I wouldn't say that I've been in denial about moving in three weeks, exactly, but there are a lot of loose ends that I haven't been focusing on because they're not written down in my excruciatingly detailed spreadsheet of Everything Moving-Related Ever. I am conscious that we need to hold something, be it ever so humble, to get our friends together before we go, because even though we never throw parties and I don't like making a fuss about myself it'd still suck to sneak out of town before anybody realized we're gone. (Or, more realistically, for people to only know our moving date when we ask them to help load the truck.) I'm slowly cleaning things out of my office, library carrel, and gym locker, and we're slowly tying up the loose ends of the move (next on the list: confirming from the Outremont police that we can, in fact, take a 22' truck down our street, ugh), but the moving boxes are still sitting untouched in the front hallway.

During the past few weeks, I've been working with an acquaintance of Peter's on parts of her dissertation. "I talked to [her]," Pete reported back the next time he saw her, a few weeks after we began working together. "She really likes you. She's sorry that we're moving. And she says that you have amazing hair. She wants to know if it's a perm."

Now, while said acquaintance never said anything about my hair to my face, that's not an entirely uncommon response. I don't want to sound egotistical, or overstate the virtues of my hair -- it's not really "amazing," and it is inconsistent. But it is short, and the front part is curly, and for whatever reason it's not a combination that you see a whole lot. Consequently, people tend to remember me via my hair; it's an identifying characteristic. And it's something that my hairdresser has taken personal pride in, as she's perfected the cut over the past five years.

Last night I went to get my monthly cut. I relayed the compliment about my hair, and we talked about how perms have changed since their proliferation in middle school. "Now, on you," my stylist explained, "I'd use a pretty wide rod, only process it for around five minutes, and use it to even out the curl around the back. It would look really cute, in case you ever want to try something different." And then it struck me -- even if it wanted to, I could never get a perm with my stylist. This was the last haircut I'd have with her in the foreseeable future. After this haircut, I'd have to find an entirely new place, and find a sympathetic hair-cutting stranger to teach, through trial and error, how to recreate ma coiffure. We parted with hugs and well-wishes, and the thought of not seeing her made me immensely sad. And that, my friends, was the moment when I realized that we are leaving.

8:21 AM »  (2) Comments

Pete won a Slinky at a friend's house this weekend. Except, because we are poor graduate students, it wasn't actually a Slinky. Instead, he came home with a Metal Spring (tm).

Please note that the packaging for the above Metal Spring also brags about how it "DOES TRICKS" and is fabricated from "REAL METAL." Which is awesome, because God forbid we lower ourselves to purchasing an Imitation Metal Spring, or Metal-Like Spring. 100% Real Metal Trick-Doing Spring -- accept no substitutes!

9:22 AM »  (0) Comments

I made an informed decision to bike into campus yesterday. There was a 20% chance of thunderstorms in the evening, but only after 7 pm. My work shift ended at 5, meaning that I'd probably end up leaving sometime before 5:30 -- I'd be golden. (Plus, I'd get home a whole 1.5 hours earlier than I would've if I'd opted to take the bus and go to the gym after work instead.)

At the end of my last conference, I heard a student outside say something about it raining. After my shift ended, I asked the receptionist what the deal with the weather was.

"I don't know!" she replied. "Somebody said that it wasn't supposed to start raining until later, but then M. came by and said something about how there was a storm brewing."

"It's really looking like it's going to rain," clarified a waiting student, "but it hasn't started yet. I don't think."

"Okay!" I declared, and slowly walked down the hall by a glass-walled conference room, squinting across the audience listening to a visiting scholar and trying to see if I could detect the nature of the wall of gray waiting on the other side of the windows. I then went up to my office to study the radar, briefly conferring with an officemate to see if she had any better information.

And then I laughed, because I work in a department and in a building that is so concrete, so windowless, and so isolated, that there is actually time for rumors to circulate and develop about the weather outside.

9:57 AM »  (1) Comments

I always have a hard time deciding when to go to the doctor, you know? After a childhood spent being dragged to the doctor on every day that I missed school and going through endless antibiotic regimens to rid me of every common cold, I tend to resist going as an adult. What if I'm not really sick at all? What if there's nothing wrong with me, and they laugh at me for being a hypochondriac? And, if I decide to go to Urgent Care, am I saying that my need for care is more urgent than that of the child entering in a wheelchair?

But after three or four days wherein both of my forearms covered themselves astonishingly quickly in a blanket of angry, warm, itchy, red, puss-filled bumps that seemed to be edging their ways above my elbows, I finally went to the doctor last night. And I had Pete come with me, because he's entertaining when you have to wait around.

"I have hives, I think," I told the nurse when she came in to the examination room. "Or something. I mean, it's not eczema, which is what I usually get."

The nurse took a long, hard look at my forearms, and continued staring at them for a full minute. "That... doesn't look like hives," she said. "Have you come into contact with any weeds or poison ivy?" After convincing her that my most recent time in the outdoors has consisted of being 1) on my bike, or 2) on weed-free sidewalks, she paused as she went to take my blood pressure. "You know, I'm not sure if that's contagious or not," she said, and wrapped my arm in a paper towel before putting the cuff on my upper arm. And that, dear readers? Made me feel like a rock star. For once in my life, I have an exotic, noteworthy, and just plain interesting ailment, worthy of medical attention.

After my consultation with a lovely doctor (who was equally perplexed and intrigued, while also finding the time to recommend that we start watching A Bit of Fry and Laurie on YouTube), I was put on hardcore allergy meds plus a strong dose of oral steroids. And I know that steroids are a common treatment for all kinds of unpleasant and unfortunate maladies, but ever since I got the lecture from the pharmacist, it's been pure comedy in the Jejune household. "So, these are probably going to make you really hungry," she said. "A lot of people just want to eat everything in sight, and they'll also make you gain weight. So you've got to be careful about what you're putting inside your mouth." "Good to know," I said, wondering how this is going to change Friday's trip to the Melting Pot with a bachelorette party. "And they might also pump you up. A lot of people start taking these and start cleaning out their closets and things." (This is why this lady is my favorite pharmacist.)

So, like I said, nonstop hilarity. I have not yet succumbed to the overwhelming impulse to rampage through the house cleaning everything in sight, but I have been describing myself as "pumped up" and "juiced" at every opportunity, and Pete's been randomly inserting "Katie SMASH!" into conversations. I'm definitely going to the gym tonight after work, and I'm also going to squeeze in as much weight lifting as I can during the next week, just on the off chance that I get huge. I grabbed a scarf on the way to the bus this morning, "you know, to hide my neck flab."

Who knew that rashiness could be so much fun?

12:27 PM »  (3) Comments

I have officially lost any lingering patience for arguments that expensive jeans are superior to their cheap brethren by dint of their longevity. Last fall, I purchased a pair of Old Navy $20 specials at around the same time as a pair of super-super-saled Earnest Sewn retail $200 jeans, and have cared for them identically and worn them for roughly equal amounts of time. While the construction and the fit of the Earnest Sewns definitely surpasses that of the Old Navys -- I have spent some time idly admiring the finish on the stitching and seams -- the Earnest Sewns also have the questionable benefit of having spontaneously sprung a one-inch hole (more precisely, something resembling a ladder-y run that you'd get in a pair of tights) right below the crotch. Which, of course, I just discovered in the middle of the day at work. And while I'm somewhat lamenting the jeans' demise, I'm more lamenting the first and last time that I will ever buy a pair of ridiculously expensive jeans, even on super-super sale.

On the plus side, I do get to run around for the rest of the day exploiting the hole's comedic potential. Or at least fighting the urge to shout "I split! Mah pants!" at everyone I meet, a la SpongeBob.

12:56 PM »  (1) Comments

Busy, busy. Am back to my normal self, after having my dissertation proposal conference yesterday. Keep in mind that the process of writing my proposal has been a byzantine labor involving five faculty members, fourteen-plus (thoroughly revised) drafts, hundreds of pages of original writing, innumerable hours reading and researching, and two-point-something years. (There is no major reason for this delay, besides perhaps my stubborn tendency to unconsciously avoid defining any major terms and asserting any clear claims. Not that such a tendency has stopped certain important academics.) The past few weeks have involved compiling and juggling the availability of five busy individuals, scheduling a conference (and then promptly changing the time again), rearranging my work schedule, finding out a week later that said time and date conflict with a job talk, re-contacting and re-scheduling the conference, un-swapping and re-swapping yet more work shifts, messing with at least three of my ongoing students' schedules for two consecutive weeks, finding out that this new time happens to be when all of the building's even remotely large-ish rooms (both those with and without phone lines) are occupied, and only managing to kludge together a room and a way for a long-distance participant to Skype in approximately five hours before the conference itself. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the relative anticlimax of having to submit the final revisions to my proposal five weeks from now, and beginning my first chapter. We here at Jejunity Worldwide have reason to believe, or at least hope, that the dissertation proper will be a comparatively easy affair.

But life carries on, and the past 24 hours have revealed that I, even while disgruntled, seem to be making minor improvements to the lives of those who surround me. To wit:

• I have made an informal agreement with a higher-up at a certain local car-sharing service to report back on the workings of a certain other car-sharing service located in Québec's largest city. (Note to self: find out the adjectival form of "Québec" for objects and non-humans. Would that be a Québecian city? Or, as Wikipedia claims, simply Québec?)
• No fewer than two of our immediate neighbors have been spotted using empty 30-lb plastic tubs of Scoop Away Free cat litter to contain sidewalk sand and gardening supplies. Seeing as how we've been setting those tubs out in our curbside recycling bin for the past four-plus years, I bet I know where those came from. In the battle of east-side environmental correctness, though, I have totally lost points.
• While working my shift in the dining hall last night, I was privy to a mysterious Power Point presentation with the title "The Four Year Plan," featuring a flurry--like, twelve--of bullet points describing all of the things that dedicated students should be doing their freshman, sophomore, and junior years to ensure future success in life. Much of this was good advice (getting to know professors, talking to students in potential majors, examining core requirements), but my mind boggled at the idea of having so much... purpose at age eighteen. Particularly because I'd completed oh, three of those recommendations during my own four undergraduate years, and even applying to grad school was a move I'd made for lack of a better idea of what to do after graduation.
  
  The presentation ended (with the final revelation that it was for students interested in applying to the business school, which makes a little more sense), and a senior that I knew stopped by my table. "I just wanted to let you know," he said, "that I'm an English major, and my friend's a History major, and oh my God, we had so much fun watching your facial expressions during that presentation." We got to talking about his grad school applications and some of the professors that he was working with, and ten minutes later, his friend (the History major) dropped in on the bench to push leftover popcorn and enormous cookies on us. "It's OK, I won't leave these all here," she told me as I shooed away the popcorn in favor of a crunchy Snickerdoodle. "But oh, I wanted to let you know that we really enjoyed watching you during the presentation!"
  
  Considering that my husband has always insisted that I have an abnormally deadpan and affect-less demeanor, this is a bit of a paradigm shift in how I've been led to think about myself. I guess my true feelings about the School of Business are just that strong.

7:51 PM »  (0) Comments

I forgot to mention in my previous post that our current frenetic landlord was really the person who got us an apartment in Montréal. There were a dozen people lined up to view it during the two days that we were there, but his recommendation to our future apartment manager cinched the deal: "I have a number of people lined up to see this apartment..." the apartment manager began. "Well, why would you need to do that?" bellowed our landlord. "They just don't get any better than Peter and Katie!"

Our landlord's also been intermittently promising us our wedding present for the past, oh, year and a half since our wedding. I haven't been holding my breath, as 1) he's in India, Panama, Italy, or some other random part of the globe for months at a time, 2) he works, publishes furiously, landlords, and teaches at two UW campuses simultaneously, and 3) his own tastes, as is evidenced by the art in our hallways and yard, runs towards the folksy (think of the paint-by-numbers Last Supper that's framed and above the bench in our front hall). So I was genuinely surprised when he showed up last night with a large piece of paper-wrapped something in tow. "It's your wedding present!" he exclaimed. "You've got to open it once Peter gets back!"

So, fast-forward to 7:45 am this morning, and our discovery that we now own a thick slab of black-painted, wall-mountable, two-and-a-half foot tall plywood, printed with a photo of... us. Yup, our landlord managed to take a wedding photo that he snapped that morning, and somehow transfer it in paint -- I don't know how, because there isn't any transfer paper or anything in evidence -- directly to a piece of wood, and cut it around the borders. It is the closest to owning an heirloom-quality cardboard cut-out of myself that I will ever get. It is a piece that transcends the boundaries of egotistical, and enters purely into the awesome.

12:52 PM »  (3) Comments

Back from the land where everyone wears more perfume, the speed of service at restaurants is glacial, and they actually show people clubbing seals on the network news. In cheerier news, Pete and I managed to secure an apartment. Because American checks take, on average, a month to clear at a Canadian bank, and opening a Canadian bank account before official arrival would involve signing a series of six documents in the presence of various bankers and lawyers, we spent a merry afternoon wandering around the neighborhood and making large cash transactions at a series of ATMs, eventually handing over an enormous stack of twenties for our first month's rent. I know people who have gone cash-only as an effort to curb their credit-card spending, but I think that a pleasant side-effect of paying large sums in cash must be feeling like a complete bad-ass.

8:34 AM »  (1) Comments