Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Framing chapter hand edit complete

Today I continued making progress with finishing the shortened and reorganized versions of my four core dissertation chapters. Specifically, I finished my hand edit of the framing chapter, chiefly intended to split out my own prescriptive normative conclusions from analysis of the divestment movement and scholarship about it.

This is a particularly challenging task because as initially written this chapter was meant to be the normative culmination of the text, with the conclusion largely given over to wrapping up and the niceties of academic writing such as identifying areas for further work.

While it has been labourious and often dispiriting to try to re-sequence the document at this stage, I am growing confident that in the end I will be able to do it in a way that not only meets the requirements set by my committee members but which actually lays things out in a clearer and more organized way for ordinary readers.

Tomorrow I will move on to making the edits to the Word version of the framing chapter, pulling out chunks that belong in the new prescriptive conclusions chapter. It will take another effort to sequence and connect the normative chunks that have been pulled from the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters, but at least that can happen after I have sent the four core analytical chapters back to the committee for their re-examination.

The target was arbitrary, self-imposed and still fairly effective

I didn’t hit my self-imposed goal of producing 50 page versions of my four core chapters by the end of January, with all comments from two committee members taken into account.

Nonetheless, the idea of the deadline served its purpose. Two of the four chapters are now done (except for a last check-through of length and successful incorporation of all committee comments as the last step before sending it back to them). I have hand-annotated the third and need about half a day to incorporate those comments into the Word version. Then I just need to hand annotate the final chapter, incorporate those changes, and check over the whole set for flow, length, and full adherence to committee member comments.

Between major progress on 3/4 core chapters and the American Political Science Association publishing my counter-repertoires section as a pre-print, this has been a good week for dissertation completion.

Always tired

I don’t know exactly why, but the insomnia which has been my normal state of life for as long as I can remember has given over to what’s more like never-ending tiredness: going to bed tired, waking up tired, spending all day tired.

It may be from the loss of academic and social non-dissertation activities that give structure and variety to life, or just from the exhaustion of watching wave after pandemic wave crest and break while we collectively flounder. No doubt it comes partly from the rage of seeing the way in which we’re destroying our world, and yet our politics simply side-steps the issue as voters and lobbyists wedded to the status quo keep us cycling between political parties and leaders that match up their inadequate ambition with unserious implementation.

Maybe more than anything my own exhaustion reflects how everyone else seems to have been eroded and abraded: turning inward, turning silent. Maintaining any kind of social connection has jumped in difficulty, even though I suspect that most people could work to reduce their feelings of isolation and hopelessness by cultivating community in the ways which are possible without close physical presence.

I feel like I need something to lay down a boundary in time — or make one day or week seem different from another — to get back to a tempo of thesis work that will let me get the thing done before the university cuts me off irretrievably at the end of the year. And yet nothing of the sort is possible. I can’t reset the location, content, or cast of characters in my days, and so life feels like April 2020 made eternal.

I know it’s one of our worst human habits to develop the pattern of entitlement and resentment: growing to feel entitled to whatever good things we have happened to get, internalizing the notion that we have them as the result of merit or a just universe, and then cursing the injustice of losing it. The habit of mind we need to cultivate is that “nothing here is promised, not one day.” If we’ve ever had the good luck to experience something positive, we should see it as an unwarranted boon from a universe that is indifferent to all our notions of deserving or fairness, and if we should lose it we should hang on to the gratitude for having ever had it.

We’re all going to lose more than we can guess — maybe everything — as the full consequences of our fossil fuel civilization work their way through the planetary system. If our collective response to loss continues to be anger, resentment, and turning against each other, it’s hard to see how we will achieve the cooperation that has the sole prospect of saving us.

Related:

Paper as mycelial substrate

Reading Paul Stamets’ Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms: Third Edition, I learned that many fungal species can be cultivated using sterilized paper as a substrate.

Since my main PhD task remains cutting down the length of my printed chapter drafts, I have begun setting aside used paper for this purpose rather than recycling. That sets up an entertaining dynamic between me and prospective thesis sections: either they make the grade, or I will feed them to my (eventual) mushrooms.

Undergoing immune response, and contemplating cultivating another kingdom

Yesterday I got my COVID-19 booster, so I am taking it easy today even though I’m not experiencing bad side effects.

One new project in development is to try growing mushrooms at home, perhaps King Oyster (Pleurotus eryngii) and Reishi (Ganoderma lingzhi) to start. Years ago I read Mycelium Running and was thoroughly intrigued. As a first step, I want to try a couple of ‘ready to fruit’ kits. If that works well, I want to try sterilizing growth substrate like flour, millet, or straw and then using liquid culture.

Covid in winter 2021–2

Partly in response to the predictable wave of infections from increased contact and travel during the comparatively unrestricted Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, Ontario has an exploding case count and is re-imposing restrictions on businesses and individuals.

I am fortunate in that all the work I need to get done is at home anyway. 2022 is the year the PhD must be completed, so the priority is getting a new draft shortened to the desired length and re-organized as directed as swiftly as feasible.

Related:

Visitor breakdown by geography, 2005–21

I began a blog to stay in touch with people in Canada while doing my Oxford M.Phil. Since then it has remained useful as an unobtrusive means of staying in touch, as well as as a place to catalog and archive useful information, especially if relevant to ongoing projects.

It’s neat to see how there have been at least some visits from nearly every country in the world:

And the breakdown by country shows diversity as well:

Based on the stats, it seems that aside from a few determined readers (mostly in Canada and the UK), most people just find a single page through a search engine and then view only that. I hope they mostly find something that’s useful for them — and, to long-term readers, thanks for holding on!

Grinching

It’s a tough, strange time right now because of COVID.

Despite the predictable (and predicted) health consequences, governments are not willing to introduce restrictions which would help control this awful wave. They know that the politics of shutting down Christmas would be awful, both for enraged households that feel like they deserve for the pandemic to be over and for businesses that rely crucially on this period for profitability.

Then when it comes to adherence to the restrictions, almost everyone seems to see them as too onerous for themselves personally, given the ways they would prefer to spend their time. Everyone seems to have some nonsense rationalization about how someone else is doing worse things so their choices are fine, or that the omicron variant is nothing to worry about so we should let it spread. And so, inadequate policies become even more inadequate as implemented.

Having not travelled ‘home’ to Vancouver since 2010, I am used to lonely Christmases. I normally feel alienated from the population because their choices show that they prioritize their own entertainment and travel over protecting the Earth. That alienation is magnified this year, with people unwilling to even protect themselves.

I don’t know how we get away from a mindset where people feel such entitlement and lack of responsibility to others, but it’s one that is imperilling us on multiple fronts.

SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant

Ontario’s COVID-19 dashboard is showing a shocking effective reproduction number for the omicron variant:

The figure is highly concerning both because it suggests higher transmissibility for omicron than for past variants and because, by extension, a larger fraction of the total population would need to be vaccinated to control its spread.

What we each choose to do affects the people around us, and we can’t allow exhaustion with the pandemic to let us abandon protective behaviours. The road to ending the pandemic as fast as possible remains for everyone to get vaccinated and to continue to employ protective measures including masks and physical distancing.