Addendum and a list of lists

Just to clarify, I still haven't finished my thesis, right now I'm very close to finishing my first chapter (I have 19 pages of what looks to be a 23 page chapter).  It's taking more slowly than I thought, but having something concrete to look at makes me confident that the rest is just an accumulation of hours worked and will not require any great feats of analytical derring-do, particularly since I've already finished the part where I do all the hard thinking.  It's just a matter now of fleshing out the ideas in my rather detailed summary.  And since I estimate the finished thesis will be around 120 pages long, then I'm already one-sixth finished.

Oh, and things I will miss about Halifax, especially in comparison to Sudbury:

• Cheap seafood
• Being able to walk everywhere
• The bus pass that is part of my student fees
• Living down the street from the video store and the supermarket
• Having nearby cafes to work in
• The support of my Masters cohort
• The more bohemian outlook of the populace
• The fact that the working class are less visible
• Being able to pop into my supervisors' office when I need to talk to her about my work
• The large academic library at Dalhousie

The last is particularly important to me since I have to retun a giant bunch of library before I leave; I've actually been hoarding them since last year and have been exercising my privileges as a grad student.

But, Laurentian does have some of the books I need, and I can take them out since I have a Canada-wide library card.

The books I can get from Laurentian:

• Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. John Rutherford (ed.)
• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler
• Culture, Globalization and the World System, Anthony D. King (ed.)
• Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (this one's a classic so I think I'll just buy it, I'll probably be referring to it a lot in the future anyway)
• Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic perspectives, Monica Heller (ed.)
• The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha
• Working Feminism, Geraldine Pratt
• The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells
• The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, Stephen Castles & Mark J. Miller
• Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays, Joshua A. Fishman
• Language and Ethnicity: Focusschrift in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman, James R. Dow (ed.)
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman
• Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford & George Marcus
• Technologies of the Self, Michel Foucault

The new and the good stuff can't be found in Laurentian, so I'll have to do a lot of photocopying before I leave, but I'll have to buy a bunch more books too.  Oh well, maybe I can get some books from U of T if we're there over Christmas.

Leaving on a jet plane

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go (I'm leaving Halifax permanently for Sudbury on the 19th but I'm still not packed, I'm actually leaving a bunch of stuff to charity)

I'm standing here outside your door (Whose door? My roommates' door? My neighbours' door?)

I want to wake you up to say goodbye (I suppose I can bang around really loudly and wake up the roommate who kind of bugs me, but that means waking up the other ones too)

But the dawn is breakin', it's early morn (My flight leaves at 7 AM)

The taxi's waiting, he's blowin' his horn (Taxi my ass, there's a hotel down the street that's only a 10 minute walk away, so I'll just drag my bags there and take the airport shuttle that stops in front)

Already I'm so lonesome I could die (It's so true! And by true I mean not)

So kiss me and smile for me (I'm not kissing any of my roommates)

Tell me that you'll wait for me (I told you already)

Hold me like you'll never let me go (Stop it with your man-on-man fantasies)

'Cause I'm a' leavin' on a jet plane (The plane from Halifax to Toronto is a jet plane, but I think the one from TO to Sudbury is a prop plane)

Don't know when I'll be back again (This is true)

Leavin' on a jet plane (I said so already)

Don't know when I'll be back again (Convocation, maybe)

Oh babe I hate to go (Well "babe," I suppose so, but I won't hate how much more costly food is here, except for seafood)

I'm famous!

Check out this video of me in a soon-to-be-released major motion picture!



I'm (possibly) in that gaggle of morons on the far side of the street at the beginning of the video. This was during the first week of September; I was hanging out in downtown LA for a completely unrelated reason and wandered into a crowd of people gawking at the shooting. I was only there for a couple of takes so I don't know if I actually made it into this poorly shot video. For those who are wondering, the movie is that Transformers movie being directed by Michael Bay. The intern who kept trying to get us to move gave a different title when I asked him (I think he called it E13) but I could read the back of his shirt.