Now, you might be saying “Do you mean cheddar?”, but I didn’t say cheddar, for the very important reason that Cheddar is a gorge. Really, it’s a rocky gorge in England, driving distance from Salisbury, as in the steak. Cheddar is a cheese that was originally made there, perhaps not exactly in the gorge but somewhere thereabouts, and that people now imitate the world over. As they do the steak. Although I should point out that what is called Salisbury steak in Britain is what Albertan’s would wear around their waist, cinched with a really big silver buckle and carved all over with whooping cowboy curly things. But anyway, to get back to the cheese thing, cheddar as we know it in Alberta is what I meant. Good old imitation cheddar Alberta cheese. That’s what I was yearning for here in the desert.

Of course the cheese I was comparing to the cheese of my early life experience was not Mojave desert cheese, but Wisconsin cheese. This is for the reason I noted earlier, that cows never stay here very long, and the additional reason that there are laws preventing cheese-deprived Albertans from milking desert mammals, such as, in particular, the laws of fear and physics that prevent me from ever being in a position to milk coyotes or gophers. And this Wisconsin cheese really was as good as Alberta cheese.

Now you may be thinking, who is this person to imagine there really exists on the global scene such a thing as Alberta cheese or Alberta beef? I am but a lowly student trotting the globe in the interest of my education. And I am learning things on the side that I feel must be shared with my compatriots, with not just Albertans but all Canadians. I have learned, for instance, in addition to the point that Alberta cheese and Alberta beef are bovine bounty, also that Canadian lobster rocks. In a Japanese restaurant in the heart of an ancient British cathedral city (which happened to be Salisbury again), I was served the delectable and exotic “Canadian lobster”. Honest. We asked for the best in the house, which caught the attention of the chef, who came out to personally assure us that this was their finest imported lobster”?their finest, most exotic, good old Canadian lobster.

I found, too, that we have worthy wheat. While in England, I put aside my studies for a weekend and decided to bake and make gravy and do all manner of things with my cooker (oven). Applying my excellent knowledge of biochemistry so that I might achieve this dream, I sought, at the grocery shop some flour. I looked for that familiar English icon, Robin Hood, but oddly, he was nowhere to be found in the shops of jolly old England. No, instead I looked and, with a shake of my head for good measure, saw on the shelves of the Safeway (yes, it really was a Safeway) bags and bags of “Strong Canadian Flour”. There it was, my own dear flour, grown along the highway, stored in an elevator, ground and shoved into a teeny little sac, in pursuit of me across the ocean and coyly disguised under a mysterious alias.

We are famous for more than our food, though. There is also the “Hearty Canadian Grass Seed” that Brits pay more for. This is especially odd to me, because grass grows in England whether you want it to or not. It grows, as does everything else, on the asphalt, for goodness sake. The year I was there, it rained so much I didn’t even have to unpack my Canadian Tire garden hose. Which, to get back to the desert scene out my back door this year, is not at all what has happened here. My hose has been unravelled an exceptionally large proportion of the time here in the scorching heat. In fact, if you want to have a lawn here at all you need an underground sprinkler that automatically turns on every hour to put out the brush fire. Which brings me to the last point worth sharing about world famous Canadian goods we all just take for granted. I hear, although perhaps its just rumour, that somebody down here has a real penchant for Hearty Canadian Water, and has a funky plan to annex Hudson Bay.

Smack. Smack. Smack. Thousands of hits on thousands of tables. Thousands of AU study guides flip open, computers whir to life, monitors emit, emails ping back and forth. And the spirits of thousands of distant-edders cheer in renewal of their commitment to the vow that they will one day finish TME2. We grit our teeth and show ourselves, the AU student body.

I’m good with that image. Except the student body part. How absurd. We’re no student body. I mean, we are anything but corporeal. We seldom even see each other; classmates often exist only in our abstract hopes and beliefs. We are way too dispersed for that allusion. We’re no body.

I’m not suggesting we lack cohesiveness. We have common goals. Like, we all wish AU would just grant us our degrees on speculation or for good behavior maybe. And we bond. Every evening we start up the distant ed machine knowing we aren’t the only one. We have strengths and we can be grouped in a common category. But you can’t draw a circle around us and say there we are. We have this necessary distance component that just won’t reconcile with the notion of a body. I mean, we all exist, share commitments, and submit to the laws of distance ed, but we’re not so physically and tangibly connected, you know.

Think of it this way. If you photographed the higher education scene in Alberta keeping your GPS-o-matic tuned to select the student ID cards of anyone over the age of 18, you’d get some fairly well-defined, blob-like, slowly moving masses at the Universities of Alberta or Calgary, or even at Red Deer College, right? There would be this visible manifestation over some demarcated square meterage, with skinny tendrils moving rapidly outward on the weekends then retracting slowly Sunday nights. You could clearly call any one of these amoeboid patches a student body”?and if you were a bad guy with a nasty laser, you could easily track those bodies. But not so at AU. Oh, we would pervade your world, nasty bad guy. But you would never find us. At AU, you’d get virtually no signal at the home base, loose dotting throughout the province, then ever less concentrated signals as you vainly spread your target out over the roundness of the globe.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying our hearts don’t all beat as one. You know they do. But we’re not doing the Bunny Hop, here, right?. We’re not hanging out in res, eating the same menu at Lister Hall, and cramming for exams together. We all have our own menus, time lines, identities:. The point is, we are so diverse that if we were a body, we would give multiple personality a whole new meaning.

We are, in fact, so not a body that we aren’t even like the components of the Iron Giant after he blew himself up and saved the world from a misfired military missile. All his blown apart self-seeking robot parts set out from around the world to reunite with their centre, to recreate their body. Well, we are all homing in on essentially the same beacon, so that if we ever got together you might call us a body. But the fact is we remain disconnected on so many levels. And that is very, very good because if we did fall into the Iron Giant analogy of a body then we would have to be a dismembered body, which is no better off than being a lased or loony body.

So, if we aren’t a student body, then what are we as we smack open our common study guides in isolation from each other, as we form, seek, and meet common goals without sharing even one little Bunny hop? How should we think of ourselves in this diffuse network of vaguely bonded people who squeeze some academia in on the side, and who, by happenstance, can claim to be virtually unlaseable? We aren’t a student body, because we don’t need that kind of vulnerability. No, instead we are the Athabasca University student soul.

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the shadow of barren mountains, beside yellow-red lake beds without lakes, amongst the tormented Joshua trees, in the Mojave Desert in the United States. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming meet.

Smack. Smack. Smack. Thousands of hits on thousands of tables. Thousands of AU study guides flip open, computers whir to life, monitors emit, emails ping back and forth. And the spirits of thousands of distant-edders cheer in renewal of their commitment to the vow that they will one day finish TME2. We grit our teeth and show ourselves, the AU student body.

I’m good with that image. Except the student body part. How absurd. We’re no student body. I mean, we are anything but corporeal. We seldom even see each other; classmates often exist only in our abstract hopes and beliefs. We are way too dispersed for that allusion. We’re no body.

I’m not suggesting we lack cohesiveness. We have common goals. Like, we all wish AU would just grant us our degrees on speculation or for good behavior maybe. And we bond. Every evening we start up the distant ed machine knowing we aren’t the only one. We have strengths and we can be grouped in a common category. But you can’t draw a circle around us and say there we are. We have this necessary distance component that just won’t reconcile with the notion of a body. I mean, we all exist, share commitments, and submit to the laws of distance ed, but we’re not so physically and tangibly connected, you know.

Think of it this way. If you photographed the higher education scene in Alberta keeping your GPS-o-matic tuned to select the student ID cards of anyone over the age of 18, you’d get some fairly well-defined, blob-like, slowly moving masses at the Universities of Alberta or Calgary, or even at Red Deer College, right? There would be this visible manifestation over some demarcated square meterage, with skinny tendrils moving rapidly outward on the weekends then retracting slowly Sunday nights. You could clearly call any one of these amoeboid patches a student body”?and if you were a bad guy with a nasty laser, you could easily track those bodies. But not so at AU. Oh, we would pervade your world, nasty bad guy. But you would never find us. At AU, you’d get virtually no signal at the home base, loose dotting throughout the province, then ever less concentrated signals as you vainly spread your target out over the roundness of the globe.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying our hearts don’t all beat as one. You know they do. But we’re not doing the Bunny Hop, here, right?. We’re not hanging out in res, eating the same menu at Lister Hall, and cramming for exams together. We all have our own menus, time lines, identities:. The point is, we are so diverse that if we were a body, we would give multiple personality a whole new meaning.

We are, in fact, so not a body that we aren’t even like the components of the Iron Giant after he blew himself up and saved the world from a misfired military missile. All his blown apart self-seeking robot parts set out from around the world to reunite with their centre, to recreate their body. Well, we are all homing in on essentially the same beacon, so that if we ever got together you might call us a body. But the fact is we remain disconnected on so many levels. And that is very, very good because if we did fall into the Iron Giant analogy of a body then we would have to be a dismembered body, which is no better off than being a lased or loony body.

So, if we aren’t a student body, then what are we as we smack open our common study guides in isolation from each other, as we form, seek, and meet common goals without sharing even one little Bunny hop? How should we think of ourselves in this diffuse network of vaguely bonded people who squeeze some academia in on the side, and who, by happenstance, can claim to be virtually unlaseable? We aren’t a student body, because we don’t need that kind of vulnerability. No, instead we are the Athabasca University student soul.

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the shadow of barren mountains, beside yellow-red lake beds without lakes, amongst the tormented Joshua trees, in the Mojave Desert in the United States. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming meet.

My new editor asked me a question. She asked: Did you have a major system shock coping with the climate change from England?

A fair question. But it can only be understood if you know my situation. I’m a Canadian, an Albertan, to be specific. I’ve been doing distance ed since before the hoodoos were carved. I finished my undergrad degree through distance ed, and am now doing a masters program through distance ed. I recently moved back to North America from England. I was there for a year doing distance ed acrobatics with my espoused in Salisbury, a lovely, historic city near Stonehenge, but am now in the United States, still doing my own distance ed thing but watching my husband do F-16 aerobatics in the Mojave desert, which is near Death Valley. Yes, the desert. I live there. Honest.

My editor wondered how I coped with the change when I moved. Well, I did notice a difference as I made the transition from continent to continent. The English temperature, for instance, was moderate and fluctuated little, whereas the Mojave’s, in contrast, is wholly ungoverned and mostly extreme. It’s near freezing in the morning, 25 degrees Celsius at noon, and bone chilling cold by suppertime”?akin to driving north-south across Alberta every day, if you know what I mean.

I noticed a difference in the rain, sun, and wind, too. England was wet. The desert is not. In England, sunglasses were an accessory, but in the desert they are a necessity. Even indoors, the glare is amazing. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. So I won’t. But I will say for those of you who ski or play outdoor hockey that it is a lot like the glare that makes you snowblind. As well, in England the wind could whip around a bit, every once in a while grab some thatch off the roof or send the odd sheep over. But in the desert the wind screams and howls and the trees curve in perpetual obeisance to its might, which, incidentally, approaches that of the sort of wind that could carve a hoodoo.

I noticed that even the colour of the landscape and the types of living things that abound are different. For instance, while England was green, the desert is not. England has trees, a multitude of trees, and bushes and grasses and heather, like you find in Alberta’s diverse parkland. But the Mojave has scrawny bushes, spaced out Joshua Trees, the odd palm, and a few conifers strewn about a sandy base. If you want to visualize this, take a swath of Boreal forest, grab a few tumbleweeds south on Highway 2, add some deformed cactus-like things, and spread it all sparsely “?round the Drumheller rockscape,

Another change I noticed was in the wildlife one tells one’s children about. England had spiders whose only claim to fame was frightening Miss Muffet, but the desert has rather cruel ones who kill Mr. Muffet in chilling fashion and remorselessly sting like irritated wasps. And whereas England had huge, friendly, slimy slugs that make great if short-lived house pets, the desert has huge, unfriendly, scaly rattlesnakes that will stick you and snicker as your leg goes gangrenous. Deadly as a bear but sneakier.

So, sure, there are differences. I left a gentler place for harsher, unforgiving reality. But were the differences shock inducing? Maybe for some. But for me and my kind? How did I cope? Huh? Who needs to cope? I’ve always worn shorts with my parka. Scorch me and blow me around like a mobile home, Mojave breeze, for I have bathed in the breath of the Chinook and ridden the Alberta Tornado. My sister got kicked off the men’s hockey team for playing too rough, and my brother rides his 10-speed through the Rockies and to the badlands. Up hoodoos and down again, mister. I ain’t afraid of no snakes. Bam-a-lam, Black Betty, bring it on spider Widow Woman and sting me. I’ll like it. Come, come now. I can get a distance ed degree and turn around and ask for more. I can hack the desert program. Desert, shmesert. I am the harried student from Alberta.

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the shadow of barren mountains, beside yellow-red lake beds without lakes, amongst the tormented Joshua trees, in the Mojave Desert in the United States. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming meet.

Only by grace am I writing this now, for sadly, my new computer died this morning. Again.

I bought it last week. Every harried distance ed student needs a computer. We rely on them to get our papers out on time, to contact our tutors:we depend on them. The one I’d been using was taken away by its rightful owner, so I needed one of my own. And I chose with care. I picked a sleek, black, state of the art powerhouse. I chose the fastest, the most capable, the one with the biggest RAM of all. It could crunch data like a Cray. Sexy and lean, it seemed intellectual but sophisticated, just right for the pedestal in the corner of my study.

I knew it had power like a teenage Anakin Skywalker, but I named it Bill, nonetheless. It was unstoppable, but with XP password protection I knew I could command it, that it would always be there for me and only me, all its parts perpetually at attention, awaiting my command, on or off at the touch of a button, always ready to take me at the speed of light to wherever I wanted to be, willing to wait with me, guide me, perform for me. It could even correct my grammar in a way I never found irritating. What more could a woman want? I was in love with Bill.

Alas my joy was fleeting. Things got ugly fast. I actually had cause to be suspicious from the beginning, but was blinded by the newness, the potential, the intrigue, and tried not to see what was before me. Bill’s stubborn arrogance was evident in the first boot. He refused to start when I commanded. I pressed his button, yet nothing happened. I pressed. I waited. I wiggled cords. I pressed. I waited. I waited. I waited. I sat down. I got up. I swore. I pressed. I waited. I cried and got the Styrofoam and packing boxes out of the garage. And then I heard it, a gentle beep of greeting, as Bill, on his own time, started up.

Sure Bill seemed to be working out after that, but the signs never disappeared. I remained blind to them, but they were there all along, whenever I asked for something tricky. Multitasking, RAM-intensive, stuff, you know, things that dig to the very soul and require real trust. At first Bill would just give up, beep mournfully and turn himself off when I really needed him. He got to the point where he would hibernate whenever things got difficult, but that didn’t improve. In fact, I’d say things got worse because it wasn’t long before he started choking, turning blue in the screen. If I was smothering him, I really didn’t notice, I surely didn’t mean to. But now, in retrospect, I think that when he took my work, sequestered it in read-only files I had no permission to change, and converted these to 0 kilobyte temporary files, he was only reaching out, desperately, in his own proud way telling me to keep my distance. Was there more to it? I cannot say. Perhaps he sensed my fear and dislike of his root directory; perhaps he sensed my poorly disguised MicroSoftophobia. Whatever it was went deep. On account of it, Bill died multiple deaths. Mind you, he was resurrected many times like a half-functioning zombie, going in and out with buzzing and urgent beeping, sometimes drama, always much aplomb, and finally, a purple screen.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I could not watch the object of my affection so afflicted and not reach out. I tried in so many ways. Bill got a thorough virus check, for instance. And I reformatted his hard drive, although psychotherapy was not the answer and things were back to bad in no time. Through it all, I never let the pain go on needlessly. I pulled the plug whenever Bill slipped into endless cycles of starting and restarting. I even attempted guided-emergency surgery. The technician on the phone talked me through a load of stuff, the most challenging of which was simultaneously pressing two release buttons to get Bill to open up. I re-seated all his cards because the diagnostics suggested maybe Bill had a dose of bad RAM. But all my efforts at rehabilitation and then resuscitation failed.

When Bill died seemingly for the last time this morning and not even my most valiant efforts brought him back to life, the technician uttered that it was hopeless. Bill’s motherboard was fried, his video card bent, his RAM unserviceable. The tech gave me a number to call to set up an appointment for someone to come to my house and clean up the carnage, replace Bill with a more peaceful, cooperative model, something more suited to my needs, something that I could command and that would not try to command me. I agreed to the exchange, but shame overtook me as I hung up the phone. What was I made of? Could I not grow to accept Bill’s capricious character, remain bemused by his spunk and stubbornness, his cheek and unreliability? Was it right to cast off his power and capability so discourteously, like so much plastic and wire? Had I really tried in this relationship?

Mourning my loss, questioning my integrity, I put the case back together, closed it, and pushed the box back into place on its pedestal. Confused, saddened, frustrated, I crumpled the note with the service number on it. Then I thought of my deadlines, the papers I had due, and knew at once that although I loved him as much as I hated him, I had to do what I had to do. I reached for the crumpled paper. Then I heard it: a single, contented beep. And I saw on the screen a familiar XP logo….no video card error, no memory error, no urgent beeping, just happy (smug?) Bill coming to life on his own time.

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the United Kingdom. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming meet.

They say she was a gypsy. I’m fairly certain she wasn’t a spy.

Her birth certificate says she was born in Alberta. But the year is scratched out. She had this thick Russian accent. And a distinctively folksy Slavic farmer chic about her. She wore a purple babushka, kept a flask of vodka in her purse, and could say “Pah” like you read about.

She was a free spirit with uncanny luck. When she got too hot in the morning sun, she would whip off her shirt (Gedo’s undershirt) and whomp about the garlic patch in her bra (emergency fifty dollar bill peaking out the bottom) and rubber boots. She told me garlic was a gift from the earth that could hide the smell of vodka any day. An avid reader, Baba had deep respect for education. She said she received her schooling in Alberta, even won a Governor-General’s award. But it was never really clear if that was in a poker game.

She was an academic icon for me as I grew up: Because she lived closer to Athabasca than I did when AU first came into being. Proximity was good enough for me. Baba was an academic.

Not only academically, but also in so many other ways, she was my inspiration and role model. Baba taught me old proverbs and passed on generations of wisdom, most of it about garlic or vodka, but some other shrewd stuff, too. I remember making mashed potatoes, a traditional dish of the old country (Byelorussia, Georgia, the Ukraine, Russia, and a few other places), with Baba one Sunday afternoon. She paused from her work, called me over from my garlic peeling and said, “Remember these words, my little kolbasa. Don’t just splash milk in. You’ll get stuff in your eye. You’ll make runny potatoes. “ Then she offered me her flask and bonked me on the head when I refused it. That was her way.

Like the scent of garlic that remained on my fingers throughout my adolescence, many of Baba’s words and ways remain with me now. Perhaps that is because some of her words closely paralleled the proverbs that appeared all over the schools I spent my weekdays in as a child. Not the sayings like “In case of fire, break glass”. And not the ones in black spray paint. I mean those inspirational sayings like the one about three things that come not back: an arrow sped in flight, a word hastily spoken, and an opportunity missed, for instance. In fact, I once asked Baba if this particular saying bore cultural parallel to what she told me about the milk and how she bonked me about the vodka. She agreed, in her cryptic Baba way, setting me up for transcending cultural insight and eternal academic motivation. She said, “Pah. Do your homework”.

With Baba’s ongoing academic leadership, role-modelling, and wisdom for life, I have been inspired not only to be unable to stop taking distance ed courses, but also to continue to verify the deepest meaning of humanity’s axioms. Some things I have learned vicariously. In particular, I saw the value of weighing actions before proceeding when I witnessed someone deeply regretting their actions. The lesson came one brisk and misty long-weekend morning. Asleep in my tent, I was awoken by mumbling voices and shuffling feet nearby. I heard a twang, whoosh, pip, zoioioioing. It was not the sound of Baba’s bra getting caught on her undershirt. It was something right above me. Lying on my back on the cool Alberta ground, with my eyes crossed, I saw it: glinting like Baba’s flask, a cold metal point. Staring down at me in my deep woods sleeping bag was an arrow, its flight through the top of my deep woods tent stopped only by the forces holding green canvas together.

Some things I have had to learn personally. In my wayward youth, for instance, despite Baba’s forewarning, I once poured the milk way too fast and there it was: milk in my eye. Likewise, other of my wisdom has been gained through my own bad judgment. I once hastily typed to my tutor: “Hi Pete: I resent your feedback. Audrey” I meant “re”, “hyphen”, “sent”: Sent again. I was saying that I had emailed again the feedback he requested. I tried to formulate an email apology when I realized what I’d written and that it had been six weeks without a response, but everything I wrote seemed feeble, insipid, like so much runny mashed potatoes. Even when I called to explain in my own voice, all he said was, “Pah”.

I have supplemented the wisdom of Baba and classroom posters in other ways. I have learned real-life applications of the wisdom of the ages about missed opportunity. I learned one lesson from a friend. Better to say acquaintance. I didn’t really know her well. She lived on my block. Off and on. Kind of an eccentric, one day she stopped at my house and invited me out for a morning game of Bingo. She said she could feel it; today was her lucky day. I said, thanks but I’ve got to finish TME2. Outwardly. Inwardly I said, Bingo? I’d rather choke on a clove of garlic. A few hours later that morning I was out checking my potato patch. She stopped in to tell me her hunch was right. Pulling the fabric of her T-shirt forward to reveal a bra overflowing with fifty-dollar bills, she exclaimed, “Pah!”, bonked me on the head, and whomped off to the liquor store.

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the United Kingdom. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming meet.

Unashamedly exhausted, after hoarsely whispering “It is done,” he beseeched, “Why have you forsaken me?” and closed his eyes.

I was not without heart; I could feel his pain. I knew he needed me to acknowledge the honour he had won for himself, our family, our country. The gruelling ritual was finally over. Sole representative of Canada in a bitter academic scenario, he had vanquished the scourge of studentship on Salisbury’s plains, had faced and beaten the fiercest of the Celtic war gods, he who never dies, Thesis.

Grandly beating a 9:00 a.m. deadline, the brave Canadian had finished with Thesis with 2 hours to spare. He was luckier than some in slapping Thesis with 230 deadly paragraphs in time. This success he attributed to the powerful weaponry brought to the battle: namely, a Dell notebook having a really big backspace key. The Dell was critical in fashioning an arsenal of 230 sleep-deprived, unified thoughts”?230 singeing topic sentences with supporting arguments”?230 brave and bold yet neither trite nor awkwardly unbelievable insights. Bullets every one, and each a dire sacrifice, I knew.

I knew too that though Thesis was despatched and our man Canada had survived – had proven Alberta and AU admirable – comrades had fallen. I did not need to wait until years later when with eyes wide and in a hushed whisper he told his son of what he had seen during the 230 paragraphs with Thesis. I already knew the horrors. I was not surprised that Thesis had been harsh, had left in his deathlike grip several sorry sots, all stuck, regrettably entrapped in eternal run-on sentences, forever fused to their keyboards.

I even knew that some sad students had not made it past initiation. Men and women of many nations had been humbled by earlier rites of the British tutorial system. This is not the “Tutors R Us” kiddie show you might know from sweet, sweet AU, gentle reader. Oh no no no. This is the mysterious tutorial system erected by the same mysterious peoples who convinced Stonehenge to stand up. I mean the mysterious tutorial system wherein a tutorial’s agenda is never its content yet always its test. I’m talking about the mysterious tutorial system wherein tutor is neither man nor beast, but evil essence:where grown men of many tribes and nations have for years been frightened by the unshorn, gaunt, white-maned principal tutor always on the couch in the staff lounge, perpetually reading a toner bottle, muttering over and over like a question “Mad cow” and randomly assigning marks to anyone who dares approach him. I mean the British tutorial system for which grown men bear memories especially of the haunting, haunted eyes of frightened Greek students pleading with British tutors whose ear drums are as unaffectable as their upper lips; Greeks crying in vain that it is all English to them.

I knew that the Canadian had survived this and more and had returned, spent but worthy, to these meagre rented quarters built on the graves of knights of old. Breathing without assistance, he had returned at 7:00 am in the misty British morning. His hands and face were streaked red by so many felt markers. Dispassionate and used, a minute after the wheels had stopped turning and the latch had clicked, his nearly dead weight cracked the car door open.

As he waited, propped, a cascade of emptied shells falling from his pocket onto the drive rolled under the car, souvenirs of terror past. A moment after the last pen stopped its roll, he blessed their lost souls with a well-known friendly Albertan oath, and wedged first one black-booted leg then another “?twixt damnable right car door and frame. I was ignoring nothing; I was all too aware. From above I heard heavy, dragging feet follow each other”?faithful dogs carrying the plasticine torso of a worn Canadian student body.

I knew his pain, his fatigue complete. Before I heard the key in the door below my window I sensed the bulk of spent self funnelled to a finger and directing itself at a scratched plastic button, conjuring a muffled yet highly offensive buzz like a secret call to his fairest love (me, obviously). Yet I did not move. Deep in the towers of our temporary rented home, beyond the mist, beyond the shade of Stonehenge, hidden from the brick halls of British academia and even farther from the Rockies and the drywall of Albertan academia, as the trill rang on I did not move. Unanswered, he slumped for an instant eternity, then resumed consciousness, searching his fist for his own key.

I was ignoring nothing. For part of the long buzzing I was silently deferring to what I knew had been done, but for most of it I was unable to move. And I silently honoured every plod up the stairs, nodding solemnly for every creak as he gently eased his academic warrior self onto folds of cool, thick, white cotton comforter and fell asleep with his boots on.

I wasn’t ignoring him. I could feel the scars of his ended battle. I heard the return of the perpetual student. I had not forsaken him; nor had I been to bed. Academia is our religion. He worships in the halls of ancient British educational institutes; I in our home, wherever our home may be, wherever we set up the Shrine of Gigabyte.

This life leaves us sleepless, ringing our own doorbell, deferring to each other, and jetlagged by the academic distances we travel every day. But we do it. I was expecting him to work all night to conquer the enemy/meet his deadline; he, likewise, might have expected to pass by me at the computer as I was when he left last night after putting his heirs to bed. No, I was not ignoring him, would never ignore him. I was deep in battle myself. Honour, shorter lived than ever he might have imagined, needed constant renewal. There, in our supposed haven from the busy leftover Celtic world about us, mysterious Thesis was far from defeated. Thesis was back and had me in a death grip.

For those trapped in their vacuums, glued to the wall by blobs of strawberry jam, obsessed by the quest for the perfect mildew remover, or oppressed by male oppression (the worst kind), The Voice’s Sandra had some sound advice last week: your prison is your own. So, guardian of your own destiny, run the vacuum in reverse. Jeannie you are Zena. Blow off those ancient trappings and set yourself free. Ride to the shrine of AU.

I say so, too. Pursue it, woman; pursue it undaunted. Seek what shall be yours, stay strong, arm yourself for the noble quest of higher education. But like my 18-year-old daughter recommends, don’t buy the metal Madonna corset; those can hurt your nipples. She recommends genuine full body armour that bangs and grinds as you ride off, warump, warump, warump, into the grey sky across rough hewn land on a heavy, mighty steed named Marty.

She says she can see you forced out of the terrible hose in a rush of back blown vacuum dust, your steed stumbling then recovering his gait. She sees you riding, riding, riding, until you start to get really, really sleepy. And hungry. So hungry that you jump off and hunt squirrel. Then make some squirrel stew, after you start a fire with the flint of the land. And then chew the rodents daintily while making earrings from their skulls and hair ornaments from their tails. Then grunt with satisfaction, look furtively about, and lay down for the night. Then start to fake an orgasm, out of habit, before you remember the point of this fantasy.

She sees you arising with the sun, washing off the night with misty dew, and being pleased. You will be pleased because there will be no mildew in the grout, primarily because there will be no grout, a fact that, nonetheless, will not stop your pleasure.

She sees you continuing, resourceful, and undaunted. After you polish your horse, meticulously removing every trace of jam and not even caring how on earth it got there, you set out for the day. You ride hard. As the noon sun starts to beat down, you slow, you stop, you dismount and tie Marty to a tree. With lightning reflexes you leap upon the hawk that lands on the branch above you, and tear it into cubes for fondue for you and Marty. That’s after you pluck its feathers and make a sexy little neck dress and halter-top thing that kind of fastens around the back and scoops in the front past the collarbone. As you get up to leave, you are satisfied to see that you’ve been tossing your hawk refuse into the trunk piece of your armour, which you took off so you could see your reflection and check out the feather thing. You do a quick clean up of all the unsightly litter nearby, and leave the shiny receptacle behind for others, knowing you have set a good example.

She sees you travel onward, noble quest in your spirit, power in your grasp, gorgeous accessories in your hair. Each tramp of Marty’s majestic hoof stirs a torrent of dust, a painful reminder. You politely ask him to step lightly so as not to ruin your coiffure. Beside the worn and dusty path you notice some really nice flowers. You veer your glorious stag westward, over softest green, following a trail of daisies, through a field of fireweed, along a line of lupines, to a world of wildflowers, lilies, poppies, ooh pretty:. then you realize you have strayed. You are lost.

Darn, you say. Was that rises in the west, or sets in the west? But then you have a good idea. You dismount. You draw your sword, take off your helmet, get down on your knees. You turn the helmet over and rip your sword across the nearby stand of flowers, catching them in your helmet as they fall. You adjust the exquisite lilies and poppies, dropping in a lonely dandelion because they have a good attitude and need love too. Your arrangement is smashing, you notice, as you place it perfectly in a bed of charming red rocks.

Having the satisfaction of a job well done but still lost, you realize things are grim. Yet you do not despair. You have one last hope: you look deep into the annals of humanity, think of all the sad things you can, wonder if the hawk had a family, and start to cry. Then, in a vision from either Minerva or your sister in Morinville (you can’t make out the signature), you see a large square”?stone and metal, perched on green land”?as a portal. Following your vision, you walk. Because you forgot to tie Marty up.

You forgive him, realizing you should have been more understanding of his needs, and start up a hill. Just over the crest you see it, framed by a halo of light: the AU portal as in your vision. A woman in a lab coat steps through it, walking towards you with something white draped over her arm. She solemnly covers your feathers with this other lab coat, gently lifts away the squirrel accessories, tosses them into a shiny bin teeming with rodent jewellery, and hands you a student registration form. She motions for you to follow her and speaks loudly but casually over her shoulder toward the crowd hovering at the door of the nearby brown building, “Can somebody watch the portal? I’ve got to clean this one up and get her to Registry, fast.”

(Graphic: Artemesia Gentileschi Judith and Her Maidservant Florence, Palazzo Pitti, c. 1613-14 – see http://www.geocities.com/tmartiac/artemisia/art.htm )

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the United Kingdom. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming meet.

Suicidal moths pinging against my window, I read. I read again. I write it down. I invert it. I write it down inverted. I break it into phrases. I look each word up. Each one. One at a time. Like the death bent moths, one by one by one by one:

Then I realize it’s not me. Like the moths in the blackness, the words are struggling to get out of their sentences. They don’t even like each other. Like sparks rising from hell, they hiss and spit at each other in succession. They not only fail to explain what a local integral is, they endeavour to protect it from being grasped by any mind out to integrate it. Those pompous words do not teach calculus. They bury it in the area under their curve.

I open the window, letting in the moths, and scream into the bleak, British night “What do you mean we call a function singular in the region surrounding a point if its local integral diverges or vanishes with a noninteger exponent when the region of integration goes to zero”.

Instantly penitent, I look for signs of a police car, pray that no windows light up. Only misty silence greets my furtive search. Then a haughty voice whispers from the darkness, “If you order it, it will come”.

Night after night the play unfolds. I work till the wee hours. Then, the occasional fall breeze on my hot cheeks cooling my passion, drying my tears, checking my anguish, each night I bid the moon farewell, each night I hear faint whispers in the trees. He marks my leave-taking. Then I sleep disturbed, knowing the glinting cover of my current textbook, Torture through the Middle Ages: Applications of Calculu s, leers until daybreak at my supplementary study aid, Test of Calculus as a Second Language.

Finally, obsessed, pushed, driven by pompous, disjointed pebbles of arithmetic, dragged by a voice in the inky night, I go online. I order.

And so I wait. I lay awake through the night, waiting, watching the pyre of my current textbook, kindled with my supplementary study aid, now flickering, now humbled, now ashes. As the last embers die, I hear a sound as of angels. Bing bong. I wipe away the last bad memories from my hollowed cheeks, grab my housecoat, and fly down the stairs. I open the door to a glorious, clear day. Finally, blinking back the sunlight, I accept the package, wrapped in blinding white. With Visa as my saviour, I know I am avenged. I pull back whitest paper, and cry tears of joy as I read: Calculus for Dummies, specially packaged with the paperback workbook Forgotten Calculus.

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the United Kingdom. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming meet.

They say she was a gypsy. I’m fairly certain she wasn’t a spy.

Her birth certificate says she was born in Alberta. But the year is scratched out. She had this thick Russian accent. And a distinctively folksy Slavic farmer chic about her. She wore a purple babushka, kept a flask of vodka in her purse, and could say “Pah” like you read about.

She was a free spirit with uncanny luck. When she got too hot in the morning sun, she would whip off her shirt (Gedo’s undershirt) and whomp about the garlic patch in her bra (emergency fifty dollar bill peaking out the bottom) and rubber boots. She told me garlic was a gift from the earth that could hide the smell of vodka any day. An avid reader, Baba had deep respect for education. She said she received her schooling in Alberta, even won a Governor-General’s award. But it was never really clear if that was in a poker game.

She was an academic icon for me as I grew up: Because she lived closer to Athabasca than I did when AU first came into being. Proximity was good enough for me. Baba was an academic.

Not only academically, but also in so many other ways, she was my inspiration and role model. Baba taught me old proverbs and passed on generations of wisdom, most of it about garlic or vodka, but some other shrewd stuff, too. I remember making mashed potatoes, a traditional dish of the old country (Byelorussia, Georgia, the Ukraine, Russia, and a few other places), with Baba one Sunday afternoon. She paused from her work, called me over from my garlic peeling and said, “Remember these words, my little kolbasa. Don’t just splash milk in. You’ll get stuff in your eye. You’ll make runny potatoes. “ Then she offered me her flask and bonked me on the head when I refused it. That was her way.

Like the scent of garlic that remained on my fingers throughout my adolescence, many of Baba’s words and ways remain with me now. Perhaps that is because some of her words closely paralleled the proverbs that appeared all over the schools I spent my weekdays in as a child. Not the sayings like “In case of fire, break glass”. And not the ones in black spray paint. I mean those inspirational sayings like the one about three things that come not back: an arrow sped in flight, a word hastily spoken, and an opportunity missed, for instance. In fact, I once asked Baba if this particular saying bore cultural parallel to what she told me about the milk and how she bonked me about the vodka. She agreed, in her cryptic Baba way, setting me up for transcending cultural insight and eternal academic motivation. She said, “Pah. Do your homework”.

With Baba’s ongoing academic leadership, role-modelling, and wisdom for life, I have been inspired not only to be unable to stop taking distance ed courses, but also to continue to verify the deepest meaning of humanity’s axioms. Some things I have learned vicariously. In particular, I saw the value of weighing actions before proceeding when I witnessed someone deeply regretting their actions. The lesson came one brisk and misty long-weekend morning. Asleep in my tent, I was awoken by mumbling voices and shuffling feet nearby. I heard a twang, whoosh, pip, zoioioioing. It was not the sound of Baba’s bra getting caught on her undershirt. It was something right above me. Lying on my back on the cool Alberta ground, with my eyes crossed, I saw it: glinting like Baba’s flask, a cold metal point. Staring down at me in my deep woods sleeping bag was an arrow, its flight through the top of my deep woods tent stopped only by the forces holding green canvas together.

Some things I have had to learn personally. In my wayward youth, for instance, despite Baba’s forewarning, I once poured the milk way too fast and there it was: milk in my eye. Likewise, other of my wisdom has been gained through my own bad judgment. I once hastily typed to my tutor: “Hi Pete: I resent your feedback. Audrey” I meant “re”, “hyphen”, “sent”. Sent again. I was saying that I had emailed again the feedback he requested. I tried to formulate an email apology when I realized what I’d written and that it had been six weeks without a response, but everything I wrote seemed feeble, insipid, like so much runny mashed potatoes. Even when I called to explain in my own voice, all he said was, “Pah”.

I have supplemented the wisdom of Baba and classroom posters in other ways. I have learned real-life applications of the wisdom of the ages about missed opportunity. I learned one lesson from a friend. Better to say acquaintance. I didn’t really know her well. She lived on my block. Off and on. Kind of an eccentric, one day she stopped at my house and invited me out for a morning game of Bingo. She said she could feel it; today was her lucky day. I said, thanks but I’ve got to finish TME2. Outwardly. Inwardly I said, Bingo? I’d rather choke on a clove of garlic. A few hours later that morning I was out checking my potato patch. She stopped in to tell me her hunch was right. Pulling the fabric of her T-shirt forward to reveal a bra overflowing with fifty-dollar bills, she exclaimed, “Pah!”, bonked me on the head, and whomped off to the liquor store.

Audrey is a distance ed maven and part-time writer living in the United
Kingdom. She is finishing her last year of an honours Master of Health
Science degree, in preparation for a distance ed PhD in how to get a
distance ed PhD. A mother of four, she sporadically sleeps, is in love with
fractal math, and has found peace where neuroscience and Java programming
meet.