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Here are the 15 most recent journal entries recorded in
yes, *that* Dawn person's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 | |
| 8:17 pm | song in my head I'm learning the piece I expect will be my last recital performance for quite a while. It's one of those modern works by a still-warm composer born and raised on the wrong side of the Atlantic, devoid of consistent time signature, key, and tempo. It's beautiful, and it's in everything I hear all the time. It will remain so until I have finished learning it: I've seen this process at work several times with complex pieces of music settling into my mind and body. I don't know when it will let me return to what normal people experience in their aural landscapes. It won't entirely settle down until I've given a satisfying performance. How terrible it is, to be so alive. Pardon my naive incredulity that this music so fully permeating my existence is utterly inaudible to you: I never get used to that part, so you may find me staring a bit like a madman. It's perfectly safe. I'm being, musically. It happens sometimes. |
| Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 | |
| 8:51 pm | have tea with someone who has a perspective I shall now embarrass my adult daughter. Are you curious about aspects of Statistics Canada that don't violate an NDA, the recent and ongoing federal cuts to the civil service, optimizing a web site for usability and better search results, librarianship, or the strange conditions in which civil servants gain and retain employment? Send a gmail to tabzilla (she can provide a more respectable "library school alumna" addy from there if you want to pass it along or just want to feel as though you're not corresponding with a Japanese man in a rubber suit) and start up a conversation. If you're local to my area, offer to take her out for a cup of tea. There, I think that should do it. You turn such a sweet shade of pink when you smile like that. Now stand up straight: you're beautiful. |
| Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 | |
| 8:04 pm | |
| Sunday, March 11th, 2012 | |
| 10:26 am | the rambling semi-parable of the virus I woke up Thursday morning feeling pretty crappy, dehydrated with no appetite, but dragged myself to work because it was Budget Day. It would take something pretty daunting to keep me from missing the once a year meeting (my first in current job, yerp) where my boss and I justify our spending plans for the coming fiscal year to the people who hold the purse strings and decide which projects get funded. This is a drastically different funding model than I'd previously used, where a prioritized "ask" list was largely given the green light in the form of "ask for $X, get between 100% and 80% of $X depending on the auguries". Then I threw up, re-evaluated my symptoms, accepted that I was fighting the flu or something very like it, washed up, made my apologies, and went home to recuperate. I'm very grateful the bus driver was kindly because, well, not on the bus at least. I've spent most of Thursday through Saturday resting and getting sufficient fluids. Shades of events over a year ago went through my mind: the need to stay well hydrated helped me return to the horizontal and rest (if not always sleep) whenever my head or stomach told me it was needed. I missed two concerts and a night of play readings that I'd have liked to go to. I sent S to the farmers' market with a list instead of dragging myself downtown. I read and answered work email a little on Thursday and Friday, because it wasn't their fault I was sick, but not so much as to tax my strength. Much. There will be a Budget Day for me next week and none of my deadlines have been irrevocably passed. Monday will be a full day at work for me. I went for a little walk around the neighbourhood with S yesterday afternoon once I felt strong enough to manage. I don't think I'll make the political rally this afternoon, but I may surprise myself. I will get to the Korean grocery in the neighbourhood to pick up a few things, with my sweetie along in case I need someone to lean on. Staying cooped up in the house is hard. Staying in bed is even more difficult for me. For as long as I can remember, I've followed the example of the other women of my family: keep running the household and doing what's needed until you're about to fall over, take minimal time to recover, get back to chores and work as soon as possible. It took some serious stress over the past two years to slap me upside the metaphorical head to look at how short-sighted and ineffective that kind of martyrdom is as a default, and I still find it difficult to resist this particular riff on the protestant work ethic. I don't think other people in my life are malingering, guilty, or worthy of shame when they take the time and resources they need to ensure they're healthy. As a wise fellow once told me when I needed to hear it, I'm part of the people in my life and equally in need of the same kind of care and consideration I give them. Thanks, T, though I'm pretty sure you're not reading this. |
| Sunday, February 19th, 2012 | |
| 6:53 pm | still not unlocked and enlightened I continue to read DW and a subset of LJ, the latter mostly in bursts on weekends. I've been fairly quiet here, not because I have nothing to say, but because I don't often gather the energy to write what's on my mind in a way that is non-cryptic and safe and respectful and concealing what I should not reveal. Among other things, there is much about my (new since December) job I have found not appropriate to write about. I do make random brief yawps on Twitter and Facebook, and don't mind stalkers in those arenas. S and I finished Season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender today and may eat the rest of the series up before the end of March. Amidst the jackpot of coming-of-age events in the story line came the "stick wake up" of the harm that is done by holding on tightly to what needs to be set free. |
| Sunday, January 22nd, 2012 | |
| 3:16 pm | if God is an iron, can I press my shirt with Her? Being who I am, I've seen a lot of references to the Roe v Wade decision today. I am not going to trot out my experiences of being female-bodied in Canada before Dr. Henry Morgentaler spearheaded significant changes in law and medical practice: I've written on the subject before and I'm not some freak show to trot my scars out for the public to gawp at on special occasions. I will, instead, write about what I want to write about when I feel like putting fingertips to keyboard. Today, my subject is the domestic chore of ironing. Over the past decade I haven't picked up an iron much, but I ironed four shirts today: three of mine, inexpensive for bespoke garments, purchased as part of remaking my image to fit my career path, and one of Boy's, for band and choir concerts. It was an action both strange and familiar. The last time I did much ironing was when Phred and I were married to each other. He usually wore shirts that wanted ironing as part of his business wardrobe. I would pull out the ironing board on Saturday nights when he was playing in Johnny's wedding band, sing tunes from Chicago (the band, not the musical or the city), and iron the shirts I'd washed that morning while The Lump was asleep upstairs. I learned to iron from my mother and my aunt, first on linen tea towels and cotton bed sheets, later on my brother's and father's shirts (and probably various blouses and dresses, though I don't have a strong sense memory of them). The temperature of the iron and whether or not to use steam depended on the type of fabric and how stubborn a wrinkle or crease might be. We didn't have a sleeve board, so ironing shirts took a lot of care and repositioning, making sure to keep pockets and sleeves smooth through multiple layers, selecting the correct side of the seam to press and the direction in which to press it, getting around the buttons without harming them. I remember that there was such a thing as spray-on starch, though I don't remember using anything other than distilled water from a spray bottle or from the iron itself. I'd put off ironing for two weeks before getting to it today, so I could iron all the shirts that need it. When I got the iron out of storage, I cleaned it and tested it on a linen tea towel to make sure it wouldn't soil the shirts. I don't iron dishcloths, bedding, or napkins (the last of which I don't use even for fancy times). As my hands bent to a well remembered task, I thought about my brother's shirts, my father's scratchy baritone voice, snuggling up to Phred when he didn't stink from bars and weddings, family studies class in elementary school and how everything we made from Butterick patterns looked like pyjamas. I thought about the skills I'd learned in choosing fabrics and picking out well-made clothes that wouldn't need special care, how to wash and how to iron, and wondered if I've done a good enough job passing those skills on to the next generation. I taught Grl ironing enough for her current and future needs, but I haven't made an occasion to teach Boy yet. Perhaps in a few weeks there will be shirts to iron again, and we can work on them together. Like many chores, there's a satisfaction in doing and in completing the job of pressing the wrinkles out. I don't want to iron any more than I want to cut the lawn or shovel the walk or take the garbage to the curb, but it's a useful task that brings a small sense of accomplishment along with it. |
| Monday, December 5th, 2011 | |
| 5:31 pm | new jerb, different stressors The interesting problems related to my recent change in employment will really start to hit hard in the new year. Meantime, I'm learning as much about procedures, politics, and possibilities as I can retain (in addition to discovering things about my predecessor that will never be spoken aloud nor written down). For the moment the best use I'm making of time working with others is exchanging information; SOP in Province Arts is different from both Province Math and The Capitol, so only the most transferrable of my tech skills are immediately useful here. I'm fascinated and largely unsurprised in observing people's interactions and reactions through the lens of my experience and the borrowed wisdom of others' words and action. Having known coming in that I would be unable to please everyone fully, it's enlightening to me (and hopefully others) both how and by whom the management changes are negatively received. |
| Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 | |
| 7:47 pm | GHC lite in Canada I went to an Ontario conference for women in computing recently. While it didn't prod the ultimate buttock for me, it clearly was a great tonic for the 100+ CS grad students while not disappointing this IT pro. The big Grace Hopper events serve both academic and industry computing disciplines at various levels and life stages. No way could the university-based locals pull off something like that with the kind of infrastructure readily available ... not for a few years yet, anyway. Attendance was capped at 150 and it was heavily pitched to grad students (who got a night in a fine downtown hotel and an evening on the town for their $40, hopefully paid by their own Women In Computing groups or research supervisors). ( details ) Those who wished, and who didn't have a ride home to catch, planned to hang out at a nearby campus bar that evening. Based on the flow of conversation and clumping of people as I was leaving to wend my way homeward, it would have been a good end to an informative, energizing day (and a half for most). $EMPLOYER could do well to host this event, still aimed at 100-200 mostly students, most of them grad students, a few postdocs, and a few undergrads in their senior year, in CS and closely related disciplines. I hope they do so next year or the following one. It will take a lot of work but there are two event-years of experience at other institutions to draw on. |
| Friday, October 7th, 2011 | |
| 5:53 pm | Bootstrap: My Ada Lovelace October 7 is the designated Ada Lovelace Day for 2011. This is a day for the celebration of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) fields: "share your story about a woman — whether an engineer, a scientist, a technologist or mathematician — who has inspired you to become who you are today." I don't have an Ada I can point to. I was a multiply gifted child raised in a working-class family. All my parents and my public school teachers told me clearly and consistently that I could and should work hard and succeed because it was obvious that I had a great potential. My mother's career was raising a family and managing a household; my maiden aunt worked as a doctor's secretary/receptionist for over forty years; my eldest sister became a critical care nurse; my youngest sister took a factory job and eventually rose to a position of some responsibility in the company. Mr. Hopkinson was my Grade 8 home room teacher. When he announced that I was the winner of the school's math award at commencement, he told the audience, students and families, that I was going to do great things and should go to Ottawa to straighten the government out. My daughter's in Ottawa now, working to parlay a very successful co-op experience as a web usability expert into a career. Mr. Hurd ran the math club at my high school. The math club was basically a bunch of geeky guys who did math and computery stuff and a bunch of geeky girls who did math-based string art. Mr. Hurd was totally cool with me hanging out with both the guys and the girls, switching between them but gravitating to the guys in using mainframe and later the personal computer the club had access to. My Grade 13 Chemistry and Biology teachers were also inspiring, encouraging figures in my life. When I earned a scholarship to go to university, the academic advisor (another man) encouraged me to enrol in computer science courses on top of my heavy maths and sciences course load. I liked the subject and wound up hanging out in the terminal room most of the time I was on campus and not gaming with my (male, with one exception) buddies. I was encouraged to excel by Fred Whiteside, Ken Redish, Bill Smythe, and Skip Poehlman among others. I never had a female prof or TA (there are still no female CS profs at Mac). I noticed that my status as a white female in Comp Sci put me firmly in the category of "curiosity" but I was never told that I was anything less because of the accident of my sex. I have had two female managers in my career to date, both for periods measured in months: both of them were much more tired than inspiring. I've worked with some rocking librarians, male and female, and have a great deal of respect for the individuals and the profession as a whole. Marcel Gagne, Robert Rossander at Ultimate, and the C compiler team I worked with at IBM were energizing to work beside. Almost all of the techs I've worked with have been male, with the preponderance of them being white or of Asian (mostly Chinese and Japanese) descent. After several years of proving my chops and building my reputation as a developer, IT tech, and network guy, I'm an IT manager supporting Computer Science instruction and related functions at a university that has a strong tech reputation. My colleagues, my direct reports, and most of the faculty I support are men. I hold the position I do based on merit, not employment equity guidelines: ask my boss, my former boss, and the school's executive council if you doubt me. I don't believe it's a fluke that I didn't Peter Principle out when I made the transition from senior technical staff to management: I have both the aptitude and the training to handle supervisory and mid-level management tasks, and I continue to pursue professional development opportunities that I can afford so I can become not just a manager but a leader. There are a lot of women outside STEM and a lot of men teaching or working in technical fields who helped me get where I am today, both by inspiring me and with direct assistance. I don't have a single woman tech to thank for inspiring me to become what I am today, unless that woman is me. And I'm all right with that. |
| Friday, September 30th, 2011 | |
| 8:38 am | Trigger warning: abuse, forcible confinement, stockholm syndrome It will be enlightening, I hope, to see how the media and the courts treat the case of a man who appears to have committed crimes of "domestic violence" against another man, who did not willingly leave his abuser. The above link has few details. More information is in the Calgary Herald article. |
| Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 | |
| 5:06 pm | photographer's wife: subject S has a Tumblr account where he posts some of his work on a "weekly theme" basis. Some of the individual photos or themes move me deeply and others don't. From the titles I've seen in his current theme, I'm fairly certain it's a project that involves several models portraying intense states of being. While I'm glad to have been a small part of the project, I'm not ready to look at the subset of results that represent my own (quite recent) involvement, so I'm giving the entire series a pass. Perhaps I'll review the project with him or on my own in a month or two. My reluctance to look at the pictures isn't because I'm afraid to see an unflattering photograph of me: thousands of photos and years of communication and mutual trust have numbed that aspect of my vanity and low self-image. Not enough time and life have passed since my act of expression for the artist for me to view his results objectively. |
| Sunday, September 11th, 2011 | |
| 7:42 am | make this a day of understanding Today is a day of remembrance and sorrow for many. Ten years ago, a handful of people executed a plan to inflict their hatred on millions. It is up to you and it is up to me to let them succeed, or to deny their dream. I was raised in an atmosphere of kindness and consideration towards others as long as those others were like us. The stranger, the freak, the one who wasn't like us was usually shunned or made the butt of jokes, not welcomed into the wider community. The children's joke How does an [OUTSIDER] take a bubble bath? He sits in a mud puddle and farts.is an example of the passing on of hatred and ignorance of the different from generation to generation. As I grew from childhood to adulthood, two strong pressures cracked the shell of the xenophobia my tribe treasured. The first was my frequent exposure to people who were not like what I had been raised to be. A strong multi-cultural community in a city made up largely of immigrants and first- and second-generation Canadians was reinforced by public school teachers (backed by the governments of the time) encouraging our mixed-ethnicity classes to share our family heritages with each other. Add in the mobility a good transit system provided me as a youth and extra-curricular programmes encouraging teenagers from families with various levels of income to intermix and there was no person anywhere in the city who could not be a possible friend of mine. The second pressure came from within. I knew early in life that I was not the person my extended family's expectations would have me be. I was, and still am, a freak: being true to who I am is in direct conflict with the straight narrow path of an honoured and respected member of that community. There are aspects of myself that I've come to share with my family of origin and have accepted; there are things I don't say or show because nothing but hurt would come of their sharing. Here at a place that could broadly be defined as mid-life, I have the privilege of being loved, respected and admired while being true to myself, yet there is room for improvement. There are individuals who do not know me but hate or fear me based on the little they see and their own backgrounds. There are both individuals and large groups of humanity I judge far too harshly because I do not know them and I don't want to know them. Please, make the effort today to understand one person a little better. Please stop yourself from repeating a thoughtless thing that reinforces mindless hate. I am doing the same, as I work to do every day. It's not always easy, but the people you and I don't understand deserve no less. |
| Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 | |
| 1:28 pm | relief valve: T minus 3 weeks I hope to write further thoughts on the aftermath of last week's explosion of man's inhumanity to man when it's not eating so much of my and others' mind: I am a decent synthesizer and I'd like to recap some of the lessons I think are being learned. But that's for later. For now, I note (heh) a marked increase in frequency with which people are asking me in the context of concern for my coping under the influence of multiple hard stressors when I'll be getting back to singing. Yeah, I miss my dear music performance enabling coach/friend, who contributes immensely to the evenness of my keel. |
| Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 | |
| 12:02 pm | of course London is on fire; any city in the world could be Recent events in London (the big one across the pond from me, not the little one an hour down the road) have generated a lot of news stories, blog entries, and publicly expressed opinions. The underlying social problems are, from my back-of-the-envelope analysis, a major contributor to the current situation. In my ideology, a reliable social safety net is a basic necessity for a civilized society. The UK is not the only nation I see going down what I consider an unwise and dangerous path of reducing social services and encumbering access to support for people in need. Several people whose opinions I respect on non-social, non-political issues have made what I see as unthinking statements placing all blame on the rioters and looters. Once a crowd grows to a mob, it is extremely difficult to hold on to one's own humanity. Have these blamers ever tried to exercise personal responsibility while those around them have gone mad? Because of my personal history, I find it much easier than the vast majority of people I interact with regularly to empathize with those outside society's mainstream, especially the poor and what some would call petty criminals. I'm currently demographically well above the poverty line and can pass as a dude with privilege, but some things are learned in the bone. Many of the people wreaking havoc haven't had anywhere near the opportunities I've gotten and don't have good reason to respect the authority tasked with trying to calm things down. I don't have a simple solution, but I have a shred of an answer: examine the system that fed and continues to feed the powder keg that was set off with a killing whose details are still under dispute, so the roots of the problems have a chance of being addressed. |
| Thursday, August 4th, 2011 | |
| 7:12 pm | the tale of the traveling bespoke pants At 15, Boy is tall and thin enough to make the casual observer think he's been photoshopped. He outgrew lengthwise the staple jeans I'd been getting him some months ago (Lands' End slim fit boys' size 20 with an adjustable waist to make them not fall right off when he puts them on). Over the past year I've investigated possible options to provide him with good quality pants that suit his style (largely non-descript, definitely neither hipster nor sk8r) at a price that doesn't hurt my budget. ( Here begins the tale ) Minor cajoling and a shower later, the pants (which I've unpacked and checked to confirm their high quality) are donned. They fit very nicely, as though they were made specially for Boy. Right, they were. I amuse myself with the India-style English of the accompanying letter, from "We are sure for many of you this must be the first time you will be wearing a jeans specially made and enzyme washed for you, else the standard jeans you buy from any store are bulk made in thousands of quantity together using one measurement system" through "Each garment is made with a lot of hardwork and love, our craftsmen can only make about 3 to 4 custom jeans in a day, be proud of your garment which can be termed as luxury at a great price" to "Warm Regards Harry :) (Team Head)". I am pleased with the product and the service. Will buy again for Boy, though I'll be stubborn and not get around to getting my own bespoke pants for months I'm sure. The heavier weight fabric is definitely going to be wanted come cooler weather, and it'll be a bonus if they do flannel lined jeans for the coldest part of the year (dagnabbit, looks like they don't). |
