11.24.09
Homesick
The warmth of the metro brake-heated station hits my face and hands cooled by the November frost. The train just left as I stepped down on the platform, but sitting on the bright orange plastic bench calms my annoyance. “C’est pas grave, j’suis pas pressée”, I think as I watch the people on the other side rush up to the surface to catch their bus.
I reflect on this city’s set of rhythms: above ground and underground, day and night, open and hidden, sophisticated and pedestrian, old and new, rich and poor. Here you can have deux faces, two lives that coexist and enrich each other. I have yet to find somewhere else where I can be a proper, serious student in the day, and the dumbest drunk club girl at night; where I can be a busy socialite and a cocooner in the same week; where I can get good jobs on the sole basis of my bilinguisme and then spend most of my year speaking, writing and reading English. Or where the life of the surface seems to stretch and expand in the few minutes spent herded with strangers in a metro wagon, and then goes back to its fast-paced normality as you step on the weather-beaten sidewalk. When you can be anywhere inside the metro lanes within half an hour, the fifteen minutes of commute always feels longer than it is.
I know it’ll be dark, and cold, and probably snowy when I get back home, but I’ll have gained heat with drinks and friends by then. A random Irish pub on Bishop is my destination tonight, and I do plan on drinking like one. The train now opens its doors in front of me, and I step in the blue car with happy expectations for my evening.
11.16.09
Intently writing letters
I didn’t think I’d dread the dreaded letter of intent so much. My first application is due in 4 weeks and I find myself unable to start working on them.
I went through the grant applications quite easily, through the writes and the rewrites, and I started rather early on them. But for the applications, I feel sullen and a bit uninterested. I’m sick of writing about the topic. I procrastinate.
Like right now!
11.13.09
While I’m working…
Right now I am working on a translation for my supervisor, who is going to France to present a paper on her research on Victorian illustration. It’s the second time she asks me to do it, and it’s pretty good work, considering I don’t get to use French much anymore in an academic setting. What I do is mostly academic writing, but sometimes I have to translate long passages from literary texts. Translation is much more difficult than what I thought at first, but it’s definitely doable. What I want to do today is to put under evaluation such a translation of a literary passage by my bilingual readers. Literary translation was my first reason to engage in an English degree, and I would like to do it as a side if I could.
So first the passage in English:
Elizabeth sat sulking in her room all the afternoon, the door shut: the hum of a busy city came in at her open window; . . . and she thought how kind and how handsome Dampier looked . . . . It was a commonplace little tableau de genre enough: that of a girl sitting at a window, with clasped hands, dreaming dreams . . . . with the light falling on her hair, and on the fold of her dress, and on the blazing petals of the flowers on the balcony outside, and then overhead a quivering green summer sky. But it is a little picture that nature is never tired of reproducing; and besides nature, every year, in the Royal Academy, I see half-a-dozen such representations.
Now in French:
Elizabeth s’assit dans sa chambre, boudant tout l’après-midi, la porte fermée: le son d’une ville animée entra par sa fenêtre ; … et elle pensa à quel point Dampier paraissait gentil et beau … C’était un banal petit tableau de genre : celui d’une fille assise à une fenêtre avec les mains jointes, rêvant des rêves… avec la lumière tombant sur ses cheveux, et sur les plis de sa robe, et sur les pétales embrasés des fleurs sur le balcon dehors, et là au-dessus un tremblant ciel d’été vert. Mais c’est une petite image que la nature ne se lasse jamais de reproduire ; et de toute façon, chaque année, à l’Académie Royale, je vois une demi-douzaine de ces représentations.
I’m sure it needs fine-tuning, but I’m sure it’s pretty decent for someone with no translation training.
11.06.09
Californications
The day didn’t really start on a good note, except for a friend who drove me to the airport, which was awesome.
I waited, literally, two hours to check in for my flight. There was a problem with the previous one, so everybody needed to be re-flown through other planes and places. I stood in line from 6h20 to 8h20, until they decided to dedicate one booth to the people checking in for the 9h15 flight.
After I finally got through and sat down in the waiting area, there was this beautiful rainbow on the turf. Well, guess what? My camera isn’t working. I made a point to charge the battery, but it might have actually discharged on the charger. So, no pictures of San Francisco for me. Not that I am that fond of pictures for myself, but I like to show them to those who weren’t there with me. So, I might take cell phone pictures if I see anything breathtaking; otherwise I’ll just need another reason to come back!
The flight was a half hour late, but the pilot pushed the plane and we made it to SEA-TAC in about 30 minutes. I caught my connecting flight to SFO without too much trouble. It’s so cool, they have an underground train connecting the different parts of the terminal (so does SFO, but it’s aerial). Anyway, the service on Horizon/Alaska was crap. Between Seattle and San Francisco I was seated at the very back, and the lunch cart didn’t even make it to us. Between 8h30 AM and 6h30 PM, all I ate was the little snack pack they give you. No wonder I ate my half-chicken in like 15 minutes straight, AND a dessert.
In any case, after I was out of the plane, stuff went smoothly. The transit from SFO to downtown is fairly straightforward, if a little noisy. But it’s cheap-ish (about 8$) and easy to use. The hotel is right next to the Powell street station–the shopping hub of San Francisco. For my Montréaler readers, imagine if Ste-Catherine was as big as Sherbrooke, and you get Market Street around Powell. The hotel is decent, considering the price I paid; the room is minuscule (kind of like the room I had at the Kingston in Vancouver), but the bed is big enough for two, and the bathroom/shower is right across the hall.
I managed to walk around for about an hour, went into a few stores. Nothing special there since they’re all big American chains I’m used to see, but GOD is that the biggest Old Navy I’ve ever seen. It’s definitely more “American” than Seattle, but with the temperature and the clothing style being pretty much the same as up in Victoria I still feel in the Pacific Northwest, more than California. But I heard Québec French still while walking around, seems like we’re everywhere!
I need to put the finishing touches to my Powerpoint (really, just change the title and the date…) and get some sleep. I’m seriously exhausted, and the single glass of wine I had is hitting me pretty hard, considering the emptiness of my stomach when I drank most of it.
Tomorrow I have to stay on campus all day (I have the last session of the day) but I might go out tomorrow night and definitely take the time to see some sights on Sunday (it’ll be sunny).
10.26.09
First class! Ever!
This afternoon I taught my first undergrad class ever. It was a class on the use of evidence in academic essays.
At this point I think I did pretty well, I think I just had trouble with the intellectual pitch (basically, speaking at a level that they will understand, and that will engage them without boring them). But our profs say it’s the most difficult thing to get, especially when you start.
I had quite a simple class plan, really: go through the main parts of the article and talk about the evidence in each. The point was to convey in which situations you should use expert evidence, and in which situation you should use primary sources. I had to speed up a little bit by the end, but I did get to the ending of the article.
Overall it went well; the class wasn’t really lively but I had about 8-9 speakers. I was stressed before I started, but when I got talking everything just got rolling. I actually enjoyed doing it; I know to bring a bottle of water next time because my mouth was getting dry by the end.
I’m actually looking forward to next time!
10.25.09
The trouble with bibliographies
Not the kind that you put at the end of papers, no. The kind that you have to come up with out of your (beep) to support a grant application.
No, I don’t know which books will be useful to me yet. No, I haven’t read everything in my old field of study, let alone in one I JUST BARELY chose to follow. Even though my proposal sounds awesome and all, I really have no idea what I’m talking about… well I know a little, but not as much as I pretend I do. The art of bullshitting, they say, is necessary to any successful academic career.
Yet, I have up to 5 pages to put a list of books that are supposedly necessary for my research. I don’t really know what they are. I’m just skimming in those few books I HAVE read (or the bits of them) or that I know about, and copy any book whose title seems remotely relevant to my topic.
After two hours of doing that yesterday, I was upset that my carrel is in the basement of the library; I would gladly have thrown myself out the window had it been higher.
10.07.09
Granting things
There is just so much going on that I can barely find the time – or the words – to talk about it.
I’m a bit upset right now, the SSHRC grant is not coming along as smoothly as I would wish. There is still a lot of work to be done, and I need to refine whatever I can properly for before October 30th. I’m really tired, and I wish I could do without it… and then PhD applications… I just wish I could curl into a ball and sleep and have my robot clone do it for me, and wake up to open the letters in the spring. I sleep a lot these days, and I am tired all the time; quite the opposite of my last BA year when I didn’t sleep for two months. It started at about this time of the year.
A robot clone would be awesome.
Today I’ve also felt a bit dejected because I completely failed at the teaching workshop exercise. A lot of people in the class have BEds, and have already spent years teaching middle and high school. I stumbled and got lost in my notes and couldn’t even find the disruptive behaviour I was supposed to stop. I’m scared I’ll be really bad, and my first teaching period is in three weeks. I want to do this well.
Right now I just kind of want to get crazy drunk and forget about it all… but there’s more class tomorrow and stuff to do and class to prepare and stuff to read and write…
(P.S.: the Habs got MASSACRED by the Canucks. 7 to 1. I am ashamed.)
09.17.09
So many choices
When I applied for Master’s programs, I had a rather definite idea of where I wanted to go and who I wanted to work with. Even though I did apply to American schools, I did not really want to go there. I’m not making the same mistake again; however, I feel like applying to four PhDs is a little tight, and I’m looking for a fifth place to try and get in.
Right now my shortlist is Toronto, York, Simon Fraser and Alberta. A fifth one is hard to come by; I’m torn between UBC, McGill and Dalhousie. I don’t have enough money to spend and apply to all three extra places, so I need to choose one. Ideally, Toronto is where I want to go. I chose the other ones on the basis of their having post-colonial specialists that aren’t strictly Canadianists. I also don’t want to end up in Typical University Town, Ontario. After having seen London, it just turned me completely off. I like a city with diversified activities; Victoria even is borderline since 80% of people my age are students.
McGill is attractive because it’s home, both our families and our friends are there, and rent is cheap (could even be free if I deign to decide to travel; however I don’t think my mom would enjoy having to refurnish my room with a bed when she’s turned it into a crafts room). UBC means I get to stay in British Columbia, which I have come to love; however they don’t have any scholars strictly in commonwealth lit: their post-colonialists are mainly Canadianists, albeit excellent ones. Dalhousie comes recommended for several reasons, they have two faculty members in my field, and it’s a little bit closer to home than Vancouver or Burnaby, or even Edmonton.
I don’t need to make a choice right now, obviously, since the earliest application limit time is December 15th, and that’s UofT; the others are all in January, some in February. But I like to be set early on things, and this indecision is upsetting me.
09.04.09
Some job news
Well, I finally got one. I will work at a small propane company for 10 hours a week. It’s a short walk or bus ride from campus. There’s no dress code, which is nice because I have no work clothes anymore!
I don’t have anything funny or witty to say about finding a job… just a lot of relief. At least I’ll be able to get that credit line I need to finish my MA.
08.28.09
Weird much?
My boyfriend just made the interesting comment that all businesses in this town work more or less like the government.
Basically, all jobs that have called or written back have done so at least 3 weeks after I have applied. In Montréal, this never happened. I would usually get called back within a day or two, but since I worked mostly with agencies they would call when they had interviews already planned for me.
So I’m finding this plunge back into the workforce a bit upsetting, especially since I’m more or less on my own now. I had quite a good contact network in Montréal, having worked with 3 different agencies over the years. Also, the market here is much more service-based than back home. Office jobs in Montréal are plenty; here it’s hotel front desk agent and barista and sales clerk, none of which I can actually do. Baristas especially, they all require coffee experience. How hard can it be to learn how to make coffee?
In the meantime I’ve found a few good ways to make extra money online, helping people write essays and the like. In 2 weeks I’ve made enough to pay for the dance class I want to take this semester.
In any case, I am still waiting for the answer from the computer labs, and I have another interview on Monday morning. I’m hoping this time of bad job luck is over. I never thought I’d need to work again before next summer, and even then I hoped I would be able to get sessional teaching positions.
Oh well, one must do what one must, and do it the best they can. Doing something other than school will do me some good, I think.
