Thoughts from the Post-Scriptum

in grad school most of your time is spent alone. you read alone, you write alone, you spend countless hours editing what you have just written only to determine you have no idea what you are talking about, then you publish. lather, rinse, repeat.

it is a pretty solitary life which makes reaching out to people all the more imporant. social events are more than just a drink or just a friendly get together they become breaths of fresh air, reasons to emerge from the hermit existence and suspend the lonely existence we've picked for ourselves. a coffee outside of your apartment becomes an almost sinful experience, every minute you spend not working there is a part of your mind that tells you that you should probably get back to work.

but we don't always get back to work, we blog, we go for coffee, we organize nights at the pub with our peers to keep ourselves from going crazy.

sometimes the hardest thing to do is to put pen to paper.

when i opened a draft of a paper i'm working on today i found this written on the last line:

I love my snarfy and hope that he never finds this sentence so then his professor can smile…

it's nice to feel loved.

i swear, just when you thought we could stop arguing about this issue:

Tories to introduce gay marriage motion

Mr. Harper, don't make me put my purse down and come over there.

Thankfully its largely expected that this will be rejected by the House of Commons, but seriously, gay marriage was just so 2005. Why can't its opponents just move on and face it, we dirty homos won and we did it whilst wearing fabulous shoes.

From Rick Mercer's blog:

At the end of the day though, watching Dion on stage, I couldn’t help but be amazed at his physical presence. The Liberals went into this convention with a host of choices. They could have gone with a battle-tested politician, a former athlete, a world famous academic or a food bank founder from the West; at the end of the day they choose the nerd.

That’s pretty Canadian.

it's amazing how easy it is to cock up a blog by just tinkering.

my new links section (which is still being added to dear readers!) took me two hours to do! i accidentally erased my main index template twice.

So then had to figure out how to bring it back from the ether of lost templates.

Then I had to figure out how to add more modules to the sidebar by taking a module and tinkering around with it to get it to look like the others.

Following that I didn't want all my links in ascending order, i wanted to add them on horizontal lines. that wasn't hard but there wasn't enough space between each link and i couldn't figure out how to insert blank space. i spent like twenty minutes googling for "separator commands" and "blank space+html"

FINALLY I managed to find it on a site that made sense to me.

i also added a cartoon that brady (a friend in my grad program) drew for me... that's just fancy that's what that is! i absolutely love it! thanks so much brady!

fuck! what a good way to procrastinate!

i remember i first saw this SNL sketch at lukie's last spring when i was down for a conferene oh sweet jesus, i'm so glad its made its way to the net.

godbless PopMuse

augusto pinochet is dead.

i sincerely hope he is rotting in hell.

my research and i have a peculiar relationship, it has many facets to it that sometimes mix and melt into one another

some days we're in an abusive relationship and my research is the trucker in a dirty undershirt.
other times i'm a negligent parent who is ignoring their crying research baby.
then we are the newlywed couple who fuck like rabbits and don't leave the honeymoon suite.

right now i'm feeling an odd confluence between abused housewife and negligent parent. whenever i sit down to write or read my research looks up at me angrily and tells me how insufficient i am. it yells at me and says horrible things. then when i procrastinate by sitting in front of the television with gillian because we are both too hungover to move i can hear my research crying.

what the fuck?

i know.

the title of the entry is a czech proverb... i love it.

last night a few friends from undergrad came into the city, k was in from england for the holidays so a few of us decided that we were overdue for a get together. sean was sweet and let me host everyone over at his apartment; it's downtown which made it easier for everyone to get to.

we had a few too many glasses of wine, junk food and dessert then went out for a drink. the next thing i realized was that it was three in the morning and we stumbled back to the apartment.

it was nice to see everyone, i forgot how much i love just having a few friends over instead of the giant parties that gillian and i have been hosting lately. its nice to be able to spend more time with each guest rather than the five minutes i usually end up spending with each person.

it was nice to wake up this morning and go out to a greasy spoon for breakfast with everyone before we each went back to our routines with our vows of friendship renewed.

nights like last night remind me how blessed i am to have such a large group of friends. even if we don't get together all the time or talk as often as we probably should its nice to know that we can pick up where we left off.

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

while i know that i've gushed about this song for YEARS i love this line:

i tried to dance britney spears, i guess i'm getting on in years

why is it that i think rufus wainwright is the musical equivalent of a good shiraz?

after about the age of 16 i stopped liking the holidays as much as i used to.

maybe it was knowing that my mother hated the holidays, or that i had a family member with a fairly serious drinking problem, or maybe i just grew to dislike the feeling that the entire exercise was a giant exercise in plasciticity. it didn't feel real, it felt forced and unwelcome, when i was 18 i hid a bottle of southern comfort in my bedroom and nipped at it all night long to keep from busting into tears when my family had a conversation that was so homophobic it made my soul feel dead.

i've come to a better place with christmas, my soon to be brother-in-law is amazing and knowing that my sister loves me for who i am, knowing that no matter what i have some members

my first academic publication is out.

you can read it here

it's just a book review but i'm really proud of it, seeing my name in the Canadian Journal of Communication has definitely been one of the highlights of 2006.

tonight at my annual chosen-family christmas known as detox-retox i admitted something for the first time in years:

it's time to go back into therapy.

it's scary to admit, and even a little embarrasing. i don't want to go back and dredge up why i feel like i need everyone to like me and why i feel the need to hate myself so much even when surrounded by people who love me.

i'm terrified, but i know things can only get better if i take care of this now.

Night Of My Life

Here we are,
Shooting stars,
Renting time in someone else's space

So unsure
Afraid to fall
I'm standing here
A little scared
But I don't care

'Cos this kind of moment, is only on loan and
I wanna remember the look in your eyes
When it's all over I want you to know that I was with you when I

Had the night of my life

So don't let go
You never know
Maybe your whole life's about to change

So let's hold on
Until it's gone
Nothing's made to last forever
Who knows whether

This kind of moment is only on loan and
Sometimes you don't know until it passes you by
And when it's all over I want you to know that I was with you when I
Had the night of my life

Maybe this whole thing comes right down to faith,
And every choice that we think that we make
Has put us right here together

today

'Cause this kind of moment
Is only on loan and,
It won't be too long till it leaves us behind
And when it's all over I want you to know that I was with you when I
Had the night of my life,
The night of my life,
The night of my life

~Damien Leith