I have no idea who’s reading right now, but I figure this is a good enough record of this PhD experience in a car town. I signed up to the All But Dissertation (ABD) survival guide, and have finally taken the time to read the monthly newsletter because no more messing around, I really need to. This month’s is about focusing on what is important and cutting out the rest. A few lessons I’ve learned this week:

1. Take matters into your own hands when nothing is happening. After waiting around for responses to my emails, I recruited my final committee member myself. It ended up not being so bad, and now, in theory, I can get my comprehensive question soon and be done by December 11 (theoretical deadline).
2. Leaves in a river. I have been meditating for years, but I was just taught a mindfulness technique, good for when you are short on time and energy and there are many frustrations (i.e. PhD land). Picture a river. Imagine your thought/feeling as a leaf, place it in the river, watch it float away and say “it’s just a feeling/thought. feelings/thoughts come, feelings/thoughts go.” And voila! You feel better. The only problem was that once I was so frustrated I imagined two people as salmon, and the river was Alaskan with grizzlies at the bottom….
3. Sip water. Apparently flushes out cortisol.
4. Exercise, flushes out cortisol. Joined the yoga club for once a week yoga, and I’ve been following a running training program. But now I’m sometimes needing to go running to burn off all this nervous energy that I have a lot of lately.
5. Read PhD Comics as needed.
6. Give in to urges as necessary. I have moved on from South Park as all knowing wisdom, and have been watching “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, “District 9″ (okay, dystopian I think more than apocalyptic), “9″ is tonight. My comps are coming. I want to watch movies about the end of the world and how hopeless  humans are. Is there a connection? Dunno. Maybe because I study ’sustainability’.
7. Evidence of hopeless humans: not only is KW entirely car dependent (only students, drug addicts and people with mental illness ride the bus), but it turns out that there is no parking for longer than 3 hours in my entire neighbourhood. No joke. No where. So…all cars, but NO parking. Except on private property. I get it, but I don’t.

Yeah, that’s right. I am grooming my inner Cartman. Exploring how to navigate the PhD selfishly. Because, folks, I now know that the reason why some direly low ratio of PhD’s who start actually finish (in the order of 17% or something). It’s because your salary stays the same, your fees mount every semester, and when you ask the librarian for a book, she doesn’t have it, and when you inquire if you did in fact order the book to her location, she tells you to look online yourself, and then you do, and no location is given, and you ask her again, but she’s not gonna help. You know why? She doesn’t CARE! And neither does the dean’s admin assistant (well, unless you’re the dean), and neither do the master’s students who supposedly “run” your grad association, or the undergrads who somehow have the power to charge you $30 a semester, culminating in >$35,000 per year that they have the power to disperse, but only to their own interests ($2000 shelves for the undergrad office anyone?). And you ask, well, how is this different than the rest of the world? And the answer is that I don’t have a manager who will either fend for me, or who I can hate and look for a new job, and there are no “minimum standards” of service here, and everything is decentralized. So, I have to do everything for myself all the time, and if someone doesn’t want to deal with me, in general, they can get away with it.

It was getting me down until I started to channel my inner Cartman. Not going to send me an article I *know* you have? Wha’eva! I don’t need you! Cartman ate all the skins off the pieces in the KFC bucket and didn’t care until he broke the toilet pipes. You say I can’t have vegetables (a portobello mushroom and an eggplant)  just because I already got a burger at the orientation BBQ that *my* fees pay for? Wha’eva! I do what I WAUNT! I’m gonna eat that portobello mushroom and potentially piss off the vegetarians anyways. Because a burger is not the end of the world, and balanced diets are in, folks. You are going to give me a hard time funding my small project asking for plants for me and my classmates? Fine, I will inform all of the grad students, via email how to get their refund on the $30 fee that goes to your fund. Wha’eva! I do what I WAUNT!

I have been complaining to a few friends about this, and while the science types don’t seem to get the same treatment (they are sort of problem solving and “in it together”), my friend assured me it’s common in the social sciences. Like the social science wine and cheese which is tense, and everyone seems to be waiting for someone to get drunk and slip up.

I think my inner Cartman is going to get me through. And I can imagine his response to all of the “helpful” people here: “You can suck. mah. bawls.”

A little crude, but it’s getting me through the day and keeps me laughing, focused and productive, rather than plotting my revolt or my resignation

Still writing, writing, writing and going through tons of theory which I’m categorizing along epistomological, spatial and temporal scales (wow!). I’m sick of my music, and I don’t like CBC radio after the morning, so I have discovered the beauty of 89.9 FM, Radio Canada. French speaking is so smooth on the radio, I can tune in and out (I really like the human voice as soothing background) and they play tons of world music in all kinds of languages. This should last me a few weeks at least.

And in the ongoing battle of The Chrysalids versus Fruit Flies, I am tipping the scales in my favour! Matt Galloway openly complained on Metro Morning about all the damn fruit flies in his house and urged listeners to call in to give ideas about how to get rid of fruit flies. I have tried the following solution: put a piece of fruit (mine is a rotting apple) in a container, cover with plastic wrap (I used an elastic to hold it taut) and then poke holes with a fork. Apparently fruit flies will sniff the fruit and get in, but not out. It wasn’t working at first, so I aided the stink and rotting of the fruit with balsamic vinegar, and presto! I currently have at least 10 fruit flies and counting. When I get a functioning camera I will post pictures.

So, apparently there are more things for me to fear in PhD land: swine flu. Word is, universities might be more hard hit, since the flu tends to attack young, healthy people–like the demographics on university campuses. One more reason to run straight to my office and dodge undergrads, increase my use of hand sanitizer on campus, and perhaps schedule a few extra days at home a week .

It has been brought to my attention that it’s been a while since I posted. Frankly, I think you can tell from my previous post that I really didn’t have many words of wisdom to share. And, there have been some new developments in life. But now I do have some new words of wisdom to share, so I will post.

1. Do not expect any degree of organization from student driven initiatives. This could be conferences, or funding proposals. In particular, do not expect funding from funds controlled by undergraduates if you are a graduate, even if you pay into that fund. In any dealing with student led initiatives, expect about 6 emails back and forth just to figure out when/where to meet to discuss how to clarify the “issues” you/they have. Then expect several awkward face to face meetings reestablishing basic criteria which should already have been established. Expect to get your way so that they can save face in front of professors/staff in the end, despite countless lost hours of useless exchange.
2. While you can attempt to write a review paper on a topic that hardly anyone has researched, expect *it* to take a long time, *you* to feel disorganized, and that *no one* will understand you. Feelings of isolation will keep you down.
3. Do not expect a linear relationship to work. Instead, think like systems thinking. A whole lotta nothing can get done, and then *WHOOOMPH*! Emergent properties lead you to have a brilliant paper on your hands.
4. Sometimes when you are having a down period, you can hit the “reset” button. As in, stop exercising, go to bed early, do what you need to do to feel good. This helps previous emergent properties emerge.
5. Do volunteer for small, radical events. You will make the cooler friends.
6. Avoid the killers. As in, people who repeatedly *insist* on bringing severe (as in death causing) allergens to parties after being told not to bring said allergen to a party. These same people have a tendency to try to overwater plants. Overwatering kills, people.
7. Do fall in love, but not with undergrads. Because a) they will be smart (hey, you’re both in grad school!) and b) no one notices if you are late for school in grad school. It’s your own damn schedule If they are an undergrad, and not mature (as in, not older), everyone will look down on you, but sort of quietly without you knowing.
8. Have friends/significant others with cars. I have essentially only taken public transit once a week for the past 6 weeks. HA! This way, you can feel morally superior about helping others reduce their emissions while being lazy. Muah ha ha.
9. It is important to have a back up bar, in case your first choice is closed or full. This is *very* important in KW.
10. Don’t expect the waitresses to know what “stout” is. Yes, I am embarrassed for them, and I am planning a social marketing program to educate the waitresses here.
11. Do go to the local churchical second hand shop in search of a love seat. Because you might find an amazing, vintage, irregularly shaped turquoise love seat for your office, and since they are churchical it only costs 25 bucks, plus 25 bucks delivery, plus tax. Yes people, 54 bucks for said loveseat.

Now that you have my words of wisdom, please go forth and prosper!

Some of you may have noticed how much I make fun of big “G” Geography titles. They usually rely on alliteration, and sometimes don’t even make sense (at least not to me). Here is an example of a title that jumped out of the boring titles containing the words “energy”, “productivity” and “growth”. It definitely gets a prize for cheekiness, at least in my books, especially since economists are NOT known for clever titles. Ever.

Blackorby, C. and R. R. Russell (1989). “Will the real elasticity of substitution please stand up? (A comparison of the Allen/Uzawa and Morishima elasticities).” American Economic Review 79: 882-888.

See? So funny and lame at the same time.

Am trying to write a paper about the role of human geography in environmental/ecological issues. Encountering some problems. They don’t address environmental issues as a discipline. And I feel like I get slightly scoffed at for mentioning ecological economics. I could not figure out why I couldn’t find much of anything, despite the fact that some spatial economists pointed out (nearly 10 years ago…am I the only one listening?) how, for instance, the ecological footprint could be improved upon from a spatial perspective. When I finally read Castree’s ” Environmental issues: Signals in the noise” in Progress in Human Geography, I could not help but burst out laughing. Some key lines:

It is a peculiar fact that. while the natural environment is one of geography’s key research and teaching foci, it is difficult to specify what the discipline’s distinctive contributions to environmental understanding are.

uh huh…

Here I want to take an honest look at the diversity (incoherence?) and character of human geographers’ research into environmental issues.

You noticed?

though strangely environment doesn’t get a formal mention in Holloway et al.’s recent Key concepts in geography (2003) except under the rubric of ‘physical systems’

They are making me read that, and I also noticed.

Theoretically, the most exciting and original thinking about the environment seems to occur in other disciplines. Human geographers acknowledge this fact by importing ideas from sociology, science studies and philosophy (among others). These ideas are then finessed and applied to new empirical contexts, but rarely reconstructed.

Maybe I will try if my patience for the discipline does not run out this week. Back to my comment above, that some suggestions came 10 year ago.

Am I exaggerating? When I recently attended an environmental reading group in London, an eminent environmental sociologist expressed delight and surprise that human geographers were studying environmental issues too!

Geographers also seem surprised that I am studying environmental issues, despite being in the Faculty of Environment.

i am glad he resisted the trend by not reducing “environment” to “resource management”, the latter being terminology I really don’t like at all, because it does not invoke understandings of the impact of the economic (capitalist) system.

What has this meant for me this term? All of my papers have involved reconceptualizing work from other disciplines into geographic inquiry.

Humanistic  geographers love discussing place as part of one’s identity, or place attachment. Spending *a lot* of time here these days when I’m not running or doing errands/chores.

I just can’t get enough of this contest. I stayed up late last night watching all sorts of entries.

This one is my favourite, and I understand transcription now.

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This is one of this year’s winners. I really like the costumes, and how they show how the experiment works with the camera sequence.

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And this is not a winner, but I love the sheer enthusiasm of the dance. I don’t understand the science part at all, though.

This was pretty much the best wake-up ever. Codejill and I have already worked out how to choreograph and costume the dances to explain the co-evolutionary process between economy and environment, and then how to explain how ecological economists embed the economic system within the earth’s processes to depict a more accurate version of how these two systems interact. So exciting. I just have to do my research for a few years to come up with the rest of the dance (the intro we worked out can definitely be for “Dance your comprehensives”).

Check out the winning PhD thesis: