Ontario in T-minus 6 days!

BOOYA

weeee!

fancy brunch and the symphony with the boy on sunday= YES.

+dinner last night was the mix of wonderful and horrible that too much wine and dropping of the wrong names can bring. it was nice to be "out" with the gentleman friend however and we giggled drunkenly when we realized it had been two months ago that day that we drank too much booze and our bodies confessed. the food was delicious and the company marvelous. now if only i could scrub my social life clean of all remenants of before in the way i have scrubbed myself clean.

+ comp papers are due on thursday at midnight. much writing left to be done, and i hope to finish at least one tonight (despite the slight hangover - a small nap later might be required). friday brings a surprise birthday dinner for one of my first and favourite friends in this city and then drinks (and probably, an early-ish night home to watch arrested development and laugh with the boy) and saturday's usual delicious post-coital brunch. i am very excited to have my life back again and am already daydreaming about all the things i want to do with my newfound freedom. yoga and squash and jewellery-making, oh my! i also really want to paint a wall in my apartment and hope to beg the landlady to let me. i love this little place, but need to finish the last few things necessary to make it my own.

i hate the way our lives overlap.

+ask me something. tell me something. let's get reacquainted, my sweet dreamlets.

+writing and writing and writing oh my. the comprehensive exam papers are due on thursday and i am not yet complete one, though have made progress on all. at least two of the three promise to be well over 20 pages (but we all know my mouth has forever been full of words). yesterday i decided, somewhat late in the game, to stop writing the paper on identity politics and rather write about social constructionist challenges to the biological view of race and compare/contrast these with social constructionist accounts of gender. i realized that a) that topic was far easier for me to write (and thus quicker) but, more importantly b) the story i would tell about the justifications for group identity in the liberal polity and opposing arguments would probably not be the same story the professor who asked that question would tell. mine would be more of a story about 20th century social movements, feminism, the fracturing of discplines in the academy and the major feminist critiques of identity (with judtih butler providing the philosophical critique and wendy brown the political). then finally a defense of identity using linda alcoff and arguments about the depoliticization of identity as complicit with capitalist neoliberalism and obscuring the relations between oppressive social and political structures. the story i think he would tell is something like Locke, Rawls, Rorty, Nussbaum blah blah blah and that's not really my scene. after agonizing for two days with concerns about this schism i realized, fuck it, how about i just answer another question and i am a happier girl for it. Rawls, Rorty and Nussbaum can suck it - the personal is political motherfuckas.

+my SSHRC application is finally done and I must say, I am very happy with it. following the epic fail of my first draft , i started again from scratch and was rewarded for my efforts with very very positive comments from my godhead supervisor whom i adore/feel insignificant in relation to in equal measure. three rounds of revisions and she's done and ready to be submitted. now if only U of A would actually update my transcript to list all my grades from winter 2009 term, i could actually fucking hand it in on tuesday. bureaucracy makes me want to set myself on fire.

+today i feel like a bad queer. its national coming out day and i should be at a fundraiser for the queer arts festival i'm on the board of right now, however comps (and, lets not lie the snow and -11 degree weather) have kept me in seclusion. being in a heterosexual relationship for the first time in a long time makes the need to be out as queer (and politically so) feel all the more urgent. being queer has always been such a basic element of how i see myself that i find the prospect of being taken as straight anxiety inducing. being visible as queer has always been important to me and it seems even more important in alberta (the land of bill 44, where transphobia abounds) - yet here i am living the most heteronormative version of my life that i have ever lived. while i like to make jokes about this (and oh how i make jokes) there is part of me that is trying to reconcile the life i live and how i see myself with how others see me. one thing that makes is easier is that herr. boyfriend is basically two steps from being a lesbian anyways (and im pretty sure sans facial hair, he would generally be confused for one). the man wears birkenstocks around the house! (plus brings me raspberries and iced tea late at night and surprises me with homemade tiramisu, so i'm keeping him! fuck you world and your heteronormative assumptions!)

+tomorrow is thanksgiving and i shall be having vegetarian/vegan thanksgiving dinner at a lovely newish friend's place with the gentleman caller, and three other friends. i planned to bring a green bean casserole and/or maple roasted parsnips - however when i got to the grocery store on my way home from the library today they were out of both. talk about epic fail. anyways, instead i will bring two bottles of wine and cleavage (as per usual). i'm very excited- even though it will definitely cut into my writing time and means that I should try to finish a paper before i go to bed tonight (which is probably another 3000 words away). i feel very settled lately, like this life i am living is no longer just some approximation of a life, but something far more real, more rooted than i ever thought possible in this cold dark little city. what a strange thing life can be.

+11 days ago it was a year since i moved into this apartment (that now looks more like me than i ever thought possible) and started this new life cut bare of the rot (stupid little girl, so anxious to play house and pretend she was something else). it all seems so long ago now - sometimes it all just feels like a nightmare. i feel like the life i am living now was the one i was meant to live here, the one i should have come here to start in the first place. alone.

i should be writing and writing and writing
but all i wanna do is be fucking and fucking and fucking.

blerg.

i'm just going to say it.
sometimes the cure to what ails ya is spending an hour in bed giggling and then having a wonderful deep sleep with your favourite boy.

:-)

+i enjoy watching grey's anatomy from time to time, not because its a particularly good show (it isn't. though i generally will watch anything with sandra oh. i wish she was my best friend omg), but because i love watching its flagrant disregard for codes of ethics or what is generally considered to be good medical practice. OMFG. SPOILERZ ALERT: so holy fuck, what is with no one drawing attention to the fact that the woman with the huge ass aortic aneursym's son is not being treated for his paranoid schizophrenia? HELLO. if these people showed up in a real emerg social work would have been all over that shit in a second. they BOTH NEED PSYCH EVALS. and dude, im not a huge fan of psychiatry in general (i've read my foucault.) but still - that is not a situation conducive to human flourishing y'all. r. k thnx bye.

+school is a ridiculous mix of wonderful/horrible lately. the internal (department) sshrc deadline is today, however mine will not be going in on time , as the draft i gave my supervisor recieved a big fat THNX BUT NO THNX. TRY AGAIN (and actually, that's the nice version of it). admittedly, i have no argument with any of her criticisms. i'm not going to lie, her brain is exponentially bigger than mine. most of my interactions with her leave me a strange heady mix of more in love with her than ever and more convinced of my own intellectual failings than ever. i realize the whole point of me coming here (across the fucking universe) was to be molded by her into something more (fitter.smarter. happier. and now, more cutting and insightful), BUT DAMN sometimes i miss feeling competant. that's right. not smart. COMPETANT.

anyways, the next 3 hours will be spent completing a new SSHRC draft based on the three sentence remnant from the old which i was told contains a very good idea - if only i would say it, which will then be emailed out to all sorts of wonderful smart delicious people for comments and then after another revision, i hope to have that in for monday.

in related news, my first comprehensive exam started yesterday. 3 x 20 page papers in 2 weeks and then an oral defense. LET THE AWESOME BEGIN. i'm actually feeling very good about it and am really looking forward to writing at least two of the three papers (the other is still a bit vague in my mind and will probably take me as much time as a first two together, so i'm not as excited about it). the first will be a paper taking a position on the change from "intersex" to "disorders of sex development" by the Intersex Society of North America (now the Accord Alliance) reading it through the frame of Foucauldian normalization. the second will be giving the various positions for and against a politics of identity within liberalism and compare these to various positions adopted by the ISNA during it's production, progression, dissolution and reformation as the accord alliance. i actually feel like this work will be very important to my dissertation which is starting to feel less like a fantasy and more like something i might actually one day do. the reading for this comp has been exciting. my brain feels awake in a way it hasn't been in a long time. something is brewing there in the back of my throat. i suspect it might be a while coming....but i'm looking forward to it.

+lately, i am ridiculously happy. being with someone suddenly seems far easier than i ever imagined possible. we've slipped into a rythm (change my stride).

damn you mad men for being so good.

DAMN YOU

i wish i weren't such a busy girl cause there is a big long post i want to make about how no one seems to be discussing these ridiculous debates over health care in the US and their relationship to maintaining the economic (and political) disadvantage of minority groups (the ever necessary, working class). COME ON PEOPLE!

"Certainly when peered at closely, the definitions of all disciplines woddle, their identities mutate, their rules and regulations appear as contingent and contestable. Most disciplines, founded through necessary exclusions and illusions about stability and boundedness of their objects, have reached crises in their attempts to secure their boundaries, define an exclusive terrain of inquiry, and fix their object of study. And, in most cases, the desires to persist over time has resulted in a certain consrvatism or its close cousin, methodism." - Wendy Brown, the Impossibility of Women's Studies


AINT THAT THA MUTHAFUCKING TRUTH MISS WENDY B. HOLLA!

\...is watching ecstatic, fast talking, spanish tween girls ignore the camp leader attempting to coax them into english.

\...is listening to adele in a copper hued dorm room while air drying after a long sweltering walk throught the city and a long.cold.shower.

\...is smoking pot and reading the georgia straight at the amsterdam cafe.

\...is gyoza and a spider roll at kitslano sushi

\...is waking to gossiping of kids at summer camp as they gather in the quad between dorms in the morning.

\...is yellow "banana" slushies and nipple clamps on commercial drive.

\...is being the person on the least drugs on the number 20 bus.

\...is dinner and dyke dancing with long lost friends.

\...is the 99 b-line to broadway station, packed to the gills.

\...is dry feet, grins and a universe that will not be refused.

\...is reclaiming my discoveries.one.by.one.

\...the corpses of moths in the dorm stairwells, who couldn't find their way out once the sun reclaimed the sky, respectfully stepped around.

\...is remembering myself as a wordsmith, first.


TOMORROW: the naam breakfast special. stanley park and the aquarium. drinks with a girl from a lifetime ago. the vancouver art gallery. yummies in my tummy.

okay. so i promise promise promise that i'm not really the kind of girl to talk about celebrities, nor will the discussions of celebrities feature heavily (if ever again) on this little site of mine. seriously, i promise this. while it is true that i often spend my mornings eating cereal and reading ohnotheydidnt and it is indeed also true that i spent money i really shouldn't as a fuckingpoorgradstudent on people magazine and us weekly to read on the plane, i am nonetheless NOT the girl who TALKS about celebrities. they aren't food for thought, they are sugar on my special k. HOWEVER, i need to make an exception FOR THIS.

joe jackson recently confirmed that michael's supposed love child omer bhatti is indeed his. LOOK THE INTERNETZ WILL SHOW YOU.



here is my problem with this.

while it is true that omer bhatti does indeed resemble michael. mr bhatti, who looks like this:



and once looks like this:



doesn't resemble this michael:



rather, he resembles THIS MICHAEL (AHHH LOOK AT THEM):



here is the problem: YOU CAN'T INHERIT SOMATIC CELLULAR CHANGES. the frightening results of an addiction to plastic surgery cannot be passed on through the gametes people. inheritance doesn't work like that. otherwise joyce wildenstein would have cats for babies.

for some reason though, i don't actually doubt this is michael's child, perhaps because this would simply confirm my long held but never publicly voiced belief that michael jackson was, in fact, an extraterrestrial.

seriously. i'm pretty sure that all the y incision in that autopsy revealed was dust and glitter. they cracked him open and there was NOTHING BUT DUST AND GLITTER.

and that's all i have to say about michael jackson (though i was a fan in the way everyone kind of has to be since he was groundbreaking in the way that i think simply furthers my extraterrestrial thesis. i also feel like he is perhaps the most perfect embodiment possible of the quotation "fame is a mask that eats into the face". also cintra wilson has this fuckingawesome book called "a massive swelling: celebrity reexamined as a grotesque, crippling disease and other cultural revelations" with a chapter on mj entitled "jacko: the no nosed man from motown (a morality fable) that i recommend you all read if you like shit that's good).

what i will say is this: i wish MY dad and i put on matching makeup and taken glamour shots when i was a kid. i feel like my childhood would have been SO MUCH BETTER.

is it excessive to take three cameras to vancouver?

i hope not.

THREE MORE SLEEPS.

in 17 days i go to vancouver.
to reclaim the sand.
to be proud. and defiant.
to remember myself
dark thighs, sharp tongue and all.

do you remember,
my pretty mouth?
that said all the words
you wish. you thought. yourself?

(do you see me my black shoes? can't be undone, can't be undone?
forgive me such drunk poetry. my hair is more grey than black these days).

do.not. mis.con.strue. these words.

i am
this song of myself.

having a tough day my dreamlets.

i'm sick of this town. i woke up covered in anger, for the first time in a while now.
i found something last night, a journal from back then (i was sorightall along).
the anniversary of my betrayal is coming up it seems.

i am feeling cruel.

tell me about who i might find interesting.
i want more ljs to read.

not that i don't love you all dreamlets.
i just have more to give ;-)
 

today, i was informed that as a student in a doctorate program in philosophy (with three degrees, and one year of teaching experience at the university level. at the age of 27, no less. mother.fucker.), i make TOO LITTLE MONEY to qualify for a student line of credit. i then attempted to explain to this individual the faulty logic of this argument, as i am indeed a phd candidate in philosophy..however i don't think they appreciated it my point.

and so here i am, with two weeks left to go in the month with about 18 dollars to my name ( by which i mean i am 482 dollars into my 500 dollar overdraft).

watch closely kids!however is she going to get out of this one? let's see what she's going to do next!

specific things that piss me off about this:
+ what kind of fucking world is this where a black woman with three degrees, working on her fourth (with RRSPs and a mutual fund as collatoral no less) can't get 20K from a fucking bank. I could easily get approved for a fucking SEARS card with 20K or another credit card (cause aren't big women of colour at the poverty line not the credit nation's favourite customers?). i know it's a recession, but come on, i am a pretty fucking solid candidate if i do say so myself AND I DO.
+if i was a medical student or a law student i clearly would have got that money, but getting a phd in the humanities aint worth shit.
+i totally wish i had sued my cheating cunt ex for at least part of all the money i lost on the move out here (and all the things she needed to keep her happy). however, something like this would cost money and would (worst of all) require that our lives intersect once again.. and i would rather be poor. still. i can daydream of a cheque for 5K suddenly showing up in my mailbox.. right?
+ i probably have more degrees than everyone who declined me. and i know i know im going on about the degrees thing, which is really not like me to do, i'm not really someone who gives a shit about that kind of stuff. but this is fucking ridiculous and i seriously needed that money. i can't keep living in overdraft and my family situation is such that i a) don't really want to be taking money from them at this point in their life and b) might require quick access to money were a health emergency to arise (which is very very possible). honestly. after i cried and called my dad blubber and smoked a joint and cried and then cleaned... i was very tempted to go over to the bank and say, listen here's the deal... if you can find one person in here with more degrees than me, i will give YOU 20 k. otherwise, just GIVE ME THE FUCKING MONEY. i doubt this would have worked. but i seriously considered it for about 25 minutes.

the moral of this story is: FUCK MY LIFE.

not to let you think it's all bile and vinegar over here: i have mint chocolate chip ice cream and ice cream cones in my house. PLUS, i found my dad a new nephrologist whom he loves and who says he sees no reason that we can't keep the old man off dialysis for another 2-3 years. this is completely fucking awesome.. especially cause my mother has to work for another 1.5 years and she needs double knee replacements (which she can't have cause she has one kidney) and doesn't drive (spatial disability) and i need someone to drive her to work.

...on a clearly not unrelated note, i am considering starting a new blog called "The Funding Made Me Do It! (or FUCK MY LIFE): Adventures of a Grad student/Prostitute" . Maybe it could shame sshrc or the bank or someone into giving me money. or become my thesis.. who knows.

beyond the above noted bullshit, things are excellent.