Stressed out trying to finish writing my conference paper and prepare for my trip to Tucson this weekend. Also dealing with having to be in Calgary for my grandfather's funeral on Monday. Thank god Westjet has great deals on their seasonal service to (and from) Phoenix. It's going to be interesting to pack for both Tucson and Calgary. Here's the forecast for Tucson for the weekend:
A weekend at a resort hotel in the desert sounds pretty good right about now.
Tonight I attended a book reading with my friend Karine. It was for Mark Billingham, a British mystery author who has worked in television and as a stand-up comic. The reading was entertaining (though I wish he had actually read more instead of chatting with us), as was the question period. However, one of the women in the audience got rather defensive about people who read capital-B Books vs. those who read for enjoyment; she didn't see the point of struggling to get through a difficult book that critics have raved over. This attitude really frustrates me because I read (and often enjoy) those 'difficult' books. Moreover, just because I like reading 'difficult' books doesn't mean that I can't enjoy reading mystery novels, which I do. In fact, many academics are avid mystery readers.
I agree that intellectual elitism is a form of snobbery and that no one should be made to feel that what they like is inferior (and that they implicitly are also inferior). Conversely, though, I also believe that people who like thick tomes or obscure authors shouldn't be criticized for having different tastes. And finally, just because someone decides to not finish a novel because they don't immediately enjoy it, they shouldn't feel superior to people who do want to struggle through.
That said, I'll still likely never read The Da Vinci Code.
One of the first negative things I noticed about my current apartment was that I could hear my neighbours having sex, which often woke me up in the morning (the ratio of morning to non-morning sex is about 1 to 1). For months I've thought it was my neighbours across the hall, with whom I share a wall. I had debated about whether to slip a note under the door (which I've done before, in another place) or to leave it alone. It got more awkward when said neighbours become the building managers in September and I had to deal with them regarding other issues in my unit. It is, after all, one thing to hear your neighbours having sex, and another thing to meet both neighbours and then be able to picture them having sex when you hear them. Ew.
This weekend, however, the manager neighbours went away for Thanksgiving and weren't due to return until today. Monday morning, I hear my neighbours again, only I know that the managers are supposed to be out of town. This is further supported by the four days' worth of Edmonton Journals piled up in front of their door. That's when I realize that the neighbours I've been hearing must live in the unit beneath mine and that I'm hearing them through the heating vents.
The good news: I'm relieved that it's not the neighbours I know; I only hope that I never meet my downstairs neighbours. I'm also glad I never slipped that note under the door. I mean, what if they were going through a dry spell, only to have a neighbour complain that their sex was too loud and ask them to quiet their coitus?
And having met them, well... they don't look the way that the sex sounds.
After years of having friends quote studies that find that women with more education are less likely to marry, reading articles about how the percentage of female professors working in the Academy is still markedly less than the percentage of female grad students, and going through the debacle over that stupid Forbes.com article about marry a career woman, finally — FINALLY — some good news for women with PhDs, courtesy CTV.ca:
Apparently, educated women have more orgasms:
The survey, which interviewed more than 9,000 women, claims that higher levels of education and income are associated with a greater prevalence for orgasm among women.Hee!
