It’s been over two months since we got back to Canada. Only two months! It feels much longer. And It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post. I tend to do this thing where I have something I want to write about but not enough time to finish and publish an entire post, so I write half a post and leave it in draft with the intention to go back to it. But then a few days later I get another idea and I still haven’t got time to finish it, so I draft that one up and leave it sitting there. I’m up to about twenty posts sitting in drafts and I don’t want to just publish them in any old order. I want them to retain the date I originally wrote them, or at least began writing them. Anyway. I have trouble finishing things generally but I’m getting better.
So what’s happened over the last couple of months? So much! The kids have settled in at school and daycare (except we have to call it ‘school’ or Thumper gets angry). The Dude is learning French at school, in the French Immersion program which basically means he’ll be doing school entirely in French for the next three years. It’s quite cool actually and I’m relieved to see he’s coping with it easily and not finding it hard or frustrating. Thumper will probably be fine with French too – she already claims she speaks French although her skills begin with ‘bonjour’ and end with a slightly garbled version of Frere Jacques. We’ve had both the Dude’s teacher and Thumper’s daycare lady comment on how clever our kids are on multiple occasions and while I already knew this, it’s nice to hear as it makes me worry less, that they won’t struggle and be left behind their peers.
Thumper has also started ballet which she is completely in love with, and both of them are doing skating lessons which Thumper also adores. The Dude is a bit hot and cold about the skating. A lot of the time he is reluctant to go to his lesson, but once he’s done he’s really happy and excited about how much he’s improving. I hate to push my kids into any activity they don’t want to do but I do love skating and I know they’ll be happier having learnt as kids. I’m glad at least both are enthusiastic about doing and learning new things.
As for me, I’m now a teacher officially. It’s an emotional roller coaster, to be honest. One lesson will go really well and I’ll leave feeling satisfied that I taught the students something. Other lessons feel like a hard slog, and like I’m just talking but not really teaching as such. And it doesn’t help that my Italian isn’t really up to scratch. Like I can teach it, it’s a beginner’s course, but there is so much I just don’t know off hand and I make so many mistakes! I try to be honest and friendly, I figure at least if they know I’m a real person they will realise they need to put in the work if they want to succeed, that there’s no magic formula and no one is perfect.
My PhD is still really non-existent, in the sense that I still haven’t even had a first meeting with my supervisor, although at least I know who it is. I certainly don’t have any certainties around my topic. I know it’s going to be something about immigration, diaspora, cultural identity, but I still have this niggling desire to be involved in some kind of analysis, like philological work. I want to explore texts to their most basic levels, pull them apart and analyse them to within an inch of their lives. I want to come to conclusions about the fundamental meaning of those texts. And the texts I’m interested in are autobiographical texts, diaries. I want to uncover the innermost workings and reveal something profound about cultural identity through philological analysis of diaries. I have no idea how I’ll do this. But at the moment, this is where my thinking is heading.
Perpetual Tangent 