Happy Hannukah

My newly started studies in Hebrew are not yet extensive enough to give a proper seasonal greeting, so that will have to do for now. We are off on another whorlwind of visiting and eating, a few hundred kilometres away from here. We'll be further out in the sticks, so I doubt that I'll be back on the net before the 29th. Then again, the sticks may have wireless. You never know these days. So, see you soon?

Geography saves

I was having a hard time figuring out what I wanted to say on this morning, of all mornings. And then I thought, if you don't know how to put it into words, say it with a map. Special thanks to the CIA and UTexas for the image that expresses what words cannot.

Points for guessing which smartass just learned how to do picture posts.

The Holiday season rocks, if for only this one reason:

We get to eat tourtiere! If this word means nothing to you, then it is likely that you were not raised in the snowy land called Quebec, the province that keeps threatening to take its ball and go home (Mom! Canada's oppressing me again, make it stop!). Considering the site stats, it is highly probable that you are reading this with a furrowed brow and a new window opened to a web dictionary. Don't bother, I'm about to get teach-y.

Tourtiere is a very traditional Quebecois dish. It's basically a meat pie, sometimes made with pork, sometimes ground beef. Originally, the filling was tourte (carrier pigeon, or so I'm told) but my people liked the pie so much that we made the bird extinct. Maybe it wasn't all our fault, but as the shake'n'bake ad says "we helped!". So, that's sad and shameful, but let's try to move on.

Tourtiere is eaten at various times of the year, but the most authentic is to have it after midnight mass during Reveillons. "Reveille" means "to wake", and is when Quebecois people open their gifts (which is pretty awesome when you are a kid...nap for an hour after church and then get to stuff yourself and open presents in the middle of the night).

Some of us used to find it very hard to be vegetarian at this time of year, since the traditional diet eschews all representatives from the vegetable kingdom, except for cameos by the potato, which manages to just barely keep vegetable status by sneaking under everyone's radar. Food is central in our culture, so not being able to partake in, basically, anything really makes one feel as though they are on the outside. This is where having a vegetarian mom kicks ass. This brilliant woman set to work on making a vegetarian version of our favourite dish, which is now easier since fake meats are everywhere. The result is so good and authentic-tasting, that my meat-eating grandparents wolfed it and wouldn't believe it wasn't "normal". And tonight, that is what we are eating. I will try to post a recipe later, in the meantime, joyeux noel if you celebrate, bonnes vacances if you don't.

Just a wee update

I am out in the country, kicking back with a glass of soynog. The tree is up, and the beast is contentedly watching the lights reflect off the tasty strands of tinsel. He is either genuinely disinterested or planning a devastating night strike, it's hard to tell. Work on my thesis is not progressing, despite the 50lb bag of books that I brought with me. I am, however, have a good time. More soon.

Edited to add: Apparently the nog was so powerful (harnessing, as it did, the twin powers of Rum and Triple Sec), that it disabled my central grammar processing unit. I'm "having" a good time everyone, no need to panic.

Temperature

Sean Paul you are on notice: if your new album causes me to blow out my computer's speakers, I'm sending you the bill.

An embarassment of riches

I find that the more I get into my academic readings, the more I want to read non-academic works. For some reason, I've always been able to find the time to read throughout my studies. I know a lot of people who say that they'll start reading for fun again when they are done their degree but I've never been able to give it up. I find that my writing and quality of thought suffers if I let it go. The times in my life when I've stopped reading for fun have also been the times when I have been most blocked and laissez-faire with my writing.

I feel a renewed sense of excitement in my project these days, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that I've got a whole new bunch of books on the go all of a sudden. I'm happiest when reading a bunch of books concurrently. Here are the ones that form a pile beside my bed and find themselves in my backpack wherever I am headed:

La Gloire de mon pere by Marcel Pagnol
Naked by David Sedaris
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
L'homme aux cercles bleus by Fred Vargas
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
A couple issues of McSweeney's magazine The Believer (thanks JK!)

Does anyone know the html for accents? Also, is there any way to write in non-anglo scripts? I've seen arabic and persian blogs, so there's gotta be a way.

Today's work

My goal for today is to finish ammending the participant recruitment ad, flesh out the chapter outlines more, read some theory and methodology articles and write 500 words on chapter 1. Non-thesis goals: revise and possibly send out freelance queries, sort through old clothes and make up box of donations. Reward: candlelight yoga and shortbread cookies.

Update: recruitment ad done, 500+words done. Didn't do any methodology reading, but that's okay. The non-thesis stuff is spilling over into this weekend, but that's okay too. Went to candlelight yoga taught by Red, which was awesome. I got to be the helper elf who got the candles light and spread around the room before class which made me feel special (cuz, apparently, I'm 12 years old).

From the sidelines, again

I was going to do a post for the teaching carnival, I really was. I'd thought of a topic of burning relevance to higher learning and plotted out some ways of talking about it. But then I worked on my thesis all afternoon. I broke my chapter down (traumatic!) and then wrote outlines for each of the new chapters (energizing!). I went to the gym for the first time in a few weeks. I ate chips and french onion dip with the girls. I came home pleasantly sleepy. I had a glass of wine and some roasted almonds. And I decided: another month of reading teaching carnival is here and I will just have to save it for next time.

Fear the cowbell, for it doth toll for thee

Bjorn to rock. Awesomest. marching. band. ever. Viking love.

Accomplishments and Narnia

Accomplished so far today:

-Woke up early. Finally, the sleep schedule is back on track.

-Just avoided burning the lentil soup, which brought back memories of almost being killed by a pot of beans left cooking on the stove (most embarrassing way of meeting one’s maker ever). Luckily I had just started dating my charming companion at the time, who rushed in to the house and got me out of the smoke (who knew burning beans would create such a pall of black, choking smoke? Everyone but me? Oh.) It was the time of my life when I was wandering around with a whopping case of undiagnosed mono, which made me fall asleep on the living room couch every few hours, cleverly ignoring whatever I had put on the stove. The doctor would later say that she’d never seen such a bad case of the illness, outside of her textbooks at medical school. Grrreat. Anyways, I didn’t burn down the house and die. Unburned lentil soup is tasty and non-deadly.

-Got the recycling out. Kept watch to make sure that Sketchy Joe the Personal Information Miner didn’t riffle through the paper recycling box again, looking for discarded credit card info to sell.

-Looked over my thesis work and mapped out what I want to do with it.

-Cawed at a crow outside the window. I know it’s a weird thing to do, but when you have a gift, you have to use it. It just so happens that cawing convincingly like a crow is my main talent. What am I doing in grad school?

-Fed the beast. A walk is imminent.

The weekend was chill but good. Watched Narnia with assorted troublemakers. Unfortunately chose to go at the same time as half of North America’s preteens. Dude behind us was showing off by making stupid comments. The whole time. The stare-at-them-until-they-get-uncomfortable trick only worked briefly. The movie was actually pretty good, preteens aside. The visuals, by the folks who brought us Lord of the Rings, were awesome and Tilda Swinton kicks all kinds of ass as the White Witch. I never read the books as a kid, and didn’t *gasp* really like them when I read them recently. I also didn’t catch on to the Christian themes, because, yes, I am that dense sometimes. You can see it in the film though, which truly has elements of a passion play for the younger set. What I think is a little subversive about this Christian message is that it strikes against the prevailing type of mainstream right wing Christianity that has come to dominate public discourse in America. Evangelical fundies will find themselves getting very uncomfortable at the tacit acceptance of “deep magic” throughout the film. The movie is being marketed to rightist Christians in the US, but makes a hypocrisy of the rejection of the Harry Potter phenomenon on the grounds that magic is “satanic”. Zing!

Is it really geeky to be excited that someone from Slough visited my blog via a google search for “imperious curse”? Okay, yes, it is. I know S-town has only one claim to fame, and is generally considered to be a bit of a crap town otherwise (which was why it was chosen in the first place). But still, Slough Trading Estate, be still my heart.

Just a quick update before I head out to get my Holiday Season on. It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, I've met with my advisor and decided to rip the guts out of my chapter and rework the whole structure of the thesis, and this is a good thing! I'm a little scared about where this all might take me, but pretty excited too.

My once annual shopping trip is in the offing, so I must go charge up the plastic.

Laters,
GSH

Greetings from the community of jerks

Monday night, grocery store. I know the cashier, we used to hang out, years ago. Despite some serious unpleasantness between a good friend and him, I persist in being polite when I see him. Because, hello, he is the cashier in my grocery store, and what else am I going to do?

Monday is going well, so far, though I've only had 3 hours of sleep. The 89 papers are finished, the plagiarists caught (9/89), and the marked essays are in the hands of the prof. The paycheque is burning a hole in my pocket, so my dashing companion and I are out to buy some fixings for chili, some red wine and some Glenlivit (cuz everything is better with a little Cousin Glen, as we call it in my family). We pick up Batman Begins and a disk of the L Word. Last stop is the grocery store.

"Buddy" is the one who ends up running our purchases through. We make a little small talk, nothing unusual, as the transaction goes through. While I am waiting for my card to scan, he looks up at me and says "So, how is everything in the community of jerks?". Excuse me? I say, because it sounds perilously like he just called me a jerk in front of a line up of twenty strangers.

"Oh, you know, academia. The community of jerks." What exactly are you saying here? "Oh, you know, not Everyone is a jerk. Just, you know, most of academia. Enough that I can make a solid generalization about it".

(At this point, the enraged social scientist in me wants to rake him over a bed of hot coals for acting as though he has just provided evidence of a social fact. The enraged non-social scientist in me just wants to rake him over a bed of hot coals for fun). Note also, that he did not say that *I* wasn't a jerk, just that "not everyone" is a jerk.

It should be noted that I am down with valid critiques of academia, it has its failings and oppressions, just as every sphere in our society does. But it's also a site of resistance, and full of interesting, critical people. See my (growing) list of linked blogs for evidence of the wicked smart people doing cool things in academia. It just really frosts me when people launch passive aggressive attacks on what I do, using comments like this.

We finish up and leave, with me muttering threats under my breath to kick him through the store's plate glass window the next time he publically demeans me when I am trying to buy food for my household (once we have cleared earshot, I'm not quite that Kung Fu in real life, most of the time, but he is testing my impulse control to a high degree).

Of course, since I know his history and what circles he runs in, I know that his "community of jerks" comment is some rich, rich irony coming from him. Nonetheless, it really makes me not want to go there when he is working.

Harry Potter and the Stack of Unmarked Papers

If I mark like hell for the next four hours, do I allow myself to go see a matinee of HP? I really liked it when we saw it on opening night, but the theater was so packed with preteens (who screamed everytime Harry came on screen) that we had to sit right in front of the screen. In addition to a splitting headache, I kind of feel like I missed quite a bit of the story since I was concentrating so hard on not feeling completely uncomfortable.

Anyone want to share a bucket of popcorn and a flick at 4:45? Rat boots are on me.