Author: The Grey Literature

This is the personal blog of Benjamin Gregory Carlisle PhD. Queer; Academic; Queer academic. "I'm the research fairy, here to make your academic problems disappear!"

There’s something strangely satisfying about this

It feels pretty good.
It feels pretty good.

Part-way through this semester, my professor handed me a large stack of official-looking papers relating to an ethics consultation with a CLSC here in Montréal. He indicated that the papers should be shredded when I was done with them, since their contents were sensitive.

It felt good to put them through the shredder. I think it might be the finality of the act. There is a satisfying noise that the machine makes as it takes all the meaning out of the paper that you feed into it.

It’s magical really: Pages and pages of meaningful information go in one side, and then strips meaningless paper come out the other end.

By the way, I only have one paper left, and I have a pretty good idea of what I’m writing too.

The job search is over

One of the fun things about looking for jobs on the internet is that often the people who are hiring like to remain anonymous. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been applying to a bunch of jobs that looked vaguely related to the skills that I have, without knowing clearly where I was applying, or what job exactly they were looking to fill. What this means is that I’ve had a number of phone calls recently that began as follows:

[Ring ring]

Other person: “Hi, is Benjamin there?”

Me: “Speaking.”

Other person: “Hi, my name is [person’s name]. You recently applied for a job that was posted on [website].”

Me: “Oh, that’s certainly possible.” …

The fun continues into the interview, because I often have no way of knowing which job advertisement corresponds with which phone call I receive, and so I don’t even know which job I am interviewing for until partway through the interview.

And I wasn’t too picky about which jobs I applied for, so sometimes the job is quite surprising. At one point, I ended up in an interview for a job as one of those street-marketing people who walks around downtown Montréal trying to get other people to sign up to sponsor a World Vision child or give to the Red Cross. The guy interviewing me asked if I thought I could handle approaching random strangers and talking to them.

After so many years of involvement with Campus for Christ, I think I probably could have handled it.

As exciting as a summer of evangelising for World Vision or the Red Cross would have been, I was offered another job that I’m actually looking forward to: I’m going to be working as a web designer for a company that makes websites for small businesses. I’ll be designing custom WordPress or Drupal themes, and working out a system for managing clients’ sites.

And it gets better: They’re going to pay me on a regular basis. I am going to have a regular paycheque.

On Friday, when the deal was finalised, I went out to the Metro supermarket across the street and bought enough brand-name groceries to fill my refrigerator.

I’m living the high life. :)

Big presentation last Wednesday

On last Wednesday, I had my Bioethics Practicum presentation. I was stressing about this particular assignment for a while, but largely thanks to the hard work of my partner, it turned out very well.

In fact, after the our time in front of the class, the prof indicated that he had been to presentations done by professional bioethicists, who were hired for sums of thirty to forty thousand dollars, who did not produce so thorough an examination of the issue at hand as my classmates and I did in our assignments.

I felt flattered of course, and asked him if we could have thirty or forty thousand dollars.

He thought I was joking.

Practicum journal

I’m really quite proud of myself for the way that I’ve been working all semester at my Practicum journal. I don’t think I’ve ever been so consistent at working away at a small task on a weekly basis.

I remember every once in a while, through grade school, there would be an assignment for a class where I have to make journal entries or something like that, every week over the course of the year, and invariably, I would fail to even think about the journal assignment until the last week of the class, when I would put together a bunch of entries, look up dates for when the entries should have been made, and do a generally bad job of it.

This time, and probably for the first time ever for this type of assignment, I actually did do the work incrementally. The assignment was to write 3 things that we learned from each class in a journal to be handed in on the last class. I’m just figuring out what to write for my last journal entry now, then I’ll print it, and that’s all I have to do. No furious scrambling through my old notes. No forging of dates with my calendar. Just type-type-type, command-P, enter.

If only I had developed this skill of working steadily throughout the year in grade 7. It would have made my French cahier a much less stressful piece of work.

Summer job

CV 2010
My CV

I’ve been looking for a summer job for the past couple months. I sent out approximately 120 emails to different professors, asking if they had research assistantships available for the summer.

In short order, I received approximately 120 emails from these professors, all telling me that they had no work for me. I don’t mind getting rejection messages, to be honest. At least that way I don’t spend much time getting my hopes up or waiting to hear back from them.

Next, I signed up on a number of job-search websites. There’s one that sends me daily emails with jobs sorted by criteria that I choose, like “student jobs in Montréal.” Another one lets you save a job search as an RSS feed and subscribe to it using your newsreader, so that whenever there are new jobs that match your search, they show up there.

I haven’t totally given up hope on having a “real people job” this summer, but things are looking pretty grim. My French isn’t super-fantastic, (although for most purposes it is passable) so I can’t say that I’m bilingual, which means that I’m not qualified even to work at Tim Horton’s or Walmart.

I’m going to continue to look for, and apply for any job that I’m even close to qualified for, but in the meantime, I’m going to start to focus my efforts more on my web design business. I’m gonna finish up a few lingering jobs that I’ve been working on during the school year, and then try to find some new clients. I looked at my budget, did some math, and discovered that I don’t need more than a few new jobs to make it through the summer, until OSAP comes in again for next year.

My action plan, moving forward is that I will work my network of contacts, re-design and re-launch www.bgcarlisle.com, put some ads on Kijiji and maybe even pay for some Google ads.

And if worst comes to worst, I can always resort to medical experiments or selling non-essential body parts on the black market, right?

TA evaluation

TA evaluation
My TA evaluation, on the side of my fridge

This week, I went in to the office of the department of philosophy and got my evaluation from last semester’s TA-ship. This is the students’ chance to evaluate the TA, and it is done online, anonymously, and the results aren’t given back until well after the course is completed.

I was very pleased to see that in answer to the statement, “The TA was effective in fulfilling his/her role,” the overwhelming majority of the students who filled out the form clicked “strongly agree.” The written-out comments were very positive as well.

Except for one person. He or she clicked “strongly disagree,” and then wrote a very negative comment.

You can’t please everyone, I guess.

Speaking of spiders

Itsy Bitsy Spider
Itsy Bitsy Spider

Today, a schoolmate and I went to visit the Montréal Botanical Gardens. We went to see the insect exhibit. It was pretty fun, and because we are students, we got in for the cheap rate!

Here is a spider.

I wonder if they have to count the number of creepy-crawlies they have in the insect exhibit every night. The reason I wonder about that is because there was a surprising number of empty enclosures, and it made me wonder what happened to the spiders or scorpions or other creatures that were supposed to be living there. I’ll just double-check the inside of my bag tonight. You know. Just to be on the safe side.

Bonzai tree
Bonzai tree

The outside of the Gardens was mostly covered in snow, but the inside had some wonderful things to see. I’ve always loved bonzai tress, and sometimes secretly wished that I had the patience to grow one myself.

Now I don’t know about you guys, but every once in a while as a child, for some reason, at schools or other such educational institutions, I was shown a video adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book called “The Lorax.” Actually, I assume there’s a book that it’s based on. I’ve never actually seen it in book form.

I'm pretty sure this is a truffula tree
I'm pretty sure this is a truffula tree

I guess I always assumed that there was no such thing as a real truffula tree. And then I saw the tree in the attached photograph in the butterfly exhibit.

As I recall from “The Lorax,” the little boy at the end was given a single truffula seed and told to plant it and care for it, so that truffula trees might grow again. I suppose that little boy succeeded in his task.

But seriously. What is that? Eight points for anyone who can tell me what sort of legit tree it is.

Honeycomb
Honeycomb

The butterfly exhibit was my favourite. They were huge, and they liked eating fruit. The cockroaches were my least favourite. The bees were kind of cool to see as well, but not on the same level as gigantic beautiful butterflies and truffula trees.

Bell technicians

Today, I finally got the intercom for my apartment fixed. The internet too! It has been a long and frustrating fight, but I finally won, and it didn’t cost me any money.

I called the people from my apartment, and they told me to try plugging the phone into different phone jacks around the house. That didn’t work. So I tried calling Bell, and they sent a technician to fix it, along with the internet, which was also struggling at the time. The technician came, fiddled around with the wires, and eventually left, having given up on fixing anything. So I called Bell a second time, and they sent another technician, who split the internet line from the intercom line, and now they both work.

Now, when I receive packages in the post, the delivery person can call up to my apartment, and I don’t have to chase them all over Québec. It’s really quite fantastic. I’m expecting some books soon, and I’m excited to think that they may actually arrive at my apartment.

Here’s a strange bit of trivia that you might not have been able to guess: From this experience, I’ve learned that Bell technicians spend a lot of time muttering under their breath about the Tabernacle.