Visitors

Last week one of my former postdoc supervisors came to MediumSizedU where I am currently employed to give a talk. Not all of the faculty attend seminars, but most of them try to make it, and one faculty member with whom I often sit had brought along a paper to work on. (something that I knew was actually due two months ago as it is a chapter in a book.) I leaned over and said, "This is going to be a pretty synthetic talk, I see you've brought work. Good idea." She's not a synthetic chemist at all.

I used to bring work along to talks, but now I almost never do that, as I'd rather not attend if it's just something that I'm going to ignore anyway. It's not like staff have to attend seminars, because we don't at all, but we go to the talks that interest us. This particular seminar was all synthesis, catalysis, and characterization of intermediates by X-ray crystallography, as the active compounds are paramagnetic and not characterizable by NMR spectroscopy. (My blogger dictionary doesn't think that characterizable is a word.) While my interests aren't in early metal chemistry any more, the speaker was engaging, energetic, and funny; my colleague didn't get around to editing her book chapter as she was also taken up with our presenter's style and wit.

I really like my former pdoc supervisor as a human. He's a warm and funny man, driven to succeed. As a boss, he's an utter tyrant, micro-managing the lab and everyone in it down to the tiniest daily minutiae. I worked for him quite a while ago, and I do know that he's mellowed somewhat (heart attack will do that) because another of his (much more recent) former postdocs is currently p'doc'ing for someone on faculty at MedSizedU. He hasn't changed that much though.

Thing is, even though he is a tyrant, he's still likable.

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On another note, I'm writing my final paper for my little course, and I've chosen to write about the paradigm shift in thought with the advent of female-centred birth control (the pill). I've been sifting through the CBC archives to get a feeling for the social milieu of the time, and firstly, I should say that the CBC has done a great job of maintaining these old files and making them public. There are 12 television clips and a couple of radio clips in this archive, and if you have time, take a look and a listen. Interesting that the audience "twitters" over the word ovulation in one This Hour has Seven Days interview. I'd love to bring one of those audience members forward in time to one of our dinnertime conversations!

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I'm a Philistine

Man. I am slayed by postmodernism. I get it, but I don't get it, it's there but it isn't. It has a definition, but it deconstructs it. It flies in the face of reality. It is Naked Lunch and Catch-22 and Kiss of the Spiderwoman all in one go. It is Monty Python on acid, and it is making me mental.

I cannot wait for this course to be over. It is nearly over, truth be told, only another month or so to go. I have to write a big major paper and I suspect it will do me in...I can't quite even find a way to write an outline for the thing, although I know full well what a paradigm shift is and how the birth control pill affected one. Sure, I was going to write about something easy like quantum mechanics or heliocentricity, but noooooooo.....let's write about something that has all the crazy postmodern feminist crazy, did I mention crazy? in it.

When my instructor said that she just didn't buy the whole notion of straightforward lectures and a building-up approach to learning, little did she know how little I bought into the whole hands-off, "learning is a shared experience" sort of approach. I think we could do with a little buying into both types of approaches, but I am not teaching this course. I feel, on the other hand, that I'm barely taking this course. It's very weird to me.

As I said to BF1 today, "I don't think I'm much of an arts student." It's easy enough stuff (well, except for trying to grasp postmodernism, which, come to think of it, doesn't want to be grasped, so maybe I should just quit trying to do that and let it come to me. Ah. There. I get it now.) but it makes me nuts. I have never wanted to throw so many books across the room as I have over the last three months. I rant. I make deals with myself: just one more page, and you can have a cookie, or one of those little chocolate bars. Ahhhh. The little chocolate bars. Halloween is a good thing.

Besides the crazy ranting on arts and social sciences theoretical perspectives, there's not a lot going on here. That is a complete lie. There is so much going on here that if I were a weaker person my head would explode. As it is, I'm just happy to catch a breath here and there, like we did on Saturday when we went for lunch with a winemaker in Niagara. Well worth the trip for a four-course lunch and four wines to try and then other wines to try after that. Wine wine wine. Added to the wine stash (oh all right, cellar) and then came home in the rain, not pleasant. Kiddies were next door with Zio in the dark, as the power had been out for almost two hours on our street. No explanation why this occurred, but it came back on in time for their bedtime, which was good, otherwise Big One would have been riding the nightmare roller coaster, and that is such a drag.

I would have expected the little darling to be up a few times tonight, come to think of it, because tomorrow she has to read a big part in the Remembrance Day pageant at school, but that's one (rare) thing that doesn't bother her at all. Read in front of 300 people? No problem. Watch Scooby Doo and the Ghost of Kingdom Come? Yeah, not so much, or at least, not without getting up crying because she can't sleep and she keeps thinking about the monsters. The Little One has nightmares sometimes too, but he just gets Hub up to take him back to bed.

And all this talk of sleep is helping me to wind down. The morning rolls around quickly when you go to bed too late, maybe I'll try getting to sleep a bit earlier tonight....