Tagged with diversity

two bits without a segue

I did not get the job at the Art, Architecture and Planning library at UBC. Selah. I did get a very nice phone call from the librarian who interviewed me (along with two other staffmembers) saying that I did a fine job in the interview and he was sure my experience would be great for somewhere in the future, but they were going with a candidate who had a lot of experience with local art. Which isn’t something I could have made myself be, so yeah. It’s the kind of situation where their priorities were just things I couldn’t fill. I hear that happens sometimes.

The shitty thing is that was probably the last formal GAA position I could possibly have gotten at UBC. I don’t think they do those just for the summer months, and come September I won’t be a student any longer. So that means I won’t have any academic library experience on my resume when I’m off looking for work. I’ve been trying to diversify through this degree, not focus, but we’ll see how much that helps, or if I’ll just be every employer’s second choice when the real jobhunting comes around.

When I was coming home from school yesterday (on the bus because I don’t feel like biking through slush and snow with my fenderless bike) the second bus I got onto wafted with the aroma of weed. It was incredibly strong for a place where no one was smoking. I sat down and another guy got on and as he walked towards the back he just started grinning. “Now this is a Vancouver bus!” he said to no one in particular. A conversation began between a bunch of the people in the back about the guy who had just gotten off the bus, who had been the source of the smells. It was all very friendly and good-natured, about the blessings of being in Canada. Eventually the guy who’d been grinning and who’d started the talking wound it up with “All right. Enough of that. Everyone can go back to their iPhones now.”

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

there are only three topics

The whole internet-sabbatical aspect to this trip has been derailed mightily. It’s because there’s wifi at the bakery and this is where I’m spending so much of my time. And I don’t need to borrow Holly’s laptop, since I brought my netbook whose VPN works so I can access the world the way I would at home. Sort of.

Last night I was talking with one of Holly’s friends about Chinese media and free expression and such. He’d been to the States on a scholarship given out by the government after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (that was a Red Cross/Crescent link – here’s the Wikipedia version) which did a lot of damage to his hometown. He had some personal experience with the media since he was interviewed by China Daily as well as a Sichuan newspaper about his experiences.

He complained about China Daily’s “famous reporter” changing everything he’d said to “make the government sound so wonderful.” What I found really interesting was how after the interview he’d been contacted by China Daily to say they’d have to make some small changes to make it sound better. “They were not small changes!”

The Sichuan paper reporter got him mad for being too prying, and forcing him to think about all the ways he felt when the terrible things were happening to his hometown (he wasn’t there at the time). “What was your feeling then?” the reporter kept asking. I had more sympathy for this reporter, since if you don’t pry you just get crappy bland stories.

We also talked about Tibet and whether it was always a part of China. We talked about the importance of a diversity of perspectives in history and current events. I talked about how the corporatization of Western media makes it suck (not as much as state-controlled media but that it isn’t as great as its ideals might suggest).

We didn’t get into Wikileaks.

Holly’d been working and only passing by our table occasionally, and I was talking most of the time. The only question she needed to ask about that odd state of affairs was “So was it comics, baseball or journalism?”

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 199 other followers