The Laursonian Institute

It’s Friday night.  I’m watching a cute foreign movie with Lewis.  I’m drinking champagne.  And I’m feeling like the luckiest kid in town!

It’s been such a fantastic day.  I had neuroimaging this morning, and it was really awkward – I was actually sort of nodding off during class.  This hasn’t happened to me since I was a freshman, I think, and I normally really enjoy this class.  I’m just getting tuckered out, I suppose.  Anyway, came home and took a nap, and refreshed myself very well for the rest of my day, and it’s a good thing I did!

The only other thing I needed to do today (having slept through the Quechua talk I could have been at)  was show up for this Language Group meeting at the Center for Mind and Brain.  I was just invited to attend by another psycho/neruolinguist in our department, and they were having a little reading group today.  I think normally they practice presentations in front of eachother and such.  Anyway, it was nice, informative and pleasant.

The important part of this all is that a professor I’ve been trying to get in contact with from my department (who has been not returning my emails) was also there, and had sent me word through a student who works in his lab (who I have Quechua with) that I should drop by some time and that he wasn’t meaning to ignore me.  Anyway, he told me to drop by his office after the talk, and we had the most amazing chat!  I told him all the things I’ve been getting into, and the classes I’m taking, and the ideas I’ve been having for a thesis, and he was right there with me on all counts.  He really likes what I want to do, and he’s sure that there’s ways to make it happen.  He has extra funding in his name for some MRI studies which we might be able to use as a pilot study for my thesis (and maybe also my second QP?).  Most of all, he seems to be really interested in letting me do the research I want to do, and providing me the support and guidance I need to do it.  This was the huge thing that was missing from my grad school experience so far, an actual advisor-type who can oversee me in a functional useful way with resources and an interest in my project!  I just about jumped out of my skin!

So I got a tour of his lab from my Quechua friend Michiq, and met the other folks who work with him.  He wants me to sign up for 2 units worth of research to get my feet wet and make sure we’re all on the same page or whatever.  I think I may be using some of these research units to read up on the literature in the field I’m trying to get in to, which he already seems to have a pretty good grasp of.  This was what I wanted to spend my summer doing anyway, so a little directed reading is even better.  It seems as though he’s also in contact with the as-yet-on-Sabbatical phonologist in the department, who is also interested in neuro work, so that looks to me like the beginning of a committee coming together, and the foundation for lots of good to come.  So…. I went to an informal reading group, and came out with a lab job for next quarter, and the beginning of what I hope is my advisor-student relation.  I never dreamed that would all go so smoothly!

After that I made Lewis take me out to my favorite Davis place (mmm, Greek pizza) and buy me a bottle of champagne.  Life is so good!  I hope I can keep my eye on getting through the end of this quarter before I spend all my time thinking about how sweet next quarter is going to be :)

March 6th, 2009 | Tags: advisor, champagne, cmb, excitement, future, neuro, optimism | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Progress being made today – had a short discussion in semantics about deixis in Aymara, and it got me thinking an awful lot about Quechua systems of various things for this lexical decompositon paper I’m theoretically writing.  So I did a little Google Scholar research (har) and I think I’ve hit upon a nice lexical field to sink my teeth in.  Quechua has a really large set of what I’m calling conveyance verbs – like bring and carry.  In fact, the dictionary listing for carry I’ve got has like 10 or 12 different verb roots.  These include different verbs for “to carry by arm” or “to carry on the back”, and “to carry under the arm”.  Good stuff!  I’m hoping I’ve finally hit semantic gold here, cause I’m starting to lose faith that I’m going to have a great idea anytime soon.  Phew.

So that was pretty much my whole day.  Went to semantics.  Had an idea.  Graded papers, had lunch with my sweetie, came home, worked on said idea.  Had dinner.  Worked on said idea.  Blogged!  Finis.  (Tukurqani!)

March 5th, 2009 | Tags: quechua, semantics | Category: school | Comments Off

Well, another day, another something.

I woke up with a wonderful feeling of optimism.  My first thoughts were reassuring myself that I didn’t need to stress out about getting to campus on time (my usual thought pattern) and that I could have a nice morning and get to class no problem.  Which is exactly what I did.  It’s amazing how much of the timbre of your day is determined by the outlook you assign it.  So not only did the morning go well, but Quechua was enjoyable too.  Learned an interesting statistic – we’re the largest intro Quechua class in the world!  Or so my yachachiq says.

Only downside of the day was I also woke up with a big headache this morning, and it was pretty crappy.  Thankfully I managed to score myself a nap when I got home and it went away!  That never happens!  Spent the rest of the day relaxing and getting small work done.  And installing Mint!  Working quite nicely.   I know somewhere in my brain that I should be attacking this semantics paper from all fronts, but I just can’t seem to get past feeling like I need to calm down and take care of myself.  I suppose when I put it that way, it doesn’t sound as ridiculous as it feels sometimes.

Ooh, also Lewis and I tried to make a Dojo-style noodle curry that would be all saucy and delicious.  We’ve been failing pretty poorly with the saucy curries, though the results are always fairly tasty.  Anyway, I was feeling the inspiration tonight, but to no avail.  I found a decent recipe for a generic curry sauce, and it was tasty, but per usual not saucy enough for the masses of meat and veg we put in it.  Oh Dojo noodles, why must you be so difficult to replicate?  Or alternately, why must you be 5000 miles away?  Or even, why are there no good noodle houses in Davis?

March 4th, 2009 | Tags: curry, headache, lazy, noodles, outlook, quechua | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Sigh.  Not sure what to say about my day other than it was successfully navigated, and now it’s time to go to bed.

Perhaps most importantly, it rained.  A lot.  Torrential rain, in sheets, for mere minutes at a time.  I’ve rarely (never?) seen rain of such sort, like the whole sky liquifies for a few minutes.  We had gusts of wind to accompany, and it was coming at our front window like we were in a carwash, with those taffy-like water globs oozing down underneath the nailgun raindrops.  Most impressive.  Needless to say, it was yet another ride-the-bus-to-school kind of day, but I managed to swing it such that I got on two satisfyingly empty buses and avoided the rainy-day sardine buses altogether.

Lewis gave a presentation in semantics this morning which went well, and we had a celebratory lunch out to our favorite Japanesey fast-foody campus-adjacent eatery.  And we picked up my favorite old pair of shoes from the cobbler who fixed the soles, again, and hopefully for the last time.  Didn’t get much done when I got home, I’ve been feeling really drained and wore out entirely these days.  We did get the package I’ve been waiting for in the mail (a whole TB of external hard drive space!) but the package was stuck in our mailbox, so I spent an aggrivating amount of time wiggling the key and standing in the rain.  Took two goes, really, but worked fairly well after I came home and lubed the key up with some WD40.

After that, I did manage to back my system up and now I’m feeling all foot-loose and fancy-free in the linux distribution sense.  I’ve spent the last too-many hours trying to get Mint installed on my flash drive (bah.) and failing.  Like all Linux-related failure, I I’ve learned a whole lot, and every foray into the world of brute-force command line editing is as entertaining as it is fruitless.  At the end of the day, here I am on a live cd, not at all using my USB, having formatted and reformatted and rereformatted the volume, ending up as clean as when I started.  But to Mint’s credit, I’m really enjoying the system on the CD, and I think now that all my actual files are externally looked after, I’ll clean install this in place of vanilla Ubuntu when I feel like I’m ready for a little troubleshooting.  I mean… the wireless is working out of the box!  How much troubleshooting could there be?  (Famous last words two weeks before finals).

So… nothing else much to report.  I did make an appointment like a good person who looks after themselves to see the doctor about these migraines.  I’m pretty sure it’s just hormones, so hopefully the doctor can just switch my birth control type and we’ll be back in the land of the visually undisturbed.  I did spend a while working on my semantics final “paper” as well (paper in quotes because it’s to be as minimal as possible, i.e., could be done in one very well executed table if it could be magically explicit and self-explanatory).  Didn’t get anywhere but frustrated about the state of this stupid project.  I’m no semanticist, and that shant be changing in the next two weeks.  Until then, I’m going to keep cringing while I think about it, and completely procrastinating doing anything that might make it less cringe-worthy.  On the plus side, I should be going into paper-ville with a solid A, so it can only hurt so much!

March 3rd, 2009 | Tags: linux, mail, mint, procrastinating, rain, ramen, semantics, shoes | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Blah, blah, blah, migraine.  Blah.

March 2nd, 2009 | Tags: migraine | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off