Book learnin' and the other kind.
I started writing this post two months ago. I wanted to make some last entries before a nice "my work here is done" ending, tying any loose ends up. Finishing things without a very stringent deadline hanging over my head has never been my strong suit. Maybe sometime this summer I'll finally post my thoughts on trips to Singapore (14 months ago), Prague (5 months ago), Sweden (also 5 months ago) and Venice (4 months ago). Maybe not. I wouldn't wait in suspense, though.

Anyway, I'm no longer Christina in London or Christina in Bristol, I'm just Christina. This is a surprisingly hard adjustment to make. But writing about my current nebulous sense of home would be dead boring to anyone not me, and not particularly useful to me in settling in here. "Not gonna do it... Wouldn't be prudent."

Okay, here's what I wrote back in April:

A lot of things have happened since March 14, when I flew to Vancouver from London. In the midst of papal and other deaths, royal weddings, elections and Canadian government scandals, I flew back to England for the first week of April to pick up the last of my stuff from Bristol and attend the excellent YOR 14 conference in Bath. People are doing all sorts of fascinating things with OR, and sometime soon I might write about it. In fact, John and I are discussing future collaboration on a blog about performance improvement and improved decision-making in the public sector, or maybe just in health care. But this entry isn't about that.

First, a short but very footnoted-list of things I learned the costly-and-or-slow way that I could have learned by reading but didn't and they might be useful to the world at large or at least Google-happy-but-somewhat-careless-individuals-like-me so I thought I ought to record them in such a way as to improve search results[1]:

1. If you have an expired Canadian passport, Canada customs will accept that as proof you're Canadian when letting you back in the country. If you are so fortunate as to have dual citizenship and to have been born in Canada, you can also enter Canada as a Canadian with your birth certificate and your other passport.[2]
2. If you call a non-residential but not [mobile/cell] phone number in the UK from Canada using YAK, they will charge you the I'm-not-saying-it's-usurious-but-it-seems-highly-unreasonable-to-me rate of 39 cents a minute, and it will show up on your bill as a call to a UK CELL number, EVEN THOUGH IT CLEARLY ISN'T.[3]
3. On a much less frustrating note, since it's related to making money instead of spending it fruitlessly, it is possible to register online for a GST number associated with a Business Number (BN), also available at that link.[4]

[1]Obligatory Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a Canadian immigration official or a telecommunications expert, this is just what I've learned.

[2]Obviously this doesn't work for travel to other countries, but knowing this would have saved me quite a bit of time and money not to mention the notary public visit it took to renew my Canadian passport before my return in March. On the other hand, who's to say that I wouldn't have lost my British passport if I hadn't had the new Canadian one to somehow exile from my handbag instead?

[3]As far as I recall Telus only charges the ridiculous rate for calls to ACTUAL CELLULAR PHONES (and really, I don't blame either company because they're just passing on the charge from the UK mobile telecom providers), but not to Local Rate (0845) or National Rate (0870) numbers such as say, understaffed police departments who have to keep you on hold for over 15 minutes when you're to report that you lost (one of) your passports in Bristol just before leaving the country. Yes, the fine print on YAK's rates page does note that you pay the same rate for "SPECIAL COUNTRY TERMINATION" numbers as for CELLULAR numbers, but I'm still outraged.

[4]Which is, I suppose, a roundabout way of mentioning that I'm gainfully employed on a 6-month consulting contract and quite pleased at the opportunity to write off a portion of my meals as business expenses. From my business number registration summary:
Business Activity:
PROVIDING CONSULTING SERVICES TO CLIENTS IN THE FIELD OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH AND FORECASTING/MODEL DEVELOPMENT

Excitement!

Second, a Bristolian blogger passed on this book-related quiz. Due to her being very funny and to my fondness for lists, I'm complying.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
I started that book at some point, but found it too depressing and didn't finish it. I also never finished 1984, because it was too depressing. I think both had depressing endings -- in my teens I firmly believed in taking enough of a glimpse at the end of the book if it was bogging down in the first 20-50 pages to see if the pay-off of reading the rest would be worth it. In the case of 1984, I managed to write an essay about it despite making the judgment call that there was too much dreariness and far too many rats. Either that or I wrote about Brave New World instead. Anyway, if I had to memorize a book and have it shape my life (which apparently is what this is about, not about getting burnt), clearly only good but not too predictable endings are in order. Actually, I'd skip having to memorize anything with too much conflict or strife, so I think poetry is the best bet.

Thus, I pick 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings. According to Amazon's Concordance, these are the 100 most frequently used words in it, with love occurring 71 times, and that works for me:

alive always am april beautiful believe beyond birds children come dares day dear death does down dream earth even everything eyes face father feel fingers first flowers forever give go god good hands having head heart hope joy kind kiss know land less let life little live look love man may means mind moon mountains must nothing now old open pretty quite rain right rose said say see shall should sing singing sky sleep small snow sol something song soul spring stand stars sun sweet things think though thy time tree true uncle upon voice whose without world yes young

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Too many to list, but none in recent years.

The last book you bought is?
I was restraining myself prior to the move, so probably The Wisdom of Crowds around Christmas.

The last book you finished is?
Um. Hmm. It would have to be fiction, since I'm even less rigorous about reading every page of books without a plot. If graphic novels count, probably Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

What are you currently reading?
This question gave me pause in April, because I'd been flitting about in a desultory manner between about 10 books since October. But now I am engrossed in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.

Five books you would take to a desert island?
J's list (and her "fat books only" rule) seem pretty good to me, but I'd rather have books I could just dip in and out of, in order to not get distracted from the task of sorting out food, shelter, clothing and mining for chemicals to make big fuck-off flares and fireworks to get me rescued. With that in mind, I'd take E.E. Cummings book mentioned above, Leonard Cohen's Stranger Music, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (so that I could learn to draw and also identify the local monsters), a very big blank book (for drawing practice, notes to self, and guilt-free kindling), and the complete works of Jane Austen (because I keep starting and not finishing Mansfield Park and because everything always ends well and that's deeply comforting to me wherever I am).

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
I'm not passing it on to anyone. The stick stops here!

The End.
- posted by Christina @ 11:26 pm