Sunday Salon: Lifequakes and Self-Importance (Mostly)

Ocean, Rain, Rocks Tunnels Beach, Kauai does its Nova Scotia impression December 2010

This morning my clock radio brought me a story about a woman who gave away all but a hundred of her books and has never felt happier.  I woke up, heart pounding, yelling "NO!!" at the top of my lungs.

Talk about your fight-or-flight mechanism.

I'm at the office all day today, prepping for classes and reading stellar job applications.  Sundays just aren't the reading extravaganzas they used to be.  In fact, I'm in a bit of a pleasure-reading slump.  Sigh.
 
But it's been a fascinating week.  First of all, I joined 750words in an effort to get myself writing every day.  It's a site that tracks your writing (keeping it private, not to worry) every day and encourages you to write about three pages a day on any topic you like. It sends you reminders, gives you wee bits of encouragement, and does some of the most bizarre analysis of your writing patterns I can imagine.

After a day of writing (I couldn't stop! I wrote nearly two thousand words that night.) it crunched the numbers and told me that I was "feeling mostly Self-Important" and was "concerned mostly about Family."  Who needs a therapist when you have a nagging website?  (It also gave me a PG for swearing and violence.  You know me.)

Then, on Thursday, an even greater lifequake hit: I saw the house I think I want to buy.  It's lakefront, half an hour from the city, eighty years old, and on almost six acres of gorgeous land.  There's a pond to skate on, a gazebo to read in, and a wired outbuilding to (I'm not kidding, this it what they claim) keep my ponies in.  Because that's what my life needs right now: ponies.   I'm so nervous about the whole process I can't sleep.  (This is our first house purchase, and it's throwing me for a loop.)

After day two of writing, 750words recalibrated its sense of me.  Now it thinks that I am "mostly Upset" and "concerned about Home."  Let me clarify that what I am writing on the site is a work of fiction, not memoir.   How does it know?


Back I go to my Playboy of the Western World, my Ghost Sonata, and my plans to convince 45 first-years that close reading is a quasi-scientific process of evidence-gathering.  Wish me luck.

Les mels et les courriels en deux milles onze

Last Monday I took my first French class in over a decade, at the Alliance Française a couple of blocks from my house.  I suddenly realized that, in the time since my last class, the internet happened.  In a big way.  And boy did it produce a lot of vocabulary.  I looked at the page of my workbook and thought, "What the hell is a mel?".

There were deeper problems, however.  I didn't know how to express any date in the twenty-first century because the last time I said a date in French it began with "mille neuf cents."  It had become so automatic that I was paralyzed with indecision when I had to begin a year any other way.

It was also the first time I had been a student in the classroom in seven or eight years, and it's really hard to go back to being a pupil when you are used to being the teacher.  I had to remind myself constantly that when you are the student, you shouldn't be doing more than 50% of the talking in any one class....

The Apocalyptic Consequences of Unequal Scrabble Luck

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

I have various cultural Canadianization projects in the works (2011 resolution?  Learn to love hockey.), and I have my friend S to thank for introducing me to the wonder that is the rich Canadian animation tradition.  (Among the things I didn't know until she told me is the fact that films in Canada used to - in recent memory - be preceded with some consistency by a domestically-produced animated short in the theatres.  I thought this practice was a relic of a half-century ago, and had long been disgruntled by its passing.)

The first place S sent me was to "The Big Snit," in which a couple engage in a Cold War of eye-rattling and chair-sawing over a despair-inducing game of Scrabble.  (I'm reminded of the sublime breakfast-table wars from Heaven can Wait.)  And then it all ends, as it naturally would, the way Cold Wars threaten to end.

Here you have it:

You're welcome.