Christmas and new year

Well, Christmastime is upon us and I hope you are well and prosperous.

The preceding year has been trying in many ways. A profound personal depression ushered in with the previous new year has given way to a profound economic depression ushering out this one. The steady improvement of my relationship with my son has paralleled the deterioration of my marriage. He talks more and more and rather precociously in English and his French is improving rapidly. My wife speaks little to me other than to say she no longer loves me.

As I write this my little boy is here and she...is elsewhere. She rented a flat in the Villeray district of Montréal. St.Henri has become too déclassé for her. I love this part of town- you can see both Mont Royal and the Lachine Canal park, and the mixture of new condos, refurbished early Twentieth Century factories and older triplexes gives the area variety. To the East, you can see the skyscrapers of Centre Ville rising in the distance above the church spires.

As to architecture, my first semester back in the MA program in Art History was reasonably successful. I enjoyed working with Prof. Bélisle both as his student and research assistant. I'm pursuing my thesis under the supervision of Prof. Hammond. We've refined my research question into an exploration of the video game as architecture using phenomenological methodology.

The apartment is rather quieter, because the "babble box" left with Sheila. People keep offering me TVs but I politely decline their offers. Anton draws instead of watching cartoons. We read, sing and exercise.

In the coming year I hope to reconcile with my wife. I plan to attend the annual conference of The Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) in Ottawa in May, 2009. I'm still training for that Marathon. I am going to try and be more playful.