If anyone knows anyone who fits the following demographic, please email me [change (a) to @, _ to .]: English-speaking European ethnic origin (i.e. British, Irish, Scottish), ages 18-35 OR 60+, grew up in Toronto, parents either grew up in the GTA or immigrated to the GTA before the age of 5. If only one parent comes from the English background, but the other grew up here and only speaks English, that works too. I'm looking to interview them about diversity/Toronto culture/etc. for a research project I've been hired on.

I've been doing some reading up about grad school, and there are a lot of bitter and frank people out there. I'm starting to look around for alternatives... I still really want to do a Master's, but then I wonder if I'll use it. On the other hand, I'll be finished my BA by this time next year and if I don't go into grad school, I have no idea what I'll do. I like the idea of being a professor, at least of teaching, but I'm not sure if I'm up for the other 75% of being a university professor. I have found some advice from Linguistic Enterprises about using a Linguistics degree in the private sector, but a lot of that requires becoming established in the field already. Of course, if I used grad school to gear up for a private sector job, a lot of the warnings in the following articles would become moot.

So You Wanna Go To Grad School?: "The Modern Language Association's own data -- very conservative and upbeat in my opinion -- indicate that only about one in five newly-admitted graduate students in English will eventually become tenure-track professors. Are you the one in five? Really? Well, that's what the other four think too. Take my advice (I secretly care about you as a person): Don't go."

If You Must Go To Grad School: "I have a mournful affection for students who remain confident of their ability to beat the odds. The young feel invincible and full of unlimited potential. And many universities view their naiveté and energy as an exploitable resource. The majority of graduate students exist to provide cheap labor for undesirable undergraduate courses and students for high-prestige graduate programs taught by tenured professors. It seems like the undergraduates are the only ones who don't know this, and they get angry when you tell them. But any student who is discouraged by these warnings probably lacks the determination and psychological resilience to make it through the process. The best that one can do with the students who are informed and determined is to give them the advice I wish I had when I made my decision."

The 5 'Virtues' of Successful Graduate Students: "Flexibility: Consider every plausible job opening in your field; do not turn your Ivy League nose up at a military academy in the Ozarks. It might be your only chance. The majority of academic job seekers cannot afford to be selective about their first tenure-track position. You must be willing to live anywhere and teach anything remotely related to your field. You should be willing to teach at any kind of college or university, including junior colleges and small, liberal-arts colleges with a teaching load of four or five courses each semester. Once you have a job, your other "virtues" should eventually make it possible for you to move to a more congenial location and institution. Do not put down deep roots if you wish to advance in your career by moving around. Avoid buying property or becoming emotionally entangled with other academics. It helps if you are single and childless, or have a partner who is willing to subordinate his or her career to yours. Dual-career academics face almost insurmountable problems unless they are already academic stars." (emphasis mine)

His point about flexibility really hits home. Ultimately, I would like to stay here. I like Toronto for a lot of reasons -- it's in Canada, it's multi-cultural, it's interesting, the politics are fairly good, it's not too far from my family, I have friends here, etc. I don't want to move to the United States, their politics/health care/etc. make for a situation which I don't think I would be comfortable with. I think I could be happy in Montreal or Vancouver, but ... I really like it here and would rather not move. I've talked to professors about this and they've said that I can basically kiss my chances of becoming a prof goodbye if I want to stay here. So, time for a new game plan.

Just finished a skirt I've been crocheting for the last week or so. It's the first thing I've ever lined, so I'm pretty happy with that. Got the pattern from CrochetMe here: Star-Crossed Capelet. Now, I am not the type of person to wear a capelet, but I am the type of girl to steal the pattern and change it to suit my whims. So, I added about 13 more rows and made the bottom into a filet crochet pattern that makes a diagonal stripe, and I improvised and created a belt that is impossible to remove from the skirt.



Note the crossed-bar stitch rows. A pain in the ass to make, but a nice texture.


And the belt, about which you (read: Dani) can find more detail in the obligatory Craftster thread.

Listening to: Comfort Eagle by Cake

Ugh, I'm feeling all PMS-y this week. Super-cranky, irritable over things that I KNOW are perfectly reasonable, tired, and reeeeeeeeeeally craving fries. This craving is not sated by fries, it just comes back the next day. I did, however, manage to resist it last night despite the ready availability of said fries. I just didn't have anything to put with them, because I am poor, rarely at home, and lacking in groceries. The great part is that it's filling me with self-doubt and thoughts like "maybe my anti-depressant dealio didn't actually work" and let me tell you, that's a lot of fun.

I wonder if I am actually PMSing though. That's the thing about being on the shot—I've gotten my period twice since last July, and both times I got really moody and had no idea what the hell was going on. Surprise! Bleeding from your uterus! Being on the shot is pretty great in terms of not bleeding most of the time (see also: not being pregnant, not having to take a pill every day), but then every period is a complete surprise and it's not like I'm stocked up on pads or anything since I might not ever get my period again. (Takes a year or two to adjust, apparantly, and after that it just stops for most people.) Most girls are always prepared, but it has been a long time since I had an emergency-period-pocket in my bag. Maybe I should re-make that, just in case.

I have to say, though, not getting all moody and cranky and craving random things every month really makes a person realise how crazy it is when it does happen again. Girls just go crazy for a week every month and can't do a damn thing about it. Hell, I want to cry over bank commercials, and I am NOT the type to cry over cheesy stuff like that. What's worse is that I react defensively to everything. I'm really trying to keep those reactions in my crazy hormone-addled head, but it's hard when your brain is screaming "HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT TO ME!" about every damn thing. Hopefully I'm keeping a rather reasonable persona going, but my emotions this week? they are unreasonable. I just have to keep that in mind and realise that while I may hate people this week, next week it should be all better.

My cousin's wife used to (still does?) have a magnet on her fridge that said "I have PMS and a shotgun. Any questions?"

I'm reading The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality. From the Guardian review:

"To go back to the beginning - or l'origine du monde, as Courbet entitled his boundary-breaking legs-akimbo vista - the vadge wasn't smelly or rude. No, it was life-affirming, iconic, divine even, and invested with symbolism that we can barely begin to imagine. Skirt-lifting was significant for centuries: in India, the gesture was meant to disperse evil influences, while in ancient Egypt, women did it to multiply crop yield. On 17th-century drinking mugs, depictions can be found of a confrontation between an exposed vagina and a reeling Satan. Even Pliny noted that a woman could banish pests by strolling around with her fanny on display before sunrise. As Blackledge notes in her quite astonishingly thorough monograph, vulval cakes were carried at the Syracusan Thesmophoria festival, just as split loaves still form part of some Italian and French Catholic ceremonies."

It's quite startling for me to realise that the vagina was a power symbol for so many cultures and remains so today for many. Other than Christianity, the book hasn't covered any culture that didn't see it as the gateway to the world, all-powerful symbol of life, virtue, and fertility, a dispeller of evil and bringer of good, a strong defensive tool, even a deity. In our culture, it's a liability, it's not to be mentioned, it's to be censored and covered with a black bar or a fig leaf. In many African cultures, it is illegal to speak disrespectfully of the vagina or vulva, because it is where you came from and you should respect and honour it. Here, it's hard to find non-clinical words for the vagina or vulva that aren't disrespectful.

I remember hearing a female comedian a few years ago saying that it was easy for her husband to suggest a midnight stroll through Central Park because he could just leave his wallet and watch at home -- she couldn't leave her vagina at home. People in our culture with vaginas are susceptible to rape, violence, being treated as less intelligent, being rated on their appearance rather than their performance (see: Belinda Stronach), and can't really expect to be paid the same for the same work. Augustine said that we are born "between shit and piss", which shows his view of the vagina quite succinctly -- dirty, shameful. Fourteenth century England declared sex illegal on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and the forty days before Christmas and Easter -- because sex was unclean and those were holy days.

No wonder we look at ancient fertility statues and see pornography. No wonder our sex education is so stilted and inadequate. I wish I lived in another culture, one that would allow me to react with awe instead of shame.

So, I redesigned the blog. Twice, actually, but Chris balked at the first one, so here we are. It's mostly stolen from a Blogger template, but I changed the background and played with some transparency levels... simple stuff really.

Yesterday, I saw Rachel Carson (an old roommate of mine) and Jeff Boadway get married. Here's a picture of them and Sara Locke reading at the wedding, and you can also see Rachel's sister Rebecca (the maid of honour):



It was a really nice wedding—Rachel was VERY excited. She spent practically the whole ceremony on her tiptoes and I thought she was going to jump into Jeff's arms at any moment. :)

Chris's two kitties (sleeping together here) are quite fond of each other. They are constantly wrestling and chasing each other, or Metro will pin Dune and practically lick him to death, and Chris and I like to joke that they are making out. So, I was crocheting the other day and had some leftover yarn that Dune was trying to get at, and I decided to crochet him this:



It's not a raindrop, as Chris first theorized. No, it's more appropriate than that. It's a sperm, which they can now compete for and lick and try to swallow... I could go on, but I'll spare you. ;)

"Happy" kitten:

Haha, I just got this comment on my entry about Tyndalians: "intresting [sic] that you connect not reading the Bible with relating to people you never would have at Bible College.Ever thought about picking that back up and seeing where it takes you?" This post might start to answer that. Why, it makes me furious, thanks for asking!

I was going to post a huge rant about a particularly infuriating passage in the New Testament tonight, but I ... can't. It's triggering too much stuff, making me too angry and sad and frustrated, and I don't think I should post things like that when I'm mad.

I keep thinking that I'm pretty much done dealing with losing my faith, and then I get to a point where I realise that I've still got so much farther to go.

I've got some friends who are questioning things pretty hardcore right now, and ... yeah, they aren't even close to out of the game, though they probably don't really recognize that yet.

When I was in high school, one of my best friends' mom's died of breast cancer, after praying for a long time for healing and having literally hundreds of people pray for her, elders of the church, the whole deal. Another of my friends' mom's was also dying of breast cancer, but she didn't die until the summer after my first year of bible college, after lots of remissions and fake remissions and new bouts of cancer and ... ugh, what a horrible roller-coaster ride that is. Anyways, clearly both of these women wanted to live and both of them had deep faith and they prayed their brains out, and God did NOTHING.

At the same time, I was just getting out of a two-year stint in an extremely manipulative church (read: cult), a place that I had felt God had led me to, and a place that caused a lot of damage. Between these two circumstances, my ability to trust God not to be a bastard was quite weakened. I toyed with the idea that he just didn't get involved in such things, that there was no mythical God's Plan For My Life to figure out, that shit just happens and God lets it happen... and while that stage prepared me to jump ship, I was certainly still on board.

My ability to read the bible and take it seriously was really lowered, especially when Jesus kept saying things like "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer," and I had tried that and it was bullshit. I kept reading about people like Job and Hosea and thinking "oh fuck, what if he's going to treat me like he treated them?" However, I wasn't thinking that I wasn't Christian, I was thinking that I was just a different type of Christian. A more basic type. God was still good, he just ... well, I hadn't quite figured out how he worked yet.

That was a long stage. I had this "basic christianity" thing going on for about three years, for the year after high school when I ran the Christian bookstore in town and secretly thought most of the stuff I was selling was ridiculous, and my years in two different bible colleges. EBC did a good job of pulling me back in a bit, but about a month after school was over, I was back to my skeptical self. Tyndale just pushed me the other way. That's probably a combination of the fact that I didn't really take any religious courses there (except for NT, and Stevie T is one of the WORST profs I've ever had), the chapels were stupid, and I didn't click with 90% of the people in residence, whereas I had found the people in res at EBC to be good for theological debates. People at Tyndale asked me, in all seriousness, what anti-aircraft missiles were. "Are they planes?" Ugh.

What caused me to jump ship? I'm not really sure. In all honesty, I woke up one morning and thought "holy shit, I'm not Christian anymore, am I?" and panicked because I knew it was true, and that meant I knew nothing about the world around me or my sense of identity or what the hell I was going to do with my life. You think I'm exaggerating, but it's true, I had to figure all of that out, had to start from scratch.

The thing is, I'm still mad about my friends' mothers dying. I'm still mad that we did so much praying and they still died. I'm mad that my uncle didn't find God to be a refuge, so he drove into the St. Lawrence River. I'm mad that Doug's dad died, because I'm sorry, but "he's in a better place" isn't good enough. I'm still mad that God was supposed to give a shit, and then he didn't even bother to exist, let alone heal. I'm mad that I spent so much time believing in it, for nothing. I'm mad because I didn't want to lose my faith, did everything I could to hold onto it, and I failed at that. I'm not sorry I failed, but I'm mad that there isn't a God that gives a shit about me. I'm mad at whomever thought that one up and taught it to people who would teach it to me.

I'm frustrated when I see scientists try to debate with creationists (oh, sorry, intelligent design-ists), because I know those people are not coming there to debate, they're not trying to learn, they just want scientists to put up or shut up. I'm frustrated when I see the impact of judeo-christian "morals" on the spread of AIDS and the lack of access to good sex education and protection. I hate it that I have to second-guess every damn thing -- am I thinking this way because I grew up Christian and was taught to do it that way, or should I change it? I mean, I don't have a clue what I think about marriage or living together or stuff like that. I know what I was taught and I don't think THAT. I think it's okay, I'm not against any of it. But what does it mean to me? Not a clue. I'm frustrated that I still like a lot of the bands that I listened to in high school, but I end up giving their CDs away because they're so full of Christian dogma that I can't stand them anymore. I'm frustrated that it seems like my Christian friends speak a completely different language than what my boyfriend speaks. I'm frustrated because I want to tell him about stuff in high school, about what exactly went on in that abusive church, and I can't even start because I know it'll all sound so crazy and stupid. I feel like such an idiot when I start thinking about it. How could I not have known that it was dumb?

Okay, enough for tonight. Time to try to sleep in the stifling non-air-conditioned smoggy humid heat of Toronto.

I'm doing a directed reading course this year, which means the reading list, grading scheme, and schedule will all be invented by me and then approved by the department and prof. So, I've been hunting journal articles. The theme is Linguistics and Sexuality. Here are some I found this morning, courtesy of York's eResources:

Applying Functional Grammar: A Discourse Analysis of Sexually Explicit Stories Written in Adult Magazines: (see? if this guy gets to write about porn mags, I can so write about porn flicks) "Adopting the tools of Halliday's functional grammar, I undertake a discourse analysis to compare and contrast two erotic stories published in mainstream sexually explicit adult magazines. These two texts include depictions of: (1) cross-sex sexual activities written for heterosexual men; and (2) male same-sex sexual activities written for gay men. I analyze the mechanisms employed by the narrators for the purposes of thematic development, the representation of the processes, participants and circumstances, and the establishment of interpersonal relationships between the stories' narrators and the readers. I provide evidence that the narrators exploit parallel linguistic devices. I argue that this is not surprising given that the texts' purposes are similar: to provide erotic pleasure to those readers who choose to read them. The linguistic means of deriving erotic pleasure is thus not so much argued to be a function of sexual orientation, but rather personal sexual preferences that vary from individual to individual within the heterosexual and gay male communities."

The Hostile Vagina: reading vaginal discourse in a school health text: "School policy and texts express one view by discussing vaginas, when they are mentioned, as functional body parts for the purpose of heterosexual intercourse and reproduction. This paper draws attention to the tensions and fissures in a popular secondary school health text, and examines the meanings the text and images may communicate to young people about vaginas. ...there is a strong justification for a more complex discussion of the vagina in school-based sexuality education, including an analysis of multiple representations of the vagina."

Reading pornography: "Drawing on previous qualitative research this paper seeks to illustrate ways in which the social and personal impact of reading pornography can be treated in terms of three aspects: how the act of reading fits into personal biography; how the reader or viewer negotiates the meanings about sexuality and gender contained in porn; and the processes of identification and interpretation involved in the use of such material."

Sex and relationship education and the media: an analysis of national and regional newspaper coverage in England

What really matters in family communication about sexuality? A qualitative analysis of affect and style among African American mothers and adolescent daughters: "While most research on family sexuality communication has examined the content of parent-child communication (e.g. topics discussed), relatively few studies have assessed the process, the way in which communication occurs. This paper presents an analysis of communication process based on data collected during a qualitative, observational study of family sexuality communication with thirty low- and middle-income African American mothers and their adolescent daughters living in an urban area in the southeastern USA."