I have now applied to four PhD programs!

In celebration, I'm taking a brain break with Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra:



(And no, I haven't seen the new stuff yet. *waves hand* Four more PhD applications and a GRE test and I'll watch it.)

I've sent in the first online application to a PhD program, and have three more ready to go once I double-check with my final referee that he'll write for me. That takes care of everything due up to Dec 8. Two of the next four (due Dec 14) are mostly done, and since I'm on a roll I can probably get the final four-or-six post-Christmas ones mostly together in the next little while. It would be harder if I was generating entirely new data for each app, but I'm not. There's very little variation between the schools.

I'm also coming to the realization that I really don't know much math anymore, and as such that part of the GRE won't be so hot. I don't have time to re-learn grade 12 math (I didn't do any in OAC) and I'm going for basic, basic skills. The verbal stuff is considerably easier.

In happier news: I'll probably get a new bed sometime around the middle of next month. With my sister moving to Mexico and all, I get to sponge off furniture they're not going to take with them. For the past (nearly) five years, I've been sleeping on a crappy futon. I'd bought it second-hand off of a friend when the Ontario Renaissance Fair closed. Yes, I've been sleeping on a bed meant for temporary on-site summer-weekends-only use. It's lumpy and uncomfortable and dips in the middle. It's almost out of my life.

Out of everything else, this is possibly the best news of the week.

I'm pretty sure that the story on Y2K-ten-years-later that started this morning's Q (on CBC Radio) was just an excuse to play that Robbie Williams song "Millennium". (Hah - the song just ended and Jian quoted part of it and said, "Good line". Hah!)

Something I didn't know about Y2K is that since then, there have been no studies to see if the billions of dollars spent on averting disaster were actually well-spent or not. That seems strange - the whole accountability thing is missing. And when we have disaster after disaster (federal bailouts and swine flu this year alone) that seems to be solved by throwing massive amounts of cash in any direction as fast as possible, it seems rather important to have someone giving a second look at this. The Q spot was based around an interview with Slate's Farhad Manjoo, who has just produced a two-part article on this topic.

...but I durn forgot that there was new Doctor Who this weekend. In some form.

I'm in the middle of revising my MA Thesis proposal (I swear, the amount of paperwork that this program makes me do...) about why I should totally watch Saxon/The Master vids for my thesis, so I should probably have better DW radar. Uh. I have no excuse. Except for the excuse of "I'm too busy writing about old episodes to watch new ones"? IDK. Mafia Wars has replaced all my critical abilities with a clock-watching mania of digital bloodlust.

Speaking of being out of date, I'm rocking out to Prodigy. Yay 1997! (Oh hai next track: Nine Inch Nails from 1992? Yes please! Ug, some of these tracks have been on my computer since before Metallica got angry at Napster. Okay, back to work. No, really. *goes*)


ETA: I actually Accomplished Stuff today, you know. I finished a solid draft of something I'm going to send to a journal this week and it'll double as a writing sample for PhD apps. It's not just all Facebook games and Professor Layton on DS. Not all.

You can't tell me that global warming isn't happening: today is the Santa Claus Parade, and there's a forecast high of fifteen degrees Celsius.

Uh, no.

Some of them haven't bought the textbooks yet, which accounts for some abysmal test scores. I'm carefully maintaining a veneer of I Don't Care Because They're All Adults and will unblinkingly fail anyone who doesn't actually answer the test questions as asked.

I think I was meaning this to be a bigger post, but really, all I have to say is: woah, I fear for one of my two tutorial groups. The group that refuses to buy the textbooks is also the group that thought the domestic abuse in The Honeymooners was okay because Ralph and Alice were obviously friends. Uh. No?

And in the course of a month, I've: seen both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, presented at a conference, failed to jump on a hotel bed even though the hotel bed was available, seen two neat cities, hung out with many people (including thucyken, firstgold, squonk and stickchick596, and many new people) and had some awesome food. (The food is important. Food is always important.)

Boston is a neat place, and there's quite a lot of Important Stuff that went on there. It may just have been a factor of my being downtown/in the North End the entire time, but every time we turned a corner there was something else famous. On the way to have Italian dinner (ammazzafame + pinot grigio for me) we passed Paul Revere's house, for example. The next day we hit the Museum of Science for the Harry Potter exhibit: props and costumes from the movies - the pre-teens were all about the kids' costumes, the tweens were all about RPatz's Cedric costumes, and I was all about the teachers' things - fun fact, Snape's robes are bluish-purple, not black. Also at the museum was the ginormous Van der Graaf generator from the 1930s that was used to futz with atoms back in the day, and the 3.5" floppy containing the world's first computer virus. Then we wandered over to the USS Constitution (in commission since 1797), which was awesome enough to make an impression even after all the awesome that we'd seen thus far.

*takes breath* And then we decided that the menu at the Cheers bar was not so good, so we had dinner elsewhere before going to see Boondock Saints II in a theatre off of Boston Common. I think I annoyed stickchick596 a bit by keeping a running commentary of where to find all the Toronto-as-Boston locations. One giveaway: Boston's streets are allergic to straight lines. Toronto's are mostly in a grid. It was a fairly crappy film, but it was also fun in its own bubble-headedly violent way.

Many jokes were made about the Freedom Trail. Like jumping on and off the painted/bricked red line in the sidewalk, declaring one's relative states of liberation or oppression, etc. All joking aside, it's a good way to map out sites of interest. Just follow the trail and you get where you need to go.

As for the conference itself, there's not much to tell. I was in the first scheduled slate of panels, meaning I got everything over with first and got to enjoy the rest of what I saw. There were some fantastic papers, a few horrifically bad presentations, and a good time was had by all. I have a good idea of how to refocus my piece, and because there wasn't a big SF/F contingent represented, I spent most of my time in panels on interior design and architecture.

It's good to be home. I'm not planning on going anywhere until February (Albuquerque!) though Ottawa in December is still on my radar. I have to spend the next few weeks doing some intense reading, though somewhere in there I'll also be applying to PhD programs and hitting the symphony a few times. ...Yikes.

Last November, I went to Wales for a conference; this November, I'm off to a conference in Boston.

Without the stress of international travel (a transatlantic flight + the train from London to Cardiff, yikes) or the jetlag, I'm looking forward to sneaking a few hours tomorrow and Thursday for hiding in a posh-ish hotel room and working on schoolwork. Yes, looking forward to meeting up with friends in the area, looking forward to the conference (there's a paper on nerdcore rap that I hope I can attend, and a whole panel on women and the development of American museums), but also looking forward to a few quiet hours of no distractions.

Luckily, my paper is in the first set of panels (last time it was the final paper of the conference), so I'll be able to relax for the rest of it. Relax and maybe order ridiculously expensive room service. Relax, maybe order ridiculously expensive room service, and get some interrupted time to work. Bliss. This is how you make an academic happy.

In other news, Claude Levi-Strauss is dead. He was 100, and since I spent all of last week writing the paper that was such a big part of Hellweek (making Hellweek particularly hellish), and trying to make sense of Levi-Strauss's structural approach to mythology was a big part of why the paper was such a pain to write.... my reaction is inappropriate. Though, it's odd to think that when I finished the paper on Friday he was still alive and when I handed in a paper copy this week he was dead. If I had a better grasp of his theories, I could make an appropriate joke. Alas, I cannot.

In other-other news, my mass-emailing of profs in grad programs I'm interested in has been yielding generally positive replies. They obviously can't judge me from the four sentences of inquiry, but there have been a few replies that have encouraged me to apply to the program. This is also how you make a (young, cautiously hopeful) academic happy.

Happy Halloween!

I like Halloween. So far today I have achieved a) socialization, b) capitalism, c) philosophy, d) a tidy room, e) this week's episode of Castle and f) the lamest costume I've ever thought of... the (sexy) bingo dabber.

The high point so far was convincing firstgold to buy a copy of The Ten Commandments: The Musical. As if the title alone wasn't worth it, it stars Val Kilmer as Moses and also Adam Lambert.

Another high point was the weather. Yeah, it's coldish and dampish and really, really windy. But the leaves are gorgeous, with lots of maples in this area turning a brightly golden yellow and others a deep rich red. So pretty.

And then I had time to kill between getting this (sexy) bingo dabber costume together (I'm in all black and I'm wearing a red toque, tee hee) and when I need to head out, so I thought sure: I'll read a little of this existentialism stuff I grabbed from the library this afternoon, seeing as I'm doing a presentation on Thursday and in Boston about how Firefly shares the existential ethos of the noir westerns and I have taken zero philosophy classes ever. I breezed through the Kierkegaard overview and then got halfway through the Sartre bit and decided it would be better to go, like, blog. I got to the bit about constitutive consciousness and my brain seized up. Oh, Sartre.

Happy Halloween!

I finally finished the last term paper! That means any and all due dates I have left to fail at are upcoming deadlines! YAY!

As I said to extrathursday, I didn't know I could write 9000 words and not actually get to what I wanted to say. However. It's DONE. The analysis is shallow, the examples vague, and the theory is poorly integrated in amongst the frantic summarization of course themes that I vaguely remember from last April, and most importantly: it is finished.

Until I revisit it in a few months to be a chapter in my thesis, probably.

No, seriously. Please share your favourite one- (or two)-pot meals!

I am an okay cook, but I lack a strong repertoire of meals. I can do a mutated pasta primavera, do a beans-and-rice that usually always works out, and have this avocado-and-couscous thing that is tasty but not for everyday, and... uh... That's it. I live on a rotation of those, and on take-out.

The problem is, I'm terminally lazy. Any meal that requires more than two pots or pans is too much, as is anything with lots of prep work.

The point: please help! If you have a favourite one-pot meal, or have a favourite recipe site that would cater to this kind of no-brainer college kid food, please throw links at me in the comments! Veg or non-veg is fine, but anything with more than 10 ingredients also sounds like a lot of work. I sound quite picky, don't I? I'm not, not really. Just lazy. And from a childhood haunted by unbuttered boiled potatoes.

Thanks!

I just ordered groceries from grocerygateway.com, because I'm soft and weak and it's cold and rainy out and I don't want to walk half an hour up that annoying hill in this weather to the grocery store...

When the delivery costs are only a bit more than the TTC fare to the Loblaws or Price Chopper, and the online prices are less than what they're charging at the corner grocery store (Kraft does not make peanut butter worth $7/jar; this inarguable fact escapes the notice of those setting prices at the corner grocery store), eh, it just makes more sense than skulking through a windy day cruelly punctuated with icy gusts of almost-winter rain.

That, and I'm lazy. (And I get paid on Monday.)

ETA (Saturday morning): groceries arrived, sans pumpkin (boo! it's heavy, and was cheap) and sans hummus (double-boo! it's the really good Longo's veggie hummus that's basically spreadable/dipable falafel). I was really looking forward to that hummus.

The jury is still out on whether this experiment was a success. If I was to order again, I'd stick to heavy, bulky common grocery items (peanut butter! laundry soap!) and not bother with any smaller, lighter gourmet stuff. However, getting a bag of fresh, delicious snap peas delivered to my door just when I was looking for a snack cannot be rated too highly.

The whole thing, though, makes me a bad environmentalist: the delivery van, the cardboard boxes... I need to investigate food options for lazy liberals.

Because this dark-by-7pm thing that Daylight Time is trying to pull is just not on.

In other news, I've started wearing interesting earrings again (or, more interesting earrings than plain silver sleeper hoops), I've made little progress on the Two Big Things on my list (but have finished a bunch of smaller things that lead up to another Two Big Things), and have secured an Emergency Interim Supervisor.

With luck, tomorrow I can crack 6K words on the Epic Overdue Paper, and then start transmogrifying the raw words into something resembling a draft.

I do have to stop myself from thinking I'll be able to pull together my conference presentation after I get to Boston. I'm almost starting to believe it, and that's a very bad thing.

If you've been having a week like I've been having, check out one of the recent episodes of Never Mind the Buzzcocks (ep 23x02), because Rhod Gilbert guest-hosts and things get a bit anarchic and Welsh. True, Buzzcocks is all about playing at being an anarchist game show, but add a little casual racism and Rhod Gilbert's shouty style and there is much to make you laugh.

OH AND ALSO: I discovered the magical UK Ancestry Visa, where residents of the Commonwealth whose grandparents were born in the UK (and pre-Republic Ireland) can have five years to work/study in the UK without the usual visa-related restrictions. Providing my parents and I can locate all the appropriate documents, and I get accepted to a program over there, and I somehow magic up the cash to make it all possible, the visa part of overseas study should be but a tiny hurdle.

It's also a good bit of information to have in case I steal my friend's idea of a post-MA academic detox and need to flee somewhere foreign. And, like, herd sheep... which is my #1 option for working holidays, according to those DFAIT posters in the washrooms at York. (For a giggle: check out Canada's official guide for helping Canadians deal with culture shock. If we want to make national stereotypes the punchline here, it is quite funny that the #1 sign of a culture shocked Canadian is when one is angry, irritable or humourless. Sounds like the Bible Belt to me.)

Okay, they're related in that they're about places other than Toronto. (Gasp! Such places exist! But I thought we were the centre of the Universe Canada this part of Lake Ontario, always yearning to be as properly historical as London, as sophisticated and fun as New York and as cool as LA...)

Anyway.

1. Even though this seems to be a Volkswagen ad and not an actual transit-related brainwave, I think the theory still holds. Fun = better. ( Video behind the cut )

2. For whatever reason, the only pictures I took in Vancouver were of Capilano. ( Photos behind the cut )

3. Calling all Bostonians/people in the vicinity of Boston! I'll be in your corner of the world on the afternoon of Nov 4 (Wednesday), and I'll be leaving on the 8th (Sunday). I've got to give a presentation on the 5th, but the rest of the time is my own. Would any of you Bostonians/near-Bostonians care to join me for coffee/dinner/touristy stuff? (Anyone else who wants to come with, there's room in my hotel if you'd like to crash. :D)

And I'm waving a little white flag at the world - ug! Who knew that gallivanting across the country wouldn't evaporate one's to-do list?

Props to thucyken and firstgold for a fun long weekend.

...back to the grind. Boo.

Watching Generation Kill is clearly more important than the dozen or so other vital tasks on my radar.

Clearly.

I have one sentence left in my SSHRC proposal, and I can hit send and worry about something else for a while (and that list, my friends, is not all that short).

I'll probably knock off that last sentence sometime in the next hour, and then I'll: watch another episode of Generation Kill, grab a quick shower, and finish packing.

I'll leave it here tomorrow when I'm at York, and I'll swing by here to grab it on the way to the airport, rather than taking it with me all day on a day when I have to do lots of running-around and handing-things-in.

And then, and then, and then: Vancouver, Thanksgiving, thucyken and firstgold, mountains and trees and sf filming locations. *glee*

My poor students. I'm supposed to prep them for their first test, and I'll be thinking: "Hey, I got my SSHRC and OGS crap handed in" and "VancouverVancouverVancouver!", and I'll keep spacing out thinking about Alexander Skarsgård like I did at dinner tonight (sorry, firstgold!)... those poor students. Normally I'm all about the early cinema. This week, though, I got nothing for them. (To be fair, quite a lot of this weekend was taken up with quite big and serious things that are still are big and scary things. I mean, I still don't know if I'll need a new supervisor.)

ETA: Okay, so it was two sentences, but I'm right on schedule! YAY. I'm-a gonna print. And somehow get over the ridiculous superstition that all pieces of an application need to be printed all on the same paper. *rocks back and forth* It'll be fine, it'll be fine.

The b**** who lives upstairs refused to turn the bass down on her stereo after I went upstairs to ask her to please turn it down because the levels were high enough to rattle my teeth. It's down to its normal loud-enough-to-identify-the-song levels, not at teeth-rattling levels.

Also: after a full afternoon of researching, I've determined that the communications/media studies programs in the UK do in fact tend to focus on audiences and screens (ie: film studies, television studies, all of the above + internet), whereas the ones in the US display a rather creepy tendency to characterize audiences as markets, and to lump the whole thing in with journalism. When they deign to study popular culture, that is.

There are a few of the ivy league schools who look at American culture (or "American Civilization", lol+wtf?), but they're dreadfully stuffy. When I peek over at the anthropology programs, the websites are full of pictures of soulful brown dudes being all tribal; sociology seems to be all about development studies.

In about half of the schools I looked at, to study some combination of media + technology I'd need an engineering background. Somehow I don't thing "knowing a few engineers" would cut it. There are a few places with exciting-sounding film programs, but so few that I'm wondering if I should cancel writing the GRE and set my sights on the ol' mythic motherland rather than that big scary land south of the border.

...The bass is still blaring. I swear, I think I can handle another hour of this effing bass before emailing the landlord. If I can't have peace and quiet (or reasonable levels of not-quite-that-loud-kthnx), I can at least leave a strongly-worded email in the landlord's inbox. I don't think a post-it reading "What part of YOUR MUSIC IS TOO LOUD, PLEASE TO TURN IT DOWN don't you understand!?" will be as productive.

EDIT: one of my roommates has now also asked the people upstairs to turn the music down, and now we're at 1:45am with the music still playing. When she gets back from the store, it's the other roommate's turn to do something about it. Much as I like the Killers, listening to "All These Things That I've Done" through the ceiling wasn't originally on the plan for tonight.

Many thanks to stickchick596 for this:

Last night I was in bed, asleep, by 9pm. Mmm, 11 hours of sleep. (Most nights I can get by on 6 or 7.)

I haven't had a day in the last 8 or so that didn't have something big to do, and a few smaller things to do. Trying to enumerate everything would cause a little bit of brain break, so I'll look forward to today:
- 10am meeting
- 1pm lunch
- evening gaming
- amyisyellow's birthday party.

Yesterday was the Ioan Davies lecture + grad seminar, which was led by Andrew Ross of NYU. I had wanted to apply to the program he chairs, and then was totally intimidated by the awesome power of his brain and personality, and then proceeded to be utterly won over and had by resolve strengthened. Not that I'll get in - I'm good, but I'm not nearly as strong an activist as they seem to be looking for. By which I mean I'm not much of an activist at all.

The most amazing thing is that even though he was speaking about All The Things That Are Broken In Global Labour he didn't come across as defeated by any of it (and it's a depressing topic to think about in any detail, let alone experience it).

And in among all that I had two TA classes. I've been trying a few different things, and this week I got my classes to re-read (HA, "read for the first time", more like) part of the textbook and answer some questions. My first group did really well with it, but I think only two people in the second group did the reading. I like changing up the classroom activities because it's fun to never be predictable. And also to not worry about planning lessons.

But I have been asked to do a mini-guest lecture on reality TV at the end of October, so I should figure out what's going on with that.

October has a few pretty damn important deadlines, and also a trip to Vancouver.

- SSHRC and OGS applications are due
- Vancouver!
- Anthro paper due, no really, totally due (original due date: May, though no one else in the class has finished it)
- guest lecture
- prepping for conference in Boston (Nov. 4-8)

And teaching, marking, and my own coursework in there somewhere.

How does your month look?

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. - George Bernard Shaw