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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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of my most enduring memories from when I was a child are of my grandfather.
When I was younger, he had a house on Delatre Street in Woodstock and I always loved to go visit him. He had a great sense of humour and a very laissez-faire attitude toward caring for his grandchildren. He was a very intelligent and loving man, and I miss him very much.
The house on Delatre Street was set on a very long piece of property, with a big sloping driveway along the one side of the house that went into a big garage in front of the vegetable garden. My grandfather was very good at gardening and caring for fruit trees. There was a gigantic pear tree in his back yard and every year he would come to visit us with bushels full of the biggest, most melting, yellow pears you can imagine. I still can’t eat pears from a grocery store, because every time I tried, they tasted like cardboard by comparison.
He also had a mulberry tree in his back yard, and for a few years, we would come to visit him and he would lay out a gigantic tarp underneath it, and we would take an elongated wooden beam and shake parts of the tree, so that the mulberries would fall onto the tarp underneath. At that point, we could just pick them up off the ground. In preparation for this, for the week beforehand, he would sit in the back yard with a couple pieces of wood joined by a hinge and fend the squirrels off. He would slap the pieces of wood together, and it sounded enough like a gunshot to work very effectively. Later on, as I recall, he got a water gun for the same purpose. I wonder which he liked better.
My grandfather was very clever about making things in his basement workshop. First off all, a lot of the woodworking tools that he kept in his workshop were things he made himself. And he used these tools to make all manner of wonderful, useful and beautiful things.
Even now, my apartment is full of a great many things that my grandfather made. He made my bed, my dresser, a full-length mirror. Pretty much everything that’s wooden and beautiful that’s in my home was made by my grandfather.
When I was very young, and I liked to collect coins, he made me a wooden box and engraved “Benjamin’s Treasure Chest” on the top of it. My grandfather was always very supportive of what I found to be interesting, no matter how strange he thought it was. And he had no problem telling me how strange he thought some of my interests to be.
He used to drive a big blue classic automobile, the make and model of which I have forgotten. I want to say it was a Plymouth Fury II, but I could be wrong. It was the kind of car that you would expect to see in a car show. It was made in the 1960’s, back when seat-belts were optional. The one that he owned had seat-belts, though. My little sister loved it, and was very disappointed when he sold it, later in life. My mother told me that one summer he took it apart to its component parts in his driveway and the neighbours were taking bets as to whether or not he would be able to put it back together again. Of course, he had no problem doing so.
I’m glad that I wasn’t there to see the house of Delatre Street after grandpa moved out of it, so I remember it the way it was. The house itself was full of dozens of clocks, all of which chimed on the hour. There was a wooden spinning wheel in the front room, and a grandfather clock. There was a huge chess set in the living room that, of course, grandpa made, and I remember playing chess with him when I was very young. The house was full of furniture, cabinets, old family photographs and Wallace Nutting prints.
For Christmas, we always went to visit. Every Christmas, all the grandchildren would mark off our heights against a doorframe in the kitchen. In the summer, we had a family reunion and barbecue, and my grandpa loved it.
I remember one day being called out of class because of one of my dad’s psychotic episodes. My sisters, my mother and I left our home and went to stay with my grandfather, where it was safe. The rest of the world could fly out of control, but when I was at grandpa’s, I was safe.