Harvest Holiday

I was trying to explain the Canadian Thanksgiving to a Ukranian friend last Friday. I wasn't able to come up with any sort of mythology or customs other than eating turkey and visiting family (and the usual harvest stuff). Well, and as was observed in The Globe and Mail recently, dumping your high school boyfriend/girlfriend if you're a first year university student, but that one didn't seem applicable to her. On the whole, it's a pretty customless holiday--we don't even have stories of pilgrims to tell, just the usual thankfulness for the harvest which always seems faintly ridiculous coming from dedicated urban-dwellers who buy their food from the supermarket year-round. I do think mindfulness of the change of the seasons is good thing, but Thanksgiving as we celebrate it rarely dwells on that.

Now having gone on about that, I have to say that my Thanksgiving was lovely. I went up to see my mom and sibs on Sunday, and had the traditional turkey dinner with them, my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle. As is customary, we ate far too much (the late night candy run with my siblings didn't help with that) and I came back feeling far more cheerful than I have for a while (although that could be the turkey and pumpkin pie they sent me back with). Perhaps family and food is reason enough for a holiday.

semiotic_trader and a_just_society, I hope you had a good time. We missed you. Where are you spending Christmas?

Test #1

I invigilated for the 101 midterm tonight. I'm always amazed at the words we get asked to define. Popular ones tonight included pronounced, prevalence, and aspirant. The scary thing is that not all of these students are ESL. One brave soul asked a TA for a definition of anomie. Ha! The TA rightly informed the student that he should have studied that before writing the test.

After the test a few of the TAs wandered down to a bar with the professor. During the class before the test, the professor invited the undergrads to join us for drinks afterwards and a surprising number of them did. (I think we got eight out of 1534.) In general, the ones who showed up were interesting and enthusiastic, although there was one particularly creepy individual who spent the bulk of the evening discussing his plans for a reality TV show that apparently centred around getting teens drunk, manipulating their behaviour, and filming the results. Oh, and ideally it would also involve nudity. I think he was pleased when we told him that there was no way he'd get academic support for such a project--it reinforced his justifications of his project as cutting edge Art. The whole conversation was very disturbing, particularly since he seemed to see nothing at all wrong with his idea.

I have to go get ready for tomorrow's NetLab tour, part of the pre-AoIR conference festivities. Why did I agree to present at this again?