The Laursonian Institute

I showed Lewis a sample of my handwriting from high school, and it’s almost unbearably minuscule.  Crafted with such precision and detail as to be unreadable.  At the time, that’s exactly what I was hoping.  I could put thoughts so tiny down on paper; so tiny that few would see and fewer would care.  It’s almost as good as writing in code, but better at capturing the meta-level of feeling like a minuscule, illegible individual.

It has been remarked on occasion that I’m more aware of my motives and thoughts than others.  I often wonder how much of this is made up, and how much of this is just the product of too long staring into my own self.  I can’t imagine myself any other way, and a failure of this kind of imagination not only serves to create an infinity of shyness, but the surety of action.  I am the way I am because there’s no other possible way for me to be.  I’ve always felt very sensitive to insincerity and falsehoods – not that I haven’t used my share of both –  but it has keep me on the straight and obvious path in most situations.  When one thing is clearly contrary to my nature, there’s no reason to pursue it.  This strong feeling of right and wrong which seems so entirely undeniable in my make-up also makes me feel like a good case for morality in atheism.  It’s not because some religious authority told me to act the way I do, but because my parents raised me with a strong moral pole.

On the other hand, knowing oneself too well can be very much a maddening endeavor.  When I feel unsettled about something, it’s almost consuming.  The irreconcilability of two potential actions, the lack of an obvious right, the need for action without precedent… all of these cause me undue anxiety.  In situations which require tact, politics, strategy, or serious compromise, I might as well be lost at sea.   There aren’t many situations where what I want and what should be possible or allowable don’t match up.   I generally work hard for what I want, and achieve that, and am satisfied with my results.    Or I don’t try, and I don’t desire whatever result would have come from that effort.

Now, I’m stuck in the middle of something ridiculous, but my brain keeps running over and through the situation.  I’m feeling a little drunk on success of such a minor variety, but I want to repeat it again and again.   After all these miles I’ve come, I’m still the illegible tiny-writing girl dreaming of acceptance and popularity in some circle of those I respect and want to know.  I pick someone I think is a person to aspire to, and I want to know them.  I want them to know me, accept me, encourage and inspire me.  I need intellectual stimulation based in respect and safety and mutual enjoyment.

This weekend, Lewis and I and another couple had a few beers together, and I felt like I was living that moment.  It was a pair I really respect and enjoy, and I want them to like me.  We had a really good night, and I think it was enjoyed by everyone involved.  I want more, but the issue is impossible to push.  The very knowledge that you desire someone else’s company this much is a damnable offense.  It demonstrates irrefutably the political and power imbalance in the dynamic, and I come out on the bottom side.  If having a good time with someone I look up to means this much to me, there’s no way I have anything to offer in return of equal value.  Nothing I can do will mean a quarter as much as this couple having a laugh with me, and it’s so incredibly maddening to know that.

I also know this isn’t likely the way anyone else involved sees it.  I can’t double-think, though the talent would be incredibly useful, and as such, I’ve already ruined it for myself.  I’ve let something get to me, and it’s tarnished me a little.  These moments of mine which are from the heart and soul, and not the mind, are impossible to enjoy without rusting the polished exterior.  If it’s something I’ve worked for, there’s sombre joy at the knowledge of success.  Success at the endeavor of being me and being liked for it is… like watching a movie so engrossing and beautiful that when the credits roll, you can’t help but feel a little more empty.  I see past myself, and the vision of myself as a confident and likable person just leaves everyday-me with an assurance of the impossibility of it all.

Yet I tell myself this – there have been, time and again in my life, people who rouse my spirits to this degree.  And there shall be again.  I’ve reached that point of being settled enough in Davis that I’m longing for friends and laughs outside my own humble walls.  And friends will come – it took me years in all my new homes to find my Bryannes, my Steens, Cerises, Darins, Armands… and I’m already at an advantage here.  I have a happy home life, a lovely husband, a large social network, and twice the confidence of prior years.  I just need to give myself the time and space and opportunity to find those people Lewis and I can spend countless days sparring and joking and theorizing with on the smallest of life’s details.  There are so many invigorating people on this earth, how long can it before we fall into the orbit of another?

March 22nd, 2010 | Tags: doubt, friends, self | Category: life | Comments Off

There’s a quiet in Davis that used to unnerve me.  At night it settles in, leaving only the faint ocean roar of the 80 in the distance.  All those people hurrying to San Francisco, or Tahoe, or who knows where blend into a white noise as subtle and compressed as the Tule fog.  No planes overhead, no dogs barking, no BART, no beats or bass lines from cruising cars.  No yelling, no shopping carts, no bangs, booms, shots, or sirens.  It used to be so disarming, coming up from Oakland for a night, to have night settle in and dampen all but this ribbon of freeway.  I don’t appreciate the quiet now, though it no longer makes my ears strain for hints of auditory mischief.

Despite living in what counts, for the west coast at least, as the middle of nowhere, Davis is indisputably on edge of the urban fabric.  The freeway is a constant reminder that we’re a stones throw from the crossroads of everything.  San Francisco pulls like a magnet in our conceptual field.  Sacramento is like a neighborhood everyone just forgets to visit.  Tahoe is our back yard disguised as a country club.  Half the cities you’ve ever heard of in California are a stones throw away.  Davis is tangled in the roots of Northern California’s transportation bindweed.

This irreconcilability is part of what erodes away the impression of inapproachableness I used to feel about Davis.  That this town was a proud, staid, calm, settled place.  It is those things, but it’s also full of undergraduates finding their place in life.  It has local produce and Co-op supporting hippies and keggers and midterms and pool parties.  It has a tight core Davisite community, but also a population that supports more pizza places and bars per capita than seems possible.  In the end, it’s just a town.  A funny, slightly quirky town – the sort that orders brand new low-emissions double-decker busses and whose major town event involves a parade of home-made bikes and antique farm equipment – but a town nonetheless.  For every boycotter of Israeli-made products picketing outside the Co-op, we have a handful traffic scofflaws parading around Davis like it’s their private property.

For all of this, Davis is great.  Approachable, amusing, and immensely livable.  I’m happy to be here, making memories and building a life surrounded by such warm and likable people.  But there’s this part of me that seems to be as strong as ever, this sense of home burned into my being, that won’t ever let me feel at peace here, or anywhere.  I can be on the winning team, but I’ll never have the home-court advantage.  I accept this as reality, as something I do not strive to change, but I can acknowledge that a piece of me believes in something I can no longer grasp.  There are all these memories built up already, of places, and sounds, and smells, and feelings which belong so wholly to another time and another land that they may as well belong to a different life, surfacing like deja vu from some past existence.

Today, this spiritual hallucination is the ocean.  My ocean is different than the one we have here.  It has sand which is perpetually cold, and so very hard.   Stinking banks of seaweed are scarce, but driftwood stacks in huge piles at the high water line.  There are no seals or dolphins to speak of, but tide pools enough to fill even the longest days.  Buckets of sand dollars are waiting to be found; an infinity of small rocks hide an unimaginable number of even smaller crabs.  The beach is pierced again and again with clear, very cold streams running into the Pacific.  If you look long enough, you may see a deer or raccoon on the margins, where forest abruptly gives way to sand.  There are no bed-and-breakfasts, no hotels with outdoor pools, no steakhouses.  Just a cold, steady wind threatening to give you windburn, water so cold you don’t dare put more than your toes in, and misty, rainy silence so deafening you can’t help but know yourself in that moment.  You’re not on the path from metropolis to metropolis, from urban sprawl to urban center.  You’re hours away from everything.  So far from any kind of civilized life that no one even really lives here.  It’s just you, this pavement disguised as sand, and the crushing, life affirming solitude that is the coast as its meant to be.

February 28th, 2010 | Tags: davis, home, life, memories, ocean, sea, town | Category: life | Comments Off

Just got back from an excellent show – managed to get tickets to the house show David Bazan was playing here in Sacramento.  It’s a nice concept – only a handful of tickets given out so you can see him play in someone’s living room, who hosts for free, presumably.  Anyway, good crowd, good vibe, good set.  I’m feeling lucky to have gone, though looking forward to seeing him in a few months at a bigger venue, too.

Seeing a good show always makes me want to relive my life 10 or more years ago.  There’s a wonderful sense of escape I get at a show I get nowhere else.  I think this is what film buffs get going to movies, or some such.  Anyway, there’s a tangible feeling of bliss that settles in me when a band is good, and there’s really no external thoughts polluting my moment.  It’s not often in my life I find a place where I’m free from worry, but concerts do it.  I think most my happiest moments growing up were at shows, with or without my posse, or with my band.  I want to dive right into it again, after a night like tonight.  Sitting on that floor, I was planning how I could force myself to go see more bands in Sac and get some of that back, though knowing the whole time that it’s a futile effort.  Until I feel free and rich, going out to shows must be an extravagant luxury, both mentally and monetarily.

I should have been keeping track of every time I’ve seen Dave Bazan.  It’s uncountable now, the total number.  I can think of at least a handful of different venues I’ve seen him in – this house, now, the Independent, the Bottom of the Hill, Bumbershoot, a teen recovery center in Bellevue once… the RKCNDY?  I miss the RKCNDY.  I tried to find pictures of it online the other day, only to realize that there aren’t many (save this tag set on flickr),  This means that the RCKNDY, like so many other formative things from my childhood, exists functionally only in my mind.  Like my childhood home(s).  Like Teriyaki.  Like Marbletop, and the Java Jump, and 2nd Time Around, and the Fremont Sonic Boom.   And these days, even like my best friend.  I know life moves on, but I wish I had, at some point, realized that I was trading a new world for my old world.  I thought I could have my cake, and that the plate would still be there when I got home.  Turns out, even the house is gone.

January 13th, 2010 | Tags: band, concert, past, rkcndy, show | Category: life | Comments Off

Messing around with images in wordpress today, and I threw together this little set of pictures of my band from waaaaay back.  We’re talking 1997 stylings here.   Such good times.

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January 9th, 2010 | Tags: album, band, pictures | Category: life, meta | Comments Off

The quarter is starting to get to its feet over here.  I’ve had all my classes save one, my neurolinguistics seminar, which I’m rather looking forward to tomorrow.  Monday was a bit more harried than I anticipated, as the professor I’m TAing for wanted us to hold section.  This is rather unorthodox for the first week, let alone the first day!  On the bright side, he also is in the habit of preparing exercises in advance, so there was not much work to be done in that short preparation period.  Section is required for this class, and as such it was completely packed this week – not a single spare seat in the house.  Teaching in cramped conditions is a little difficult because the room gets hot, and the kids are a little less apt to volunteer in a large class.  Last quarter I averaged something like 10-15 students in my non-required sections, and yesterday I had about 30.  It’s slightly ridiculous, and I think slightly unnecessary to have required section attendance, but on the other hand, this class is also going to be a fair bit more difficult. Other than a bunch of TA stuff, I only have Quechua on Mondays, so it works out nicely to have several low-stress hours of class attendance and then just one hour of teaching.  Very nice indeed.

Today all I had was Phonetics, which I fear is going to be equal parts trying and inspiring.  It’s taught by the professor I TAed for last quarter, who is the most laissez-faire professor I’ve seen.  We have no syllabus, no book, no readings, no homework, and no real expectations for our term paper.  This is nice, but it also means he teaches the class with the expectation that none of us are really learning anything, or even want to be there.  He told us this morning that he expected us to attend class “at least 51% of the time”, which I know is a joke, but sets an odd tone for a graduate seminar.  Graduate students don’t skip class – we’re putting a lot of our lives into being here, and we tend to be rigorous and reliable students.  We wouldn’t have been admitted if we weren’t!  For all that, it’s still going to be an interesting class.  We’re doing acoustic phonetics exclusively, and it’s a subject that’s one of my secret loves.  I feel some days like I could have been a phoneticist in another life, if acoustic phonetics had been taken seriously by our Generative-minded undergraduate department.  As it’s not really part of the Generative research paradigm, it wasn’t actually taught at USC.  What little of it I’ve done (which is more than most, admittedly) was from my very favorite professor, an adjunct who USC didn’t hire and who was teaching Intro Phonology, though he was in fact a phonetician.  I got a big kick out of reading spectrograms, and he inspired me to be a linguist.

Sometimes I look back at those days and I see what it was that got me inspired about linguistics and linguistic research.  If I hadn’t continued to bark up the phonology tree (though each class after his was somewhat of a disappointment), I certainly could have ended up as a phoneticist.  There’s a lot of room for phonetics in phonology, actually, particularly in the cognitive science approaches.  I think all three of these things converge in some way, if for no other reason than both being concerned with scientifically describable data with direct language interface.  In other words, both cognitive science and phonetics are among the very few contact points of hard science (biology, physics) and language.  Typology fits into this picture too, if you think of it as an offshoot of applied statistics interfacing with evolution, biology, migration, what have you.  Typology is an interesting grab-bag of domains, which I think takes a particularly large mind to grasp and is probably why Lewis is well suited to it.  It’s like majoring in world history.  The world is a large place, with lots of history, affected by an inconceivable number of factors, and those who can synthesize that knowledge are laudable.

My brain feels flushed with thoughts of career.  And today, I’m feeling determined to be a straight-backed eyes-forward engaged-in-my-life sort of individual.  This happens to me less than it ought, but if there’s anything less useful than being a defeatist by nature, it’s feeling defeated about being a defeatist.  I’m not getting much work done today, but I’m determined not to let it get the better of me.  I’ve been to class, finished my Quechua homework, emailed all my potential referees for the internal fellowship application whose deadline is coming up, and I even found time to blog.  I’m prepared for tomorrow, and I’m not going to feel swamped or behind on anything though I am, at turns, both.  Today, I do what I can, and revel in the very success of doing.

January 5th, 2010 | Tags: career, class, future, past, phonetics, section | Category: life, school | Comments Off

A pause.  A temporary lull between festive diversions and my furtive life.   It’s the last weekend before I start the fifth quarter of my graduate program.

It’s been long enough that I am not nervous whatsoever about the coming course load.  And long enough for me to feel like I’m not going to accomplish anything notable this quarter.  Edging closer to some inevitable department-wide acknowledgement that I’m a good student, and a poor researcher.   This PhD feels simultaneously easy and impossible – the work itself is trivial, yet the outcome is unachievable.   It’s not for lack of resources, or even an inability to understand my subject.   Failure is predicated merely on the fatalistic view of my own trajectory which prevents the fervent spark of inspired research from catching.  I’m green wood on a cool evening; building the fire is formulaic, but a achieving a toasty refuge is improbable.

Despite this, I’m looking forward to the return of a regular schedule.  I enjoy the somewhat tedious monotony of going to class – the endless reading, the hours of taking notes, and the cathartic final essays.  It’s a new year, and it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that the prospect of a fresh beginning doesn’t leave me a little hopeful that this will be the quarter I start making my mark.  To be honest, being a mediocre academic is still less disappointing than what I see as my alternative: a completely forgettable woman. This isn’t the note I intended to start this new year on, but fatalism and optimism need not always conflict.  I think this is going to be a good year.   I have a life I love, with good friends and engaging work.  I’m blessed in so many ways.  If I could only suppress this feeling of ultimate and unavoidable disappointment, I’d be sitting pretty indeed.

January 1st, 2010 | Tags: failure, future, musing, school | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Manu Chao, Murder Burger, milkshake… making a handout.

November 21st, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

I keep having dreams about a professor I didn’t choose to be my advisor, but that I strongly considered asking.   He is my favorite teacher by a fairly wide margin, and I find him personally amusing and good to work with.  On the other hand, he’s not really in my field, and expressly stated that he does not want to get sucked into work in neuroscience.  For those reasons, I think I made the right choice.

This hasn’t stopped me from a most amusing set of dreams about him all week.  Usually he’s being chummy with me, and making me feel like I’m good at stuff, and my work is worthwhile.  Last night I even dreamed that he was texting me at a party explaining how no one else in the class he’s teaching is paying attention and that I’m an excellent student doing excellent work.  It’s so ego-masturbatory, but it’s also an oasis of confidence in my otherwise Eeyore-prone life.  There’s something wonderful about waking up after having dreamed about being respected and admired by people  you respect and admire.

Then again, I also woke up convinced it was Saturday.  A sad reality to realize that it’s Thursday, and I have go to teach.  Not that section is that bad.  It’s just no Saturday.   Onward and upward.

October 22nd, 2009 | Category: life, school | Comments Off

I was having a charlie brown kind of day, but managed to be uber productive anyway.

October 15th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off