RBOC: thoughts upon returning home

• My laptop is really no longer an efficient tool. This was driven home to me when I found a plug in the airport lounge and sat down to work. Although I sat down at least 5 solid minutes before the man beside me, he was booted up and clicking away while I was still watching the little hourglass. And he probably didn't need to plug in within 20 minutes of bootup in order to avoid running out of battery power. Ugh. It's functional, which is why I still use it, but one could not by any stretch of the imagination call it efficient.
• Meeting with your entire committee within three days because you're only in town once or twice a year is an intense experience. Normally, if one of them had something discouraging to say, you'd have at least a few weeks to digest it before hearing what the next one said. Not so when you're only in town for a week and need to meet with everyone at once.
• I got good feedback, did necessary paperwork, picked up hard copies of things I needed, cleaned out the last of my crap out of my old office. Which is what I set out to accomplish.
• Dissertation writing group was good. Meeting with my advisor just before the group was probably a good plan, but it meant that I spent much of the evening feeling on edge. That's because my dissertation has not been heading in the direction it should be. Good to know that. But disturbing to realize my vision is not in line with what I need to do. At one point during our meeting, my advisor looked at me and said, "this is distressing you, isn't it?" Yep. Distressed is a very good word for it. I was thinking that I'd seriously miscalculated my entire grad education to that point and that I also was not capable of doing what she was asking. Those kinds of thoughts are enough to take anyone's breath away.
• Come to think of it, this is the second time I've had a conversation with my advisor that has made me feel like I made a colossal mistake in choosing first the school, and now the project. Is it just my advisor? Or have I really made some colossal blunders? I honestly don't know. Don't suppose it matters though, really. I mean, what are my options? Chuck it all away? I don't think so. So I keep going. But meanwhile, I wonder. Actually, I try not to think about it because my breath still catches in my throat at the thought of what it might cost if this was a colossal mistake.
• Much of the work I need to do now involves a rethinking of the project, which I'm sure will induce more anxiety as I struggle to change what feels natural to me into the project that my advisor has told me I must write. It's not that she's autocratic, she's right. It's just that I've been thinking about my project for so long in one way that it's just plain hard to think of it in the way I need to.
• On a more positive note, I had an absolutely wonderful couple of evenings with friends that really made up for all the distress of meeting with my committee, and the huge pile of work that needs to be done now. I feel privileged to be able to count such wonderful people as being in my corner, willing to listen to my ramblings, share their stories, and just plain be as glad to be with me as I am with them. It's also nice to see those kinds of people physically, in person. I'm all for the electronic age, but it sure don't beat a hug and a smile!
  

I didn't cry this time!

This time when I visited friends at PhD city, I didn't cry! I was made to swear I wouldn't cry. Probably because last time I was here with everyone I got really maudlin over the fact that I missed everyone.

So, congratulations to me. I managed to stay dry-eyed, even if at other times I felt odd, or out of place, or even a bit distressed (talking to advisor).

I didn't cry!

Capitalism, collaboration and Collective Intelligence

People as wise a Bill Gates have argued that capitalism is undermined by any movement to assemble a global "creative commons" that contains large bodies of scientific and cultural content

Don Tapscott, We are smarter than Me

Part of me bristles at Bill Gates's so utterly wholehearted embrace of capitalism that he would dis creative commons project just because it is collaborative. I would suggest *gasp* that capitalism is not all it's cracked up to be, and perhaps a little bit more recognition of our commonality might do the human race a whole lotta good.

But maybe it's just the traffic that makes me say that.

Let me explain. I've been bullied by people driving large vehicles for the last year, as I drive my (very) small, fuel efficient car around. Guys in big trucks like to tailgate me, which means as a defensive driver, I drop my speed in order to increase the gap between me and the person in front in order to allow enough time for the joker behind me to react without hitting me in case I have to suddenly brake. (Yes, a digression, but bear with me)

A few weeks ago in the local paper, a couple of newly transplanted Americans were complaining in the letters to the editor that Canadian pedestrians step out into crosswalks when the light is for them without looking for vehicles (that would be illegally entering the crosswalk). They said that pedestrians in American cities (their words, not mine) were more cautious (and hence less stupid?) I was confused at what the complaint was about. But being in PhD city again, I remember that as a pedestrian you take your life into your own hands here - the car rules, whether you have the right of way or not.

So what does this have to do with commonality?

Well, I think that the aggression of large trucks and the inability of drivers to stop for pedestrians stem from the same attitude. That attitude sees others in public spaces as objects, or potential obstacles in one's way. That attitude makes it easy to lose track of the fact that there are people in each of those cars, and the pedestrian wants to move through space efficiently just the same as you do. Would you not stop for a friend crossing the road? Would you tailgate the car that you knew was being driven by your mother?

It's because we so easily become overwhelmed by the number of people around us that we forget that they are people, who have the same feelings and thoughts as we do. There are so many people surrounding those of us who live in large cities that we forget that they are PEOPLE, not objects.

Capitalism also rests on the assumption that all the "agents" in the system are just that, parts of a system in which the individuality of each of those agents gets lost in the theory. Really, that's a lot of what Marx was talking about.* Collaborative creations, whether they are driven by a creative or an economic urge, can't help but remind us that we are not the only people on earth surrounded by objects or obstacles in our way. They remind us that some of those objects or obstacles are people. People who feel and think in ways eerily similar to our own (or sometimes, even more eerily, dissimilar to our own!)

There's another important part of that sentence, that I'm poignantly reminded of, having recently been in two different countries for their successive celebrations of their nations' creation. "capitalism is undermined by any movement to assemble a global "creative commons" that contains large bodies of scientific and cultural content". The global nature of our culture has been (over)stated many times before. But the kind of divisions created by nationalism - the dominant means for dividing cultures and peoples over the last few centuries - have also brought damage through misplaced patriotisms, boundary disputes, and the need to retain "sovereignty". Perhaps a reminder of our commonality, our collective intelligence, rather than divisions along national (or even ethnic) lines could do us a lot of good.

I realize that this blog post borders on the lines of... what, flights of fantasy? Some might accuse me of Pollyannism. Fair enough. But we've tried intellectual property rights, increasing copyright legislation (think DRM and P2P), nationalism, division, the spread of capitalism... perhaps its time for a new plan?

*I realize Marx was much more complex than this simple reduction, but much of his theory rests upon the assumption that people are people, not cogs in a machine.

You really can't go back...

As an optimist, I've always thought the sentiment "you can't go home again" was awfully pessimistic. Even when I moved back to the city I'd left 4 years earlier, I still retained the hope that you could indeed go home again. Sure, some of the people I had known were gone, but the city itself was still there, the restaurants that I loved, and even some new places.

But traveling back to PhD city after moving away almost 2 years ago has felt weird. Very weird. It's all recognizable. But everything has changed. Even though many of the same people are here, the relationships are all changed.

It's more than just a wall where a door used to be.

I feel like I don't belong.

And I suppose I don't. I've been so long away from all the usual activities, I suppose I shouldn't actually expect to feel like I belong. But I did. And the shock of realizing I was wrong threw me for a bit of a loop earlier this afternoon.

You CAN'T go back. Maybe it's not a bad thing. But it's definitely true.

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day! I hope you had a day that featured at least a bit of relaxation... even if you aren't Canadian!

For the first time in a long time, I did not host a Canada Day barbecue - oldest daughter did instead! What a nice feeling being able to just show up with food, then sit back and relax!

She did a fabulous job as a host, and even had some really neat games/activities planned. I know she's doing the whole run down of everything that didn't go as she envisioned it, but she did an absolutely wonderful job! Hope everyone else had as nice a day as I did!

On an unrelated note, I am heading off to meet with advisors and other smart people for the next week, so posting may be sparse... then again, it may be particularly prolific, who knows? But I will be on a different routine, so it's hard to say...

Leonard Nimoy's Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

This is just so bizarre that I'm left speechless!

It's a good feeling

Getting the draft of the chapter that needs to be sent off in two days finished is a good feeling. I still need to do an overall edit of the chapter - writing each section separately over several months means there are probably gaps between the sections that'll need to be addressed - but finishing it is definitely a good feeling!

And just in time for the weather to really get gorgeous... patios, hiking trails, and bbqs... nice!

Opposable thumbs... ain't they grand?

Nice that our opposable thumbs distinguish us from most other creatures... of course human beings are known for their cognitive abilities, and their use of language, but those things aren't readily apparent in a first impression (and for some humans, they aren't even apparent after extended interaction!)

I've been thinking about my opposable thumbs lately, mostly because I've been hyper-aware of my thumbs. You know how they say you don't really know what you've got till it's gone? You could say the same that you don't really know how useful a body part is until it starts aching.

We've been refinishing our deck, which means all the old paint has to be sanded off before we can stain it. Why the builders of the deck decided paint on the walking surface was a good idea is beyond me. Stain, baby, that's where it's at for high traffic areas!

Funny too how the deck looked fabulous last year when we bought the place (actually only 10 months ago) and looked like crap as soon as the snow melted off it. If you'd asked me last year, I wouldn't have thought we'd have to paint for at least a few years.

So yes, my thumbs ache from holding the sander in place as it does its job. But if I didn't have opposable thumbs, I wouldn't be able to sand my deck... then again, if I didn't have opposable thumbs, I probably wouldn't have a house with a deck that needs sanding... or even care for that matter if the paint is peeling...

okay, the post is officially degenerating. Time to go...

Ending it

I suck at writing conclusions. I've known this for a long time. My modus operandi for a long time (i.e. seminar papers) had been to just leave the last piece of my argument hanging there without even trying to tie everything together.

That was (marginally) acceptable for writing seminar papers, particularly if the last part of my argument was in any way summative of what I was writing about, but it's really coming home to me now in the dissertation that that strategy's just not going to work anymore. After all, the transitions between the chapters should at least give a nod of recognition to the overall project and how each chapter fits into that project.

I tell myself it will all work out fine in the end, as I struggle with the conclusion to this last chapter (no, it's not complete, but I just finished writing the last section, so it seemed appropriate to attempt a conclusion). After all, once all the chapters are written, I'll have to deal with the thing as a whole, and all the introductions and conclusions will (and probably should) change when they're placed up against the chapters that precede or follow them. So I'll get a chance to sort it all out at the end.

But I still really suck at conclusions. I suppose one really positive outcome of this whole dissertating process would be getting better at writing conclusions.

If I get better at it, that is.

Sooo slow!

It's been three weeks of writing since I last updated my dissertation writing meter. So I figured it'd go up quite a bit, after all, I've been writing what seems like an awful lot.

1%

That's all it's up. Guess I did almost as much cutting of useless stuff as I did typing new stuff. Phooey! At this rate, I'll take me three more years to finish the thing!

Interconnective scholarship

Where indeed would we be without the internet?

This isn't going to a cheerleading post for the internet - after all, I remember doing research in the days before the internet, and I certainly didn't feel like I was missing out on anything. I also could probably finish this dissertation if the internet disappeared overnight, though it would involve a lot more travelling to physical locations like libraries.

But I have found twice in as many days that connectivity to the internet has brought me two ideas that I intend to use or at least explore in the dissertation. If it hadn't been for the internet, I would have had to spend more time and energy exploring these things, or remain ignorant of them.

The first item was a mention on a listserv about a connection between two books I hadn't thought of pairing together - Rushdie's magic realist text Midnight's Children, and Ian MacDonald's science fiction text River of Gods. I've of course read Rushdie's book, and intended to discuss it in my fourth chapter (the one that focuses on magic realism as technique), but I had only started reading MacDonald's book before I got sidetracked and set it aside. I had been thinking of mentioning it in the sixth chapter, the one on science fiction, but now I'll have to read it earlier to see what kinds of fruitful connections might be there. I may ultimately decide not to use MacDonald's book in the fourth chapter, but it might prove an interesting angle to take.

The second was a blog post. The writer was talking about collectivity in the context of Web 2.0 technologies (something very big on my work-related radar right now), but it talked about the hive mind and the Borg in particular. And right now I'm stuck in a place in the dissertation chapter where I'm trying to bridge hybridity with collectivity (specifically a reference to ants and bees in a novel) and this article looks like it could provide that link. [Now I just need to find something to make that prosthetics/war/progress link!]

Without those electronic connections, I'd still be stuck working out the argument connecting hybridity and collectivity, and I might have written all of chapter four without even opening MacDonald's book, not knowing I was missing out on a connection that could prove interesting. No doubt I would've managed without these connections, but they sure helped.

RBOC: Hump day edition

Yes, I know it's not Friday. But there's no rule that says RBOC can only be on Fridays. 'Cause I said so. So there.

• My nose and throat are scratchy, which makes me cranky. And less productive. Which makes me even more cranky. Funny how the last time I had a cold was last July. Why don't I get colds when other people do, you know, in winter?
• I'm thinking lots about student cheating, and why it happens, and how it's so easy to understand when you know a student is struggling, and how utterly reprehensible it looks when you watch the student who struggled to produce hu's own, from scratch paper that really wasn't good while someone else tries to take the easy way out.
• I'm stuck in the diss chapter trying to work out a connection between the prosthetic impulse, war, and the notion of Progress. Don't know where to find the answer, so I'm avoiding that section. But I'll have to come back to it sooner or later.
• I've booked a flight back to meet with my advisor(s), arrange paperwork, and have this latest chapter of the diss workshopped with some smart people. Problem is, that means I HAVE to have the chapter done by then!
• I saw The Happening on the weekend, which means I understand when critics say its not like his previous work (that's a good thing for this movie), but I'm surprised that I haven't heard more buzz about the explanation for why the events in the movie take place. It's an interesting idea, and I'm surprised I haven't seen much talk about it. Perhaps that'll be a blog post for later this week

I like these bullet things. Much easier than a coherent blog post. I'll have to do them more often...

Dr. Jones's failed tenure bid

Poor Indiana - failed to get tenure while out on his last adventure.

Monkey business (yes, I know chimps aren't really monkeys, it's just "chimp business" or "ape business" doesn't have the same ring)

(Lilli Strauss AP photo)

This will certainly be interesting:

The European Court of Human Rights is to hear an appeal to declare an abandoned chimp a human in order to appoint a legal guardian for it. Since humans are the only ones under Austrian law (where the chimp lives) who can have guardians, a woman is asking to court to declare the chimp human. As the news report wryly notes:

Beyond the legal challenges, anthropologists say chimpanzees are not humans, though without a clear definition of what it means to be human, backing that claim up is a challenge perhaps fit for some great courtroom drama.

Really? You think there might be courtroom drama? Forget the courtroom, what does this do to our definition of human beyond this single case? The article points to the same problem that my dissertation often points to - the difficulty in defining what a human is, particularly when compared with intelligent machines (or animals in this case).

The article quotes only people who talk about how difficult it is to make a determination of human characteristics that are unique to humans, but buries the one argument - language - in a link that doesn't really match the argument. But the innate capacity to manipulate language that comes so easily to humans might be one. Yes, there are humans who don't have language, so I don't know that it's foolproof, but it might be a place to start.

What the article never brings up are alternate solutions to this problem. A chimp can still be property, can it not? Can the woman who wants to be a guardian to the chimp not simply purchase it? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems a much easier solution for caring for the chimp than having it declared a human with all the rights that entails...

Lo, what light through yonder window breaks?

Welcome back, sun!

The old people keep taking over...

After all, look at the latest Indiana Jones movie - a grey-haired hero joins up with other older characters, including one in the grips of senility - to drive the action of this action movie.

Similarly, according toWho Blogs Now?, blogging is aging as well. Aside from company blogs and splogs (spam weblogs), the average age of adult bloggers in 37.6. So it's not just young people who are blogging, though the percentages of bloggers in a population does decrease with age. As the article says,

As a result, figuring out exactly who blogs has become more difficult.... However, word-of-mouth is still a powerful marketing tactic, and since influential bloggers are so effective at spreading the word about their likes and dislikes, blogger demographics continue to matter.

Not surprising to find that about 2/3 of bloggers are white, but then again, this mirrors the percentage of whites in the U.S., the country where the information comes from.

There was only one confusing thing for me and that was the article's identification of who belonged to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers - I'm terribly close to Baby Boomers according to them, and I'd always considered myself firmly ensconced in Gen Xers... But that's another post.

Telecommuting delights

I cannot wait until I get to go back to telecommuting only! The drive to work this morning was longer than I expected (even though I left earlier than usual). I suspect part of it was because of the rain, something drivers here rarely have to contend with, so it freaks them out. I swear, as a group, they drive faster in a blizzard than in a little rain...

Three more teaching days and then I have at least 2 months off. Woohoo! I do enjoy teaching - I really do. But I could do without the commute and the marking. So a break will be fabulous.

Maybe I'll have time to read all those books I bought!

(Extra) value reading

You had to know I couldn't resist the contrast with the last post...

This weekend, the annual city-wide charity book sale was going on. I didn't realize it actually started on Friday, so we didn't go down till Sunday, and I was wondering if there would be anything good left.

I don't know what we might have missed, but I found me some great finds! Some of them have been on my amazon list for a while, and some of them were just really interesting in that I-hadn't-thought-about-buying-this-book, but-here-it-is kind of way. After all, at $1-$2 a book, and the proceeds going to charity, it was very tempting to buy more than I could realistically read (at least until next year's sale!)

But I found Will in the World, which I know I won't get to read for a while, but it just sounded so interesting I wanted to have it.

I also found Primate Visions, which I could realistically spend a week reading sometime soon because it fits in with the dissertation reading. I'm also reading a fiction novel by Will Self called Great Apes, in which a man wakes up to find the world populated by intelligent chimps who tell him he only thinks he's human. And no, it's not like Planet of the Apes, it's far better done.

I also got a copy of R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the play that first coined the term "robot" in it's contemporary use in 1921. I know less about this play, and since it's by a Russian, it isn't useful as an example of a British writer grappling with the issues raised by cyborgs or robots, but I also have suggested it as a volume in a GenEd class that I might get to teach on the Social effects of Technology, so I'd like to take a look at it more closely.

I also picked up Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer - I've heard both authors speak before, and they're both science fiction writers, but I haven't read any of their work (and, again, their themes are related to the dissertation), so I'm hoping to find a couple new authors I like. Karl is a Canadian Mennonite science fiction writer - how cool is that? - so I'm just intensely curious about his writing. Interestingly, I cannot find an image for Sawyer's book of the volume I actually have - the one I have is a U.S. published version, 1st printing by the looks of it, so it's weird that the cover on mine is different (much more interesting in my opinion). I also just picked up Sawyer's newest novel, Humans that I'm reviewing for Wordfest this fall, so here's hoping I like his stuff enough to read 2 novels of his!

I did not buy any Stephen King, or any Danielle Steel, even though there were a LOT of copies of probably everything both have ever written...

(De)valuing reading

Ever notice how sometimes topics or issues seem to all of a sudden come at you from different venues? Happens to me all the time. I'm convinced it's because I'm clueless to most of the stuff around me and just happen to attend to the things that repeat, but that's beside the point...

What I have been noticing is a recent upsurge in references to reading in the things that cross my desk(top). I've been struggling with the reading/writing dilemma lately. Those of you who've written a dissertation definitely know what I'm talking about, but even if you haven't, you've probably encountered it anytime you've written a research paper. It's that urge to read just one more thing, find one more source, before you feel capable of starting to write.

I've been suspecting that my writing is as fitful as it has been because I have to read more. But retreating to reading as an activity is also a very easy way to avoid dealing with the writing. And since I have a definite, quasi-scheduled deadline (no, that isn't an oxymoron - it's both definite, and only roughly scheduled) for a chapter, there should be some urgency to get the writing done. But I keep finding myself reading other things in an attempt to solve some of the writing speed bumps I'm encountering.

[A related, but non-reading problem that I'm struggling with now is that I read a book review in a journal that arrived this week. The book sounds like it would help me solve one of those problem areas in this chapter. The problem? Neither my school, nor the local university library have the book or are connected to universities with the book (according to Worldcat, only 13 libraries in all of North America have the book). So I'd have to order it. But no North American online bookstores have it (even amazon.co.uk doesn't have it). So I'd have to order it from the Czech republic. With the shipping, the price tag gets a bit high... So I need to decide if that's the price I pay for not being connected to one of the universities that have it]

But back to reading. Through academic blog surfing, I came across this excellent post over at To Delight and to Instruct on the devaluing of reading time as non-productive work. As academics, we value writing (and publication) over reading. The yearly kudos list of grad student accomplishments that our department produces lists only conference papers delivered, articles published, or positions gained. The list coordinator would probably laugh if I wrote in and said my accomplishment for the year was to read 2000 pages of literary criticism, even if 500 of it was French philosophers!

This privileging of writing over reading as academic activity isn't limited to grad students (who are actually the one group whose reading is expected to dominate academic activity). Horace writes that it's hard to think of a reading day as productive. This is because of

the idea of our work being inserted more and more persistently into a capitalist logic wherein everything is measured in terms of its exchange value, where its quantifiability is most tangible and its value is clearest when it can be reproduced, or exchanged for capital

and that grading, the most quantifiable part of teaching, is the least effective pedagogically. Certainly my students don't learn from my grading (any composition teacher can attest to that - more often than not, you get the final draft with the same problem you provided a solution to in the draft... *sigh*). My students learn in the classroom, not through the powerpoints or lecture notes themselves, but through the dynamic interaction of two human beings engaged in exploring a problem together. But that's a different blog post.

The point is that our training into the academy reinforces this idea that writing is productive (because quantifiable) and reading, or worse yet, thinking about things, is non-productive time. We count our productivity by words written, or pages produced (and I've fallen into the most extreme case of this as evidenced by my participation in NaNoWriMo). But the creativity that writing requires can't be reduced to a timetable or a formula. In an article that my students are reading this term "What Business Can Learn from Open Source", Paul Graham notes the same need for "soak" time regarding ideas (in this case, open source software programming):

The...problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.

I nodded vigorously when I read this. The couple of years I spent in an office of the 9 to 5 variety were like that. I know there were many times that I felt the guilty start of being caught staring at the wall while I thought through something, when I should've been trying to look busy. It's very stressful trying to look like you're working when what you really need to do is just think... I'm lucky that in my current work as an elearning content manager, adjunct instructor, and dissertation writer, I can spend time staring at the walls, walking (or running) around, while I mull over problems without anyone looking at me like I'm wasting time...!

It doesn't mean that I'm not susceptible to that urge to seem productive though. Even when I'm reading academic sources, I feel like I need to be making notes on what I'm reading. You know, so that I can justify spending the time reading by the fact that I'll at least have these notes if I need them later. It's a tad pathetic. But then again, I feel a certain level of perverse satisfaction as I see the number of entries in Endnote climb (topping 600 at this point, so let's hope they come in handy! actually, they already have, which of course just reinforces that perverse delight in the growing number...) At least with an new Endnote entry, I can point to something quantifiable - see, I was reading, and now I have one more entry...!

Reading is one of those things that you can get in trouble for at work, especially if you're not making notes. Which is why I found this Read at Work website absolutely fabulous! When you go to the site and click to enter, you see a desktop like this one, you know, the generic wallpaper that computers seem to always come with. Then if you select one of the files on the "desktop" it will open to a powerpoint file. I especially like The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde (you'll find it in the short story file). The site takes you from the imitation desktop to one of the literature links that looks like a powerpoint presentation. So you can be reading great literature and anyone looking over your shoulder at work will think you're hard at work on the next powerpoint presentation. As you can see, you don't even need to register to use it. I love it!

Scrolling through some of the selections on the site, I can't help but wonder if students would read these stories in this format because they're chunked into smaller, easily digestible chunks (well, that, and they come with graphics... though some of the images don't necessarily match the content). After all, one of the challenges of online reading is that what works well on paper - paragraphs neatly arranged in a uniform pattern on a page - doesn't work well on the screen. After all, we all remember those early amateur websites that were basically text on a screen (with colored font thrown in - what was it about colored font that those webpage makers were fascinated with? one of those mysteries I never did figure out). It took a while to figure it out, but all the literature now recognizes that reading online is a very different activity than reading on paper, and to be effective, it has to be arranged, organized, and translated to the online format.

Of course all this talk of online reading (okay, all my talk about online reading) gets me wondering what the content of the dissertation would like look converted to web format... Maybe I'll actually have the time this summer to give it a try. At least a website would be more "productive" than just reading...!

Unread books meme

Since I'm stalling out on the dissertation writing, I thought I might cheer myself up with the following meme. Whether I'm cheered up will depend on the numbers I suppose. So, the meme is to identify which of the top 106 books most often marked "unread" by members on Library Thing that you've read.

The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1 The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams*
2 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3 The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
4 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5 Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
6 Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
7 Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8 One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9 Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11 Ulysses by James Joyce
12 War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
13 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
14 The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15 Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
16 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
18 Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
19 A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
20 The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
21 Middlemarch by George Eliot
22 Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
23 The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
24 The Kor'an by Anonymous
25 Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26 The Odyssey by Homer
27 The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
28 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29 The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30 The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
31 Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
32 Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
33 The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
34 The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
35 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
36 The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
37 The Iliad by Homer
38 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
39 Emma by Jane Austen
40 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
41 Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
42 Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift
43 The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44 Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
45 Dracula by Bram Stoker*
46 Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
47 A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
48 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
49 The once and future king by T. H. White
50 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
51 To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
52 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
53 Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
54 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
55 Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
56 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
57 Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
58 The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
59 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
60 Underworld by Don DeLillo
61 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
62 The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
63 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
64 The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
65 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells*
66 Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
67 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
68 Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
69 A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
70 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
71 The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
72 The inferno by Dante Alighieri
73 Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
74 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75 Swann's way by Marcel Proust
76 The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
77 The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
78 Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
79 The portrait of a lady by Henry James
80 Silas Marner by George Eliot
81 The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*
82 The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas
83 The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
84 The book thief by Markus Zusak
85 The confusion by Neal Stephenson
86 One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
87 Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley*
88 Bleak House by Charles Dickens
89 The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
90 The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
91 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
92 The known world by Edward P. Jones
93 The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
94 The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
95 The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
96 Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
97 Dubliners by James Joyce
98 Les misérables by Victor Hugo
99 The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
100 Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
101 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
102 Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
103 Persuasion by Jane Austen
104 A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
105 The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
106 Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller

39 read; 2 bought but not read; 2 started but never finished.
I do find it interesting that of the ones with * that I've read more once, the multiple readings have happened because I was studying them, not because I necessarily wanted to reread except in one instance. The other interesting thing is that aside from the Neal Stephenson, there's not much on the list that I haven't read that I really have a desire to read. That must be why these books are on an 'unread' list.

I'm going to be all annoying netizen and tag rebeckler, thirdworstpoet, and unacademic advisor for this meme.

Lists

Since my good friend was on a list-making binge lately, and I have nothing really intelligent to say, sharing lists ought to easy... Although none of my lists are complete, here's some samples:

This week's list:
Buy groceries and birthday cake
Pick up oldest daughter & cook birthday dinner for her
Teach 3x
Mark English papers
Write up Speech evaluations
Meet with boss for lunch
Attend client meeting regarding potential project
Prepare different project summary before lunch meeting
Mail chapter to advisor
Go to university library
Go for 6km run
Finish Wordfest book review

Things I want to learn how to do/take up as activities (money and time are of course objects to consider for many of these):
Get motorcycle license and buy a bike
Learn to dance the Salsa
Scuba diving
Build a decent wine cellar
Visit Australia
Learn how to fly an airplane

There's a lot of distance between those two lists, isn't there...?

In sickness and celebration

Brief blog hiatus due to illness and daughter's graduation - congratulations!

Grandparents came to town for the ceremony and banquet. I had to teach during the ceremony, which sucked, but I was there for the banquet. Reverse of what happened for oldest daughter's grad, so I guess at least I'm being consistent in being 1 for 2 for both.

I feel reaffirmed in my belief that my students should get a lecture on social speaking situations in my Public speaking class, even though it isn't required in the curriculum. There were some people at the banquet - full grown adults, older than me by the looks of it - who have NO idea how to give a good toast! The teacher who toasted the grads strained my patience, and I've got a pretty good tolerance for long-windedness....

I anticipated the work disruption of guests and grad, but I didn't anticipate the illness (nothing serious, just made me totally unproductive for a while), so tomorrow's my only dissertation day this week. Bummer. I'll just have to make it a good one! Wish me luck...

Not sure what this one means...

You know how when you're anxious about an exam, or a new semester of teaching, you sometimes have those dreams where you're in the exam or the classroom and you're unprepared?*

I had a similar kind of anxiety dream last night, but it was all mixed up. I dreamt that I had signed up for a class on Monday afternoons, right after I teach. I was running around trying to get to the class. I had lost my schedule, but I'd been to it once, so I was trying to find the classroom. Oh, and for some reason, I had a lap dog with me and one of my own students kept following me trying to ask questions and he just wouldn't get it that I needed to find my own class!

Weird! I've never had one of these kinds of dreams where I mix up my roles as teacher and as student before... and what's with the lap dog?

*I had a unusual version of this kind of dream before my first husband and I renewed vows. I was sewing my own dress, and in the dream, I still had to finish sewing it an hour before the ceremony was supposed to take place!

Two great things that go good together

When in New Orleans, we spent the later part of an evening walking down the street, looking into store windows as we made our way to Walgreen's for some sunburn relief in a tube.

Along the way, we saw a place called The Melting Pot, that advertised itself as a fondue. It was closed, so all we could see were a couple of tables and a bar, and we thought what a nice little neighborhood restaurant it seemed. The next morning, one of those lovely booklets of "places to go, things to see" rated it quite highly, which surprised us, because based on the short store frontage, we hadn't thought it was that big a place to warrant a mention.

But it sounded like fun, so we made a reservation.

It was magnificent! (and much larger than it appeared!)

The meal is more than just food - it's a production in and of itself. We spent three hours there! If you go for their full experience package, you get a cheese appetizer fondue, a main course fondue, and a chocolate fondue for dessert! Sooo yummy!

Unfortunately they're only in the U.S., but since Ruth's Chris has now come to Canada, perhaps The Melting Pot will too. (If you're in the Boston area, there's one set to open this fall in Back Bay) I would definitely recommend trying the place out because the one in New Orleans was fabulous!

The title of the post does say there were two good things that go together. The other was the Conundrum white table wine. Yes, something labelled "white table wine" usually isn't worth mentioning, but the Conundrum table wine is named so because it's a blend of varietals that's very skillfully mixed to produce a white wine with an absolutely yummy smell and a complex of flavours that make you wish you could just gobble it all up!

The wine complemented the fondue very well, which is hard to do because a fondue has so many different flavours going on, but because the wine's a varietal mix, it's got so many fruits and scents, it actually worked really well. It would be an excellent patio wine, all on its own too.

I took a trip to my favourite wine store when we got home and grabbed their last two bottles of the 2006. It cost a bit more than I usually pay for wine, but I think this one will be worth it. If you can afford one wine splurge and you're looking for something unique in a white, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try. You probably haven't tasted a wine like it before!

One dollar short and one day late... a.k.a A room of one's own

This week, as I yet again squeeze in a bit of work here, a bit of work there, a bit of parenting here (and there), some household maintenance, putting out fires (not literally), trying to realize vacation plans, I realize that I either:

Want a wife

Want a room of one's own

After all, who wouldn't?

But then I thought about it, really thought about what it would be like. Which led me to the conclusion that I can't imagine what it would be like.

I don't literally mean having a room of my own or having a wife. I mean the idea that lies behind those phrases: to have the freedom from responsibility that would allow me to ignore everything else and just concentrate on the work I need to do. That's essentially what Woolf is saying in wanting a room of one's own - it's the desire for a space, behind a door, where no one knocks unless the house is on fire. When you, the person behind the door, are the one who decides when the door gets opened again.

I think I cannot imagine what it would be like because I've been working in a piecemeal fashion for so long that it's become a habit that I don't know I could break. Though since I haven't had the luxury of trying, I'm not going to say I couldn't. If I had the opportunity, I'd give it my best shot.

A few weeks back, when I was interviewed about being a single parent and student, the interviewer asked if I'd been accommodated when asking for extensions etc. and I'd replied I'd never asked for one then (and only once ever asked for one, but that was years later after I'd taken a battering during the qualifiers). I explained that since I'd never not been a parent while in school, I'd just developed the discipline to start projects early so they'd get done on time.

After all, when you've got kids that have got to be fed, washed, sent to school, supervised, whatever else, you can't just pull an all-nighter and expect the next day to be normal (or even survivable!) The discipline to start early became a necessity, and the habit stayed with me, even after the kids were old enough to fend for themselves if I had pulled an all-nighter. In fact, I was teased in graduate school for being the one who had the all the reading done all the time (not that I actually did, but I got teased that I did).

But I've always had this image in the back of my mind about how my child-less peers approached their work - writing and reading when the mood hit them, sometimes for days at a time, eating leftovers, or surviving on noodles and coffee, able to throw themselves into a project wholeheartedly and achieve a kind of intensity of scholarly activity that I could never hope for in the piecemeal I-can-read-this-one-article-while-I-cook-supper way that I studied.

But now I'm wondering. Would such intensity make me a better scholar? Would being able to ignore my family members and their bodily needs for food, clean clothes etc. have made me smarter than I am? Would I struggle as much as I do if I'd had that time to throw myself intensely into my work?

I always feel like that country song "one dollar short and one day late" and I gaze jealously at this image of freedom, where I can work on the dissertation for days on end, only emerging for the breaks *I* need, to eat the food *I'm* hungry for, to stop when *I* want to stop. Not when I have to make dinner, or pick someone up from somewhere. Not to have those thoughts intrude into my reading that I have to remember to pay that bill, or put the garbage out tonight, or pick up that item from the store before Friday.

Pathetic, ain't it? My fantasy is a life where I can work whenever I want to!

You don't own your body

Did you know that you don't own your own body? Legally speaking, that is. You have control over it, but you don't own it.

To me that's odd. Commonly speaking, we think that our bodies are ours to do with as we please. The idea that a woman's body is her own to decide what she does with it has been a cornerstone of feminist thought for decades now. And it's true, a woman does have the right to control her own body.

But she doesn't own it.

That's thanks to patent law. If tissues from your body are used to create a vaccine, or a treatment, or a cell line for research purposes, you no longer 'own' any part of that subsequent process. You might own the raw material i.e. your body, and you can control that raw material. But as soon as a bioscientist takes that raw material and applies a process to it, which the scientist patents, you no longer have any interest (legally speaking) in that technology and cannot control how it is used, or ask for compensation for it.

The way our legislation has been written, tissue that is removed from the body is considered waste, which means the person whose body it was removed from no longer has a claim over it.

I'm simplifying things significantly, but this is the general interpretation of the law as seen in John Moore vs. the Regents of the University of California. Having read segments of the judgment, I suspect this is the court case that Michael Crichton is referring to in Next, his novel about the patenting of human life. If you're looking for an airplane novel, this one's a good one. Though, then again, most Crichton novels are airplane novels.

But as you're reading the novel, just keep in mind that although you control the body that's reading it, you don't own it.

Is there a protocol for this?

Okay, so my dissertation supervisor has had my introductory chapter for about two months now. She indicated when I passed it off to her it would be a few weeks.

Ordinarily, I would not consider this a problem. But I've just finished drafting chapter 1 and I'm not sure what I should do. Should I wait to get the introduction back before sending the first chapter? Should I send it off anyway? Am I being annoying if she has two chapters at one time? Should I email (again)? (I emailed a week ago to say chapter 1 was in the final stages and to ask this very question - no response yet)

I can continue to work, but frankly, chapter 2 is also on the doorstep - that is, it needs one additional small section added and some serious trimming of the rest, but most of the content is there. If I don't send off chapter 1 soon, there's a very real possibility that chapter 2 will be sitting around as well, waiting to be sent off!

So, any ideas out there what the protocol for this kind of thing is?

Very excited!

Although teaching post-secondary is an activity that ostensibly is part of the "life of the mind", I find myself starving for real intellectual engagement. It's at times like this that I really regret having left the city of my doctoral program because that was at least one place to get that.

So you can imagine my delight at the prospect of a summer free from teaching in which I can live the "life of the mind" without also trying to explain to a student how 2 pages about how video gaming is so cool falls short of a 5 page argumentative essay!

I of course will still be doing my online work - and we've just been approved for a major project that's set to begin in about a month - but I also anticipate having much more time available for doing what I love.

Now I just have to get through the next 5 weeks...

A new distraction

I've found myself reading a couple of early twentieth century precursors of science fiction over the last couple of weeks. It's really quite fascinating stuff. It has me wondering if they two samples I read: The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle and Man's World by Charlotte Haldane (wife of J.B.S.) are representative of Edwardian and early twentieth century sf.

In the nineteenth century, the "scientific romance", what is commonly understood to be the precursor to the gee-whiz-bang rockets-and-mad-scientists science fiction of the mid twentieth century (when the genre really took off) was preoccupied with biology. If you think of the work of H.G. Wells - War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, or even Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde - they all employed ideas of evolution, devolution, and social Darwinianism in their subtexts.

The stuff we think of most often when we think science fiction - and the stuff Margaret Atwood thinks of when she defines herself as NOT a science fiction writer - really came into being in the 1940s and 1950s - the BEMs (bug eyed monsters) and rocket ships, Flash Gordon, and all that jazz. The sf of this period is really more about physics than it is about biology.

[which makes me wonder, will science fiction ever go through a phase where it's all about chemistry?... I can't imagine, but it seems a bit unfair for chemistry to not have its moment in the sun]

This stuff from the 1920s that I'm reading still retains a lot of that social Darwinism, but the new emphasis on physics is also creeping in as well. The narratives are a real sharp contrast with the modernist texts we usually think of from the period - Woolf, Joyce etc. and I would love to read more of it to figure out exactly how those differences play out.

Since I've not studied modernism extensively, it's a project that I'm not equipped to undertake right now, but I do think it might be an interesting avenue to pursue after the dissertation gets finished. See? I am working hard at keeping myself from getting distracted. It's just there are so many really interesting things to read!

This is why driving downtown is nasty

According to this news report, this weekend marked the longest continuous concrete pour in Canadian history. The pour is only second to one in Dubai and another in Vegas. Now that's an unusual event!

It also explains why it was IMPOSSIBLE to drive downtown this weekend. The Bow-Encana project has been wreaking havoc with Calgarians' driving patterns for many months already, but combined with the blocking off of additional streets for the Mother's Day run, it was impossible to get a car through the downtown core yesterday morning.

I know. I tried. I guess we should've taken the train down to the Tower for the Mother's Day run! On the bright side, it was finally *not* raining, and the sun was not overpowering, so it was a perfect day for running. I even finished the course about 2 minutes faster than I thought I would, so I'm happy with the results. (Daughter is less than happy with her performance, though I think it was stellar.)

But we should've taken the train!

2 down 5 to go

I've just finished the rough and dirty draft of chapter 1. Woohoo!

My word count actually went down - which is probably a good thing given how overly wordy I was getting, and it should drop even more as I edit chapter 2, which is also rough and dirty, but needs a section added as well as a bunch of stuff trimmed down or moved to footnotes.

So here's where I stand right now:

Introduction - is with advisor, who's had it for several months now, but since the BIG conference is this weekend, I'll start bugging her for comments in a couple of weeks.

Chapter 1 - rough and dirty draft - by that I mean all the arguments are there and all the sources I wish to use, but I've paid little attention to what it sounds like. I figure a couple of weeks of editing, adding missing pieces, reading a bit more, and it will be draft ready for advisor's eyes.

Chapter 2 - also rough and dirty draft - this was actually the first thing I wrote, last year, and so now that I'm getting a better sense of the layout of the whole thing, it needs some serious modification. But like chapter 1 most of the argument is there and the majority of the sources, so it should only require a few weeks to a month of editing to get it advisor-draft ready.

Chapter 3-6 - bits and pieces strewn across these - each chapter has about 3000 words that sketches some of the argument, but there will need to be a lot more reading before I can begin to write any of them.

So I should be on track to have 4 of the 7 chapters completely drafted by the end of the summer, which is my goal right now. I figure I can then complete edits and the remaining three chapters in the following year and be a doctor by this time next year! That would be a very gratifying feeling!

Right now my challenge is trying to balance the amount of paid work I can do during the next year against the need to get this stuff written. I'm really undecided about what to do. I enjoy both of my jobs, but one has been really slow lately, and other other is changing significantly in form, and I don't know if I can feel comfortable within that change. Right now I don't need to really make any decisions immediately, but I will need to make them in the next few months.

But in the meantime I'm going to go celebrate the completion of a draft with... oh, wait, I suppose catching up on the laundry, recycling, and exercising aren't really celebrations, are they?

Language-dependent reading

In my wanderings through the linkages of the interwebs I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal. "How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language" describes the research of Maryanne Wolf at Tufts.

The argument in this article is that the brain's activities during reading are different based on the language being read - the implication is that reading disabilities like dyslexia are more common in languages like English than Chinese, because the relationship between word and sign in English is more abstract. Interesting. Wolf's book, Proust and the Squid, is on my amazon list, and this article is making me think I have to move it up in priority, because it sounds absolutely fascinating.

People are idiotic in real life

Subtitle: Why I find Cloverfield annoying and will probably find Diary of the Dead annoying.

In real life, people say idiotic things when surprised, like "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Did you see that? ohmygodohmygodohmygod"*

Realistic? Yes. Entertaining? No.

Fiction film is still fiction. I like my fiction to be have a bit more intelligent dialogue than what we often spout in real life. Perhaps it's a bit of elitism. If writers are just going to write what people say, then they're just recorders. I expect writers to come up with more interesting lines than the kind of stuff that I say when I've not had time to think about it. I want to see the effort of a creative mind in my movie dialogue. Because lets face it, in real life, we say some really stupid stuff.

*I'm pretty sure this is a fairly accurate rendition of the dialogue in Cloverfield when everything starts to go bad.

Festival-ing

Jazzfest was an intense yet relaxing weekend of good food, good music and good company.

New Orleans still is recovering from Katrina, but it's made some really significant strides from what we could see. People told us stories of returning after the hurricane, and the French Quarter seems to have really recovered well - dozens of restaurants later, we could not get a table at 11:00 on a Saturday night and ended up retreating to the Garden District just to eat!

The festival itself was fabulous! We did get rained on Friday night during Stevie Wonder, but the rain ended by Saturday morning and we only had to contend with the mud at that point! The highlight for me was probably Santana on Sunday - he put on a fabulous show, the sun was out, and everyone around us was just chillin' and enjoying.

Maybe it was the weather - maybe just the Santana fans. When Stevie Wonder endorsed Obama on Friday in the rain, there were mostly cheers but some boos, but when Santana did on Sunday in the sunshine, there was nothing but cheers. I found that interesting.

It's a good thing Stevie got there. And it's a good thing we got there. On Thursday night when we left, we were delayed and so we were late coming into Dallas for our connection. We ended up sprinting the last 10 gates just to get there in time before they wanted to give away our seats to standbys. We were in such a rush to get in the plane, we didn't pay much attention to who or what we were passing as we made our way to our seats. Had we been looking, we would've realized that Stevie was waiting for us to make that flight too! And here I thought all these performers chartered their own planes!

I'd post some pictures, but I left my camera with my husband who's still there, so pictures will have to wait. I gotta say pictures would sure help me keep that warm sunny glow. Going from 25 + degrees over the weekend to single digits and overcast today has been a bit of a letdown...

Snippets

The poster presentation went fairly well. Good questions, some interesting conversations. Lots to think about.

One of my neighbors is putting in a submerged pool. Didn't really think of this neighborhood as being upscale enough for a pool, but there it is.

Going to New Orleans to the jazz festival tomorrow. I suspect this jazz fest will spoil me for all others... Mostly, I'm looking forward to warm temps and sunshine!

Two friends in as many weeks have asked me about my Smart because they/family are thinking of buying one. A sign of spring? Or just of rising gas prices?

I'm experiencing a lull in academic feedback and in work projects. Which is fine right now, but I'm starting to fear they'll all come at me at the same time...

We started going to the gym a few weeks ago - before then we didn't have memberships anywhere. It's actually a bit depressing to see the scale go up as you gain muscle before it comes back down!

Memory lane (and its back alley)

Memory is a funny thing. There are those events, images, and sensations that are burned into our memory, even when they're trivial, and then there are those events that seem impossible to recall in any detail.

I've spent a lot of time being drawn back into a period in my life that wasn't really so long ago, but feels like a lifetime.

This week I went to my Alma Mater three times: drop off poster, proof poster, pick up poster and spend a day in special collections. I also stopped in at the department to see if they had an openings for sessionals.

I took the stairs.

I didn't take the stairs for my health, though I could feel the work of 10 flights, but rather to see how Leon is doing.

Leon first appeared in the 1970s (the exact date eludes me, but there is a footnote on one of the stairs referencing it). Obviously, Leon has fallen on hard times when his caregivers can only manage to pay attention to him in a spelling-challenged drunken state. Luckily for Leon, his last restorer was either too out of shape or too drunk to "restore" him past the sixth floor, so that upper floors are still pretty much the same as I remember them.

Leon's story begins in the basement, where he sees a light above that he's determined to reach. As he hops up each flight of stairs, his adventures reflect the departments he's passing. Some of the events don't match the floors anymore, since the university has grown significantly since his first inception. For example, his English department adventure only covers two flights/one floor, but the department had grown to one and a half floors by the time I started there, and I noticed now fully occupies two floors.

The restorations certainly reflect the times as well (aside from the orthographic challenges of new curses). "Indians" is scratched out and "Aboriginal" put in its place (though on the stair, it isn't capitalized, which it should be) and the last drunken caregiver got a bit too liberal with the annotations.

Curiously, he/she mis-spells bitch more than once, adding a 't' at the end, which I can only assume is an attempt to combine the older form and its newer one. Perhaps Leon should contemplate that one as he goes past the linguistics department...

I wonder how many current students know or care about Leon? When I ponder that question, that's when I realize how large that gap is between where I was when I first encountered him and where I am now. Leon is one of those common knowledge kinds of things that float around in undergrad circles, casually, as if they'd always been there. Knowing about Leon is one of those things that mark whether you're a newbie or not and being able to nod knowingly when someone tells you about this cool story on the stairs that they discovered meant you belonged. I am glad to see that Leon is being cared for, but the purist in me was a bit disturbed by the editorial revision and annotation that he's gone through.

I also participated in a sociology research project about single parents in post-secondary institutions earlier this week. It too reminded me of those days, but the memories there were a mixed bag. The interview asked a lot of questions about support and what the university could do to make the experience better for single mothers. The thing is, I'd never really thought to include the university itself in my attempts to meet the challenges of being a mother and a student at the same time. In fact, I remember feeling reluctant to speak of my parental status, especially to profs and other administrators because I didn't want pity and I didn't want special treatment. I wanted my academic accomplishments to stand for themselves and to be evaluated exactly the same as any of the 18 year olds in the class.

Not that that was easy! I really struggled through first year chemistry. Even though I'd taken it in high school and actually gotten a decent mark, the first year chemistry course looked like Greek to me. I struggled mightily with stoichiometry, which I swear wasn't invented when I was in high school!

But that's the kind of memories all this week has been dredging up. It also reminds me that I have no way of knowing what the future will bring either. If you had told me what my life looks like now back then I would've found it hard to believe. Which makes me realize how futile it is to try to imagine what kind of life I'll have in another 5, 10 years. I just have to take it as it comes, which is all that any of us can do really when it comes down to it.

7 days

I know I live in Canada.

But 7 days of snow in spring is a bit much, even for Calgary. Where's the sunshine and flowers???

Squeezing into a shoe that isn't supposed to fit

This poster has been a real challenge to complete. Not that there's anything particularly insightful on it, but just trying to arrange the kind of argument that I would spend 20 pages of text writing into a more visual format.

And you can tell that I'm not used to making graphs or even charts, because it took me the better part of yesterday just to produce those two little graphics you see on the poster!

English literature definitely is a qualitative kind of discipline, where our arguments are built on comparisons of what is contained within the texts we use as our sources, not how many of them there are. Quantitative analysis really doesn't show up in English (except for a few structuralists and come cultural critics), so trying to come up with a graphic representation of my argument was difficult indeed.

But it is finished. Now I just need to get it to a printer that can produce it poster-sized, finish off the actual paper that will go with it (if anyone is interested in the rest of the argument), print off information cards and write up my 5 minute blurb for the judges who will be coming around to all the posters to analyze them. So there's lots yet to do! But it's been interesting so far.

[Clicking on the poster should give you a bigger version of it]

My new boyfriend

At least that's what he tells me every night.

"I'm George Stroumboulopoulos. And I'm your boyfriend"

I am enchanted. I will admit that.

Imagine my surprise at leaving the country for four years only to return and find a CBC program I like! George has some of the most interesting guests on the show, and although his attempts at comedy sometimes fall flat (no flatter than Letterman or Leno though), there's competition with The Daily Show in my house for the late night slot.

Chuck Norris?

So apparently, Chuck Norris jokes are all the thing now. Why? I don't know.

My students were comparing their favourites during our lab period today, and at first, I thought I was mis-hearing them. But no. These students, who weren't even alive when Chuck Norris movies were cool, are suddenly all over him.

I don't get it. I've probably seen every Chuck Norris movie ever made - I dated a guy who was a huge Norris fan - but the cinephile in me has erased most of those memories. Despite that, I have to say, I find the Norris websites confusing...

Intellectual stimulation (or lack thereof)

I've been feeling the isolation of being in a place NOT the same as the university that will grant me my degree when all is said and done.

I knew it would be a tradeoff coming here - that work, life, kids education etc. would be easier, but writing the dissertation would be harder. But it's felt particularly poignant over the last few days because:
a) I received email notice about a workshop that I'd badly love to attend but can't since it's 3000 miles away
b) A friend and colleague is defending and I won't be there for it.
c) I'm realizing that with the end of the semester (for most people) that everyone is busy and I should not expect responses to the various queries I have sent over the last few weeks.

I've tried to alleviate some of the isolation by attending events at the local university, but with the term winding down, those will also dry up over the summer. We did go to the local sciencecafe last month, and I hope to go again this month, but that's only one evening every four weeks or so, and doesn't really satisfy in the way that attending a lecture or defense would.

I'm taking summer off from one of my jobs, so I'll have more time for writing, but with the summer also come even fewer opportunities for intellectual stimulation. At least the internet is a (poor) substitute, that will hopefully keep me going till I get through the writing!

Patience

Everytime I start a new academic or work project, I label a new file folder. I'm going to either have to go buy more folders, or stop beginning new projects because I've only got one left now. I'll give you three guesses which option I'll choose, and the first two don't count!

I'm a rather impatient person. I've been trying to get better at it, but I do tend to want things to happen faster than they tend to. I'm thinking that might be why I keep taking on so many projects. While I'm waiting for other people to do their part of a project, I get impatient and go start a new one. Then all of a sudden I've got a huge number of projects on the go!

Patience is a virtue.
Virtue is a grace.
Grace is a little girl,
Who doesn't wash her face.

I recently worked on a project for a government client. Talk about slow! Everything has to be approved by many people at many different levels, and just getting an answer to a question can take a week! That was hard to get used to.

But academia really isn't any better. I find myself getting a bit annoyed at the seasons of academia. Last spring/summer, I sent off three proposals for book chapters or articles to various places, all of which were conditionally accepted (to my surprise!) Each indicated they would respond and send revision requests by the fall. It's now April and I've yet to see those revision notes. I also know I won't see them till May since it's the end of the term, but I find myself a bit annoyed that none of these projects seem to have happened on schedule. I'm suspecting that's the norm in academia, but it doesn't make it any easier while I wait.

I'd just really love to finish these projects off, file them away, and concentrate on the current ones. *sigh* But I'll just have to wait till I hear back from the people who have the power to publish them.

Have patience. Have patience.
Don't be in such a hurry.
When you get impatient,
You only start to worry.
Remember, remember,
that God is patient too.
And think of all the times
when others have to wait for you*.

I am hopeful that someday I'll learn patience. I have been learning to be a more patient driver over the last few years. Perhaps I'll be able to do the same for the rest of my life as well. It's just that there's so much I want to do that I don't want to wait in order to be able to do it! That includes academic projects, which is my challenge: to focus on what's happening right now, and leave everyone else's schedules to them.

*These are the lyrics to a children's song the girls would listen to on one of their favorite tapes. For the full effect, you'd have to be able to imagine a turtle singing them in a slow, low voice that sounds like a record being played too slow.

New genre

I'm venturing into a new scholarly genre in three weeks time - the poster paper.

The genre is primarily used by scientists (including social scientists) so those of us in the humanities usually don't have the experience of publishing this way. But I submitted an abstract to a conference on genomics (the science of genetic information), specifically to their section on "liberal democracy and genomics" and it was picked up as a poster paper.

So now I have to figure this genre out!

Looks very different from the kind of writing/publishing I'm used to doing, that's for sure!

It does offer me the opportunity to think beyond just words to describe the work that I'm doing, which is not only a novelty, but something I've been wanting to do for a while now. (I've been thinking about creating a dissertation-based website where I can include dissertation-related material that wouldn't necessarily make it into the dissertation itself)

I think producing this poster presentation will actually be very productive as I work to adapt my research to this kind of format. I'm expecting that in the act of translating my work into this new genre, it will reveal things about my research that I haven't really thought about before.

Certainly, thinking about my research into the novel I'll be discussing - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - as a scientific project, with a background discussion, methodology, results and discussion, will require me to approach the novel and my work on it from a different angle than I have to this point.

I realize what I'm doing might be construed by some as a kind of "disloyalty" to the discipline. After all, the 2006 presidential address by Marjorie Perloff to the MLA called for a return to a more conventional definition of the English department, with less cultural studies and perhaps even less interdisciplinary work and more literary work. The debate of whether this is a good idea or a bad one is too large for me to engage with right now, but the point is that presenting a poster paper certainly isn't staying faithful to the (original) "literary" nature of the discipline.

But I'm looking forward to it. Wish me luck as I try to remember what a science poster presentation is supposed to look like!

Happy Blogversary

Five years.

I don't think I necessarily had any notions of how long this blog would last when I first began, but I probably wouldn't have guessed it would be going five years later.

During the time, many things have changed. Pictures and video are much easier to embed now and the whole Blogger interface has changed. But mostly I think things have stayed the same. I still seem to blog about the same kinds of stuff, maybe I blog a bit more about my dissertation work, but considering its LARGE role in my life, that seems natural.

When I first began, I thought the blog would be a way for friends who were far away to keep up with what was going on in my life, instead of having to write the same email over and over. But it very quickly changed, partly because I realized that the people who I email are not necessarily the same people who read the blog. So as a kind of mass email, it has failed.

But the blog is just the medium, and its purpose (at least for me has changed). One of the things I really have found useful about blogging, particularly as I blog about the dissertation, is that it has taught me how to talk about my academic work in a way that is less formal, and a bit more approachable. Now, before you protest, know that I do recognize that I've still got a long way to go before my writing about the dissertation really becomes approachable, but I'm starting to see differences, and if for nothing else, the blog has been instrumental in making that happen.

So here's to five years - who knows what's yet to come?

The horror, the horror...

Okay, "horror" is probably too strong a word for it. But the inability of so many people to use language to effectively express themselves is really starting to get to me.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old.

Maybe it's because I'm marking first year composition papers.

Maybe it's because while taking a break from marking first year composition papers I tried reading the letters to the editor section of the newspaper.

Maybe it's because I started reading favorite blogs during another break from marking first year composition papers and came across my buddy Jim's comment that BostonNow is limiting its reader-generated section because

Thankfully, the paper seems to have realized that most people who would blog for free in this situation are either terrible, desperate, or a little crazy, so they've cut down on the amount of space given to re-printing them.

Together, these events have conspired to convince me that the number of people capable of using language to accurately convey a coherent, well thought out argument (about anything!) is drastically falling. And it's not just people who have an excuse. About a third of my class are ESL students, which means they often say things I can't understand, but I do understand why they're having difficulty expressing themselves. Another 10% of my students write like I would expect high school graduates to write.

But it's the other half of the class whose inability to manipulate the language with any dexterity that (collectively) convince me we're in serious trouble. They grew up here, speaking the language since they learned to talk, writing it all through their formal education so far, and yet they could not write an argument to save their lives because they can't grasp simple concepts like "every sentence needs a subject and a verb". They prattle on in their writing like they do when they speak. And although I've yet to see someone type out "you know what I'm sayin'?"*, they're coming real damn close.

It gets really frustrating, because there's just so much that they have not learnt to this point, that even covering the basics would take far more time than I'm allotted to teach them. I'm supposed to be teaching them the higher writing functions, but I feel like I only teach those functions to that 10%. The rest I'm just trying to get caught up. It's exhausting and depressing at the same time.

*the answer to this query is usually "no" since the phrase is used to avoid actually saying what it is that the speaker is convinced he/she is saying.

Big Dog

I've seen a much shorter clip of Big Dog before, but this one shows some really interesting scenarios that the robot works through - hills, ice, being knocked off balance. You might want to play it with the sound off (or down) because Big Dog does make a rather annoying sound while operating.

Big Dog was produced by Boston Dynamics.