Author: MK

In one of my many small attempts to augment my understanding of the French language, I’ve been picking up the free newspapers around town and reading them as I ride the Métro. This works well since the papers aim for about a fifth grader’s reading level, and that’s probably about where I sit on the totem pole as far as my French goes.

Every once in a while, I find something fairly interesting, and really understand it. I once read and re-read a tiny paragraph about a new kind of alarm clock that is a puzzle, and in order to turn off its rousing wail, one must put the puzzle back together again. Reading this amazed me twice – First amazing thing: I understood exactly what it meant and somehow I was sure that I got it! (This can sometimes be a dangerous assumption. It can be worse to misunderstand something and think you have understood, than to know you are completely lost.) Second amazing thing: What an annoying alarm clock! It will never sell! The only constructive thing I might want to do upon waking is make myself a cup of coffee.

This morning I read, in an article that partially lost me with a few of those exotic fifth-grader verbs, a particularly lovely phrase. “…les libéraux tentant de tuer dans l’oeuf une autre motion de censure des conservateurs, la disant contraire au règlement.” Read it again, yes, “tuer dans l’oeuf”, kill in the egg. How marvellously graphic! It seems much more dramatic than its English equivalent, which I imagine to be “nip it in the bud”. No nipping here. We are killing unborn chickens and other things that come from eggs.

Clearly, what I took up as an idle activity while on public transport could be a idiomatic gold mine as well as basic French practice. It also seems to be an activity that leads to a web of mental relationships built between all the tiny fragments of things that remain once I’ve thrown the paper away, since I found myself wondering later why the silly alarm clock idea was not killed in the egg.

Here is a short, impersonal update of what I am up to besides writing on this blog. I have started and not finished several blog entries, not happy with the tone they were taking (either too personal or too distant). I haven’t been able to devote much time to rectifying the problem of not necessarily what to say but how to say it here on the blog. So instead, a little catch-up on what I’m actually doing, for those who are curious:

– finishing off some writing. An article on blogging for Broken Pencil, and article on Wi-Fi for Spacing.
– building some electronic bits and parts for my thesis director, Eric Raymond. His work is cool and he’ll be having the first show in Interaccess’ new space in Toronto this May. The piece, Scribe, takes the idea of drawing robots to a whole other level.
– Getting ready to give a talk about my work at Goldsmiths on April 25. I love London and can’t wait to be back.
– Finishing off my “Sonic Signatures” project. It’s site-specific audio that uses foley as a technique to distill the ambient sounds of Ile Sans Fil hotspots into short sound clips that are meant to represent the dominant features of the acoustic space in each.
– Thinking, thinking, thinking about my thesis project, Lecture-Machine. I recently received a grant from CIAM to help me finish the work. Now I can hire a C++ programmer to help me modify the Via Voice SDK.
– Oh yes, and thinking about my future. Yesterday, someone who has a 100% success rate of being able to see through my many behavioural facades remarked: “You sound confused, Michelle.” I was talking about my life after the Master’s degree, and I thought I sounded pretty sure-footed. Like always, he caught me and called it out: actually, the plan is not so much a plan as it is a splintered mass of possible directions. There are no obvious answers.

I promise, dear readers, that I will never subject you to a laundry list like this ever again. But for now, at least you know where I’m at since I’m not spending time thinking out loud here.

Today some friends and I were making babka, a Polish Easter bread, and went to the Jean-Talon market while we waited for our dough to double in bulk. Because one type of Polish sweet is never enough, especially at Easter, our main mission at the Market was to get to the Polish bakery and buy some paczki, which are wonderful things that could be called donuts, though I feel that the word “donut” doesn’t come close to revealing their charm. (“A rose by any other name…” aside).

So it was a paczki mission, and when we realized how late in the afternoon it was we worried that there would be no paczki left. Fueled with a determination to win the paczki, I charged through the crowd, shoving aside old people and babies, only the glorious paczki on my mind. When I finally reached the bakery, I squeezed to the front of the line and was overcome by some latent hoarding urge, some Polish grandmotherly desire to have too much of everything for fear of the day when you may have nothing. And so with a voice filled with urgency I declared “I want three boxes of paczki!!”, three boxes, being a completely ridiculous amount for three girls to consume in one afternoon. The kind counterwoman began to fill the boxes, and the fellow who I had unceremoniously shoved aside to get to the front of the line began to grumble. The counterwoman asked him what he wanted to placate him. “I want a box of donuts,” he said. I turned to my Polish companion and we exploded into giggles. This guy wants “donuts”?! Perhaps he would be better off at Coffee Time. The little Polish grandmother in me proudly walked away with the completely excessive three boxes. I justified my excess by explaining I would leave a whole box in the studio for my classmates to consume.

Our babkas turned out beautifully. It was a glorious afternoon.

It wouldn’t be Easter either if I didn’t listen to my Russian Easter CD, which is a really lovely collection of choral music by the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir. I first heard some of this music when I had the habit of not being able to fall asleep without having the radio on. (I have since been cured of this problem). Only one radio station would do, as well – CBC Radio, of course. One morning, I awoke suddenly near dawn, and the most beautiful thing was playing on the radio. Lovely, mysterious, and in a language I did not know (which turned out to be Russian). I remained awake long enough to listen to the whole piece, and scrawl down on a piece of paper the name of the song. It was “Alleluia Behold the Bridegroom”, from the Russian Easter CD. I went out and bought it within the next few days. The lyrics to this music describe the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, where some virgins are, you know, hanging out waiting for the bridegroom to show up, and the foolish ones didn’t bring enough lamp oil so their lamps go out and they can’t see any of the action, but the wise ones brought extra oil and get to see everything. The moral of the story is to always be ready, because you never know the day or the hour, when something important is going to happen. (Like the Second Coming). Anyway, according to this parable, I guess I was in the foolish camp today a little bit, leaving my paczki purchase to the last minute. In the end I wasn’t denied any paczki, but you never know the day or the hour when you might really want some paczki and because you left it to the last minute, you don’t get any. Perhaps I was wise because I bought three boxes and will therefore be prepared for much paczki-joy in the coming days. Though it seems unwise to eat so many paczki. All those years of Catholic school and I haven’t yet taken the parables to heart. There’s still time to repent, I hope.