Tagged with ubc …

Jan 19 2012
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library, school, vancouver

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.”

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Nov 19 2011
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australia, photography, tech, vancouver

like talking in my sleep

So apartment hunting in Vancouver from Sydney was something I was kind of dreading. But since Holly decided she’s staying in Harrisonburg after Xmas, at least I only needed a place for one person. Last weekend I spent a big pile of time going through Vancouver listings using PadMapper and the UBC apartment listings. This is how I met Emma, who has a room in her Coal Harbour apartment (a character building with hardwood floors no less). We exchanged emails and she called one of my references, Marlis.

Now, Marlis is a chatter. An excellent one. Last February when someone stopped in to pick up a wine rack she was selling they talked in the living room for 45 minutes, prompting confusion in the kitchen as to whether this was someone she knew or a stranger. It was a stranger. This served me well, because when Emma called Marlis, they talked for 45 minutes, and Marlis told Emma everything she needed to know about me, so there was practically nothing for us to talk about on Skype the next day. Which, as you may be aware is good, because it’s a lot of work for me to be chatty.

I completely credit Marlis’ talking with getting me this place, because really, I’m some strange guy who’s going to be sharing space with Emma for months. She needs to have some idea that I’m not creepy or disgusting (which I’m not, but it’s much more useful to have third parties confirm that). Thank you Marlis. (If you’re in the market for a photographer, check out Imaging By Marlis, as she’s pretty great at taking pictures as well as talking to people.)

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Jan 22 2011
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library, photography, school, travel, 中国

ramble ramble

Today I learned about Lexis Nexis QuickLaw and the interesting things you can do with it. Here are my notes, which may or may not be useful to you if you weren’t there. It was another of the Special Libraries Association week events at school. They put on good events. Useful stuff. On Wednesday we got to tour UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections which included watching a robot go and find a metal box in this vertically huge storage area and bring it back to us so we could see what was stored inside a smaller box within that box. It was Robert E. Lee’s wife’s hair. Which was very blonde.

If you don’t read my library blog you might not know I didn’t get the job I interviewed for last week. Which is why I’m home this fine Saturday evening. I know eventually I will work again, but the lack of money coming in is starting to make me a bit twitchy. And I’d rather be saving money right now for when Holly gets here (in 17 days). She apparently likes to eat something called “food” rather than my preferred subsistence: gnawing on the aspirations of children. Not that I have any legitimate right to gripe about money, not when I gladly make the choice to do these intercontinental flights every few months. If it was that important to me I could sit here with a few more thousand dollars and be much less happy.

But enough about that. I was at Brenda’s parents’ place in Abbotsford last night watching slides and eating Croatian food. It was pretty excellent. It made me want to travel somewhere that isn’t Nanchong (after the next time I go to Nanchong, of course). Happily, I know someone who might also like to do such a thing. There are lots of places in the world that aren’t Nanchong. They are fun to speculate about.

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Oct 13 2010
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school, 中国

不好学生但是我 trying

Yesterday I had my first Chinese class in a long time. Years upon years. The Grad Student Society has a few of these little classes available for grad students available. You can take French or Shotokan Karate or yoga or 普通话. It’s like $5/class so what’s not to like? Apart from having that class at the end of my day where I’ve been at school from 8am-5pm already, but them’s the breaks.

Not knowing exactly what the levels of the classes would be I went to the beginner class yesterday. It was very beginner and our 老师 told me (and the other woman who studied Chinese years ago) to come to the second class so we could challenge ourselves. That beginner class was pretty funny though. Six guys, three girls. All but one of the guys had “impress Chinese girls” as some part of their reason for being there. I protested that Holly’s from Virginia, but I remain lumped in with them. We recited sounds and said “nice to meet you” a lot.

In the Beginner 2 class there were only three of us and it feels like it’ll be a good fit. There’s another woman who taught in Taiwan for a few years, whose 中文 is better than mine, and the woman who’d studied years ago and is very enthusiastic but whose 中文 is worse than mine. Basically we’re just going to ask “How do I say this?” kind of stuff and then use that as our basis for learning shit. My personal goal is to get the whole “where 在 clauses fit in sentences” down. I don’t know why they don’t make any sense at all to me.

But even if I don’t learn anything, it’s going to be good to have my brain working at least a little bit in 汉语. Hopefully I won’t have to spend so many weeks in December smiling and nodding at incomprehensible comments from 唐玲. I’ll be smiling and laughing at slightly comprehensible comments. And you laugh, but that’s actually a significant difference.

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Sep 08 2010
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food, religion, school

best proselytizing ever

I biked to school today. It was not too terribly hellish with hills, so I’m not sure what that bodes for my ride home in a few hours. Now, when I say “not too terribly hellish” I mean there was only one hill I was ready to slit my belly on the side of the road to apologize to the universe for my failure to climb it but please please please I just want to die. And this is where the evangelists came in.

So there’s this two-stage hill climbing W 8th up to UBC. Two thirds of the way up there’s a church. As I climbed up to be level with the church there were three or four retirees with beards out standing and cheering their fool heads off. I saw the cyclist ahead of me give them a high five as he went by and I dragged my carcass along towards them. They had a table saying “St. Someone’s Juice Stand” and they weren’t just giving out high fives, but juice-boxes and granola bars wrapped in a little “Here’s what our church does” pamphlet. It was actually kind of awesome. They just come in when you’re at your weakest and give the weary traveller sustenance wrapped in an inoffensive (as in, no hellfire and damnation of nonbelievers) message. Pretty slick.

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Aug 27 2010
2 Comments
books, comics, travel

lefty

I’m in Vancouver. After meeting Jackie and Terry on the plane (they were heading west for a wedding), the SkyTrain tried to separate me from one of my bags, but through phonecalls back to Winnipeg, all worked out. And then I cursed my two checked bags a hell of a lot as I took the bus the rest of the way to my new home. But I got here and the room is not as small as people had said it would be. Everyone did a very good job adjusting my expectations. Thanks.

I went out walking for a couple of hours, familiarizing myself with the area, as I am wont to do. I found comic shops and used book stores and the train station. I’ll head to UBC on Monday to get my bus pass. And then I had dinner with my new roommates, Brenda and Marlis. Which was fun and welcoming. They’ve been really great and it’s going to be a pretty good time here, I think. Except for the times when I realize how far away I am from the woman I love. Those times kind of suck.

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Apr 29 2010
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games, library

sucker and a suckup

I’m volunteering for my first library conference in May, the Manitoba Libraries Association thingy here in Winnipeg. We had our first meeting last night down at Millennium Library.

I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. One is because hey, I’m going to be doing a bunch of these once I get to library school so I might as well get my first one out of the way. I have no idea how the age breakdown of my class at UBC is, but if I’m going to be old, I want to at least have a bit of experience to go with my white hairs.

The other reason is less about my experience at school and more because I was going through my resume recently and the “volunteer experience” in there is pretty light. I don’t claim my MCC time as volunteering, since I got paid by my school for my teaching. And other than that, well, I suppose I’m a selfish jerk who’d rather paint miniatures than feed the sick or what have you.

Speaking of miniatures, I’m on a 1/300th scale World War II aircraft kick right now. They’re so small and cheap! I got a game, Wings of War: The Dawn of World War II, which Reyn and I played a few games of before he went to Africa, and it’s a bunch of fun. It uses cards for maneuvering and also for the planes, but you can also use figs. The official figures are like $15 each, though they come with maneuver decks which makes them useful in game terms. What I’ve done is bought a few flight bases of the appropriate size and a swarm of these cheap little planes. So far I’ve got some Battle of Britain planes painted up and some Italian and Vichy planes to fight the Free French and RAF in North Africa.

But yes, back to the conference, most of the volunteers, apart from the coordinators, were Red River students. I always forget there’s a library tech program there. I don’t really know what they learn in that program that you wouldn’t learn from working in the library. But it’s a qualificationary foot in the door I suppose, and I’d look pretty stupid calling anyone out for getting one of those.

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Feb 16 2008
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travel, 中国

contingency zero

I got the last variable in the plans for the next year nailed down yesterday. Nailed down in the form of another rejection, but one that was well-expected. I applied to UBC’s Creative Writing MFA program again, and again I didn’t get in. So I don’t have to think about the costs of going back to school in September. And that ended all the plans I had for leaving this frigid city I don’t really love. My plans for the future now stand unladen with any expectation of anything happening. Sigh.

Of course, that’s not true. Things happen. Two weeks from today I’ll be on my way to Nanjing for a month. And the plan is to head west and south in September on a good ol’ road trip. I’ll watch a lot of baseball this summer. That’s enough, right? That’s sort of like a life.

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