For those of you who aren’t Canadian, our national day is July 1. This year it was rather special for me. See below.
http://peghole.com/canadaday/index.html
[originally transmitted by e-mail July 4 2003]
Friday, July 4th, 2003
Sunday, June 22nd, 2003
Busy week
I missed Boudoir for the second year in a row. (I’m possibly getting too old for it.) I had Friday off, M. hauled me to the new MEC (Mountain Equipment Co-op), just open two weeks in Montreal, I dropped my paycheque. I didn’t need a backpack - M. bought a new expensive one for himself on Thursday and gave me his old expensive one – and I didn’t need a tent - M. bought a practical and moderately-priced tent on Thursday – but I needed a sleeping bag, a mattress, a water-purification system and nylon clothes.
I hadn’t known one needed nylon clothes for backpacking, but apparently one does. They are lightweight, and when backpacking every gram counts. And they dry very quickly, preventing hypothermia. In the event I bought a pair of nylon pants for keeping bugs out and a pair of boxer shorts for wearing under a comfy hemp skirt I already have.
Other nifty purchases: Muskol, sunscreen, waterproof matches, books of Quebec and Adirondack hiking trails, an aluminum emergency blanket, a small tube of biodegradable soap, a gadget for converting camping mattresses into legless chairs, a compressor bag to convert my large fluffy goose-down sleeping bag ($175 CAD / $130 USD) into a small soccer ball, special socks, an organic cotton t-shirt ($14 CAD / $10 USD) and a titanium cooking pot ($36 CAD / $27 USD).
Surprisingly, I was not instructed to buy hiking boots, and I didn’t bring the subject up. (Next paycheque.)
After thoroughly exhausting ourselves spending all that money we paused for a bagel at the Bridgehead Fair-Trade coffee shop that in the MEC.
Next stop: Ikea. We had to exchange some chair legs that had the wrong findings with them. Two and a half hours later, and laden with somewhat more than chair legs with the correct findings, we returned home. Boudoir had started an hour before and we hadn’t had supper or decided on our itinerary for today.
Apparently we still haven’t… but we bought the accessories, which is the important part.
Will keep you posted!
Thursday, June 12th, 2003
I think this is not very flattering but terribly characteristic.
I asked Pat from IT for a new monitor yesterday morning and he brought me one. I also whined about my filthy keyboard and asked what I was supposed to do about it: take two hours out of my day to pop the key caps and scrub them in the sink? Leave a note for Housekeeping?
Pat said that he’d never heard of Housekeeping doing it, but he could get me a new keyboard. Somewhat miffed, I wanted to know if I was the only person in the organisation who managed to make her keyboard so filthy?
No, said Pat. Certainly not. But I was the only one in the organisation who wanted someone else to clean it for her.
Oh.
He brought me a new keyboard.
[originally transmitted by e-mail June 12, 2003]
Saturday, May 3rd, 2003
Re: Take the Test, sissy!
Deirdre Wright wrote perceptively:
>
>OK, where’s the test?
Oh. Um. Well here is an example of low empathy (droning on and on about a topic long after everyone has gotten the point and gotten bored) and high systematising (missing the forest for the trees).
Here you go.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/apr/17/research.highereducation
[originally transmitted by e-mail May 3, 2003]
Fwd: Take the Test, sissy!
——Start of Forwarded Message ———
> From: WASSERMAN Adam <_______ @iata.org>
> Subject: RE: Take the Test, sissy!
>
> Well, I have to say, these results should not really
> surprise anyone who
> knows me…
>
> So as per the results, my brain-type is extreme
> Type-S (male brain). Now if you’ll excuse me, I
> need to go alphabetize my underwear drawer.
>
> Adam
>
——End of Forwarded Message ———
Now that you’ve taken the test and are wondering what it means…
I took the test: I’m Type-S, but not extreme. Very low end of average on empathy, very high end of average on systematising.
Now I have a quibble. Well, two.
One is calling Type-S and Type-E “male” and “female.” That’s like calling height “male” and fatness “female.” Yes, in a given genetically similar group with similar nutritional histories and activity profiles the averaged height of all the men is going to be greater than the averaged height of all the women, and the averaged percentage of body fat of all the women is going to be greater than the averaged percentage of body fat of all the men.
But it’s still more to the point to say someone is tall and fat than to say they have a gender-balanced physique.
Which brings me to my second quibble. What does “balanced” mean? In the body-type example, both tall fat people and short thin people would be “balanced” because they have equally lots or equally little of the qualities you’re measuring. So saying someone is “balanced” in fact gives you hardly any information at all about their bodies: are they tiny and frail? physically extremely imposing? or so ordinary you would never notice them?
Why would you even want to oppose the two categories? What if you put them together, so you add your Empathy score to your Systematising score. Somebody who scores near zero in this case would have very few tools of any kind for dealing with the world. Somebody who scores near 100 would have lots of tools for coping with a variety of situations. Someone who scores near the middle would have an average level of coping skills of one kind or another: perhaps lots of one kind that they use for compensating for a lack in another kind, or perhaps they have a little of everything.
I see the use of this kind of test when you’re evaluating someone who has come to you for help and you want to know what they’re good at. This is routinely done in psychological batteries. They want to know whether you can read, for instance; whether you have friends; whether you use a lot of drugs, eat well, pick fights, get your exercise, have a complicated living situation, an adequate income, an average IQ, health problems and so on. Someone with a low IQ who gets lots of exercise, has lots of friends but picks fights is going to benefit from different support than someone who reads all the time, has medical problems and weeps over the state of the world.
But even in this case you would want to say that someone has low/average/high Empathy and also low/average/high Systematising skills. Announcing that the individual is Balanced will not help you support them at all.
[originally transmitted by e-mail May 3, 2003]
Tuesday, April 15th, 2003
FW: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true story
Glossary:
Outremont: well-to-do professionals live there. Rich people too.
Nerve.com: the personals site where I met Adam, and Mark, and Anne (in that order).
100 pounds: about 45 kilos.
>on 4/15/03 3:51 PM, Cummins, Alison at wrote:
>Um, may I forward this? It’s funny and lovely. (Just like you.)
—–Original Message—–
From: Anne McKnight [mailto:______@sympatico.ca]
Subject: Re: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true storyHi,
A funny story about Internet dating, with the moral being, you never know what will happen.
Remember last fall when I met that cool musician guy with the heady imagination, had a nice coffee with him, after which he asked to meet up again, and then he up-and-said his trials (“”) with Internet dating were over, when we actually hadn’t even been on a ‘date’?Well, the scene at that time was kind of bleak. I was dog-sitting. In outremont. In a house with no good food to raid, except for dog food, very expensive dog food. The dog had allergies and had to be given pills often. The dog’s allergies made its anus itch. The dog would sit & spin on its poor itchy anus for hours on end. I didn’t know this was an allergic symptom. I thought she had to go out. I took her out alllll the time. She has no discipline and weighs over 100 pounds, and would drag me down the street, towards other dogs, towards piles of dogshit, towards sodden donuts in gutters, all of which I would pry out of her mouth. If she put anything in her mouth, it would activate more allergies, more sitting & spinning. Is it any wonder I turned to alternate-virtual–worlds? Also, I was writing grants, which in academia means inventing parallel lives you will probably never get to live. Which I have already not gotten to live about 7 times since I moved here, all those parallel lives recycled back to the drawing board…
So, anyway, I answered the cursory, wildly funny ad on nerve, and started a conversation with this guy, the musician. Even though I was stuck with the itchy-anus dog, in outremont, with no food but dog food, it made me happy. I met him, and that made me happy too, since more than ‘dating trials’ I thought, oh at last, someone I can talk to about the freaky things I like, music & etc. well, that didn’t work out, obviously. I was dissed-electronically, ick.
The synchronicity of the conversation was good though, as it got my imagination deceived, productively, into thinking it had an interlocutor. I wrote a grant proposal to pay for all those things I invented in the parallel worlds that crossed between that conversation & the parallel universe sponsored by the government of quebec.
So synchronicity point 1, is that K**** says, Sunday, he is working with the guy who is the ***** man at *****, who is this guy. Oh really, say hi for me. So, yesterday, Monday, synchronicity 2–I find out that I got the grant. 45K + 10K for equipment, sound & image editing stuff. I guess I owe that guy a beer some time. Even though he has a girlfriend, and protocol dictates we will probably never be in a together-drinking situation anytime soon, due to the blowback such an encounter in his single days would oh-so-predictably provoke. Moral of the story: you never really know, do you?
Chalk up another felicity for parallel, virtual lives, and the unpredictable directions they go…
a
[originally transmitted by e-mail April 15, 2003]