Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Historians, and more historians.

Turns out the book launch event was on Monday, so that's what I did last night. It was held at my supervisor's place on campus, and it was a lovely affair. I caught up with some fellow grad students whom I hadn't seen in a while, chatted with my favourite historian/prof couple, spotted Jack Granatstein, and talked with some new people. It was nice, though I do have something to say about two of the new people I met. Both are former students of the prof whose book was launched. One of them was a Massey fellow while he did an MA in history; the other was a history undergrad a few years ago. Apart from both of them being very tall---thus making is slightly painful for me to talk to them (despite my being in heels)---I soon came to realize that they were very uninteresting people. Nice and stuff, but boring. Maybe because they are both corporate/banking types now. How unfortunate. The former Masseyite was waxing nostalgic, but only managed to prove my point about Massey being white, preppy, and elitist. All of which is fine, except that he didn't see it this way. Strange. Apart from them, though, the conversations I had were interesting/entertaining. I heard tell how Michael Ignatieff was "quite pleased with himself" and "pretentious" during his early undergrad days at Trinity. Awesome. And, because I know the prof/author/committee member pays attention to such things, I drank most of a glass of wine! (Instead of opting for water.) I must add his book to my to-read list.

After the party I headed over to visit LG. It was nice to see him.

This morning I had a reading group meeting. A few new historians have joined, and we heard about one of them's project. Very interesting and cool! We talked about it for more than 2 hours---and it totally didn't seem that long.

Apologies for the boring post. My brain is moving slowly these days. I am mostly better, but quite tired because I have been having trouble sleeping. Sigh.

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