Sunday, December 21, 2008
So, I recently re-activated my Facebook account. I deleted it in March, but deleted by Facebook’s standards basically means dormant-but-definitely-still-sitting-there-waiting-for-you-to-come-crawling-back, so all I had to do was type in my password and I was back on my networked feet.
I kind of have a hate/hate relationship with Facebook - I mean, it’s a time suck without any of the brainless pleasure of say, minesweeper - but ultimately my laziness and near-infinite capacity for stalking people wins out. Bouncing between student jobs and practicums and classes and different cities makes me eager to keep track of the people I know, whether we’re in the same city again, where they’re working, etc. I know that the cool kids are using Facebook as a stand-in for email, a grow-your-own-dinosaur application warehouse, a social calendar and who knows what else, but I’m basically the twenty-four year-old equivalent of your great-aunt Nelma in my usage. I can’t do the friendship-maintenance thing in three lines or less. But it works for me as long as it’s doing what it’s supposed to - tracking a network.
At the same time, though, I’m one of those tinhats keeping her privacy settings so high that no one can find her profile. Another friend has her privacy settings set to a similarly fortress-of-doom-like level. So we can’t find each other to friend each other. So we mostly stick to the olde email system, which is fine by me. She’s awesome enough that I’ll take a ten-line email over a three-line note any day.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
I have to say, the end of term this time around was comparatively crazy. This confusion of overlapping and outside-of-the-department courses translated into a formal exam (the likes of which I haven’t seen since my second year mandatory science class, Physics of Music: my eyes practically popped out when confronted with science), a set of weekly labs, and some mercifully well-spaced term papers. Those projects as a whole were interesting, too: an analysis of public access to the government’s Geographic Information in Alberta; a semi-hypothetical Web 2.0 lit review and analysis for my practicum employer, the Banff Centre; and a development project for a Canadian literary memoir collection, which was secretly just a shell for me to drool over several different Creative Writing MFA programs in Canada.
But if school was mostly satisfying and not all that overwhelming, I guess the difficulty came in saying goodbye to Dalhousie and Halifax as a whole. I’ve made some excellent friends at library school, people whose support I know I’ll miss when the end-of-term, end-of-degree mania comes around again this spring, especially. Also the city itself: wind storms, ice storms, Pop Explosions, pubs, and my aerie in the sky: Fenwick Tower. I’ll certainly miss my view of the harbour from the 26th floor, even if I’m alright without the dust-monsters, ancient elevators, and inch-thick floor varnish.
View from the Eye of Fenwick Tower
That said, now that I’m back in Alberta, the weather seems about on par: crazy cold and no signs of a thaw. I can’t see through my apartment windows. It’s like living in a little winter-cave, I love it.
