Uninspired

I should be working. I had planned to be working this morning.

But I'm really feeling unfocused and uninspired this morning. Maybe part of it has to do with the brilliance of the papers presented at the colloquium last night. I walked away from it feeling stupid in retrospect.

But part of it also is that I don't want to teach this afternoon. It will be a short class because they'll all be exhausted from finishing their drafts and the biology exam that the majority of the class also has today. I also keep looking at the clock when I do try to read because I worry that I'm going to lose track of time and be late to leave. I could leave early, but since I want to drive (what luxury!) I also can't leave too early because then I won't have enough money to plug the meter.

So I sit here frazzled, uninspired, unintelligent, feeling annoyed at my three day a week schedule, not looking forward to getting drafts, and wondering if I should try going to the gym even though my workout yesterday exhausted me.

Grrrrr.

Pins and Needles

My head's been in my ass more often than usual lately... when I start to worry about the future, that kind of thing tends to happen.

What was bugging me wasn't much, just the whole finishing school thing, no biggie, right? Problem is, I really want to finish - I've got an awful lot invested in this. And it's not just me - our whole family is invested in this joint education venture - we've worked hard to get as far as we have, we've done without things, we've gone deep deeeeep into debt, we've lived what has felt like a precarious existence for the last three years to get as far as we have.

And we're close enough now to taste it - I can actually imagine the dissertation (which is something that I haven't been able to do before) and D is entering the home stretch - he's written qualifying exams, he's completed all his course work, he's done most of the practical qualifications he needs to graduate, and will be there in less than a year.

So when I found out that my loan application had been declined, what I felt I can't quite describe - disbelief, fear, desperation, despair, anxiety - or something that was a bit of all of them, and it preoccupied my thoughts for much of the past few weeks. People who I met often said I looked tired, but I think it was just that I was worn out with trying to figure out what was wrong.

Because there was no good reason that I could see for the decision. My credit rating looks exactly the same as it did last year when I applied for the same loan (which I got), so it couldn't be that. I checked my credit record, but there was no incorrect information on there that would've affected it. It took several days to track down the information I needed to find out what was wrong, all the time, I tried not to imagine what we'd have to do if I didn't sort this out.

You know what was wrong?

When my school emailed the confirmation of enrollment to the lender, they neglected to actually fill out the form and sent it out blank. So the lender thought that meant I wasn't registered and rejected the application. But the kicker was that it took over a week to get anyone to tell me why the loan was rejected, and then another three days, four phone calls, and a personal visit to the person in charge to get them to understand that this needed to be fixed.

Now I'm sitting here with my fingers crossed, hoping that nothing else goes wrong before they get the money to me...

I hate it when I can't tell dreams from reality

Last night I dreamt I needed to send out four very important and urgent emails.

Question: Is this just a general anxiety dream and the emails are just an expression of anxiety, or did my brain insert emails into the dream because I really do need to email people and have forgotten who?

I hate it when I can't tell my dreams from my reality.

They're getting closer!

The Tim Hortons, that is... there are now 3 in Massachusetts (though none are still very close by).



The quintessential Canadian donut shop is slowly infiltrating the corner of the continent that I live in and I'm psyched (even if I don't ever order the double double). In fact, Boston could be one helluva great coffee mecca if they manage to even get to the suburbs, because then I could have either Tims or ABP anywhere I go! How ideal would that be!?

After all, who can't help but love a donut shop that's penetrated the halls of academia, with a dissertation by Steven Penfold at York U. in 1999 on the sociology of Tim Hortons: "The social life of donuts: commodity and community in postwar Canada".

International moments

Today, the bus driver recognized my accent, asked where I was from and told me he was from Nova Scotia.

Later in the day, I passed a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "MooseJaw Saskatchewan" on the front.

Imagine that.

That's gonna be me in the back row!

I'm happy to say that I managed to get a ticket to the sold out reading by Neil Gaiman next Friday in Cambridge. This will be very cool! Coming from where I grew up, there weren't many writers stopping by town on book tours, and though I've caught a few people before, Gaiman is definitely the coolest reading I'll ever have been to!

Connections

Booker novelists have expressed outrage at Turkey's charges against author Orhan Pamuk of "public denigration of Turkish identity" for his statements about the Armenian genocide. Turkey has actually updated its penal code regarding freedom of speech in recent years to bolster its attempt to join the EU, but this charge will likely hurt them in their application.

Connections:

I live in a town in which I've been told the largest concentration of Armenians outside Armenia itself reside. There's an Armenian library in town and the anniversary of the genocide is commemorated here.

I read lots of Booker Prize winners and I value freedom of speech for everyone (even if I don't agree with what is being said - which isn't the case this time).

The first advanced writing course I taught was to international business majors, one of whom wrote about Turkey's bid to enter the EU... so I actually know a little about it, and it doesn't look like much has changed from when this student wrote about it two years ago.

Ivory Tower-itis

As I started reading this article by Thomas Benton on the death of secondhand bookstores, my first thought was, "Cambridge has the best used bookstores! That's where I always go. What's he talking about?" Then I realized that he hadn't said "Cambridge", only "in the vicinity of Harvard". Aaah! Well, that's different. 'Tis a pity that Harvard has so few used bookstores in its vicinity.

As I continued to read, the back part of my brain that's always categorizing and labelling told me this was one of those opinion pieces heavy on the nostalgia, though accepting of the fact that the world changes. Then I realized when I got to the end, that it was not nostalgic or accepting, but calling for change! A rallying of the universities to save the rapidly disappearing used bookstores!

Oh! See I was mistaken. When I read the author's statement that "Online bookstores are wonderfully convenient, particularly now that I live far from a major city. These days, I can obtain nearly any book I want, including rarities, on relatively short notice" I thought he was waxing nostalgic but only that. I guess I didn't take the "live far from a major city" part seriously since he'd already indicated that when he was at Harvard, "Two or three times a year, my long-suffering wife and I would take to the road in a rented car, traveling north to Gloucester and Newburyport in Massachusetts, Exeter and Portsmouth in New Hampshire, and Portland in Maine (being sure not to miss the Douglas N. Harding rare-book warehouse on Route 1 near Wells)" which seemed to indicate that he wasn't averse to travelling to obtain books. It also seems it paid off: "I probably acquired more than 2,000 books -- scholarly and antiquarian -- by the time I finished graduate school seven years later."

Imagine my surprise at the end when he writes, "If influential and wealthy people -- perhaps the kind who collect books themselves -- can be convinced of the importance of secondhand bookstores to an academic community, perhaps money could be found to subsidize their continuing existence in places such as Cambridge" Seems like a plan, or at the least a proposal.

I wonder who those influential book collectors might be? Hmmmm?

The idiocy continues

The library home page at my university was recently revamped, which means menus aren't where they used to be. And it is not evident from what is on the front page what links I would need to access the OED. After several unsuccesful links, I spot the "Search" function. Of course! I'll type in "OED" and it will take me to the link.

Only the "Search" function is "Coming Soon!" - so wait, let me get this straight. You rearrange the site then don't have a working search function? THAT was a good idea!

I like meeting new people (well, most of the time anyway)

Met the new group of doctoral students this year - there are 9 of them, which is by far the biggest class admitted in many, many years. Makes me a bit jealous - there's only two of us left from my class - they all get to go through the same stuff together at the same time. Some don't have MAs though, so they'll still be on a different track, so I guess it's not really that big a change in the numbers.

I do know I was looking forward to meeting them when I woke up yesterday morning, but then, I felt so drained (no good reason) by the time the meet 'n greet started, that I really didn't feel like being 'on' for meeting new people... you know, making nice conversation, remembering names, asking polite questions etc....

Not that I needed to worry - they were all cool and within about two minutes, I was actually enjoying the shindig. (though I would've enjoyed it even more if the department could've sprung for at least one free drink!)

The experience was a bit like I feel about teaching. Usually when I'm heading in, I'm not enthusiastic, but within a couple of minutes of starting class, I'm psyched and actually feel energized after teaching.

Same kind of thing with meeting new people. I actually worry that I'll look or sound like a dork. Which is stupid. Not because I'm not a dork. But because when I think about it, I really just don't give a damn. Well, mostly don't...

*pfft* Okay, so I do. But I also don't. And no, I DON'T need to make up my mind. I'm gonna have it both ways.

Back into the swing of things

Going to school in the morning was an odd, and slightly disorienting experience after all the movement of travelling halfway across the country and back.

The morning started well - I was psyched about the class I was teaching, looking forward to the possibility of shadowing and working with the new prof in the department, and just really sailing through on the aftereffects of several days of no work (not to say I didn't get tired during the trip - I'm exhausted - but I didn't do anything intellectual, which was a nice break!)

Unfortunately, things started going downhill pretty much as soon as I arrived at school. I had an immediate disappointment in not being able to shadow, but it was countered by a kind of schadenfreude-relief of finding out in a non-annoying kind of way that it wasn't going to happen. Then I had some bad/worrying news that I need to follow up on to try and correct. Then I went to the department meeting... though that was kind of a neutral event.

My biggest disappointment came the moment I walked into my classroom. I walked in to the tiniest classroom I've ever seen (the functional part of it is probably the size of my bedroom... which has never had thirteen people in it before) and announced "I'm here for English 111 - Constructing Narratives across Media. I hope you all are here for that too". I was rewarded by nothing but blank looks.

Apparently, the twelve people in the class who I thought had all signed up because they were psyched about studying multiple media for their comp class didn't exist. What did exist were twelve nursing students whose advisors had just scheduled them into the class - they had not selected my class because they were interested in the topic - they just ended up in my class.

That threw me for a loop, because I felt like I needed to explain what the class was about and how it was different from the regular class and how it was the same. I almost cried in frustration - if I have to teach the freshman comp, I wanted to teach students who were excited about the concept of this special topic course and motivated to talk about it and write neat papers about it.

So I'm very disappointed... and worried... I guess I just have to wait and see if the class warms up to the material and if I can fix the problem I learnt about in the morning. Wish me luck

Nebraska

Okay, so first off, I just gotta say... DAMN! this country is big! Almost as big as mine! I have car butt now from sitting in a moving vehicle for soooo long! But it was worth it!

Corn, corn, corn

There's lots of corn grown in this country... or at least in the country I travelled through. Corn and soy. Different from the endless wheat fields I'm used to seeing. But if you squint, it looks exactly the same. Felt like I was driving across Saskatchewan and Manitoba most of the time.

Nebraskan fast food

In Nebraka, there's a fast food chain, Runza's Restaurants, that make runzas. What's a runza, you ask? It's a whole bunch of ground beef with cheese wrapped in dough that's then cooked. And it's damn good - too bad there aren't any of them here 'cause they'd probably get added to my list of favorite fast food places.

The wedding

Only one word describes this wedding: beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! They are a fabulous couple and their happiness was a delight to see. Congratulations!

We are such geeks!

At the wedding reception, when people are supposed to be drinking and having a good time, someone at our table of eight mentioned Bentham's Panopticon... and we all nodded our heads 'cause we're all geeks who've read Foucault. Sheesh! I felt the need to drink after that just 'cause we were obviously thinking too hard!

There is such a thing as too much

Six states and fourteen hours of driving is just too much: Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania.

Holy Toledo!

So, now I know where the expression comes from... because we decided on the way back home that we'd have dinner in Toledo. We saw the sign for the Toledo zoo - probably not a great place for dinner, so we keep driving. And driving. About ten minutes later, it dawns on us that we must've blinked real hard and missed it, 'cause there ain't no Toledo to be seen, hence "Holy Toledo! We missed it!"

State Troopers

These are scary dudes, and I really don't ever want to meet one, which is why I was really glad that I got lucky in New York with them. No, not that kind of lucky. I mean that I didn't have to talk to one of them. I was in the left lane following this dude from Kansas who wasn't going as fast as I wanted him to but wasn't moving over to the right lane to let me pass. Well, we go past a cop on the side of the road who flips his lights on just after we pass him - he's after one of us. So I back off and shift to the right lane. Kansas didn't see him or something, 'cause he kept going at the same speed. Cop pulled past me and nailed Kansas instead. I'm sure some state troopers are really nice people, but I'm happy to say I have yet to meet one!

Home again, home again, jiggedy, jig

Three thousand miles of travelling under our belts, we run into our only snag a half hour out of Boston. A tractor trailer flipped, blocking two lanes of traffic. At least that's what the radio said. I believe it, 'cause when we turned off onto a side route that would go nearby my house anyway, we say nothing but stopped traffic for a couple of miles ahead. That last half hour actually took an hour and a half - a bit of a frustration after such a long travel!

ROAD TRIP!

I am off to Nebraska for a wedding, so don't expect posts for a while. Three of us are driving... and yes, it's a LONG way!

You can start placing bets on survival, sanity, arrival times etc. now.

So far I've been lucky

The 'helicopter' parent phenomena is one that I've mostly managed to avoid, though I've certainly heard the stories. I remember talking to a woman who works in the Registrar's Office who fielded a call from a mother asking if she would check that her son was eating his vegetables. That's just wrong on so many counts, I don't know where to start.

But the more disturbing part about it is the consumer mentality that is creeping into higher education (particularly here in the U.S.). Going to school is seen as a rite of passage and a necessity to obtaining a good job. In a private institution like the one I teach at, the vast majority of freshman are just that "fresh" out of high school with little or no life experience to speak of. In all the freshman classes I've taught, I've only once encountered a student who hadn't come straight from high school, and he was still only 20.

With this mentality, students come to see their education as a product that can be consumed and if they've paid for it, they expect to get out of it a passing grade, an 'A', a credit, whatever it is that they've decided they should get out of it. In other words, I'm supposed to deliver whatever it is they think they are entitled to after they've paid their tuition. It's a weird attitude to encounter and it cheapens the learning experience.

If any of you ever see me acting like a helicopter parent when my kid goes off to school next year, slap me upside the head... hard, ok?

One more thing that can go wrong

Got an electronic memo today:

During the summer, the Office of the Registrar worked closely with Information Services to develop electronic rosters (E-Rosters) for the semester undergraduate day courses. Faculty who are assigned to teach these courses in the fall and are on the University's faculty file will have the ability to print their rosters as often as they wish until the grade sheets are generated. These E-Rosters will reflect the student add/drop activity that was processed at the close of business on the previous business day.

While I understand the rationale behind this, it fills my heart with trepidation. Before it was just that (incorrect) electronic files messed with my ability to work out or access the library. Now there's the possibility that those same kinds of mistakes will screw with my work. Great!

This might actually be enjoyable!

Since I'm going away to a wedding on Wed. night and not coming back till the day before classes start, I figured I should do some work on my course materials etc.

I'm teaching one course this term and two next term, the reverse of what is usually required of us, but I asked for the arrangement so that I would have time to write those damn exams that are still looming over my head during the fall term. Let's hope I get them written, otherwise, I'm gonna be screwed come spring term!

Anyway, the uni has decided to try and make freshman writing more interesting by creating special topic sections of the required freshman course. So I submitted a proposal and it was accepted. It was a series of sequences that I pretty much already was working with, and all but one I've already tried out and found they worked pretty well.

So anyway, I'll be teaching a freshman writing course in "Constructing Narrative Across Media" which means we get to 'read' a whole bunch of stuff that isn't just books. We'll be 'reading' painting, film, and, you guessed it, blogs! Their final project has them revisiting the work they've been doing all term, which means one option is to create a blog of their own - the last time I tried this with students, most of them 'got' it, though some of them really didn't put much effort into it.

The course is great because I get to talk about narrative, which is something I study and actually know something about. And I get to talk about film and blogs... two things I also know a little about. The only thing I don't know much about is painting, but it's the first thing we do, so it's not like the students are ready to start rebelling yet and usually works out pretty good. It also means we get a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts across the street (another reason why it's going to be more fun than sitting in the classroom all the time).

I suspected that there might be an added benefit to the class, and there certainly was - when I logged onto the webCT for the course, I saw that I only have 12 students signed up yet! Alright! Now, sure, that could change before the term starts, but a small class would make this an even better course to teach. It's always easier to get students talking, and everyone talking, when there aren't too many people in the class.

I still need to re-read a bunch of the essays and stuff, and write at least one more assignment before the term begins, but it's looking like this could actually be a pretty cool class!

My imagination fails me

Today while driving, I was cut off by a car pulling out of a liquor store parking lot. I was behind it for a few blocks until it turned off again... into a cemetery.

????

I fail to see the connection.

My Private School Days

Betcha didn't know I ever went to private school, did you? But I did. The only reason I did was because my dad and mom both worked for the school, otherwise, I wonder that they ever could've afforded it.

Besides, when you live in Brasil and don't speak very good Portuguese yet, you're probably best going to a school where the language of instruction is English. So I was playing with Google Earth (which is another in a long line of useful things to do when you're procrastinating about doing the work you're supposed to), and I managed to find the school! Here's the aerial shot:



And before you get all jealous, the pool was under construction when we left. That big green space? A real futbol field. The structure at the top of the picture was the elementary/junior high classrooms and the cafeteria/administrative offices are in the light colored building next to the pool.

Now I just need to find the house we lived in!

It's good to know your limits

How much caffeine would it take to kill me?


After 104.76 cups of Brewed Coffee, you'd be pushing up daisies

Now I know. Do you want to know your limits?

There and back... again

This has been a summer full of travel, well, for my family at least. I've pretty much stayed put aside from a brief foray across the border in search of comedy.

Our family hasn't been together much this summer - they've all been off here and there, back and forth, to and fro, well, you get the picture.

The day after school ended, we sent daughters 2 & 3 off on a jet plane. The next day daughter 1 left. Then nothing much happened for about a month. Then daughters 2 & 3 came back. Two days later, daughter 2 left again. Eleven days later daughter 1 came home. Two days after that daughter 2 came home. Three days later, husband left, and three more days after that, daughter 3 left again.

Today husband gets home, and then in another three days daughter 3 gets home. Four days after that I leave and by the time I get home, school starts.

So, did you manage to keep track there? I did (though I guess I can cheat cause I have the calendar with everyone's travel plans on it in front of me). That makes three days together as a family so far and four next week. In the two months of summer, we only managed to be together for a total of a week!

Is this a having teenagers kind of thing, or just my travel bug family?