thereIfixedit

http://thereifixedit.com/ This has got to be the funniest shit I've read in a long time. Funnier than awkwardfamilyphotos.com. About as good as failblog.org.

And undoubtedly all of them are funniest when they're for real, not set up for the purpose of sending something they think will be funny on the site.

crash

Plane crash in Ko Samui. I'm going to feel awesome about flying that same airline to that same airport.

UPS

K's building no longer allows UPS to leave packages since there have been thefts. Fuck. So now we have to play tag with UPS. Today I waited until 5pm for a package. Awesome waste of my time, especially since I had planned to be working at a coffee shop where I usually get more done. Unless you're unemployed or work at home, who the hell is ever home to sign for a package??? And if you are unemployed, chances are you have no money to be shopping online. People no longer have housewives who sit at home doing nothing because we all need to work to eat these days.

What's more awesome is I'm not allowed to have packages shipped to "work" because the admins will not have it. There needs to be a new way to get packages. This is just too annoying.

Thailand

Flight is booked, hotel for the first few nights in Bangkok booked ($45 a night for a nice 4-star includes breakfast and taxes). Probably going to hit Chiang Mai as a next stop and then one of the islands for some beach hut laziness. Which island should I go to? Suggestions? Kinda picking between Phuket and Koh Chang (thanks Robyn!) but open to others...

shopping

I just attempted to fix a long unproductive somewhat miserable day by blowing a hundred bucks on vacation clothes for my upcoming trip to Thailand. But I got lots of stuff for that hundred bucks: 2 bikinis ($12 and $16), a yoga wrap cover up ($17), shorts ($5), pair of (Kids' size) Teva sandals ($35), breathable Teva hat ($9). The last two things from REI Outlet online and the other stuff from Old Navy (all stuff on sale). I'd say that's a good deal. I quite enjoy finding good deals. Doesn't fix the fact that I wasted my whole day doing nothing but being miserable but it helps.

trip

This was the year I was going to make up for a lifetime of missed opportunities to travel overseas with friends and now it looks like it's not going to happen because of conflicting schedules and travel itineraries. After this all my friends will be having kids, either their first, or even their second. And then there's me, the one with no stability, no control over my future, not even any rights in the country I have called home for 9 years. Add to that the 6 years of that I totally wasted with a loser who cheated on me with the office slut (who was also married with kid at the time). Ugh. Fuck my life to hell. I want those years back. 

Seattle

Went for a run. It felt shitty and not fun. What the hell is runner's high? Whoever coined that term clearly has never actually been high. I nearly twisted my ankle again thanks to these piles of broken up concrete that they call sidewalks in Seattle. Seattle also features long stretches of potholes that they call roads, and this crumbling piece of shit that is going to fall down and kill everyone any moment now called the Alaskan Way viaduct. But hey we have light rail now to the airport....actually no. That is delayed til December this year. But you can take a shuttle bus from that last stop to the airport. That sounds really convenient when you are carrying luggage. Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually runs this city.

suck

As in I suck at blogging these past few (more like 12-18) months. I think ever since I started twittering, I haven't needed the daily catharsis that blogging offered me. So I bitch and complain in 140 characters instead of 500 words or so each day. But I do miss the long winded bitching that I used to do here. I think I need to come back more often, maybe instead of playing Pet Society and Packrat on Facebook every fucking day.

So anyways, it's fucking cold outside and it's mid-July. Fuck Seattle. At least when it's raining or cold in Vancouver, you can go out and make yourself feel better by eating your weight in izakaya or smoking some BC bud. No recourse here. And Seattlites drive stupid slow to make things even more miserable and frustrating.

Anyways I was up in Vancouver a couple weeks ago and it was awesome. I had dim sum, brisket curry, johnny cakes at the Reefs Caribbean restaurant, izakaya, sushi, barbeque, and I can't remember what else but it was a lot and it was delicious. I miss eating in Vancouver. Also did a nice hike up the Baden Powell trail in Deep Cove to Quarry Rock. Totally fun even though it got pretty hot up there. Spent an afternoon out at Jericho beach too. I miss nice, accessible, big, beautiful beaches. The host's family is a seafood distributor so there were gigantic prawns on the gigantic BBQ that he brought in on a pick up truck. So yummy.

Wow I've forgotten what it's like to type more than 140 characters. I'm tired.

FML

Fuck my life. Name of a popular blog that isn't mine but should be. In fact it should just be full of tales from my life and my life only because I have plenty. I recently moved back to my department at school after taking a year's leave and working for another department that isn't full of angry old white people who still haven't figured out the value of women of color in academia. It was such a nice break.

However, the office across the pond sucked because it was in the campus "riot proof" building built in the 1960s to house the administration so that people couldn't storm the offices. Riot proof means it's impossible not to get lost in there. The offices are not numbered sequentially and the building has sections that you can shut down and also an elevator that doesn't actually work. It was also kinda dirty and the conference room doubled as a "kitchen" (ie microwave and mini fridge, no sink). So yeah, humanities folks are housed in there along with other marginalized fields of study in academia, with the exception of math and statistics which got a nice shiny renovated floor. Anyways I moved all my shit to my new office in my home department and thought, finally, I get an office with a window and non annoying office mates and everything. Then the IT chick barged in today with some old prof. Like she fucking unlocked the door and let herself in. I was holed in there working on my syllabus for summer. No excuse me, or hello or anything but she sure talked to the prof in a sugar sweet voice. They were talking about furniture and shelves and this and that but I wasn't listening. IT bitch then says to me, did you know you're moving out of this office? and I say, uh no, I just moved in and the admins just gave me the key last week. She says, well they know, they've known for 2 weeks that the office is going to be occupied by faculty. Well fuck me twice. Clearly if they gave me the key and told me to move in, they don't know and I don't give a shit if they do or not. So yeah I'm getting kicked out of the office I just moved into and I didn't even know until bitch barged in and held a fucking open house in there while I was trying to work. I should note that we used to have some super cool IT people but they quit. Not surprising.

Anyways, I decided I had to get the fuck out of there because the whole building gives me bad vibes. Went to the library to pick up my books and realized they just started closing early for the week because it's semester break. Awesome, no books. Decided to blow off some steam by browsing some books at the bookstore. That was nice til I went out to catch my bus. I saw it there at the red light. Light turned green and bam, it lurches forward twice and stops. Driver turns off the display and kicks off the passengers. I should mention this bookended a day that started with me missing my bus on the way TO school.

weekend

I had a surprisingly eventful weekend. Went for happy hour Friday with a colleague from out of town. Had some great nachos and beer there. Went to the Folk Life Festival here on Saturday, out with friends Saturday night for Tamarind Tree and the Hideout bar afterward, a wedding Sunday and did some grilling at a friend's house today. On top of that, finished all my grading and assignment development for the class I TA.

running

Ever since it started warming up here, I've been trying to get back into running, mostly because it's free, doesn't require going someplace special, and can be done anytime. I need that kinda flexibility to get off my fat ass. I've worked up to doing 4 miles and getting home with energy to spare, so I'm going to try to get to 6 miles, and maybe work up to a half marathon, maybe.

The coolest thing about running in Seattle (okay, maybe the only cool thing since a fair weather runner like me doesn't get much fair weather here) is that one of our local Seattle Celebs, John Curley, former host of Evening Magazine for years and years and years is a triathlete. So he gives money to charities if you register to Beat John Curley and succeed. I don't think I ever will but what an awesome (and charitable) idea.

I'm thinking of doing the Furry 5K because I love the idea of running among dogs and it's money for the animal shelter.

squirrel

Today I went to Green Lake and counted 21 turtles sun bathing on the logs and 12 tiny baby ducklings, 5 for one mom, 7 for the other, and many many many dogs. Yay, that made me happy!

This here is a story about a big squirrel helping a little squirrel and it is awesome. I love it when mother nature gives us opportunities like this to stop, forget about all the shitty things going on in our lives, and pay attention to her for just a moment.

momentum

I know that as with any major event, there needs to be a period of rest and recovery before you get yourself back on track. I defended my exams March 31 so we're coming up on 6 weeks now and I still feel like I'm functioning at only about 70% of my intellectual capacity which wasn't a whole lot to begin with since I mostly want to just sleep and eat carbs lately. Fuck. I have a finite amount of time before my funding expires. No funding means no tuition waiver which means I'd have to pay for taking credits while working on my diss if I can't finish it before my funding runs out. I hate that my money and citizenship/visa issues are all tangled up like this. It makes planning really difficult and leaves me none of the flexibility that permanent residents and citizens have like getting an off-campus job or taking a leave of absence or taking a little longer to finish.

Ah well, day at a time. I had a small success today in that I hooked up my digital converter to my new antenna and it worked like a charm. Cool. Now I have a handful of channels instead of just one fuzzy one.

living

It rained again today. Isn't it May? WTF? And when it rains, for some reason, the bus always runs late and then I end up both wet and late which is always an awesome way to start a morning.

Knowing full well that I don't deal well with bad weather - I get in bad funks and just want to eat carbs and cheese, and stay in bed - I'm not sure that living in the pacific northwest/western Canada is going to be a good long term plan. I can't waste 8 months out of 12 (2/3 of my life) being miserable. Something is not right with that. Man, I have a lot of requirements for where to live - weather, good Asian food, other Asian Americans, diversity in general, left leaning politics, mountains, water, good healthcare and education. I think this is a mystical place in fact. It's a combination of California's climate and Canada's government.

Meh, it's nothing I really have the luxury of thinking about anyways. I'm here til Decemer 2010 when my funding runs out. Then it'll be up to the gods. For now, teach, publish, and dissertate til I get this degree.

The process of exam preparation at least taught me some things I didn't expect to learn:

• taking baths is relaxing and worth the work of scrubbing the ring around the tub left by bath bombs and oils
• the first half of a book review is often a great summary of the book
• writing happens faster when you don't agonize over every syllable as I usually do
• pre-cooking a ton of food and putting it in single serve packets in the freezer is a great way to save time and eat better
• this is an extreme test of your ability to manage your time, and more visibly, your ability to handle stress, so it's interesting to see how people deal with it
• it's easier to get work done if you schedule yourself to be somewhere so that your day isn't so shapeless
• at this point in our education, advisers with fragile egos can actually feel threatened by our knowledge, intelligence, and potential future contributions to the field, and the results can be nasty (learned from a friend. no one feels threatened by me, that's for damn sure)
• academia is full of self-centered passive aggressive people with frail egos and poor social, interpersonal, and organizational skills (not on my committee but this is a frequently recurring theme I've noticed)
• fatigue feels like it can be cumulative; I'm still tired
  

no shows

Today marks the middle of week 5 (of 10) at school. The class I TA had their midterm today and two of my students didn't know which TA to hand in their exam to because, well, they haven't even shown up to one discussion section. In other words, they have no fucking clue who their TA is because they skipped the first 5 weeks of class. Better yet, one of my persistent no show students also didn't show up for the exam. I wonder if she actually plans to pass this class (not possible at this point). I wish we could hand pick students like this and kick 'em out to make room for students who give a shit and can't afford to just register for courses they have no intention of passing.

back

After a long hiatus I'm back. During my absence I completed my written exams, which I've blogged about and then 2 weeks later I endured my hazing which is a 1.5 hour oral defense of essentially everything I ought to know about my area of research as negotiated with my committee of four people before all this started and I passed! So now I get to replace the M.A. after my name with Ph.C. which means Ph.D candidate. I get the D after I write my dissertation which is looking like it's going to be over 200 pages and about 6-7 chapters long.

People unfamiliar with academia often ask the same questions so here's an FAQ:

1. So are you a doctor now?

No, not til I finish writing my dissertation AND survive an oral defense of my arguments. Probably another 1-2 hour grilling by my committee and possible others. I know at SFU dissertation defenses were public events. Luckily I don't think they do that at my school. So not until I finish and defend my dissertation do I earn my D.

2. When do you graduate?

It's more a matter of completing a project than a matter of time. I graduate when I finish writing my dissertation and pass my oral defense. The more scary question is when does my funding dry up. For me, December 2010. So if I'm not done by then I need to either find an assistantship (research assistant or teaching assistant or other teaching job) at my school to get the tuition waiver, or I'll have to pay tuition out of my own pocket to cover my dissertation credits while I finish up. Either way, not finishing on time will fucking suck the big one and really stress me out.

3. What classes are you taking?

I finished my coursework last year so when I say I'm in class, I'm either in a class that I'm auditing for fun (because it wasn't offered when I was taking classes) or I'm in an undergrad lecture for the course I TA (teach).

4. If you aren't taking classes, what the hell do you do all day?

I TA two hours a week, hold office hours a couple hours a week (when my students come with questions or help or whatever), and attend lecture for the class I TA 4 hours a week. Aside from teaching related stuff and attending talks from visiting scholars (pretty much an expectation for us), I'm not at school at all.

Instead I'm usually at a coffee shop or at home writing my prospectus, which is a 15-20 page detailed plan of what my dissertation is about. At the same time I'm trying to revise and edit old papers and submit them to academic journals for publication because that's kind of the academic scorecard at research universities like mine. Publish or perish (or teach a huge load at a community college).

And the other big thing we need to do continuously is present papers at conferences. So between teaching, trying to publish, attending conferences, and working on my prospectus, I haven't got a lot of spare time on my hands. Which is why when I was prepping for exams I had absolutely NO time on my hands. Essentially I had to do all that stuff PLUS read 2-3 books and articles a day for about 4 months. Now I'm back to a more normal and humane schedule. Thanks the gods for that.

---

So yeah, it's been 3 weeks since I passed my orals and advanced to candidacy so I've been resting, catching up on sleep and exercise, and I also just came back from a conference in New Orleans. Now I'm already behind on getting my prospectus done. It's kinda like running on a treadmill on level 10, constantly.

exams

So I said I would blog about what these exams are about. I don't have time to get into a lot of detail but basically it's this:

• 3.5 days to to write 4 essays (15 pages each, for a total of 60 pages)
• one essay typically deals with primary methodology we use in our research (mine is on cultural studies)
  
• the other three essays are topical (e.g. Asian American pop culture, development of Asian American studies as a discipline etc.)
• each essay should demonstrate our knowledge gained from doing a list of readings for each essay -- about 20-30 readings (mix of books and journal articles)
  

And here is my preparation schedule to date

April 2008 (early April): my first draft of reading lists sent to committee members to edit and add readings

Summer 2008: did a few readings after teaching A-term (2? credits); continued negotiating and refining the list with committee members

Fall 2008: took 10 credits of reading; continued negotiating and refining the list with committee members

Dec 2008 to Jan 2009: focused on getting through all the Cultural Studies methods readings

Sep to Dec 2008: took 10 credits of reading, 5 for each of 2 committee members (meetings with each every 2 weeks to discuss and review my understanding of the readings and how they are situated in the larger scholarly conversation)

Mid Feb: finalized a date for exams, booked meeting room for orals with admin

Feb 28: Completed 90% of all readings (5 books and 20 articles remaining), Completed final meetings with all committee members; got form signed and returned

March 1:
TO DO: Finish key readings e.g. Lowe, O&W, Wei, Almaguer; review Cultural Studies Theory/ist summaries online ; outline arguments by scholar and by concept for each exam question area, prewrite some arguments, read remaining low-priority readings only as needed in the pre-writes
March 15: rest and spa day??

March 13-16: written exams

March 17-21: grading of final papers for teaching responsibilities

March 22-28: staycation/mini vacation

March 29: review my exam essays

March 31: oral defense

coffeeshop

Been pretty much camped out at this coffee shop 4-5 days a week, 3-8 hours per day the last month or two with my friends who are also preparing for exams. Usually pretty uneventful. We have gotten to know the musical tastes of the barristas and who makes a better coffee. We even know when they are scheduled to work. Definitely recognize all the regulars. There are a couple women sitting behind me right now though, who are really pissing me off. One of them has her chair all backed up against mine and they won't shut the fuck up. Here an IM dialog between me and R I thought you might find entertaining:

(2:57:29 PM) me: i am going to strangle these bitches
(2:59:32 PM) R: I know they are SOOO LOUD
(2:59:36 PM) R: and the laugh!
(2:59:44 PM) me: what theyre laughing at isnt even funny
(2:59:51 PM) me: if i could laugh too i wouldnt mind so much
(3:09:55 PM) me: why is this bitch all the way up my ass like this
(3:10:01 PM) me: there is like 5' of space on the other side of the table
(3:10:23 PM) R: they were trying to get out of the sun
(3:10:34 PM) R: I don't think you're important enough to worry about
(3:10:40 PM) R: cuz, its all about them!
(3:10:50 PM) me: i should get your full spectrum light and shine it at them
(3:11:50 PM) R: the girl behind you just turned around and gave me a dirty look for talking
(3:11:55 PM) R: I guess Im bothering her
(3:11:58 PM) me: BITCH
(3:12:02 PM) me: shit is going down

school

I have come to realize that regular people really have no idea what the fuck grad students do. I'm going to do all grad students a favour and tell you all because there seems to be some mistaken idea that we just take courses and assist with teaching here and there and so we have all this free time to travel and fuck around. Wrong. So very wrong. Unfortunately I need to finish reading an article and half a novel (for the lit class I TA) tonight so I can't go into detail but I'll at least share what I did today. BTW, I should note that I have a particularly understanding partner who almost remembers my schedule for each day and recognizes my hell. Those of you who don't will have to send their partners a link to this blog as I edumacate y'all.

- checked my email to see if my paper got into this conference that I really need to go to or people on future hiring committees are going to wonder why I didn't
- there was no such email but I did respond to an email to say that I would be a reviewer of a manuscript for a journal even though I totally do not have time for this but need the experience and it will look good on my vitae (aka CV aka resume for academics)
- then I went to campus and held my 2-hour office hours which is when undergrads in the class I teach are welcome to drop in to ask questions, get help or in this case review a draft of a paper
- this was followed by a 2-hour lecture where we watched a film based on the novel the class just read (there are 5 novels, which means I have to have read them all before the students do)
- 2 hours is precious so I worked on reading the next novel while watching the film
- after lecture was our 1 hour weekly TA meeting where the 3 teaching assistants meet with the prof to discuss what we plan to teach in discussion section friday (which we run independently, 50 students to each TA). We also talked about deadlines for grading their 50 midterm papers due in a couple weeks
- took a bus home, went to a 75 minute yoga class, ate dinner, and now I have to read an article that is on my exam reading list and finish that novel before bed.

So that is a detailed day in the life of a grad student. Note, there is no room for much media consumption on this schedule. Sometimes I turn on the TV to catch the evening news while I cook dinner and eat, but after that, no TV.

Tomorrow I have no obligations on campus so I meet with friends at a coffee shop to read and take notes for our general exams. Last week we scoffed at the grad students at the next table complaining about having to read a book a day. Pssssht. We need to read MORE THAN a book a day to get through our reading lists which are comprised of about 25-30 readings per list (4 lists on 4 different topics so about 120 readings). List is a mix of journal articles (20 pages) and full books. Tomorrow I'm hoping to knock out two books on my list.

Next time I'll talk more about these gang initiations/hazings, I mean general PhD exams.

phone

I got a new phone and switched over to Sprint so I could pay $10 more for a lot more functionality -- commercial free streaming radio, Sprint TV, and mobile internet access. Unfortunately that also means getting really fucking annoying calls from some some company in Atlanta that I don't pick up. If you get weird calls, google the number and you'll probably find out it's some "marketing" agency wanting to ask why you switched or whatever. That or the call about your car's factory warrantee running out. I hate those.

I haven't had a chance to figure out all the things that I can do on the phone but I do know I can watch clips and deleted scenes from Ghost Hunters. Awesome (especially since I don't have cable).