Thursday, October 26, 2006

ma a a a a a a rian! madam libra a a a a a a rian!


i shamlessly love the 1962 production of the music man starring shirley jones and robert preston. along with my love of the soundtrack to funny girl this only further heightens the possibility that i might have a small, somewhat pudgy, balding little gay man who loves to sing show tunes trapped in my body. nevertheless ...

the firm boundary that i put between the world of 1950s/1960s musicals and my own little reality was startling blurred the other day when i went into stauffer to pick up a book i had recalled from term loan. i approached the counter and one of the librarians asked how she could help me. i gleefully responded (yes, gleefully! i was really excited about finally being able to get my grubby little paws on this particular book!) that i had received an e-mail notice that the book i had recalled was available for pick up. without asking any further details that one would think she would need to retrieve the book (like the title, my last name, my student card, etc.) she disappeared and returned with the book in hand. i was awestruck. did she have super librarian powers of divination? did she, like marian the librarian, love interest of the nefarious professor harold hill, have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the books under her care? was she the metalibrarian? i gathered my wits about me enough to affirm that the book she was holding was the one i had requested and i asked her how she knew. she threw me a wry smile and laughed,

"shannon, isn't it?"

"yes ... er ... how did you ...?"

"you come here a lot. we get to know our regulars."

now, seriously. this isn't a friendly boston bar, where everybody knows your name. this isn't even the public library in the town of 115 000 people in which i currently live. this is the humanities library at (if the school website is telling the truth) "one of Canada's leading research intensive universities"; it's a pretty sizable place with, i am sure, many people recalling many books every day.

wow. am i ever a nerd.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

having a dissertation is a little like having a dread disease ...

you can only take one day at a time.

it has been going better since i took the lyrics of roger miller's "you can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd" to heart and decided to "knuckle down, buckle down, DO IT, DO IT, DO IT!" it has been a bittersweet few days, however, and the words of yeats' poem still ring true.

"The Fascination of What's Difficult" -- W.B. Yeats

THE fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

the fortune cookie gods

sent me a message in my cookie today:

"you'll accomplish more if you start now."

'k, guys. i hear you.

my name is eddie ... *

yesterday, a friend confided in me the murphy's law of his life: the minute he gets something fixed, something else breaks. the something and something else in this case were the problems with the hot water in his apartment and his computer, respectively. his plaintive song struck home, because for the past week and a half one of the two radiators in my apartment hasn't been working. it's the rad in the living room, so for over a week and a half i've been huddled in blankets at my desk trying to write, all the while blowing on my finger tips to keep them warm (i never thought writing my dissertation in a garret would be so true to life!). this morning (finally!) the plumbers came to fix it. i couldn't help but think about jon's observation when the two plumbers, eddie and his friend, both of whom had hair that would make an 80s bon jovi envious, clomped up my stairs in their work boots.

while he poked and prodded the tangle of metal pipes and valves that is usually disguised under a chic wooden cover, eddie's friend and i chatted and he told me that he lives in the house almost directly behind mine. when i found this out, my back bristled slightly, for behind our house, with a shocking regularity on wednesdsay nights after 9:00 pm, there's an 80s hard rock band that practices, playing VERY LOUD covers of everyone's favourite 80s hits. it drives my neighbour and i up the wall. in the summer when my bedroom window is opened, i usually lay in bed with a pillow over both ears cursing led zepplin. my neighbour has, on occasion, called the police.

well, you guessed it. eddie and his friend are members of that band. when he realized he was my neighbour, eddie's partner gleefully turned to me with a giant smile on his face and with genuine excitement asked if i heard the band that practices behind my house on wednesday nights. i smiled mutely for a minute and then recovered enough social grace to admit that i did. he went on to tell me all about it -- their upcoming gig downtown, their myspace profile, the release of their first cd, and what a great drummer eddie is. (when he first started to tell me about the band, i had a sneaking suspicion that eddie was the drummer). i stood there feeling like a horrible snob.

i've often gone off on patiently-listened-to rants about the necessity of supporting local musicians (a friend has a fun folk/eurotrance band that i like to brag about and another friend has a standing gig every other wednesday night playing celtic tunes at a local pub), and i try to do my bit by volunteering at local music festivals and such. why should my support be dictated solely by my taste (i'm sure bourdieu would be fascinated ...)? as per the tao of jon, i think something else broke now that my rad is fixed.

so, here's the info that eddie's friend passed on to me -- the band's name: sumthin' rotten; their next gig: "in a couple of weeks at the time to laugh club on princess street'. i've done some preliminary googling and haven't been able to locate the finer details, but if i do get my hands on them, i'll post them here.

*if you haven't heard the song by the south austin jug band that the title of this post borrows from, you should ...

Friday, October 13, 2006

addicted?

i think, that as a grad student, it's almost inevitable you become addicted to something. even though i fear accusations of attempting to organize my world into neat and tidy binaries, i'm going to suggest that those addictions take one of two forms: healthy or unhealthy. it's really easy for a healthy addiction to slip into the realm of the unhealthy, or i suppose another way of thinking of it is that suddenly what you thought was an addiction that "wasn't so bad" can be revealed to be more bad than you supposed. i'm not sure if grad student addictions (GSAs -- the acronym looks and sounds like something that 'ideologue and wife-murderer' althusser would think up) in and of themselves have an inherent health or 'unhealth'. i think it's more along the lines of how one would answer a question such as: "does it help or hurt you?" i've got a few GSAs, which as a whole are pretty mundane, nay, even nerdy: coffee, obsessively checking my e-mail, eating french fries ... you get the idea -- anything that helps you cope. this summer, however, i developed a new addiction: racing.

following our crew's performance at henley, that infamous race of the 'row 'n barf' variety, i had the most amazing feeling of calm. in the build up to henley, many things in my non-rowing life came crashing down around my ears and there were times i was wondering if i was going to make it through it all. at the end of that first 1000m in the A4+, as our boat sat in the finish area, it was as though the world had readjusted itself and all of the tension, anxiety, dread and sadness that had plagued me for weeks suddenly left. it was cathartic. racing at the worlds had a similar effect, as did racing at rideau, and trent. it's been two weeks since we blazed through the finish line at HoT, and though i've tried to recreate that feeling that follows a race by going on long runs and attempting marathon erging sessions at the gym, i haven't come close. i want it though -- i really want that feeling again. isn't that what keeps addicts coming back? despite my lack of success, i may have found a solution.

once a week i get together with a friend and we erg at the campus gym. S didn't compete this year, though he did train over the summer and we've decided that this term, it will be our goal to get our erg splits as low as possible. one night, during some procrastinatory googling (another of my GSAs), i discovered the website for the national indoor erging championships which will be taking place in the atrium of the CBC building in TO in february of 2007. there is a category for masters women of my age and the winning split from last year is only around 5-6 seconds better than mine is at the moment. i've found myself another race. so with S's erging help (strangely, at the moment he is more convinced that i can do this than i am ...), i'm going to put in a semester's worth of gym time in hopes of answering the siren call of my new addiction. there's no telling if the catharsis will be the same on an erg as it is on the water, but there's only one way to find out.


Wednesday, October 11, 2006

15 seconds of almost-fame


wow. my undergrads are going to love this: my good friend shani has been selected as an ambassador for the yoga clothing company, lululemon. they're holding a photo shoot this coming tuesday, and since shani made her rowing life a central feature of her application for the ambassadorship, they want a shot of her in a boat. guess who is going to make up the other half of that double/pair? i wonder if i get to wear free lululemon workout gear too?!

my mother didn't tell me there would be days like this

when you get to revel in the joys of writing for a "living" (notice the inverted commas)! what other "job" (again with the reality check a la punctuation) allows you spend a rainy morning in your bathrobe, sipping warm italian coffee and writing about rowing?

Friday, October 06, 2006

huh?

being ever diligent about ferreting out pieces of 19th-century sports journalism, i decided to spend today working in the special collections room at my undergrad university while i'm home for the thanksgiving holiday. i arrived at campus, parked the car (and had to pay far too much to do so!), and took care of priorities -- COFFEE. as many of you know, my mother's coffee-making skills, or lack thereof, are mythic, and i could feel a caffeine headache coming on as it was after 9 am and i still hadn't had my morning cuppa. now the quickest route from the library to the nearest source of good coffee on this campus takes one right past the english department -- or at least where the english department used to be! imagine my surprise (shock? horror? dismay?) when i whizzed past and threw a casual glance over my shoulder at the doors to the deparment only to see that the secretary's office had been plastered over, as had many of the doors to the offices that i spent so many hours haunting as an undergrad. i was confused, not to mention a little upset. it turns out that they've moved the entire department to the opposite end of campus, perhaps as much as a kilometre away from both the library and the good coffee place!

on my last trip home i found out that the folks that bought my childhood home had torn it down and built a new one on the lot. i also discovered that they had torn down my elementary school to make way for a housing development. this time around, i find the place of my academic childhood has quite literally been turned into a long, beige, blank hallway. what the h*ll is going on? are the fortune cookie gods sending me some sort of fat, cosmic, cliched reminder that one can never really go home again? if so, i get the message guys, but you could have just sent it in a cookie.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

hubris

why do i do this? why, when i know it's going to rain like nobody's business, do i refuse to carry an umbrella to school, thinking that i can somehow outsmart the coming weather? do i think that it's going to not rain, just for me? just so i can walk smugly home to have the pleasure of watching the rain beat down against my living room window from inside my dry, warm apartment? and why do i tempt fate further by putting on my sunglasses? it's ridiculous.

i can be such an idiot sometimes. correction: i can be a pompous idiot sometimes. i will soon be, if i choose to leave the confines of my office, a pompous, wet idiot. even better.

postscript: so as i'm walking home, cursing my hubris once again as water cascades off the tip of my nose and drips onto my canvas jacket (my hoodless canvas jacket, i should add), i run into andrea who after a brief chat, offers me her umbrella, even though she is heading in the opposite direction. she's a smart girl, wearing a goretex jacket with a hood, so she'll arrive at her destination nice and dry and one up in the good deed department. i arrived home wet, cold, grumpy and embarrassed.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

can i wear red?

this is the pressing question at the moment. lunch with L has got me thinking about shoes again. we got talking about shoes (after talking about ships and sealing wax), more specifically about this pair of red boots that L has that are somewhat mythic in nature. confessing mermaid has been eyeing them for a long time and has been thinking about buying a pair, just because of their luscious redness. L said the boots make her life better -- and i believe they do.

i could certainly use a little red in my life right now, and after our lunch i must confess that i'm trying to imagine my feet in them. would they make me a better writer? perhaps i'm a big enough girl now that i need writing boots rather than writing pants to get myself over those difficult paragraphs. if i do find myself the proud owner of wonderful red boots, then i will in part blame the fortune i received in my cookie at lunch today. i cracked open the cookie, dismaying that i would once again be told that i would make a good lawyer (!!), only to find the following message: "your nature is intense, magnetic and passionate". it sounds sexier in french (just like boots are sexier in red): vous etes passionée, fascinante et dynamic". i think it's time i embraced my inner red-boot-wearing girl.