spending all your money on me

So, as everyone knows, I am obsessed with words that end in "-trix," such as navigatrix. Witness this quote from a long time ago:

"The key to being the Navigatrix is to be assertive, as in, 'I am the Navigatrix! I know exactly where we are! We are not lost AT ALL!'" -me, explaining the tao of navigating secondary highways, on our road trip
-a long time ago [well, 2003]

It turns out that navigatrix, while still being a word I made up, is also a real word (to the extent that inclusion in the Urban Dictionary confers word-iness). And it means exactly what I thought it meant! (Normally I get angry when this happens, but the "navigatrix" thing was comforting.) Today I found out a new one: rixatrix. "A scolding or quarrelsome woman; a scold." I owe these linguistic revelations to my friend Dai, who is more tolerant of my whims than the average person, and also owns an impressive number of internet T-shirts.

What Is Stephen Harper Reading? This is a very winsome project in which Canadian writer Yann Martel sends a book to Stephen Harper every two weeks, along with an enthusiastic letter explaining why he should read said book. The first selection is Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych: "Ivan Ilych is an indubitable masterpiece. There is nothing showy here, no vulgarity, no pretence, no falseness, nothing that doesn’t work, not a moment of dullness, yet no cheap rush of plot either. It is the story, simple and utterly compelling, of one man and his ordinary end." This is being done to raise awareness of the need for Canadian federal funding for the arts. I don't expect it will have any impact, but it's still a pleasant notion. If a political action must be futile, it should at least be charming. Yann Martel, I salute you.

I handed in my last assignment of the semester today, but instead of feeling jubilant, as is my right, I feel sort of exhausted and hungry and lost. And displaced. A displaced, almost-done-my-degree, popcorn-shrimp-eating, thinking-of-going-to-sleep person.