erin!balser

And it hurt. But mostly it made me sleepy.

I wish I had a real excuse for why I’ve ignored this blog thing for as long as I have. The excuse is that I have a job now. Since March, I’ve been working as the Sales Assistant at Kate Walker & Company, a sales agency. It’s a bit hard to explain, because we sell books to book stores, not people. And the books aren’t ours. And my personal job is sales-free. It’s been going really well, I’ve learned tons, I like it a lot, but it’s made me sleepy. The change in schedule has nearly killed me these past three months (and it doesn’t help that I’m still blogging near full-time over at my other blogs). But I’m adjusting. I’ve actually started to do things during the week! So this is an exciting development that’s inspired me to actually use this blog again.

I doubt this will last very long. And I’m still not entirely sure what to do with this blog, whether it should be personal, publishing or somewhere in between. But I’ll figure it out.

On a side note, I’m working up the courage to submit a completely unsolicited “why Kate Walker & Company needs a blog” report. We’ll see how that goes.

Descant (one of my favorite literary magazines!) recently wrote a post about cleaning off the bookshelf. Some titles are impossibly hard to part with, no matter how embarrassing. Yes, I’m talking about my entire Baby-Sitters Club series. Others, not so much.

Their suggestions range from the charitable to the communal to the depressing, but they do have a point. You can’t hang onto books forever.

When you’re done with a title, what do you do with it? And what books can’t you part with?

For On the Danforth, the student magazine that we here at the Book and Magazine publishing program at Centennial College produce, Jen and I interviewed Michelle Lane, the founder of the Lane Montessori School for Autism. She was a fabulous and very impressive woman.

Michelle founded the Lane Montessori School for Autism in 2003. She wanted to create a unique program for children with autism and special needs that combined the traditional Applied Learning Behavior Methods with the Montessori teaching methods developed by Maria Montessori in the late 1800s.

LMSA combines traditional Montesori teaching practices with Applied Behavior Analysis practices. The classes are very small–only four students each–and the students receive a lot of one-on-one attention. Lane’s school integrates traditional autism approaches with the Montessori approaches. Lane believes that the blend of these two approaches is best for children with autism.

“Children with autism are largely visual learners,” Lane says. “They learn concrete concepts through hands-on learning, as opposed to abstract concepts. It’s about understanding the world around them.”

Read more »

So Matt started a new blog this week, Y Working. It’s about the generational gap in today’s workplace.

The site’s only been up a few days, but it’s something Matt’s thought a lot about over the past few years and he’s got a lot of interesting things to say.

I’m not just saying that because I date him. Although, it’ll be nice to have someone else listen to him for a change!

For months I’ve been meaning to post some insightful meta-crap about living in Toronto and what it means to be a small-town Nova Scotian living in Toronto. It’s supposed to blacken my soul and harden my heart; a horror I don’t realize it until some family tragedy forces me home and I open my eyes and see that a community of high unemployment, low population and little to do is really the way to the good, the truth and the light.

I always hated Toronto growing up. Hated it for having the things Digby didn’t, hated it for appearing to have economic and political clout, hated it for the fact my parents’ income couldn’t buy them a one bedroom condo downtown there, hated it for being smug and superior, hated it for being smoggy, hated it for being there.

Then I moved here. It wasn’t intentional, it was just the path my life took. It made sense to live here and no sense not to. I still can’t fully embrace living in Toronto (hell, living in Ontario), because somewhere I’m convinced a little part of me will die.

I don’t even like Digby. And I still can’t do it.

However, I’ve realized a few things. Toronto gets the short end of the stick most of the time. I can take the subway regularly (during rush hour!) and not want to kill myself. It’s actually nice to be able to shop at three different Gaps in a single day if I really wanted to. Saying hello to the hooker who works the corner is a nice thing to do. That even though I live in the downtown core–within walking distance of all those icons that make Toronto what it is–it bugs the hell out of me that my walk to school is routed so that I can’t see the CN Tower.

The fucking Soctiabank building is in the way.

So yeah. This wasn’t profound at all. But then, neither is living in Toronto.

Matt killed BE Something yesterday. It was a sad but necessary death. Now that I actually go to school for hours on end (as opposed to spending all day in my pajamas reading stuff and “thinking”), Matt commutes like a maniac, and there’s that damn writers’ strike (for the record, I support the writers!) there hasn’t been much activity over there. It makes me sad.

But what can you do?

Maybe I’ll revive it when the new season of America’s Next Top Model starts. Those recaps made me pretty popular. I’d like to think it was my stellar wit and not my fantastic Google ranking.