rochelle.mazar.ca

Welll, this is interesting: a gender test. The moral of this story: gender infuses everything you do. What a surprise. It was right about me, though. Is it right about you?

I introduced Brandi to blogging tonight! Yes, everyone must blog, it’s a new law. And now, I’m exhausted, good night good night!

My sister is in town, and I went with her to pick up her wedding dress. It’s quite nice. I said it was cute, and I got scolded for that. We meandered through the A.G.O. and some some interesting pieces of art. I insisted on seeing the ‘Europe from 1100-1800’ section, but we saw the group of seven and the modern art sections too. Good fun. I saw one exhibit that interested me…it kind of reminded me of MOOspace, oddly enough. It consisted of a film projector showing a loop of a girl in a red dress dancing, and a room filled with speakers on poles, and the artist reading loops of text. It was at that point that I started to wonder if I couldn’t convince my sister to consider MOOspace as artistic space. She was talking about making her usually static dolls move and do things….she sounded like me getting frustrated with my static MOO project and wanting to make it interact and engage the reader. My sister is mostly terrified of technology, so that may or may not go very far.

On the topic of my own project: my first verb! I brought the plague to Bingen! When you visit the Butcher’s living quarters, and touch the fuzzy little animal there (actually a rat), you begin a 15 minute sequence of messages that simulates the symptoms of the plague. What pleases me most is that it keeps affecting the reader even when they leave the room and walk around. Some of the gruesome details:

You feel an uncomfortable heat in your armpits, neck, and groin and you lean over to throw up more blood.
You reach up and touch your neck. You feel large, hard, bulging nodes that seem to be causing the pain you’ve been feeling.
The swelling under your arms hurts you terribly, and then suddenly, the glands burst. You find yourself a mess of pus and blood.

15 minutes of it, yes. Oh, I’m so proud. Jason has yet to get the plague. It’s a goal for me. Having a terrible craving for guacomole. Must go satisfy it.

What a great night. I had no idea I stuck around for so long, though…look at the time. I thought it was about 12:30am, I didn’t realize I would be pushing 3:30am when I stumbled home. I guess that’s what happens when you start talking and find there’s just no end to what you have to say…I thoroughly enjoy my time with salmon, we can move from the profoundly personal to the entirely theoretical in three steps or less.

We spent some time talking about the ‘essential self’, which was very interesting, and something I need to think about some more…it makes me think about Caroline’s definition of where the essential self is located….some people think about their ‘self’ being in their head, or in the heart. Caroline was quite sure her self was in her belly. She would touch her belly when she said ‘me’. And tonight I completely, fully understand what she means. Tonight I have the feeling, from my gut, that I am so happy with the choices I’ve made in my life. I’m happy with where I am, the skills I have, the knowledge I’ve gathered. I have been unsure in the past 3 years that I was really equipped with the skills and strength required to exist in healthy relationships with people. I don’t think I realized what a toll that uncertainly took on me. Now I am sure that I am actually stronger than I accounted for, and I’m certainly stronger than the people around me thought I could be And I’m proud of who I have become, and I’m proud of what I’ve done. It’s amazing to wander through the city feeling like this. A profoundly peaceful feeling, and a profoundly exciting one.

salmon and I spent the evening talking and thinking and brainstorming and finally even coming up with some solutions to problems, theoretical or practical. I know I’ve been thought of as the random idea generator at Achieve, and I think that’s actually happening because I haven’t had a real outlet to do that for some time. The last time I felt this excited about anything was in the spring of 1999 when I was taking Katy Park’s Evidence of Experience class. There was a real sense there that we were cutting edge, that we were figuring out ways to think about historical problems and issues that had just not been thought about before. There were times when we would come up with ideas in that seminar and we would all just kind of fall silent thinking about the implications of what we’d just said. That was so wonderful. I would get so excited about the ideas we were generating and debating, the kind of fine line we were walking, that it was actually difficult to just sit still. What a wonderful feeling. I’m so glad to have rediscovered that. And I feel so happy. Maybe this is partly due to the fact that I am no longer ODing on estrogen, and that I’ve started to take those happy psych drugs (though those aren’t supposed to take effect for another week and a half at least). Or just the happy circumstances of last week are finally sinking in. In many ways I feel like I’ve found a niche for myself, and I’m challenged by the fact that I’m not entirely qualified to fulfill that niche. Is there anything more engaging, more exciting, than being on the brink of understanding something? I know my new goals are not to stop being a random idea generator, but to start being an solution producer at the same time. Again, part of the joy of the process is not being entirely certain that I’m up for the task.

And, at the same time, it’s starting to sink in that not only is this move to OISE (should it happen!) good for me socially/emotionally, but it looks as though it will be good academically and professionally as well. I’m feeling more and more positive about my ability to be a good historian who is also versed in pedagogy and techonology, and the possibilities of getting gainful employment that way. Oh, I should bottle this feeling. I could make a fortune.

Oh, one more thing: salmon introduced me to the joys of guacamole tonight. What a wonderful thing to put in one’s mouth. I had no idea.

Blogger is having some growing pains…I haven’t been able to post since last night. I’m glad to have been able to this afternoon, but it’s still random whether or not it’s going to work….

But, I wanted to mention that I had a *great* time with my French friend, Anne-Helene. She is truly a sweet and funny girl. And a good cook, to boot. 🙂 She lives in the world’s most ornate house. Her landlady, unbeknownst to her when she agreed to live there, is a francophile. So everything (*everything*) is French. There is actually a poster of a view of her school in Paris hanging in her bedroom, and she didn’t bring it with her. It got funnier and funnier as the evening went on. (“Oh, look at that…a poster of ‘les confitures’ and ‘le vin'”) It was like walking through a dictionary.

I’ve been having strange dreams. So now of course I’m compelled to tell you what I’m dreaming, too. Last night I went to Latin America. I think I won some kind of trip. I don’t know what city I was in, but I got a tour from a nice, hefty, strong man who took me into a boat. It was like any old-style city, except that the narrow streets were filled with water. And I noticed I was taken on the tour that at every corner there was a pole sticking out of the water with a red scrap of fabric on the top. And if you looked under the water, you could see that there were dead black men shoved into the foundation of the street with those poles jabbed into their chests. They were gory, too, still bloody and stuff. It was horrific. There was more, something about trying to find a place to stay, and I was scared, because there was this impending sense of violence. It’s quite an image to have in your head, let me tell you. Now you can share it with me. 🙂

Off to salmon’s tonight….yay!!

Why I Want to Live in London, Ontario
Well. I was helping Janine look for an apartment in London, and wasn’t that a mistake. She found herself a bachelor in London. This place is in a building overlooking a woodsy area, with a pool, free membership to a gym, it’s near downtown and on a bus route, free parking, and it’s $459 a month inclusive. Remind me, why am I living in a tiny little box in the sky with no nice amenities and a view of 1500 dirty balconies with peeling paint and paying $630 a month for it? Oh yeah, I forgot. For the priviledge of living in Mike Harris’ no-rent-control downtown Toronto. Lucky us. Sheeeeesh. Maybe I should have looked at a program in UWO or McGill….think of how well I could be living! Argh!

Well, Janine got offered an internship in London, beginning in May. I’m thrilled for her, but I’m really going to miss her. She’s such an important person in my life. Luckily, she’s going to have a car, so she says she’ll be here in Toronto a lot, even for work. So I guess I’ll still see her some, at least. We’d better fit in lots of fun time before she leaves. She’s a little sad because her friend didn’t get hired by this company in London, and really really wanted to be. The guilt of success…no doubt her friend will get a good internship shortly. And last night I got two meeting proposals…one with my second reader, Prof. Terpstra, and the other with the tech historian, Prof. Hood. So I’m going to be meeting-hopping for a while. And I got an invite to go have dinner tonight with a very sweet French girl I met at work (I still have to work out how to get to her house…me and my amazing sense of urban direction), and I’m off to salmon’s tomorrow night for html and project bonding. I’ll bring the breakable bottle of wine. (salmon has this incredible knack for breaking a full bottle of wine at parties.) I’m having a tremendous craving for a cinnabon. And a frappucino. (Where is the nearest starbucks? Every 2 blocks, lucky me!)

I went to meet with Jason and salmon at the faculty club tonight. What fun. Fish&Nun enterprises begins! While there I accidentally ran into Barbara Todd and Jennifer Morey (the imfamous pair!), and I unloaded a bit about some of the stuff I’m considering vis-a-vis school. First off, she thinks I’m writing off the department too fast. She might be right. She was very supportive of the ideas i have, though, and thinks I’m actually thinking in the right direction for getting a job in the future. She’s thinking rather differently than Mark is, Mark being one of the few colleagues I have in the department. She thinks the admin would be more favourable to this kind of tech project than we might think. She offered to sit in with me in a meeting with the head of the department. So that’s just great. She’s also very supportive of my thought to move over into OISE…she agreed that they would accept this project point blank, where the department would require more teasing. I mentioned that to me the ideal situation would be to do the degree jointly, and she seemed to think there might be room to try something like that. She says she’s going to start pushing the department to hire someone who’s got the word ‘pedagogy’ in her/his job description. She thinks most departments in the country are going to have to start thinking that way shortly, so it looks like I’m actually well placed to be taking a step like this. Now it seems just a matter of figuring out how to bring some historians over to help me with my project and keep them on the committee…doesn’t *sound* like too big a deal. Thank god for Barbara Todd. What a great day.

Well, today I managed to get my *new* doctoral application mostly together….now it’s just a matter of waiting for letters and transcripts to trickle in. But I put together a writing sample and something one might roughly call a letter of intent, if one were so inclined. I would post it, but I’m still feeling a little funny about it as a letter. It reads more like an apology than anything else. Though I’m really looking forward to next year. For a change I really feel like I have a lot to learn, and I feel like I have a lot of people to rub shoulders with. So that’s a really nice feeling.

I spent the afternoon with my friends Rhonda and Alana down by Winchester park. They are sweet, sweet people who just can’t stop trying to feed me or hand me drinks. I should be back there now, but it seems a bit late and I don’t want to impose anymore than I already have….they’re babysitting a (gasp) 9 week old beagle girl, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off her. She reminds me so much of my little munchin at that age.

So I spent the afternoon speaking beagle and pulling [insert name of random object/piece of garbage here] out of this little girl’s mouth. What a funny duckling. Beautiful day. Oh, the feeling of warm wind on my bare arms….it’s so beautiful it’s almost unbearable. I can’t wait for the summer. Oh, and it seems that my dear friend blue has decided to come for a visit from Iowa this summer….what fun that will be! I’ll have to start making fun plans now, she strikes me as a fun kind of girl.

Still marvelling at the nice weather….[raises a glass] here’s to it continuing into the week….we need this. We really need it. This winter of my discontent has rolled along way too long….

Well, I had a great time at the silly movie with emma. We didn’t win a door prize, but we did get to see a movie for free. It was funny, and emma is fabulous to see a funny movie with. Man, that girl can LAUGH. Afterwards we nipped by to see Jason, and ended up sticking around and helping him (loosely speaking) generate exam questions. Oh, those poor environment students….

I’ve started putting my application together to switch into OISE. My mother will probably frown over the last two ‘wasted’ years, no doubt, but I feel really good about this, and it would never have occured to me before now. And talk about learning about bad educational environments in higher education…well, I guess everyone has to crash and burn at some point. Now if I can just figure out the money….I know the next year will be okay, with a SSHRC or with a loan, but what about the summer? Should I stay in the history department for the summer, try and finish up my comps work first? Should I just go ahead and work? Should I get a temp job for now, make some cash, pay my rent? Who knows, who knows.

Well, this was rather interesting and obscure. Last night Janine and I went down to the Necropolis to wander among the gravestones, which was very cool (it’s always good to have someone with you who knows their new testament inside and out), but I guess we started too late, because by the time we ran out of light and went to leave, they had locked us in. Janine thought this was cool, she was fired up by the ‘challenge’. I was not. Much as I enjoy graveyards, the idea of spending the night in one did not please me. It’s not that warm out yet. Well, we wandered around a bit looking for a way out, but I managed to wiggle the padlock through the metal thing behind it and open the gate. It took a bit of wiggling to work it back through so the gate would stay shut, though. Better security is required at the Necropolis, but not as long as they don’t bother to check for people when they lock up.

And: I forgot that they shut off the water today between 9am-5pm. And who got up at 9:30am? Great. I HATE that. Not only no shower, but no iced tea either. This is the start of a good day, I can just feel it.

I had a great meeting with Joel and Jason today; Joel has a fabulous dog. We talked about my options for school, and he had ideas about my project that surprised me. So, the conclusion was: I can keep doing good history, learn some programming languages, put history online, and end up with a very marketable multi-disciplinary phd. I could teach (in a somewhat forward-thinking history department, once they see that I’m recommended by historians and that I have a good solid historical disstertation and publications), in a women’s studies department, in an education department, or, I could go into admin (if I feel like that’s what I want to do) or I could just say screw it and use all these technical skills to do something like design webpages or something like that. And I’ll have the experience to do all of this. The only real hitch is money; I’m too late for OISE funding, but I do have an OGS and a SSHRC application pending. I don’t hold out a whole lot of hope for those, though. I know my proposal is strong, but I was so out of it when I was writing those proposals, I don’t feel terribly confident. I was so unhappy then, and I didn’t even know it. Anyway, if everything falls through, I think at this point the best thing I can do is just take some time off. That way I can put together another SSHRC application (which would be VERY sexy given my new topic), and put in a real application for OISE next year. This part of the plan is a bit scary, to be honest. I’ve never not been a student. But, on the upside, I could just go ahead and get some temp work, make some money, just live in the real world for a while, just do things that make me happy…meet some new people, breathe it all in…just take a BREAK from all this. It’s wound me up so much, I can’t even see which way I walking these days. Joel referred to me as “dying on the vine” in the history department. I’m so cut adrift, and we can blame whomever we want, me if you want, but it’s true. I don’t think I can stay in the department. It scares me. And the idea of the next 4 years are NOT inspiring. But, in spite of all that…things are definitely looking up. I haven’t been this happy with my schooling possibilities in a long, long time. I was incredibly inspired by what Joel had to say. I really….I felt my passion coming back. I think this is what I need to do.

Also: dear, dear Janine is on her way over here right now. We’re going to do something totally fun and walk down to the Necropolis across from Riverdale park and look at some old graves. It will be great. She just got a interview with a company in London, and I’m so happy for her, but I just don’t know what I would do if she were to leave Toronto. I depend on her so much. 🙂 Well, at least I have so many wonderful people still around me….salmon….we need to have that ‘gooey’ talk over a good strong beer. And god, we have to talk about this OISE thing too….maybe we’ll be colleages! That would be *so* great. I can’t think of a better colleague. 🙂

Oh! Also! I finally convinced Jason to come see my apartment. He seemed to like it. I do so enjoy it when people can see something nice in this little place….and…

It feels like SPRING today!

Heee….Yay, welcome to my blog, salmon. 🙂 And yes, we should have a raging debate about text and GUI. Somehow I managed to get painted as the anti-text girl and I’m not sure how that happened. (Jason?) Miao pointed out that there must be a point where a MOO stops being a MOO…where is that point? I don’t think this is necessarily due to incorporating graphics or sound or whatever..but it comes down to not just why it’s used but how. At the moment I personally find the GUI bulky, the text window not as flexible (my copy and paste options don’t work from the pull down menu, and I keep crashing my computer trying to remember how to hot key them), I want a different font, a bigger font, a different background colour, and a bigger buffer too. That would be nice. We’ve spent a lot of time making the graphics and sound better, but our GUI doesn’t do what most regular MOO clients do naturally on the text side. Of course I’d like to be able to control the size of the window as well. What if we could minimize the graphics window? That may not be entirely useful for all, but I would apprieciate it. 🙂 I know salmon’s done some great work on juicing up text….some of the many things I want to work on include incorporating her moo progging into my project. I guess I should DO it for a change instead of just yakking about it. 🙂

Today I am experimenting with adding ‘team members’ to this blog. I figure, if I’m going to talk about people, they should be allowed to post a response, no? Anyway, nature abhors a vaccum, and me talking to myself is, well, a lot of hot air. If there were a response option I would just push for that, but this seems to be the only way. Let’s see how that works….

On a more personal/academic note: I have the coolest, sweetness, nicest adviser ever. I wish I hadn’t lost all my enthusiasm here and at this point….she is probably the best single thing at this university.

“It’s an attack on French culture to ban a glass of wine and a cigarette during surgery.”
–Rick Mercer

I just fired off an email to the tech historian in my department….hoping to find an ally in my attempts to do some online work during this degree. Here’s the email:

Professor Hood,

I’m a 2nd year phd student in the history department (early modern women/family history) and I’ve recently been thinking very seriously about online pedagogy and the possibilities of incorporating online elements into my projects. I have a lot of ideas about this, some of which are available in preliminary form online right now. I’ve been working in a synchronous interactive text-based environment with graphical user interface attached…a graphical MOO (spin off of MUDs). It’s called Project Achieve, and it’s an educational MOO housed here at U of T. Right now I’m working on creating historical simulations in tableaux; I create environments with early modern art and added sound effects (some midi taffel music, some animal or ‘street’ sound effects, that kind of thing), and then I program ‘bots’ who react to triggers from the user to explain concepts or their point of view. For example, Luther will explain his position on the Eucharist, and St. Francis will preach to the birds. (This project is viewable at http://achieve.utoronto.ca:2221 , push login (guests require no password) and type @go bingen to go to the first room.) Recently I’ve been thinking that there are more possibilities here than I previously imagined…I was imagining my dissertation (about the relationships between fathers and daughters in early modern France, a very narrative project) as a narrative, interactive series of tableaux, simulated to explore the various details of my project, with the primary sources linked behind the tableaux, and my own web log (blog) accounts of my search for the document, my interpretation, how it works with the secondary literature and how it fits into my proposed thesis. I’m just boggled by the possibilities of the technologies I’m encountering, but of course this is an absolutely outlandish bit of fantasy, and I think the department will look at me like my head is spinning around were I to mention it. I thought perhaps talking to you about it might be somewhat more encouraging. 🙂

Could I meet with you to discuss the possibilities of online technology in higher education? Thanks for reading along this far…

Rochelle

I had quite a conversation with my very dear friend Janine today, with whom I always end up having thoughtful conversations. We discussed the idea of satanism in society. Afterwards, I looked up some stuff online, and I discovered a rather startling fact; many many people believe that the world is filled with satanists who kill/maim/torture or otherwise abuse children in North America. I personally don’t believe this is so, if only for the simple fact that in order to be an evil Satanist one would have to accept Christianity as it stands and decide to take the ‘wrong’ side. Seems unlikely. Though I know that there are lots of religions (Voodon, Wicca, and other neo-pagan excursions) that Christians believe to be satanist, but by all accounts are not. I ran across an interesting stat: in the last 300 years, no criminal investigation has uncovered any evidence for Satanic ritual abuse. The point of a stat like that, of course, is to show that satanist may well exist, but it doesn’t seem to be part of their agenda to perform ritual murders. Many Christians believe that there are as many as 60,000 ritual murders of ‘innocents’ a year in North America. Amazing.

It’s all very reminiscent, of course, of early modern witch-hunting. Lots of comparisons have been drawn, and what seems to be the underlying similarity, more than anything, is the fear. Fear that there is someone out there, preying on your children, and they are so smart and so powerful and so organized that it’s impossible to find a trace of them. (If there’s an organized international group, shouldn’t there be at least one stupid satanist who doesn’t dispose of a body properly? At least one mistake?)

Oh the world we live in.