Things to say other than whinging about thesis
I have some of those, I swear! :c)
For example, notes from the Berkeley conference a couple weeks ago -
- Got the paper written *before* I gave it. Yay! Granted, about 2 hours before, but written is written, and I really did like the way it turned out. Went to a coffee shop a block from campus to run through it a couple times and everything.
I was the first paper in a session on historical and sociolinguistics. Why on earth people think those things pattern together is beyond me. But it meant that I was in the same session as a paper on operationally quantifying subjectivity (socio, I guess? should have been semantics) and one on rhinoglottophilia (not kinky, alas. really should have been), as well as one I really did want to see, on pre-Acadian Cajun French.
The fun part about that was that I had actually corresponded with the speaker back when I was a lowly freshman and he was a Stanford grad student. I was trying to identify the language in which the chorus to a favorite song of mine had been sung. We linguists are well-connected little beasts, and (based on what I thought it sounded like, and the fact that the rest of the song was in French) I promptly e-mailed a friend of mine who was a native speaker of Haitian Creole, as well as a few other linguists who had known interests in ferreting out pop-culture language information. No dice on the Haitian Creole, but Professor Vaux (my then-department adviser) sent the e-mail to a Quebecois student of his, who responded that the chorus was in Wolof, and attached a rough translation.
Linguists rock my socks.
Anyway, former grad student is now a post-doc in New Brunswick, and I finally had a chance to meet him in person - yay! - and to see a very interesting talk on Cajun - double yay!
My own talk went well - I ran a little under-time (due to the adrenaline rush), so I had more time for questions, and since they were good questions, it was just as well. [Side-note to the gentleman who asked the question about LSQ as a foreign language: *thank you* for just speaking up and asking your question without me calling on you. I couldn't for the life of me tell if you were intentionally raising your hand or not, and I would have been terribly embarrassed to have just skipped over you!] And, Lovely Cousin dropped in to watch me present - thanks for the moral support, cous! :c)
- Conferences are not about talks. You give your own, if you're lucky there are a few others that catch your interest, if you're unlucky you pick the best of the worst and go out of moral obligation, and the rest of the time you get to schmooze with colleagues and/or hang out in an interesting city.
Thus it was that, in addition to giving my talk, my weekend was composed of:
- hanging out with Lovely Cousin and her Lovely Housemates
- meeting up with mypaganpoetry (whom I hadn't seen since high school!)
- having breakfast and then lunch with Lovely Cousin's former professor (who was, incidentally, a childhood friend of my dad's - the whole thing was miraculously un-weird)
- chatting up toy-store clerk whose dissertation way back when had focused on the theme of silence in Wordsworth's poetry and who was delightfully knowedgable about Wilde as well (his wife, incidentally, specialized in disability studies and medieval literature - wish she'd been there too!)
- reading Lovely Cousin's fascinating course materials for the "Blind at the Museum" project (museumfreak, if you want more details, ask - this seems very very far up your alley, and in fact I thought of you the whole time I was reading). It's ironic, isn't it, that the visual artist in the family is becoming more and more involved with the blind community, and the musician in the family has been sucked into the Deaf-world. Stop snickering, Fate, we get it already. ;c)
- wining and dining and hanging out with fellow insane linguists at the conference dinner party. ::waves hello to the Rice/UCSD folks:: Using my cell phone to read what is hands-down the oddest narrative self-proclaimed CV of any academic out there. (E. Douglas Mitchell - not safe for work, or indeed for your own mental health in general, but provided for the sort of people who go out looking for train wrecks to watch. Click on "Fruth and Tiction," and when you get to the glassy-eyed pigs, don't say I didn't warn you.)
- lunching with a Harvard friend who is now at Berkeley Law (or Boalt, as I am told to call it).
- running into a gaggle of debaters from my old high school, none of whom I know or even know of. Their reaction to my name tag: "Oh, my God! Are you really Nassira? THE Nassira? Can I shake your hand? Look, guys, it's NASSIRA!" *quiver* Apparently, my debate coach hasn't found anyone new to talk about yet.
- a deepening Red Bull addiction. Ok, Mischa, you win. :c)
now back to thesis. and probably Red Bull.
For example, notes from the Berkeley conference a couple weeks ago -
- Got the paper written *before* I gave it. Yay! Granted, about 2 hours before, but written is written, and I really did like the way it turned out. Went to a coffee shop a block from campus to run through it a couple times and everything.
I was the first paper in a session on historical and sociolinguistics. Why on earth people think those things pattern together is beyond me. But it meant that I was in the same session as a paper on operationally quantifying subjectivity (socio, I guess? should have been semantics) and one on rhinoglottophilia (not kinky, alas. really should have been), as well as one I really did want to see, on pre-Acadian Cajun French.
The fun part about that was that I had actually corresponded with the speaker back when I was a lowly freshman and he was a Stanford grad student. I was trying to identify the language in which the chorus to a favorite song of mine had been sung. We linguists are well-connected little beasts, and (based on what I thought it sounded like, and the fact that the rest of the song was in French) I promptly e-mailed a friend of mine who was a native speaker of Haitian Creole, as well as a few other linguists who had known interests in ferreting out pop-culture language information. No dice on the Haitian Creole, but Professor Vaux (my then-department adviser) sent the e-mail to a Quebecois student of his, who responded that the chorus was in Wolof, and attached a rough translation.
Linguists rock my socks.
Anyway, former grad student is now a post-doc in New Brunswick, and I finally had a chance to meet him in person - yay! - and to see a very interesting talk on Cajun - double yay!
My own talk went well - I ran a little under-time (due to the adrenaline rush), so I had more time for questions, and since they were good questions, it was just as well. [Side-note to the gentleman who asked the question about LSQ as a foreign language: *thank you* for just speaking up and asking your question without me calling on you. I couldn't for the life of me tell if you were intentionally raising your hand or not, and I would have been terribly embarrassed to have just skipped over you!] And, Lovely Cousin dropped in to watch me present - thanks for the moral support, cous! :c)
- Conferences are not about talks. You give your own, if you're lucky there are a few others that catch your interest, if you're unlucky you pick the best of the worst and go out of moral obligation, and the rest of the time you get to schmooze with colleagues and/or hang out in an interesting city.
Thus it was that, in addition to giving my talk, my weekend was composed of:
- hanging out with Lovely Cousin and her Lovely Housemates
- meeting up with mypaganpoetry (whom I hadn't seen since high school!)
- having breakfast and then lunch with Lovely Cousin's former professor (who was, incidentally, a childhood friend of my dad's - the whole thing was miraculously un-weird)
- chatting up toy-store clerk whose dissertation way back when had focused on the theme of silence in Wordsworth's poetry and who was delightfully knowedgable about Wilde as well (his wife, incidentally, specialized in disability studies and medieval literature - wish she'd been there too!)
- reading Lovely Cousin's fascinating course materials for the "Blind at the Museum" project (museumfreak, if you want more details, ask - this seems very very far up your alley, and in fact I thought of you the whole time I was reading). It's ironic, isn't it, that the visual artist in the family is becoming more and more involved with the blind community, and the musician in the family has been sucked into the Deaf-world. Stop snickering, Fate, we get it already. ;c)
- wining and dining and hanging out with fellow insane linguists at the conference dinner party. ::waves hello to the Rice/UCSD folks:: Using my cell phone to read what is hands-down the oddest narrative self-proclaimed CV of any academic out there. (E. Douglas Mitchell - not safe for work, or indeed for your own mental health in general, but provided for the sort of people who go out looking for train wrecks to watch. Click on "Fruth and Tiction," and when you get to the glassy-eyed pigs, don't say I didn't warn you.)
- lunching with a Harvard friend who is now at Berkeley Law (or Boalt, as I am told to call it).
- running into a gaggle of debaters from my old high school, none of whom I know or even know of. Their reaction to my name tag: "Oh, my God! Are you really Nassira? THE Nassira? Can I shake your hand? Look, guys, it's NASSIRA!" *quiver* Apparently, my debate coach hasn't found anyone new to talk about yet.
- a deepening Red Bull addiction. Ok, Mischa, you win. :c)
now back to thesis. and probably Red Bull.