i am editing a book for the very first time.

it's a springer chemistry book about molecular orbitals and shit. it's an interesting learning experience, going through this massive manuscript. i'm getting paid 3 euros a page, and because the pages are way less dense than the papers i was editing, it's supposedly a net gain for me.

too bad this is the most boring book ever written. ever.

also, all of the authors are japanese, and their english ranges from poor to shit-poor.

i've asked my freelancing supervisor to give me next week off. my parents are going to be in town, i'll have my convocation, and i just don't want to have to come home from work and edit for three hours each night that week. it means the second half of the manuscript's going to be delayed by a week, but i don't think the world will suffer too much if this collection of papers about the DV-X(alpha) method isn't made immediately available.

***

i'd promised to write a thing or two about my internship. it's pretty good so far; i'm doing a lot of filing and photocopying, but it's pretty much what i'd expected. at least i'm still learning stuff. i've been going through the slush pile of unsolicited submissions and have come up with a system to make the process more efficient. i submitted a proposal to my supervisor about the project; if it works out, it may be a substantial part of my internship report.

otherwise, i've been doing a lot of proofreading. my supervisor's given me two proposals to review, both of which i rejected 'cause the writing was just too bad.

i might be indexing a cookbook in a couple of weeks, but this upcoming week, i'm actually covering the front desk for the receptionist. i'm terrified i'll answer the phone "dumbass and mcintyre" or hang up on someone when i transfer their call.

i can't believe i've already been working there for three weeks.

***

finally started my herb garden last week. i have basil, sage and rosemary growing, and my oregano and chive seeds are finally starting to germinate.

yum.

saw sloan last night. i'd never seen them live before...they were fun, but i was actually pretty impressed with the opener, magenta lane, a punky chick band from toronto.

***

allegedly, if you start exercising, at some point, you will find yourself more energized rather than tired. i sure hope that's going to kick in soon. i've been biking to work for the past two weeks and i'm still exhausted.

i've got stuff to write about, but i'm too incoherent at this point -- more later.

welcome back, family guy...welcome back.

gah. no post for too long.

a) my sweetie got his thesis done last friday. finally. the three days leading up to his deadline were brutal for both of us; the first night i stayed up until 3am editing his thesis, then got up at 9 to help him implement changes. the day after, i got up at 6am to do a final round of editing, while he'd stayed up all night writing. when he went to submit his thesis to the faculty of graduate studies at the eleventh hour, he found it especially nerve-wracking, as the two people in front of him were sent away because their theses didn't conform to the rather arbitrary formatting regulations. fortunately, they accepted his thesis, which means that he won't owe the university a few thousand dollars in returned scholarship money and back-tuition, and that he'll be graduating with me.

we went out with S&A that night and had a three-pound crab to celebrate, marking the beginning of a string of fine (expensive) dining.

b) i am babysitting HG's food processor for the summer while she's in montreal. i pledged to use it at least once over the next three months, but haven't really thought about it yet. we went out to dinner and saw some of my publishing friends for one last time on sunday night.

c) monday was my first day of work as an intern -- or, as it turns out, the undersecretary to the administrative assistant -- at douglas & mcintyre. the d&m sales conference is tomorrow (a sunday -- and i'm going for my own *cough* edification), and in preparation, we had to put together these massive sales kits, which meant that i got extremely well-acquainted with the office photocopier. i spent the day doing menial tasks, like putting books in the mail for review, photocopying, cleaning cardboard boxes out of the back room, photocopying, recycling old catalogues to make room for new ones, photocopying...the rest of the week was more of the same, with occasional bouts of covering at the front desk when the receptionist had to go away, sorting reviews, filing stuff...which i don't really mind; doing mindless labour is fine after eight months of school, but i wouldn't want to do this all summer. the higher-ups tell me i'll be given some more interesting stuff to do after this sales conference. we'll see.

what really blows me away, though, was that i was constantly busy while i was at work; i always had something to do. and before i'd arrived, the poor receptionist had to do all of what i did plus go through the slush pile and man the phones and deal with couriers and apply for book awards. whatever they're paying her, it's not enough.

some of the submissions they're getting in the slush pile are pretty amazing: of course, you've got to have the indignant arrogant authors who think (ahem, know) they've created the best book ever written; there is one writer who stapled a ten-dollar bill into his submission of humorous christmas stories (...yeah...), and the little old ladies who write their memoirs of growing up in buttfuck, saskatchewan and expect everyone to be fervently interested in their story. part of my project is to figure out ways the acquisitions process can be made more efficient, and i already have a few ideas...

d) i wrecked a pair of jeans and a skirt riding my bike to work this week.

e) on monday night, i saw dmac for quite possibly the last time, or at least the last time in a long while, anyway. i'd found out a couple of months back that he'd decided to go back home and not return to vancouver for school. ubc wasn't really doing him any good, and it's probably for the best that he's pursuing other interests now, but it saddens me that a good friend is leaving the city.

f) on tuesday night, my sweetie and i went out for dinner to celebrate our three-year anniversary. it was just overpriced pizza and pasta, but a nice dinner nonetheless.

g) on wednesday night, we went out to feenie's for the first time, the (arguably) more affordable bistro next to lumière. my sweetie had the $14 crab ravioli appetizer that helped feenie win on iron chef america, and i had a bite -- it was amazing. incidentally, douglas & mcintyre is putting out a new cookbook by rob feenie; his picture on the cover allegedly took two rounds of photoshopping to fix the man's lazy/wandering eye.

everybody's leaving!

*cry*.

when i didn't feel like doing work earlier today, i googled the names of a bunch of random people i knew, from high school and even elementary school. it always shocks me how quite a few people just don't seem to have any web-presence. i'd think that every name i typed in would turn up at least one major hit.

i went on my googling spree after trying to find the contact information for some old friends, actually. in these few days before i have to start my job at d&m, i'm taking some time to reconnect and catch up with people i'd been neglecting. it's awkward (so...i know we haven't talked in two years, but...) and a surprising amount of work. i'm hoping or expecting to wake up tomorrow morning to an inbox full of new messages, and i'm fully prepared that the gratification i'm hoping to feel from people wanting to get in touch with me probably won't materialize in any meaningful way. at least i'm not talking to these people after years of silence and asking anything of them.

so it's my birthday today.

i'm not doing too much; i just invited S&A over for gyoza and fried rice. since last weekend, i've developed a tenacious addiction to the frozen gyoza from capers. i suppose it's not that expensive a habit, since i have to eat anyway, but those mid-evening cravings for vegetarian dumplings can be distracting.

i was asked whether i'd be going to the ubyssey party at wreck beach tonight. i'd thought about it before i made my plans, but i didn't really want to spend my birthday with a bunch of volunteers i don't know. i only found out later, though, that A is bringing a friend who's staying with her, which means that i still have to clean my house, which i thought i could avoid.

this past week has been a bit bizarre; it's felt like i've been working non-stop while i've somehow also managed to do a bunch of leisure activities.

monday, we had to head to school for a seminar on how to write a good internship report. our prof kept talking about how the internship process has been relatively free of problems, with the exception of one firm, and everyone knows that one firm is the one i'm heading to. it was at once sort of funny and disconcerting. i headed straight home that day while the others went out for drinks, i think. i still had my last paper to finish up, and i did a rather shoddy job of it. i am so beyond caring about it, though. the instructor's marking seems completely arbitrary, anyway; it doesn't seem to matter how much effort i put into his papers.

i had my one-on-one self-evaluation with JM on tuesday. afterwards, SD, WF and i headed out for noodles, where we basically gossiped about people in our class for two hours. when i got home, i worked on putting together the contract for the newsletter redesign that i've somehow shafted myself into doing. i've got to learn to say no, although i haven't heard from the old boss since tuesday, so it may be a non-issue.

on wednesday, we had a group photo taken at school, and our yearbook was ready. it was just a side project a few of the students took on for fun, and it's absolutely amazing and rather hilarious. when i got home, i started putting together my year-end report for the production post at the physics journal. i think this is the last big transition report i'll ever have to write. i wrote all day and still wasn't done by 2am, but in one day, i'd already accumulated more words than the history paper that took me three solid days to complete.

thursday, SP, HG, my sweetie and i went to bowen island for a short hike around the lake. it was more of a walk than a hike, but it was really all my decrepit body could handle. we got there at about 10:30 and left the little island of 3500 at 3. i had plans to do work when i got home, but ended up napping and sitting around catatonic for the rest of the evening.

yesterday was pretty cool but sort of bittersweet; i met with AW to talk about the future of MOMENTUM, and pretty much secured the contract to compile their style guide and writer's guidelines, which i'll be starting in a couple of weeks, i think. after my meeting with her, i headed down to an herbal bliss to get some rooibos for my uncle. starting the 16th, the lady told me, everything in the store was going on sale for up to 75% off. it was closing at the end of the month. it was surprising and sad news, but SD and i have pledged to go on a tea-buying binge early next week. i'll also ask the mother-in-law if there's anything i can get her.

i headed over to the greenhouse by my place to pick up a plant for LC; she had originally intended for her party last night to be a garden party where everyone was required to bring a plant of some sort for her yard, which had been dug up when the flood restoration people had to fix her home's drainage problem. i eventually decided on a heather bun evergreen, but as i was picking it out, it kept running through my mind that LC's boyfriend is a landscape artist. i had visions of him taking the plant and saying, 'oh. one of these.'

the party was great; we all got our yearbooks signed high-school style. it was also kind of sad when we left, though. i know i won't see some of these characters again. for a while, anyway.

lords of dogtown?!

allow me to be the first to say: bluuuurrrggggh!

the movie looks disgusting. and it doesn't even look like they wrote peggy oki into the script. what, the asian chick doesn't get a part in your precious knock-off of a movie?!

vomit!

i don't generally use so many interrobangs, but i think this heinous travesty really warrants them.

i've been negligent in my updating, and it certainly isn't due to a lack of material. okay, here goes:

1) i was working late at school two mondays ago, as is often the case on mondays, and my sweetie came over to school so that we could have dinner together. he had with him a coupon for a restaurant on the waterfront, aqua riva. the coupon seemed to read that, with the purchase of one entrée, a second entrée under $20 would be free.

i raised the concern that, in my cons, black jeans and t-shirt, i wasn't exactly dressed well enough for fine dining. he replied, 'do you think i'm dressed well enough?' as he pulled on his torn jeans and loud top. for some reason, that was enough to convince me to go.

we headed into the fancy restaurant, where the bread is served in these specially made conical metal sculptures, and already i became self-conscious about us being utter riffraff. we were shown to our table, where i looked at the menu to find that only one entrée was priced under $20.

to alleviate the confusion, but also to out us as riffraff, jeff asked the waitress about our coupon. she patiently explained that up to $20 would be taken off the price of the entrée, and brought us some bread in a fancy conical metal basket.

we ordered, and as we waited for our meal, we were trying to have a normal conversation while being starkly aware that we sorely stood out from the rest of the restaurant patrons. at one point, my sweetie was telling me about how he had to take out the garbage because it was "stinky. highly stinky," and just as he uttered those words, our waitress came from behind him to refill our water. i buried my head in my hands, desperately trying to stifle my laughing. the waitress seemed bemused as she walked away.

after we finished our meal, the waitress brought the dessert menus; i wasn't planning on having dessert, since the meal was going to be expensive enough, and the desserts were all about $8 each, but she sort of shamed or bullied us into it. my sweetie decided that he'd go for the cheesecake, and when the waitress came back, she said, "i recommend the tiramisu, the crême brûlée or the berry crumble."

"oh," said my sweetie. "and i'd already settled on the cheesecake."

"i wouldn't recommend the cheesecake. in fact, the cheesecake and the pecan pie are my least favourite choices."

"um, i guess i'll take your second choice, then."

"the crême brûlée? sure."

she smiled and walked away, and i started laughing at our continued riffraffery. "they should just put a sign on our table that says 'riffraff,'" i said, just as, of course, the waitress came from behind me this time, to refill our water. my sweetie sort of lost it and started laughing fairly hard at that point.

we paid for our meal, left the waitress a substantial tip, and eventually bussed home after i concluded upon returning to school that i wasn't conscious enough to do any more work on our tech project.

2) we went to victoria on thursday for a field trip to see trafford publishing (a print-on-demand/vanity publishing company) and abebooks, both of which are making bucketloads of money in an industry that, as we keep being told in management class, is continually losing cash. i went on wednesday night and stayed with HG, whose father and stepmother have a lovely bed-and-breakfast-type home in metchosin, a half and hour's drive from victoria. our history instructor booked a conference room at the quality inn for our thursday lecture. afterwards, a few of us stayed behind, walked around victoria and had dinner together. it was loads of fun, especially since there were several among us who were getting to that delirious stage of exhaustion where everything is funny. it was also kind of bittersweet, 'cause we knew that we'd all be parting ways in a couple of weeks.

3) i am so grateful that christians think jesus died and came back to life; the four-day easter weekend was something i really needed, not that i did much beyond work on my history paper. the thing's a piece of shit, but i don't want to think about it or work on it any further.

4) we more or less finished our tech project document yesterday. i'm pretty happy with it; it's quite comprehensive and its 70-page length really drives home how much work we did on it. now, we just have to plan our presentation. we have a few things in the works. in anticipation that our project would be pretty much impossible to execute, we called ourselves 'sisyphus solutions,' so at our presentation, we're going to start off by pushing a giant papier-mâché boulder up the stairs of the auditorium to the the of rocky. when we get to the top, we're going to hoist the boulder up above our heads.

we also have plans to dress like techies: black jeans hiked up to our nipples, black t-shirts tucked into our pants, socks with sandals and tape on our glasses. it'll be totally hot.

5) so begins the week from hell. two exams, one paper, one big presentation. oy. i haven't even picked a topic for my last tech paper. i'm sort of discouraged by the fact that i didn't do particularly well on my last one. but, when it's all over, we all get to head over to our prof's house in coquitlam and get sloshed on his vineyard's bad wine! i can't wait!

6) i was planning on taking the two weeks off i have in april off -- that is, no work on anything. much walking outside and vegetating. unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be possible. i have a backlog on editing i have to catch up on, a bunch of physics journal stuff i need to take care of, and just a couple of days ago, i heard from my old thesis supervisor completely out of the blue. he wants me to help design an easy newsletter template for the physics department.

if i'm to make any money in freelancing, i have to stop feeling guilty about charging people for work that i do. i don't know why i have that problem.

strange days. i'm in a rather bizarre mood right now, feeling as i'd imagine a person with ADHD on valium might feel. i'm feeling a bit sour and kind of stressed out, but my body is inexplicably relaxed. i'm so overwhelmed with work i can't bring myself to do anything. i'm more or less in a state where i realize that i'm going to be hit with a load of work in three weeks and that i'm going to wig out, but i can't do anything about it right now.

helpless...

listless...

but i shouldn't be. i have a 20-page history paper that i have essentially yet to start, but i keep deleting what i write. if i get that out of the way, things won't be so bad. why can't i write it?

why do i feel so lethargic?

***

thursday, in our history course, a book restorer came to talk to us and show us her work. i never realized how economics-driven the book restoration business was; they do to the book what the client asks, even if it may not do anything to preserve the book. it was more about raising the resale value of an old book rather than preserving the content of it. i appreciated what she did quite a bit, and her work is quite extraordinary; but it disappointed me somewhat to have my naïve notions of book restorers as being the conservationists of human knowledge unceremoniously dashed.

friday, we trekked up to special collections on the main campus; i've heard that sfu can be quite beautiful when it's sunny out, but it was grey and misty and altogether depressing, especially in the campus's dystopic concrete landscape. as i was making my way on my 45-minute bus trip after having woken up an hour earlier than usual, i thought, 'if i decided to do a phd in communications, i'll have to make this commute every fucking day. i'm not sure i can make that commitment.

this week, we head out to victoria for a field trip. should be fun, and could be exhausting. we're to visit trafford's print-on-demand facility, as well as the abebooks offices.

presentation tomorrow, midterm wednesday, should be concurrently writing my history paper, two weeks behind on my editing...

why can't i get a move on it?

fucking jetsgo!

roar!

this is what i get for being on the ball and booking tix for my parents three months in advance.

bugger.

i might be able to get my money back, but it's a long convoluted process of faxing the credit card company and have them file a complaint on my behalf. it may take until mid-july for me to get my money back.

well, at least i'm better than those poor stranded fuckers out there.

and now i have to book with westjet, which has probably jacked up its prices in response to this whole jetsgo fiasco.

yay! i have an internship!

this summer, i will be working for douglas & mcintyre publishing group and studying how they can streamline their acquisitions process. i'll even be paid! modestly, but it's better than what i'm getting now.

i'm excited. i've got all of these grand plans to bike to work, but we'll see what happens come the end of april.

it's such a relief to have this settled; i felt like i was one of the only people left who didn't have an internship.

in other news, i experimented with my new oil fondue set yesterday to see (a) how long it would take to get the oil hot enough to fry things if i relied on just the flame, and (b) how successful i could be at making vegetable tempura using the fondue set. this is all part of my presentation plan for my history course, but i'm not sure it's going to work out. i think i've decided to make hush puppies rather than veggie tempura (just couldn't get the batter right), but that excludes those non-dairy folk in my class from being able to partake. how is this relevant to the history of ink, you may ask? well, it really is only peripherally so, but at least it makes class interesting. see, old-timey printers used to go beyond the city walls once or twice a year to boil linseed oil and make their own ink. for the germans, it was pretty much the equivalent of their wayzgoose, a day when everyone in the printing house got together for 'merrymaking' (two of the books i read used that very term) and a meal: they'd fry food in the boiling oil and eat it.

tonight, i try my hand at making berry-juice ink and prepare my presentation.

basic pez etiquette:

if someone offers you a pez, check to see if the dispenser's been pulled back, revealing the candy. if it has, you are obliged to take the candy. do so graciously, even if it's one of the gross yellow ones or if you just plain don't like pez candies. if the latter's the case, you say, 'just one, thanks.' if the dispenser hasn't yet been pulled back, and you don't want a pez candy, it's safe to refuse. just don't make the pez offerer have to push the candy back into the dispenser. that's just rude. the best response is, 'why, i'd love a pez.' i mean, seriously. unless you're actually diabetic, a single pez candy isn't gonna kill you.

what a bizarre week.

my sweetie got acute food poisoning on monday night. rancid shrimp in a salad roll, he speculates. he called from work at about midnight that night explaining that he was spewing from both ends and asked if i could go get him some ginger ale while he gingerly made his way home.

on my way out to the gas station -- the only place around that might be open at that hour -- and as i was walking down the sidewalk, i see a skunk dart out from the bushes and come barreling straight for me. i skirted around me at the very last possible moment; i think it might have been about 40 cm away or less. i don't think i've ever been quite so close to a skunk before.

just what i need, i thought, to be sprayed on my way out to get ginger ale for the ailing husband.

anyway, monday night was sleepless; certainly, it was much worse for my sweetie than it was for me, but horrible sounds of vomiting every twenty minutes made for a sleepy nori on tuesday.

i had tuesday off, actually -- our tech project wasn't to start until wednesday, when i had to give my presentation on content management systems. i joked that it was just like a reading break, only a fifth as long. i spent most of it nursing my sweetie back to health, which was interrupted by a meeting with BCAMP, in which i was pretty much told that there was no place for me there and that i really should consider other internship options.

well, poo.

i tried working on my CMS presentation, which ended up quite the piece of garbage, especially when compared to LC's awesome presentation on wikis. however, i did manage to get an entire research article laid out and sent out for proof.

wednesday, i finally got to find out whom i'd be working with in tech. turns out i'm shafted with the smelly guy again -- who was utterly ineffectual in our last project and was, as you may deduce, smelly -- but the rest of my group seems pretty solid. our goal is to find a way to automate the process of catalogue production by flowing ONIX-compatible XML data into a commonly used layout program like quark or indesign. last year's group got pretty far with the project but couldn't quite make a fully functional package. i got stuck being project manager, which is fine, i guess, but i'm just afraid that i'm not really going to end up giving it my all because i feel so burnt out.

this week, i also decided on my history paper topic: the history of ink. i'm not entirely sure what angle i'll be taking on it -- and i have about six books that i asked my sweetie to get me from the ubc library to read yet, but i ran the topic by my instructor, and she was entirely too enthusiastic about it. unfortunately, on thursday, i found out that smelly guy apparently wanted to take on that topic as well, and wanted to coordinate presentations on the same day.

so unimpressed i was. i don't want to have to coordinate anything with him.

anyway, the week ended fairly well, with a few of us heading out to drink on friday night and plan a kitshy 'yearbook' for our class, complete with an elementary-school-type class photo with our prof standing by us and one of those white-lettering-on-black signs reading 'mpub class of 2005,' individual photos with incoherent call-outs to our peeps, favourite quotes and inside jokes, an autograph page, and tally of our upcoming 'most likely to...' survey.

tonight is oscar night. in keeping with three years of tradition, at least one of S&A is coming over for dinner and to watch the program; however, none of us have really seen any of the nominated movies, so the whole affair is really just an excuse for me to take sunday night off. i guess i kind of need it. within the next week, i have a tech paper due and i have to get started on this history presentation worth a rather substantial chunk of my mark.

~sigh~. okay, here i go.

i have a laundry room!

huzzah!

magazine project over!

we had our presentations yesterday, and all three groups did pretty awesome. fuck, am i ever glad that's over.

my designs got the least criticism -- surprising, considering i was really the only art director of the three groups that wasn't a 'designer.' one of the panel members said that our magazine proposals were 'among the best he had ever seen,' which i thought was lip service, but apparently last year, the groups put out dave, a magazine for the regular and not terribly good-looking 'dave' who just liked to drink beer and hang out with his friends; boys only, a magazine for the 'reluctant reader' in the 9 to 12 male demographic; and goal, a magazine for parents of children who played sports -- essentially for soccer moms.

yeah.

so our magazines don't seem like that much of a stretch. they could actually be real titles.

after the presentation, we hung out and had brie in the lounge. KS and i played guitar and people drank a lot of free liquor. a bunch of us went out, intending on going to subeez, but it was packed. we ended up at honey, a pub i'd never been to before, but it was great: booths with large plush velvet cushions, music from the 60s, a wall onto which they projected some russ meyer-esque film with russian subtitles...food was consumed, drinks were imbibed and dancing was done.

good times.

i'm tempted to take a pause, but i have some severe catching up to do...a mountain of editing work, physics journal crap, my technology presentation i have to give this wednesday, my technology paper, my history paper...

and although i did the laundry last weekend, it's been sitting in a massive (but clean) heap on my bedroom floor, remaining unfolded and getting permanently wrinkled.

oh yeah: my internship plans with MOMENTUM fell through last night. i don't really know what i'm doing this summer.

excellent, as they say.

where others hyperventilate, i appear to clench my jaw retardedly hard. at this point,i think my molars are going to fall out; i am *so* stressed out. there is so much shit to do and not enough time/energy/brain cells to do it. K&T called today and said surprise! they're in vancouver for the weekend! let's hang out!

aaugh! worst timing ever!

i'd invite them over for tea but the apartment is currently a filth-encrusted hovel, the laundry room still isn't done, there is refuse all over the bottom floor of my place, i have a big presentation that i have to design all snazzy this upcoming week (what the fuck made me think i could be art director of a magazine, anyway!?), there's a completely unintelligible article i was supposed to edit three weeks ago, both my prof and MOMENTUM are putting pressure on me to do my internship with them, i have a management assignment to do and i'm running on an average of five hours of sleep per night this week.

*whimper*

why won't sfu give me a week off?

why!?

instead of prosecuting michael jackson for child molestation, we should prosecute janet jackson for giving the FCC the reason it was looking for to send freedom of speech back to the mccarthy era.

discuss.

ugggghh...

that's how i feel right now.

i've been in this perpetual state of exhaustion since monday and i'm not sure why. i'd thought it was the whacked out fumes from the tiling adhesive my sweetie's been using, but now i'm not so sure. i just constantly, constantly feel like i should be sleeping, and i'm constantly, constantly cursing my backward university for not having a reading break.

suicide rates are highest at sfu, too. correlation?

anyway, my internship prospects look like they may be taking some concrete shape...i am either (a) working for MOMENTUM (i find out sunday whether and how i fit into the whole magazine-publishing scheme), (b) working part time as a research assistant to my prof gathering data in support of BCAMP's application to get magazine publishers a provincial tax credit and part time for BCAMP putting together a position paper including lobbying strategy and contacts, or (c) working (who knows how?) for douglas & mcintyre.

until then, i've got more pressing issues on my mind, like 'how the fuck am i going to get that 700-page book read by next friday,' and having to buckle down and write this silly paper on eben moglen i've been putting off for four days now.

*yawn*!

"A study for cost-tolerance allocation model of by integrating process capability index Cpm into product life cycle cost"

you know editing is going to be hell when that's the title of the article.

nori's nash summary:

wednesday, 19 january: flight supposed to leave at 1945h. thomas calls at around 1730h to tell me that due to freezing rain, the highway from the edmonton airport to the city may be closed and that i should call him when i get in to let him know what's up. check the flight information website, which claims that the flight has been delayed to depart at 2022h. check ama website, which says that the highway is extremely dangerous. refresh. highway is closed. fuck. sweetie says that he can see if he can convince his parents to pick me up via the back roads with chains on the tires. i leave the house at about 1815h.

hop on the 98 b-line at around 1835h. sit on one of the bench seats. dude across from me is trying to read life of pi, but there is someone sitting next to him talking to him. i can't see him because my line of sight is blocked by a girl standing in the aisle.

"yeah, you know? i got a $300 a day habit. i'm tryin' to get healthy, man."

dude reading is visibly disturbed. "uh...good luck with that," he says.

girl in the aisle gets off the bus. that's when i see that the guy behind her is actually smoking a crack pipe -- on a bus -- and blowing out the window. he gets off at the next stop. dude reading understandably sketched out.

"can you fucking believe that!?" i hear from another dude at the back of the bus. "i've never seen that in my life!"

"what happened?" asked this rather imperceptive man sitting in the corner.

"if he hadn't been blowing out the window, i would have clocked him and thrown him off the bus myself!"

"what happened?" the man repeated.

"he was smoking crack! i work in the downtown eastside. i see that kind of shit all the time, but never on the bus! what does he think this is, the skytrain?"

yes.

i eventually get off the bus and catch the connection to the airport. get to the desk.

"i'm supposed to fly to edmonton."

"that flight's been cancelled. but you're confirmed for the 945h flight tomorrow morning."

"there's nothing earlier?"

"well, there is a 7am flight, but it's full. you can come at 6am and try for a standby seat."

pout.

"are you sure i can't get a seat on the 7am flight?"

checks. "oh. things must have changed. okay, you're confirmed for the 7am. be here at 6 at the latest."

head home. call thomas with the news that he'd have to postpone my talk. spend the rest of the evening trying to sleep but not succeeding, then just giving up and watching television.

***

thursday, 20 january (my sweetie's birthday): get up at 500h. look around at the ridiculous renovation mess in the apartment and contemplate whether i should eat something. i'm not hungry, but i know i'll be ill if i don't eat something. decide against it and just pack a bunch of arrowroot cookies and ginger candies. call a cab. head to the airport.

fly to edmonton and cab it to the hotel. am late for my own talk by 20 minutes.

try to check in. they don't have a reservation for me. find thomas. get my t-shirt and registration package to discover that my name had been misspelled on the name tag. try to check in under that name while bizzak promises me a new name tag. head into the room to find the personal effects of at least two others. wonder whom i'm rooming with.

see ET, whom i haven't seen in years. she looks fabulous. also run into other old friends.

see doug southam's documentary photo session. it is excellent. conclude that it is an unfortunate coincidence that the cancer lady's last name is tarbox.

see paula simons's session on opinion writing. she's extremely fun and articulate. miss opinion writing.

meet my roommates, AC and KH, who both seem pretty solid.

hear buzz that people were disappointed that i didn't give my session today. begin to worry that everyone's expectations are too high.

spend evening editing and trying to get some reading done for jmax's tech class, but too tired.

***

friday, 21 january: get up to have breakfast up in la ronde. lose my roommates but find basil sitting with someone i don't know. ask to join them, introduce myself to the dude with longish greasy-looking hair. midway through my meal, basil gets up and leaves. other dude is weird.

"have you seen van helsing?"

and

"i could talk some more if you want."

he tells me he wanted to go to my talk, but since it's been rescheduled to 11, he can't see it.

pity.

i dick around in the tech room for an hour and print out some handouts for my talk. find myself with nothing else to do and just sit around getting progressively more nervous. head to my session room, wait for people to file in...

give my talk. it goes okay, i guess. there are roughly 50 people there -- not a bad turnout -- and i'm hoping they didn't all leave disappointed. a few people come and chat after my talk, which i take to be a good sign, although they're almost all weirdos. one chunky nerd asked me where he could find magazines to write for.

what?

i find out he's from the quill, and it all makes sense. i tell him to contact the mmpa and that seems to satisfy him, but he continues to talk to me about assinine things.

i go to RB's talk. that boy sure knows how to sell himself.

see one of ron johnson's many presentations. similar to what he had last year. don't learn much, but it's still good.

give my second talk. about a dozen people show up -- more than i expected. "since we're a smaller group, i want this to be more of a round-table. why don't you throw questions at me and let me know what you want to get out of this session?"

silence.

okay...

i talk about the lunatic society and robert maxwell and eventually, they start asking me questions, most of which i seem to be able to answer to their satisfaction.

evening: lewis lapham.

also, meet dmac's mom.

yes. lewis lapham. an engaging talk, as expected, but he doesn't say anything i don't expect him to say. get gag rule and 30 satires and have them signed. "is there outrage that we simply don't hear about up here?" i ask him.

"no. there's no outrage. i've tried hard to find it."

watch napoleon dynamite with dmac, HT and AL.

chat with bizzak.

go to bed.

***

saturday, 22 january: wake up to our fourth roommate, whom i haven't met, showering. she emerges, i introduce myself. she is a small unassuming asian girl.

head upstairs to breakfast, which, disappointingly, consists merely of fruit and pastries. eat a blueberry danish and a bowl of fruit salad. am joined by DL and LB.

go downstairs and run into SL. feel obligated to go see his talk. it's okay -- raises some issues that i hadn't thought about -- but his malappropisms and use of the word 'utilize' make my eyes roll.

see CB's talk on alt weeklies. see HA in the audience and chat with her for a bit. make fun of KO for having to introduce CB and encourage her to introduce him as her boyfriend. JC is also there. he is the shit.

see therese kehler talk about freelancing. she is, as roommate KH puts it, "abrasive and borderline rude." her advice is sort of inconsistent and not terribly helpful -- "i hated this pitch. and your pitch is the most important. it's your chance to make a good first impression...but we ran the story anyway"; "never write in the first person. but here are some cases where it worked"; "this was a terrible article. but i rewrote it and ran it anyway" -- leading me to think, ah...this is why ed is the way it is.

ken alexander's talk. glad i went, but his answers to the questions are somewhat disappointing. he doesn't seem to have much of an idea of the walrus's mandate, identity or audience. having a forum for canada's writers and readers is fine and good, but not having an easily articulated purpose just makes failure more likely. i won't be shocked if the magazine folds within five years.

meet the parents for dinner. they pick me up and we eat at pearl river. yum. there, a man comes and says hi to my dad, shakes his hand and mine, and asks my dad a few questions that he stumbles in answering. when the man leaves, my dad says "this is embarassing...i don't know who he is."

it takes the three of us a good ten minutes to figure it out, but we finally do -- it's old neighbours of ours who moved about three years ago. glad they don't understand cantonese...

head home after dinner, where i find my christmas present from my sweetie -- a the cheat sweatshirt -- which had taken until just the last week to arrive. i pack all of the crap we'd forgotten in edmonton after our visit over christmas and promptly fall asleep for two hours. alone in my old bed. sweet.

get dropped off at the hotel, where i pack up. things don't quite fit, but i cram as best as i can. head down to see dmac, find him in the tech room. we sit and talk for a long time...but we are interrupted. we will have to recapitulate later. anyway, we are interrupted by a group of his friends, who are up from banff and dropped by to say hi to him.

later on, we're joined by HT, and while the three of us are obviously engaged in conversation, AK comes along and sits down, attempting to join in on our rather personal discussion. we try subtle hints to get him to go away, while he gives us not-so-subtle hints to vote for him in the cup presidential election. we tell him none of us are voting, and he says "you can still read my position paper even if you're not voting."

go away, AK. you're not charismatic.

head toward the elevators, where i am flagged down by my roommates, who infom me that there is "action" happening in our hotel room thanks to the fourth girl. apparently, KH and AC walked in to find her and a dude partially clothed. they hadn't even chained the door or hung a 'do not disturb' sign on the door.

"oh sorry...uh...we'll give you some time," says KH, meaning, of course, "we'll give you some time to get dressed and compose yourselves," not "we'll give you some time to finish having sex." but as soon as they walk out the door, they hear the door chain being latched.

the three of us are sexiled.

"how long should we give them?" AC asks. KH just wants to get to bed. we eventually go back up, knock on the door, and roughly ten minutes later, hear (from another room down the hall) someone leave our room. i ascertain that it's safe enough to retrieve my sweatshirt, do, and head back downstairs to chill with dmac and HT, who are on safety. we sit until about 0330h and get to bed.

***

sunday, 23 january: wake up, finish packing, and eat brunch, which is a bizarre hodgepodge of food -- ravioli, waffles, salmon and eggs benedict?

head to HT and ZBP's session about queer journalism. a freak from the gleaner keeps interjecting. otherwise, it is a fine session.

get driven to the airport by thomas. will miss him till i see him next.

ROAR!

freezing rain in edmonton. flight cancelled. missing my own talk.

fuck!

poor thomas. he's probably much more stressed.

however, i bet he hasn't seen a dude smoke crack on a bus before. as of tonight, i have. it was spectacular.

two members of my magazine group missed class today because they were both too busy pumping water out of their respective homes.

people keep saying "i've never seen it rain like this," but they must have. it's vancouver. it did the same thing last year. probably has done the same thing for years prior, too.

just checked the environment canada website. it's -11 in edmonton right now, and will only get down to a low of -21 during the conference. big improvement from the -44 they were getting last week, and certainly better than the unceasing sheet of water here.

i liked vancouver better when it was covered in snow. for a reason i may have identified but am not entirely sure i have, i feel much more vulnerable when i'm walking out in the rain. it's not just the wetness and the grey skies -- i think the fact that my rain gear cuts off a large portion of my peripheral vision puts me on edge. i can't see what's around me, and i don't know what's coming.

now it's beginning to look like i may need an entirely separate wardrobe just to make it to the airport tomorrow. my rain coat, rubber boots and jupo will serve me no function in edmonton.

i'm excited but nervous. i have no idea how many people are going to come to my talks. "who the fuck is this person, and why the fuck should i listen to her?" is probably what most delegates will think when they read the conference schedule.

my sweetie just warned me not to pee in the ice machine at the hotel. i shall keep that in mind.

there is a big hole in my kitchen ceiling. but the installation is almost done. i have a functioning stove and dishwasher again, although there's so much debris and garbage in front of both appliances that i can't do much with either.

***

SM put it best on thursday: "do the rest of you feel like you've entered a state of perpetual panic that doesn't look like it'll abate until the end of term?"

it's true. i'm experiencing this continued jaw-clenching stress that is a bit too overwhelming to know what to do about -- one of those situations where you freeze and you can't accomplish anything, even though you know that'll just exacerbate everything in the end.

monday was fine; "i can handle this," i thought, as we went through the syllabi for the management and technology courses. when the outline for the magazine project was handed out on tuesday, the "how the fuck am i going to get this all done" set in, and when we had our first history class on thursday, i completely slipped into a deer-in-headlights mode.

i'm going back to edmonton for nash on wednesday. i can't help but panic that if i fall behind, i just won't ever get adequately caught up. i put together one of my presentations yesterday. the other, i'm being a little too flippant about, i think. i've convinced myself nobody's going to show up...

the courses all look like they'll be interesting; but they will be a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a whole hell of a lot of baptism by fire.

our magazine project i'm apprehensive about. our groups have evidently been mixed since last term, and i'm afraid that i might not be able to get along with everyone quite as well as last term. i'm also concerned that we're all generally stressed out, and that the tension's pervading our meetings, putting us on edge much more than is reasonable. ultimately, i'm worried that the magazine we'll end up having to work on won't be something i'm passionate about and i'll just end up doing a mediocre job on it.

finally, i'm worried about my internship. only one place has gotten back to me, and we've been playing telephone tag for the past week.

*sigh* (frustration...)

~sigh~ (calming...)

one day at a time...one day at a time...

my kitchen, and the room that's supposed to (eventually) be the laundry room are in utter disarray at the moment.

have i told this story before? here's the synopsis: when we bought the place, the owners claimed there was a rough-in for a washer-dryer set in the little room by the kitchen they were using as a storage closet. that didn't at all influence whether or not we would have bought the place, but i didn't really give it much thought, since, after having bought a house, it was rather unlikely that we would have any money left over to buy a washer-dryer set, particularly since my tuition this year is outrageous.

however, my in-laws came to visit, and while they were here, they bought us a washer and a dryer. ridiculously generous of them, to say the least. the machines were scheduled to be delivered several weeks later, and when they were, we cleared out the storage closet and my sweetie attempted to install the set, only to discover:

1) the "pipe" that's supposed to feed water into the washer is about 0.25" in diameter, meaning that it would take approximately 50 years to fill the washer.

2) there was no standing pipe in which the water was supposed to drain from the washer. there was just this corrugated hose that runs a convoluted path through the kitchen cabinets and just ends right under the kitchen sink. meaning, of course, that if we were to have hooked up a washer to it, after it had taken 50 years to fill with water, it would drain into our kitchen cabinet, onto the kitchen floor, and quite possibly the apartment below us.

3) the dryer electrical was piggybacked off of the stove.

4) the washer electrical was piggybacked off of the microwave.

when this was further investigated, it was found that, rather than run a cable behind the drywall and through holes in the studs, the installer had simply gauged this curved trench in the drywall and embedded the cable into it.

first class.

my sweetie's intial plan was to smash through the concrete kitchen floor with a sledgehammer and run proper piping under the floor. he called our realtor to ask where exactly our property ends and where the property of the dude below us begins.

turns out his property ends at his ceiling...but ours ends at our floor. the gap belongs to the strata council, with whom my sweetie had already had a previous run-in. suffice it to say that we decided not to put ourselves in a position to have to deal with them again. anyway, when the realtor found out what a shoddy job had been done with the installation, he kind of went crazy and said that he wanted to take the previous owner to court, how the whole thing is "mickey mouse" and how all fire fighters were useless (the previous owner was a firefighter, to put that last comment in some context, but i guess it would have been marginally funnier if i'd left it unexplained.) my sweetie did his best to discourage any kind of legal action, but the realtor was insistent that we keep all of our receipts and get reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses. turns out it wasn't the previous owner's shit-installation job, after all, but because they signed some sort of disclosure form about alterations to the property, they're still paying for the cost of materials.

strangely enough, the previous owners' realtor called us, saying that the previous owner's father had died and he'd made the coat rack by our door. they then offered to pay "any amount" for it. we said just to pay for our washer dryer installation and not worry about it.

wow. this isn't a synopsis at all.

point is, we had to run the pipe behind the stove and dishwasher. both appliances were pulled out and this morning, my sweetie flooded the bottom kitchen cabinet after discovering that he couldn't shut off the cold water supply to the sink. he's going to try freezing the part of the pipe with dry ice, cutting it, the capping it.

what should have been a straightforward plug-and-play installation is turning into quite the gargantuan mess. i'm looking forward to being able to use my stove again. i don't even care about the washer and dryer anymore, excpet that they're currently taking up space in our living room.

if DV were here, he'd say that my week was a testament to the church of the shaft and the flow...

monday: picked up S&A's wedding gift (part of it, anyway). that night, we dropped it off at their place and watched them forcefeed their cat. see, cats are kind of retardedly designed. housecats will get fat, then if something upsets them, they can stop eating. like other animals, they'll begin to metabolize their own body fat if they don't have food. problem is, their livers can't handle that. it gets all fatty and useless, and, if untreated, the cat just dies. apparently, then, the solution is to forcefeed the cat. i watched as A held the cat's head while S squirted pasty liquid catfood into the cat's mouth as the animal protested. rawr-rawr-rawr-rawr...

tuesday: finally got my letters and CV all ready for the internship application. went to school and printed everything out. then went and bought myself a long overdue pair of cons. they've got quite the racket going; there must be, like $2 worth of material in them and they're selling for $60. brings me one step closer to being joey ramone next halloween, though. also, bought the napoleon dynamite DVD, which my sweetie was convinced i would never be able to do. also picked up cables to connect the laptop to the television so that on saturday, we could run the DVD off my 14" laptop while watching it on my 13" television...?

wednesday: walked around town and dropped off my internship stuff. both BCAMP and ABPBC are in sun towers, so if i get hired at either of those places, i could head to victory square and shoot up during my lunch break. MR at ABPBC was honest, though -- she said that she probably wouldn't hire on an intern if she couldn't find funding for it. BCAMP is still a possibility, but the director wants me to think up potential projects -- she knows much better than i what her organization does, though, so i'm sort of at a loss. dropped off my CV at adbusters, too. tried to tell the lady i spoke to that i'm applying for an internship, not one of their writer/editor jobs, but it didn't seem to sink in. she was sort of bitchy.

thursday: my cold got worse. it also snowed about 4 cm. news stories showed helpless and hopeless vancouverites slipping everywhere, many of them complaining that city crews hadn't salted enough. bunch of wieners. i also got promoted/demoted in my freelancing job, depending on how you look at it. my supervising editor moved me to another journal -- the visual computer, from the international journal of advanced manufacturing technology; the upshot is that it's easier to edit, but i'm paid less per page (2.75 euros). i think it's still a good deal, though. we'll see...

my sweetie picked up a wireless router yesterday, i'm now doing this from bed. sort of dangerous, in that now i have no reason to leave bed.

wireless is awesome.

vancouver is ridiculous. they're predicting we'll get 1 cm of snow tomorrow. there are already 2 cm of salt on the roads.

also, i'm now giving two presentations at nash. how did that happen?

napoleon dynamite party this saturday. woo!

hm.

long time no update.

well, here i am now. what do i say...?

1) we got a sweet haul for our non-denominational gift exchange. i got an ipod mini from the in-laws, and my sweetie got some high-quality hockey skates. got some new clothes, and JH brought me a jupo -- a rain skirt -- which he is now stubbornly refusing to accept repayment for... (thanks, JH). my sweetie got me an oilers jersey, which i will wear either when the nhl comes back, or when it's clear that it will never come back. to wear it now is just sort of wanky. apparently, he also ordered a sweatshirt with the cheat on it for me, but it hasn't arrived in the mail. i wonder if it will before we go back to van.

the grandmother in-law gave each of us a $500 cheque, which was sort of excessive, to say the least. one of these is going straight to the red cross in light of the tsunami disaster in south-east asia. it's staggering how many people that disaster's taken.

2) saw (or will see) most of the people i'd wanted to see, with the notable exceptions of KL&TH and M&L. i'm not sure what's going on with the former -- been e-mailing both of them for a while and they haven't responded at all, which leads me to believe that maybe they just don't want to see me (which is okay; i just sort of want to know). i'm thinking M&L may have read my blog entry where i said their wedding wasn't much fun and don't want to talk to me. *shrug*...?

3) i sent an invoice for my editing work done over december. i edited 411 pages. yeesh. also, the value of a euro has gone up, now i'm getting $4.95 CDN per page. wahoo!

4) been trying to lay out the january issue of the physics journal, and it's a total disaster. acquisitions have been poor, and my continual emphasis that the editors need to get me good photos and graphics just doesn't seem to be sinking in. also, the english editor has been retardedly slow to respond; i haven't even gotten his feedback for the proofs i've put out yet. fortunately, it seems that most schools are starting late this term (i don't go back until the 10th). we may have a couple of buffer days that i'm growing more and more confident we'll have to take.

5) still need to fix my CV and write my cover letters for my internship. blargh!

6) am sick. it was only a matter of time. DA was sick...DI was sick...the lack of sleep and dry air aren't helping.

7) looked up program requirements for a PhD in communications. 12 full-time terms or 6 years, it says. am i ready to make such a commitment?

i know edmonton sort of sucks, but it still bugs me sometimes to hear people talk smack about it. some don't understand why i would possibly miss this suburban dystopia, where south edmonton common has really gotten retardedly out of control. in addition to it being a large ungainly cluster of big-box stores where you're forced to drive to get from one store to the next, the traffic congestion around the area is unreal. way to concentrate all that's wrong with north america in one disgusting cold-sore of a place, kids.

yet, i like my hometown. today was the second day in a row of big ultra-blue sky. sunshine reflecting off the snow on the ground makes up for the early nights. vancouver may be 5 degrees above freezing, but being under nothing but clouds gets to you after a while.

unfortunately, all of the mucous membranes in my sinuses have shrivelled in retreat at the dry air. i've been drinking tonnes of water (edmonton tap water isn't full of cupric sediment like vancouver water is, incidentally), and it's all i can do to keep from getting a nosebleed.

also, my eyes hurt like hell, and i can't really tell if it's because it's dry, because i haven't been able to sleep like a normal person 'cause my dad likes to keep my room at meat-locker temperature, or because all i've been doing over the past four days is read undecipherable papers about fuzzy sets, weld pools and grinding by people who can't write in english and don't seem to mind. a new study says that people who stare at computer screens for long periods of time are more likely to get glaucoma. now that i've removed myself from a profession where i might blind myself with a laser, i seem to have chosen a different route to blindness. some might call it fate.

***

been reading publishing for profit for my management course next term....and it's a pretty crappy book. spelling idiosyncracies, clichés, and the layout is just horrible. i think it's what, 11.5/14 or something, and the margins on the book are about a quarter of an inch. it's a real travesty that a book on publishing can look and read that badly.

so! it appears that i will be speaking at nash! thomas *ahem* neglected to inform me of this when he'd scheduled it, leading me to assume that i was off the schedule and he was avoiding telling me. starting a magazine from scratch is supposedly my topic. i'm thinking about how to turn that into an hour-long session.

unfortunately, my speaking engagement coincides with my sweetie's birthday, as did last year's conference. oh well. i've got his gift all purchased (found it serendipitously while shopping for his christmas gift) so he shouldn't be too upset. three more sleeps till he arrives, and hopefully with my ibook.

***

my pants are too long, my mother has decided. "let me shorten them for you." every year, i come home with pants that might be a little frayed, and she takes it upon herself to shorten and rehem them, leaving me with a suitcase full of ridiculous garments that aren't quite long enough to be pants but much too long to be shorts.

i have forbidden her from altering any of my clothing this year. we'll see how well she does.

ah, dial-up.

at least it's something, and i'm not totally disconnected from the rest of the world. it's not quite as frustratingly slow as i'd braced myself for, either. i mean, what else am i going to do with my time?

arrived in edmonton yesterday evening, and am already feeling a bit under the weather. didn't help that i couldn't get to sleep until 3am mountain time and was woken up by a phone call (wrong number, apparently) at 8:30am. who the fuck calls people at 8:30 on a saturday, anyway?

my parents have this creepy photo-essay of my life framed in my bedroom like some sort of shrine. other than that, not much has changed. so far, i've just been diligently earning my pay, 3 euros at a time. i'd told the supervising editor that i would have only sporadic e-mail access, so before i left van, he'd uploaded about 50 articles for me to work on over my 'holidays,' at my request. don't mind working -- just eagerly anticipating actually being able to spend some time with my friends.

i'd wanted to bring my ibook to edmonton (where all of my CV stuff i need to finish for my internship applications, my paper on math typography and my physics journal shit are, not to mention indesign), but it hadn't been fixed yet by the time i left town. hopefully it'll be done by the time my sweetie flies out here.

this entry is turning into quite the muddled hodgepodge of crap. what else? oh, my mother is livid at my passive-aggressive, gossipy bitch of an aunt (by marriage). it seems she's been talking smack about me to my relatives in hong kong. i don't care, but my mother does. according to the aunt, i'm fickle, flighty and i'm never going to graduate or find a decent job. that, apparently, was enough to set off some sort of rabid mother bear syndrome in my mom. it's kind of funny to watch, but she really does just need to relax.

okay, it's become painfully apparent that i have nothing of any value to say here. i think it just feels good to be online, which may be a sign that i should sign off.

i leave for edmonton tomorrow. i'll be there almost a week before my sweetie arrives. i haven't spent that much concentrated time alone with my parents in a long, long time. i anticipate that i'll have a good time for about the first couple of days, and then it will get excrutiating.

also, all they have is a dial-up internet connection.

will i survive?

so, kids, if you're in edmonton, call me up. please.

please.

the great fridge purge.

i've had an inordinately large amount of soup this weekend. i found half a bag of floppy carrots and turned it into carrot ginger soup. not bad, but it's a lot of soup, especially with the butternut squash soup i had on friday and saturday. it looks like i'm in for more, too -- minestrone, perhaps -- as there's also a rather large bag of hot house tomatoes on the verge of spoilage...

beyond the soup, though, i seem to be running out of food, and i'm leaving in five days, so i'm not even sure i should buy more groceries.

***

text & context final exam tomorrow. eeeee...

i seem to be fated to have laptops break on me, then have the repair people mistype my phone number into the work order. the same thing happened to me when my pc laptop got sad in june. fortunately, mac repairpeople care a lot more, in my opinion, and generally seem way more competent.

i called today after not having heard from them at all, worried that they'd been trying to reach me through the errant phone number in their database. turns out the unit is still somehow under some miraculous warranty (despite the fact that thomas had had it for, what, over two years?) and they've already ordered the parts. they said nothing about having to wipe the hard drive, so i'm hoping that it doesn't have to happen. i actually haven't owned it long enough to have too much content on it; i just don't want to lose the software that i *cough* don't have the cds for. i hope to get it back sometime early next week.

i leave for edmonton on the 10th. my sweetie doesn't leave until the 16th. i'm going early so that my parents can no longer complain that i spend all of my time in town out with my friends and not with them. i really should spend some more time with them, though -- both have had elective surgery this past year.

anyway, there's a tentative plan to head to brooks on boxing day for a corb lund concert (sans geoff berner!).

***

had dmac and his girl over for dinner last night. we had a great winter meal: butternut squash soup, homemade yam gnocchi and punkin pie. also, balsamic-marinated chicken and watercress and red radish salad. yum.

i still have tonnes of punkin pie left, so gerry and smorg, if you're reading this, you should come up for pie and hot chocolate or some such.

right. i should really write this essay so i can get studying for my final on monday, hmm?

you know, protesters' "hey-hey, ho-ho" chants are lame enough. do they really need to put political lyrics to 'my bonnie lies over the ocean'?

***

pierre berton died. huh.

my ibook is sad.

i dunno what's wrong with it. the display got all fucked up after it fell asleep, then when i tried to restart it, all it gave me was a blank screen. i charged it up overnight, and by morning, it seemed to boot up, but then it fucked up again after it fell asleep.

~sigh~

and i've only had it for a month.

fortunately, i have my old computer, so i'm not totally up shit creek for my text & context paper, but all of my notes were on the ibook. i dropped it off today for repairs. we'll see how much i'll have to fork over in a few days. i hope i can get it back before heading home to edmonton.

***

went to S&A's wedding this weekend. it was lovely. they're so sweet together that if my relationship weren't solid, i'd have thrown up or something. and the more weddings i go to, the more i realize that M&L's wedding, the first i'd been to, was actually quite bad--i didn't have very much fun at all.

my sweetie's off for a 10-day stint in switzerland. i'm not sure if his absence has had a positive or negative effect on my productivity.

okay. one paper, one presentation and one final to go...

our class went to the bruce mau 'massive change' exhibit at the art gallery today. it's supposed to be all about the future of global design. i'd really wanted to go when i first heard about it, but as the weeks went by, my enthusiasm dwindled, primariliy because i heard that it was massive crap.

our group got a guided tour of the installation, though not a comprehensive one. our tour guide was essentially pierre bernard, 'pierre bernard's recliner of rage' on late night with conan o'brien, without the lisp. the cadence and pace of his speech was so perplexingly bizarre.

"am i asking a rhetorical question?"

his whole tour was essentially that (it'd have been hilarious if he'd actually said that) -- he'd pose one question after another, and it was never clear whether he'd actually want us to respond. he'd pause, wait, wait, wait...then ask another question. coupled with the visual assault of the exhibit itself, the general tour experience was exhausting, and sort of a waste of my time. the exhibit, despite being gratuitously huge, was underwhelming, and i had other things i need to get done. oh well. at least i'm in a program where we get to go on field trips. are you?

***

leaving for scott and anne's wedding tomorrow. i haven't even started packing yet, though it shouldn't take long. i have to leave straight from school to the airport, so i have to take my shit with me to class. i wish i had less to do; then i'd actually enjoy this trip. i'm generally not as excited about scott and anne's wedding as i guess i ought to be about two good friends getting married. probably because it feels like they've been married for a while already, and because we're not going to know very many people at the event. also, did i mention i'm drowning in work?

only today did i manage to finish writing my design paper, and i have yet to typeset it, which is going to take me at least two more hours. i haven't started my text and context paper on scholarly publishing, nor have i started research for my libel presentation. poo. my efforts to track down libel lawyers and editors to talk to have been fruitless to date, and i'm rapidly running out of time.

yet, it'll all be over in a week and a half.

fucking insane.

drowning...

i'm supposed to do a presentation for my design class, which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem, if i didn't have to do it on monday. yeesh. it's supposed to be about the typography of mathematics. it'll be interesting, i thought. once i started doing research (about a week and a half later than i ought to have), only to find that (heh) there aren't really any good sources out there.

whee!

there was a book called the handbook of typography for the mathematical sciences listed in the sfu library catalogue. sounds perfect, hmm? unfortunately, it was on loan. checked ubc library, and they didn't have it. desperation mode led me too check chapters on-line. no luck. amazon.ca had it, thankfully, and i ordered it with rush shipping.

yesterday afternoon, the buzzer rang.

'hello?'

'this is canada post with a package for nori maki.'

'oh. come on up.'

that was fast, i thought. but awesome, i'll have my book, and i might be able to pull this off after all. i heard a knock, opened the door, and the canada post dude handed me this massive box of canned fish from the st. jean cannery in nanaimo and left me gaping at the door, completely perplexed.

it was addressed to me alone. i had no idea what to make of it.

i e-mailed my sweetie, confused. were we expecting a big random box of canned fish? he called later that evening and said that he'd forgotten to tell me, but his mom was sending me a box of fish as a graduation present.

can't say that i'm not grateful. it's just quite possibly the most bizarre graduation present i have ever gotten.

anyway, the book i ordered arrived today, and it turns out to be kind of a useless piece of poo. i think i'm going to extract all i can for my presentation and *ahem* send it back.

also, i've been trying for the past three days to install metafont on my computer, with zero success.

first, it gave me

dyld: /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/mf can't open library: /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.6.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)

when i tried to compile the code. i looked on the ol' information superhighway for a solution, and it told me to install fink and get the "lesstif-shlibs" package. i tried. i got

Failed: Can't resolve dependency "gcc3.1" for package "xfree86-4.4.0-13" (no matching packages/versions found)

procured the X11 tools cd from the ubyssey and installed X11, gcc2.95.2 on my computer.

tried installing "lesstif-shlibs" again.

same error.

*fume*! help?

***

so i have a presentation and a paper on the typography of mathematics for my design class, a paper on scholarly publishing for text and context, and a presentation on libel for editing. i went to ubc to drain the libraries of their books: found four libel books at the law library, three books on scholarly publishing at koerner library, a couple of books on the history of mathematical notation at the math library...i find it peculiar that now that i'm no longer a student at ubc, i'm going out of my way to exploit that university's resources. i mean, before today, i'd never even been inside the law or the math libraries.

so...much...work.

oh...

i earned 42 euros yesterday.

for lunch today, i had ten bits of leftover deep-fried cheese, six pieces each of brocolli and cauliflower, and a mandarin orange.

yeah, i'm gonna die.

that's what i get for having a fingerfood potluck, i guess. it was good times -- five of my publishing friends came, along with a bunch of ubyssey kids, and a few odd characters from a few odd places. not surprisingly, few physics-types showed up. anyway, it was fun, and by virtue of the fact that it was a fingerfood party, the clean-up this morning wasn't terribly horrific. i seriously need to vacuum, though.

i made tuna tartar served on romaine lettuce leaves, which my sweetie seemed to enjoy. people brought samosas, bread and cheese, cookies, pumpking pie, mushroom pate and, yes, deep-fried cheese bits, among some other more unusual dishes, including curried deviled eggs with, uh, raisins.

today, i scanned the leftovers: about half a glass of red wine, a single falafel ball; two slices of baguette topped with tomato, feta and red pepper spread; ten cheese bits; a tub of seven-layer dip; a quarter of a bag of corn chips; some cauliflower and brocolli from the veggie platter; two separate baguettes halves...

somehow, a lone falafel ball doesn't quite seem as inviting the day after a party.

SW didn't make it last night, though. on thursday, he was dressed up as a cowboy and taken out for his stag: to memphis blues, the railway club, then a gay bar. he'd gotten so intoxicated at the railway club that he was apparently talking to the little model train that runs around the establishment, after which he had at least seven additional drinks. his roommate tells us that since that night, he's only left his bedroom to go to the bathroom. he'll never want to be single again.

***

so! i got hooked up with a freelance copy-editing position. it called for someone who had a science background, had editing experience and knew LaTeX, and i guess that made me an apt candidate. it pays 3 euros a page, and the dude who's doling out the work estimates that i'd be able to do 4-5 pages once i'm trained, but i'm not sure. so far, i've worked on this one six-page manuscript for over five hours...

i'm supposed to copy-edit articles for a journal published by springer -- the international journal of advanced manufacturing technology (titillating, no?), which, apparently, are written largely by non-english speakers. i'm finding it hard to know whether a bizarre term i come across is an idiosyncracy in translation or whether it's an esoteric term used in advanced manufacturing technology. i'm learning, i guess, but it seems to be taking me a fuck of a long time.

point is, i'm getting income soon. not very much, but maybe i can break even now instead of digging into my dwindling savings.

well, back to work...

i'm rich!

well, not quite. but at least i can eat again.

i turned in my six keys, and got $145 back in deposit. my keychain is unrecognizably lighter. i also endeavoured to get my tuition reimbursed. according to the chick at student services, i'll have $282 credited to my visa in two or three weeks.

taking money back from ubc feels so good...

***

friday night fingerfood potluck! i'm excited.

it's quite, quite retarded that the night when the launching of fireworks is the most prevalent is the night when you have hundreds of kids running about the streets.

vancouver is weird.

nori maki, MSc.

catharsis!

today was what they call a tremendous day.

text & context was cancelled, so i was able to finish up my final thesis corrections early in the morning. my second reader had returned the manuscript to my supervisor, who'd relayed that 'there is not much by way of corrections,' which was great news, but before i actually laid eyes on the manuscript, i had no idea whether he was basing that judgment solely on the amount of ink on the paper. i had paranoid spells of wondering if it'd be covered in short comments that would take a lot of time to correct. 'rewrite,' for instance, or 'this is all wrong.'

it was just a few casualties of editing here and there. it took me about 25 minutes to fix up the thesis, another hour to distill it, then yet another hour waiting for kinko's to print it up (77 dollars for three copies!?).

i had a design midterm, but besides one question that i sort of blanked out on, the rest of the questions were pretty awesome. 'what is CMYK?'

i haven't had a midterm like that in a long time. i love my design instructor.

anyway, right before i left harbour centre, ZBP came by with thomas's (well, now my) computer! yeah, the one i'd been waiting since the end of september for. i haven't played with it yet, but i've got it.

as soon as i got onto ubc campus, it was a whirlwind of errands: get thesis signed by my second reader, drop off dmac's prayer flags and basil's tickets at the newspaper, get thesis signed by supervisor, run to the faculty of graduate studies...

i got in by the skin of my teeth; at 3:56. the office closes at 4, officially. i thought they were going to give me a hard time about there being colour in my thesis, but the lady reviewing my thesis didn't really say much about it at all.

'so you know this colour won't show up in microfiche, right?'

'yeah, i know.'

'okay. i just wanted to make sure you knew.'

she signed some forms, accepted my thesis, and now i have an MSc!

i went and had a great long talk with the hilariously flamboyant grad secretary, then i ran into MTh on the way out the building, who bought me tea as we sat and caught up for a while.

got to chat with dmac for a bit, then went to say hi to my sweetie in the lab. he ended up relenting after not too much arm-twisting and came out to dinner with me at the vietnamese noodle house. i haven't had dinner with my sweetie in a long time.

finally, the night sky was almost completely clear -- perfect conditions to see the lunar eclipse.

oh, and thomas should be getting into town sometime tonight. whee!

now, i am at home, wrapped in a blanket, warm and happy.

***

i have been invited to no fewer than three different election-watching parties. i am torn.

today at school, i was given a $25 gift certificate to the sfu bookstore because i could spell more words from the letters in "publish" in three minutes than anyone else in my class.

i feel special.

so i didn't want to jinx it, but i guess there's no point being irrationally superstitious.

i submitted my thesis to a second reader yesterday.

my excitement is subdued, since it obviously isn't a done deal yet. with any hope, i'll be done before the end of this month.

now i wait. i hope the second reader doesn't ask me to rewrite the whole thing.

also, i now have to do a presentation about my thesis work in november; some requirement of the physics department that i didn't know about. i know i'm being utterly paranoid, but i'm afraid i'll give my presentation, and someone will ask me a simple question i totally can't answer and somehow, someone will rescind my master's degree.

ugh.

why do i care, anyway? i'm getting a new master's. maybe 'cause i figure i'm owed a degree considering how much the thesis shortened my life.

***

my text and context prof sort of offered me a 'project manager' job today. it was weird. i thought he was proposing an internship, but it turns out it's for an academic journal grant proposal that's due in april. i want to do it, but i'd be so swamped. it'd be paid though. the more i think about it, the more i really want to be involved. i just don't know if i can handle the workload.

i don't know what to do for my internship. you, reading this: what do you think? i'm being torn in 6 different directions:

(a) ccsp press: the canadian centre for studies in publishing (the department that runs my mpub program) is going to be starting up its own press. tentatively, anyway. i'm totally stoked on being involved in this academic press right from the beginning. i think my internship report would be really relevant and hot.

(b) MOMENTUM: my beloved MOMENTUM is coming back...? that's the rumour, anyway. if it's being relaunched and the timing is right, i'd want to be involved. i could do editorial, design and management for a magazine that i love. i'm sort of wary of working for a publication that seems perpetually on the brink of collapse, though. i guess that doesn't really leave me with that many options.

(c) arsenal pulp press: small press that prints a load of really really awesome titles. they also share an office with geist. i think i could learn a lot, but the student who interned there this past summer says that she was relegated to menial duties. also, she didn't get paid.

(d) adbusters: talked to a dude at media democracy day and they seem amenable to taking interns. i'm not sure if i'd rather work in their editorial or design departmenti don't know if i'd be paid, though -- almost seems counter to their philosophy. that typically wouldn't be a concern for me -- lord knows i've done my fair share of unpaid thankless work out of love for the publication -- given my current situation, i'd sort of like to make enough money to eat.

(e) bcamp: the bc association of magazine publishers. one of the other students in the program used to work there and said there would be a lot to do. i've always wanted to work for a publishers' association and do some policy work. i don't know if i'd be paid, though.

(f) ubc press: i'd be on the ubc campus (where my sweetie and old friends and the ubyssey are) and, according to one of the students in the program last year, her supervisor asked for a report to be turned in at the end of the summer, meaning that she was essentially done her internship report for the program before september. also, she was paid.

mhmmmmm...it's something to mull over. i talked to my prof about all of this today, and he said 'they all sound like viable options.'

doesn't really help me make a decision. *shrug*

oh god, i want to die. or kill. actually, mostly kill.

i was supposed to submit my final draft to my second reader tomorrow. my supervisor gave me his corrections on friday and said he'd like to do a final minor edit (ugh) before i submitted the thesis. i told him i'd try to get it to him early afternoon on sunday and if he sent it back to me with a minor copy edit, i could probably have it to him monday morning.

he sends me the 'copy-edited' version, full yet again of retarded corrections of digitally scrawled corrections on the PDF, some of which didn't even make grammatical sense, as well as one thing that he perceived to be an eggregious omission that, he says, "i should have caught earlier."

fuck you. fuck you!

"why didn't you vary pitch?" he asks.

uh...because you told me i didn't have to? now i'm not sure what's happening. i have to make all sorts of additions that are going to take a ridiculous amount of time, and my second reader probably won't get it back in time if i submit it too late. and i have to get the final version in by 31 october, or i'm humped. financially, that is. also, the book project at school (real school) is picking up. these next three weeks are going to be utter hell.

fuck.

ROAR!

no, i think this is a rare occasion that merits numerous exclamation points.

ROAR!!!

***

however, i did make home-made spinach-ricotta cannelloni tonight. it was yummy. it almost makes up for the fact that it's almost 2 am and i'm still not done my thesis. actually, it really doesn't.

sigh.

here's a harrowing thought: a simpsons live-action movie.

once the simpsons finally goes off the air (not soon enough), it'll take a generation for it to sort of peter out, then some ass in hollywood's going to cast the spawn of freddy prinze jr. and sarah michelle gellar as bart.

it's going to happen. you know it.

with any hope, i'll be long dead. if not, i guess i'll just have to burn something down.

***

after getting my latest round of corrections from my supervisor, where he:
(a) re-corrected passages that he had corrected in the first place, essentially restoring them to the way they were in the first place
(b) corrected certain passages and inserted rather substantial queries that he could have (and should have) been dealt with on, oh, the first or the second reading, maybe? yarrgh. frustrations...

...i put my foot down and gave him an ultimatum. this next version i send will be the final one, i told him. the one to be sent to the second reader. no more changes! if there is still something heinously wrong with it, he should have caught it sooner, i say. if i submit any later than 31 october, i'm out another $300, which, as you'll recall from a couple of posts back, i cannot afford.

he seems to have responded well to it, so it looks like, after this weekend, i'll be ready to send the damn thing to a second reader. then, a week later, i should have any last corrections done. then i submit, and with any hope, i'll never have to talk to anybody about fucking photonic fucking crystals fucking ever again!

some of my publishing friends are urging me to have a big party when i finish. i think they just want me to buy them booze and cook them food.

***

i really really want to see team america. but i'm po'. also, i have no time.

some random shit:

-nobody seems to be reading this blog anymore. *shrug*. probably my fault for not making it more compelling.

-my kitchen is splattered with pumpkin (rightly pronounced 'punkin') bits. i probably expended more calories chopping up the pumpkin than i'll ever get out of it. soon, though, my house will be infused with the amazing aroma of pumpkin pie. the pumpkin that my sweetie bought was big and kind of stringy; i don't think it'll work that well for soup. but i did manage to get about two cups worth of seeds out of it, and i think the whole thing cost about 50 cents.

-i think i'm more or less done my thesis. i don't want to get too exuberant about it prematurely, though -- that was my mistake last week, and when i was brought down, it put me in a foul mood for days. i'd like to have a party for everyone i've ever complained to about my thesis, but unfortunately, i'm po'.

-i was supposed to get thomas's ibook this past week, but no news from ZBP, who was acting as courier. maybe she just decided to keep it for herself?

-this will be the first year in three S&A and we won't be having thanksgiving dinner, and it's sort of bumming me out. i feel like it's the first in a list of traditions that we developed to support each other during the hellish experience of our master's degrees to die and that more will soon follow.

-my house is a total disaster. there is paper everywhere, a pile of dirty dishes and clothes strewn throughout the apartment. i know how i'll be spending my holiday tomorrow...

i am po'.

my sweetie calculated our finances this weekend and found that with his reduced income, my lack of income, our mortgage payments and other bills, we are left with roughly $2 per meal.

shit.

anyone want to have me over for dinner?

"you need to make it more a thesis and less a list of facts."

that's what i got out of my meeting with my supervisor.

he didn't even seem to notice my "thesis schmesis" shirt.

actually, it's a "thesis shmesis" shirt, by virtue of the chick at bang-on's screw-up. and i realized yesterday that every time i wore the shirt, i'd have to explain that to people around me. it has already grown tiresome.

also: i hate taking the bus home at the same time rez trash is trying to get off campus. i want to submit my thesis so that i never have to do that again.

i thought i was so close. so close. i've been almost done my thesis for the past month now, and it's really starting to piss me off. now, after this meeting with the supervisor, my workload for tomorrow's just been doubled.

excellent.

some good stuff did happen today, but i'll post about that later. now i must froth.

wow.

evelyn lau (author of runaway: diary of a street kid) came to talk to our editing class today. she just talked about what it was like to be an author being edited, but just being in her presence was so...raw.

she published runaway when she was just 18 and listening to her speak and realizing what she's been through made me at once grateful that i never had to experience any of her hardships and sort of disappointed that i would never have the scope to be a genuinely profound writer.

i mean, i've had such a pedestrian upbringing...the brilliant creative geniuses that rise to acclaim, whether it be in writing or in art, seem to have had such hard lives -- most either psychologically disturbed or drug-addicted, or both -- and it makes me wonder if i'd need a similar kind of afliction to really understand.

evelyn lau was so articulate and seemed so warm and, well, normal. just speaking to her now, it's virtually impossible to picture her as a strung-out hooker on a vancouver street corner. it was amazing to hear her relay her experience with such linguistic perfection and then to realize that she didn't have an education past the age of 14.

that said, our editing instructor, who happened to edit runaway, actually, told us that she probably wasn't sustaining herself with just her writing and was likely getting some money from some freelance editing she was doing on the side. for some reason, i inexplicably found myself concerned for her well-being, something i don't feel i have the right to do.

wow.

i wrote the conclusion to my thesis on thursday night. i expected it to be much more cathartic an experience than it was, but i'm still glad that i've pretty much got the bulk of it done.

i asked the supervisor if it was at all realistic to expect to be able to submit my thesis before the 8 october deadline.

"it's not impossible," he says.

which means that if i elect to get no sleep and work on it every waking moment, it'll be down to the wire.

the first battery of corrections rolled in from my supervisor tonight. he's out of town, so he's got some funky-ass program that lets him scrawl notes on a PDF. he sent me the document full of barely-legible digitally rendered scribbles, but you know what? it's feedback, which is more than i've gotten in the last two weeks.

this weekend, i have to finish a paper for my text and context course, after having finally finished reading blockbusters and trade wars yesterday, a full week after i intended to be done with it. it doesn't seem like the paper should be that difficult, but for some reason, it's a bit of a time sink-hole for me right now. i aim to get it done tonight, meaning i should be up until 2 am. i also have to write a 5-page manuscript evaluation (requiring a partial re-reading of my manuscript) for my editing course and two TI sheets for the book publishing project. i'm expected to make corrections to my thesis in the meantime, something i'm not entirely sure where to fit. i'm way behind on my reading...oh...

went to dmac's for dinner tonight, though. shrimp and veggies in a green curry sauce on rice. and peanut-butter-cream pie. yum. oh yeah, and i got to see the incredibly (like, REALLY) phallic lava lamp that his parents brought him. what would his sigmund freud action figure say?

tomorrow, i go to the word on the street festival. first time i've gone, and i'm really excited about it. next saturday's sort of freaking me out, though. i'm sitting on a blogging panel for media democracy day and i have no idea what to prepare or what i should say.

i'm at my lab and the draft of my thesis is printing right now. the printer's taking its sweet time: one page every 12 seconds or so. somehow, the monstrous piece of garbage ballooned to 88 pages. maybe i inserted a few too many schematic diagrams.

anyway, i really shouldn't post if i don't have anything relevant to say. but maybe someone will post some encouraging comments about how i'll make it through this week without an aneurysm?

mpub's a lot of work, yes, but i'm still loving it. next saturday, i will be a corpse, but a happy corpse.

excellent.

others have graciously done what i wish i had but don't have time to do:

http://hate.erstwhiledelight.com/comicsans/

http://www.robinjohnson.f9.co.uk/comicsans.html

http://bancomicsans.com/home.html

now: just 300 pages to go in blockbusters.

ugh...

i still need to:
-put a real-space field plot into my thesis
-analyze the gaussian positioning simulation results
-write up the gaussian positioning simulation results
-write my conclusion
-insert my citations
-tighten up my introduction, which currently really really sucks.

i also have to finish reading (i just started yesterday) the over 400-page blockbusters and trade wars, three chapters in my prof's book, five papers on communication, culture and economics, my editing manuscript, two chapters in elements of typographic style and some pages in pocket pal by this weekend. i also have to finish my editing assignment, write up our publising imprint's mission statement, and start the review of blockbusters.

jebus.

i wish i could read faster.

mmmmm...

man, my apartment smells so fuckin' good right now...

i took a 3-hour break from thesis/publishing to bake apple pies. i don't know if they taste good, but they sure look and smell sexy.

i want to take a couple to the ubyssey kids tomorrow and maybe one for the mpub crew, but i don't want to seem like i'm trying too hard. maybe i'll just leave the mpub one at home for the guests i'm expecting for the game on tuesday.

thursday's and friday's classes were superb. i love my editing instructor; she's a big bag of fun. she's given us each a manuscript -- a real manuscript -- to work on for the term, and i have no idea how she keeps track of everything. apparently, it's customary for the editors not to have any of the manuscripts bound -- they just keep stacks of paper loosely kept together with rubber bands. the sample manuscripts our instructor brought in to show us were almost pristine; the corners were a little worn, but my one-week-old thesis draft looks more dog-earred than her copy of an edited manuscript that had been read time and time again. i don't know how i'll keep my manuscript from getting scrambled, disheveled and covered with food stains.

editing book manuscripts, it appears, is a lot more aggressive than i'm used to. or perhaps editing in an industry outside of the student press is a lot more aggressive than i'm used to. it's become quite evident that descriptivism has little place in book editing, and since the timeline is a lot more drawn out for a book than for a serial, there is emphasis on a certain conservative perfection.

i can't say that all of the books i've read have conformed to this standard, but it seems we'll be expected to adhere to it, in any case.

we've also been given a short editing test, and it's pretty much the worst piece ever written! god! it's truly, truly wretched: run-ons, incomplete sentences, sentences that just end, a complete lack of logical flow, spelling errors, diction and syntax errors, convoluted structure and generally uninteresting subject matter...i guess they're trying to throw everything at us to see how we'd do. i've seen worse submissions to the physics journal, but i've never had to edit any of them, 'cause i've always had the luxury of refusing to publish if i thought an article were sufficiently bad.

...i hadn't mentioned this earlier because the outcome was still in question, but one of the students who was supposed to be in our cohort was stopped at the border when he tried to cross up to canada from the states on tuesday. he's been trying to sort it out, but now it doesn't look like they'll solve the problem in time for him to join us. now, there are only three males in 17 students. we don't know, of course, why he was detained at the border. for lack of a better theory, i'm going with coke mule.