Monday, December 29, 2008:  Well, That Was Unnecessarily Complex

I think my latest letter to Mr. Winter (below) may have been a bad idea.  I was to leave for the airport for my annual journey to Fanny Bay a few hours after I posted it.

The sequence of events that followed went something like this:

1)  My plane was originally supposed to depart at 7:15 a.m.; I would thus have to rise at about 3:00 in order to get to the airport in time.  However, knowing that very few flights were running on time, I checked the website around 10:00 p.m. the night before and discovered that my plane was now due to take off at 9:30.  Hurrah, I thought...more sleep for me.

2)  I got up at 4:30 and checked the site again.  The plane was still leaving at 9:30.  At 6:30, I left for the airport.  I arrived without incident.

3)  My plane actually took off at 9:30.  Hurrah, I thought...things are going right.  I guess the crisis is more or less over.

4)  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

5)  I arrived in Edmonton at 11:30.  My connecting flight to Comox (on Vancouver Island) had originally been meant to leave at 1:00, but I noticed that it had been delayed until 2:30.

6)  I sat around and drew pictures for an hour and a half.  At 2:00, someone announced that the flight had been delayed until 4:00.

7)  After some stress-inducing fiddling with my Bell calling card (which would not work on Telus phones) and several attempts to call my parents collect (which didn't work because they had apparently blocked all collect calls), I bought a calling card and alerted my parents to the change.  They told me that the information on the Internet had not been updated.

8)  Still before 2:30, some guy on my flight talked to the WestJet people and informed a bunch of us that the flight had been delayed until 5:00.  No announcement was made.  The board continued to list our flight as leaving at 2:30; eventually, the flight was described as "boarding" and "departed."  I'm reasonably certain that this information was posted online as well.

9)  At about 4:30, someone announced that our flight had been delayed indefinitely because the airplane that would fly us to Comox was still in Vancouver, which apparently had only one working runway.  "Don't worry," chirped one of the increasingly desperate WestJet representatives.  "We'll get you there!"

10)  Five minutes after this announcement, our plane was listed as departing at 5:37.

11)  At 5:30, our flight was cancelled.  We were directed to a certain desk, where a guy named Mike shouted instructions to maybe a hundred and fifty of us.  The instructions were basically:  "Go away.  Find hotels.  Keep your receipts.  Don't call us before noon tomorrow."

12)  A few of us managed to find rooms in a hotel not far from the airport.  If you know the Edmonton airport, you'll be aware that it is actually not all that close to Edmonton.  The hotel was in a place called Leduc, which apparently consists of a strip mall and a couple of gas stations.  The hotel was running out of rooms, and I got stuck in one that smelled very strongly of cigarette smoke.

13)  By this point, I had been up for nineteen hours and really needed to go to bed, though I talked to my parents before I did.  An hour and a half later, at 10:30 Edmonton time, I was awakened by the phone ringing.  It turned out that my father, a much more persistent person than I, had calmly ignored the message on WestJet's voice mail ("We are not taking calls at this time") and managed to speak to an actual human being who had got me onto a flight to Vancouver the next day at 5:15.  My dad is awesome, by the way.

14)  The next morning, I talked to some other people who had been on the cancelled flight.  A family of three had been told that there were no planes and that they were probably stuck in Edmonton until Boxing Day; they were thinking of taking the Greyhound (nineteen hours to Vancouver, then a ferry ride).  An older woman had been offered $250 to give up and go back to Saskatoon.

16)  My flight was delayed until 7:30 p.m., but at least it wasn't cancelled.  A few of us burst into spontaneous applause when the WestJet representative announced that it had arrived.  From what people were saying, many of us had been waiting around for two or three days.  We were actually fairly lucky; WestJet paid for our food and accommodations.  Air Canada passengers slept at the airport.

17)  My dad (remember the bit about him being awesome) met me at the Vancouver airport, and we drove to Tsawwassen to catch the last ferry of the evening at 10:45 p.m.  After a two-hour ferry ride (and a very late hamburger dinner), we arrived on Vancouver Island in the middle of a blizzard and drove for close to an hour and forty-five minutes, finally arriving at Fanny Bay at 2:30 a.m. (5:30 EST) on Christmas Eve.

18)  Never, never mock Mr. Winter.  Never, never, never, never, never.

I've had some hellish plane journeys before, but this one left them all in the dust.

I hope you've all had good holidays.  As my gift to you, I present all the doubters among you with irrefutable evidence that it really does snow in BC.*  These pictures were taken on Christmas Eve:

Here's the view from my parents' front lawn...or what remains of it, at any rate.	This is the front yard from another angle.  Note the actual snow.	Yep.  It's a road.  Yep.  It's a snowy road.  Yep.
The snowy road also goes in the other direction.	My parents' house is here barely visible beyond an enormous mound of snow.	My parents' back yard has a forest just behind it.  Deer eat their little trees.
It's always fun to watch heaps of snow pile up on the lawn furniture.	Wow...it's even snowing in the neighbours' back yard!	I had room for one more picture.  So sue me.

*Which consists of more than just Vancouver.  Honestly, people.  The Lower Mainland is certainly temperate, but it is off in the southwest corner of the province.  My sister, just for instance, lives in Prince George, where it starts snowing in October and rarely lets up until May.  Residents of Prince George are far more familiar with snow than are residents of Toronto.


Monday, December 22, 2008:  1) A Richly Deserved Open Letter to Winter; 2)  Merry Thingmy

To:  Mr. Winter
Re.: Recent weather in Toronto and, in fact, across Canada

Dear Mr. Winter:

And the bloody same to you, sir.

Sincerely yours,


Toronto

************

Tomorrow, at 7:15 a.m.,* I board a plane to return home for Christmas.  I shall get to see my niece, who is apparently at the crawling-around-really-quickly-and-tormenting-the-dog stage, and more than likely help my parents shovel freakish amounts of snow...if it continues to dump like this, that is.  It is therefore time to wish you all a Merry Christmas and/or a Happy Break.

My advice to you this holiday season is:

1)  Don't book 7:15 a.m. flights.  Since the weather is so uncooperative, I am going to have to try to leave by 4:00.  I shall therefore have to rise at 3:00.  As I generally go to bed at about 2:00, I am left with a bit of a problem.  I would like to go to bed early, but I may have procrastinated on too many things.

2)  Stop bloody working.  I know you're panicking, but damn it, relax for a few days, will you?  There will be plenty of time in January for you to be overwhelmed by your usual feelings of gut-wrenching terror and despair.

3)  When Aunty Janet gets into the rum and starts singing "Deck the Halls" off-key while Uncle Brad launches into his latest jovial attack against your perpetual lack of a significant other, slip outside and take a long walk in the snow.  Then resign from the Prime Ministership.

4)  Hug a puppy.  Make sure it does not pee on you.

5)  Don't try to make snow angels in Toronto.  Though it looks as if we've got two feet of snow on the ground, we've actually got half an inch of snow over one foot, eleven inches of solid ice.

6)  READ THE FUN BOOK.

7)  Even when stress is making you want to scream and claw out your own throat, have a good time.  I'll see some of you in the new year.

*Alas.


Monday, December 15, 2008:  Almost...There...

It could very well be that I will be able to have a real Rant next week.  At the moment, however, I am still slogging through my seemingly endless marking.  I have about sixty more exams to finish, plus nine presentation essays and one term paper.*  Marks are due on Wednesday at 4:00 p.m.  I think my brain may shrivel up and die before then.  I may also go mad and start lobbing stuff off my balcony.  It is entirely possible that there will eventually be sobbing.

In the meantime, here is one last Poem of Desperation:

My Ringwraith action figure
stares accusingly across the room at
my mute failure to pick up the exams
and delve once more
into desperate scribblings about Harry Potter and Jack
Torrance and Ozymandias, king of kings
(look on his works, ye mighty, and so on).

I own a Ringwraith action figure.
It has real stabbing action and no
face.  I am fond of it.  But it is not
helping my concentration to know that
a Bearer of one of the Nine is gazing
facelessly at me in my procrastination.
Perhaps it will try to knife me and take my soul.
I'm not entirely sure
I will mind.

O brain,
stop stalling.
Be strong,
O brain.
Mark for me,
and defy the scorn
of the Black Rider perched
on my television set.

*And a paaaaaaaaaaartriiiiiiiiiiiidge in a peeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaar treeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.


Monday, December 8, 2008:  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh

Well, here I am, a week after my last entry, and I'm still marking all day, every day, and going to bed in tears with a pounding headache.  My only consolation at the moment is that some of my students chose the creative option (they drew Scott-McCloud-style analytical comics instead of writing five-page essays), and the results have tended to be very good, thus alleviating my headache and proving to me and the universe in general that damn essays are not the only damn way to make convincing, logical arguments, damn it.  I am now taking ten minutes I don't have to type out this entry, though soon, I shall have to return to my dwindling but still frighteningly large pile of papers.  I would procrastinate by writing a long, long Rant about something completely irrelevant, but the sad truth of the matter is that I simply don't have time to do so.  HOW AM I GOING TO MANAGE WITH TWICE AS MANY STUDENTS NEXT TERM?  I think I shall go sit in a corner and hyperventilate.  No, wait; there's no time.

I also have to look for two library books I'm sure I've returned, though the library claims I haven't...write four course syllabi, three of which I can't write, even though they're due in a week, because I don't know my class schedule yet...order about a thousand books*...communicate with another prof about these books, as she wants me to order hers as well...remember to hand in my DAMN CONTRACT...and prepare to invigilate on Friday, after which point I shall get a whole new pile of stuff to mark.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I shall go back to marking, weeping copiously, and trying to resist repeatedly hitting myself on the forehead with my copy of The Shining.

*Not an exaggeration, for once.  I genuinely have to order about a thousand books.  All the trade publishers in the world should get down on bended knee and thank me for existing.  Seriously.


Monday, December 1, 2008:  Still with the Stress

I'm so damned far behind on everything that it's not even funny.  It is currently noon on Sunday; I'm writing this entry now so that I can spend the entire afternoon 1) marking, 2) crying, and 3) developing a splitting headache.  I sometimes wish that I were not averse to 4) drinking, since it would probably make the 1) marking lead slightly less often to 2) crying, but as it would also possibly give rise to 5) lawsuits and 6) unemployment, I think I shall soldier on without it.  I could, of course, resort to 7) chocolate, but in my current mood, I would consume an entire huge Toblerone bar while 2) crying and 8) trying not to drive myself mad with 1) marking, and then I would have to be 9) ill.  I do have some 10) cookies, and I am attempting to exercise self-control and not devour them all right now.  Sometimes, what with the 1) marking and the 11) despair, mindless scarfing of 10) cookies seems the way to go.  I would probably be happier about 12) life in general if I didn't know that my 1) marking would be followed immediately by 13) more marking, the latter of which I will have only five days to complete.  I am 14) on the verge of hysteria and 15) in serious denial, so excuse me if I 16) hyperventilate for a bit.  I'm pretty sure that my current bizarre practice of 17) numbering random words and phrases in this 18) paragraph is predicated on 19) insanity cause by 1) marking.  I should probably desist before the 2) crying begins again, though I'm afraid that if I do, I shan't be able to stop myself from falling brainlessly on the 10) cookies.  I think it may be time to go 20) pound my head against a wall.


Monday, November 24, 2008:  I'm Behind on Everything Again, So Here's Another Despairing Poem

The hours shrink
daily, narrowing themselves down
to dry sticks of nothing--
I watch them tumble by
and smash against the mountains
of necessity.

In my mind is the ability
to mark a hundred essays,
apply for a thousand jobs,
write a million novels,
all simultaneously.
In my hands is the ability
to write a blog entry
about comic strips.

The minutes shrink
hourly, cannibalising their neighbours
as those untouched term papers mock me
from the corner
of my room.


Monday, November 17, 2008:  Some More 24

Three weeks ago, I posted an excerpt from the new season of 24, which begins in January.  Here is another excerpt, this time from episode 2, "6:00-7:00 a.m."

******

INT    CTU*    DAY

CHLOE O'BRIEN and MILES FELIX** are working side by side, typing furiously away.  Chloe is on speaker-phone, listening to it ring.

MILES:  Haven't you got him yet?

CHLOE:  He's not picking up.  He's turned off his voice-mail.

MILES:  Chloe...you've been calling for over an hour now.  He doesn't want to help.

CHLOE:  Don't you talk to me like that about Jack!  You don't know him.  Something must have happened to him.

MILES:  We could send a team.

CHLOE:  Are you crazy?  We're in the middle of a crisis!  That bomb's due to go off within the hour.

MILES:  Isn't that why we need Jack?

CHLOE:  Shut up, Miles.

SECURITY GUARD (OS):  Hey!  Stop!

JACK BAUER enters the room at a run.  He is carrying a bulging man-purse slung across his body.

CHLOE:  It's okay...it's Jack!

She hurries over to him, Miles right behind her.

CHLOE:  Jack, thank God!  Why weren't you answering--

JACK:  There's no time for this, Chloe.

CHLOE:  I agree, but--

JACK:  Damn it, Chloe, listen to me.  I was chased all the way here by fifteen irate students waving midterm exams.  Do you understand what this means?  Undergrads!  Up before seven!  On a Saturday!  Something's going on.

CHLOE:  Jack, there's this bomb--

JACK:  I need to hack into the university mainframe and reroute the encryption on the grading database.

CHLOE:  I don't even know what that means.

JACK:  Please, Chloe.  I'm running out of time.

MILES:  Look, I hate to interrupt, but so are we.  There's a bomb set to go off in the centre of town in thirty-nine minutes.

CHLOE:  You're the only one who can help us.  You know the guy doing it; he's a figure from your mysterious past.

JACK:  I don't have a mysterious past!  I don't care about the centre of town!  I need to deal with these students before they kill us all!

CHLOE:  Jack, snap out of it!

JACK:  You snap out of it!  You need to get your priorities straight, Chloe.  I believe the children are our future.  If I don't figure out who has been convincing them that I am an unusually hard marker, millions of people are gonna kill me!

He runs off down the hall.  Chloe and Miles stare after him.

CHLOE:  This is going really well.

Bink...bink...bink...bink...


*Rumours that CTU has been disbanded in the new season are, as I can confirm, completely false.  No, really.  Would I lie to you?
**New character!  Very exciting.


Monday, November 10, 2008:  And Things Just Keep On Getting Better

It has been one of those weeks.  Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.  Exactly two things have gone right:  a very kind person has given me a bike, and Barack Obama has beaten John McCain.  The rest of my life has been headache-inducing at best.  Even better:  in a few minutes, I am going to have to type out thirty long and brutally honest student evaluations (from this summer) so that I can update my teaching dossier.  I am then going to cry a lot and go to bed.

My poor students, whose essays are due on Monday (section 1) and Tuesday (section 2), have been e-mailing me for advice all weekend.  I don't blame them; I told them they could, and some of them are making excellent use of the opportunity.  In fact, I'm rather proud of the way many of them seem determined to improve their thesis statements until they simply can't be improved any more.  However, the situation--as well as a comment someone made a couple of days ago at Massey--has made me think about the way we treat both undergrad assignments and the people who have to mark them.

This particular person is TAing for the first time ever.  She has just made the colossal but wholly understandable mistake of offering to look students' essays over before they hand them in.

Why is it a mistake?  It shouldn't be.  The most useful essay assignment I've ever marked was assigned last year by a prof who believed in giving students a chance to improve on their own work.  She had them write their first essay of the term in class; the second essay was the first one rewritten.  The students were able to use their marker's detailed comments as a guideline, and the ones willing to put the work in turned in substantially different essays the second time around.  The technique echoed one I myself experienced in UBC's Arts One programme.  Every two weeks, I would write an essay that I would then present to the class.  My peers and my prof made comments on the draft, which I subsequently took home and rewrote for the next class.  It was a gruelling schedule, but twelve rewritten essays later, my writing had improved immeasurably.

Arts One is a one-year programme that encompasses eighteen credits; in other words, it takes the place of three regular first-year courses (English, History, and Philosophy).  Twelve essays in a year-long eighteen-credit course is not unreasonable, especially when the prof has only about twelve students.  The prof in my first example had about a hundred students, but she also had two TAs to mark for her, so the double essay (plus one more term essay) worked out fine.  I have a hundred students and no TAs.  I do nothing but mark.  It would be lovely if I could afford to look over student drafts, but there simply aren't enough hours in the day.  A lot of profs with full loads--I'm teaching only two sections of one course--wouldn't even have time to glance at thesis statements.

The newbie TA is in an even worse position.  She's being paid by the hour, and the hours she is putting into vetting the student papers are completely unpaid.  I really wish she could have her cake and eat it too:  I wish TAs could be paid for prereading papers.  Instead, profs tend to rely on writing centres, which many students don't trust (this summer, one of my students complained that the people at the writing centre knew nothing about the subjects he was covering in his essays).  Rewriting marked-up drafts is a fantastic way for a student to learn how to construct a working argument.  Generally, however, we have the time and/or the money only to set the assignments and mark them when they come in.  Markers who give detailed comments beforehand do so on their own time.  Students are, in fact, forced to rely on the kindness of strangers.

I have no real solution to the dilemma.  If we had world enough and time, perhaps we would turn out more good writers and fewer frustrated people who believed that essay writing would forever remain an unsolvable conundrum.  For now, we'll have to scrape along as best we can...and perhaps nudge universities into creating more programmes like Arts One.


Monday, November 3, 2008:  An Open Letter to the Absolute Rat Bastard Who Stole My Bike Today

Dear Absolute Rat Bastard:

I hope you're pleased with yourself, sir.  I hope your decision to deprive me of the bicycle I have owned for nearly nine years and that I use to get around the city on a daily basis makes you feel good about yourself as you collect your goddamned twenty dollars from whoever the hell buys the bike from you for resale.  Without that bike, I have to waste either time or money--pick one!  You've earned the privilege--to get to a job that I may not even have after January and that makes me barely enough money to pay for food and rent.  Maybe you can steal from some little old ladies next...or the nice guy who babysits your little sister.  Hell...why not hit up seven-year-olds for their lunch money while you're at it?

I bet you were surprised when I came running up behind you and started screaming imprecations at your back.  How lucky you are that I was stupid and yelled before I had reached you, though it was true that you were nearly at Yonge Street by the time the swearing began, and I probably didn't have much of a chance to catch you at any rate.  You are also very lucky--blessed, one might say--that the people of Toronto are sheep and stand around staring and gawping when a woman screams at a thief to stop.  The one person besides me and my friend who bothered to chase you was not, alas, as fast as MY BLOODY BIKE, and he had to give up after a block or so.  What a charmed little piece of slime you are that there was apparently only one decent person at the corner of Edward and Yonge at 4:15 or so today.

Granted, I don't know what I would have done if I had caught you.  You're a big man, and I have arms like strands of overcooked spaghetti.  However, I did have adrenaline on my side.  I had quite a lot of adrenaline on my side.  I still feel ill from all that adrenaline.  I wouldn't have wanted to be you if I had got my hands on you.

Will I report you?  What's the use?  I could describe you as a young man, fairly large, with brown hair and an unfortunate habit of stealing bikes in broad daylight on busy public thoroughfares, but the police wouldn't care.  My bike didn't have a serial number, so I couldn't register it.  My friend did get a picture of you as you rode away.  We know what your back looks like.  Gosh.  How useful for us.

I yearn for my bike to dump you in the gutter, you piece of garbage.  Yes, I realise that a bike is "just a thing."  It is also, for me, a kind of freedom.  You've taken that freedom away.  Thank you ever so much for leaving me my helmet attached to the twisted remains of my lock; I'm sure I'll find it useful on my hour-long walks to and from work.

Yes...I certainly hope you're pleased with yourself.  Have a nice day.

Yours truly,

Kari.

Dear Everybody Else:

Never buy a Supercycle lock.  Look at this:




Monday, October 27, 2008:  The Longest Day of His Life*

By dint of tireless detective work** and contact with some anonymous connections in the industry, I have managed to get my hands on a copy of the script for three new episodes of the hit show 24.  From what I've seen so far, I can tell you that season seven is going to take a radical new direction and, with luck, emerge as a whole different show.  Even people disillusioned by the shark-jumping antics of Jack Bauer in the past few seasons would be advised to watch the premier and then decide whether to stay or go.

 Below I have posted a highly illegal excerpt from episode 1, "5:00 - 6:00 a.m."

******

INT    JACK'S APARTMENT    DAWN

As faint light begins to filter through the grimy blinds, we see JACK BAUER hunched over what looks like an enormous mound of thin pink booklets.  He rubs his temple as he reads through them, frequently stopping to make notations.  The phone rings.

JACK:  Damn it!

He picks up.


INT    CTU    DAWN

CTU is imbued with an atmosphere of barely controlled panic.  CHLOE holds her phone to her ear.

JACK (VO):  What?

CHLOE:  Jack, it's me.

JACK (VO):  Chloe?

CHLOE:  We need your help.


INT    JACK'S APARTMENT    DAWN

JACK:  Damn it, Chloe, we've been through this.  I don't work for CTU any more.

CHLOE:  It's the terrorists, Jack.  It's always the terrorists.  You're the only one who can stop them.  You--

JACK:  I have a new job.  New responsibilities.  I thought you understood that.


INT    CTU    DAWN

CHLOE:  This is important.

JACK:  What I'm doing is important!

Chloe pauses for a moment.

CHLOE:  Jack...


INT    JACK'S APARTMENT    DAWN

CHLOE:  Jack, you're teaching English.

JACK:  At the moment, I'm grading.  And I'm running out of time.

CHLOE:  This is a matter of national security.

JACK:  This is a matter of horrible grammar!  You're aware, aren't you, that I have a degree in English literature?

CHLOE:  Yes, but--

JACK:  Then you've got to understand how it makes me feel to grade a hundred and fifty midterms written by people who don't know how to read instructions.  My God, Chloe...it's torture!


INT    CTU    DAWN

A number of fascinated CTU agents have gathered around Chloe's desk.  She has put Jack on speaker-phone.

CHLOE:  Jack--

JACK:  This student tells me that Geoffrey Chaucer was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1915.  1915, Chloe!  Damn it!  And this one thinks that Shakespeare was a woman.

CHLOE:   There's a bomb in the--

JACK:  They get all their information from Wikipedia!  Wikipedia!  Wikipedia!  They don't know how to cross-reference!  They have never established a perimeter on their research!  They have no idea how to extract information from reluctant journal articles!


INT    JACK'S APARTMENT    DAWN

JACK:  Please, Chloe.  You've got to leave me to my work.  If you don't, hundreds of people are gonna fail.

CHLOE:  What about the bomb?

JACK:  Who cares?  I've got a new mission now.

CHLOE:  Jack--

He cuts the connection.


INT    CTU    DAWN   

Chloe stares at the dead phone in her hand.

CHLOE:  ...Damn it.

Bink...bink...bink...bink...


*My title is more or less stolen from the first song of 24:  Season 2:  The Musical.  Yes, it exists.  No, I'm not lying.  Take a look.
**That I did when I should have been marking.


Monday, October 20, 2008:  Seven Responses to Last Week's Seven Reasons

Last Monday, I was feeling rather low, and I posted seven predictions regarding the following seven days.  Here is how those predictions panned out:

1)  Today is Thanksgiving.  I am over here.  My family is over there.

That was very true.  What I failed to predict when I wrote the list on Sunday evening was that when I woke up on Monday, I would be unable to move my head.  I spent the entire day suffering from excruciating neck pain.  Ibuprofen did not help.  Cursing and weeping did not help either.  It hurt to breathe.  Sometimes, I really hate Thanksgiving.*

2)  On Tuesday, we shall spend a great deal of time, energy, and money electing exactly the same government that we have had for the past two and a half years.  Then I shall phone the computer shop yet again (because the guy who swore he would call me never did) and be informed yet again that the repair people have yet a-freaking-gain forgotten about the existence of my desktop computer and need another four days to figure out that nothing is wrong with it, even though clearly something is.

The bit about the election was certainly true.  The bit about the computer was not because I forgot to phone the repair shop.  However, I did phone on Wednesday.  The computer guys had not forgotten about me, and they did deign to acknowledge that I was not hallucinating my computer's inability to turn on, but they hadn't finished fixing it yet.  They said they were waiting for a part that would probably be in on Friday, and I would be able to pick it up on Saturday.

3)  On Wednesday, I shall attempt to finish marking one hundred midterms while writing a two-hour lecture on Alan Moore's Watchmen.

That was about it.  I forgot to predict that I would give myself a nausea-inducing headache in the process.

4)  On Thursday, I shall give the lecture.  The marking will not be finished.  At 4:00 p.m., I shall again remember that I have forgotten to set up my university voice mail.

Again, I have astonished myself with the accuracy of my prediction.

5)  On Friday, I shall once more phone the computer shop after once more not being called back and learn that there is nothing wrong with my computer, which will not turn on.  I shall explain in detail the bit about the machine's inability to work at all.  The repair guys will politely imply that I am a freaking moron.  I shall pick up my computer, take it home, and discover that it will still not turn on.  The rest of the afternoon will be devoted to frantic attempts to finish my colour comic on a laptop that works when it feels like it.

Okay, okay...I screwed up on this one.  I was a little upset about my computer when I wrote that.

6)  On Saturday, I shall finish my colour comic at 4:00 a.m., then sleep for a few hours before taking my bloody computer back to the bloody computer shop.  I shall end up limping violently, as the knee I bruised three weeks before by falling off my bike will still not have healed.

I finished the colour comic at 2:00 a.m.  When I phoned the computer shop later, I was told that the part had just arrived and that the computer would be ready by 6:30.  I said I would get it the next day.  The guy said that was fine.  He phoned me again at 7:00 p.m. to explain that the part he had been waiting for had turned out to be the wrong part.  The right part would arrive tomorrow...when, incidentally, the shop would not be open.  My computer would be ready by Monday...twelve days after I had taken it in.  And no, my knee had still not healed.

7)  On Sunday, I shall realise that what with the dysfunctional computer, the late nights, and the hideous, hideous marking, I have once again left myself no time to prepare for the next week's classes.  I shall cry a bit.

I'm at this stage right now.  Oh...and I'm still not finished my damn marking.

Then it will all start again...

Amen to that.

*Last year, I had a horrible stomach ache that kept me from enjoying my turkey.  The year before that, I got to spend a diverting half hour cleaning up someone else's vomit.

Monday, October 13, 2008:  Seven Reasons This Week Is Going to Be Terrible

1)  Today is Thanksgiving.  I am over here.  My family is over there.

2)  On Tuesday, we shall spend a great deal of time, energy, and money electing exactly the same government that we have had for the past two and a half years.*  Then I shall phone the computer shop yet again (because the guy who swore he would call me never did) and be informed yet again that the repair people have yet a-freaking-gain forgotten about the existence of my desktop computer and need another four days to figure out that nothing is wrong with it, even though clearly something is.

3)  On Wednesday, I shall attempt to finish marking one hundred midterms while writing a two-hour lecture on Alan Moore's Watchmen.

4)  On Thursday, I shall give the lecture.  The marking will not be finished.  At 4:00 p.m., I shall again remember that I have forgotten to set up my university voice mail.

5)  On Friday, I shall once more phone the computer shop after once more not being called back and learn that there is nothing wrong with my computer, which will not turn on.  I shall explain in detail the bit about the machine's inability to work at all.  The repair guys will politely imply that I am a freaking moron.  I shall pick up my computer, take it home, and discover that it will still not turn on.  The rest of the afternoon will be devoted to frantic attempts to finish my colour comic on a laptop that works when it feels like it.

6)  On Saturday, I shall finish my colour comic at 4:00 a.m., then sleep for a few hours before taking my bloody computer back to the bloody computer shop.  I shall end up limping violently, as the knee I bruised three weeks before by falling off my bike will still not have healed.

7)  On Sunday, I shall realise that what with the dysfunctional computer, the late nights, and the hideous, hideous marking, I have once again left myself no time to prepare for the next week's classes.  I shall cry a bit.

Then it will all start again...

*And that is all I shall say about that.  Those of you familiar with my political leanings will probably be relieved that #2 is not, in fact, seven thousand words long, with two hundred footnotes.


Monday, October 5, 2008:  Ode to Now

O Sunday!
How you mock me with
your weekendness, the illusion
of spare time, free time, time time--
vanished.

The clock ticks
on, and I have not finished my work,
have not created the midterm I
really bloody need to create right now, damn it,
and there is pie in my refrigerator,
and I am tempted to eat some
and not finish my Batman article.

And I have not marked those two last presentations,
which were both good, by the way, but
have been crowded out by Batman
and the midterm
and the knee that I destroyed last weekend and that is still throbbing even though it hardly looks bruised at all,
and pie.

O raspberry-almond pie,
you are kinder to me than my midterm,
which still does not exist because
I am writing a poem instead of working on it.
O raspberry-almond pie,
solace me.

Solace me a lot,
O raspberry-almond pie.


Monday, September 29, 2008:  The Perils of Playing to a Crowd

The annual Massey College Founders' Gaudy is a perilous event.  Its dangers generally revolve around the so-called Hepatitis Cup* and the consequent consumption of copious amounts of alcohol.  For me, however, Friday's Gaudy carried with it a slightly different danger, though still one connected to the Cup.

Let me explain.

At every Founders' Gaudy, three large Cups filled with wine are passed around the room.  Each participant must grasp the Cup, intone, "Floreat domus Massiensis" ("May the house of Massey prosper"), and drink.  Some people sip; others chug.  Passing the Cup along without drinking is considered acceptable, if a bit of a wimp-out.  Non-drinkers tend to bear the jeers and catcalls of their peers stoically as they hand the Cup along.

I am a non-drinker.  So are some of my friends.  One of these friends succumbed to peer pressure last year and actually found himself in a state of drunkenness for perhaps the first time in his life.  I generally just pass the Cup on.  I am amused when other people chug, but I never even try the wine.

However...on Friday, I was sitting at the High Table.

Generally, each High Table guest has a brief moment of embarrassment as the Master introduces him or her, then is allowed to lapse back into blissful anonymity.  At the first break, I sat through the introduction of me as a "Junior Fellow from 2002 to 2004"**; I also vicariously re-experienced my own first High Table when the Master mistakenly glanced several times at one Junior Fellow while introducing another one.***  The second break brought a new hazard:  the Hepatitis Cup itself.  Eventually, the three Cups would be taken out to the lower tables, and attention would be divided...but the guests at the High Table had to drink as everyone in the hall stared at them.

I was at the Master's left.  I was the last person to get the Cup.

I don't drink.  I'm not sure why; I just don't want to drink.  Even a token sip would seem wrong to me, in some vague, ill-defined way.  I think I may have Issues.  Yet...there I was, standing on a dais while a hundred and twenty people gazed avidly in my direction.  Many of the people in the hall knew I didn't drink.  There were whistles and cheers.

I picked up my glass of water, which happened to be full, and drained it.

It was a bit of showmanship I later paid for grievously.  I hadn't been the least bit thirsty.  My bladder was not pleased.  Neither was my stomach, which hurt acutely for three hours afterwards.  Actually, for an hour or so there, I thought I was possibly going to die.  You wouldn't think a glass of water could have that effect, even if drunk very quickly, but it seems to have done.  I also had to endure some ribbing from someone who thought she had seen me pour the wine into my glass and then drink it all.  This was someone who knew I didn't drink.

Theatricality, my friends, can be as intoxicating as alcohol...and can leave you feeling just as horrible afterwards.  I'll try to remember that next year.

*So-called by generations of sniggering Junior Fellows, that is.
*Actually 1999 to 2004.
***Happened to me in 1999.  There were two English students at the table.  The Master was understandably confused.


Monday, September 22, 2008:  The Ph.D. Rites of Passage Can Bite Me

A friend of mine is going through his first Ph.D. defence this Wednesday (he's in physics, so he gets two:  one now and another one six weeks later).  His steadily rising nervousness is far from uncommon among pre-defence Ph.D. students.  As the defence approaches, the candidate is overcome by premonitions of inevitable disaster.  That two-hour meeting, which one's supervisor will probably cheerfully characterise as "just a conversation among colleagues," looms in the foreground like Mount Doom, and one's feeble attempts to fling one's research into its fiery depths seem destined to fail.  The defence is a little bit of hell on earth, designed to frighten the candidate into fits.

It is also completely unnecessary.

What...you think someone who has written a two-hundred-page thesis* over a space of five years is going to be booted out without a doctorate because he's forgotten Shakespeare's birth date under pressure?  You figure a student whose writing has made it past several experts and possibly even been published in peer-reviewed journals could still be exposed as a charlatan during the defence?  By the time the defence comes around, the candidate has already won her spurs.  If her committee has somehow neglected her to the extent that she has made it this far undeservedly, the external and internal examiners are going to notice the fact long before they ever enter that scary little room and start grilling the candidate mercilessly.  The defence simply confirms what everyone already knows.  It is possible that the only way a candidate with an intelligently written thesis could fail would be to show up at the defence dressed as the Marquis de Sade and remain in character throughout.

The defence is a rite of passage.  It is not the only one the Ph.D. programme contains.  Sometimes, I think grad school is deliberately designed to chip away at one's confidence bit by bit until one emerges a well-read, organised, knowledgeable nervous wreck on the brink of a permanent breakdown.  The rituals of the Ph.D. programme sometimes seem to make as little sense as fraternity hazing.  They are also considerably less fun.**

I'm not sure about some of the other disciplines, but I can certainly list the rites of the English department at U of T.  They are:

1)  The comprehensive exams.  In my first year, I was expected to write the comps about half a week after I arrived at the university.  There was no reading list; we were told to become familiar with all of English literature, then be careful to write about the right bits of it.  A few years later, someone did come up with a list that the newbies could use...and a few years after that, the comps were moved to the second year.  No matter what the format is, the things are damned terrifying.  We went into them knowing that most of us would fail the first time (we did have up to five tries).  Students now go into them knowing that they have to pass the second time.  A friend of mine was undeservedly booted from the programme because the markers kept changing their minds about what they wanted to see on the exams; on her last try, she simply sat there, staring at the blank page in front of her, knowing that she would not be able to write anything coherent.  The comps are supposedly there to make sure that students have a basic grasp of English studies...but I would have thought that the B.A., the M.A., and the process of application to the university would do the same thing.

2)  The search for a supervisor.  This ritual is one of the more humiliating out there.  In the autumn of your second year, you set up meetings with a number of profs in your area and try to convince them that they want to take you on.  In English, there is virtually no benefit in this arrangement for the prof; you offer nothing but the possibility of a minor note on your supervisor's CV.  Rejections are frequent and often brutal.  A lucky few find supervisors quickly; others end up turned down by so many people that they are forced to go to the departmental chair to ask for an intervention.  Egos that have already been crushed by the comps end up more or less obliterated.

3)  The writing of the thesis abstract and the creation of the special field list.  Once a supervisor has reluctantly taken you on, you must firm up your plans for your thesis.  Compared to the other rites, this one is almost pleasant.  The one unpleasant bit is that your proposal is circulated to all the profs in your department.  Scholars of Victorian melodrama have their abstracts scrutinised by experts in literary theory; modernists must convince medievalists that their work is relevant and interesting.  Not all abstracts are accepted; some students must revise their proposals before they can continue.  At the same time, they are struggling to put together lists of at least fifty works on which they will be tested some time in the next year.  Some supervisors help with these lists; some tell their students that they are big kids now and should figure out everything for themselves.  This stage ends up crushing many.  It seems harmless enough until the student looks past it and sees the vast, vast amount of work it entails.

4)  The special field exam.  In my department, this exam resembles the comps but goes beyond them; it allows you to study and write on your area of expertise.  I did not enjoy the field exam at the time, but I was quite grateful for it later.  However, not all students find the exam useful.  While my reading list related directly to my thesis, some students find themselves studying texts that their supervisors think they should study but that are actually largely irrelevant.  My exam itself was a good experience, as the questions were geared specifically towards my interests, but a friend of mine exited the exam room more or less in tears; the examiners had been trying to trip her up.  Like the search for a supervisor, the field exam can, in the worst cases, be an exercise in humiliation.

5)  Submission and defence.  Submission is sometimes a difficult process, especially if it happens during the summer, when supervisors and committees tend to go on vacation.  However, the defence itself is, as I've already implied, an extreme form of busy work.  The Australians skip it entirely, and I've got to admit that I sometimes envy them.  Australian Ph.D. candidates don't pass automatically; their theses are examined thoroughly.  The candidates simply aren't forced to sit in little rooms and answer questions for two hours.  And guess what?  The world hasn't ended yet.  Astounding.

Some of the rites of passage are useful; some seem designed to destroy the candidate's self-esteem; some could, depending on the examiners, supervisors, and committee members involved, go either way.  Most of them could be dispensed with or at least made more pleasant...but we certainly couldn't have that.  If we had to go through all this garbage, you should have to go through it too.  Traditiooooooooooooooooon...

So grin and bear it, Ph.D. candidates.  You'll get through the process.  Soon enough, various profs will be shaking your hand and taking you out for drinks at the faculty club.  Just...when you too are a prof, remember your rite-of-passage-related terror, and be easy on your own students.  Despite common belief, their self-confidence doesn't have to be obliterated in order for them to emerge as well-rounded Ph.D.s.

*Or, in my case, three hundred and fifty-nine.  Please stop laughing.
**I often feel that I would rather take off all my clothes, paint myself blue, and be chained to a tree in the middle of campus while my peers danced around me and pelted me with pig manure than go through the comps again.


Monday, September 15, 2008:  An Intercepted Letter from Mr. Fall to Mr. Summer

S:

What the bleeding hell are you playing at?  Okay, yes, I realise I don't officially take over from you until the 22nd, but people tend to think I'm in charge now.  You're destroying my reputation, you weasel!  Cut it out!

Do you know how humid it was yesterday?  Of course you do...because you deliberately cranked up the humidity.  People were practically swimming through the air, S.  Good grief.  Sure, you get bitter about being shunted out of your sweet position after only four months on the job, but you know what?  We're all in the same boat.  Spring and I don't take it out on people; you and Winter do.  Get over yourself.  Seriously.

I hear through the grapevine that the bigwigs sent you a letter of reprimand (correction:  another letter of reprimand) only a month ago.  Do you like challenging authority?  You're going to get us all fired, genius.  Maybe if you actually had to live with the incredibly stupid weather you're constantly creating, you would be less likely to poke the bosses...but nooooooooooooo.  You spend all your time in that swanky air-conditioned office you've constructed--without permission, I might add--and you ignore the results of your complete idiocy.  You stupid, small-minded little man.

If you pull a stunt like this again before the 22nd, I'm going to come down there and kick your self-righteous arse all over the goddamn equinox.  Stop messing around.  I would like to get through at least one day in September without having to change clothes every other hour.

Fumingly yours,
F


Monday, September 8, 2008:  A Rank Beginner's Perspective on LARPing

I attended my first ever LARP this weekend.  A LARP, in case you think I am making words up, is a Live-Action Role-Playing Game; in other words, attendees invent characters who fit a certain prearranged scenario, dress up as these characters, and act out a semi-scripted story (certain characters know more than others or have particular necessary roles).  A GM (Game Master) relays information to various players at appropriate times and also acts as a sort of referee.  In other words, a LARP works a lot like a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style role-playing game, except for the minor fact that instead of sitting around a table and rolling a twenty-sided die to figure out how hard your punch is going to land at this point in time, you're actually running around trying to kill people with foam weapons.  Our particular LARP took place at a high-stakes poker game in the 1930s, but as it was a "horror" game, it involved a lot of blood and magic and inappropriate hysterical laughter.

I was a last-minute replacement for someone else, and I took over a character who was a sort of minor partner to a jewel thief played by one of the few people at the LARP I knew.  What follows are a newbie's impressions on a very interesting way to spend an evening.

I have some experience with acting and improv (mostly, admittedly, from when I was a teenager), and I know my own weaknesses; I get excited, lose my head, and make stupid decisions.  This all happened...but the other people playing were really good.  Even my fellow noobs seemed to know what they were doing.  One woman played a Russian bodyguard so convincingly that it was actually easy to become terrified of her.  The guy playing the party's host was also good at exuding an air of bullying menace.  There were a couple of hilarious starlets (both played by older women), and my partner in crime made an excellent femme fatale.  The costumes were also well done.  I had half a day to prepare and ended up doing a terrible job of scraping stuff together, but some of the dresses were amazing, including one borrowed satin one that became a problem when its wearer emptied a full glass of diet Coke into her own lap.

My partner and I were trying to steal a jewel.  We failed, mostly because we were both really obvious about hanging around the room in which the jewel was supposedly being kept.  My partner also tended to be gun happy; at one point, she dug a tiny gun out from between her breasts and shot her host for no apparent reason, at which point the host went after her with a meat cleaver.  I then turned hysterical, denounced the host to the whole party, attacked the Russian, and was killed as a bloody nuisance who wouldn't stay out of the way.  In fact, I was the first person to die and not be brought back to life as a mind-controlled, stigmata-bearing zombie (don't ask).  My partner ended up chained in the basement, struck with magical narcolepsy, and killed.  The poker game dissolved in confusion because half the players were dead or insane.

I'm truly not very good at this sort of thing, but I enjoyed it a lot.  It's fun to see grown men and women improvising bloody murder while plotting to steal mystical diamonds and torture innocent house guests.  I mean, sure, you wouldn't want to be involved if this actually happened, but it's fine when everyone is brandishing cap guns and bouncy knives.

In other words:  I liked the LARP.  There was ginger ale.  I drank some.  Goodbye.


Monday, September 1, 2008:  Welcome to University; Please Check Your High-School-Related Knowledge Here

Summer break is over.  Come tomorrow, students will be stuffing their unnecessarily expensive textbooks into their backpacks and heading off to either Orientation Week (Welcome to the engineering faculty!  Dye yourself purple and cluck like a chicken!) or, in some less enlightened universities,* to actual classes.  High-school graduates, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, will be setting foot in the halls of Academe for the first time.  The world will open before them, chock full of possibilities.

Then it will slam shut in their faces.  It will probably laugh mockingly as it does so.

The transition from high school to university is often a cruel one.  Suddenly, a student who has consistently been in the top five percent of her class finds herself surrounded by people who have also consistently been in the top five percent of their classes.  From number one or two, she plummets to number seven hundred and ninety-six...and that's just in the first term.  The intimate high-school classes at which she excelled have abruptly ballooned into enormous mobs of strangers; her biology class contains a thousand other people, and her English professor lectures in a theatre with two levels of balcony.  Of her five profs, one can remember her name after a full term of classes, and that only because she cried in his office when she asked him for an extension on her paper.  Everything is different and scary and strange.

The worst bit, however, is not the hugeness of the classes or the remoteness of the profs.  The worst bit comes when the student realises that she is expected not simply to learn new material but to relearn old material that, apparently, she originally learned wrong.

I have only a glancing knowledge of university science, so I won't venture to comment on it...but I know far too much about university English classes, and I can say fairly definitively that very, very little of what students are taught in high-school English--in Ontario, at least--is useful in university.  What students do know tends to be kind of, well, harmful.  For instance, the Ontario Board of Education is so fond of the sandwich method of essay writing that teachers are, according to a source who shall remain nameless, forced to teach nothing else.  Whether or not the source is correct, the results argue that she is; I have had to un-teach the sandwich method (which is formulaic, stilted, boring, and not apt to encourage independent thought) more times than I can count.  Eighteen-year-old students who have, after all, been in the top five percent of their classes enter university not knowing what analysis is and incapable of doing more with a work of literature than summarising the plot, often incorrectly.  They can't spell or write coherently.  When provided with the statement, "The book is on the table," an entire class of mine once identified "on" as the verb of the sentence.  Some may argue that a knowledge of grammatical terminology is not necessary for a non-English major, but it would be nice for a marker to be able to point out the problem with a particular sentence without having to write, "You use the wrong verb tense here.  The verb of this sentence is 'walk.'  A verb is an action word that can take on various forms in various situations.  You have used the form referring to actions in the present ('walk') instead of the form referring to actions starting in the past and continuing until the present ('has walked')."  In other words, it's difficult for a marker to correct a student's errors when the two of them don't share a common vocabulary.

More and more often, English professors are finding themselves obliged to teach essay writing as well as literary analysis, even though their students supposedly learned to write essays in high school.  I expect that biology profs who had to sit their students down and say, "Okay, class, this is a human being.  This part of the human being is called the finger.  This part is called the hand," and so on would be just a little bit frustrated with the task.  Yet everybody seems to take for granted that English profs will be happy to re-teach essay writing and that students will not mind having to forget everything they have learned over the past five or six years.  Life baffles me sometimes.

University should be more challenging than high school, but it shouldn't involve re-teaching.  There is absolutely no reason that high-school English teachers should be forcing on their students methods and knowledge that not only won't help them in the "real world" (I suppose the ability to summarise Catcher in the Rye incorrectly and express your unsubstantiated feelings about its protagonist could come in handy at some point, but for the life of me, I can't think when) but will actually hold them back if they go on to university.  Fourteen-year-olds are not inherently stupid.  Many of them are capable of sophisticated thought and impassioned, persuasive writing.  If we deny them access to information that will help them and forbid them to try out forms that will let them grow, we may as well keep them forever in grade nine, rocking along in the same tired old grooves, never realising that their brains can move beyond the formulae if they try.

*Such as the one at which I am working this fall, damn it.


Monday, August 25, 2008:  Further Adventures in Juggling

Last summer, I learned to juggle three balls.  This summer, I have been trying to learn to juggle three clubs.  I have, admittedly, not been trying for all that long--I bought the clubs a while ago, but I barely practised all summer until the beginning of last week--but I still think I can confidently call the endeavour an exercise in bloody incompetence.

Admittedly, it took me a long time to get the hang of ball juggling.  I practised daily for something like a month before I could do a half-decent cascade for more than five seconds at a time.  Now, a year and a half later, I'm struggling with other simple patterns.  The clubs, however, are another story.  I can throw one up into the air and catch it; I've even mostly got the requisite airborne flip down.  Maybe fifty percent of the time, I can throw two up into the air and catch them.  When I add a third, everything goes completely to hell.

Part of it is the awkwardness of holding onto one club while throwing another, but part of it seems to be some diabolical quirk in my muscle memory, which apparently panics when it is asked to do something more complex than hold a pen or shake a fist at an evil driver.  Instead of flipping around in a neat semi-circle and falling into my hand, as it does when I am working with only one club, club #1 tends to hurtle off into the distance while club #2 is spinning out of control through the air above my head.  Club #3, not to be outdone, heads straight backwards at about fifty kilometres an hour and hits me directly between the eyes.  All three clubs then fall to the ground and lie there, mocking me.

The best bit is that since my apartment is far too small to accommodate club-flinging (I tried it; there are too many ceilings and walls and computer monitors and things), I get to practise in a field near my apartment.  This field is lovely and convenient, but it also places me in full view of anyone walking, cycling, driving, or waiting for the bus on Broadview.  Small children point and laugh.  Little dogs want to play catch with the clubs.  The bus-stop people actually stand there and watch in fascination as I try to brain myself with what must look to them like a trio of red bowling pins.  If you ever want to learn humility, teach yourself to juggle in public.

Whenever I become particularly demoralised by my utter lack of progress, I pull out my juggling balls and do a really, really fast cascade.  I'm not sure this actually does anything for my self-esteem, but it amuses the small children.


Monday, August 18, 2008:  Foobery, Foobery,  Dumb Plots and Foobery:  Nothing Else Holds Fashion

On June 18, 2007, I went on an extended Rant about my disappointment in the deterioration of Lynn Johnston's For Better or for Worse, a comic strip that I had once enjoyed and that had influenced my own approach to comics.  At the time, I, along with the rest of the world, thought that Johnston was on the verge of a sort of semi-retirement; she was planning to freeze her characters in time and keep the strip running as a series of short vignettes tying together groups of old strips that would act more or less as flashbacks.

Well...she changed her mind.  She did do the flashback thing, but the characters didn't stop aging, and the plot didn't stop advancing.  The Foobocalypse, as the snarkers over at the Comics Curmudgeon termed it, seemed to have been delayed or averted altogether.  Part of the bla--er, part of the credit apparently belonged to Johnston's husband, who had left her for another woman and made the prospect of retirement rather less attractive to her.  The character of John Patterson, who was based closely on Rod Johnston, kind of vanished from the strip for a while there, though he eventually made a reappearance, still happily married to Lynn Johnston's own counterpart, Elly.  Johnston explained to the world that she would retire...albeit in the fall of 2008, after she had wrapped up a number of ongoing plotlines.  The End of the Foobery* was set for late August.

Now Johnston has announced yet again that she is not going to retire.  Instead, she's going to go back to the beginning of the strip and start telling it over again; she will draw the comic in what she calls a "retro" style while "blending at least half of the classic original comic strips with new material" (as Universal Press Syndicate's news release tells us).

Oh, for crying out bloody loud.  Please stop, Ms. Johnston.  Retire.  Start a new project.  Learn to paint!  Just stop flogging this particular horse, which has been dead for years.

As I said in last summer's Rant, FBOFW has betrayed its roots, its original themes, its characters, its innovative qualities, and its readers.  The year between my last Rant and this one, however, has seen the strip dive headfirst into a sea of manipulative treacle.  Sure, wish-fulfillment fantasies exist (a lot), but this is just ridiculous.  The central characters have all happily embraced their own Stepfordness, acknowledged the fact that Change is Bad and the Pattersons are the Only Sane People on Earth, and accepted the well-deserved adulation of all their less fortunate friends.  Michael Patterson, the saintly writer son, has published two novels and risen to fame in the course of about a year and a half.  Elizabeth Patterson is settling down with her high-school sweetheart; the culmination of her story came when her father gushed to her, on her wedding day, "You're a beauty, Elizabeth.  I'm so proud of you."**  Elly and John are constantly declaring their undying love for one another.  And now Grandpa Jim has had another heart attack--on the day of the wedding, natch!--and has somehow, despite his earlier strokes having left him without the ability to communicate, requested that Liz not be told about his plight lest he spoil her "special day"...so we are doubtless about to drown in highly artificial bittersweetness.  Oh, yes:  for at least the past five years, almost every strip has ended with an execrable pun.

I hate this comic.  I hate it because I used to love it.  I shouldn't be wasting my hatred on it--it's a comic strip, and there have certainly been much worse crimes against humanity--but I don't care.  I wish I could stop reading it.  I wish I could stop complaining about it.  Most of all, I wish that Lynn Johnston had retired years ago, when most of us could still fool ourselves into believing that she was at the top of her game.  Bill Watterson had the right idea when he stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes.  I never have to hate Calvin and Hobbes because it will always have been good all the way through.

Actually, there are a number of comics I hate (legacy strips, GO AWAY!), but my hatred of the Foobs is a special case.  I never liked The Family Circus,*** so I don't feel as if it has stabbed me in the back.****  Betrayal hurts...even if the traitor in question is a comic strip.  Yes, I do need to get out more.

Ah well.  I hereby officially wash my hands of For Better or for Worse.  From now on, my loathing of this comic will simply make me laugh--laugh!--which is, admittedly, more than the comic itself does.  Down with Foobery; up with Mockery; all is well with the world.

*"Foob" is 'net slang for 1) For Better or for Worse, 2) any character in For Better or for Worse, or 3) a silly person who still likes For Better or for Worse.
**And this, my friends, is what is wrong with...a lot of things...in our world today.
***Has anyone ever liked The Family Circus?  I mean, come on.  Every character in that strip deserves to die painfully in the very near future.  I am, of course, including the characters who are already dead.
****...plus set me on fire, hit me over the head with a shovel, and mocked me as I lay dying of my wounds.


Monday, August 11, 2008:  It's Been a While Since We Had to Send an Open Letter to Summer

Dear Mr. Summer:

We write to inquire as to what in the name of all that is holy you think you are playing at.  You have always been one of our more erratic employees, tending to arrive on the job far too early and linger far too long, but your present behaviour has baffled us all.

Why, sir, have you deigned to turn our office into an aquatic environment?  Employees at Vancouver, Inc., or London & Sons may be used to constant sogginess and a need to carry rain gear at all times, but we are generally more efficient in our treatment of the climate.  What has happened to your usual practice of cranking the thermostat up to 35C and increasing the humidity to absurd levels without actually introducing water into the equation?  We are used to sweating, gasping, and breaking out in heat rashes on a regular basis; we are not used to umbrellas.  What has got into you?

Mr. Summer, your insolent--nay, downright seditious--behaviour must cease.  At this time of year, our company is accustomed to the ultimate in heat-induced misery.  Refreshing drizzle and bearable temperatures are simply unacceptable, as is the fact that many of us were forced to wear light jackets this weekend.  No one came down with heatstroke.  No one stood forth and cried dramatically, "I am sick to death of living without air conditioning!  Give me environmentally destructive blasts of freezing cold air ere I melt quite away!"  No one even cried.

Please resume your duties as soon as possible.  We depend on you to turn August into a small but vital piece of living hell.

Sincerely yours,


Toronto


Monday, August 4, 2008:  No One Yelled at Me This Weekend

Disappointingly, I got through this Saturday without running into an unreasonably angry man.  I guess I'll have to go on about superheroes again instead.

On July 14, I Ranted a little incoherently and ungrammatically (I think it may have been kind of late at night when I wrote that Rant) about superhero movies.  I mentioned that I would not forgive the new Batman movie if it followed the same tired old superhero plot and failed to provide its hero with an interesting personality or motivation.  Well...I have now seen The Dark Knight.  I am happy to report that the film does not repeat the egregious errors of Batman Begins.  The token female character has a meaningful part in the plot; Batman's motivation deepens in complexity; the presence of Harvey Dent allows the writer and director to get at the idea of heroism from more than one angle; the Joker, as the plot's monster, gathers up all these elements and mixes them madly together into a morally fascinating stew.  The whole thing deviates nicely from the Patented Hollywood Superhero Plot.  I thoroughly approve.

Now someone just needs to make a meaningful superheroine film...or, well, any superheroine film at all.  No, Elektra doesn't count, and neither does Catwoman.

Come to think of it, I would be ecstatic to see a solo comic-book superheroine with brains, a personality, and small breasts.  I know that such a wildly improbably figure may never be created, as comic-book writers and artists tend to assume that all their readers are fourteen-year-old boys, but damn, it would be nice to see a heroine who wasn't in danger of falling on her face every time she stood upright.  I've never been sure how, say, Wonder Woman is supposed to leap madly into action* when her enormous bosom is flapping about out in front of her like that.  Gentlemen:  do you have any idea how much those things would weigh?  If poor Princess Diana actually did fling herself off a building and swing through the air on, I dunno, her Lasso of Truth or something, the momentum would tear her breasts unceremoniously from her ribcage.

Indignant readers who think I'm making a mountain of a molehill (or, in this case, of a slightly smaller pair of mountains) and who are inclined to argue that most superheroes, male and female, represent physical ideals should watch out for my Wagging Finger of Doom.**  Sorry, people, but while it's true that many superheroes have manly jaws and biceps five times the size of my head, others are--how do I put this?--monsters.  The Hulk is huge and green.***  Hellboy is a bright red demon.  The Thing is...a Thing (and one of his teammates, by the way, is a smoking hot woman whose primary power is to hide this hotness by turning invisible).  I'm not as up on the X-Men as I could be, but as far as I can recall, all the really freaky-looking women are bad guys, whereas there are certainly freaky-looking men (including, arguably, a short, bad-tempered Canadian) amongst the good guys.  Where are the feminine scales, fur, and fangs?  Where are the hideously scarred women who hide their faces beneath masks and live in lonely mansions with their faithful butlers?****  I want to see skin issues, yo.

To be fair, Marvel's recent Runaways series involves a group of young people, most of them girls, who are highly varied in appearance; two of the girls are babes, but neither has particularly large bazoombas.  One of the girls (the most interesting) is fat and four-eyed; one is a little kid with super-strength.  Go, Runaways!  You show those incredibly successful franchises what's what!  Yay!*****

Oh well.  Some day...somehow.  For now, I can console myself with the completely unrelated fact that Katie Holmes will never be in a Batman movie again.

*When she isn't being kidnapped and tied up.
**My one superpower.
***Except in certain comics in certain continuities and yadda, yadda, yadda.
****Or, alternatively, in the sewers.
*****At this point, imagine me standing all alone and waving a little flag.


Monday, July 28, 2008:  I Keep Running into People Who Want to Yell at Me

Last Saturday, a man called me so that he could bawl me out for stealing his wallet and his phone, neither of which I had ever seen.  This Saturday, the following happened:

I was biking up Devonshire after a friendly afternoon Scrabble game.  Just before I reached Bloor, a man flung his SUV's door open, right into my path.

Now...I have been doored before.  My previous dooring was a gentle one; the door clipped my bike and sent me tumbling into the middle of Broadview.  Luckily, it was after midnight, and there were no cars coming up behind me, but even so, I ended up with a giant bruise on my knee, a hand-brake knocked out of alignment, and a smashed bell.  I know people who have experienced a lot worse.  One of my friends went right over his handlebars and ended up in the hospital with an almighty gash on his face.  Being doored is unpleasant, dangerous, and usually painful.  It also leaves you with a healthy mistrust of parked cars.

Because I had already acquired such a mistrust, I was watching the cars and was able to swerve in time.  As I passed the SUV, the man who had opened his door in my face looked up and said rather cheerfully, "Oh...sorry."

Even as he spoke, I was already coming out with the Patented Toronto Cyclist's Response, which in this particular variation was the obscene equivalent of, "Heavens to Betsy!"  My exclamation was not, I should note, the obscene equivalent of, "You are a bad, bad man!" or, "Go do something terrible to yourself!" or, "I do not like your mother!"  It was an expression of disgust and censure, but it was not particularly personal.

The gentleman's response was, "Excuse me?  Excuse me?  What did you say?"

As I continued to bike up the street, he shouted after me, "I apologised!  What the hell is your problem?  I apologised!"

I am going to have to admit that at this point, I favoured the gentleman with a hand-gesture, the equivalent of which very well may have been, "Go do something terrible to yourself!"

I heard the sound of running feet.  As I turned the corner, I was confronted with a very angry gentleman who approached me aggressively and pretty nearly screamed, "I apologised to you!  I apologised, but you just go on and on!"

I lost my temper.  I am not proud.  Everything I said from this moment forward was spoken in a heavily sarcastic tone of voice.

"Yes, you apologised," I said.  "Have you ever been a cyclist?  Do you know what happens when you hit a door with your bike?  It's all right for you--"

"I apologised!"

"Fine.  I accept your apology.  But--"

"I apologised!"

"I--"

"I apologised!"

"Okay!  Right!  I accept your [darned] apology!"

The gentleman turned and stormed off.  I fumed for a bit, then left.

All right...I shouldn't have said "[Heavens to Betsy]!" as I passed the car.  I do think, however, that a cyclist who has narrowly escaped a lesson in short-term flight because some idiot doesn't think he has to shoulder-check before he opens his door should get one free swear-word, no matter whether the idiot is simultaneously apologising or not.  "Gosh, I'm sorry I nearly killed you" doesn't really cut it for me...especially not from someone who obviously feels the simple words are enough and the nearly-squished cyclist an ungrateful jerk for not tugging her forelock and going, "No worries, guv; I love living dangerously."  I think the moron with the SUV had a right to feel I was being rude, but I also think I had a right to be rude.  A happy, obsequious response to a thoughtless driver would carry the implication that the whole near-death experience was no biggie.  In fact, while it may not have been a biggie to him, it was rather a hugie to me.  I have no wish to be doored again.

I should have got his number; I could have put him in touch with last week's grumpy old man.  The two of them would get along perfectly.


Monday, July 21, 2008:  This Really Happened

At 6:35 p.m. this Saturday, my phone rang.  When I picked up, the following conversation took place:

Kari:  Hello?

Man's Voice:  Who's this?

K:  I think you've got the wrong number.

MV:  No, I haven't got the wrong number.  [Incomprehensible, indignant muttering and snarling, some of it vaguely insulting.]

K:  I'm really not sure what you're talking about.

MV:  Oh, yes, you are, since you stole my wallet.

K:  I...what?

MV:  You stole my wallet.  

K:  I did not steal your wallet.

M:  If you didn't steal my wallet, why did you just answer my phone?  You stole my phone, too!

K:  I didn't steal your phone.  This is my phone.

MV:  It is not!

K:  It is!

MV:  Well, it has my number.

K:  It doesn't!  It's my phone, and I am using it in my apartment.

MV:  Yeah, right.

K:  I.  Am.  Sitting.  In.  My.  Apartment.  Right.  Now.  This isn't even a cell phone.

MV:  Well...well...that's not possible.  It's my number.

K:  No, it's not.

MV:  It's my number!

K:  Did you call 416-xxx-xxxx?

[Pause.]

MV:  It's not my number.  Bye.

A friend of mine has observed that it was probably quite difficult for this gentleman to forget his humiliation enough to work himself into a righteous fury and call the actual correct number.  I think he probably managed, though.  He was that sort of guy.


Monday, July 14, 2008:  Now, Here's a Novel Concept

It's been a while (since November 12, actually) since I've Ranted about Hollywood cliches in generally (as opposed to Hollywood cliches in Beowulf in particular).  I think the fact that I saw The Incredible Hulk over the weekend is a good excuse to start again.

I have nothing against superhero movies.  In fact, I tend to like them because superheroes are pretty well all versions of the character I call the "half-monster hero"; I wrote an overlong dissertation on him not that long ago.  Yes, superheroes' stories are all pretty similar in various fundamental ways, but frankly, it's as easy to compare Superman to Beowulf as it is to compare him to Batman.  These guys follow certain patterns because heroes generally do; the details are what can make a particular story interesting.

However, Hollywood, in its eternal wisdom,* has decided that those troublesome details are just window dressing instead of the bits of the story that give it its character, its meaning, its originality.  Hollywood writers and directors see only that 1) other superhero movies have worked, and 2) certain people are fans of certain comic books.  Under the excuse of believing that 3) it is impossible to capture the convoluted complexity of a comic's world, the writers distill the stories to their most banal elements:  that is, to the basic heroic pattern, with a few incidental plot details sprinkled on top.  Many of these details are lifted from other superhero films, in which they were, after all, successful.  For instance, though it's true that many superheroes do actually have love interests, when Hollywood writers come across one who could (at this point in his story, at least) do without one--one such as, oh, let's say Batman--they add an extraneous character to the story.  Kudos to Iron Man for undermining this trope with its intelligent treatment of Pepper Potts, but boo to the Batman franchise, which probably deserves to be slapped.**  Guys:  if there's a girl in the story, give her a real part.  If there isn't, don't try to shoehorn one in.

The Incredible Hulk is possibly the most predictable superhero film I have ever seen.  Almost from the beginning, I knew who the villain was going to be, how and why he was going to gain his powers, and when, almost to the minute, it was going to become apparent that the plot of the movie could be summed up in the following words:  "The army spends most of the film trying to kill the hero, then relies on him to save everyone in the last fifteen minutes."***  The writers were on autopilot, and the protagonist ended up with no personality at all.  He didn't even have all that many lines.  Why would he need them?  HULK SMASH!

I am still waiting for someone to realise that it's possible to follow the hero pattern without following what has come to be the hero plot.  Okay, I'm a medievalist, and I like medieval examples that nobody else has ever heard of before...but consider Richard Coeur de Lion, one of my favourite medieval romances.  The writer has taken the historical story of Richard the Lionheart and reworked it so that it fits the heroic narrative.  In the process, instead of taking the Hollywood route**** and blandifying Richard, he has turned his protagonist into a terrifying, axe-wielding cannibal who has mastered the art of politics in its most brutal form and is, at one point, pictured as a horned demon covered with blood and roaring as he severs the chains of Acre harbour by main strength.  Medieval writers didn't really go in for deeply psychological portraits--in fact, they would have been awfully puzzled even by Hamlet--but even so, Richard, a highly derivative product of an age that didn't consider you a real "auctor" unless you had a myriad of different sources for your work, puts every Hollywood superhero flick to shame as far as originality is concerned.  He also manages to stick to the hero pattern while following a path that does not, in its details, resemble those of 99% of other heroes.  The poem is both comfortingly familiar and refreshingly different, and no, the "different" aspect does not derive from the fact that much of the story is history.  Even the non-historical bits--even, actually, the derivative bits that can be found in hundreds of other stories--are got at from unique angles.  It isn't even as if the Richard poet is a brilliant author; at best, he counts as "pretty good."  He still avoids brain-dead apery, though.

It is also worth noting that we are not awfully puzzled by Hamlet.  Why not provide one's hero with some psychology beyond, "Criminals killed my parents; I must fight crime," or, "This whole story is really about a girl"?  Sure, a movie is only two hours long, but interesting characters are...interesting.  Sometimes, they even create plot instead of being created by it.

Note that I'm not talking about comic books themselves here; superhero franchises are often corporate creations, and the relative complexity of a hero can wax and wane over the course of his or her existence.  Hollywood movies, on the other hand, have specific creators who are attempting to interpret these huge and disparate bodies of work.  The results, which are frequently bland and predictable, can be frustrating in the extreme.

Will I see the new Batman movie?  Of course.  As I've said, I'm a sucker for superheroes.  Will I forgive it if it is Just Another Superhero Movie?

Nope.  With great power comes great responsibility...and all that jazz.  Do something with your plots, Hollywood writers and directors.  We know all the standard ones already.

*I.e., its unforgivable stupidity.
**Granted, I haven't seen the latest installment, which comes out on Friday.
***Okay, yeah, I'd seen the trailer...but even so.
****Or what would become the Hollywood route seven hundred years later.


Monday, July 7, 2008:  Ten More Minutes...Then There Will Be Polkas

Okay...this deserves a Rant.

It is 1:07 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, July 6.  My downstairs neighbours are sitting on their balcony, playing guitars and singing "Feliz Navidad" off key.

How is it even possible for me to express how annoying this is?  It's bad enough that there are suddenly Christmas songs in July; the fact that they are barely recognisable except via their rhythm and their rather slurred lyrics is making me inclined to take some sort of revenge.  It is possible my accordion will be involved.  Maybe I could quickly write a song called, "You Are Irritating Me, and People are Trying to Sleep," then belt it out on my balcony.  My upstairs neighbours might be upset, but I'm willing to bet I would shut up the silly drunken fools downstairs.  I almost liked it better when the two cranky old ladies lived there.  They smoked like chimneys and made it impossible for me to sleep in my bedroom, which always smelled strongly of smoke, but they didn't sing out-of-tune Christmas songs in the wee hours.

Yes, admittedly, I am the sort of person who clutches her ears dramatically every time any musician, herself included, goes ever so slightly flat.  However, these guys aren't actually hitting the notes they think they're hitting.  They're nowhere near to hitting these notes.  They are, in fact, so far from hitting these notes that I am tempted to go downstairs and hand them some signposts, since they're obviously not going to find the things any other way.  If you're musical, think of it as follows:  when these guys should be singing an A, one of them is hitting F#, one C, one B, and one a strange combination of E and G#.  When they should be singing a B, they will land on a similarly random collection of notes.  They are doing this all very, very loudly.  I think I may need a new brain.

At about 10:00 this evening, two young men I assume are now part of the sing-along below decks pounded on my door and were baffled when I answered.  I was wearing night-clothes at the time and did not want to be opening my door to strangers, but these guys, who were obviously on the wrong floor, just kept on knocking.  I think they may have laughed at me a bit afterwards.  I shall lean out over my balcony and try to hit them with raw eggs.

Oh, damn it.  I thought they'd stopped...but here they go again.  Tune the guitar, you morons!  I'm a floor above you, inside, and I can hear the dissonance.  Oh.  Dear.  Lord.  They are singing "Happy Birthday" in two different languages.  Shut up!  Shut up and let me go to freaking sleep!  I don't care if it's your birthday.  I hate you, and I hate your birthday.  I have to mark tomorrow.

...They are not stopping.

Oh well.  Who needs sleep?  I'll just have to resign myself to this horrible torture and try to resist the urge to pull out the accordion and start in on a rousing rendition of "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

I am not sure I can resist the urge.  That is not singing.  It is yelling with musical accompaniment.  Any second now, my ears will start to bleed.

I wonder if I could hit the guitar with an egg?  I suppose it's worth a try...


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