The Laursonian Institute

My parents are in town, and I’ve got so much TA stuff to do tomorrow!  Egad!  What a Friday I shall have.

November 13th, 2008 | Tags: parents | Category: life | Comments Off

It was a fairly successful day, but I’m feeling rather cranky at the moment.  I just finished grading a section’s worth of homework and I found a little cheating action in there.  Nothing makes me more cranky than people cheating on their work!  It’s not like we’re demanding an unreasonable amount.  And if you hate the class this much, maybe you should have dropped it.  Sigh.  Anyway.  Let’s not talk about this.

Let’s talk about how Lewis built me a fire tonight!  I should have taken a picture; it was marvelous.  It made our living room all toasty and homey, and it was even nice to grade papers by!  We also got our veg box tonight, and it’s full of bounty.  Oh how I love our veg box guys, even if their website only works some of the time.  Ooh, and we also went to the Co-op and got some essentials.  I had wanted to go to Ace, too, to get some more bulbs to plant before it gets too late, but Lewis and I were both pretty crashed out by the time we were ready to leave campus.

Not much else went on today.  But we have a – blessed! – holiday tomorrow!  I’m going to sleep in, and get a ton of work done, I hope I hope!  I did do a little private phonology lesson this afternoon which went okay… turns out the more phonology classes you take, the more crap you get at explaining all the fun stuff.  But I think my student got the jist and hopefully the homework won’t be too much trouble.  I’m looking forward to doing phonology in sections this week!  Too bad this is the only week of it… I feel like I’m ready to teach phonology classes!

Ooh, I also wrangled Sallie Mae today, which should count as a week’s worth of success at least.  Somehow, calling them is always a huge chore.  I even got stuck in an infinite phone tree loop today… but I prevailed, with what I’m declaring to be at least 2/3rds success.  I have all my loans deferred now for at least four years, which is a start.  A four-year-long start.  In another three and a half years I can start worrying about that last third I didn’t get taken care of today, which is to make sure they defer my loans throughout my stay in graduate school, which is predicted to be six years as the moment.  But whatever.

It’s midnight already… I really should get some sleep!  So much to do, and time passes so quickly while I’m doing it.. it’s like the very act of accomplishing work always makes me further behind!  Reminds me of one of those spider webs where the more you struggle to free yourself, the more tightly bound you become.  But I guess that’s what it’s all about.  Graduate school, that is.

November 10th, 2008 | Tags: cheating, co-op, fire, metaphors, phonology, sallie mae, vegetables | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Well, I sat down to blog, but then this cat sat in my lap and made it rather hard to type.  Short list instead:

• got transcription almost done – 13 minutes to go!
• planted some of our house plants, and daffodil bulbs!
• made delicious breakfast
• had dinner with the Lawyers – yay!

Now off to do some pre-bed reading with this toasty Boo.

November 9th, 2008 | Tags: in-laws, kitty, list, transcription | Category: life, meta | Comments Off

It’s been a week of socializing, which for me, is probably a record.  I went out Thursday with my co-TA to Sudwerk, and here I am again, blogging after a dinner at Sudwerk with more ling friends!  Lewis and I met up with another grad student who lives in my office, and her husband, and we rocked the drinks and eats… so tasty.  They actually had a pretty nice jazz band playing tonight as well, which was excellent though it did make it difficult to hear anyone talking.  Double bonus points for us – we went out to dinner with some folks for the first time, and then we invited them over!  Turns out they like games as much as we do, so we played a round of Zombie Fluxx, and then introduced them to some Cheap Ass Games (namely, Secret Tijuana Death Match).  So much fun!

And to top it all off, I even got a fair amount of work done today.  Here’s to being, I hope, one day away from being done with my transcription.  Sigh.  Too bad I have to code it after that!  Tomorrow should be good though.  A nice, calm Sunday, with a great week coming up!  Tuesday is a holiday, so we don’t have class.  Mondays have always been pretty chill.  And my parents will be in town Thursday!  Yay!  I’m rather looking forward to much in the near future.  And I’m not letting myself get too worried about the upcoming papers, though I know there’s a lot of work to be done…

For now, lets just call this much Saturday success!

November 8th, 2008 | Tags: dinner, friends, games, transcription | Category: life, school | Comments Off

I solved my one-unit problem today (as in, I had signed up for one fewer units than were required) by commiting to something fantastic.  I’m going to learn Quechua!  What have I gotten myself in to!  I do hope you expect a whole blog full of “Arggg semantics!” and “Arrggg Quechua!” next quarter, cause that’s all I’ll really have left to say.  At least I won’t be TAing that quarter.  Wooooot.

TAing actually went really well today, despite the sort of boring subject matter that is phonetics.  I think I got some kids to play with their mouths and discover their articulators and all that good stuff.  Phonology next week, which should be most righteous.  We just did contrastive and complimentary distribution in class today, so I think the next few lectures ought to be on phonological problems or processes.  Yaaay.

Also had a nice hang-out in the TA office (as always!) and secured the plan that I’m going to find a home for my big silly red rug!  Just gotta get the office swept up and vacuumed (and maybe have the floors washed?  We can apparently request this) and then the rug will be in action!  I’m so excited to finally have something to do with that thing.  Anyway, I got some good teaching tips from fellow-TA Heather, and we agreed to meet tomorrow evening for drinks and non-linguistic chatter at Sudwerk, a tasty brewpub nearby.  Lets give that a double yay for making friends and social events!

Only other piece of fantastic news today… I got some cleaning done!  I spent the morning not doing any (school) work and actually getting some much needed house tidying and cleaning done.  I got all the dishes washed, and swept and mopped the kitchen and entry way and bathrooms.  It’s still not very tidy in here, but it’s certainly a good start.  Those floors were looking pretty shoddy.  But Lewis did laundry yesterday, and the rest of the house isn’t actually that dirty, so maybe this weekend in between transcribing my interview, I can finish that up.  And finally plant our bulbs!  Egad we’ve been busy.

Life is so good!

November 7th, 2008 | Tags: decorating, drinking, friends, quechua, rug, socializing, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off

Here I am, in my office, doing some background research for a paper…. and getting all distracted by linguistics-internal silliness.  There’s a funny phenomenon in linguistic theory papers (perhaps in theory papers of other domains as well?  I’d be curious to hear from other folks about titular conventions in their field, too) where it seems as though the choices in paper titles is pretty constrained.  There’s the super-descriptive, a la “An autosegmental account of Coast Salish”, the broadly defined (“Trends in…”, “Working papers in…”, “Foundations of…”, “Frontiers of…”, “Aspects of…”, etc.), and several more modern spins on less-academic sounding cheeky titles like “Mam, my trousers is fa’in doon: Community, caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect”…

I’m sure there are more archetypes of lingusitics journal titles, but there’s one in particular that really stands out for me.  It’s “Towards a Theory of…”.  I confess to having titled my BA thesis in accordance with this particularly snooty sounding one.  But what I find intriguing about this one is that it seems to be relatively recent.  A quick search of the Language and Language Behavior Abstracts database gives me a full 81 hits for “Towards a Theory of”, the earliest from 1972 (“Pedagogical grammar: Towards a theory of foreign language materials preparation”).

I’m taking the first of three linguistic theory foundation classes this quarter, so all the heavy reading I’ve been doing is from the 1920s-1950s, essentially.  A time of very investigative, interesting, fairly cohesive research.  And a lot of papers that have very solid sounding titles:  “Prinicples of Phonology”, “A functional view of language”, “A System of Descriptive Phonology”, etc.  Nobody titling anything with movement included.  So my thought is… did the generitivist schism make us all self-conscious?  It’s as if no one wants to say anything very definite any more, but instead to merely add little bits of knowledge to an already extant body of work and eschew responsibility for any possible major theoretical missteps.   All of the sudden we’re “Towards a theory of” stuff all over the place!  Though in reality, I think this was Chomsky’s game plan too… by the time you’ve analyzed his most recent work and found logical flaws, he’s already onto a new formulation and no longer interested in what you’ve spent so long looking at.  Everything is in a perminant preliminary state.

Anyway.  I guess that’s enough soapboxing for now… I really ought to get back to work!

November 6th, 2008 | Tags: linguistics, metalinguistic, theory | Category: meta | Comments Off

I’d be lying if I said that the world didn’t seem a little more bright today.  Everyone I talked to was saying the same thing – for the first time in our lives, us 20-somethings feel proud to be American, and hopeful of the days ahead.  I can’t believe what a difference a day makes, but there you have it.  I wish we could inaugurate him now and just go forward at break-neck locomotive speed.  But I suppose a few months to get the troops and the plans in order isn’t too much to ask.

Wasn’t much of a day today, as is true every Wednesday.  Got up really early (for a sleep-in day) and got the work I needed to do out of the way pretty quickly.  Class went alright, and I had two whole students come by my office hours!  Was able to help both out, I think.  We’re doing phonetics right now and a lot of learning your places and manners of articulation I think is just practice.  You need to become hyperaware of your tongue and what it’s doing to be able to figure out what sound, technically, you’re even making.  So sections went sort of crappily because we had to spend the whole time covering the chart and the nitty gritty details of terminology.  Didn’t even have time to play around at the end, and I ended up aborting a little fun exercise right in the middle.  I had no idea how much time we had eaten up… usually sessions sort of plod along at a reasonable pace, but all of the sudden my time was completely gone and I hadn’t looked once at my clock.  Geesh.

Came home and got some transcription done for my 260 project.  I’m really not sure what’s going on with my variables… I hope they’re varying properly!  It’s almost impossible to hear these things while simultaneously broadly transcribing your interview, but I have at least found a handful of neat syntactic and semantic variables I never could have thought to elicit.  I’m all primed for 2nd language speaker data for when we take that class!  Woot!  Other triumphs tonight… Lewis did the laundry, and made a roast!  It was so delicious!  And I got the ironing (from… three weeks ago?  four?  I don’t even remember!) finally done.

It’s been a good day.  Tomorrow… adult beverages with fellow TA to work our grading rubric and possible complaining session.  Yay!

November 5th, 2008 | Tags: laundry, obama, patriotism, phonetics, roast, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off

Is there really anything else to say after today?  Well, maybe, depending on some of these California ballot measures.  But for an election night… the best ever.  Good grief Obama is a fantastic orator.  It’s about time we had an inspiring president!  I don’t know what the next four or forty years has in store for me, but for the first time it feels like we’ve got someone I can trust and who is paying attention in control of this ship.   I’m surprised how personal it feels, but it does… it feels like each and every one of us needs to contribute and needs everyone else helping out, and with all that manpower and willpower we can actually get somewhere.  And that there’s a lot of “up” from here.

I’m so blessed.   It’s 11:00 and I’m listening to Lewis sing folk songs on his guitar, my kitty is curled up in bed with me, in my calm and sane and safe rented house, and I’m pausing to blog about the most inspiring political night in my life, and resting before another big day doing what I’ve always wanted to.  If I could encapsulate this feeling of opportunity and privilege to administer to myself on bad days, I would.  I wish this feeling could last forever.  I feel so connected to every single person I know.. all the facebook status messages, all the livejournal wooting, all the reports of people partying it up all across the nation, the adorable voicemail from my ecstatic parents… it’s like we all reaped a reward we’ve worked so hard to get, and for right now, for this very moment, the feeling that things are going to be okay is overwhelming.

November 4th, 2008 | Tags: election, hope, inspired, obama, optimism | Category: life | Comments Off

Yay, it’s election day tomorrow!

I didn’t get as much reading as I could done today, partially because Lewis and I spent the dinner and post-dinner hour going over all the state initiatives.  Some good stuff to vote on this year, and some not-so-great stuff to not vote for as well.  Here’s to hoping everything turns out!  I especially have my fingers crossed over props 4 and 8 (fingers crossed for denial, of course).  Quite looking forward to voting, at any rate!

Schooly stuff went alright today.  Mondays are supposed to be my easy days, but it was a bit of a slog anyway.  Had some late-breaking midterm snafus where it turns out we flubbed the answer key, though not from lack of knowledge so much as being rushed and not reading all the questions all the way through.  C’est la vie, though it makes us look like schmucks.  Had our weekly meeting as well instead of the Wednesday one, and it doesn’t look like we have anything scary on the horizon TAing-wise.  Get to do some neat phonetics this week, and phonology net week!  Yay!

In other news, it’s really cold today!  Davis-cold, I should qualify that, since it’s really only in the 60s. But it’s been raining and windy and our house gets real chilly when the sun isn’t out to warm it.  Our kitty spent all day wrapped up and sleeping in a blankie, and I really wanted to do the same.  In fact, that’s where I’m off to next!   What luck!

It’s fantastic to know that at the end of every day, I’ve always got a warm, blanket-covered bed to come home to.  Bed is the best place.

November 3rd, 2008 | Tags: bed, blankets, cold, elections, midterm, taing, voting | Category: life, school | Comments Off