Agggrrr... I have been getting this feeling of mild anxiety, manifested as a tightness in my chest, as I've been facing the major write-up of this last paper on the South Asian diaspora.  I don't really understand why - I felt like I had a clear sense of what I wanted to say in it, and I enjoyed all the reading I did over the past week or so.  (I'm ( Read more... )

I really don't want my LJ to be all about work, but I guess that was my life for the past week.  I handed in the thing on Friday around lunchtime.  My prof said to put it in her home mailbox, as she wasn't going to be up on campus for a while.  She lives in east Vancouver as well, only about a 10 minute bike ride away from me, right at the end of a ( Read more... )

I'm burnt.  7am and I've been going at this thing since something like 11am yesterday, and I'm still not done.  There's just not enough time - I found out way too late about how big this thing is supposed to be, and now it's gonna throw my whole next two weeks or so out of whack.  And I'm going to have to mark 50-60 final exams in the next couple ( Read more... )

All y'all are probably out partying and getting drunk and laid right now... and here I am sitting at home at midnight on a Friday night, being a good and dutiful grad student... heh.

I got ten handwritten pages down today - how much of that is useful or remains after I've whittled away at it and typed it in remains to be seen, but it's a start, at ( Read more... )

I just found out today that the research proposal I have to hand in next Wednesday is supposed to be around 20 pages - not just the 2 page short proposal done in the SSHRC format.  I'm so screwed... I honestly though that we really just had to put in a lot of work into handing in a polished, perfect short proposal, and now it looks like I'll be ( Read more... )

Last class of the term today... pretty grim stuff, about post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda.  The question was whether real forgiveness and reconciliation can happen between ethnic groups in such places, and we didn't really come to an answer, but all agreed it was tough. (Okay, we talked about it for more than 3 hours, but I don' ( Read more... )

I found a few short music reviews I did for Exclaim! back in the spring of 2002... exactly five years ago, now.  I guess they got some bright-eyed enthusiastic intern to enter them all into an online archival database.  I think there was a fourth, but I can't remember what band it would have been for.

I met the editor of Exclaim!, James Keast, ( Read more... )

I missed Beer Trek... y'all gotta let me know how it went... ;).

It was a bright, sunny day here in Vancouver, yet with a crisp-cold ocean breeze from the west off the ocean.  I took the newer bike into the wind through downtown and around Stanley Park.  Much of the seawall on the far northeastern side of the park is still inaccessible (by bike, at ( Read more... )

I feel pretty good - I've been fairly productive over the past few days. Finally finished all the backlogged marking I had by Tuesday noon, then spent the afternoon in the nice, bright sunshine reading stuff I've been meaning to, at the cafe on the Drive down the block from my house. A little hippie drum circle a few metres away provided the ( Read more... )

I'm gonna be doing a presentation on this article tomorrow...:

Gautam Malkani on race and masculinity.

It's a looong one for an online article (although kinda lightweight if you're looking at it as an academic piece).

It's interesting to me that brown guys in the UK are making being East Indian a 'macho' thing... there are many parallels (or at ( Read more... )