| thoughts from a cunning linguist | |
Taxes. Are. Done. Now I just have to finish the marking. One day left!
Coming attractions: I'll be writing a conference paper on "blogging, the war, and gender politics." I've been collecting info and interesting sites for some months now. But if anyone has any juicy suggestions, I'm all ears. (Or should that be, "I'm all eyes"?) At the conference, I'll be all lips. Woo hoo.
And that is: you can't find stuff that you thought had put in an unforgettable place--you know, for "safe keeping." Like tax documents. If you don't fill out those tax forms, the minute the T4s arrive in January, those T4s and receipts go off to the land of missing documents (right next door to the colony of odd socks and the island of misfit toys). Then you have to scramble because, remember, you've already procrastinated, so you're looking down the barrel of an April 30 filing deadline. And, you end up having to request that a particular payroll department provide you with another T4 (at the last minute). Thank god that some administrators are more organized than I am. I'll be gettin' me a T4 after lunch!
WillI manage to file on time? (Hide 'n' watch!)
Ahhhh. I've never been so happy to be doing nothing. I've done that this evening: nothing. For the last week, my brother and his girlfriend have been visiting. And all the while, I marked and entertained and cooked meals and marked some more until the wee hours of the morning. I was marking time in terms of essays, quizzes, and exams. I averaged about 5-6 hours of sleep per night. I still have more marking to do, but I have three more days in which to get it done. And I have only exams left. Exams never take as long to mark as essays because they are not returned to the students. They don't need to have as many comments on them. But the guests are gone and two-thirds of my marking is done. I can afford to take a nothing night.
I guess I've always been a bit of a procrastinator (so my mother tells me, anyway). So I suppose I was the one who put myself in the position I was in last week--with marking piled higher and deeper (that's what a PhD really means) and guests to entertain all at once. It's also why I'll probably end up leaving those exams I have to mark until the last possible minute I can (and still get them done on time).
Why is it that people procrastinate, anyway? I know I always feel better when things are done ahead of time. Yet, there is something that makes me put it off.
I could wonder further about what that is, but tonight I really do feel like doing nothing.
The big news this week in Canada is that the World Health Organization has put Toronto on its travel advisory list. And there is outrage. Yes, SARS has hit Toronto hard. But Torontonians, politicians, and pundits everywhere are crying foul. Admittedly, the measure may be extreme and alarmist.
What's curious, though, is the kind of alarm: it's the economic alarum that's sounding. People are upset because Toronto's tourism industry is going to suffer. They are worried more about the economy, it seems to me, than about health. (Hardly the best way to convince the WHO that TO should be removed from the travel list: "Hello? Dr. WHO? We think you should remove the travel advisory because our economy in Toronto will suffer") Convince people that this is an error, not by causing economic panic, but by explaining carefully that there is no need for a health panic. There's a difference between the cause of concern and the effects of the concern.
I agree that the biggest effect likely will be economic (I guess it already is). Or at least this will be the biggest effect on the largest number of people. Now, first let me say that I'm hardly jumping for joy at this fact. But I do see this as an opportunity of sorts, a lesson in economics, if you will, that Toronto might well learn and apply to its own ideas about economics in Canada.
Toronto is now learning what many other parts of Canada, especially Eastern Canada, have known for a long time: economics is about luck and politics as much as anything else. Places and regions don't choose to have poor economies. Newfoundland, for instance, did not choose to have its cod fishery go belly up. But people in Toronto would be the first to say, well you just have to deal with it. It's been said to many a Newfoundlander that in choosing to stay in Newfoundland instead of moving to Alberta or Toronto to find work, that person is "choosing" underemployment or a life of chronic unemployment.
The fact is in both cases, factors beyond people's control create both bouyant and trying economic conditions. Toronto has never felt itself out of economic control. It's always been able to point the finger from a position of relative economic superiority: Toronto is, by luck, conveniently central in a decentralized country, conveniently close also, to American industry, and conveniently located in the Canadian province that is also home to national capital. As a city it has benefitted and grown as much because of luck as because of planning.
I'm very sorry that Toronto or any city has to be worried about something like SARS (no matter how panicked that worry might be). I'm not one bit sorry, though, that Toronto is getting to learn an economic lesson: decisions made elsewhere, by powers greater than you--and decisions often made unfairly--nonetheless determine economic conditions.
When I was growing up in Newfoundland, the local radio station had this regular spot called "Would you believe?" It always presented outlandish, but true stories and far-fetched facts.
I think it's time now for some of us to begin hosting a "Would You Believe" based on stories from students. Excuses are far more creative than "the dog ate my homework" these days. Rather it's "the computer ate my homework-- only after I was kicked out of one computer lab because it was closing and I couldn't get to the next one, so I thought I'd call you from a payphone instead to say you won't be getting my essay tonight." Huh?
Or: your course was too hard, so I couldn't write my paper. I didn't even bother trying and that's your fault.
Or: my grandmother died for the seventh time and I know you won't really force me to prove that so I'll get my extension anyway.
Or: WAAAAAAHHHhhhhh. I can't even talk about it. You'll just have to take my word for the fact that there is a good reason why I can't hand in my work.
Or: I have a doctor's note that said I was sick on Wednesday last week, so I can't hand in my paper next Friday.
Now, I completely understand that shit happens and people's lives do fall apart. My own very life has been in shreds more than once. And, being very close to my grandmother, I also do sympathize with the grief of loss one might suffer when a grandmother dies.
But it's because I do take these facts of life seriously that I get so pissed off at the frequency at which they get trotted out as excuses for not meeting deadlines. Yes, some of the people do have genuine excuses and genuine losses. Many, however, are just trying to capitalize on the fact that life does shit on some people as a way of buying themselves time because they screwed up.
Would you believe I'm fed up with it?
...to bed, that is. It's been a marathon marking day, folks. I revved myself up with my version of "Gentlemen start your engines, this morning" (i.e. "Bush Whacker, uncap that green pen!) and haven't stopped since. (Yes, sometimes a pen really is just a pen.)
I did answer the odd e-mail between essays. And I cackled with Maurice for a minute about how he and Poupoune compiled The Bush Whacker soundtrack. I even ate some food--turkey leftovers supplied by the She-Woman.
But I have not seen the outside world today. April 21, 2003 has been "the day of the poorly printed word," replete with many typos, sentence fragments, and paragraphs that could not decide whether they exist in the present, past or future tense. And for my viewing delight, one student even supplied me with a plagiarism case to investigate.
With such excitement, why would I ever need to leave my house?
Maurice, Poupoune, and I all "paques-ed" ourselves into Van Dyke today--in celebration not of Easter but of the fact that Poupoune finally got her bush to Halifax (after many months of promising). ("Paques" means Easter in French.)
We went on what Maurice and Poupoune call a "nowhere": a trip that can be anything from a "now, here" to a "no, where?" With Maurice as chauffeur, we sped down the South Shore of Nova Scotia, taking the scenic route as far as Lunenburg. Maurice was armed with his digital camera, so there are pics on the aMMusing site. Experience Queensland Beach, Lunenburg, and Blue Rocks with us! (Stephanie, if you're reading this, you'll be pleased to know that I wondered along the way which camera you would use to capture the day).
Poupoune says she's coming back to visit us again soon. You'll have to stay tuned to see if she really will (we're skeptical).
I have lost so much sleep this semester worrying about my Cultural Studies class. I designed the course as an investigation into "Making Culture": a 2nd-year course in a new program at one of the universities at which I teach. Cultural Studies is a discipline that ultimately examines the structures of power and the way knowledge is constructed and circulated, through forms of culture ranging from television and advertising to watercolours and foreign films. It takes as its objects of study as much how the things we watch, see, and hear influence our thinking about the world as it does what we watch, see, and hear. The field is simultaneously fascinating and complex. It puts the everday under scrutiny. But to do so, Cultural Studies highlights how complicated our relationships are to the things we often take for granted about our culture(s) and, further, it pushes us to consider what is also missing from our taken-for-granted lives, the things we never get to see or are exposed to on very negative terms.
Understanding how culture is made (as, say, a piece of art is literally "made," but also as cultural categories for understanding art are conceptually "made") is, in short, a difficult enterprise. It requires learning complex concepts and acquiring language that itself may not be "everyday" language.
My students think my course has been too hard, the readings to difficult and the bar set too high. I've agonized through the term about how to make it better, not easier, but accessible. I've held study groups, given exensions for those who have struggled and explained things in great detail. The result is that many of the students have risen to the challenge. Some have written brilliant papers and exams. But there is also a number of students who have consistently put things off too long and not completed the exam. For these, I don't know what to do. They're smart students. They get the material when we discuss it. They just refuse to believe that they're getting it, no matter how much positive affirmation I provide.
So I'm torn: between thinking I did the job well and that I let them down.
And torn up.
I don't know how much of this problem is my fault. Perhaps the course should have been easier. I don't know. But I was enlisted to deliver this course--a course that had not even been designed or taught before--in a new program. No one else among the full-time faculty at the university was prepared to teach it. No one provided any feedback on the course outline as it was unfolding.
Now, I get to suffer from the fallout--fallout because my course was too hard, because I've had no support from the faculty. because I made them read "theory."
In the end, the marks for the class will not be low and in the end, the students will have learned something. I guess this is the main point of teaching.
Somehow, though, I still feel like I've failed them.
OK. It's April 17. It's almost Easter. And Easter is late this year. So how cold is it in Halifax you might ask? A whopping -20 (-4 for you Fahrenheit folks) with the wind chill factor. The day before yesterday it was +14 (57F).
This can't be what they call global warming.
Can it?
April is the cruellest month. T.S. Eliot said it. I doubt he was referring to academics for whom, at this time of year, PhD means "piled higher and deeper." But he might as well have been. And so the stack of essays beckons and repels all at once. You drift toward it because you have to, but you really don't want to wade through piles of mediocre writing. It's the essay that earns a "C" that takes longest to grade. The writing is poor, the argument lost in the expression, if it exists at all.
I had a roommate once who told me about getting an essay back from one of her profs. Every time she strayed off topic or was just trying to fill in space with words that said nothing of significance, he would draw a little shovel in the margin of her essay.
Since then, I've always wanted to draw those shovels.
I haven't had the guts--I write the sentences of explanation instead.
But as the printers of lottery tickets tell us, everybody's got a dream.
I'm steaming, frustrated, saddened all at once. Picture this: you have wanted all your life to teach at a university. Finally, you land a contract. The first course you teach goes exceptionally well; the students think you walk on water. The next semester, you get to teach the same course again. From day one, you have one particular student who is a pain in the neck--a real attention-seeker, who gets pissed off when he cannot have _your_ notes to photocopy and who will not shut up when anyone else (including you) is talking in class. New to the job, you don't know what to do. You seek the advice of colleagues, of department chairs. How do you control a disruptive student? How do you quell your alarming suspicion that the hostility arises from your open and frank discussion of lesbian and gay issues that began on the first day of class? No real help comes from the powers that be. Word is, the student is a "good student," a "good guy"--he's involved in student politics after all and awarded for it. You agonize over what to do, how to be fair, how to keep the class on track. No one really lays down for you what your options for dealing with this very difficult situation might be. You struggle through only to be told at the end of the semester that this student is filing a complaint against you for discriminating against him, for not letting him speak in class, for effectively harrassing him. The committee that deals with fair treatment, harrassment, etc, will hear his case. Never mind that endless levels of administration have failed to provide adequate support or even hear your case properly. You are now on the defensive. The student sits home and polishes his award.
A big part of me wishes the above person were me, so I could fight the fight on my own behalf, pull out all ths stops, accuse all the right people in style. But it's not my fight; I can't dispell my colleague's fear of both formal and informal recriminations. Unfortunately, the best I can do is support her fight and hope there is a grain of decency left in someone at this damn university.
How does my blood boil? Let me count the ways.
Ok, I admit it: I think I'm addicted to watching American Idol. Yes, me, the person who for many years didn't even watch television at all. I still don't have cable--I just have a pair of rabbit ears. But I don't know what's happened to me in the last six months--I even watch certain shows on a regular basis: CSI, Law and Order. I'm not a television junkie, but I sure am tuned in as I haven't been for a long time.
I think I first watched American Idol by accident, really. I wasn't doing anything and thought, gee, I'll flick on the tube, just for the hell of it. I became interested in the criteria by which people were chosen for the competition and interested in particular in the (now-former) contestent, Frankie. Her fate intrigued me because her voice was (is) so powerful, but she was a full-figured woman--very attractive, but not conventionally so. I wanted to see what would happen to her: how the judges would assess her, how this empty mass called "the American public" would respond to her. I followed her participation in the show long enough to get hooked, long enough that when she was booted off the show for failing to disclose that she had posed for an "adult" website, even my outrage did not keep me from continuing to follow the progress of things.
I don't really have any other good explanation for why I keep tuning in (besides just being "hooked"), except the fact that I don't have a good explanation probably insires me to keep looking for such an explanation. I think I keep hoping I'll be somehow surprised by the turnout, though that hasn't happened yet as week after week people get voted off the show.
One of the things that I do continue to be surprised by is the extent to which this voting American public has its opinions shaped by the crabby Simon Cowell, the judge with the most acerbic comments to make about all the contestants. He's a Brit, so I wonder if there some kind of colonial hangover working here. But he's anything but "nice." He's hardest to please because his standards are so high (or so he suggests), at least until his judgment is clouded by a pretty girl with not much talent like Ms. Carmen Rasmussen.
The other thing that fascinates me is a question about mass culture more generally: how does it renew itself? How does it create new famous people? Where do they come from and what compromises must they make to become and stay mass produced? American Idol is nothing if not a lesson in how to find star. It begs the question: what kind of "liveness " is possible in mass media? And is whatever liveness we might observe, really in the end just an illusion of whatever liveness fits the mythology we want.
I suppose the show doesn't really ask any new questions or present any new answers to old questions. And given my propensity to "intellectualize" life (as so many people point out to me), perhaps in the end it's just brain candy, not worh the paragraphs I've just typed.
Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
The makers of Palmolive dish soap have outdone themselves. Yesterday, I went to wash dishes and forgot that the day before, I had used the last of the dish washing liquid. So I bundled myself up and went around the corner to the Shopper's Drug Mart to replenish the soap and pick up a birthday card for a friend while I was at it. I didn't know what kinds of choices I would have at my disposal. There is now everything from Ocean Breeze to Aloe Vera to Spring-like flowery fragrances. But what took the cake was the aromatherapy dish soap--infused with lavender and ylang ylang essences. And it was the same price as all the other "flavours." I have to admit, the fact that the bottle also claimed this soap to be "Anti-Stress" sold me.
After all, who doesn't need their stress to be reduced when they wash dishes?
But really.
I've been spending the last few days compiling and writing a newsletter for part-time faculty union in Halifax. Overall, we have about 1400 members. The secretary and I have been brainstorming all day about how a newsletter might take electronic form. But no electronic template I've seen (for a newspaper or otherwise) seems to capable of delivering such a service. Ideally, getting the newsletter into a newsletter format that could be distributed by e-mail would be the thing. Currently what happens with our newsletter is that Maurice posts all the newsitems individually on our website. But this doesn't really enable us to distribute the newsletter--we can only send people to the link. And let's face it, the newsletter as a list of news stories is not quite as aesthetically appealing as it is in "newsletter format." I wonder if there's any kind of template or softward out there that can do the job....
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I lived with (though sometimes it felt like I was dying from)"the elephants"--the ones doing the dance of joy on my uterus in high heels. So I just call my monthly affliction "having the elephants." My youngest brother has never forgiven me for introducing him to the phrase.
Normally, I have elephant-sized pills to subdue the dancing beasts, but alas, my prescription had run out. It was just me, the heating pad, and as many Advil as my stomach could handle.
Gee, as I write that , I imagine a potentially sqeamish reader like my brother, someone who landed on this website and didn't know what would greet him or her today. It's funny (funny "peculiar," not "ha ha) how out of place the discourse of bodily functions seems in public or even semi-public places. Even in ads for "feminine hygiene products," the fluids are always blue, as to protect the public from the spectacle of fake blood. But sqeamishness notwithstanding, our assumptions about bodies signifies persist in spite of our deconstructions of gender roles, underlying stereotypes that pop up in the weirdest of places.
I can still remember when I first heard the absurd logic (it now seems only urban myth: no one could really have said this, could they?) about why a woman could not be President of the United States): she could be PMSing and get too emotional or hit the wrong button, thereby blowing up the world. (I guess they'd have to call it the Ovarian Office, if that happened.)
Which begs the question: is George Bush a bush of another kind who's been PMSing for the last year or so? If so, I can only hope his elephants are as distressing as mine.