Point of Reference

I feel as though I ought to try and say something profound and meaningful, or at least touching and respectful today, but so far all I've managed is a list of complaints. My personal connection to the two world wars is pretty distant. World War II was primarily a war of my great-grandparents' era, and the one great-grandfather I knew died before I was old enough to think to ask him about it. What I do know about his experiences was that he was taken prisoner early in the war, and spent seven years in a POW camp. My grandmother was seven when he left and fourteen when he came back. She must have barely remembered him when he finally returned. I can't imagine being separated from a parent for that long, and I can't imagine trying to build a relationship with one after that long a break. I'm sure it was incredibly difficult, even as everyone around them was doing the same: a generation's worth of shattered families and broken bonds.

Right now I'm watching a video on the CBC website about the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War and the subsequent reparations. This is one of the few aspects of the Second World War that I have heard first-hand accounts of, and I'm glad I asked my grandfather about it before he died. Most of his family was sent to the camp at Slocan, in the B.C. interior, but my grandfather was shipped from Vancouver to a farm in Southwestern Ontario. The part that I always found most incredible about the whole experience is that after stripping him of his rights, his home, and his family, the government still had the gall to draft my grandfather to fight for the country that was holding his parents and siblings prisoner. And he went, as so many Japanese men did. And then he and his siblings built new lives for themselves after the war, starting again from scratch because the government had sold all of their property and possessions for a fraction of their value during the war. All of which, I imagine, contributed to my grandfather's decision to choose a Caucasian wife, and his relief when his son did the same.

So here's my tribute on Remembrance Day: Thank you to the people who suffered through the war and rebuilt their lives afterwards. And thank you to the people who fought for redress and justice on behalf of those who suffered at Canada's hands.

I had an interesting post-Kill Bill* discussion on Friday with some fellow doctoral students about who qualifies as a nerd. One of the students suggested that anyone doing a Ph.D. qualifies as a nerd by virtue of that activity. The rest of us laughed and launched into a discussion of anime, SF, and Myers-Briggs results. I think that by the end of the conversation, she was ready to concede that not all Ph.D. students are created equally nerdish. (And we didn't even have to bring up RPGs and LARPs!)

On an unrelated note, MacGuy's back from L.A., and he brought me Ghiradelli chocolate! Isn't he sweet? Okay, yes, it was only because he couldn't think of anything else to buy for me, but it was still a nice gesture. :) I think he's back for a whole two weeks this time.

*Evaluation of the movie: stylistically beautiful and far too gory for my taste. Yes, the violence was clearly over the top and not meant to be taken seriously. No, that didn't make it any easier for me to watch people's limbs get hacked off. Will I see volume two? I haven't decided yet, but I'm certainly not paying Friday-night prices for it.

The GSU meeting didn't end up being particularly informative. We went over the budget, which I suppose was educational in a way, but I don't know enough about the GSU or the services it offers to really have an opinion on how they're spending their money. On Thursday we're going to have the first Graduate Sociology Student Association meeting of the year, which might be a little more interesting. At a minimum, I've found that those meetings are an excellent source of information regarding department politics and that's always entertaining.

I downloaded iTunes a couple of days ago in response to my roommate's enthusiasm for the introduction of the PC version (an extension of his general enthusiasm for all things Apple). It's a decent enough program--it certainly makes sharing our playlists much easier--but it lacks a few features of WMP that I rather like, so it looks like I'm going to continue to support the Evil Empire.

Today was a mix of good and bad, academically speaking. (And really, academics rule my life right now, so there's not much else to tell.) On the good side, I found out that my SSHRC application has a decent shot of being forwarded to the School of Graduate Studies. Or at least I assume so, since they asked one of my current professors to write a letter of recommendation for me to show that I have support at this school as well as my old one. On the bad side, that prof would now like a copy of my (as yet unfinished) thesis so that he has something to write about it. I'll send him what I have done, but I wish I had more. I need to overcome this overwhelming sense of dread I get every time I open the file.

My plans for the weekend: co-author the 30-page paper due Wednesday night, prepare the hour long presentation I have to give on Thursday morning, and finish the next chapter of my thesis. Piece of cake, right?

The presentation is over! I didn't have time to finish writing up my notes and thought I babbled incoherently as a result, but three people asked for copies of my paper, so they must have found something of value in what I said. I'm finding that one of the advantages of attending a relatively specialized conference is there's a much greater chance of encountering people who are interested in what I'm doing. If only I were still interested in it.

The other two presenters in my session were both quite good, particularly the second one, whose work I've read (and liked and used) before. It's rather odd meeting so many people whose work I'm already familiar with. They're just distant names on a page; I wasn't expecting to learn about them as people. But I haven't been disappointed yet.

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?

I took the memory key to school and had my officemate run various Norton repair products on it. Disk doctor repaired something and now I can once again save files to the drive. I still can't see or access the old files, however, even though I can scan them for viruses with Norton, back them up with the XP backup utility, and restore the backed up files to my hard drive. If I check the properties of the folder on my hard drive where I restored the files, it tells me that there are 155 files present. However, I can't see any of them in windows explorer. I don't think I actually need any of them--the only thing that I didn't have stored elsewhere was the SSHRC proposal that I rewrote yesterday--but I'd like to know what happened to them before I entrust anything else to that drive.

Today's the big hand-in-our-SSHRC applications day. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be getting SSHRC funding this year, partly because my MA supervisor has not been encouraging about the kind of letter he can write with my Master's thesis incomplete (and I get the impression that the fact that I've taken so long could well mean I'll never get another good letter out of him again; fortunately this will probably be the last one I need from him), and partly because I've been so busy that I haven't put as nearly as much time into writing my program of study as I should have. Plus there's the whole lack of publications thing. Oh well, there's always next year, right?

Back to work now. I'm really, really, really stressed.

ETA: In an attempt to increase my stress level, my USB key just decided to erase everything I had stored on it. I think everything was backed up elsewhere... ::crosses fingers::

A. When we were out shopping on Saturday, we stopped by a luggage store where I spotted a bag manufactured by a company that was started by a friend of mine when we were undergrads. We haven't spoken since graduation, but I was still oddly excited by it.

8. I saw the trailer for The Return of the King today and it looks fantastic. One more reason to be excited by December.

iv. I'd enjoy the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend a whole lot more if I didn't have a conference presentation to prepare for the following week.

#. There was an article in Slate today suggesting that it might be a good idea to bring in professional designers to redesign ballots, rather than relying on the antiquated laws currently governing the states.

I haven't figured out yet if relations between faculty and students are truly that much more acrimonious here than at my previous department, or if it's just a few domineering faculty and a few bitter students, but we were regaled with more stories at yesterday's Graduate Sociology Student Association meeting. The stories involved such weird occurences as a top secret meeting at which a rules was passed to prevent the grad student rep from speaking at faculty meetings (apparently this failed because some of the faculty were a bit irritated at being excluded from the top secret meeting, and a few even throught that the graduate students ought to have speaking rights). The most recent rumour says that in response to the top secret external review conducted last year, the department is going to take away some Ph.D. student offices and use them for...something. RA space, possibly. I've decided to ease into the politics gradually. I signed up as the liasion to the Graduate Student Union, which I'm told mostly involves forwarding email. That ought to give me a chance to see how things work before being thrown in the middle of them.

I think this afternoon, I'll bake muffins. And shop for a lightbulb.