To con-fer

I spent the last two days - very LONG days actually - at a grad conference.

About halfway through the first day, I found myself thinking "I've been to so many conferences already... why have I never been to a grad conference?... this stuff is great!"

It might help that it was held at my alma mater, so I knew some of the profs who stopped in, and I actually got the chance to chat with my MA advisor, who I haven't seen for years because she was on sabbatical and then on another leave, so she hasn't been as active in the department in the last little while. She didn't recognize me at first, but then when she did, she was very generous and kind, asking about my program now and inviting me to come by and chat with her about my current projects, which I'm certainly going to take her up on! (this despite the fact that my dissertation is no longer anywhere near her area of expertise!)

I also got an offer from one of the organizers to forward their 'to do' list to help us with our grad conference we're organizing for next month, which will also be a huge help with our own efforts to get this thing going.

But that wasn't the best part of it.

The best part was the students and the presentations. There were some really exciting papers, and the only one that I found really difficult to follow (and thus not terribly interesting) was the one in French. My French isn't good enought to have gotten more than the most rudimentary sense of what the paper was about. If I'd been able to read it, perhaps I would've gotten more, but my mastery of the spoken language is minimal, so I didn't get much out of it.

There was a woman presenting on the novel - Never Let me Go - that I'm presenting on next month at another grad conference, so I was really interested in her talk. Her title hadn't given any hint about what she was talking about, but I recognized the epigraph she began with right away, making me perk up at the end of a long day... Her approach is of course different than the argument that I'm making in the paper I'm presenting, but since I'm also going to be writing about the same novel in the dissertation - which is the whole reason for a dry-run discussion of it at a conference - I'm going to check out the theory she used to see whether it might also suit my purposes.

That was probably the only presentation that intersected with my own research interests, but there were many other presentations that I found fascinating as well, including one from another former MA student now returning as a doctoral student. We did recognize each other, but he was in the creative writing program and I in the literature program, so we'd never been in the same classes, but it was neat to hear what another graduate of the program was doing.

And the best part was the Q&A period. See, at most conferences I've been to, even the most collegial of ones always run the risk that the questions from the audience will not be true questions, but some pompous academic taking the opportunity to spout on about their own research. Those kinds of questions get really boring, both for the other audience members as well as the presenter; and they take up time that others who might have genuine inquiries could be using to ask those questions.

Even my paper went over quite well. Considering I was the very last person on the program, ending my talk only moments before the promise of free pizza in the campus pub (on St. Paddy's day on top of that), I actually got several questions and comments, and the back and forth that the discussion generated seemed to result for a genuine engagement with the paper. It was a very positive experience! Certainly much better than my second conference experience where the only question I got after my presentation was along the lines of "Are you related to so-and-so? Because I'm looking for my sister who was adopted a birth and I was hoping you were her" Huh? How is that a question worthy of the Q&A after a presentation? Ugh!

But that was another story. Yesterday's presentation went very well, and I was immensely pleased! Now all I'm hoping is that the conference we're holding next month will come off even half as well...

What does the world need another English major for?

This was a question I asked myself many times even while I decided to major in English literature. I wondered how useful such a degree might really be in the real world.

Today I was in a room with three people who majored in English: a music producer, a project manager, and a tv/radio personality.

... I guess the world can use English majors after all!

How bizarre, how bizarre

Sunday, I went running in shorts and a t-shirt.

Today I shovel snow.

There's a saying in Calgary: "If you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes"

40 days

In 40 days, all this conference stuff will be over. Whew!

Not really the proverbial 40 days, but it did find it an interesting coincidence when I added them up that today was the day I decided to blog the conference.

So, in 40 days, the interdisciplinary grad conference that we decided to launch this year, will be over - success or failure, it will be over. When I signed up for this thing, I underestimated the nature of the work. Not the amount, but the way it's been spread out and the length of time it seems to take to check any one thing off the to do list.

It of course doesn't help that I'm 3,000 miles away from all the other committee members. It also doesn't help that we've never done this before, so none of us are really clear on what needs to be done. And we spend a lot of time telling each other what we're envisioning... or at least I do. It seems to take forever to email ideas back and forth, waiting for people to read their email and have time to respond to it.

But it is coming together. We do have a really good group of people working together. And it's funny how my expectations for the group haven't necessarily panned out. Group members are responding differently than I expected them to, which makes for an interesting dynamic.

The biggest challenge is everyone's busy-ness. We've divided all the tasks into groups and everyone has taken on a chunk, but for some people, that means they're doing a lot during one short period of time (including all the post-conference stuff that'll need to be done!) It makes it challenging. So does the long distance. But I'm trying to be patient, and not count the number of emails I send trying to stay in the loop. Hopefully once it's all done, we pull this thing off and don't have to think about it till next year (which is whole different story right there)!

Hockey thought of the day

A hockey player without a stick is a bit like a one-legged soccer player.

For rebeckler

Because another one is scheduled to roll into town tomorrow and to answer rebeckler's question of what's a chinook? (I think she had at least four ???? though, and yes, you guessed right that it's a wind), I dug up the following:

According to the Weather Network:

The term Chinook comes from an Indian word which means snow eater. The Chinook wind is a warm, dry wind that descends the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and sweeps across the foothills and other parts of Alberta. When it moves over heavy snow cover, it can melt and evaporate a foot of snow in less than a day. Also, the temperature rises sharply, sometimes over 20 degrees Celsius in one hour. On average, southern Alberta gets 20 to 30 Chinook days per year.

Wikipedia's entry for Chinooks in Alberta is interesting, including the following facts:

In most recent winters (since the 1980s), chinooks and warmer weather have all but banished winter to just a few spells of sharp cold of one or two weeks, and some midwinter months have averaged high temperatures over 5°C (41°F), similar to the West Coast of British Columbia, where Canada's warmest winters are found.
In Lethbridge, chinook winds can gust in excess of hurricane force (120 km/h or 75 mph). The winds gusts can be strong enough to shatter car windows through air pressure differential. On November 19, 1962, the winds there gusted to 171 km/h (107 mph) in an especially powerful chinook.
In Pincher Creek, the temperature rose by 33°C (60°F) in one hour in 1962. Also, trains have been known to be derailed by chinook winds there.
Calgary is also well known for getting many chinooks, as the Bow Valley in the Canadian Rockies west of the city acts as a natural wind tunnel funneling the chinook winds.

For some, the chinook is a mixed blessing. While it's great to get relief from the cold, persistent chinook winds can fool plants into germinating thinking that spring has arrived, and the changes in air pressure can negatively affect people. Not to mention all that melting snow creates a heck of a lot of slush! The Mountain Field Guide notes some of the effects the Chinook winds can have on people and the landscape:

Relief from sub–zero temperatures
Highly strung people may begin to shake or fidget
Susceptible people may get headaches or suffer nervous disorders
Psychologically, many people fell “better”
Wood may split due to extreme dryness
Fire hazards are increased
It may cause violent grass or forest fires, or cause small fires to spread quickly.

You can tell a chinook is around by the distinction chinook arch that forms in the sky above Calgary, which looks especially nice at sunset.

The newest thing in computing?

I've been reading Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, a book that's been recommended to me by several people, so I thought it was time to pick it up. I found the following passage interesting:

The general interface with personal computers has been treated as a physical design problem. But interface is not just about the look and feel of a computer. It is about the creation of personality, the design of intelligence, and building machines that can recognize human expression... The challenge for the next decade is not just to give people bigger screens, better sound quality, and easier-to-use graphical input devices. It is to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages... The burden of interaction today has been placed totally on the shoulders of the human party. Something as banal as printing a computer file can be a debilitating exercise that resembles voodoo more than respectable human behaviour.

Having recently purchased a replacement computer with Windows Vista (the only choice outside of going with Mac), this debilitation is making itself felt. For example, our (new!) printer does not have the drivers for Vista, meaning we cannot print directly from the new computer!

Sad thing is, Negroponte wrote that passage in 1995. We're now past the decade during which he proposed that we make computers more useful, and they've become more of a burden on the human user than ever before! At least with my C64, I knew exactly what I was getting and if I didn't know how to get it, I knew I had to go back to my BASIC code book and figure it out. Now? I haven't a clue. I can turn in on, then I usually just hope for the best!

Innocence and precocity

Answers provided by Grade 2 students:

What's the difference between moms & dads?

1. Moms work at work and work at home & dads just go to work at work.
2. Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.
3. Dads are taller & stronger, but moms have all the real power 'cause that's who you got to ask if you want to sleep over at your friend's.
4. Moms have magic, they make you feel better without medicine.

What does your mom do in her spare time?

1. Mothers don't do spare time
2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.

What would it take to make your mom perfect?
1. On the inside she's already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.
2. Diet. You know, her hair. I'd diet, maybe blue.

If you could change one thing about your Mom, what would it be?

1. She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I'd get rid of that.
2. I'd make my Mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.
3. I would like for her to get rid of those invisible eyes on the back of her head.

CYA

So I had this long rant about my job that I - thank god - saved as a draft after writing because, well, that's what drafts are for - to let you cool down before posting or sending something disastrous. Now the post itself wasn't particularly disaster-causing and not even very caustic. It was even rather nicely constructed, and dare I say a tad witty... of course I can say that, you've never seen it so you have to take my word for it!... But I decided it prudent not to publish it.

Suffice it to say I've been busy... and not always in a good way.

Today I did something new. Do I dare admit it?

Sure, why not?

Today, I created a series of powerpoint slides. There. Now I've admitted I've never used powerpoint before. Yes, I know. Everyone has used powerpoint. Even little children know how to use powerpoint. Your dog probably scratches out his requests for walks and doggie treats using a powerpoint presentation complete with sound and graphics.

But I've never used it. That is, till today.

It's a pretty nifty program, though it is constraining in its formatting, regardless of how many choices you're offered. That's part of the reason I've never used it before. I've sat through too many powerpoint presentations that bored me out of my mind. I never wanted to inflict such boredom on others.

In an effort at full disclosure, I wasn't actually creating a presentation today. What I was doing was creating individual slides that I could then save as JPEGs so that they can be mated with the video and audio files we'll be producing for our latest project. So I didn't mess with slide transitions, or animations, or sound, or anything like that. But for a first time, it was kinda fun. Maybe I'll have to rethink my aversion to the program...

Fainting Goats

It was one of those 'you have to be there' moments, but these fainting goats came up in conversation at a party last night. So I thought I'd share them.

Snow is definitely worse than sand

Certainly as a vacation destination, I'll take sand over snow pretty much any day. But I suppose that's because I grew up in snowy climates.

But that's not what I was thinking about today. I was thinking that snow is definitely worse to run in than sand. Easier than in sand above the tide line, but definitely more difficult than sand below the tide line. Not only is the snow an obstacle and a shifting surface that you have to negotiate, the additional challenge of snow is that the snow we have now has been subjected to wind and sun since it fell, so it has a little bit of a crust on the top. But it's not thick enough that you can run on top of the snow. So when you run through it, the crust makes the slippage of your foot as you break it unpredictable. First you lurch to the left, then the right, then the heel, then the toe. It breaks your cadence and makes for a challenging run, that's for sure.

I was so excited about the possibility of running outside again. A chinook has finally blown in after some below seasonal temperatures, and the snow has stopped falling after a week of constant shovelling. The city here is really pretty good about clearing the walking trails, so I figured it would be the perfect day to go.

Alas, the city very efficiently cleared the snow several days ago, but the south end of the canals is all exposed land - housing developments are non-existent or just beginning - so there was a lot of drifting. At first I hopped over the drifts, actually enjoying myself, but then I turned a corner and the pathway was nothing but drifts! After ten minutes of slogging through them to come to a clear path again, I came to the conclusion that I'd rather run on the beach, than in snowdrifts!

Famous Puppet Death Scenes - Scene: The Feverish Heart

We spent our weekend pleasantly, celebrating the mid point between birthday and Valentine's day. This production was one of the activities for the weekend.

Yes, I realize this is the third time in the last half year that I've blogged about a puppet production. It's really just coincidence, since I'm not deliberately seeking out puppet productions. This one - Famous Puppet Death Scenes - is a hard one to describe however, so I leave you to just enjoy the clip. We were delighted with the show, but it is so unique that there's no frame of reference to use when describing it. I first heard about it through an article in the newspaper describing how it was a big hit when it played in NYC, and since it's a homegrown group, that seemed all the more impressive.

I really do wonder why it seems puppets are so attractive right now - perhaps it has something to do with their materiality, or with the presence of the puppeteer within the production. I don't have plans to see any more puppet shows though, so you should be spared further puppet talk at least.

Hiatus

I seem to be in an impromptu hiatus on this blog. It hasn't been intentional. Mostly it's a result of adjusting to the difference between working in the corporate world and the academic one. In the academy, I know exactly when my busy times will be, when I have to complete tasks, and what my weekly schedule will be like (give or take a meeting or two) at the beginning of every semester.

In the corporate world, even though I'm a contractor, I need to maintain a good relationship with my contractee, who is essentially my boss. I'm finding that he operates on a much more immediate basis than I do, often telling me only days ahead of time about a project deadline (like he did this week). That makes it difficult for me to calculate my workload more than a few days ahead of time, which is something I'm not used to. So it's a bit of an adjustment.

Since boss man is out of the country for the next three weeks, I will hopefully have a bit more control over my life and get back on track with my academic work as well as blog posting... but I suppose only time will tell.

So my apologies if you've been logging on and seeing the same thing over and over. It should improve over the next few weeks.

Stop right there!

Gene Police

You!!
Out of the pool!

Blown away

The weather channel is saying the gusts of wind outside are hitting 75 km/hr (that's almost 50mph for those metric-illiterate). I suspect out here near the edge of the city, we're feeling it even more than people protected by the buildings.

I thought I was just that tired. But no, those gusts are strong enough that the house actually shakes with a few of them. Even my computer monitor is wobbling on the desk, the wind is blowing so hard.

Last week, I tried to run in this kind of weather - the gusts were only 60kph, but even then, I felt like I was running fully steam uphill when I was going into the wind, even though it looked like I was almost standing still. Made me feel old and out of shape. At one point when I rounded a corner and the wind angle changed, it almost ripped the ear buds of my mp3 player right out of my ears!

Today? Thank god for the treadmill. It's boring, but at least it won't steal my breath away!

Flying beer cans

Got directed to this cartoonist's site: Pearls before Swine by a friend. I especially like Friday's cartoon - hope you enjoy it too!

Passport woes

So, the rumours you've been hearing about long wait times at Canadian passport offices? Yep, they're all true.


Stood in line 4 1/2 hours yesterday to try to get new passports for myself and two kids since they expire in a couple of months and we'll be travelling within that time. It's supposed to be easier to get it if you fill out the application form online first, but you can't do that for a children's application, which I had of course. Also, the lineup for the south office is supposed to be shorter, but because the building is smaller, it snakes outside for most of the time, so I went to the downtown office, where although I waited a bit longer, I was inside the whole time. Which was nice because there was a wicked wind blowing that day that would've felt really chilly.

The thing that surprised me the most about the line was not so much it's length (though that was a bit shocking) as the people in it. There were a few expressions of the wow-this-line-is-really-long kind, mostly at the beginning when we first started lining up, but other than that, everyone waited pretty patiently. Sure, the kids were running around, bored out of their minds (and I forgot my mp3 player, so had to listen to ALL of it), but aside from a few conversations here and there, people mostly waited patiently for the line to move forward.

It got me thinking about the last time I was in a government office waiting for a long time. I'm not sure if it was the Social Security office, or the DMV, but either way, the waiting people there were certainly much more boisterous about the whole affair. I know the last time I was at the DMV, there was one gentleman who kept following us around, talking to us, and another who was demanding rather loudly to be served (and who was promptly escorted out by security).

Although there was a sign at the passport office telling people that if they were harassing they wouldn't be served (much like the signs at the DMV) the mood of the crowd was such that I would've been surprised to hear anyone complain. Mostly, people stood quietly, or talked amongst themselves.

Now maybe the comparison of the group at a Social Security office and a passport office isn't fair - there isn't probably much of an overlap between the two groups. But at the same time it makes me wonder if in addition to spelling and pronunciation, we also inherited the British facility for queuing.

The language may be different, but we're really talking about the same thing

I had a meeting for work today that wasn't quite what I expected or was used to. It actually went better than I thought, mostly because the person who I thought would create the most waves seems to have not read the document I sent out at the beginning of the week. I'm not one to get offended if you don't read what I write, so it worked out well.

It was the biggest meeting I've been in to date - 6 of us - which might not seem like much, but most of my meetings have been with 2 or 3 people at the most. I wasn't looking forward to it because I suspected it would drag on - it did - but it consoled me in some ways because it quelled some misgivings I'd been having about this job.

I took the position because I had the experience to pull it off and I thought it was close enough to my career goals that I could actually include it on a cv. (Even at my most creative, I don't think I could make coffee schlepping at Tim Horton's into a line on the cv) But much of the work I began with was mundane or seemed far removed from academia.

But today's meeting made me realize it's really just a question of a different vocabulary. It was a pre-production meeting, where we were hammering out the aesthetics and optics of how we wanted to present the content that I'd developed for our project. We've already done one project with the same host website, so it needs to look similar to the existing project, which gave us a basic framework to start from. But we still needed to think about how this particular project will demand a different approach, and what tone we want to take with it as well as what combination of text, image, video, and audio we wanted. As we talked about it, I began to realize that our talk of users and scripts was really the same thing as audience and voice that we talk about in academia.

I had been afraid that my work for this company might be perceived as lying too far afield from my academic work, so I was pleasantly surprised to realize much of what we were talking about was the same things we talk about when writing within the academy. We just use different words.

True, I've really only talked of audience and voice in the context of teaching writing composition to undergrads, and not really in terms of my own scholarly work, but there's something to be said for paying attention to audience and voice in scholarly work that I don't think we get much instruction in as graduate students. Perhaps that's because we're supposed to know this and I'm the only one who doesn't. But if recent research, like the article in this year's edition of Profession put out by the MLA is any indication, I'm not the only one who isn't taught this stuff. Maybe it would make moving from student to scholar a clearer transition if we did talk more about audience and voice in the context of say, the dissertation. But that might be a post for another day.

What's in a name?

Did you know that Dolly the sheep - you know, the one that was cloned - was named after Dolly Parton? Apparently one of the stockmen who helped deliver her came to name her after the chesty country singer because Dolly was cloned from a mammary cell. One of my coworkers found this out recently and couldn't wait to tell someone. My boss's question about how my dissertation on clones and cyborgs was going gave him the perfect opportunity.

...I wonder if there's a place for Dolly in my dissertation...

All dried up

Not much blogging. Plenty happening. Just don't know how to blog it.

Instead, some retro-blogging.

Last year today, I was contemplating oldest daughter's plans to leave.

The year before that, I had just heard my grandmother died.

And the year before that, I apparently thought readers might be interested in what I was reading myself.

Time flies

It's hard to believe that this day last year I was preparing to write my exams. It seems both longer than a year ago, and shorter at the same time.

I remember even before my exams being very excited about the possibility of working on my own stuff, and I suppose that's part of why it 'feels like it was so long ago' because I haven't been working on my own stuff - I've been trying to slog through stuff other people want me to do in order to get their approval so that I can finally do my own stuff! At least the end is in sight.

But at the same time, work is starting to really heat up and it's demanding more of my time these days. On the other hand, I think we're finally getting the grad conference planning under control, so I hopefully can spend a bit less time emailing the other committee members about that.

It is true that work expands to fill the time available, isn't it?

Spiders On Drugs

The Hinterland Who's Who is one of those childhood memories that anyone my age will remember from Canadian tv, but this one puts a new twist on an old (and tired) educational media spot.

Strings

A while back I wrote a post about storyworlds, mentioning one of the key features of a fictional storyworld being internal cohesion. In any non-realist narrative, the rules of the world have to be consistent within the story frame. We all know the frustration of watching movies or reading stories where something happens that's difficult to believe because it lies outside the realm of possibility.

When you're making a film with puppets, well, then your storyworld has to not only be consistent from the perspective of its narrative, but you have to respect the nature of the medium - the puppet - in telling the story.

The Ronnie Burkett show we saw a few months ago, while it didn't foreground the puppeteer, kept him in the audience's view, so that as an audience member, you always saw him and could not forget about the presence of the puppeteer. You saw Ronnie at all times, so you were hyper aware of his movements, and at some points in the narrative, I found myself following the puppeteer, watching him create the show, rather than watching the puppets themselves and attending to their storyline.

During that show, when Burkett got some strings tangled, the audience could see his embarassment, but also delighted in his deviation from the script by inserting a comment about the tangled strings into the mouths of the puppets themselves. Had the puppeteer been hidden during those comments, they would've ruined the storyworld created by the narrative by reminding the audience of the puppeteer. As such, they simply reinforced the audience's awareness of his manipulation of the puppets. In some ways, Burkett's show mirrored metafiction's foregrounding of the author as producer of the text e.g. Calvino's If on a Winter's Night.

Strings (2004) is a movie without a terribly original plot line - royalty, betrayal, love, a quest, death - but it uses puppets to tell the story. What is unusual about the movie is that it, like Burkett's show, does not attempt to hide the strings attached to the puppets (though unlike Burkett's show, we do not see the puppeteers).

Instead, the narrative uses the strings as a way of creating the storyworld.

The strings of a puppet are essentially its lifeline. A puppet cannot come to life without strings, and the realism of a puppet's movement depends on the skillful manipulation of those strings by the puppeteer. In this story, the strings are not just metaphorically the puppet's lifeline - they are its lifeline within the world.

When a puppet's head string is cut, it immediately dies, though puppets can also die if enough of their other strings are cut. But being puppets, with interchangeable parts, they also have the advantage over humans when it comes to regeneration. One of the early scenes in the movie shows the prince having his hand string cut off. All he needed to do was call down to the dungeon, have a hand removed from a slave, and attach it to his body in place of the broken one.

The storyworld rules with the strings going high up into the heavens, beyond sight, mean that a puppet can never go underneath something. So their gates are like reverse portcullises, rising up out of the ground to a height that no puppet could jump, and no puppet can traverse past because the bar prevents their strings from moving forward.

Consequently, all of their buildings are roofless, and with the rain, you can tell who are the oldest puppets because the wood of their bodies shows their long exposure to the elements. Also, in the dungeon, puppets are locked up by dropping them through a grid, so that they can't move outside the lines of the grid.

When a puppet is born, its mother develops a second set of strings that are intertwined with her own. Meanwhile, a baby is carved in preparation to receiving those strings - in the movie, it is the father who is carving the baby, but since it's the only birth we witness during the story, the narrative doesn't indicate whether other people might also be charged with carving the baby. When it comes time, the mother can tell, and she needs the assistance of someone else. The strings that are intertwined with her own life strings start to loosen and that other person - the midwife - grabs the strings before they break (they're fragile at this point) and inserts them into the carved baby. The strings then change color and thickness, as they carry life to the child. When all the strings are attached, the child is alive.

The film is an excellent of example of a storyworld axiom: puppet strings are really its lifeline and extend high into the heavens, that is then carried to its logical conclusion in every aspect of that world. It's like imagining if everyone could change their gender whenever they want to, or that dragons can fly - the axiom is adhered to in every aspect of the character's lives. It's a very involved storyworld, and even though the plot is particularly clever, it's worth watching just to see how the plot unfolds within the confines of the storyworld's rules.

Unintended effect

In a strange kind of Eisensteinian montage moment, I found myself making connections between two back-to-back commercials that I doubt the advertisers had intended.

First, a commercial from Fidelity Investments about rolling all your old 401ks into a single IRA to maximize your retirement savings. This was immediately followed by a commercial from Osteo-BiFlex featuring a 77 year old woman who still works as a waitress. She says, "I’m 77 years old and I work as a waitress. I work 10, 12, 14 hours a day… I just couldn’t do it without Osteo-BiFlex."

Maybe she wouldn't have to do it if she'd listened to Fidelity...

Dissertation fix

I've been jonesing for my dissertation lately, and the Christmas break finally gave me a chance to work on it.

Yep, I'd say it was a bit of a compulsion, and having the chance to put other projects aside (and work) for a week and spend some time reading the stuff I really want to read was such a relief, the only thing I can compare it to would be how it would feel to have a cigarette again. Getting back to the stuff I want to read might not quite be that lightheaded, relaxed feeling I would get from a puff, but it sure did feel good.

Not that I haven't been doing work on the dissertation, but for the last two months, I've been responding to a reviewer's request to add material that holds little interest for me, and it's been tough going.

It's also taken me a long time to adjust to my new line of work. It's not that I'm working a lot, but that I'm unsure of what I'm doing, so I spend a lot of time thinking about it when I'm not actually working, which eats into time I could be spending reading things I really want to read!

So I finally got to read some criticism on cyberspace, and a book about Star Wars (only marginally relevant, but on my to do list) and I felt reinvigorated about the dissertation. Now I even feel like I can slog through the rest of the material my one reviewer told me to read 'cause I'm remembering what I'm in this for.

So one of my new years resolutions? Not to quit this compulsion, but to encourage it. Unconventional for a resolution, but if it works, who am I to worry about protocol?

They all look the same to me anyway....

So the announcement by the USFDA that there will be no restrictions or required notifications on cloned meat and milk, has some people north of the border asking questions about what Canada's stance will be on cloned animal products.

Some have suggested that Canada would be wise to require labelling, simply to distinguish itself from US products for people who might not want to eat cloned meat. We really do have an aversion to anything that we don't imagine is naturally made, don't we? Considering how many of the things we use and consume in our lives that have been touched by some kind of technology, some kind of invention that humans have dreamed up to make our lives better, it really is surprising the reluctance we have - as a group - to accept things that have been modified by technology, particularly when those things are animals or human beings. We have less fear of robots than genetically modified humans, less fear of gadgets than we do of cloned animals. No wonder many cultures have had a fear of twins.

Of course as far as I'm concerned, I would eat cloned or non-cloned food - most of it would depend on whether it was on sale or not! I don't even have a problem with GMOs (genetically modified organisms), at least not in theory. I do have a problem with the economics of genetically engineering foodstuffs, like monoculture, patenting and the kind of extortion that a company like Monsanto can get away with.

Some observers have noted that cloning is still so expensive that it is unlikely it will be used for mass production of meat products. Cloning may be used as a breeding tool - to ensure the continuation of genetically superior breeding stock - but it is unlikely that we'll be eating cloned meat anytime soon.

For me, taste and cost are the primary driving factors in my food purchasing decisions, not where the food originated from. As long as the animal is healthy, I really don't care how similar it might be to any other one.

White Christmas... almost

Today, the day after all the festivities, the very relaxing and enjoyable holidays during which I did nothing, it now snows.

But I don't mind. I've never really felt like I needed to have a White Christmas to make it a real holiday. I've also never really felt the need to have turkey at Christmas (though this year I did courtesy of my sister).

Actually, no snow over Christmas was actually pretty nice. It was easy to get around and was warm enough that it wasn't a chore to travel. I like that.

Today, the day that I need to get back to work, it snows. Several centimeters. It seems appropriate that the day back to work is the one where it snows, doesn't it? It also feels really nice to have done pretty much nothing at all for the last two days.

Happy Winter everyone!

(clicking on the photo will show you a satellite image of how the earth changes with the seasons)

Tis the season

Ahhh... the joys of gift shopping... I'm very glad I finished last week.

I've been reading several articles in the paper and online about how popular gift cards are this year. And how they're such a great idea. And how they make your gift shopping so easy.

And I suppose they are an easy gift to buy. You don't have to search for the right size or color, or second guess whether they'll like the gift.

But for a shop-a-phobic like me, the gift card is usually not the gift that I get most excited about. I've received a few gift cards before - some of them have been appreciated because they were places where I regularly shop anyway and it was great to be able to go and pick out something I wanted. I've gotten other gift cards that sit in my wallet for months before I'd find the time to go to that particular store, and then sometimes it took a while to find something I actually wanted there.

The downside is, for someone like me, the time you save shopping for my gift just gets passed off on me. Giving a gift card that you don't know the person will love and use, just puts the burden on the recipient to spend the time you saved.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no scrooge, and I'm not against gift cards per se, but all this talk about gift cards lately has just got me thinking about them. They're fabulous for giving experiences - a trip to the movies, a day on a ski hill, an outing to the local amusement center - and sometimes you just know it's right (like if you gave me a card for amazon or chapters...) But I still like getting actual things.

After all, just imagine a Christmans morning just full of gift cards. A tree stacked with nothing but gift cards just isn't as much fun on the morning of the 25th.

Those Canadians and their computers!

Actually, it's those Canadians and their blogs. Apparently, per internet-capita, Canadians read more blogs than any other country*

Two point touch theorizes that is has something to do with the trust and level of establishment of IT press (with the US having a well trusted print IT press, which is why it ranks lowest):

The equation then becomes that penetration of blogs is in inverse proportion to the trust and penetration of mainstream print media. Common sense, I guess.

But a commenter takes the cultural approach:

To be fair, TheGoodBlogs statistics may not be truly representative of what’s out there since our sample is still relatively small. However for what it’s worth, in terms of absolute visits, US (64%), Canada (18.5%), UK (4.88%), Germany (1.94%), France (1.75%), Australia (1.46%), India (1%) and the rest is less than 1%.

What does seem to correlate though is if I apply the absolute numbers against the number of internet users per country (obtained on www.internetworldstats.com), it shows me that Canadians with Internet access is almost 2.5 times more likely to visit blogs than their US counterparts. I found nothing to that substantiate the other countries like Spain etc.

Anecdotally, (tongue-in-cheek of course) I think it means that the US have better alternative channels of entertainment like better cable and satellite TV, more online shopping opportunities, better shopping malls and recreational distractions than us poor sods up north! We rely on keeping each other company online when we’re snowed in and frequent blogs in the hope that someone will be our friend!

I tend to think the commenter is closer to the mark, simply because I don't know whether the US has a more well trusted IT press than Canada. The argument does shift during the post from theorizing about IT press to mainstream press, which I would imagine are worlds apart. At least when it comes to mainstream press in the US (which I have more experience with than the IT press). But it's an interesting piece of trivia.

*The countries included in the analysis are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US

Much better

My earlier post trying to share the presentation I made wasn't working - Geocities kept rerouting you to a different page than the one I asked it to send you to - so here it is in all its glory (or not!)

No pulse?

Usually when we say someone has no pulse, we're using figurative language to indicate an individual who is unemotional, or reluctant to express any passionate emotion, but I would imagine that this man, who literally doesn't have a heart beat is actually pretty excited about his new heart.

Happy anniversary

As I was running today, it occured to me that right about this time (well, maybe November) is my tenth year running anniversary. Hooray for me! Since the traditional tenth anniversary gift is a tin or aluminum item, I guess I won't be buying anything to celebrate it... after all, metal and running don't really seem to go together, do they?

I had quit smoking earlier in the year - which means this year is the tenth anniversary of that event too - and I was putting on the pounds. It wasn't pretty and I figured that I was getting old enough that my regimen of eating whatever I wanted and sitting around wasn't going to work anymore. I had to actually do something now to maintain my weight.

I remember my first run. It was about 300m and by the end of it, my lungs were on fire and I felt like throwing up. Yeah, I was in horrible shape. But despite that horrendous first attempt, I went back the next day. This time I stopped at 250m and the burning wasn't quite so terrible. I gradually began working my way up the distance, usually trying for a continuous run rather than the walk-run-walk-run that they usually recommend for beginners. (Part of this was because I didn't know of this wisdom, and part of it was because it felt like cheating to me to walk part of the time.)

But the thing I kept thinking about as I was running today was that ten years is an awfully long time and I really haven't done anything worth writing about during that time. Sure, the first time I ran a 10k (took me over an hour!) I was pretty proud of myself, and I've run more than one of them, but I really haven't gone the distance, so to speak. I'm not talking marathon here - I don't know that I could manage one of those - but something that stretches me a bit more might be a good idea.


Thing is, I've tried to increase my distance and frequency at various times before. And I find I can't do it. It's not so much the time it takes to do so many runs, though they do require a significant commitment, but it's the exhaustion. When I try to run farther or faster, trying to build up to something more than my 2-3 runs a week, I end up so tired that I spend more time sleeping. And even when I'm awake, I find I'm exhausted enough that I can have difficulty concentrating. Concentration is not something I can give up. I can't afford it.

So I feel stuck at this level of exercise. I still enjoy it, and I notice that if I don't go running for a while I start to feel out of sorts, but I'd like to take on a new, longer challege - maybe a half marathon - without disrupting the rest of my life. Problem is, I don't know that I can accomplish that.

So I feel good that I've been running this long and am still enjoying it, even though I feel like I could be doing more. Guess I'll just have to be happy with that.

Customer Service... I do not think that word means what you think it means...

Two stories of customer service - one good, one bad. Which one do you want first? The good one? Too bad, it's my blog. You get the rant first.

Last week, I spent a rather frustrating several minutes on the phone with my cell phone company (at least calls to them don't run up my minutes). I was requesting - for the third time - a copy of my first two bills on the account.

We signed up for the service at the beginning of September, and got a rather annoyed call at the beginning of October from the company asking why we hadn't paid our bill. We responded that we hadn't received one, paid the amount requested, and confirmed our mailing address with them (they'd written it down wrong).

The next month, we again had an annoyed call asking us why we hadn't paid our bill. Now we were annoyed as well and told them that yet again we had not received our bill and could they please send it.

Then at the end of October, I spent several minutes on the phone convincing someone that I had never received my bills for the previous months and they needed to send them. The lackey on the other end acted like he was doing me a favor by not charging me the $8 "bill reprint" fee. He did however do me the favor of at least telling me what my account number was, so I could sign up for online billing. (I would've known my account number and signed up for online billing in September if they had ever seen fit to send me my bill.) Now the power over the bills was at least in my hands though it wasn't retroactive.

Last week when I called, the second lackey I talked to told me the post office must have lost my bills and he would send new ones out but charge me the $8. Now $8 ain't much - good cup of coffee and a biscotti - but I hadn't been the one screwing up here - it was either the cell company or the post office - and I didn't think it was right that I should pay for someone else's mistake. He argued. I lost it and cussed. Then I asked for his supervisor. He finally told me I wouldn't be charged for the additional bill.

Who in the world authorizes staff to argue with a customer over $8? Especially when I've got four phones I'm paying for. What kind of customer service mentality is this? It's not like the $8 was gonna come out of the lackey's pocket! And even though I'm not paying for it, I'm unimpressed with this service provider and am seriously considering switching after only a few months. Was it worth it to them to lose a customer? Especially one with a blog? You notice I haven't mentioned who it is, but if they pull another one like this, you bet their name will be emblazoned across a post!

The good one? My hubby ordered an item off ebay. When it arrived, it was the wrong version. He emailed the seller. She looked at it and said, yep, oops, that was my bad. I posted the wrong version.

THEN. She went out, BOUGHT the version she'd promised, is sending it to him, WITH a SASE to send the wrong one back!

Now THAT's excellent customer service! My cell phone provider could learn a thing or two from her.

Learning then teaching

I've been learning a new software program for work, and I figured the best way to figure out all its features was to create something with it. It's a multimedia program that allows you to produce video clips, utilizing camera input, sound recording, images, and existing sound clips.

So I created a brief clip about the thing I think most about these days: cyborgs. It's a brief intro to the term and some of its common uses. Perhaps someday it might be actually be useful to my teaching.

If you want to see it, click here. It will download to a temporary file on your computer - so if you don't want it to do that, don't click, but if you do download it, it will run on RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.

I had a lot of fun putting together. Hope you enjoy!

Finally moved in?

I've decided that acquiring, and cooking our first meal on a barbecue constitutes "all moved in"... and boy! was that a great tasting steak!

I like grilling a lot, so finally buying a barbecue - half price! who says it's crazy to buy summer equipment in December? - is the end to a quest that began the week we got here. It's not the exact same model as the one we'd first eyeballed, but it's got all the same features. And did I mention it was half price?

It cooks like a dream! People who have been to my house in real life and had barbecue anytime in the last several years may have noted the flame-like nature of our old barbecue. Not this one! Even in winter weather - chinook weather, mind you, but winter nonetheless - it produced a nice even heat that cooked everything just perfectly. And it's got one of those cool side burners for a frying pan or a pot as well!

Helps being in cattle country too - the steaks were an outrageously low price because we bought bulk and the quality was fabulous. Shout out to my sister for telling me about the place. I love it!

Steaks cooked on our new grill + beer I brewed myself. That was an awesome meal!

Valley of no left turns

Been away from the blogsphere for the last few days because I've been spending less time in front of my computer. Went out to a mountain resort over the weekend, which was fabulous! We had no schedule, no agenda, no kids, no email. Nothing but beautiful scenery, fresh air, hot springs and good food.

I needed that!

The valley we travelled through to get there - the valley of no left turns - is the only place I had previously seen a moose. Shortly after telling everyone in the car that, we saw one! Which was kinda cool.

Coming back meant there was lots of work to do that had piled up while I was enjoying myself instead of working, so I've just been trying to whittle down the to do list. Sometimes it feels like it will never go away. Losing our internet connection yesterday didn't help and it took almost two hours just to get ahold of someone at the company who could tell me what was going on!

Why is it that the good times are inevitably followed by the bad?

It's a good feeling...

...when you accomplish something really hard. I got this letter today:

Dear Novelist,

You did it.

Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.

And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It's an amazing accomplishment, and we're proud to have had you writing with us this year.

I'm pretty proud to have done it! Now I'm going to take a bit of a break from it, then I'll have to take it up again, finish off the last two chapters (at least I figure it will just be two more chapters), then return back to the beginning and smooth out the rough edges. That'll be the labour intensive part.

But it feels good to have set myself a challenge and to have met it, even when at times I felt like giving up.

Record breaking

Why does it have to be that the year we come back, we start breaking records? It hasn't been this cold here in ten years!

UPDATE: We set a new low -30.1C last night. Coldest it's been since 1896.

The response from either side seems to be "this is ridiculous!"

Ran across this obscure new item: a man was ejected from a gym for grunting during his workout. Much of the internet reaction to this story has been cries of 'ridiculous!' from hard core bodybuilders, but I find the ridiculous part of this story to be this patron's reaction to having his membership revoked - he's suing for defamation of all things because people are making fun of him for getting kicked out.

Now, I had a membership at Planet Fitness. I've had memberships at several different gyms, and been a guest at several others. I've worked out in university gyms, women's gyms, hard core gyms, and Planet Fitness. And I've got to say that Planet Fitness was one of the best gyms I've ever worked out at.

Why were they one of the best? Because they lived up to their tag as a "Judgment Free Zone". I'm not one to be intimidated by the big muscle-y guys in the "guys" weight room. I plow on ahead and enter, moving the pin waaaay back up on the machine and pulling the seat all the way up, but it took me some time to muster up that kind of courage, to enter the "muscle" zone. (Mostly, I think of how much money I'm paying and how much I want to use the equipment I'm paying for and that gets me over any reluctance I might have to tread on sacred masculine territory)

But when I first started going to the gym, those big muscle-bound guys were intimidating. Many of them seemed to hang out just to try to intimidate anyone who didn't have as much muscle mass as they did.

Now I can respect that someone might choose to spend hours in the gym every day to get their body into peak performance. I also can respect the person who simply wants to go in once or twice a week, do some light toning and exercising and spend the rest of their time doing other things. But that respect isn't always evident in gyms, and I've been given the annoyed look for coming in and messing up the place where "real" men are working out. I've just learned to live with it.

What Planet Fitness is doing is trying to create a gym that makes casual exercisers comfortable. They're very upfront about it. Their policies are all over all their material and their website. You walk into a Planet Fitness and you immediately notice that there are more ellipticals than free weights. That tells you something. There are plenty of gyms out there where the emphasis is on weights and you know it the minute you walk in.

What I think is a bit ridiculous, is for someone to walk into a Planet Fitness thinking it's a Golds Gym. They're not the same. And if you want Gold's Gym, you should go there, not the Judgment Free Zone. Crying foul because you thought you could tranform one into the other strikes me as just plain ridiculous.

Reflecting on Writing

After reading the latest issue of Reconstruction, blogging is on my mind again.

Always when discussions of the use of blogs, or the appropriateness of academic blogging makes its rounds through the blogsphere, or emerges in a journal issue like this, I am reminded of the Tribble-like concerns that so often get expressed: that blogging is a waste of time; that it's self indulgent; that it does little to further one's career and can in fact damage it; that scholarly blogging has no merit because it isn't peer reviewed etc. etc.

Of course I make no claims to scholarly blogging. I'm a scholar who blogs, but when I do mention my research, it is usually because I think readers might find it as interesting as I do, or because I'm trying to organize my thoughts about something particular. The primary (or even secondary or tertiary) purpose of this blog has never been to work through scholarly arguments. That should be self apparent to anyone who's read it. Reading the Reconstruction issue got me wondering though if this blog might be a way for me to work through some of the challenges I've been having in my academic life lately.

Some of the challenges I've been facing lately that might benefit from more frequent academic blogging blogging could include:

1. Improving my writing. This is a big one. I have an advisor who tells me my academic writing is stilted and awkward, that I don't seem to have found my own writing voice. I agree that sometimes my academic writing is too strained. Part of it has to do with my training - remove every mention of the personal - and part of it I think with my relative inexperience in writing.

I've been admiring academic writers who can thoughtfully connect their personal positions and identity with their academic topic, and I'd like to emulate that. I'm still not sure about what kind of academic "voice" I have, which makes it difficult to know what I need to be going to develop it. Perhaps writing about academic topics in an open, everyday forum like this blog will help loosen that writing up.

All this practice would presumably make writing an easier process, which would have the added benefit of making my writing tasks easier when it comes to producing them.

2. Providing unity. Blogging more about my academic projects might unite the disparate pieces of academic work in a way that explains their commonalities.

Right now along with the dissertation research, I'm juggling a chapter revision, a collaborative book proposal, a conference presentation, and an organizational committee for another conference. Since each of these activities involves a different topic or area of interest, I'm finding myself compartmentalizing them in a way that I don't necessarily think does me much good. Since they are all academic endeavours, there is a commonality in them, and I think if I could find a way to incorporate them all into one category, I might find fruitful interchanges between them, instead of boxing them each up as a separate activity.

3. Working through the difficult parts of my research. Right now, I'm faced with a research task for the dissertation that I see the value of, but don't relish doing. (Isn't that the way so many things in these kinds of projects, or life in general, are like?) I've made little headway on this aspect right now in part because it pushes me in a research direction that I'm unfamiliar with and I'm having some difficulty figuring out what material I should concentrate on the most.

Perhaps blogging my reading would help me articulate how useful the material is as I work my way through it. A bonus might even come if I have some readers who could help me navigate through the quagmires of the reading as well.

This blog has remained mostly personal to this point because that's what it started out doing. I don't really wish to abandon the personal, since it gives me a great deal of satisfaction knowing that people who I care about stay in touch with me this way. I'm not sure if this blog will work as a combination of academic and personal posts.

Then again, after the Storyworlds post, tw asked if I was going to post some of the Nanowrimo writing, and I've been considering doing that (after I clean it up a bit since it's awfully rough right now). Although the fiction writing has nothing to do with the subjects I study academically, I'm finding the process of writing to be similar. Although I've written a bit of fiction here and there, this is the first time I've written so much in such a short period of time. It has made me much more aware of the writing process itself as I struggle to figure out how to get from one plot point to another, find a new plot twist opening up in the context of trying to write about something else, and taught me that much of writing is simply sitting down and plowing through what needs to be done. Inspiration be damned, just write!

So at the end of this post, as I consider everything I've said so far, I guess all I've done is confirm for myself that this blog will remain fairly eclectic, and given myself permission to make it even more eclectic if needed by discussing my academic work from time to time. I suppose this post itself is a good example of reason #3 above - working/writing through a problem to find a solution. Thanks blogreaders for coming along for the ride!

Plugging Away

Still behind.

But even more so now. I was doing really good coming into 25K - I was even a bit ahead at that point. But then I had a child who was ill, and it scared her. So I spent a lot of time just being nearby. Which of course means a lot of things got put on the back burner. Nanowrimo included.

Now I'm playing catch-up again. I don't think it's impossible for me to catch up, so I'm giving it a try, but it will require a lot more time than I feel like I can afford right now. Work is starting to get busy, my boss is out of town next week, so we want to get some things done right now, and we've just added three new projects to our roster over the next several months. There's variety in my work - which is great - but it means there's lots of it.

But I don't want to quit Nanowrimo. I set myself this challenge. I think I can meet it. I want to meet it. I keep saying I'd like to try to write fiction. Now's the opportunity to do it. With structure. And a goal. And a deadline. These are things that motivate me. So. I'm. Not. Giving. Up.

(At least not yet)

Last week, I wrote that it was difficult to get words on the paper, not because I didn't have ideas for the story, but because it was just hard to arrange them. This week, I am running out of ideas. Well, not really running out. I have ideas, I just don't know how to get the story from where it is now, to where I want it to be. Even when I do get words down, I have to still the inner critic whispering - okay, I have to yell to get her to shut up - who I have to ignore and just keep writing. The goal here is to get the words down. After comes the time where I make them into good words. But even with carte blanche for vocabulary, grammar and ANY sense of style, I'm still struggling.

But. I'm. Not. Giving. Up. At least not yet.

Gender bender

I realize I'm not the girliest girl on the planet, but it's a bit disturbing when a celebrity face recognition program shows the highest matches with men!



And who the hell is Christiano Ronaldo?!?!?!?

Shocked

Today started pretty ordinarily. I began work in the morning and took a break a few minutes ago to have some lunch. We recently started getting the newspaper by subscription - I haven't subscribed to anything other than small local papers in years - and sometimes I read it while I eat lunch.

There I was, eating leftover Chinese food, when I turned the page and saw a picture of my former sister-in-law.

She disappeared 16 years ago and they just now charged a man with her murder.

I'm shocked. I hadn't really thought much about her since my divorce. I had only met her once, and briefly, and even then, I don't think she said much more than two words to me. I don't think she particularly liked me. But she was also fairly young when we met, so maybe it was just teenage standoffishness to a stranger, since that's what I was to her. Either way, I didn't really know her at all. She hadn't been living at home for several years before she disappeared, but I remember how hard her leaving had hit her mother.

Even though I barely knew her, reading about this case and being reminded of it, has affected me more than I would expect. I think the thing that makes this feel so shocking is how it will affect people who I care about - my stepdaughter in particular. I hope when this news unearths memories for her as well, it isn't painful, but might provide some relief knowing that there will be some closure with the pressing of charges against the man believed to be her aunt's killer.

Scattered

Too many things.

Too many different things.

Too many things to keep track of.

Too much work to do.

Storyworlds

For my comprehensive exams, one of my areas was narrative theory, which is an area of inquiry that examines the features and functions of narrative. Sounds simple, and in some ways it is, but there are some subtleties that I never would have thought about had they not belonged within this category.

But that's beside the point of this post. My point is that one of the concepts of narrative theory is the storyworld. It's really big in theories that explore the function and interactive nature of video games in particular. If you've ever read a book set in a place that you didn't recognize (which is most books) or played a video game, you've got an idea of what narrative theorists mean by storyworlds.

Rawdon Wilson describes how the axioms of a storyworld contribute to the kind of story you get. He uses a parable of two brothers who tire of reality and reimagine it to describe what happens in the use of storyworld axioms. The first brother creates his world by inventing counterintuitive propositions and accepting the axioms that would grow from them. This is what science fiction or fantasy is often seen to do - to take a proposition and follow it to its logical conclusion.

The second brother employed a code of normality which was interwined with a code in which anything might happen in his creation of a new imaginative world. This is magic realism. These brothers eventually become difficult to tell apart in their creation of new worlds to their followers.

Now, obviously Wilson's definition leaves out the third kind of storyworld, where the writer (a third brother so to speak) reproduces the recognizable world, even if it is part of the world that is unfamiliar to the writer or his readers. But that probably goes without saying.

I got thinking about storyworlds after I had a very strange experience this weekend. At one point, within a small group, we were talking, not about anything in particular, but just the kind of banter that happens when friends get together. Anyway, someone said something, and my first thought was to relate it to the storyworld I've been creating in this novel writing endeavour. I almost opened my mouth, because it made so much sense to me to say what I was going to say. But I stopped myself before saying anything by realizing what seemed very real and logical to me, the creator of this storyworld, would be incomprehensible to someone who didn't know that storyworld. Had I made a comment that made perfect sense for me buried in this world I'm creating, it would have sounded like sheer idiocy to anyone else.

Wilson didn't talk about what happens when fictional storyworlds invade the real one, but it doesn't take much to realize how disastrous it can be when you can't tell the difference between the two.

My kind of poetry

"WINTER POEM"

a poem by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre

" SHIT It's Cold! "

Just a little behind

If you've been curious how the Nanowrimo is going, well, the post title says it all.

On second thought, the title doesn't quite cover all of it. I am a bit behind where I should be at this point in the month in order to reach the goal of 50,000 words by November 30th. But I'm not terribly far behind, and today is the day I'm going to try to catch up to where I should be.

I need to average just under 2000 words a day to reach my goal. Right now I'm about a day behind. Part of it is because I've never undertaken something like this before. It's been a strange experience, working on a long piece of fiction with this kind of deadline/challenge hanging over my head.

It's also hard. There are some days that as I'm writing, I'm checking the word count every 200 words or so because it seems so hard to get them on the page. It's not that I don't have ideas for the story. I know where I want it to go, and I've got it mapped out for the next 5,000 words or so as well as some episodes that I want to include later on. But sometimes translating those ideas into those black marks on a white page is much harder than I ever thought it would be.

It makes me wonder whether other writers struggle in the same way, or whether it comes more easily to them? I don't know the answer, but I'm clinging to the hope that it will be like other things that I've tried. At first, they're really hard, but then get easier as I get more experienced at doing them. My academic writing has been this way. As an undergrad, I used to struggle a lot to get papers written. Not because of a lack of ideas, but just the process of getting it onto the paper in a format that I was satisfied with. But as I've progressed through my degrees, it's gotten easier. Not that it's easy. Just easier. I still feel like I'm sweating bullets at various points in an article. It's just that there are also places where I can sail along relatively unhampered by difficulties our doubts about what I'm writing.

Part of the reason why I took up the Nanowrimo challenge is because I wanted to see if that same thing could happen to a piece of fiction. I guess we'll see when November 30th rolls around.

I didn't even know these things existed outside the movies!

When the robots take over, they won't be running in the streets killing people - they'll be hitting us where it really hurts, our cars.

That's Calgary for you!

Yesterday during my run, I was getting quite warm and at one point thought to myself, "Boy, that breeze sure is nice"

Today it's snowing and I'm dreaming of warm sunny beaches.

Miscommunication, or non-communication?

Yesterday got entirely derailed and now I feel out of sorts, like my plans are in ruins and I don't know how to get back on track.

See, yesterday I had planned on finishing reading a theory book, and making significant headway on one of the novels.

But my boss called at 10 am. And he had a huge list of things to do. He's been in Hong Kong for the last three weeks, so we've really only communicated by email. I had a clear idea of what he wanted me to get done before he left, and I did all those things, but when he called he seemed disappointed that I hadn't done more.

Now, I hadn't failed to do more because I was lazy or just didn't think it was important. I'd done everything I knew he wanted. I had also sent him an outline that he wanted to forward to our client. I sent it twice. But when he called, he told me he needed it to be more detailed. Which confused me, because I didn't see how I could get much more detailed without actually starting to create the content, which we didn't want to do until the client approved the outline. And then he was disappointed that I hadn't created the outline for another project. I was under the mistaken impression that we hadn't even secured funding for that second project, so I didn't work on it (if we don't have money for the project, I won't get paid for doing the work, right?)

After he told me we did have funding, I got on the outline right away, but I was still puzzled by the request to expand the other outline. Luckily I wasn't puzzled for long because he called back and told me he'd found it in his inbox. He just wanted some minor notation changes, which were easy enough to do.

All in all, it was only a few hours of work, but I have mixed feelings about it because I think he's disappointed in my lack of work while he was gone, whereas I feel like I wasn't given a clear indication of what he wanted. It's a little frustrating.

Actually I think it all comes down to email. I'm fairly comfortable with email, and although sometimes I don't exactly get my point across right away, I keep trying. I feel comfortable having an extended conversation over a series of emails, but his are generally very short and often don't directly answer the questions I've asked. So when he goes away again next month, I'm afraid we're going to have the same problem. All I can hope is that our projects are well enough established that I'll have a better idea of what they need for us to pull them off and I'll need to rely on his email communication less. But I'm still a bit concerned that miscommunication or lack of communication might make this ideal job less than ideal.

Maybe that's why today it feels hard to shift gears and get back into my own work. But I've got to find a way to shift back and forth more effortlessly, or this kind of thing will keep on happening. And I've got to figure out my boss's communication style before he leaves town again.

I'm near Carl Sagan! Don't know if that's cool or scary...

So I was wandering through the internets a few weeks ago when I found this. It's a Worldview Quiz, which is supposed to give you an idea of where your beliefs and values fit in reference to some well known figures. According to their description:

Half of the questions deal with beliefs about how the world works; for instance, to what extent your worldview is based in faith, science, or both. The other half deal with opinions about what is important, especially as relates to humankind and the future; these values questions are outside of the realm of science.

As you can see, I mapped up in the top right corner, which I can only assume belongs to eternally optimistic science geeks. Some days I'd say I can fit in that category, but other days don't feel that way; other days I feel way too pessimistic about everything - including science - to ever think things will work out for humanity. My position on the chart reminds me of the transhumanists I've been reading about (for example here): they believe that we will transcend our current biology and technology and in so doing, transcend many of the problems in our world.

At the same time, I'm highly skeptical of such a project, since I doubt adding technology and changing human beings into posthumanity will solve the problems we already have. I suspect we'll drag them with us into the posthuman future, where they will simply be amplified (some of the texts I'm writing about in the dissertation explore this very question).

Maybe the day I took it I was feeling especially optimistic. Or maybe it outweighs my pessimism slightly. Either way, for what it's worth, I'm apparently a believer/valuer of progress and science.

Winter

Fall is awfully short here. I'd forgotten that. Actually, when we went to New England, I marvelled at how long the fall was, but coming back, I'd forgotten that the reverse was true, that it's very short here.

Since the snowfall last weekend, it has felt wintry, even though I know all the snow will be gone again by the end of this weekend and it will feel much nicer outside. Which is good, because I'm not quite ready for cold yet.

I've been trying to be more diligent in my running schedule and quit making excuses for not going. Cold weather one of those excuses I'm really happy to use, and I don't want to start using it... at least not yet. But I think I'm going to have to get some better cold weather running gear.

When we were here before, I lived a couple of blocks away from the Olympic Oval, which has a beautiful 400m track around it and is open to the public whenever the speedskaters don't have it booked (you can just barely see the track running just outside of the ice surface in the photograph). I sure got spoiled having that facility next door. The temperature at ice level was perfect for running, whether in the heat of summer, or the cool of winter. Now I have no access to an indoor track, so if I want to go, I have to venture outdoors. Hence, the quest for better outdoor running gear.

The snowfall did allow me to impress my oldest daughter however. The main roads are pretty good - it's not really that cold nor have we had that much snow - but the side roads to her house are pretty slick. I came around one corner and the backside of the car began to slide, so I went with it and pulled it through the corner. I pulled up in front of her house and she said to me. "That was so scary. But you just kept talking as if nothing happened!" (It wasn't really scary - I've had scary slides, and this was nothing more than a little slip of the rear end around an icy corner - but she's now starting to pay attention to these things) So she thought I was pretty cool to handle it that way. Kinda neat when you're kids think you're cool, even when you know you're not...

4755 words

That's a lot of words, or very few words, depending on your perspective. It's very few words for a novel, or some long piece of academic writing like, say, a dissertation. It's even only about 1/7th of my master's thesis.

But it's longer than a conference paper, and about the length of some seminar papers I've written. It's also really long for a blog post.

I'm pretty happy with the number though. That's how many words I've written for Nanowrimo, which is right on track for getting to 50,000 words by the end of the month. Actually, it's even a bit ahead of the game, which is good, because I can anticipate a certain level of reluctance creeping in as the month goes on. Thirty days solid of that kind of writing production is pretty intense, even if it's really rough writing. And it is. I'm not thinking about which word to use, or how to phrase something as much as I 'm just concentrating on getting the ideas onto the paper.

I'm having fun - so far - and it's kinda cool to think that if I can keep this up, I might just have an interesting story by the end of it.

But that's a long way off, and there are a lot of things that could derail me before that point. One day at a time is all I can count on. I've done things that way before - one day at a time - sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always in the end, feeling like it was worth the effort. So here I go again, with something else this time. One. day. at. a. time.

Too much of a good thing?

One of the disadvantages of living in a house bigger than a closet is that there are so many more places to put things and forget where you've put them.

Minimalism, or an embarassment of riches?

Just as I'm ready to embark on the Nanowrimo challenge, I come across this: the six word novel. Some of my favorite authors are listed, and I'm surprised by how many of the novels envision the end of the world or humanity. Since I like sf, I've always liked those kinds of stories, but they seem unusually common even for a group of genre fiction writers.

Daylight Savings

I've always wondered what people who work the graveyard shift think of daylight savings. In the fall, they have to work an extra hour that night, right? I wonder if they get overtime? (I assume they would, but my copy of the Alberta Labour code doesn't specifically address it). I would hope they'd get overtime! I hated working graveyards enough as it was, but to think you might have to do an extra hour at regular pay is just too much!

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

Next time you see me post about booking a flight to go somewhere else, remind me never to book an evening flight back, okay? Man! was I tired Tuesday night! Getting on a plane at 6 pm EST then spending the next seven hours on a plane/in an airport was brutal. Everytime I think my body's getting better at travelling, I realize I'm just deluding myself!

Seeing friends was good... very good... but I also ate waaay too much good food!

Finally nailing down a response from one of my readers was also good. And bad. But mostly good. I sure do hope I don't have to show up in person at his office door to get him to read stuff everytime though, 'cause that will get very expensive! But threatening to appear in person did the trick, and I got some really good feedback. He challenged me to add a dimension to the dissertation that I didn't have there. It will make the dissertation better (if I can pull it off, of course) and provide me with some really good experience in integrating thematic and philosophical themes within one extended scholarly endeavour. So it was good feedback.

The downside is that it requires a huge course of reading to pull it off. HUGE. In an area I've never concertedly studied before. Which means I need to take probably three or four months to read through it all and formulate a response to my reader's comments. Like I said, it will improve the dissertation, but, right now, it feels a bit overwhelming. So, it's off to the library to find what I need.

Why do I feel a bit like Frodo, contemplating Mount Doom?

You just can't go back

They say you can't go home again, and my experience moving back to Canada would confirm that. It's not quite the same as it was before you left... because you're not the same person, obviously, but it does surprise me how many people expect things to be the same. Moving back, I remember locations, routes, what places have good coffee, what streets to avoid, and such, but my interaction with those spaces is different than it was before I left.

Actually, I found myself when we first got back thinking about the more distant past, about 20 years ago when I first arrived in the city, rather than my life just before I left it 4 years ago. I'm not sure why, but I can only assume that the re-arrival two months ago triggered a lot of memories of that first arrival.

And now I'm finding that coming back to Boston, even only two months after leaving, feels very different. I suppose most of it has to do with not having a routine to follow, or the knowledge that I'm just visiting, but even it and the school feel like different places. I also realize that my half of any conversation will feel different than the other half. As I'm talking, I'm thinking about how weird it feels to be back, but at the same time, with some people who I never did talk to on a weekly basis, I realize that for them, nothing may feel different. What seems huge to me - that I'm no longer living here - is irrelevant for them. And that's a very strange feeling.

So I guess I'm figuring out that not only you can't go home again, but you also can't go away again, without it being different.

There are types of violence I guess

Just opened the wrapper on a DVD that bears the warning:

R for Strong Sci-Fi Action and Violence, and for Language

So how is Sci-Fi Action and Violence different from regular violence? Is it the potential unreality that is offensive? Transporters are subversive while subways aren't? Laser guns more violent than machine guns? Spaceship chase scenes more horrifying than the General Lee flying through the air? What?

Even the irrelevant can be relevant

I've been reading an interesting - and blessedly short - book about Star Trek and humanism that I picked up a couple of weeks ago. As far as academic press books go, it has all the things I think a good academic book should have. A (fairly) clear topic, a clearly outlined agenda, a handful of excellent insights that have me nodding and wondering why I didn't think of that, and the ability to generate a few questions that have driven me to further investigate the ideas presented.

Having said that, I've also been encouraged by reading Drones, Clones and Alpha Babes: Retrofitting Star Trek's Humanism, Post 9/11. Yes, I realize it's one of those many books that have emerged in the last five years that are trying to capitalize on the events of Sept. 11th, and since the book actually has fairly little to say on the subject, the title would certainly be just as descriptive without those final words. But what I've been encouraged by is the author's insertion of herself into the text.

I've been struggling a bit over the last few years with the idea of calling myself a Brit lit specialist, since, well, I'm not British and have never lived in Britain. I've been feeling like I'm not qualified to discuss British literature - particularly from a cultural studies perspective - without having lived there. But then I read Diana Relke's book, and in it, she makes it clear that she is a Canadian writing about an American cultural phenomena... and an American political climate. Her writing appears more academic for this reason. By looking at a cultural phenomena from the outside (but not so far outside that there's no resonance of understanding for her as the author), she has a kind of distance that allows a more objective point of view. As a reader, there doesn't seem to be an agenda, just a critical analysis, and it makes for a stronger argument I think.

So, I feel encouraged by her example that my own work is not without merit and my distance from contemporary culture in Britain might provide me with an advantage I might not have if I were immersed in the middle of it.

I think her summary in the Afterword of the book best sums up her approach to the subject as a Canadian studying an American pop cultural phenomenon:

In short, we make a fetish of any event that permits us to avoid the truth that no two nations on Earth are as alike as Canada and the United States. Like the Borg and Federation, like Shinzon and Picard, we are mirrors for each other - and what we have recently seen in that mirror is a squadron of Israeli Defense Force bombers at a Canadian military base practising how to drop Israel's newly-purchased American bunker-busters in the impending war against Iran. So we're already implicated. But that mirror also makes Canadians much more likely than other nationals to appreciate the nuances of the American imagination.

I like the idea that viewing another culture from the outside might act as a mirror for our own culture. It certainly lends itself to one of the central premises of my dissertation - that the human-species-wide implications of genetic biotechnologies represented in fiction may find expression in different ways across cultures, in part because of those cultures' histories of community inclusion and exclusion and how that has shaped their definitions and attitudes toward citizens and others.

So while the subject of the book is only peripherally related to the work I am doing, it has modelled for me a way of writing that is very attractive. Time well spent, I would say.

Perhaps a touch of narcissism isn't bad

Usually after I publish a blog post I go to "view blog" just to see what it looks like. I've been trying not to do so lately because it feels narcissistic, but OH LOOK! Blogger didn't publish the post it said it had published last weekend!

Guess I'm just *have* to keep checking up on them!

It's all about not embarassing myself

I didn't embarass myself on the Gorilla Run. But I came close. I woke up that morning with a stomach ache, which really didn't go away before the race, so my stomach was aching something fierce during the whole run.

At least that was the only problem. I woke up that morning out of a dream in which I had a stomach ache, which was a bit disturbing since I woke up with a stomach ache as well. But at least the rest of my dream didn't come true. I also dreamt that I couldn't find anything in the morning. I also couldn't dress myself. I kept running back into the house to get things. I also kept realizing that I'd forgotten to put on pieces of clothing, like a long sleeved shirt under my T-shirt or socks. As a result, in my dream, we didn't get out of the house till 10:10, which means we totally missed the 8 am race!

At least we got there on time. And I'm glad I ran with my sister. She was a great motivation, and everytime I wanted to slow down or even stop because my stomach was bothering me, she'd say really positive things like "we're almost there" and spur me on to keep going. She was great! and I wouldn't have done near as well if I hadn't had her pushing (or more accurately, pulling) me along. But I didn't embarass myself by dropping out or walking, so overall, I'm pleased with my performance.

Congratulations!... too bad we didn't plan this too well...

Congratulations to middle daughter for running a great 4k race today and qualifying for the Provincials! Yeah!

Too bad they take place the weekend the two of us have already booked tickets for Boston and she won't be able to go...