A Book A Day

Last week I had several instances of reading a book in a day, which was quite satisfactory. To procrastinate on working on my project proposal (wherein I have to outline everything I'm going to write about and provide a background to the topic), I started reading Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1989) and continued the whole day until I finished it. Admittedly, I have not held her in very high esteem after I was let down by her classic The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). It just wasn't the groundbreaking feminist science fiction novel I was expecting, and her use of the male pronoun always bothered me. This book was a collection of 1970s essays as well prologues to her books, with her going back and providing commentary on them from her 1989 perspective. It gave me some good insight into her perspective on both the science fiction field as a whole, and her works as a part of it. I liked a lot of what she had to say about the genre, and she admitted that she later realized what a big deal it was that she used male pronouns and regretted it. So, I am looking forward to rereading that novel (checked it out of the library today) as well as her other ones from the 60s and 70s. They will undoubtedly be important novels to compare to Dune, and I'm hoping I will like them.

The next day, I read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895). Nice, quick science fiction with a tolerable frame narrative. Normally you forget the narrator is telling a story by the time you return to them, but this book is short enough that you don't.

The following day, I started with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845). It is supposed to be the closest to science fiction of his short stories. It was certainly an interesting premise (check it out for free from Project Gutenberg -- love stuff out of copyright!). Then I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), where three young men stumble upon a land populated only by women and girls. I found several similarities to Dune and marveled that she was writing this so far ahead of the "official" start of science fiction, especially with all of the attention to women's issues. It was great to see the men floundering when they were trying to explain how great their civilization was but kept having to avoid or explain away problems like poverty, crime, and diseases. Unfortunately, most of Gilman's critiques about society and gender still ring true today.

So I'm steadily working through my science fiction classics list. I moved it to a spreadsheet so I could sort it by year, and am trying to read in chronological order when possible to see the genre's evolution. Most of the books are available at either the university library or city library system, although some I might have to break down and buy elsewhere. It's difficult not to accumulate a sizable book collection here, especially working in academia, but I keep in mind the trip back home and how much paper weighs.

We watched Pixar's WALL-E movie and I was able to enjoy some of the references to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have found that watching movies at different stages in life can render a new response and perspective on them. Maybe it's having more life experiences to compare them with. Just something I've noticed when rewatching movies that I haven't seen in a long time.

We've gone to the first two of the Lazy Sundays free concerts in the park to try to get out and enjoy the summer weather and some live music. Yesterday on our way there I picked up my first found money! A 10-cent piece on the sidewalk. Since they got rid of the penny and nickel, I guess people hold onto their change more carefully.

We took our car in today to get it tuned up ahead of our roadtrip down south. Oil change, new air filter, and new tires (spelled tyres here) since the old ones were almost bald and not very safe to drive on. Also got a wheel alignment and the tech commented on how off it was (it took them an extra half hour to fix). It's probably the first time it's been aligned in a long while. No word back on the check engine light problem, but otherwise it is ready to go. With gas dropping to 1.79/liter ($6.78/gallon) and the weather in the 70s, it's a good time for a summer vacation.

Happy New Year 2015

Happy 2015! I hope to explore lots of New Zealand this year.

The package from my family arrived with a much-welcomed array of goods. There was a veritable bounty of shelf medications like allergy medicine, cold/flu liquid tablets, motion sickness pills, and pain relief pills which would have been a fortune here or not available. This would have been enough on its own, but there were also some Christmas gifts and food from home which we enjoyed.

We also received our IRD numbers from the government so they can take out taxes. Yay. If there's anything to be excited about here, it is that one of my favorite numbers is the last two digits.

I made a goal of finishing all six Dune books before the year ended, and so I wrapped up the sixth book on December 30th, just in time. Reading them all together in a short time period meant that I could notice changes in style, character development, themes, and other things which was nice. Now comes the harder part of synthesizing all of my observations into the PhD proposal. Basically, I have to outline what my argument will be and what each chapter of the paper will focus on. I also have to provide a literature review, meaning an analysis of what has been written about the topic so far and what I think I will do to improve upon current research.

I also just finished 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) yesterday. It was not what I was expecting and seems a bit out-dated now that we have so much more information about our solar system than we did then. There were virtually no women in it, and it got really weird at the end. I continue to be surprised by how different the short classics are from Dune. The lack of world-building is so apparent, and the intent and goals of the writers seem to be very different.

We had a nice New Year's Eve with a live music concert in the central park sponsored by the city council. There were country, rock/funk, and Celtic bands who provided good music and energy to ring in the new year. There is an interesting tradition of having the "archwizard of Canterbury" cast a spell for the new year. He seems to be an equivalent to our old Father Time. There was also a sweet fireworks show right above our heads - the closest I've ever been to fireworks. Debris was even raining down on our heads!

D's jalapeno plant on the porch finally has some peppers ripening red. It has been fun to watch them grow and hopefully they are worth the wait.

We took a day trip to Akaroa, which is about 90 minutes south of Christchurch. It was a nice drive and a cute town, although it was overrun by tourists from the docked Princess Cruises ship. It was quite hot out, so we had a packed lunch in the shade and checked out the farmer's and craft markets. We also visited the Barrys Bay Cheese factory which still makes cheese the old-fashioned way. We watched workers spiking big cheese rounds with long metal sticks which will leave air holes and create the blue veins in blue cheese. D bought some 6-year aged cheddar cheese and garlic cheese. Both are good, and the aged cheddar is super intense!

strange "field" of trees on a bare hillside

Earthquakes and Christmas

Earthquakes

Yikes! Christms Eve brought 2 earthquakes in the afternoon. The first one had a couple jolts and scared me. We got under a doorframe and our cat scampered on the hardwood to get behind the couch. Then there was another one a bit later which was shorter. Our cat spooked again and ran under the bed. I can imagine the chaos of pets getting lost after the earthquakes here, and a postgrad student in my department actually just published a book on this topic with heartbreaking stories of owners searching for lost pets. I discovered I really don't like having to move around while the earth is moving underneath me. We feel fairly secure in this house, seeing as how it withstood all of the rest of them, but the many cracks in the ceiling are a constant reminder of the stress it has taken. These were only the second quakes I've felt (first one was in California while I was asleep so by the time it shook me awake it was over). After recovering from the first one only to have another one come a little while later, I now have more empathy for the folks here who went through not only the big ones in 2010 and 2011, but many aftershocks that probably rattled them every time. It was weird timing coming on Christmas Eve.

He has recovered from his shock and taken over the chair.

Christmas

Even though we are careful about acquiring too many things since we won't be able to take most of it back with us, since we are here for a while and it's hard not to, we got each other a couple presents for Christmas. D got me some wall hangings, a sweet Shakespeare puzzle, and of course a bird feeder and seed. He also got both of us Civilization: Beyond Earth which is a new science-fiction-themed version of our favorite computer game that has fun alien siege worms and other science-fiction elements. I got him some international-food-section candy and a cast-iron tortilla press and corn flour. His parents got us some travel gifts: Hobbiton movie set tickets and passes for the inter-island ferry so we can get our car over to the North Island to explore. Hobbiton sounds so cool - we will be going there soon and will definitely be posting pics! 

I think this is the first Christmas where I've ever been able to wear a tank-top. Also the first one where I went on a walk on a beach. Several people had recommended a place called Taylor's Mistake where all these old holiday homes still exist -- they call them baches (pronounced "batches") - - so we had a nice drive along the coast to get there. It was super windy, but very sunny and warm with lots of other people out enjoying the water and weather. I plan to return and have a picnic soon.

Boxing Day

Sales weren't very good. The only thing I found were some beach towels on sale at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Gearing up for that picnic! We did get some lights at K-Mart. For some reason, almost all of the holiday lights here are solar-powered or battery-powered. And they are LED so the big strands were still $27 even at 50% off. We got some smaller strands and tested them out -- they worked! I guess the upside of solar is that you don't have to pay for power. The 6 balls change color too. I can't wait to decorate next year! :)

Next we saw Big Hero 6 at the movie theater. This time the employee let us pick our assigned seats -- we told her that we don't have those in the U.S. and she was shocked and said she wouldn't like that at all. We emphasized the importance of having buffer seats, but I still don't think she was convinced.

Jobs, Parties, Movie, and Meds

Jobs

We joined the ranks of the workforce this week, having both been accepted to be notetakers for the disability center on-campus. This is nice because you get to sit through a class in your field and take notes for students who are otherwise unable to take their notes. You get to learn and get paid for it. Not too bad a deal. We had to apply for an IRD (Internal Revenue Department) number at the post office, and it was a surprisingly easy task. The form was two pages long and just required copies of our passport and student ID. The lady processed the forms, gave us a receipt, and said to expect our numbers in the mail in about a week. What won't be so simple is figuring out all the tax stuff, but we'll just have to wait until the end of their year (March 30) to deal with that.

School

There were two holiday parties, one with some of the arts college's departments and the other with a small group of postgrads. Unfortunately, the first party suffered from the typical clique problem where each department's people just sat at their own table and didn't interact or leave room for anyone else. The second party was at a vegetarian restaurant which suffered from the dinner party problem where you may or may not be seated next to interesting people, and you never get the chance to talk to anyone from the other end of the table. Perhaps because the university has a small but growing animal studies research group, we have been encountering a large proportion of people working on animal rights-related topics and bringing them up in conversation. One lady was against the concept of pets and another was a vet who believed all vets should be vegans. I'll admit, hearing these new points of view has made me think more about humans and their relationships with animals than I did before.

With the new year just around the corner, I decided to ask the head of school for a meeting to discuss some of my frustrations at the lack of communication and events for postgrads in my department and others in the arts. This was the professor I met the first week I arrived whom I knew it would be advantageous to have talked with, and I was right. I felt comfortable going to him and we had a great meeting going over my concerns and coming up with solutions. As I suspected, he already knew a lot of what I was saying was happening, but it took someone speaking up about it to put it back as a priority on his huge to-do list to revitalize the school. I'm encouraged that the next few years will see the build-up of a strong postgrad community that supports us and reflects well on the school.

Home

We saw our first movie here, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, which came out ahead of the U.S. release for a change. On this side of town, the movie theater is actually reasonably priced at $10 a ticket, and the theater was very nice with stadium, comfortable plush seating. The weird thing was they have assigned seats - which we didn't realize - and someone came in and made us move because we were in their seats. This system makes sense to give an incentive to buy tickets in advance online so you can get the best seats, but it was ridiculous in the huge theater to have all of us bunched up together in the middle. We moved over one after the movie started to avoid a smelly guy - it's called a buffer seat people!

At the house, we had another visit by insurance inspectors. After about half an hour of walking around and making notes, one of them showed up on the porch wearing a haz-mat suit and told us that we should stay out of the house for the next hour while they collected samples from walls and ceilings. We said we really didn't want to leave for an hour, so they compromised and worked on one side of the house at a time with a door shut. (Hopefully they don't find anything hazardous!) So now there are masking-taped-up patches all over, as well as numbers in Sharpies so they can match photos to rooms. No care taken to make the holes in inconspicuous places - I don't think this would fly in the U.S.

generic aspirin was $2.59 for 20 300mg pills

brand-name naproxen sodium (Aleve) was $14.99 for 12 275mg pills 

We bought a 32" LCD TV at a garage sale for $100 which was a really good deal. Americans just need more than 1 television, I guess. A gift of fruit mince pies was given to us, and though I tried the raisin and apple-filled treats, they are just too sweet and weird tasting for my palate. I think you have to have grown up on them. Having to buy medicine for D since his back went out, I was reminded how expensive medicine is here and how I should have brought more with and wish someone had told me how crazy the prices are for even regular stuff like pain relief. Thankfully there are generic versions of aspirin and ibuprofen, but most other medicines and anything name-brand is at least $1 or more per pill.

Although not many people decorate for Christmas, there is a website where people can put their address if they do put up lights and want others to come see them. We drove about 10 minutes to a suburb with a lot of postings and saw several really nicely decorated houses. A couple even had signs saying come on in and see more, so we stopped at one and had a nice walk around the house full of lights, trees, ornaments, and other decorations. Definitely made me sad we couldn't bring any of our decorations with!

Making Acquaintances

I met several new students this week, and the conversations began with my prompting, so I'm discovering how easy it can be to make acquaintances in a new place if you just put in a little bit of effort and initiative. Granted, I started the conversations knowing they were probably Americans so we had something in common, but it turned out we shared other interests as well.

After hearing one young lady discuss her love of baking, I noticed she said "cookies" instead of biscuits, so I asked her where she was from. Turns out she was from California but has lived here for many years so her accent is a combo American-New Zealander. She was already walking with another young lady, so I met her as well and she was from Britain. We all stopped and chatted for a bit about what we were studying and then some of the cultural differences we had encountered. It ended with friending on Facebook which will hopefully enable some future hang-outs.

Later in the week, I had been breezing through Dune Messiah in the student lounge at school and was getting up to go to lunch when I overheard an American couple eating lunch nearby. They were talking about the housing crisis and someone they knew who was being too picky about the neighborhood (I had to agree with them - you can't afford to be picky in this city). I decided to ask if they were Americans since they sounded friendly enough. Sure enough, they were and even better, they were from San Diego so we got nostalgic together about the good and the bad of living there. It had been getting too crowded for them so they opted for a big change. We exchanged info and they are actually living just one suburb away from us. I am proud of myself for taking some risks and glad to have been rewarded with some new acquaintances from other departments. You never know what one conversation can spark!

My meeting with my supervisors went very well. It is nice to be able to talk science fiction on an academic level with people who really know their stuff. And to get a generous chunk of time in which to so: three-hour meeting! It goes by fast when you're jumping from books to theories to movies to culture to education and so on.

weather was very strange yesterday - there was a glowing haze everywhere and then this rainbow appeared

"Thanksgiving" Week

This week's theme was being aware of being international.

In order to keep my U.S. phone number, I switched it to a prepaid account and have to top it up every three months to keep it active even though I'm not actually using it (haven't turned it on since the first week I arrived). I tried to top it through the T-mobile website and that failed. I tried it again and it failed. I discovered it is free to call toll-free U.S. numbers through my Viber app, so I called the refill number which the online chat rep had advised and tried that way which failed. I called my credit card company to make sure it wasn't on their end. I then called T-mobile's customer service number and after three people and having to go through a credit card verification (which was the reason it was failing), it finally worked. So, the point of sharing this is to advertise the good news that while abroad, if you have internet access, you can call your credit card and other customer service companies for free through their toll-free numbers with the Viber app.

While we missed out on the Black Friday shopping experience, one of the Walmart-like stores here, Warehouse, which has a red logo, had a "Red Friday" 1-day sale on Friday. There were more people there than usual, but Warehouse hadn't quite learned the tactic of placing the deals throughout the store to force you to go through the store and decide to pick up other things. All of the deals were on pallets up at the front. So we grabbed the two folding tables we wanted, checked out, and were out of there in 15 minutes. Not too bad.

That evening, we went to our first Operation Friendship dinner for international students hosted by a local church at one of its member's houses. We also had to bring a wrapped gift for a gift exchange since it was the last one of the year. There was a sizable group - 45 - with international students from all over (Iran, India, Korea, Malaysia, Serbia) and older folks from the church. They encouraged mingling through a meet-as-many-people-as-you-can game. Dinner was a potluck of leftovers from someone's Thanksgiving party and other dishes like casseroles and vegetables. Dessert included chocolate cake and ice cream which I haven't had in a long time. I enjoyed meeting a variety of new people and had a somewhat intense conversation about U.S. immigration policies with a guy from India. He said it was good to get a different perspective than the media's.

This theme has been increasingly apparent as I realize how much we are all at the mercy of what gets reported in the news. I may be quite ignorant of a lot of what's happening in the rest of the world - especially since we aren't subscribing to a newspaper anymore - but most people know or at least think they know what's going on in the U.S. because certain stories make headlines. Yet I find that people's opinions are so often just based on a tiny snippet of information and nowhere near the whole story, or are missing a crucial opposing viewpoint, at least in terms of my perspective as it's my home country. This is good in a way because it forces me to reflect that this happens in reverse when I see media coverage of something happening in another country and think I have it figured out or form an opinion based on one article. It doesn't mean we can really help it, but it can help us keep an open mind when someone challenges our beliefs or opinions.

Saturday was the American Club's annual Thanksgiving party where they supplied the turkeys (super expensive here - $50-$70) and we all were supposed to bring a plate of food to share. I made pumpkin cheesecakes (gluten-free with some yummy hokey-pokey flavor cookies for the crust) in cupcake liners and they turned out great. We met up with the cool British couple and their kids whom we had met at the Halloween party last month. The guy even lent me a couple of his British science fiction books to check out. I let myself indulge a bit and got a big plateful of food and tried several desserts (pumpkin pie with whipped cream, warm berry pie with whipped cream, some kind of meringue-type cake, and a brownie).

notice how plain the picky eater's plate is

As I've been weeding the flower bed along the fence, I found that the massive dandelions were obscuring a bunch of strawberry plants with some ripe strawberries on them. Sweet! I picked a decent handful today before the critters can get to them. Free fruit is always a treat.

Tomorrow begins the last month of the year. December already!

uncovered strawberry plants

 

Presentations and Networking

We only went to school three of the five days this week, but it was for legitimate reasons.

One day was the Postgraduate Showcase at the university where postgrads could voluntarily give 12-minute presentations on their research topic. It was an all-day event, starting with a good speech by the keynote speaker, a retired professor of law, and then including four sessions of 3-4 speakers per session. The professor discussed some of the changes in postgraduate work since he received his PhD, namely the limitless availability of knowledge and expectation that more will be included in research papers. He said it used to take about 2 years but now takes 3-4. One can get information overload, and I definitely know about this when it comes to looking up food, recipes, and health topics online. There is a lot out there, and that's only including the first 1 or 2 pages of Google searches and the tangents you can get on from those sites. He showed us copies of a government policy recommendation from years ago (a 12-pages booklet) and one that he helped work on recently (a 300-page bound book). And yet, he acknowledged that most people don't bother reading through any of the longer stuff because they don't have time.

In a refreshing turn, he told us not to use esoteric and hyper-intellectual language that isn't accessible and is just trying to make the author look smart. This is part of the reason that non-academics don't think the work coming out of academia has any relevance since they can't understand it. I know the humanities are guilty of this, myself having come across many articles and books that could have said the same thing and gotten the message across in simpler language (I'm looking at you, writers who include French theorists!). He cautioned us against overlong sentences as well. It was a nice pep talk about how we will be contributing to the sum total of all knowledge and will develop valuable skills in the research and writing process.

Regarding the presentations...let's just say I learned a lot about how not to present. The advice we received in the postgraduate seminars a few weeks ago really came home to roost when I saw how other people a) went over time b) hadn't practiced so didn't know how to pace c) didn't use slides effectively d) spent way too much time on boring parts like methods and didn't have time to get to results and the interesting material e) weren't able to understand or answer questions. In spite of this, it was interesting to hear about all kinds of different research topics, including a linguist researching how often certain words were used in four English-language and Arabic-language newspapers regarding the uprising in Libya; a chemist designing a program to make it faster to determine molecular shape which can affect how molecules ingested by living things might change once inside them; and a multi-disciplinary student looking at robots and ethics. One disappointing thing was the noticeable lack of arts/humanities students. There were only a couple (we heard some had dropped out, too, which was too bad), and I resolved to work hard to change that for next year by drumming up support. It doesn't do any good to slink away just because the science/engineering departments are getting all of the funding. The work we do is important too, and remaining visible and active is one way to not be completely forgotten.

The other day we didn't go to school was because I went to a networking breakfast for local women researchers put on by the Canterbury Women's Club. It turned out to be a really good experience. There was a non-political presentation by a local politician (I'd heard her speak before on-campus) on the importance and history of women researchers in this area, and she reiterated the importance of the humanities even though they don't seem to have the same "utilitarian" purposes that the sciences do. I met a couple older women as well as a few other students. I proposed more of a regular meeting of women researchers on-campus, either through this group or a separate one, since there isn't currently a network and it would be a good way to meet people and support each other, especially those of us not in the fields getting all of the attention. I know one thing: networking is important and worth investing in.

The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit location guidebooks finally came in the mail. Hello, road trips!

We discovered the Canterbury Museum has a massive collection of birds. I was excited to find out there is a type of magpie here! The ones in the UK were beautiful, intelligent, and awesome. This owl was looking very cute too.