Thank you Futurama....

                                     BENDER
                         Ah! Nothing like a warm fire and a Super
                        Soaker of fine cognac.

              
               [He squirts some into his mouth.]

              
                                     FRY
                         Yeah, it really puts you in the Christmas
                        spirit.

              
                                     FARNSWORTH
                         What-mas?

              
                                     FRY
                         Christmas. You know? X-M-A-S.

              
                                     LEELA
                         Oh, you mean Xmas. You must be using
                        an archaic pronunciation. Like when
                        you say "ask" instead of "aks".

I'm happy to report that I've done absolutely nothing related to school or work for over a week now. Bliss! I hope everyone else is being as lazy as I am. Xmas sloth rocks.

Another meme. After seeing it at Queen of West and The Clutter Museum, I couldn't resist.

Record the first sentence of the first blog post of every month this year.

January: Let me introduce you to the Poopsmith.

February: I haven't been doing this blog thing for a long time, but I've been doing my best to make my blog thematic, pretty, and decently entertaining (for me, at least).

March: This morning I finally finished my woefully overdue special topics reading list.

April: A couple Christmases ago I gave the hubster the "Don't be a jerk" postcard as a greeting card.

May: ...and it's not because I'm a round-heeled woman.

June: I was in Toronto last week.

July: I'm not really the poor blogger (that title has already been claimed by a very funny blogger I recently discovered) but I have been rather remiss in my blogging lately.

August: A: Some kind of health problem strikes.

September: I'm ABD -- all but dissertation, all but done, almost bloody done, all beer day -- whatever you call it, I've got those letters.

October: Last year, after my SSHRC proposal didn't get it through the uni AGAIN, I promised myself I wouldn't get all pissy and upset over the process this year.

November: The short answer is:

• In Calgary
• In Lethbridge
• In ridiculous amounts of pain thanks to bronchitis (now gone) and a sinus infection (still here)

December: First, apologies for the extended break. I've been lazy.

The title isn't a typo. I stole this from Dr. Couz.

1. Hot Chocolate or Egg Nog?
Nog, but diluted with some skim milk, spiked with spiced rum and sprinkled with nutmeg. Hot Chocolate is good after winter activities, but it often makes my tummy upset.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?
Wrapped -- well, Mrs. Claus probably does the wrapping.

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?
Coloured. I miss big lights. Tiny lights are pretty but not nearly as retro-fun.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?
No. My cat would probably eat it (she can jump pretty high).

5. When do you put your decorations up?
Whenever I get around to it. We just put up the tree yesterday, and last year we didn't decorate at all as we were out of town. Meh, I'm not fussed about decorations. Just hand me some nog!

6. What is your favorite holiday dish?
Stuffing and nalysnky.

7. Favorite Holiday memory?
Ukrainian food -- including the stink of holubtsi, even though I still don't eat it. I'll make it, but I just can't get into the sour cabbage taste.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
Erm, maybe when I was 9?

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?
Only when I have a lot of gifts under the tree.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree?
Unbreakable decorations. Tess loves knocking them down.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it?
Like the look of it, like to play in it, don't much care for living with it for the entire winter season.

12. Can you ice skate?
Not very well. I am not what one would call well-balanced.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?
Hockey gear when I was a kid. Loved it!

14. What’s the most important thing?
The food, friends and happiness. I don't stress about Christmas, and it's always good.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert?
I don't care much for desserts generally, but a nice apple crisp with vanilla ice cream is pretty dreamy -- especially if it's Mom's apple crisp and Dad's homemade ice cream.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
Um, the food?

(This meme should make it clear exactly WHY I'm on Weight Watchers. :p)

17. What tops your tree?
A hand-me-down plastic faux candle. It's quite pretty, actually.

18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving?
Giving! Especially for my parents, sister and brother-in-law and Mike.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song?
Ukrainian Bell Carol.

20. Candy canes, Yuck or Yum?
They're good in hot cocoa. I can never finish a whole one on its own!

If you're reading this, you're tagged. Go to it bitches!

My SSHRC application once again did NOT make it past the university. This is my fourth and last attempt. I am no longer eligible to apply for SSHRC PhD funding. This is both a good and bad thing.

Applying for the SSHRC every year was the most exhausting, humiliating and stressful part of my doctoral program. Nothing has made me feel as inadequate and stupid as the SSHRC process. The application process is beyond stupid. I will never actually know if I actually deserved a SSHRC because the fuck-wads in Grad studies never actually sent my SSHRC on. Essentially, my application was being evaluated by a whole bunch of people with no interest in my field who were trying to bureaucratically figure out which applications were most strategic in order to maximize the university's SSHRC funding.

Every year I improved my application and every year they didn't give a shit. I honestly think they just made up random suggestions for improvement, because not once have they made a difference. I'm also at a loss to how students with NO conference papers are awarded CGS SSHRCs, but my multiple professional VETTED conference papers don't even get me past stage 1 of the application process. Despite having a University Fellowship, I'm not good enough to get past phase 1.

Fucked.Up.

So I'm glad to be done, but I'm bitter. I think the vetting process is flawed and biased towards social sciences. I'll admit that I'm miffed that the CGS recipients in my department are uniformly older, with wider experience outside of the uni and more pressing financial situations (children, for example). I know it sounds petty, but the SSHRC process really fucks with my head. Every year I felt worthless after getting that god-damned form letter from the Grad faculty.

So it's done. I will never have a doctoral SSHRC. I will never know if I actually deserved a doctoral SSHRC. On the plus side, I will never have to go through that ridiculous, humiliating and degrading experience again.

So fuck you screening committee. I hope karma bites you in the ass.

No one has left a comment on my blog in weeks. WEEEEEKS. What the hell is up with that? Normally that would leave me into a spiral of self-hatred and massive depression, but not this week. This week, I discovered the most amazing thing: someone has cited me in an article about the Battlestar Galactica video game. What's even more amazing is the fact that the article they cite (although they don't actually *cite* me -- they just included me in the "Works Cited" list) has never been published. Wow. Apparently my intelligence and incredible writing skills are no longer confined to reality. Now, my work has managed to infiltrate writings across North America before I've released anything other than an abstract! Fuck SSHRC -- that's what I call influence (ha!).

(Thanks to Furry Floors for the inspiration.)

1. I have a cold, so I'm feeling rather crap.
2. Christmas is a mere two weeks away, and I'm nowhere near being in the holiday swing of things. I need a tree, decorations, more hot apple cider and a party or two.
3. All the snow is gone. The weather is now typical island winter weather -- blustery, rainy, gray.
4. I'm pretty sure I could eat a horse today and still have that weird empty-tummy feeling.
5. I officially started my Xmas shopping yesterday.
6. I anticipate being able to run again in the new year (yay!).
7. I've decided to host a pre-Christmas dinner at our place so I have a good excuse to make Ukrainian food, drink fancy booze and eat our famous stuffing.
8. I'm contemplating auditing a German speaking class in the spring or summer semester.
9. University scholarship awarding processes suck ass.
10. Today is all about the marking.

First, apologies for the extended break. I've been lazy.

I thought I'd start my series by talking about the most common grad student work experience: being a TA (teaching assistant).

The duties of TAs vary widely depending on the university, department, and program a student attends. Science TAs normally lead a lab or tutorial, and are generally overworked and under-appreciated by both students, admin and their "boss," who is usually their supervisor. If you want to read a bit about the joys of being a science TA, explore some of the archives over at Rantastic. Generally, science TAs have it rough, and I don't envy them. Social Science and Education TAs probably fall somewhere in between Science and Humanities TAs. Social Science students generally have better funding that humanities students so may not have to worry as much as Humanities students about where dinner will come from, and they seem to face less direct stress from their bosses that Science students. It's harder to generalize about Humanities TAs, because their duties vary so widely between departments and universities. I'll try to stick to recounting my own experiences as a TA in English, so please don't be offended if I make a statement that utterly does not apply to other programs.

Generally, TAships are part of an English grad student's funding package. Most MA programs have automatic TAships for new students, but some (like my current uni) do not, and instead offer tutoring jobs in, say, a writing help drop-in centre and fellowships specifically for MA students. My first TA position was at Jackass University, where the TAs were not unionized and therefore were not paid by the hour, but rather by stipend. The rest of my funding came in the form of a graduate award distributed by the Faculty of Graduate Studies. I believe TAs at J.U. are now unionized, which is a good thing -- I once sat down and figured out how much I was getting paid per hour based on the amount of work I did, and it was just under $10 an hour. Pretty darn low. Anyway, at the start of the year we were given the option to request to TA for a certain 1st or 2nd year course or leave our assignments in the hands of random matching. I chose to volunteer for a 2nd-year course in my field of interest. Interestingly enough, the second year classes at J.U. were almost double the size of 1st-year classes, so in a way I got a raw deal, as my pay was the same as another TA who was marking fewer papers. But I was okay with that since I was getting experience in my field. Yay me, right? Well, maybe not. Because what I got wasn't really teaching experience. It was marking experience. And we (two TAs were assigned per course) had zero input on the actual assignments. Oh, and the profs didn't actually mark anything but the final exam. So to summarize: prof lectures and devises assignments, we mark and meet with students, and then prof marks final exam. The prof has no clue if students have improved over the year or what their style, voice and interests are. We have no clue if they performed well on the final and thus can't provide a true evaluation of their progress outside of quantitative grading. And while I think that system is a bit wonky, I did come out with a pretty decent sense of how to mark and how to interact with students on a one-to-one basis. In the end, it was probably the undergrad students who got the raw deal.

Still, with all the flaws in that system of TAing, the one for MAs at my current uni may be even stupider. New MA students either get a full MA fellowship or a combination of a fellowship and a job in the writing centre. Don't get all excited by the idea of a writing centre, though: it's really just an office space with a couple desks and some writing handbooks, staffed by one or two students. PhD students don't have to TA, but can teach as sessional (aka slave) lecturers in their 4th and subsequent years -- which is a good thing, because the PhD fellowships dry up after 3 years. The logic of the 4th year teaching stint escapes me, since 4th year is when one should be finishing up the writing of their dissertation, not opening up a whole new can of worms by learning how to teach. But cheap labour has to come from somewhere, and PhD students do need to learn how to teach sometime before they graduate, so I guess the system does, in some weird way, work to our advantage. Oh, and TAships are sometimes available to students, but the majority go to MA students since their fellowship is smaller, and most of the TAships are for distance ed. classes, or are more administrative rather than academic -- assisting a teacher with recording technology for a grad class, for example. I applied for TAships in my department for two years and never got a position. Some MA students who had external funding got positions, which defeats the purpose of a top-up since those students already had more money than PhD students by virtue of getting an MA sshrc that paid much, much more than an internal MA fellowship (that's a whole other rant).

Right now, I'm TAing for a distance ed. class outside of my home department. It's been an interesting experience, and I've certainly learned a lot about the subject, the way distance education works, and the way I evaluate students. My students come from various programs, backgrounds, countries and age groups, and I never came across that kind of diversity at Jackass Uni, or in my teaching work after my MA (which I'll talk about in Part III). As at Jackass Uni, my supervisor is quite cool and appears to have confidence in my marking abilities, and that's nice -- the hubster certainly didn't have a good experience with one of his supervisors at Jackass Uni, and that can really fuck up one's TA experience. I'm also more than fairly compensated for my time, as the union at my uni is quite strong. And I like teaching, even if what I'm doing isn't traditional teaching work.

But that's not to say TAing is all roses and lollipops. Marking kills the soul in so, so many ways. Sometimes it's the isolation; sometimes it's the under-appreciation; sometimes it's just the mind-numbingly horrible work that certain students submit. I understand that undergrads get stressed out. I get it. I was an undergrad not so very long ago, and I had TAs too. But please, if anyone out there reading this is a student, be nice to your TA. Our heads hurt. We make mistakes. Sometimes, we lose our patience. Please don't harass us 5 minutes after we return an assignment -- take a breather, and give us one too. Please don't think that just handing in an assignment will guarantee you a 70. Please read the assignment and ask questions BEFORE it is due. And please, please don't run to the prof before talking to us. Nothing kills the soul more than that.

So, that's a bit about TAing. Any questions?