Melissa and our cousin Eric:


Me and Eric:


Me and Dad:


Grandpa and the woman he's courting:


Eric and my cousin's daughter, Isabel:


Melissa and I at Nathan Phillips Square last night:


Skaters at Nathan Phillips Square:

I'm back in Toronto. Melissa's here visiting for a while, so we've been out and about, spending too much money. I'm 90% unpacked, and have discovered that the space under my bed, when properly utilized, more than makes up for the fact that I don't have a closet. Who would have thought?

School starts on Wednesday, and my paper is nowhere near done. My schedule this semester has the following bonus features:

- earliest class starts at 11:30
- latest class ends at 5:30
- Mondays off
- Tuesday/Thursday is in Complex II (all classes, and my job)
- Wednesday/Friday is in and around Ross (all classes, and my other job)

Let's hear it for sleeping in and not having to walk across campus billions of times! The class lineup this semester:

LING3800 Language and Mind: This course explores how the structures of human language reflect the architecture of the human mind. The techniques and results from a number of disciplines and perspectives (e.g. artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology) are considered.

LING4140 Grammatical Theories: This course will examine the metatheoretical issues and assumptions underlying the development of different linguistic theories. The foundations and formal framework of Government-Binding theory, the most recent version of Chomsky’s Extended Standard theory, will be introduced and later compared with a competing linguistic theory.

LING4230 Language Disorders: This course surveys a variety of language disorders, among them aphasia, delayed language development, dyslexia and language dissolution in old age. Specific disorders are discussed within a psycholinguistic framework. There is some discussion of basic strategies for therapy.

LING4400 Topics in Grammatical Change: This course deals with morphosyntactic change from a broadly generative perspective. It focuses on large-scale changes, changes resulting in dialectal variation, and changes in progress. Both language-internal and language-external mechanisms by which change takes place are considered.

LING4900 Independent Study – Advanced Topics in Discourse Analysis: It's an independent study. I get to play with Susan.

Did you notice that four out of five courses are 4th year Linguistics courses? Yeah, I'm hoping that I won't be pulling out my hair by mid-semester.

On a completely unrelated note, I think the Bay Centre for Birth Control is a great thing and I'm going to have to check it out sometime, especially if I ever decide to look into getting an IUD.

Well, I'm moved out and living downtown now. It went alright. My parents helped out and then stayed in my new place for a few days and got to try some REAL Toronto restaurants (i.e. Vietnamese and Indian, instead of Kelsey's and Swiss Chalet) and tour through Kensington Market a bit.

Now I'm at my parents' place. There are three cases of beer downstairs (!) and clementines and eggnog, and I went to Don's Fish & Chips for lunch. Ah, Brockville, the town where people remember me as "that girl who used to run the Christian bookstore." Sometimes I just want to run away. Tonight my parents will go to church, and Melissa and I will sit here drinking beer and watching movies. Hey, it beats communion wine.

Heading back to Toronto on the 27th, with Melissa in tow until the 2nd, where I will work on unpacking and visiting friends and writing a paper before school starts back up on the 4th.

I've had most of my appetite back since I finished exams and the move, but I'm still crying every day. This is driving me crazy. I'd like to hit fast-forward and be done school, to have healed a bit, to start feeling optimistic about the future again, because it looks pretty frustrating from here.

At least there's still the St. Lawrence River. We went and had our lunch sitting on Blockhouse Island today and it was cold and foggy and gross out, so much that we could hardly see the American side of the river, but I just find it to be such a comforting thing. I don't really know how to explain it, except that the river has always been this huge presence in my life, this big body of water that keeps on flowing no matter what. It was how I figured out which way was south for a long time; it was the landmark. It feels like home.


Mallorytown Landing, via

My previous work on crocheted vulvas has inspired someone at Craftster to crochet some male anatomy. I think my life's work is done. ;)

Next semester, when the move is done and I'm in different courses and settled down a bit, I think I'm going to work some more on the vulvas. I want to make the pattern a bit nicer, and I'm going to crochet a bunch of them up to sell. I already have a buyer, actually. Maybe I'll finish Linguistics and become a Female Anatomy Crocheter. The Vagina Monologues/V-Day crowd will be my key market, but my secret desire will be to introduce them to public schools for use in sex education. Diagrams just aren't cutting it, and they don't emphasize the important bits.

Why is our culture such that something like 40% (or more) of sexually-active women don't have orgasms? In India, there's a saying that the gods gave out 10 portions of sexual pleasure – one to men, and nine to women. Over here, we think that men are the ones who are digging for sex all the time and that "good girls don't." Maybe if more women knew what they looked like and weren't afraid to touch, they would get in on those nine parts of desire. Maybe if it was common knowledge that orgasms help to ease menstrual cramps... (Now, that's the way to market vibrators. Get WalMart on the phone! "Feminine needs" indeed!)

Of course, if we teach high school students about sex, then *gasp* they're going to have it. Newsflash: they're having it anyways, but not getting good information about STIs, STDs, birth control, etc. Or they're having this huge guilt trip and the vague abstinence message, and then you have people who are having oral/anal sex because it's not "real" sex and have no clear idea that it's just as easy to get STIs this way. Or they're having sex but not buying condoms because it's embarrassing and maybe they live in a small town and know all the clerks.

And Ed, if you're reading this, these are the things that pro-choice people want to solve. No, they don't want the abortion rate to increase. They want abortion to be legal and safe, and they want unwanted pregnancies to decrease. This isn't accomplished by condemning the people who have abortions, but by increasing sex education, access to birth control, and improving the lives of people who are at most risk (i.e. poverty, etc.).

I'm pro-choice, not because I like abortion, but because it's horrifying that before it was legal, Chicago's hospitals had entire wings devoted to women dying of botched abortions. I'm pro-choice, but I'm going to be as responsible as possible with birth control, because I don't want an abortion myself. I'm pro-choice and I want the abortion rate to go down. I'm pro-choice and I think that there should be limits on abortion. I'm pro-choice because I recognise that abortion is something that is going to happen whether it's legal or not, and it should happen in a safe environment so the woman doesn't end up dead or infertile or otherwise damaged. I'm pro-choice because I recognise that adoption is also a brutal choice and is not the cut-and-dried happy ending that was always presented to me.

It's just not as simple as "abortion is bad." Being in a situation where abortion is an appealing option is bad. People have complex reasons for wanting them, because life isn't simple, and sometimes all of the available options are bad in some way. Cutting off options isn't helping. Working to prevent the situation in the first place is helping.

The cat pictures will stop very soon, I promise, because Watson will not be able to sneak downtown and into my bed. For now, however... CUTE.



I went to a Sarah Slean concert last night with Sanda and crew, and it was lovely. I would post photos but it turns out that they all sucked. Why can't my camera just see what I see? Argh. Someday I'll figure that out.

She didn't play Me and Jerome, but she did play Bank Accounts and dedicated it to Paris Hilton, making snide remarks and gestures all the while, so that was well worth it. :) She's a silly playful type, lots of fun. She also had some dude come out and play a guitar/piano duet of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and gosh it was good! I will have to hunt down his name, in case he's doing some solo work.

Then I came home and decided to call Chris and ended up talking to him for about 2 hours. ("Am I allowed to call you? Is this okay?" Blah.) It was a good conversation, we sorted some things out. Things like: let's actually try to be friends, but let's not try to do that too fast because I am not done being upset. Things like: we do not hate each other! Things like: oh fuck, we are going to live very close, like a 10 minute walk from each other, and will likely run into each other by accident at some point and who knows how we will react! Anyways, the last few days have been good ones (i.e. I do not find myself sitting on the kitchen floor with a box of kleenex), so it was probably a good time for it. I feel like it's settled as much as it can be at this point, so that's one less thing to wonder about in the next few weeks. Time to concentrate on other things.

This weekend, I get to:
a) pack the rest of my belongings before Monday night
b) figure out how to forward my mail to my new house
c) study for an exam for a course I hate on Monday night

Oh, see how that all coincides with Monday? Yeah, and my parents are coming that day too, so I have to figure all of that out at the same time. Entertain and study and pack everything! No biggie! Then I get to move on Tuesday, do some Toronto stuff with my parents, and then try to find enough clothes to pack for going home for Christmas.

Frankly, I'd like to spend the rest of the weekend in bed. Maybe someday.

Kathy's cat, Watson:



Watson has been Satan Incarnate for most of the 2 years that I've lived here. He will stalk you in the middle of the night and rip your legs apart. He will fucking kill you if you try to rub that belly. In the last few weeks, however, he has been sitting on my lap, lying in my bed all day and night, following me around, purring if he's just in the room with me. I think he's plotting something, but I plan to distract him with moving boxes before he gets any bright ideas.

Last night's sunset:



This yarn used to be grey:



Now it is not. Observe the power of food colouring! (The green is actually much nicer. Stupid camera.) I used the tutorial on this page to make a centre-pull ball, which is a lovely lovely thing.

Tomorrow I get to see Sarah Slean and SANDA. It will be good times! I will bring my camera!

Okay, back to working on a 10 page report that is due tomorrow. *grumble, grumble*

One of the last sunsets I'll see for a while:



My apartment is on the 8th floor and faces west. In 8 days, I'm moving to a 2nd floor apartment facing north, with trees and buildings blocking any decent view of the sky.

Kathy all sexied-up for The Ball:



She's been swing-dancing like a billion times a week (okay, more like 4), and they have this holiday ball. She's been quite excited about it. :) Bah, she's a lovely roommate and I'm LEAVING HER! She bakes the best buns and apple crisp and EVERYTHING, and she is funny and hugs me when I need it and wah!

Dying yarn with food colouring:



It's fun. It's pretty. Best of all, it's cheap.

My childhood, seen by Google Maps by mathowie inspired a whole pool of memorymaps.

After a brief look through, I like these: Chicago, Paris, Zhuzhou.

Here's my home, with some commentary.

It's 8:15 and I'm ready for bed. Something's not quite right with that.

FAQ:
Q. You've moved already, right?
A. No.
Q. But, I thought you-
A. Not until the 20th.
Q. So when are you done everything for this semester?
A. I'm not. I have a paper due in January, which I get to work on over my Christmas break, and then everything starts all over again. Life is wonderful like that right now.

Between this guide to freeing up hard disk space on OS X and the DeLocalizer and deleting music from Chris that I didn't like enough to keep, I got freed up over five gigabytes today. That's a good 12% of my laptop's total space. Woo. And now I won't have music that specifically reminds me of him coming up when I put iTunes on shuffle. A much-needed bonus in these days of crying.

In other purges today, I have been cleaning out clothes that I should have sent off to Goodwill a long time ago, and actually throwing out notes from former classes. Intro to Phonology? I never have to take Phonology again. Recycling bin! I don't know why I keep such things, I never go back and look things up anyways. Later this week I get to go through all my notes from both bible colleges and finally throw them out. No, Heather Ann. You will not need to look up what J.S. said about the history of the Reformation. Ever. Recycling bin! Intro to Syntax? Gone. Notes on Romans? Garbage. Should have happened years ago. I have also thrown out memorabilia from things like the weekend trip to Montreal last January. I haven't thrown out photos, partially because I don't actually know where they are. That's probably a good thing, but you know I'll find them within the next week, given that I'm packing everything I own.

I also donated several books to Kathy and/or the Tyndale library. The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance is not something I need to lug to yet another apartment, nor is the full version of The Message, or The Case For Faith, or a billion books by Philip Yancey, or (heaven help us) Passion and Purity. Ack! Francis Schaeffer? Technically that book belongs to Gabe, but I'm sure he's forgotten by now, so it goes to Kathy. Henri Nouwen? I secretly stole that book from a nun, and now it belongs to Kathy. (True! I am a bad person.)

I stayed over at my new apartment last night. I didn't plan to, but I went over in the afternoon to make truffles with them (cinnamon, nutmeg [best], and Bailey's [least likely to freeze, ever]), and that turned into dinner, and that turned into going out for beer (yay!) with some of their friends (some of whom are male! egads!), and then crashing on the futon, and then breakfast. Strangely, everyone was up before 9 on a Saturday morning. Such things will change when I move in. I plan on reverting to my pattern of getting up at the crack of noon on weekends.

They really are lovely girls* and I'm excited to move in with them. They are silly and they will make cookies for me and there is a constant supply of tea and teasing, so it's all good. There is also the fact that the LCBO is but a two-minute walk away, so if I keep losing weight at this rate, I'm just going to have to take advantage of the caloric content of beer. It'll be rough, but sometimes you just have to make sacrifices like that.

*some of whom may be Christian and go to things like InterVarsity and Freedomize once in a while and have elaborate plans involving accountability to 7:30 a.m. devotions, but also drink beer and use 'fuck' rather liberally.

Brockville Carpool. Includes sections for to and from Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, Montreal. Right on.

Classes are over, and because I made it thus far, I rewarded myself with clementines and eggnog. I still have one report (Dec 15), one exam (Dec 19), and one paper (Jan 4). Extra-curricular activities consist of making/buying all Christmas presents, packing my entire house, and moving (Dec 20), all in the next 2 weeks.

I'm so tired. Can I stop crying every day sometime soon? How about eating, can I start doing that more often? And stop feeling nauseous and overwhelmed? Please? People keep asking me if I'm okay, and I just can't dredge up the energy to lie. No, I'm not okay. I'm a wreck. I'm burning out and I'm not sure how to handle it. I'm the kind of girl who cries twice a year, but it's been more like twice a day for the last month or so, and I wake up exhausted and frustrated and sad.

I have some thoughts on how to deal with it, various ways to relax, and I'm hoping that once I'm into next semester and the move is over, I'll start feeling better. If I'm still feeling like this at the end of January, I'm going to go back for counselling at York. Might as well take it while it's free.

Today, while digging through a lot of my crap in an effort to throw things out before the Great Packing Project begins, I found this absolute gem of an artifact of my time running a Christian bookstore:



Yes, it is a cardboard cut out of DC Talk, in the Nu Thang era. It makes me cry with laughter. The huge crosses! Michael's hair! Comedy gold. :) Anyways, I'm either going to have to build a shrine to this thing in the name of all things kitsch (and what is more kitsch than 80s-era Christian music?), or someone will be the lucky recipient of this glorious relic of the past. It could be you!

Watson was being excessively friendly yesterday. Observe as he gives the TV stand some much-deserved lovin' and basks in the afternoon sun.



That cat can be absolutely insane and has taken some random swipes at me in the last few days, but he secretly loves me, and I'll secretly miss him when I move.

Alright, I have an exam tomorrow, which I suppose I should study for at some point. (It's not called cramming when the whole course has been a review of other courses I've already taken. Right?)

I have been re-reading For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, and it challenges me because she grapples with suffering and the sheer number of people on earth and yet does not give up on the idea of God. Here are some quotations:

Nelly Sachs wrote,

Who is like you, O Lord, among the silent,
remaining silent through the suffering of His children? (p. 28)

· · ·

Rabbi Akiva taught a curious solution to the ever-galling problem that while many good people and their children suffer enormously, many louses and their children prosper and thrive in the pink of health. God punishes the good, he proposed, in this short life, for their few sins, and rewards them eternally in the world to come. Similarly, God rewards the evil-doers in this short life for their few good deeds, and punishes them eternally in the world to come. I do not know how that sat with people. It is, like every ingenious, God-fearing explanation of natural calamity, harsh all around. (p.30)

· · ·

NUMBERS · We have dated waves, as well as clouds. On April 30, 1991—on that one day—138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned it to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

"No, it's easy," she said. "Lots and lots of dots, in blue water." (p.48)

· · ·

What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of "the individual"? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 million people in Asia—the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of the distance, as gravity does?

Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in Thailand? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion people now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?

There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this. (p.59)

Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. Penguin Books: Toronto, 2000.

Have I mentioned that my roommate is a total Christmas nut? She is. We would decorate Watson too, but he's got the heart of a killer and would never let us away with it. This is his "would you quit making that orange focus-light shine in my eyes already?" face.

One more week and things let up... sort of. I wrote an exam last night (in half an hour! even though it was 2 hours long!) and I have another on Monday, and then a presentation on Tuesday, which I am nowhere near prepared for yet. Then, I have a report due on the 15th, a Sarah Slean concert to attend, an exam on the 19th, the big move downtown on the 20th, Christmas presents to finish before my parents arrive, a ton of packing and unpacking to do, a paper to finish for January, and I'm going home for Christmas and then Melissa is coming up here for New Years. And then a new semester starts and I can go through the wringer all over again.

Have I mentioned that I'm starting to resent school? I am. I'm getting burned out. I am not tired of learning, I am tired of the university system that piles all this stress on us and turns it into a game of "which paper am I going to concentrate on, which is worth more marks" and "should I do my reading or try to get at least 7 hours of sleep" and "I would love to reflect on this article, but I have 3 more to read by tomorrow" and frankly, full-time work is looking mighty good to me right now. I can scarcely imagine having to focus on ONE job, rather than five classes and two jobs. I'm looking at my student debt and realising that I've been dirt poor for the five years that I've been living on my own, and I will be dirt poor for the foreseeable future, even if I start working full-time. Between OSAP and taxes, if I started working for 30K/year, I would have about the same amount of money to work with that I have now, which is possible but exhausting and means I will be living with roommates and feeling guilty every time I eat out forEVER.

I'm tired. I'm tired of not knowing where the money is going to come from, of not knowing what to do next year, of feeling that between my career and my love life, I'm starting from scratch. I am so jealous of my friends who have known since they were little what they wanted to do, and are doing that.

Sometimes I feel like being smart is a handicap of sorts. (I feel like such an asshole for saying these things, but here they are.) I get bored. The sheer number of options paralyses me. I have a hundred things I could do, all things that I know I would be a decent fit for, jobs that I know I would be good at, and I'm just not interested in any of them. Is that a symptom of depression, I wonder? Often I'm interested in aspects of all of the options and choosing one means giving up the rest. I don't know which should get priority.

With academia, it's very neat and I would get a kick out of it, but I'm also feeling disillusioned with a lot of it and I tire of the subjectivity in the social sciences, not to mention the 6 more years of school and incredibly dismal job prospects. I'm watching these videos of Stephen Hawking and wishing that I had gone into Math or Physics or Chemistry or something concrete where there are mysteries, but there are conclusive experiments too. And funding from private companies! But I can't do that, I have gone too far in one direction and I feel that I can't turn around now.

I could go into Publishing, but it is so competitive and that scares me. I would love to work on something feminist, maybe a magazine or a bookstore or a rights organization, but so many of them are non-profits and I don't know how to balance such a low salary with such a high debt. I would love to do something noble, like working on making sex workers safer and less stigmatized, but I don't know how to do that. I wonder how many friends such a job would scare off.

I have been day-dreaming about taking off, working abroad, trying to get a residency somewhere so I can write or crochet massive feminist murals or something random like that. Are those crazy thoughts? Would I ever get the courage up?

So, I feel afraid right now. I'm under a lot of stress and there is this bad thought underneath it all, lurking and whispering, "No one will hire you, no one will date you, you will have to move home and live in a tiny little village where no one understands you." I know it is not true. Most of the time.