Grievance

Today was by far the most painful stats class yet. We're already two chapters behind in the reading list, so what does our prof do? Give long, drawn out examples of things that are self-explanitory, of course.

What I think he was trying to get at was something about how when asking people survey questions, you should make sure you word them in a way that they would understand what you mean the same way that you do.

So he started talking about how someone had to do a study on communication and sailors in the navy. They wanted to know who people would talk to if something bothered or irritated them, so they asked and ended up with really wonky results because of the way that they worded the question. What they had asked was "who do you go to when you have a grievance?" which to some people means a complaint, and to others with a good solid union background (such as myself) means a serious complaint against your employer, and the formal process that the union takes to advocate for your rights.

So far so good. Fairly relevant and on topic, until he continued:

But by "grievance" the researchers meant something more like: "I hate breakfast on this boat." "The coffee is always cold."

Good examples, those.

"And it tastes like mud."
"They must have made it out of dishwater or something."
"And the eggs."
"Are there really any eggs in those things?"
"Sure, they're yellow and all..."

Got the picture a long time ago. But wait, there's more!

"But they have the same texture as oatmeal."
"Oatmeal that has been boiled every day for three months."

And on and on and on only to get into an argument with our ta about how he was wasting time, and then breezing through all sorts of things that really badly needed more explanation.

And now we're three chapters behind schedule. Joy.

Ciao

Best picture I've seen all day.

Two more days of work left and I'm glad. I'm starting to feel redundant, but that's the point. I explain things over and over, and over and over. It would never take that much explaining to train me but I persist. She's catching on, gradually. People tell me I'm such a patient person. Too bad it doesn't seem to get me anywhere.

Up until today I'd forgotten just how much I liked Back to the Future. I love that movie.

I wish people would stop calling me in the middle of class.

I really badly want to say something interesting and relevant to anything but I just don't have it in me today. Too tired. I know that I was going to stay up so I could talk to some people but I just can't tonight. Been doing that too much lately.

Been having trouble sleeping as well. Same old, same old. Toss and turn and lay in weird positions in the hopes that they will unlock the key to somnolence. Drift off only to wake up in a panic because you can't remember if you set your alarm or not which in turn ends up being another hour and a half that you resort to mental massochism for lack of anything better to do.

Why is it that the collective parental unit always seems to arrive when a) I'm not home and b) my apartment just happens to be a big mess? Why can't they come over when I've actually done the dishes for once?

worst. most disjointed. post. ever.

Time for more reading...

So, I was just sitting in the common room, minding my own business when someone walked in and asked "okay, which one of you is Erin?" at which point I both raised my hand and attempted to hide behind my computer. Evidently my fame precedes me.

The sad thing is that it's purely online fame. In person I'm a very forgetable person. We've probably met before, but you don't remember. Remember?

Callan has come to the realization that for the past six or eight years or so I've put far less effort into school than him and managed to end up with substantially better results. He's decided that maybe he would do better if he copies my notes in class, so now I sit with him constantly looking over my shoulder. I don't mind, that is, until he begins to whisper in my ear...

"What does proliferation mean?"
which I defined as the spread and distribution of things both through direct and indirect means
"So why didn't you just say that?"
because "proliferation" is a better word and in my notes, at least, I like to be parsimonious
"Parsimonious? What the fuck? What does assiduous mean?"
fuck off and write your own notes
in your own words

You can only get so far by hanging off of others' coattails. Especially when you're preventing me from listening to the prof. Luckily he doesn't do it for very long before he leans back and resigns himself to not understanding anything. "Fucking genius," he'll whisper in my ear, and during the break, he'll innocently forget to share any of his curly fries with me.

Bastard. I don't eat fries, but it's a matter of principle.

That's all, folks

6:10 Drag self out of bed.

6:11 Spend a moment standing naked in front of the mirror, noticing that overnight you've developed a large wrinkle running vertically between your breasts.

6:12 Assume that it was probably because you ended up sleeping in 3/4 prone again, sort of half on your front but half on your side and on top of your arm so that it was all tingly when you finally woke up and thought to roll over.

6:13 Realize that you have no time for this at all and get into the shower.

6:23 Emerge from the shower and into a dramatic monologue about politics, colonialism, class struggle or women's issues.

6:24 Comb out hair. Shed all over the place.

6:25 Notice that the wrinkle is gone.

6:26 Realize that one day that wrinkle won't be gone. There are some things that even showering can't iron out.

train ⇒ work ⇒ bus ⇒ school ⇒ meeting ⇒ bus ⇒ home ⇒ study ⇒ bed

lather rinse repeat.

Culinary exploits

It seems that every time we're in the neighbourhood, we decide that we'll stop in at the Clayburn General Store for lunch, and every time we pass by, it seems to be closed for some reason. Today we were pleasantly surprised to find it up and running.

Clayburn used to be a company town, built around a brick factory. Today pretty much all that remains there is the store, which is a neat little place filled with antiques. Half of it is a tea house, and the other half a candy store. I ended up with a nice spot of darjeeling and the ploughman's lunch, which is pretty simple: cheese, bread, butter, pickles. It doesn't look like much when it comes out on the plate but it's surprisingly filling.

My sister is quite enamoured with the sticky toffee pudding that you can get there, but we didn't stay for desert.

While we were busy flying around at the Pitt Meadows airport last month we happened to hear that the Chilliwack airport has the best pie in the world. Wondering if there was truth to such an outrageous claim, we decided to investigate.

My first observation was that the cafe serves a rather wide variety of pies. My second was that as the slogan of the place implies, people fly in from all over the place, just to eat there. We watched one man taxi up the tarmac and park his biplane right in front of the window. Apparently he had come a hundred miles for a piece of rhubarb pie. Unfortunately for him, they were out.

I ordered some raspberry peach pie and I must say that it put to shame every other piece of pie I've ever had. Absolutely delicious.

My grandmother used to live out in Chilliwack General Hospital and every time we went out to visit, there was never anywhere worth eating out there. I wish we had known. We could have tried all the flavours by now.

George

Ended up sitting beside George on the bus today.

He wrote his own concerto once, sometime when we were 17. I've never heard the entire thing come to fruition but he played an excerpt for me on his violin. George always plays lead violin, always wears a suit while doing it. Don't let the suit fool you, though. There is something that happens somewhere in the combination of his fingers, strings and catgut that is a tad magical. It's someone else that sings out, someone who has no words, just feeling.

George is very soft-spoken. I'm not sure exactly how long he's been living here, but his English is flawless. Every word carefully chosen, exact, to the point. Nothing out of place. He's not one to say rash things that he doesn't mean, because everything has been quietly preconsidered. He must have memorized half the dictionary to be able to speak the way he does.

Give him enough time and he'll figure out any puzzle, or formula, or equation, or concept, or text. He will present the solution to anything to you in layman's terms with as much diplomacy as anything else. He's clearly better than you, but he doesn't care to mention it. It doesn't even register.

He got an internship, of sorts, in a lab over the summer, where he counted worms.

He counted worms. He measured worms. He catalogued worms. He disected worms. He modified and spliced the dna of worms.

If only George could find it in himself to give up science for arts, he could save the world. I really believe that.

note: at my school arts is economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, criminology, history, political science, linguistics, philosophy, humanities, english, foreign languages, women's studies, history, community economic development, labour studies and dialogue

ie. the study of people

Though, I'm cooler than all those people because I'm a communications major, which is an applied science. :)

And that was Wednesday

For the past few weeks I've been only working part time because of school, and so I've been a lot more busy. That I can handle, mostly. Things have been taking me a little longer to do, but everything that is absolutely essential has been getting done. I can be very efficient when I want to be and I think the volume of work that I can pump out when pressed is starting to scare our database person, especially when I dump it into her inbox.

It's actually nice going from full time to part time, because you can use that excuse to make the co-op student do all your filing and mailing for you. True, some days I have had absolutely no time to do that stuff anyways, but there have also been a couple where I haven't had much to do other than nap, which I confess I've done on more than one occasion, not always voluntarily. Well, I could have done filing, but fuck filing. I've had enough of it.

I found out today that there have been a couple of people holding back work from me for a while, assuming that I was completely swamped. I wish I had known. If nothing else, I could have prepared some of it in some sort of logical and coherent way to be able to train the person who is going to replace me a little easier.

This on the job training thing has been a gongshow from the start.

She arrived yesterday, and because they knew that I can only stay a couple hours each day because of school, they plopped her down in front of me and expected me to show her everything I knew.

Little did I know that some very nice, helpful people had decided to help clear up some of the backlog that they're convinced I've been swimming in, now that I've been working part time for the past two weeks instead of full. The problem there being that no one else in the office knows exactly what I do or how I do it and no one bothered to talk to me before going ahead with it, and so the work that they had done was sort of half completed and gimpy.

Needless to say I spent the first half hour of my morning with the new girl trying to figure out what the hell had been done with my work while she looked on, confused. When I finally decided what still needed to be done, I began to show her. However, I wish that everyone else had just left everything alone so I could show her the process from start to finish, rather than from steps 5-8, but oh yeah, looks like someone left out number 2 so we'll just do that too.

So I ended up showing her a mishmash of random crap and explaining a lot of stuff when ideally I would have been doing it with her instead. Even at that, we didn't really complete anything before I had to leave.

It was just as I was about to escape out the door that I found out that the poor girl hadn't been given any sort of orientation yet and didn't even know the most basic things like where the washroom was, or where to get more supplies for her desk. Or where to meet outside if there was a fire or an earthquake.

Or even what the whole office does and why it exists.

It was at that moment that I realized that no one had bothered to go over any of the specialized terminology that we use in that office, reducing everything I had said for the past three and a half hours to unintelligable babble. Fuck.

Tourist

I met the most delightful tourist on the bus today. I don't often say these things about Americans.

He's come from California to learn about Smart cars. He used to sell Hondas before he retired, but now he wants to go back into business, maybe as the first dealer of Smart cars in the US. They don't have Smart cars in America? Well, apparently not.

He said he was surprised that the weather was so warm and pleasant here. He had packed a heavy coat in his bag and it hadn't come out yet. Was he really so surprised, I asked, since he probably knew how the weather was in Seattle? Well, of course he knew what it was like in Seattle, but Canada's supposed to be cold. We Americans don't think, you know. It's not something we're good at.

But he was enjoying his time here, yessir. Even just the plane ride in over the mountains was enough to tell him that he would like this city. They've got all this art and those waterfalls in the airport too. Very inviting.

His plans? He was going to go to the Museum of Anthropology. Did this bus go there? No, not really. I'd try the B-line if I were him. No matter, he had to drop some things off at his hotel. A friend offered to drive him, but he'd rather take the bus. You meet more people that way, you know. You see more things too, and then the people you meet tell you to see more things that you hadn't thought of.

Had he been to Grouse Mountain? Bus 28, I think, but don't quote me on that. Is it Gross as in g-r-o-s-s? Nope, grouse, like the bird. But maybe not tomorrow though. It's going to rain.

No matter. He's here to enjoy himself and he's going to do it. But yessir, he's going to get back into the business again. Spent some time reading Socrates, doing some introspection and now he's up and at her.

He had such a positive and endearing personality that I liked him right away. And just as he was getting off the bus, he thanked me for being so nice to him, leaving me to wonder why. Is it that he's heard that Vancouverites are naturally cold, aloof bastards, or was it that he was black? I will never know, but I wish him the best of luck.

Terje

My ta Rob looks a lot like Terje Vinterstø, and by that I mean the Skambankt Terje ^

and not the Kaizers Terje. ^

The hat, in all things, is essential. Tis just not the same without it.

I once had a 14 year old girl offer to package Terje up and send him to me expresspost from Norway. I told her that out of consideration for him he should be packed in bubble wrap so he wouldn't get hurt on the journey over, and also so that he would have something to do inside the box. However, he'd have to be under strict orders to finish popping all of the bubble wrap before he arrived because I fucking hate bubble wrap.

Though, in retrospect I probably should have asked her to send an ashtray too, because I don't have one and Mr. Vinterstø smokes far, far too much. Tsk tsk.

I don't think Rob smokes. He just writes theses about American intervention and interference with broadcast media in the Middle East and America's attempts to gain popular support through propaganda.

Me? I'm reading a book about postcolonialism right now. It's making me feel like a dirty sonofabitch because I'm white, but I think I can safely say that I've felt that way for most of my life. Good book. I'm enjoying it.

Retrospect

I keep saying to myself that I should make this blog more random, include more of my own drawings, photos from daily life, links, clippings from elsewhere but I never do. I wonder why.

Looking back in my archives, this time last year my mother's father, Old Weird Harold died, which had little impact on anything at all.

Last April I wrote something about having a dream and wanting to have someone who I could tell all my secrets to. Someone who had no prior knowledge of me, my reputation, my family, my friends, my town. I've always felt very pidgeonholed by what people expect of me. I'm very used to getting strange looks when I speak my mind or attempt to be myself, because people seem to think I'm a much different person.

Then strangely enough, last year around this time I got exactly what I asked for. Sometimes life works out in mysterious ways. Mysterious ways that conspire against all odds to keep me sane. There is no rational way to explain it so I won't bother.

I can't tell you how nice it is to start from scratch. It's not an opportunity you get often, especially not for me. Even the weirdest things to come out of your mouth are completely normal, because there's no reason for anyone to think anything different. All they know is what you tell them, what you've said in the past.

And yet even with that I can't seem to loosen up completely. I've been asked a certain simple question more than once now, and each time I put off answering because to me, it's not simple at all. The closest I got was a halfwritten email that is now sitting in my drafts collecting dust. By the time I had finished 1200 words or so, I could not stop the tears rolling down my cheeks and gave up. I cried for about half an hour and once I had stopped, I brushed my teeth in the dark so I wouldn't have to look at myself. But once in bed I cried for another two hours straight and spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, only to get up in the morning looking like hell. So much so, that people at work pointed to my swollen eyelids and asked if I was contageous.

I guess I'll do it later.

Also around this time last year I had a heated debate with a classmate who I was unfortunately stuck doing a project on communication via the internet with. She insisted that communication via the internet was only good for the simple transmission of information, limited to the cold hard facts and could not possibly be used for anything more personal than that, and I was unable to agree with her. As a result, our project suffered because we didn't take a stance or make any sort of argument at all.

I still think, though, that any sort of interactive medium is to a great degree, what you make of it. That is, if people have the desire and the drive, they can overcome a lot of the limitations of any sort of technology. But what would I know? I'm most likely delusional.