I’m having a bad week at school - reverting to those obnoxious, tangential asides that make me hate myself almost as much as the poor students sharing class time and space with me.

Just yesterday, i interjected an answer to a question directed at another student, went on a three minute rant about the Crusades that contributed nothing to the class discussion and… horribly… lectured about English compound tense formation in my undergraduate Italian class. I need to stop wasting my breathe and other people’s time. I need to self-censor.

Just once, i would like to NOT become a blabbering know-it-all when the different uses of the imperfect and perfect tenses comes up in a language class that is not Latin.

Years of French classes that failed to teach the concepts, piles of tests with failing grades and a chorus of condescending teachers expounding “it will come with practice” as an explanation cause my blood to reach the slow simmer that dissolves cartilage when making chicken stock.

My hand inevitably darts up and i feel the need to talk about gerunds, verbal nouns, compound tenses and active present participles. Why oh why do professors and teachers alike feel that a fruitful beginning to this discussion is a list of when you use one tense and when the other? What in God’s name does an “action completed in the past” mean? Are not all actions governed by the past tense completed? What is an uncompleted action? URGH!

Would it not be simpler to provide the INCREDIBLY SIMPLE direct correspondence between the imperfect tense and English constructions using “i used to…”, “i began to”, and “i was [verb ending in 'ing' here].”? Could someone please teach the French-as-a-second language teachers in the English school system in Quebec this rule? The last thing i needed was ANOTHER situation that instantly turns me into a raving lunatic.

Our Latin professor gave a revelatory lecture the other day on the evolution of tenses… i now have more ammunition with which to make everyone’s life a misery.

If i were another student in my Italian class, i would hate me too — and that is a HORRIBLE realization.

By far the best weird thing that i have made this semester (the lamb stew was good too as was a spaghetti sauce) is a lentil pie. I wanted to take a picture, but SOMEONE has made off with my camera…hmmm… i wonder who that someone might be? Not a very curvy roommate who had me sit in a lingerie shop getting lectured by the sales clerks for my non-bra wearing habits while she was being fitted for TWO HOURS! LOL.

Here’s the recipe - if you have some lentils on hand from a soup, i seriously consider giving it a try. It’s easy, smells great and tastes scrumptuous too.

Lentil Pie

Ingredients:

One pie shell (can be bought frozen)

Olive oil

1 diced onion

1 diced garlic clove

1 diced carrot

1 diced celery stalk

1 1/4 cups of green lentils (red might be fine too)

1 small can (398ml) of italian tomatoes

2 tbsp sesame seeds

2 tbsp capers

1/2 tsp savory

3/4 cup mozzarella (or old cheddar)

1. Pour lentils into a small bowl filled with water in order to let them soak a little while you start the recipe.

2. In a large saucepan, fry onion and garlic in olive oil over medium heat until transparent. Slowly add all other ingredients except cheese and bring to a simmer stirring often. I suggest mashing in the italian tomatoes, they will break up easily, but make a very nice consistency. add the lentils last, but don’t forget to drain them first.

3. Let reduce for about ten minutes (while your oven is preheating to 350 F)

4. Pour filling into (defrosted) pie shell. Cover with cheese.

5. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes or until both crust and cheese are a browning.

Yield: 4 VERY FILLING servings.

I will likely add some parmesan to the filling next time… if you want to be creative. I also cannot come up with any reason not to use other veggies on hand, like peppers and mushrooms.

Perhaps one of the best feelings of this past year has been re-establishing old friendships - discovering after years of sporadic contact that you still have much in common with a loved one and that there is a whole cornicopia of new, wonderful stuff to share.

the best thing i’ve got going right now is likely the best friend status - yeah to friendships begun in kindergarten, strengthened in grade 5 and ebbing by grade 11 to be resurrected in grad school.

i’ve also found anew my first boyfriend, my first new friend from high school and my first boss to be younger than me.

I hate people. I love individuals.

I am rapidly approaching my 500th post. Reaching number 500 seems to signify something… like that i should invest in web-hosting and relocate again, for good. That i should develop my own lay-out. That i should start an honest-to-goodness food blog. all of the above. none of the above. any suggestions?

The highlight of today was simple: i was dragging a cart filled with groceries across a busy intersection when a freshly washed white car stopped completed within and surpassing the crosswalk. i yelled at the woman driver. she made a face at me… i proceeded to life my foot and pretend to kick her car screaming that “it’s a motherfucking crosswalk bitch!” she backed up (because there was no one behind her).

Have i mentioned that i hate people?

I’ve never understood how a mile came to be such a ridiculous, unrounded number. In fact, the mile has always been the example to prove the inherent superiority of the metric system…

Yesterday in Latin, we ended up discussing the origin of the term ‘mile.’ Apparently, a mile once was a reasonable number - a 1000 paces or mile passus. This came out to about 5000 feet. Thousands of miles were milia passuum (milia is the plural of mile).

I have come up with an experiment to see if Romans were the same size as us… how far do you walk in 1000 steps? I may have to get off the cross-trainer and on to the treadmill to check this one out… unless someone else feels like being a guinea pig for me… any takers?

Nonetheless, i feel comforted knowing that there is sense in the world. Some anyways.

The past week has not been particularly eventful except for one BIG development: The purchase of my round-trip ticket to Sydney in order to spend 9 days with Ilya, a friend from the LAC, before Christmas. I leave on Saturday Dec. 8th at 6pm and arrive in Sydney on Monday the 10th. I am looking forward to naming the first koala i encounter Murphy. I arrive back in Toronto on Dec. 18th very late at night… i will take a cab alone for the first time in my life. How bad can it be after flying alone for the first time too?

The unseasonably warm weather has been encouraging my plans to get into better shape. I have been going to the gym regularly (Monday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday) and have now added reps to most of the exercises my trainer set up for me. Speaking of my trainer, he won (!) the Toronto marathon last week. I know that i am in good hands. LOL. I am going to yoga this evening just for a change of pace.

Thursday night was bi-weekly pub night with the other history graduate students. We had some interesting conversations and it was nice to get out of the house. I stupidly brought an assigned reading for my class the next morning (on the French Revolution) and it very much directed the conversation for the better part of the evening. Oh well. There were some great discussions on Freud and i love Freud. the book in question is Hunt’s The Family Romance of the French Revolution - it’s interesting.

More interesting was the accostement by a VERY drunk guy on the subway on the way to the event. The dirty language he sent in my direction by far surpassed any dirty-talking i have ever heard before… it was difficult not to blush as i was ALSO reading about the Marquis de Sade’s literature. Lovely. may i never hear such foul language again.

Friday afternoon i attended a lecture given by Professor Bruce Venarde of University of Pittsburgh on ““Sexuality” and Salvation in France around 1100: In the Tracks of John Boswell.” The blurb about the talk was as such: “This lecture considers sex and sexuality in the lives and writings of three clerics – Robert of Arbrissel, Marbode of Rennes, and Baudri of Dol – in light of John Boswell’s pioneering Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.” In a nutshell, it was about a co-ed monastery and the rationale and criticism of this movement. It was very entertaining. He is a great lecturer - tuned into his audience, with appropriate aside jokes. I was able to completely follow the discussion, which i must say made me feel good about myself also.

The week-end itself was relatively uneventful. Veronica and i watched Pulp Fiction with Cammy, our other roommate, and went to play on the swings in the park. Yeah for unseasonably warm weather yet again! I haven’t made anything very interesting this past week but a Scottish apple pie and some whole-wheat maple syrup muffins. I brought the latter to class of Friday in the hopes of making more friends… bribery. Or… you don’t make friends with salad.

I have an in-class composition to prepare for Italian on Tuesday. As i am still deep in slacker mode, i was contemplating writing the 450 word assignment in English, running it through the google translator, and then correcting the errors.

Lo and behold… Google offers as user interface not only Klingon but also… bork, bork, bork. I was perplexed as to what Bork, bork, bork is… until i looked it up on wiki and discovered that it is the language the Swedish-chef speaks on the muppets.

What the hell are people thinking? Who wants to translate webpages into Klingon? or Bork, bork, bork? Do these people not have better things to do?

Grrr…

Back to writing about how summer is a better season that winter.

Last Sunday evening i helped Veronica study for her astronomy test. during the course of this very interesting task, the status of Pluto as a dwarf-planet came up for discussion.

Apparently ‘planethood’ is not defined as a body orbiting the sun, but rather a body of a certain size orbiting the sun - and this size is defined as ‘having enough gravitational force to clear it’s own orbit.’ For those of you who are having a similar reaction to mine (what the hell does that mean?) - Pluto is not big enough to ensure that it does not go catapulting into stuff on it’s way around the sun.

Ok. Now - why the sudden change? What could possibly possess astronomers to strip Pluto of planet-status all of a sudden and to the chagrin of a generation of schoolchildren who learnt the catchy mimetic device My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas to learn the order of the planets.

Firstly, apparently a rather large asteroid has been discovered in the belt between Mars and Jupiter that would be a planet if the size criteria were in place. Apparently it made more sense to reduce the number of planets orbiting our sun to eight rather than increase it to ten (or eleven… i think there’s another dwarf-planet past Pluto). Ironically, the astronomer who came up with the ‘orbital clearance’ criteria refuses to call Pluto a dwarf-planet.

So… is Pluto a planet or not? Depends on who you ask. It’s amazing how even the most concrete things can get bogged down in definitions.

Lastly, i provide a thought-experiment for your general amusement. Yes… it is reductio ad absurdium, but i don’t care. I think it’s funny.

If i were so fat, stinky and otherwise unattractive that as i walked around on the planet Earth i repelled all other people… might i too be considered a planet? I would, in effect, be orbiting the sun with a cleared orbit… LOL.

Thanks to Wikipedia and Veronica’s astronomy textbook, which i will not go searching in her room for because that would be rude, for this science lesson.

Excerpts from a conversation - parenthetical remarks are your narrator.

Prof: “I don’t see the link between Boccaccio’s Nero and civic humanism. What you’re trying to do is either really intelligent (!) or really problematic (read dumb).

H: “ummm… ok… let me try this… it’s a given that civic humanism is a constructed rubric… it never really existed, but the phenomenon that are usually used to characterize it DID exist. The revival in classical values and learning, which Boccaccio plays a key role in, caused a paradigm shift in the ways we approach education, specifically the humanities in education, and how said education was expected to create both a virtuous ruler and a ‘civic humanist.’ Now Boccaccio’s recounting of the life of Nero deals explicitly with the Emperor’s education and blames much of his corruption on poor upbringing. Furthermore, because we know that between the first and second edition Boccaccio discovered a new source, Tacitus, any changes he made were conscious efforts on his part to create a better tale. It’s these moments, and what they can tell us about what this pre-humanist thought about education that are going to be the most fruitful. If we trace the development of this new educational programme, we SHOULD come out with a better understanding of the cultural context which permitted it to happen. Shouldn’t we? Am i making sense?”

Prof: “Yes. You need to articulate that in your proposal.”

…

H: “So, what should i do now? Continue with the secondary readings or start transcribing and translating from the text to establish a preliminary textual analysis?”

Prof: “You’re much further ahead of the game than most people at this time of the year (!!!). You need to be doing both at this point… skipping back and forth. One informs the other.”

H: “But i’m on the right track?”

Prof: “Yes.”

WHOOT!

The only question is, does anyone else understand what i’m getting at?

Yes. Yesterday i embarked upon a new path for salvation… err… redemption… err… whatever.

The experience necessitates a round of thank-yous.

Thank you Captain Obvious for pointing out that my relationship to food is ‘problematic.’

Thank you Captain Obvious for pointing out that my grief has not been worked through.

Thank you Captain Obvious for pointing out that my usual coping mechanisms are unable to deal with the new developments.

Thank you Captain Obvious for being… well, obvious.

Why do people write graffiti in washrooms? Particularly in places they are unlikely to return to… like, for instance, Union Station.

What are the chances that you are going to return to the same stall and get a kick out of reading “[insert name here] is a dick”?

Better yet, why do people respond to these scrawlings with other scrawlings? do we just want to parrot ourselves? Can the responder not come up with something more ‘original’ to write? Do they really want to be known to the world as the person who wrote “is not”?