My life as a dialogue. I just got to the final and most persuasive subpoint, and I’ve forgotten what issue we’re debating. I carry on anyway, hoping that at the end of this section it all comes back to me. Or that no one noticed I obviously lost my way.
This is one of those dead-tired sort of days. But it’s okay. It should be the last one this quarter!
It was a necessarily busy day today. Had Quechua this morning and we did dialogs and had a little Peruvian feast. I wish I knew what anything was called or made of, because it certainly was delicious. Oh, and we drank some Inca Kola. Drinking neon yellow soda at 10 am is certainly a way to kick off a day. Anyway. Much fun was had in Quechua, and my heart is softening a bit towards that class. Probably a good time to have handed course evaluations out.
Went straight from Peruvian snacks to my lunch date with Bernard Comrie. It’s so amusing to have lunch with famous linguist-types. I don’t know what it is about being a grad student that gets you introduced to these folks. Maybe it’s the benevolence of those above you to spread your name around and get your face known. At any rate, it was great being invited to lunch. The food and company were both excellent, and I learned amusing things about Comrie that will stick with me for a while. He’s a good guy.
Had to ditch lunch a little early to go meet with my TAing professor, and then my research professor. This is the last set of homeworks I have to grade for this quarter, which is excellent, but sadly means that soon I have to grade the final. Had a very nice final meeting with my research professor, and wrapped up what we’ve been reading very nicely. Unfortunately he also assigned me a little write-up to do before the end of next week, so I didn’t quite escape without a short paper to do. Oh well. I sort of needed to synthesize what we’ve been doing anyway, so it will end up being rather useful later.
Spent a few minutes with Lewis in the sunshine on the Quad, and puttered about for my spare hour until it was time to go to Comrie’s talk! I’d seen him give portions of this talk in Cambridge before, but for some reason it was much more engaging this time. The talk seemed to fly by, and all the questions were very interesting. Before I knew it, it was 6:00 already and time to go home. Crashed a fair bit when I got here, didn’t make dinner… but I did watch some Colbert over some left-overs, and made a loaf of lemon bread for breakfast tomorrow.
All in all… a very successful, if draining, day!
I’m feeling so very delightfully relaxed. Sorta. I realized right after typing that out, that per usual I’m sitting here with my jaw clenched as tight as can be. I do wish I could stop doing that. I guess on a metalevel I’m relaxed, but on some sort of biological level I’m still all keyed up. Anyway.
It was a good day. Penultimate semantics class finished, though it was sort of painful. Professor was discussing his own paper, which is really interesting, but I didn’t bring it with me (it’s 60 pages! truthfully, I didn’t print it!) and it was more like a talk than a class. Got some TA work done after that, and headed home. Spent home-time pretty well, reviewing my semantics work and doing a bit of thinking about the last meeting with my professor for research I have tomorrow. Got tired of thinking and mowed the lawn. Made Lewis take me out to our local “Mexican” place (New Mexican I guess?) to split some nachoes, and then I was feeling all rejuvinated. Did a bunch more research prep for tomorrow (synthesizing! my greatest talent!) while sitting by a toasty fire. I’ve had this kitty on my lap all night, while I drink mate and eat what’s left of my chocolate chip cookies and listen to these nice Mozart clarinet and bassoon concertos… life is pretty spectacular.
Tomorrow should be an interesting and sorta big day! I’ve only got Quechua to get through, but I have a million things in the afternoon to do. First of all, and I guess most importantly, I’ve got a lunch date with a very famous visiting linguist! Thankfully it’s not just me, there should be several of us grad students, and a professor friend of ours who invited us (and is good friends with the visiting linguist). It’s just a little unnerving, but very exciting to feel partially responsible for entertaining someone I respect so much! After that, I’ve got a meeting with the teacher I TA for to get the last homeworks from him, then my last research meeting with that professor. Hopefully he’s going to tell me that I don’t need to do any more work this quarter! And then after that… the lecture that the visiting linguist is giving. I’ve actually seen him give this talk before when Lewis and I caught him at Cambridge, but it’s a really neat thing, so it certainly won’t be boring to catch again. Yay, it’s Comrie Day! (For fun, try to count the number of publications he has on his site..!)
I have not adjusted to this time change. It’s 10:00 and here I am, completely exhausted again.
It was a pretty darn good day, though. It’s always encouraging to start off the last week of school! And as a bonus, we had a Quechua linguist-guy visiting our class this morning. He was only going to sit in for an hour or so and watch us work, but in fact he gave us a very interesting 2-hour lecture and used up all our time! So we didn’t have to do our dialogs, and didn’t even correct or turn in our homeworks. Thus, we also didn’t get any more work assigned! Best class yet. Neuroimaging was good and short today (as it is every Monday), so it was a real smooth day.
I did also go to see the doctor (nurse practicioner, it turns out) about these migraines though. I was looking forward to having that taken care of. So there isn’t actually any real news from the visit. My nurse is great. She thinks the headaches are some combo of hormones and stress, and that I don’t have to do anything about them unless they really get in my way. We can try messing with my birth control perscription, or they could perscribe me migraine medicine or something that has the effect of migraine mitigation (anti-depressants, blood pressure medicine) if I wanted… but one crap day a month sounds a hair less bad to me then being on medicine every day I don’t really need. So for now, no change. But good to know that it’s non-life-threatening and that I’ve got escape plans if I need them. Nurse said I could even see the neurologist if I wanted… ooo. Anyway, sort of a relief to know the headaches are not a huge deal, just another minor annoyance to deal with in life.
So I triumphantly rode home, got all my work done, baked cookies, and concocted dinner. I’ve discovered that one of my best cooking resources is some innate ability to conjure up a version “KC’s Rice Surprise”, my Dad’s magical never-the-same-twice refridgerator meal. Boy, Laurie’s Rice Surprise was sure good tonight. Verrry spicy, and full of kale and collard greens and rice and red beans and ground beef. Mmm. It did have the odd effect of making my fridge as seemingly full as when I started though, since I somehow managed to create twice as much rice surprise as the rice I was attempting to use up. Ended up going right back in the same tupperware it came out of! Oh well! It’s at least a little tastier now.
This is the most social day I’ve had in ages! I may wax poetic about the two wonderful groups of people we saw today… but I don’t think words really capture the feeling of comradrie and fulfillment I’m left with. In short, we got up early to go to Berkeley and have Thai brunch for our old co-worker’s birthday. The whole team was there, and it was so wonderful to be with the work group. That’s a truly special group of people, and I’m really hoping we can make good on the plan to do another Afghan food / Bollywood night with them while we’re on spring break. We definitely need to spend more time with them. Thai brunch was a little strange this morning, because it turns out it was the 100th day of mourning for the death of the founder of the temple, so they were having a big funeral next door to the brunch-having, and the place was crawling with monks (it’s a temple, so it should be, but these were out-of-town-type monks all congregating to show their regards) and the usual Berkeley crowd as well. They weren’t charging for brunch today since it was sort of a special day, they were just asking for donations instead in remembrance of their departed abbot. We paid what we would have normally, but it was still a nice gesture.
After a lovely brunch, we headed back up to Davis and squeezed in a little work (and made some chocolate chip cookies!) before going over to our friend Ben’s place for his birthday. This was another really great crowd – old school Davis folks of the Ben’s family and family friends varieties, as well as a few Ben-friends I’ve come to know and enjoy. It’s funny, I think of Ben as one of the most social, connected people in town, and yet I’m at his birthday party and I know almost everyone there through one event or another by now… from other parties, from the brunch club, from cribbage nights, people who were at my wedding I didn’t even realize I knew… The longer I’m in Davis, and the longer Lewis and I are together, the more old-worn-shoe all these parties get. It’s a really gratifying feeling. I’ve done so much moving around in my life, lived in so many houses and places and cities, and had so many different groups of friends… so on nights like tonight, it starts to feel like maybe I’m settled, and maybe there’s joy and comfort to be had in maintaining a loose network like this for decades. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been at a Davis house party, dreading that I don’t know anyone but Lewis well enough to feel like I could chat them up, feeling like the out-of-town novelty with no intrinsic value. This doesn’t happen so much any more. There are no new “scary” people left to meet! Just lots of nice people doing interesting things with their lives that I’m happy to talk with.
So we’ll call this a rousing success of a day, in a time when both Lewis and I should probably have been home working. But I think we’re both better off for having had a chance, even in the busiest of times, to connect with our roots and get our heads out of our books. Yay!
I’m full of toasty chai, and very sleepy. It’s been a long day. A long, choreful day.
I got up early and made Lewis some apple cinnamon muffins and got rolling on the laundry. Spent all morning alternating laundry and homework, which is a sure way to wear oneself out by lunch. But I did manage to finish all my work today, and all the laundry, as well as cleaning both bathrooms and finishing up the dishes. Ooh, and we took a walk and got some ice cream from the Davis Creamery! Phew.
I guess that makes me prepared for a day of playing tomorrow – we’ve got two birthday parties to attend, one in Berkeley, and one in Davis. Wouldn’t have said yes to both, but they’re for two of our favorite people, and I can’t imagine not going to either. Should be rousing fun, even if it’s an early morning (after daylight savings at that!) on a day Lewis and I both have an awful lot of work to do. Some days you just have to choose frolic and folly and know you’ll make it all up somewhere else.
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 :)
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!)
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?
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!
