I may be vegan but...

...there is nothing like going barefoot in sheepskin boots.

New Things

I started training for my new job as a Dietary Clerk.
I finished reading my first ebook on the ereader i got for Christmas (Hard Times by Charles Dickens. I enjoyed it a lot).
I conveniently got two books in the mail today: Remedial Christianity and Language through the Looking Glass (it's an introductory linguistics book).
My resolution for 2012 was to become a vegan. I actually read The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone and thought it had a lot of great advice about living a vegan lifestyle. I've been trying all sorts of new recipes and enjoying it very much. Tonight I made curried sweet potato soup and braised red cabbage. I've also given up alcohol and caffeine.

I sound boring. Maybe that's why I don't blog much any more. Every night I've been journalling on paper (then reading an ebook). I feel happier: I am happy working, cooking, eating, reading, knitting, walking. I like the pink sky in the mornings and the sunsets at 5pm.

The Christmas Letter

I've been suffering from blogger's block, but maybe it will be good for me to work through that now.

My mom receives Christmas cards with Christmas letters in December. I read them when she leaves them lying around the house. I thought I would take a stab at writing my own.


My Christmas Letter 2011

I wept copiously on January 1st, 2011.
I went back to Bordeaux, France on January 13th and studied full time at the school for foreign students learning French on the Université Bordeaux III campus. I had serious jet lag and took up calligraphy. I listened to radio classique and practiced foundation hand and textura quadrata night after night.
I rented a harp and took harp lessons from the principal harpist of the Bordeaux orchestra. That was great.

My friend Ashlee from Alberta visited me for 10 days or so in February. We planned to go south to the Spanish border but my friendship with M. dissolved and the travel plans fell through.

In March I celebrated my 22nd birthday with champagne, a lovely cake, and some people I didn't know well but later grew to know better. One was a Winnipegger and her visiting boyfriend. The other was a robotics engineer from Australia.

In April I visited Ashlee in Edinburgh, Scotland. I went to the International Harp Festival and did a Wire-strung harp workshop. I also saw some great harp concerts and drank a lot of Irn Bru. I read some terrible, terrible chick lit on the shores of Loch Ness. I did not see Nessie. I ate food that I had heard mentioned by characters on Coronation Street (sausage rolls, eccles cakes, fish and chips and mushy peas that I regretted later on).

I worked a bit as a translator of French fitness videos into English. I also went into the recording studio to dub over a Pilates video and a Latin Aerobics video.

D. came and we went to St-Jean-de-Luz for a few days. We went to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, and then ordered a bunch of food from the one euro menu at McDonalds, also in Bilbao. Then we went to a village called Etsaut (even French people didn't know where it was) and rented a donkey that we took hiking in the Pyrénées. We went to Paris. I was also in Paris in April. I do not like Paris. I did like Musée d'Orsay because I took an Art History course in Bordeaux and most of the paintings were in Musée d'Orsay. I surprised myself by how much I could enjoy museums. Now I'm all museum'd out and traveled out.

I came back to Winnipeg in time for convocation. Then I went back to Kenora and worked. I went to Toronto in August and found Jesus. I lost him sometime in November and I'm still trying to figure out where he is exactly (I checked at the right hand of God but God said that he thought he might have gone to the restroom).

I moved to Fredericton and lived with 11 roommates and a landlady with 7 or so cats. She bred Persians and Himalayans. I did three months of my B.Ed. before withdrawing and moving back to Kenora. When I write all this out and think about the things that I am not writing it does seem to make sense that I ended up back here.

My family is doing well. Dad retired last year. Mom retires next year. She is going on a trip to England this Spring. H. is studying Environmental Design at the University of Manitoba. She sleeps at school sometimes, when she sleeps at all. I am happy that she is so into what she's doing that she'll do that, but I also think that it's a messed up world we live in when people have to do that sort of thing for school. I. is in the army reserves and is going to B.C. in January to shoot snow packs and cause controlled avalanches. I think this is every man's dream job.


If this were a real letter I would come up with some conclusion. I'm not sure what it would be. I wonder if anyone would even care to read it because it seems like all I did was move around a lot. Other people usually write about trips (check), and births and deaths (I didn't really have any this year). I guess you could conclude that my life is fairly frivolous. I don't think I'm really a wanderer, I was just masquerading as one during 2011.

If I had one wish for 2012, it would be stability, and that we all learn to want what we have. Maybe that's two wishes.

Merry Christmas.

Just for the heck of it, here's a poem I wrote after reading my Mom's 2011 Christmas letter. She always writes a paragraph about me which always makes me feel a bit awkward.

I aborted that plan

came home

to wear slippers and drink

tea out of the fine china

gilt edges

I struggle.
I am normal.

I rant about technology

Luddite:
one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change.


This is apparently in the top 10% of lookups on the online Merriam-Webster dictionary (which happens to be my online dictionary of choice). 


I self-identify as a luddite. The irony of blogging about this is not lost on me.
I went to two workshops last week about using technology in the classroom. We learned about wikis, blogs, twitter and edmodo. I am not opposed to using technology in the classroom; there are ways in which it can be really useful. I do think that it's misused a lot though. Example: we were shown a blog where every student in a grade 1 classroom had their own blog. These kids do not know how to write yet! There were Smartboard screen caps showing the screen while an audio recording of their voices played explaining a pattern they had drawn. I would add a link here except I find the whole thing totally creepy and weird and do not think that 6-year olds should have an "online presence", so I am really not going to promote that. 


Apparently it's really motivating for students to write for an audience. My question is, if everyone is producing, who is the audience? We are all caught in up in our technological illusions of grandiosity. As a blogger, I am no exception. 


The future is here, and interpersonal communication is mediated through a cold, inhuman interface. Sure we can skype with people from around the world, but we can't hug them (but students are not allowed to hug each other in the school in which I intern anyway -- it's against the "hands off" policy).


I went to King's Landing today. It is a living museum that shows how people lived in the 1800s. Simple things that we take for granted took hours and hours to make. I, on the other hand, feel so removed from my own survival. My life is disturbingly abstract. I know nothing about agriculture, construction, or sewing. People were trapped in narrow, arduous lives 150 years ago by the lack of technology and the all-consuming task of surviving in the Canadian wilderness. Now I am chained to a computer because I am so dependent upon technology that I would most likely freeze or starve to death without it. 

When the tales of brothers Grimm and Gorey have been outlawed

Get out your measuring cups and we'll play a new game
Come to the front of the class and we'll measure your brain
We'll give you a complex and we'll give it a name

Get out your measuring cups and we'll play a new game
Can't have the cream when the crop and the cream are the same
Liquid or gas no more than the glass will contain

When you talk about the hand of glory

A tale that's rather grim and gory

Is it just another children's story that's been de-clawed?

When the tales of brothers Grimm and Gorey have been outlawed

I think they're gonna make you start over
You don't want to start over
Put your backpack on your shoulder
Be the good little soldier
Take your places now
'Cause we're all predisposed

Measuring cups, play a new game
Front of the class, measure your brain
Give you a complex and we'll give it a name

When you talk about the hand of glory
A tale that's rather grim and gory
Is it just another children's story that's been de-clawed?
When the tales of brothers Grimm and Gorey have been outlawed

Put your backpack on your shoulder
Be the good little soldier
It's no different when your older
You're predisposed
That's all for questions now
The case is closed

Comic Sans

Disappointingly, I am not able to make this blog post in Comic Sans, but the topic is Comic Sans. The focus of my blog seems to be changing. I'm glad I specifically chose a vague name for my blog, because I seem to want to write about what ever I am thinking about, which is usually influenced by whatever I am doing. Last year I was living in France and trying to learn some French. This year I am learning about teaching.

I'm putting together a PowerPoint presentation for a lesson that I need to present for a Science Teaching Methods course. I'm going to actually teach this lesson to a grade 6 class in November as well, so I want it to be good. I had heard that using the font Comic Sans helped with reading comprehension, so I have decided to do most of the text on the slides in that font. 

I'm not a fan of Comic Sans, it's a pretty undignified typeface, but I think it will be just right for my lesson on Arthropods. 

I wanted to share this because I found it funny.

Getting educated in the Faculty of Education

It is not yet noon and my brain is already fried. I open up my locker and stare into it, immobile. I know I have to do my assignments one at a time, but which of the three readings that are due tomorrow should I start with?

My professors are not entirely to blame for the intensity of my schedule: many of my time commitments have been self-imposed. I have never been so intellectually stimulated by formal education as I am here. I sat in my morning class and trembled with excitement while we discussed Rousseau's Emile.

The things that we discuss in class only touch the surface of what I want to know. One of our assignments is to design the ideal classroom. I draw diagram after diagram of desk placement, but I'm also interested in how lighting affects learning, whether or not it would be a good idea to give my students stress balls, if 11-year olds can and should meditate, and something called rocking chair therapy (which apparently can be helpful to persons with ADHD). One of my profs uses a rain stick to get our attention. I would like to use a tibetan singing bowl, but would it be loud enough?

I want to research alternative/experimental schools. I don't know if I can find the time. I am reading a book of Short Creative Nonfiction (called In Fact, it is selected submissions from the first ten years of the journal Creative Nonfiction.). I can really only seem to find time to read it while I'm eating. All my other time gets consumed.

Other blogs I read

Maybe I should just start blogging about the crazy word usage of another blogger that I know. You can read his blog here:
http://consweatman.wordpress.com/

Last week, I learned the word panopticon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Amazing. How did this word escape me for 22 years?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXav-PljwtE
"Do you know what this is, son? This is the panopticon". I heard that song for the first time 5 years ago.

Today I started to read Con's blog and only got as far as "multifariously".

I read other blogs too, I think there's a section on my blog that shows which ones I follow. I really enjoy "Smother Goose" which is someone blogging about twisted children's tales. I also read my friend Sandy's blog. She's a journalist who likes to blog about cats.

Plugging my other blog

I would like to refer you all to my new blog:
http://meinmysmallcorner.blogspot.com/
The new one is about the Bible. I have no idea how many posts it will inspire, but people generally have a lot to say about the Bible so maybe I will too.

I will continue to post in this blog about everything else.

What am I modeling?

Here I am, living in Fredericton. I had my first day of orientation for my Education degree yesterday. One of the topics that stuck in my craw was "dress code". I know some of the other Ed students are struggling with this as well -- after 4 years as university students, we now have to put together a "professional wardrobe".

The thing is, with all this talk about us becoming role models, I am thinking very carefully about which values I want to model for the students. If I go out and buy a bunch of new clothes to wear during my practicum, I would consider that to be modeling consumerism and materialism. 

I was telling some of my fellow students about how I had scrounged in my mom's closet and had some vintage blouses from the '70s to wear. Did I detect a couple of strange looks? 

My practicum placement is in a middle school (grades 6-8). Students at that age are desperate to fit in and "be cool" (I remember this because I used to be that age and I wanted Roxy t shirts SO MUCH). I want to be the kind of role model that shows that confidence and self-respect have nothing to do with wearing the latest fashions. I want my dress-sense to express my sense of humour about myself and the world around me, and my desire to avoid conformity when it compromises my values. So while I will have to respect the dress codes rules and keep a kempt and modest appearance, I want to respect my own values as well. 

My landlady is taking me on a shopping trip to Value Village this weekend. Apparently the VV here is awesome. And thank goodness I bought so many cute pairs of shoes before I got so concerned with personal integrity. 

Resuming my wandering ways

So here I am using the free wi-fi at the Toronto airport. I'm about halfway to my destination: Fredericton. I am increasingly disillusioned with travelling and I long to settle somewhere and build something real. I had to take 7 pounds of clothing out of my suitcase at the airport, at the last minute (I was overweight).

I tried to watch movies on the plane but I am starting to feel like pop culture (in this case, Hollywood) contaminates me when I engage with it. I don't want to fall out of touch with the things that normal people do, but   I've been finding it hard to stomach. I watched five minutes of Red Riding Hood before I deemed it intolerable. Then I spent the rest of the time watching Never Let Me Go, which was extremely depressing. I guess it was maybe trying to make some points about medical science and ethics, but I feel like everyone who watches it will be like, I emotionally engaged for an hour an a half with the issue of medical ethics while I drank a soda and ate buttered popcorn.

I stopped by the bookstore in the airport. I always love seeing which books are being sold in airports, because it is a specific sort of demographic that they cater to (wealthier people who fly a lot) and I think the books reflect that. Some of the titles that jumped out at me: Learn Just Enough to Get Laid, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, The Power of Positive Thinking, Outliers, How the West Was Lost, and Becoming Enlightened by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. If only I could get enlightened on a plane. Sigh.

There was also a book about making friends, and turning online friends into real friends. I considered this book, because I don't know anyone in Fredericton and I don't want to spend too much time alone because my mind is a scary place. When I am alone I can either: a) be really reflective and self-examining, or b) watch tv online (especially Coronation Street -- it's like candy for my soul).

I am seriously contemplating getting my boots polished while I am here. They need it.

untitled

Googling how to spell spontaneity.

Gertrude Stein

I think I like Gertrude Stein she said she is much better to read if you haven't listened to too many opinions of her beforehand.

A painful process

I was going to compare my time in France to growing pains. As in, when much growth is undergone at one time, the body struggles to adapt, making it more painful than a slower change. This is probably true of my mental experience in France, but of course I'll never know how I would have been different had I never gone.

This isn't true of actual growing pains though. Apparently they are not associated with growth spurts, and doctors don't really know their cause. 

So you can pretty much disregard this whole post.

Sowing wild oats

I'm pretty tired, so this is going to be a copy-pasted explanation from Wikipedia (sorry):

"Sowing wild oats" is a phrase used since at least the 16th century; it appears in a 1542 tract by Thomas Beccon, a Protestant clergyman from Norfolk. Apparently, a similar expression was used in Roman Republican times already, e.g. by Plautus. The origin of the expression is the fact that wild oats, notably A. fatua, are a major weed in oat farming. Among European cereal grains, oats are hardest to tell apart from their weed relatives, which look almost alike but yield little grain. The life cycle of A. fatua is nearly synchronous with that of Common Oat (see also Vavilovian mimicry) and in former times it could only be kept at bay by checking one's oat plants one by one and hand-weeding the wild ones when they were in flower but the grains had not ripened yet, lest the wild oats seeded themselves out. Consequently, "sowing wild oats" became a way to describe unprofitable activities. Given the reputation of oat grain to have invigorating properties and the obvious connection between plant seeds and human "seed", it is not surprising that the meaning of the phrase shifted...''

O Canada

It's been a long time since I've written a post. I'd like to think that it isn't because I find my home and native land uninspiring, but rather that I spend less time sitting alone on the computer, feeling slightly lonely, and having no one to talk to other than the cyberspace, a place in which my blog is like a discount movie theatre with only a handful of people present, and most of them are napping.

I met F.'s family this weekend. We took his sister and some of her friends, including a German exchange student, out on my family's boat to watch the fireworks. I guess the boat is shabby: it has chunks missing from the upholstery, and the carpet is worn right through in places. The [Mani]toban girls seemed apprehensive. We waited in the boat at the edge of the water, just outside the space that was off-limits because it was too close to the fireworks. The restricted area was not marked in any way, we knew it was out of bounds because there was a police boat patrolling and occasionally flashing its lights. We packed 12 people into our boat. We saw people packed even tighter in boats. We waited almost an hour for the fireworks to start.

The fireworks were, according to F., the best he's seen in his life.


It's hard to capture this kind of moment in words. I was just thinking that it would be exactly the kind of thing I would want to stumble upon if I were a German exchange student in Canada... the kind of authentic experience, doing what the locals do, hearing what they talk about...


It was the kind of moment I felt happy to stumble upon myself.

L'Étranger

I wrote exams for four consecutive hours today (I am done 4/8). I am getting used to this whole writing exams every day thing now. I think I did okay on my politics exam today (I'm failing the course), so that made me feel a bit better.

I came back to my room and finished reading L'Étranger by Camus. I bought a copy that has a dossier in the back with literary criticism of the book. The cover of the book is Conference at night by Edward Hopper, so it also has an essay comparing the book to the painting. I didn't even realize it until I read about it in the dossier, but probably one of the reasons why I didn't have too much trouble understanding the book is that it's written in passé composé instead of passé simple.

My friend Robert

Two exams down, only 6 to go!

I wasn't allowed to use anything other than a pen for today's exam (Compte Rendu - listening to an audio clip and then writing a summary).

However, in my spare time I have been getting better acquainted with Le Robert.

Now when I talk to friends from back home who did immersion and I talked about tutoyer-ing and vousvoyer-ing, they don't know what I'm talking about sometimes. Tutoyer and vousvoyer are the verbs for calling someone ''tu'' or ''vous'' respectively. And it's a big issue and very nuanced: vousvoyer anyone older than you but don't vousvoyer a friend or they'll think you don't like them. Coworkers are complicated. I usually tutoyer my boss because he is kind of a chilled out hippie. Complicated stuff though.

So here's another great word: zozoter. Zozoter is an informal word for zézayer. Zézayer means to pronounce the French soft J (as in, je) as a z (example: ze veux). There are two words for doing this! French really is a rich language.

Another one that I like is coq-à-l'âne, which is a passage from one subject to another unrelated subject without any transition. A direct translation of this would be rooster-to-donkey, or cock-to-ass.

I am going to finish watching The Life of Émile Zola, winner of Best Picture in the 1937 Oscars. Before I saw this movie I had no idea that Le Figaro used to be published in English in the 19th century. I am certain that this movie will help me succeed on my Art History exam. I also intend to watch Madame Bovary and Les Enfants du Paradis if I have enough time.

Mon cher Robert, things I wish I'd been taught sooner and a massive aside about American missionaries in France

For next week's exams we are only allowed to have a monolingual French dictionary, so yesterday I went to the librairie to buy a dictionary. After much deliberation, I came home with Le Robert micro, and a copy of L'Étranger by Camus. I've read a few chapters in L'Étranger and although I don't understand everything, I understand enough to keep wading through, but néanmoins (nez-en-plus!!!), it's a pleasant wade.

Le Robert has become my new friend, and I lie in bed and flip through the pages, checking out the IPA spelling of words, finding out precisely what the phonetic difference is between dessous and dessus. I've also been wondering about how to pronounce words that being with in-. So if it's in + consonant, you get a nasal vowel 

as in, vin. French has 4 nasal vowels and you can say them all in the phrase ''un bon vin blanc''. 

But back to ''in-''. If it's followed by a vowel, it's not nasal, it's just ''in'' in IPA, which is like ''een'' if you compare it to English I guess. Mystery solved. Thanks Robert!

The whole IPA thing is really useful actually, I wish I had learned it sooner. 

Another thing I wish I had learned sooner: liaisons à l'oral. Either no one ever taught me this, or I wasn't paying attention. Basically, if a word ends with a consonant and the next word starts with a vowel, you tie them together. Example, ''les petits enfants'', you would pronounce the ''s'' in ''petits'' (normally it is silent). Oh but you pronounce it like a ''z''. Now that I come to think of it, this is kind of hard to explain and there are a bunch of other weird rules like the ''d'' at the end a word turns into a ''t'' when you do the liaison. 

I'm not big on memorizing grammar rules. I like to be told a rule and then pay attention to the pattern in things I read or hear, but if I am asked to articulate what the rule is later on, I've usually forgotten the specifics. I'll just write whatever ''sounds right''. Memorizing rules is all right for some, but grammar is just a means to an end for me, I just want to be understood.

This post is just about as boring as my weekend, which has so far consisted of taking breaks from my translation work to study for my exams. I watched the movie ''Potiche'' last night though. I enjoyed it. On Friday there was a picnic with some of the other students. A few of them are American missionaries and they had another American missionary at the picnic who was visiting. I struck up a conversation with this lady ''What do you think is the best English translation of the Bible?'' 

''What's your opinion on Jehovah's Witnesses?''

She eventually got that glint in her eye and I knew she was hoping to save me. I tried to tell her about my church back home and how it meant more to me than the Baptist church that I've been going to here. I wrote down the name of my Winnipeg church on the back of a receipt and told her to google it because my Minister puts her sermons online. 

I don't really understand the logic in sending American missionaries to France. University is free and they have their incredible sécurité sociale, so the state is looking after the vulnerable, and the people are probably too educated to get converted to American-style Christian fundamentalism.

It's hard for me to have a discussion about religion with anybody though because I really have never looked into it enough to feel that I have any sort of authority to argue any position. What's up with diehard Christians always citing the prophesies in the Bible as being proof that it's the word of God. Is that good proof?

This missionary also chatted with me about evolution, which is NOT a good way to convert me. I told her, my belief in evolution is in no way at odds with an allegorical interpretation of Genesis, but she was all ''it is literally 24 hours per day in the Genesis story''. Even though I suggested that since the Earth wasn't formed there would be a different conception of time. Nope, she was pretty sure that all Evolutionists started with the notion that there was no God and took it from there, so they had faulty reasoning. I pointed out that Darwin was a Christian and didn't publish his results for years because of that. But according the the missionary he lost his faith later on. 

But she never directly answered my question: is the devil responsible for carbon dating and fossils?

Sigh. I should get back to work.