The computer is still in diagnosis - I'm hoping we'll hear later today that they've fixed it. Right now it's with the BU IT guys, who can fix any software problem it's having, but if it's hardware, then we'll have to go elsewhere. Frankly, I think it is a hardware thing 'cause it all of a sudden started doing the same grinding, mechanical noise thing before shutting down that it was doing before. And it had been working so good for the last two months.

When I told a friend about the computer he suggested that my computer and my car should quit talking to each other! I agree, and hopefully the computer will come home this week especially since I have to do minor car repairs this Saturday - maybe the car repair will fill my things breaking down quota for the month. Having the computer back for next week would be great since it's spring break here and since I'm not jetting off to some warm, tropical haven of hedonism, I was hoping to get lots of work done.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

In other news, I got my BCIS application sent off last week, so I'll know in a couple of months if I can work off campus this summer. I'm going to keep my eye open for positions in the meantime - hopefully I'll know if I have the permission before I would got to any job interviews. It would be kinda neat to do some work other than teaching, even if just for this summer, and we need the money because we've both hit the cap on student loans and have to find funds elsewhere.

My computer is down again. Posts will likely be infrequent, but hang in there - I need the damn thing so I'll have to figure out how to fix it or replace it... though neither of those options excites me.

I had a great teaching day today!

What an excellent feeling it is when you feel like the discussion in a classroom was productive, interesting and actually *gasp* educational! I've taught this text four times before this and I have never had such a good preliminary discussion of it. And I have to wonder if it has to do with the conscious choice I made this time to structure the beginning of the class period by talking about something that was in many ways actually peripheral to the text. I started talking about a theme that is only dealt with in about a tenth of the essay, mostly just because I felt like I needed to put some more structure into what are usually more loose discussions in class. But the strategy seemed to work. It gave us a language with which to contrast the important parts of the essay, and I think more importantly, the students felt more comfortable talking about the text after they had sat through a traditional style 'lecture' full of unfamiliar terms and concepts.

It's odd, this psychological dimension to class planning. Many times, I can't always put myself into the head of a freshman undergrad - I would find it boring to get a lecture about Marxism when what I'm supposed to eventually write about is Requiem for a Dream, but they seemed to actually like it. At one point, I just stood back and let them discuss it among themselves - they really engaged with it.

So I guess the lesson I've learned is to lecture at them for a bit, as much as I dislike doing so, and then get a discussion going. Who would've thought a seminar would run best with a lecture component? I always thought of them as two different things. If you've taught before, maybe you know what I mean... or maybe I just have a weird group of freshmen... or maybe it was a fluke. Regardless, I felt like it was worth going to school today to teach, and that makes some of the disappointments of the last week seem less intensely important.

Unusual week. I was at school all five days, which is unusual - I can usually count on one uninterrupted day of studying at home (well, as uninterrupted as it can be when I've usually got family running back & forth while I try to concentrate). Now I know you might be thinking I'm complaining about doing something that most people actually do in a week, but with a 2 1/2 to 3 hour round trip commute, going to school two more days out of the week than I usually do chopped a significant chunk out of my week. And the reason I was there so much was to go to a bunch of meetings, presentations, appointments etc., so that ate time too.

Now I feel behind yet again. Ergh!

Oh, yeah, Happy Valentines Day!

Obviously, this day of love and sweetness is not the first thing on my mind. I had to ask the piano tuner the date this morning for his cheque. Duh! It's the 14th! But if you know me, my lack of enthusiasm for a holiday that seems to be all about spending as much money as possible to say things that you really should be saying all the time, not just on one day, isn't too uncharacteristic. And my cynicism grows each year - not about love, but about the holiday. Love I do believe in.

What else?

Oh, yes - Sandy's going to Colorado this summer - she's got a scholarship to go on one of those experiential/human service junkets out West (more than just Colorado). Only 150 high school students in the greater Boston area are selected, and she's one of them! Cool, eh? She's just gotta decide which tour she wants to go on. She seems pretty cool with the whole thing - I think right now I'm the one who's more nervous about it. But she's highly capable and will manage well - they wouldn't have chosen her otherwise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's very humbling when you realize that you've been blind to something that has been in front of you all the time... particularly when the reason you didn't see it is because you were running on an assumption... a cherished assumption.

I have been humbled. I am sad to have to abandon that cherished assumption, but I guess I deserve to be sad at letting go when I was the ass who held onto it in the first place.

I suppose this is how one eventually gets older and wiser, but there's a little part of me that would rather still be blissfully unaware rather than wiser.

Hmm... what to say about the weekend. It has been a full one. It has also been a crazy, frustrating, funny, annoying one. But thank god its over! Betcha haven't heard anyone say that about the weekend for a long time!

Something deep down inside me suspects that it has something to do with my birthday. Last year I hated the day and this year, the miserableness seemed to extend through the following three days. I'm suspicious. Perhaps I'll need to conduct an experiment next year to test this hypothesis.

On the plus side, I have a good friend who was very understanding and empathetic when he found out about my weekend. And because his family is going through a rough spot right now, I'm wishing good karma back on someone who deserves it.

*good karma wish*

In fact, I'm wishing good karma throughout all the places that this post will be read... it may not be much, but a broad karma spread has to be better than just my localized good karma wish, right?

I've been very busy in rather odd ways in the last couple of days. Monday started off rather ordinarily with a visit to the library, workout at the gym, teaching a class, heading home, doing the dinner thing, reading... usual kind of stuff.

It got unusual about 1:30 in the morning when Dwayne informed me that the basement was flooding. My first thought was one of confusion because we hadn't had any rain or snow in a week. It was not nature invading our home however, but the water tank. Nature had invaded our home with basement flooding earlier - minor compared to this outbreak! - so the landlord had left a wet/dry vac. Fortuituous, is that not?

But spending three hours in the middle of the night sucking water out of carpet was painful...not at the time, but even now my muscles are aching with the combined effort of a gym workout and then the workout of the bent-over-pressing-the-vac-nozzle-down-hard-to-create-suction for three hours in the middle of the night. OUCH!

So I rescheduled my Tuesday morning in an attempt to regain some of that lost sleep. But it was pretty much in vain. I called to request a cash release on that loan that I was having problems with, and they STILL had not released the money - needless to say, I need it pretty bad by now. And then the library lost my photocopy card - that was just adding insult to injury. They had my card in the first place because it stopped working in the middle of a copy job and took it telling me it would take a week to fix. And the only reason I have a card is because half the time the photocopiers in the library don't accept cash [as a canuck, it amazes me that people actually would expect a machine that has to accept papers bills to work]. By the time I got home, with waiting longer than usual for buses, I was cold, hungry, tired, and getting wet since we had this weird kind of snow-rain-sleet thing happening.

I get home, and someone has already put the chain on the door, so I can't get in. And there's no food (its 8 pm), and everything that was stored in the entry is getting wet in the snow because it got pulled out so the water heater could enter. I'm afraid I was awfully grouchy. And I had to say I was sorry later.

But, at least we had hot water.

Today was much better. I called to harass the loan people again, and this time they had my money! - now I just have to wait for them to cut a cheque and mail it. And the library actually found my card! And I found out that I have (some) summer work on campus.

Now I just need to finish all these little paperwork things and get back to my reading and meet with the profs I was supposed to meet with yesterday. But that's okay.

You know, my husband is a fabulous man. He's taken care of all this hot water heater thing so well. He's great!

The New England Patriots win the 38th Superbowl in the last 9 seconds of the game and only by a field goal. Well.

An interesting game - the Pats outran and outthrew the Panthers, but they made some bad plays in the second half and by the fourth quarter I was thinking that if they lost, no one should think it an outrage because they were starting to lose it.

I think I like the CFL better though. With one less down, there's more passing and kicking and less of that mishmash huddled up-the-center rushing. Okay, yeah, I know, I'm sure there are proper terms for all of it, but I only watch infrequently and these are the most descriptive terms I can think of. There were a couple of tries at a 2 point conversion during this game, which I think is more interesting, though overall, I like 3 downs better than four. Having said that, I've never mastered the skills of the game myself, and my comments are not meant to be critiques but expressions of my own preferences for amusement. Did that CMA enough?

Attended a Chinese New Year's party last night - emphasis on the getting-together aspect of party and light on Chinese New Year's. I enjoyed myself and saw quite a few people who I hadn't seen since last year. Met a couple of new people too. Got invited to a SuperBowl party tomorrow. I'd like to go - it would be neat to watch with a bunch of other people, but I don't think Dwayne wants to go, and I'd like to watch with him. So since I can't be in two places at one time, I guess I'll have to decide.

Good news: My budget increase was approved, so I will get all the loan I need for this year.
Bad news: They still haven't released the funds even though we're creeping up on a month since they were supposed to be disbursed.

I HAVE SO MUCH READING THIS TERM! I can't believe how much I have yet to read, and how quickly I'm falling behind. It's not even that I've been busy with other things 'cause I'm only teaching one section this term, I haven't gone out since New Years (unless you count stopping in at IHOP during a grocery shopping trip), and I've put a hold on all my other writing. And I still can't keep up! Over the last year I've gotten better and better at reading quickly, reading later at night without falling asleep, staying focused and getting more out of what I'm reading, but it still isn't helping. Right now it's all Critical social theory (a.k.a. Marxism), which is one of my least favorite theoretical approaches - I'd rather be reading Jung even! So my strategy is just to keep reading as much as I can whenever I can and hope it'll work out in the end... either that, or I take an incomplete in one class - which I did last spring and I regretted it for months after. Humfph.

*Sigh* I've spent much of my weekend doing paperwork - a necessary evil you say? In this case, NO. An evil, yes; necessary, no.

I've been trying to get a hold of my loan money since the beginning of the month. I have a loan from a private lender (one of the only lenders who will provide loans to Canadians studying abroad) that is supposed to be disbursed to the University at the beginning of each term. Each term so far I've had to usually wait for a couple of weeks before the University pushes enough paper around to satisfy the whim of some paper-eating demigod - hidden in the basement of the library most likely - before they credit my tuition account and then I can request a cheque for any positive balance in my account. The loan I am awaiting is private - did I mention that? - and has NOTHING to do with the University. This is how I pay my rent, since the stipend - there's an understatement of the term! - barely covers groceries, insurance, utilities etc.

But as of Friday it still wasn't in my account, and I'm starting to run out of cash. I've been calling & leaving messages for people all over the place, but not getting responses. Finally on Friday morning, I got one of my calls returned...

Well, it seems that the University is always looking out for its students, making sure they don't fall down elevator shafts while in custody oops, registered, or spend their money unwisely on healthy food at a non-university eatery, or just plain don't have too much money. Yes, the university has a budget line for me - and I am not to have too much money it seems. Being in the home of capitalism, it's fine for me to work 50+ hours a week outside the university and make what paltry money one can as a student (not me of course since they hate us here), BUT they cannot handle more money for me than they deem appropriate for a student. If they give me my loan, they will be giving me $4000 more than they think appropriate. ("Give" is the wrong word, since they only "give" me the stipend and the rest is loan - which incidentally is accruing interest at this moment and will ALL need to be paid back - no student loan forgiveness here!)

I told her I could not support a family of five on the paltry figure she quoted (I have a hard enough time with the little bit more that I do survive on and even then, they are reluctant to give that to me). The long & short of it is that I have to submit a budget, bills (thank god I've been anal about actually keeping receipts), credit card receipts etc. to prove that it does take more than $23000 a year to support a family of 5 in Boston! No shit - my rent is $18,000 a year - you do the math...

So, I have to prove that is costs more than that to live here, and then MAYBE they'll increase my budget line to allow me to get all the loan money that the private loan company HAS ALREADY APPROVED ME FOR AND DOES NOT COME OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY COFFERS in any way shape or form.

Does this system strike anyone else as asinine?

Countries I've travelled/lived in:



create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Lots of world left to explore!

Sandy kicked ass at wrestling today. She got 12 points for the team - yeah Sandy!

The part of Bush's State of the Union address that made me laugh out loud:

"A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription. (Applause.) By keeping costs under control, expanding access, and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America's health care the best in the world. (Applause.)"

Ha! As far as my experience has been - the service is the same but costs 4X as much... maybe it's different when you're a rich fat cat.

Interesting things

Sir Winston Churchill had a parrot (among other pets) that is still alive! It's 108 years old and still repeats the phrases he taught it including "F*** the Nazis!"

tergiversation \tuhr-jiv-uhr-SAY-shuhn\, noun:
1. The act of practicing evasion or of being deliberately ambiguous.
2. The act of abandoning a party or cause.

"Doodlebug" in addition to being the larva of an insect was the nickname given to V1 bombs that fell on London (most heavily in July/Aug 1944). The bombs' engine would cut out just before it would hit, so people would hear it coming and then nervously wait until they heard it hit, knowing that it had missed them. You can hear it about half way down the page under V1 'Doodlebug'

That big exam Dwayne wrote in December? He aced it! Yeah!

Currently reading:
Mother London - Michael Moorcock
Tithe - Holly Black

On deck:
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Wicked - Gregory Maguire

Just finished:
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
London under London - Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman

If you've been keeping track, Ulysses has dropped off the list for a while. I'll get back to it, but I only have so much time in a day. You can obviously tell which books I have to read for the Victorian lit class, though it might be harder to spot the independent study books.

The Red tent was an interesting book - it retells the biblical story of Dinah, the ony daughter of Jacob from her point of view, including her mothers' histories and Joseph's rise to power in Egypt later. It's an interesting take on a minor event in the bible, but if you decide to pick it up, you might find the first third of it rather slow - I know I did and had to be encouraged to keep reading before it got good. And yes, it made me both laugh and cry.
David Copperfield, well, it's Dickens. I like Dickens a lot - his characters seem so real, and hence likeable, even when they're scoundrels - but you have to have a bit of fortitude to get through the length (as with most Victorian novels). I think I enjoyed it more than Great Expectations, but less than others.
And Neil Gaiman? Just fabulous! I definitely have to read American Gods now. What was fascinating about this book was the way it imagined the London underground, and I read it along with the Trench and Hillman book, which was a fascinating non-fiction history of how everything under London - and there's LOTS of stuff under it - got there in the first place.

The Michael Moorcock is also interesting, though I must admit it's not a page turner. It's a bit too obscure in some places to keep me up at night reading, but the way he shapes the narrative through the lives of the characters is interesting. The chronology is messed up though, and it means I'm constantly having to make mental (or actual) notes about where things are at during any given chapter. It can be annoying, and is (I'm about half way through), but sometimes those chronological displacements are what end up pulling a story together in the end.

If you like fantasy - try the Gaiman. If you'd like a light read (even though a bit slow at first) pick the Diamant (and no, you don't need to know the biblical references, but if you do, it makes it a richer read). If you're in a blizzard, trapped in the house for four days... well, maybe then the Dickens would carry you through best! *wink*

School was cancelled yesterday because it was cold. BECAUSE IT WAS COLD. Yikes!

So the kids are bored, getting in each other's hair, and it feels like today is the last day of the weekend. But there's still three (!) more days to go because Monday is a holiday and Tuesday a PD Day. And because it's cold, there's not much to do outside. Ugh!

I am drowning in stuff... okay, specifically books & papers, but I'm drowning nonetheless. I pack up boxes of the stuff but it seems like I never get any more space in which to work. I know I tend toward pack-ratness, but over the years, I've gotten pretty good at discerning what I truly will need and what I won't. The big purge last summer sure helped pare things down into the critical and the non-critical. And although I make mistakes about what to keep and what to throw occasionally, overall I think I'm pretty good at it.

But I still have no space. I have to pile books on the floor in order to have a desk to work at. I am drowning.