lives in a much higher tax bracket than we do probably also has something to do with her perception) We've checked. She qualifies for no federal aid... just like I don't. And yes, we checked the state schools too - although she's completed her entire high school education here, she'd be considered international when it comes to the tuition bill.

So she'll go back home, where the tuition is 1/4 to 1/10 the price it is here (and for most of the schools she's applied to, there is an extended family member or friend in the same city to ease the transition).

Her peers and guidance counsellor seem to constantly question the wisdom of this. They also seem to think she's not actually applying because the deadlines for Canadian schools are much later than for the ones here, so she hasn't heard back from any of them yet. Many of her peers have already made decisions about which school they'll go to because they've been receiving letters for months.

I've also had to work to convince people who I know that "no, we can't get funding" because they just can't seem to believe it. I even had one person express surprise that I would want my daughter to go to school back home when there are so many wonderful schools here, the implication being that the quality of education back home couldn't possibly match what we could get here. I tried not to feel insulted. Particularly since I have three degrees from a Canadian university and don't feel like I'm less qualified than my peers who got degrees here.

She gets more frustrated than I do about the school stuff, mostly because she hears this all the time.

I don't hear the school stuff very often, but I do on occasion find that friends - even close ones - forget that I'm a foreigner and don't belong here... not really, anyway. I don't talk with a strange accent (as long as I don't say "about") and my skin color pegs me as Euro-American at least, so I don't stand out, but I do find it surprising that so many people who know me fairly well regularly forget that I am only here as a guest.

It also makes me realize that my cultural heritage - what I see as an essential part of my identity, is not at all apparent to those around me on a regular basis. It's only when I order beer in a restaurant, or mention hockey or some other "Canadian" thing that I give myself away. Most of the time, I can pass for American. I'm not sure I know how to feel about that.

Hoax heaven

I didn't succumb to any April Fools Day hoaxes, but then again, I didn't read the newspaper or listen to a news broadcast (which is where they usually emerge) yesterday, so that's not surprising.

I had fun reading about all the April Fools Day hoaxes on the Top 100 April Fool's Hoaxes of all Time though.

My favorites were:
#1 Swiss Spagetti Harvest
#7 Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
#23 Guiness Mean Time
#36 Discovery of the Bigon
#69 One-Way Highway
#85 Kokomo Police Cut Costs
#89 Asterix Village Found

The Black Box revealed!

How your computer works (watch out, the sound is a bit loud) The interconnected pieces actually remind me of a computer game we had ages ago where you had to put all these different pieces together in the right order to accomplish a task. I remember it being a lot harder than it looked...

The circularity of time

This time last year, I was blogging a storm: four entries in one day - probably a record. First I expressed my delight in having returned home, even though PCA was a great conference, and lamented the difference in climate between Southern California and New England. Then I talked about the conference experience, then I talked about more of it, and even more of it!

I ended the post saying that I needed to find a way of getting to next year's conference - which I have - but it's a little later this year. So a year later, I am frantically trying to put together the conference paper. It's not that I don't have material, it's that I have too much material, and I need to select which parts to shape into a conference paper that I'll present orally instead of writing for publication (or at least a reading audience).

This year the conference is in Atlanta, Georgia - a place I've never been, though we did drive through Georgia on the way to Florida at Christmas. I'm booked into the hostel again - I can't afford the prices at the kinds of hotels these things are held at - and I'm hoping it won't be in a club district again. Google Earth reveals a pretty quiet looking neighborhood about a kilometer from the conference site, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I'm really looking forward to it - there are some great papers listed - some names of people who I'm looking forward to meeting with again - and I get to see a city I've never been to before (even if it is just the downtown area, it's gotta be better than Indianapolis).

Dissertating is fun!

Well, at least there are some fun parts to it. Working in an area that not only includes contemporary fiction, but a cultural studies approach to it means that the kind of stuff that goes on around me every day - the news, tv shows, ads, blog topics, you name it - often has direct relevance to the topic I'm pursuing.

For instance, earlier this week, while driving home I was listening to a song I've heard many times before. But this time, when I got home, I immediately looked up the lyrics for it, and wrote them down, because they'd make a great epigraph for a chapter. I'd heard those lyrics many times before, but with my mind on computer-enhanced human beings, they took on a new resonance.

I like this getting psyched about what I'm working on! I know it will get old after a while, but right now, it's pretty cool!

so what's up with me?

Thanks for asking!

There's not much blog-worthy going on. Lot's of reading too little time. I'm slowly crossing things off the list, but still worried I won't get all of them done by deadlines.

Having said that, I'm at the point where there are so many things going on, I'm having difficulty choosing which one to work on first, and when I start working on one thing, I have this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me I should be worrying about something else.

Reading today has been especially annoying since they're doing major renovations next door... which they started at 7:30! that's half past seven IN THE A.M.! I'm all for the early bird getting the worm, but you put Michele in an awful nasty mood when you start power drilling next to her head at that hour of the morning... grrrr.

I'm trying to console myself with two facts: 1) the house next door is as small as mine, so there is a finite amount of work that can be done in it, which means it should be over soon, and 2) the house on the other side had its renovations last year, so once these guys are done, I should be guaranteed to have some peace... just in time to leave windows open overnight and hear the lawn guys at the crack of dawn...

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the rest of the day.

What part of "leave a message" didn't you understand?

I played the oddest message on my cell phone yesterday. It was left by a child - which isn't odd - but it wasn't my child, and it was left in Spanish. This child mumbled a bit, as many children do on the phone, and my Spanish is a bit elementary, but he or she seemed to be asking mom if they could go to a friend's house.

Now what part of "Please leave a message" in English spoken by someone clearly not YOUR mother, did you miss?

Odd.

Students and violence... not what you think

Those students are burying me in their papers... all I can hope is that I will soon finish responding to all of them.

In the meantime, go see V for Vendetta.

I planned to see this movie as soon as it came out, and I was even more impressed with it than I expected. If you're staying away because of the R-rating, don't. There's almost no sex and while there's violence, most of it is stylized with little blood. But some of the ideas might be incendiary if exposed to someone in the right frame of mind.

Oh, and A History of Violence - now on DVD - was also excellent. Interesting to watch both movies within a few days of each other. Each question what role violence plays in our society and come to different, but equally thought provoking conclusions. Perhaps I'll blog further about it once I crawl out from under the weight of all thse papers.

Which one is it?

The term is restarting after the spring break, and I find myself pondering what kind of a teacher I am, and whether I need to change or not.

I look at my marking book and see that two students have not handed in the assignment that was due before the beginning of the break. I sent both emails telling them I haven't received them, but still haven't heard back. One student has been struggling, and the week before the break, we worked out a schedule that would get him caught up. He agreed to it, but hasn't done it. The other one, who knows?

The question that is running around my head is how involved in all this should I be? Part of me says to leave it - they're adults - I'm not their mother, I'm their teacher etc. But another part of me hears what other people are saying, about caring about their students as people, they're not just numbers etc. and I wonder whether I should be more involved.

These are upperclassmen - not freshmen - so my inclination is to teach, not to nurture. If they've made it this far, they should be able to get their act together. The freshmen - yes, I treat a bit differently, especially in the fall term, because they're still adjusting to the change from high school to university. That I understand, and the adjustment is rough even if you're not 18.

My natural inclination with university students is to say, "You're adults. Start acting like one", spell out my expectations, be helpful when they come to me for help, provide a high quality classroom experience, and let them take responsibility for whether they pass or fail.

I also don't tell my students much about myself - I tell them in the first class that I'm a TA and a student like them, but after that, I'm their teacher, and that's all I am.

Part of this philosophy probably stems from my own experience as an undergrad. I would NEVER have thought of talking to a prof about a personal problem, and I NEVER asked for an extension on an assignment (I saved doing that for the first time in my doctoral program!). I figured that since I got a syllabus at the beginning of the term, there was plenty of time to plan out my time and no excuse for not being ready for a deadline. And my professors never expressed the slightest interest in knowing about my personal life. They didn't tell me about theirs and I didn't tell them about mine. Seemed right to me that that was just the way it worked.

But I was also 28 with three kids at home when I entered university, so I was used to having to take responsibility for my own life. It feels natural to me to respect my students as adults by leaving them to organize their own lives and just concentrate on sharing what I know the most about - the subject matter of the course - but I wonder whether this is enough. Mostly, I wonder if there are expectations out there in academia that I be more for my students than an expert in my field.

On an interesting side note, the results of this modified Meyers-Briggs scale don't seem to jive with my teaching philosophy... which of course makes me wonder why.

Your #1 Match: ISFJ

The Nurturer You have a strong need to belong, and you very loyal. A good listener, you excell at helping others in practical ways. In your spare time, you enjoy engaging your senses through art, cooking, and music. You find it easy to be devoted to one person, who you do special things for. You would make a good interior designer, chef, or child psychologist.

Your #2 Match: ESFJ

The Caregiver You are sympathetic and caring, putting friends and family first. A creature of habit, you prefer routines and have trouble with change. You love being in groups - whether you're helping people or working on a project. You are good at listening, laughing, and bringing out the best in people. You would make a great nurse, social worker, or teacher.

Introducing...

...the third worst poet in the Galaxy!

Check out yawp (tales from my so-cubed life) and newest addition to the blogroll. The third worst poet is not a Vogon, and hardly deserves the title "third worst" but the blog is amusing and well written - especially the haikus - I on the other hand, could never get the hang of haikus...

You'll especially want to check out a familiar/unfamiliar TV theme song linked to this post.

Old, but Good

If you've heard Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?" routine, you might enjoy an updated version of that confusion (listen to the original)

If Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were alive today, their famous sketch, "Who's on First?" might have turned out something like this:

COSTELLO CALLS TO BUY A COMPUTER FROM ABBOTT

ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
COSTELLO: Thanks. I'm setting up an office in my den and I'm thinking about buying a computer.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: No, the name's Lou.
ABBOTT: Your computer?
COSTELLO: I don't own a computer. I want to buy one.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: I told you, my name's Lou.
ABBOTT: What about Windows?
COSTELLO: Why? Will it get stuffy in here?
ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with Windows?
COSTELLO: I don't know. What will I see when I look at the windows?
ABBOTT: Wallpaper.
COSTELLO: Never mind the windows. I need a computer and software.
ABBOTT: Software for Windows?
COSTELLO: No. On the computer! I need something I can use to write proposals, track expenses and run my business. What do you have?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything?
ABBOTT: I just did.
COSTELLO: You just did what?
ABBOTT: Recommend something
COSTELLO: You recommended something?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: For my office?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: OK, what did you recommend for my office?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yes, for my office!
ABBOTT: I recommend Office with Windows.
COSTELLO: I already have an office with windows! OK, let's just say I'm sitting at my computer and I want to type a proposal. What do I need?
ABBOTT: Word.
COSTELLO: What word?
ABBOTT: Word in Office.
COSTELLO: The only word in office is office.
ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.
COSTELLO: Which word in office for windows?
ABBOTT: The Word you get when you click the blue "W."
COSTELLO: I'm going to click your blue "w" if you don't start with some straight answers. What about financial bookkeeping? You have anything I can track my money with?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: That's right. What do you have?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: I need money to track my money?
ABBOTT: It comes bundled with your computer.
COSTELLO: What's bundled with my computer?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: Money comes with my computer?
ABBOTT: Yes. No extra charge.
COSTELLO: I get a bundle of money with my computer? How much?
ABBOTT: One copy.
COSTELLO: Isn't it illegal to copy money?
ABBOTT: Microsoft gave us a license to copy Money.
COSTELLO: They can give you a license to copy money?
ABBOTT: Why not? THEY OWN IT!
(A few days later)
ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
COSTELLO: How do I turn my computer off?
ABBOTT: Click on "START".......

What was on the radio...?

On the day I was born: "I'm a Believer" by The Monkees
setting me up for an optimistic streak?
The day I graduated high school: "There'll Be Sad Songs (to Make You Cry)" by Billy Ocean
the old "first day of the rest of your life"?
First marriage: "Invisible Touch" by Genesis
Oldest daughter born: "One More Try" by George Michael
"just one more push..."
Middle daughter born: "When I See You Smile" by Bad English
Youngest daughter born: "End of the Road" by Boyz II Men
three's enough!
The day my ex and I decided to separate: "I Knew I Loved You" by Savage Garden
emphasis on the past tense I guess
The day I got married: "Hot in Herre" by Nelly
ooh yeah!

Find out the top song on your dates

Movie notes

Usually, if I'm still thinking about a movie the next day, it's because it had a strong effect on me - emotionally or intellectually - but in the case of this movie, I'm still thinking about it because I haven't yet figured it out.


I don't generally read a lot of reviews before going to see movies - I prefer to view them without the filter of someone else's opinions. But in this case, perhaps I'd feel less confused about the story if I had gone into the theatre knowing a bit more about it. The more I think about it, the less confused I get, but in the theatre, I found myself sometimes struggling to follow character motivations.

Part of what was most distracting was the stylistics of the movie - as you can see in the photo, this is not a realistic setting or world. A voiceover before the credits, after them, and at the end of the movie repeats the message "this is not a world you would recognize" which of course begs the question of just what is the relationship between that narrative voice and the audience? A question that is never satisfactorily answered - sometimes it seems we are looking at a future world, sometimes an alternate universe. Sometimes even, it seems the world we are allowed a glimpse of belongs to a different kind of universe - a comic book universe, for example - which is the only explanation that also accounts for the episodic nature of the fight scenes and their emphasis on looks over a sense that the character is at risk of losing the fight. The movie is "anti-Kill Bill", as one intelligent person described it.

A thoroughly different take on vampires is Lifeforce, based on the novel Space Vampires, which pretty much says it all. It's also rather bloodless, like Ultraviolet but in this case, it's because the space vampires don't survive on blood, but on life energy, which leaves their victims looking like mummies until they manage to steal away someone else's life energy and so on. It's a cheesy, but fun movie, with some bad acting and bad sets, but a convolutedly fun sense of its own marginal position between horror and space opera.

Now, a horror movie that took itself a bit more seriously, and mostly convinced me of its sincerity as a horror movie was Creep. I do have a soft spot for stories that take place in the London Underground, so that kept me going through some of the rougher spots. There was one scene that was really implausible, and the main character sometimes had very little sense, though at other times, she showed a great deal of foresight - she was inconsistent, but you're set up to think her so when she teases a fellow partygoer, then blows him off for the chance to meet George Clooney. Franka Potente does a lot of running in this movie too, in fact, I think I've only ever really seen her act like a runner. The director, in commentary said that he tried to make the audience feel sorry for the 'creep' of the title, though I never really felt much sorrow for him - he was a pitiable character, but I did think he got what was coming to him, whether he was aware that what he was doing was wrong or not. Even though it failed in a few places, it was the kind of movie that stayed with me for a day, and not in the bad I-can't-figure-it-out way that Ultraviolet did, but in a interesting-how-they-did-that kind of way.

Thin... I wish!

I just came to the realization the other day that I have committed myself to producing three pieces of academic writing by the middle of April. That's only five weeks away! Eek! I committed to two of them several months ago, but the third I committed to this week without thinking about the timing of the other two. I've done this before, but not quite this badly - it will be difficult to get all this done (I do still have to teach during this time... oh, and my taxes will be due before then, won't they?)

When I saw this article: Academic AWOL it struck a chord because I've done the same thing - in committing myself to these three projects that will be difficult to complete in the given time frame, I'm running the risk of being on an academic AWOL. I'll either have to reschedule one of them, or I'll discover that I'm smarter than I think I am by getting them done in time. I kinda hope it's the latter - it would be nice to discover I'm more capable than I think!

Note to self: stop saying yes!

Right now though, it was one of the comments about marking that caught my attention today. Mostly because I'm wading through a huge pile of marking. This term, the students seem to be worse than I've ever had before. I don't think it's necessarily a trend to poorer students but just the luck of the draw that I got two classes with a high proportion of poor or underprepared writers. They aren't bad enough to have to be in some kind of remedial class - not that we have those for this course - but so many of them have absolutely no idea how to incorporate material from other sources, the conventions of academic writing, or even what some very simple everyday words mean!

The comment that caught my attention was about how to avoid procrastinating marking. I know I procrastinate because it's painful and monotonous. It's painful to see how poorly prepared for writing some of my students are, how difficult it is for some of them to follow instructions (really, in this course, if you follow the instructions there's no way you can get lower than a B, yet students fail it all the time!). It's monotonous to tell student after student the same thing... especially if I've already said it in class!

If anyone out there does have a method for making marking easy, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll just have to keep procrastinating about it...

Once bitten, twice shy

Oh, do I know the agony this woman was going through! The woman, a master's student, stored her thesis on a jump drive but hadn't backed it up anywhere else and a thief stole her purse where she was keeping the drive. She got it back by asking herself what the thief would've done and scrounging through a dumpster until she found it.

I know her agony. I've had entire pieces of work disappear on me - from the last two hours of typing because I haven't hit 'save' and the computer crashes, to losing an entire paper revision in undergrad (at 2 am, of course!) I've gotten smart since then, maybe even a bit obsessive. Although I don't like taking the time to back stuff up, I do it at least every couple of months or less, depending on how much work I'm producing at the time. I've even worried about a fire and keep an older set of backups elsewhere so that I can recuperate the majority of my work in case my computer goes up in smoke.

I am thinking of getting one of those jump drives, or 'thumbs' though for the dissertation stage, so that I can put everything in one place and have access to my notes etc. anywhere that I go. They do look awful handy, and they're not too expensive. I suppose there is a danger of losing it, but if I've backed up on the hard drive as well, it should be minimal I would think. The idea is growing on me, that's for sure.

The canon strikes again

"You need to find a white guy" my supervisor said to me, during our meeting today. No, she wasn't giving me dating advice. She did mean 'guy' in the 'you guys' kind of way that applies to humans, you know, the way 'mankind' refers to all 'womankind' too. (When addressing my daughters I frequently say 'you guys need to clean your rooms' or similar things. I did have a non-English speaker question why I referred to my female children by a term she identified as male however) I did get my supervisor's drift though... and since we talked about white women too, she wasn't being sexist.

We were talking about which novels and novelists I would be talking about in my dissertation, and the 'you need a white guy' was a nod toward the concession that if you want to talk about contemporary British fiction, you can't just talk about fiction by postcolonial writers. You have to talk about some of those white 'guys' like Amis or Swift, or Barnes, or Byatt. It's a very good point. If I don't talk about at least one of those authors, a hiring committee might not recognize my expertise in the contemporary British novel. I want hiring committees to think I'm smart, so I need to go find a white guy for my dissertation.

Why God Never Received Tenure at any University

He had only one major publication.

It was in Hebrew.

It had no references.

It wasn't published in a refereed journal.

Some even doubt he wrote it himself.

It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?

His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.

The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.

He never applied to the Ethics Board for permission to use human subjects.

When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it up by drowning the subjects.

When subjects didn't behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample .

He rarely came to class, just told students to read the Book.

Some say he had his son teach the class.

He expelled his first two students for learning.

Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed his tests.

His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.

Goodbye Ms Butler

Octavia Butler died this weekend. I guess that means that Fledgling, which is on my wishlist, will be her last book. I am looking forward to reading it, after all, who can resist an amnesiac vampire story?

Shake, rattle n' roll

Someone clever would have something witty to say about the news that an earthquake hit Eastern Canada yesterday, but I don't.
I know there are fault lines all over the earth, but I never realized there were some in Ontario. Looking at a seismicity graph of Canada, it makes me glad that I've always lived in the part in the middle, you know, where there's no red dots.

What is the odor of infinity?

Methinks there is a strong correlation between mathematical proficiency and poor personal hygiene.

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?
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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