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My family’s favourite Christmas movie

For some people, it’s that terrible stop-motion animated feature about Rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer, and for others it’s one of the millions of adaptations of A Christmas Carol. In the same way that there are certain smells or decorations or sounds that remind different people of Christmas, there are movies that do the same thing. It’s almost Pavlovian.

But for me and my family (except for my older sister, who likes to pretend she doesn’t like it) our favourite film to watch at Christmas-time is Little Shop of Horrors.

Five points for whoever can give me the weirdest true Christmas tradition that their family regularly observes. It has to be something real, and it has to be something that is done regularly.

La Gare Centrale

Here is Montréal’s central railway station, all decked with Christmas lights and decorations. When I was there, I overheard some very loud, somewhat creepy laughter from somewhere in the station.

I looked around, and caught the eye of an elderly woman who also heard the laughter and found it disconcerting. We saw each other’s confusion and shared a moment.

Soul patch

A soul patch is a small patch of facial hair just below the lower lip and above the chin.

It works like a nicotine patch: When I wear one, I don’t have to feed on the souls of the living.

I’m clean-shaven these days.

The Redpath Museum

The Redpath Museum, on McGill’s campus, has free admission. And there are dinosaurs, and geodes and lots of taxidermied animals, and a meteorite, and a mummy too.

This photo is from the end of November, when an old friend of mine came to visit me.

Class photo

Here is a photo of me and my classmates and the prof from Bioethics Theory this year. I’ve blocked out faces just in case they didn’t want to be put on my site. I didn’t ask them or anything. Heh.

This is just after our last class, when we watched The Sea Inside, a movie about a quadriplegic man’s 30-year struggle to be allowed to commit suicide. So if we look a little bit melancholy, that’s probably why. It’s a good movie though, if you’re interested in the topics of euthanasia, assisted suicide, end of life care, etc.

This gives you an idea of what a typical class size is for me now. This is a far cry from the second year of my undergrad, when the prof proudly announced at the beginning of my organic chemistry class that we were students in the single largest undergraduate chemistry course to be taught, ever. There were 1600 students in that class.

Now, in my whole programme, there are four of us. There are a couple people who are not in the bioethics programme who are taking the course for other reasons, though, which is why the class is more than four students.

There’s a lot of snow now.

So it’s been snowing for the past few days, and it’s been fun to watch, but now there’s a lot of it. I took a photograph of the entrance to my apartment building, and I would like you to compare it with the photo that I took at the end of July.

Wild.

Quality of life

There is a girl in one of the sections of the class that I’m a TA for, who every once in a while, gives me cartoons that she draws while she works on her essays.

I think this one was inspired by discussions that we had in conference regarding quality of life, and the permissibility of euthanasia.

If you missed the cartoon about Signposting, check it out, too. It’s little things like this that made my job as a TA just that much better.

Only one essay left now!

I just finished another essay. This is the paper for my Bioethics Theory course. Check out the graph of my progress! Along the x-axis is minutes after 10h this morning. Along the y-axis is word count.

My essay is done, but I could probably go through it and put a bit more work into it tomorrow. My brain is fried now, though.

You can see there were some distractions. Part-way through the day, I got caught chatting when I should have been working. You know who you are!

After this, I have two sets of papers to mark, and only one essay left, but that one’s going to be painful because it’s for the Merleau-Ponty class.

Just finished

So late last night, I finished the first essay of my late-term essay season.

One thing I do while I write, to keep me motivated, is graph my progress.

Whenever I’m taking a pause to think about how I’m going to word something or what I want to write next, I click on the Word Count button, then divide that number by the number of words I want my essay to be, multiply by one hundred, and plot that according to the number of minutes of work it took me to get to that word count.

So along the y-axis is the percent of the word count and along the x-axis is number of minutes.

I started doing this last year, and I now have a lot of graphs of the rate of my schoolwork. After I finish, I like to look at it and see where I was most efficient, and try to figure out what it is that helped me out so much.

In this case, I took a nap around the 1-hour mark, and then there was a short period of low productivity, but after the nap, I worked harder than ever before.

Il pleut

So it rained today and it rained a lot.

I learned something though. The shoes that I wear are cracked along the bottom. (I knew that already, actually.) Otherwise, they’re fine, and so about a month ago, Pickles glued the sole of my shoe together. It’s barely noticeable.

What I learned through the rain is that even though my shoe was glued back together, it is not waterproof, and not suitable for use in the wintertime. I need to buy new boots. Cold feet are terrible.