May | 2010 | basil.CA

Archive for May, 2010

Summer School

May 28, 2010 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Jan-Aug 2010

28 May 10: In terms of teaching, summer has always been the busiest part of the year for me. I love this season’s vibe at Kwantlen: It’s flip-flops time, the sun’s still up when the night classes get out, and the students are especially committed. (You can read the nifty Tumblr blog and twitter feed this semester’s communications students have created. And here’s a Facebook Group, too.)

Other school news: My colleagues in the Applied Communications department have elected me as the new chair; I am deeply grateful for the confidence they’ve shown in me. This is a “time release” position; that means I will be teaching two fewer classes per year; and that means the news is bittersweet.

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Two kinds

May 21, 2010 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Jan-Aug 2010

21 May 10: There are two kinds of people: People who find the course of their lives profoundly absorbing, and then people for whom the lives of others seem more worthy of attention than their own. Long-time basil.CA readers know that I’m in the latter category; a good many of my friends are in the former. I find my interests interesting; myself, not so much. This explains why I am drawn to teaching, editing, and publishing.

Still, this *is* my website, so I might as well put in a word about myself, in terms of who I am rather than what I’ve done (the latter is what the resume is for). Here goes: I don’t want to own a house or condo, or land, or a car, or stocks and bonds; I don’t want to have more friends; I don’t want to be thin or have enough hair to comb; I don’t crave the esteem of others, though I used to; I also don’t crave longevity, and never have; nobody knows my real views on religion or government, or ever will; in my youth I was obsessed by hitch-hiking because I had to have surprise destinations and conversations with strangers; and Vancouver is the love of my life.

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