The Laursonian Institute

The Laursonian Institute

An exercise in thoroughness

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I keep on slipping, slipping, slipping…

It seems around now, at the end of each quarter, this void opens up in my head. It’s a place I know I shouldn’t go, because I can’t be there and here at the same time. It’s full of thoughts: unorganized, murky, recursive thoughts. My papers live in here. I can dip my toe in, and pull out paragraphs like seaweed. But I can’t organize a paper, and think it at the same time. Today, I’m slipping in. I’ve organized, organized, organized… I’ve outlined, I’ve re-outlined, neatly stacked my books, prepared my topics, summarized my readings. This is as far as this line goes. From here, you must disembark, grab your paltry outlines, and step into the fog. If you’ve done a good enough job you’ll have stashed food in your pockets, water in your bag, and brought a map of the right city, in the right time. You gather this fog in your arms, package it, label it, store it, and arrange it. Three weeks pass, and you can’t remember why you were here, or why it seems like so much time has passed and there’s nothing to show for it. More weeks of silence, relative freedom, organized thought returns after a restorative period of languid disinterest. At the end of it all, someone gives you a grade: an A. The same grade you would have gotten regardless of the sequence of events that lead you here. Not because your paper earned it, but because your graduate school admission came with this clause: you’ll spend the next several years writing papers no one reads, compelled to do so by a sense of duty and a fear of the unknown, which will earn you in all circumstances the letter signifying your continued acceptability: an A.

Today I found PhDComics.

Life so full of nebulous, ungraspable existance.  I want to condense it, and I can’t.  Life is good.  Slow moving, yet expedient… fulfilling and untenable.  Life is strange when you’re on the way to achieving your highest goal, which will nearly happen by default.  There are a lot of papers to write between here and there, but writing papers is what I do.  I write papers, I teach, and at my best, I sit in all the chairs I’m supposed to occupy at the right times and in the right places.  And after I do this enough times, someone gives me a Doctorate.  A Doctorate in Being Places One Ought.  My letters of rec will say, “writes papers on any topic”.  “Follows directions well”.  “Seems to know what she’s doing”.  I’ve got direction, even if I don’t know what it is.  Convincing enough direction that people give me research grants before I have a project to spend them on.  I simultaneously worry about the day-to-day details way more than I should, but feel very relaxed and at home with the Big Picture.  I guess that’s probably good.

Vitals

For a Monday, it was a pretty domestic day.  My reading group was cancelled, so I only had my cognitive neuroscience class this morning – yay!  I’d been hoping for a day off, of sort.  Not feeling much like updating though, so I think I’ll list up:

  • went out to lunch!  Mm, Dos.
  • got all the dishes done!
  • made potato salad, and chocolate syrup
  • started laundry
  • got almost all my rough drafts graded
  • read the penultimate paper for my cogneuro essay

Oh yeah, one other good thing today – I got another fellowship thing!  These funding guys are always really mysterious, so I’m not quite sure where it all comes from.  At any rate, I got a nice email telling me I’d been awarded some kind of research grant, and that they’re giving me 1500 bucks to spend on things “vital to the research” I’m doing, and I have to report back about what I’ve been doing to the powers that be next spring.  I’m not quite sure what my research is, yet, or what I’ll need 1500 bucks for, but it’s pretty neat to know I have a personal little expense account at the department next year.   I’m +2 for next year!

Buggered again

Woke up rather late this morning after a long and excellent night last night.  We pulled together an impromptu barbeque and pool party with some of our linguistics friends last night.  Had a really good time – cooked some tasty food, poked around in the pool, played some games, had lots of laughs.  I really enjoy my cohort!   And we had the luck of Lewis’ parents wanting us to look after their dog in the evening anyway, and inviting us to have the party at their place.  Such luck!

This morning as sort of a bust, sadly.  I got a migraine sort of right after I woke up – didn’t even have breakfast or anything.  I’m pretty bummed out.  I was even supposed to be going in for another scanner session today with Lewis, and I had to cancel.   I might have been able to handle it, but I always feel like.. I’ve been up reading in the dark all night and I’m hungover.  That’s the best I can describe it.  Usually I get these migraines in the afternoon and can kind of coast until bedtime and sleep it off, but this 10am business is just not great.  I did take a nap later and wore most of it down, but I’ll be glad to get some real sleep tonight and wake up refreshed in the morning.

Despite it all, I got a lot of work done today.  Skimmed some book chapters, and skimmed over the stuff I might want to go over in sections this week.  I even charted out what I need to do in the next few weeks to get ready for my term papers and final presentations.  I’m going to make it… Just three weeks to go, and then I’ll have so much time, I won’t even know what to do with myself.   That’s going to be so sweet!

I’m watching baseball.

Life.  It’s good.  Tiring.  Fulfilling.

Days of Future Passed

It’s odd, to age on the internet.  I went back to read my livejournal anniverary post today – the first post I have on this very day, but 8 years ago.  Perhaps I’ll post a snippet at the end here tonight.  It’s from a very odd time in my life. I wonder sometimes if this quixotic little adventure I’m on trying to semi-regularly blog my ridiculous graduate school foibles will end up standing the test of time.  Where does it all go, when I stop paying for this domain?  When LaurieandLewis.com becomes passe?

There’s an amazing amount of time.  An incomprehensible spread, like taffy, effortlessly but enduringly covering every moment of every life.  I read a paper from 1988.  Lewis call is “old school”.  I counter: “..not that much older than what I was reading yesterday”.  I was five, in 1988.  I was in Bellevue.  I was in Kindergarten, at Sunset Elementary, and I was in class with my not-quite-yet-best-friend Bryanne.  We were the English Kindergarten, not the Spanish Immersion next door.  Those kids were strange.  1988.  Soundgarden released Ultramega Ok.  Chris Cornell was already a grownup.

My sister was 15… and dating, or almost dating Lonnie?  One of my first memories of Lonnie was the feeling of absolute mortification and instant regret after playing a game of jacks in our entryway.  Instead of bouncing the ball on the floor, I bounced it off his forehead.  I thought he was going to find it funny, but it must have hurt, because I think he got kind of mad.   It was one of those lessons you learn as a kid – actions have consequences, and sometimes the things you do hurt other people, even when you only mean to be having fun.   Around this same time, I have my first memory of disappointing my Dad.  Mom was out somewhere that night, and just Dad and me were at home, so he was responsible for getting me into bed.  I remember it was bedtime already, and he asked if I had brushed my teeth.  I hadn’t, but out of some feeling of insolence, I sort of proclaimed proudly that I hadn’t, and he was pretty mad.  I rushed upstairs and brushed my teeth pretty quickly thereafter, but I remember being worried for a long time that I had let my Dad down, and that I should do what I’m supposed to do without being asked.  Funny how long these things stick with you.

The further I get from my childhood, the less it makes sense to me.  I took so much on faith, that life is how it is, and it’s normal, and everything is okay.  Now I wonder – is life how it should be?  Am I the way I was meant to be?  What if I’m messing something up that I don’t even realize, because I haven’t learned one of those ball-to-forehead sort of lessons?  I know you can’t think your way out of this.  But I feel like I have to loosen my grasp on some things I had held dear.  I’ve been thinking a lot about growing up.  I’ve got this idea in mind lately, that I have upheld my end of the bargain, but that there was no contract, and nothing to be followed through upon.  It’s pervasive, and it permeates most my feelings about growing up these days.  I feel like I was a really naive girl, who wanted to believe in the the best of everyone.  And I’m slowly starting to realize that the adults in my life kept me in this state of unknowingness because it was the nicest place to grow up.  But that I grew up, and now I don’t understand why everything seems so different in retrospect.

Case in point lately:  my brother.  I only have two siblings, which are in reality half siblings.  It was a point of pride in my life that, to quote my Mom’s mantra about the situation, my siblings were “real siblings to me”.   I don’t have any full-blooded siblings, so I honestly don’t know what the difference would be anyway.  So I grew up with this underlying assumption that my siblings are my siblings are my siblings.  And that even though my brother and sister have other step- (and maybe half-?) siblings, they were sort of inconsequental, because the three of us were The Family Unit.  So my brother, like any real brother, would want to stand up for me, to protect me, to guide me through life… to deal with me, at all.  Turns out, my brother doesn’t like me.  Turns out, he maybe doesn’t like anyone.  But I’m pretty sure, standing from where I am now, that my brother never thought of me as a real sister, as a real part of his life, or as anything more than the kid his mom had to replace him.  I know he’s fucked up, so maybe this isn’t all his intention.  The feeling stands though:  when people ask if I have any siblings, do I still tell them I have two?  What does it mean to have a half-brother you thought was an enduring force in your life, who it turns out you’ve seen less of than some of your cousins?  And who doesn’t seem to regard your existance as noteworthy at all?  I haven’t even seen him in five years.  I haven’t spoken directly to him since… I can’t remember when.  We had one nice conversation once after he got out of the Army.  So I must have been in… high school?

I degree from the point. What I’m attempting to pontificate on is the fact that bunch of seemingly fundamental things that formed the basis of how I viewed life seem to have been good faith assumptions based on what things the people around me told me were true.  And I’m filling with this creeping sense of injustice I’ll eventually have to let out, or somehow get over.  Maybe these were feelings I was supposed to deal with 10 years ago.  In some ways, I think I must be as naive as ever.  But I just don’t see how I can progress in Life (big “L”) without figuring out whether the fundamentals of my outlook are sound.  And they’re not looking very sound.

I’ll sign off with a quote from my past self.  Context:  this is me, in my senior year of high school.  I’m living in a hotel, because my parents have moved to a different city, but wanted me to finish school in the same place.   I’m about to take the IB French test, and I think I already know that I’ll be moving to California in August to go to USC.  My life is basically filled with being an honors student, and trying to date an exchange student, which is going pretty shittily.  But I am surrounded by good friends (Tiffy, mostly) who are keeping me bouyant and I’ve got my eyes securely locked on the future.  This was my May 14th, 2001:

I’ll keep this short this morning.. partly because I need to bust out to get to my test, and partly because I dont remember what really happened, and what I dreamed.. but I just had the strangest night..

I guess about 1:30 some random girl screamed in the hallway, and woke me up.. I gave it a big, “what’s this for?” and went back to sleep.. and then someone randomly decided that they wanted in my room and kept trying to open my door, so that really woke me up.. on top of that someone kept going in and out of their room and the doors in this place make the biggest loudest closing sound.. so all of this caused me not to really get any sleep after 1:30 which is bad, because i was planning on being very rested for this french test.. but oh well. After that I just kept dreaming about all this weird stuff.. girls getting kidnapped and people trying to barge into my room.. it doens’t sound so bad on the LJ but I was sort of disturbed…

but it all really worked out for the best, because my alarm wasn’t set and so after spending this whole sleepless night i was like, “hey, i should be getting up.. where’s my alarm?” ..so I guess being tired is the price i’ll pay for being awake. bleh. i need to get outta here…. but not before i say, “bonne chance!” to myself :)

It’s okay, past Laurie, it all works out.  And you did pretty good on that French test, despite the weird day.  In fact, you remember that French test much better than you remember this odd night.  So no need to fret.

Applied me-matics

Excellently productive day?  I think so!  Though I didn’t do any reading, and a day without reading is never a great idea.  What I did get done was some prep for section, and the approval of a prompt for both my neuroscience class, and my typology class.  In fact, my typology professor had some really good ideas about what direction to take my paper, and thus I’ve even sort of gotten an outline put together for that one!  I’m hoping sections go well tomorrow.  I have to hand back the midterms, and my Wednedsay section did particularly poorly.  We’re also moving into real “discussion” territory, and these guys also aren’t too participatory when I’d like them to be.  So we’ll see how well I can manage to swing chattiness.    I’ve also been scheduled for my fMRI safety training tomorrow, so I can officially operate the magnet!

In non-school triumphs, yesterday we did our tri-weekly co-op trip, so there is actually food in the house today.   I had a smoothie and toast this morning, which is hands down my favorite (regular) breakfast.  I also made it to the gym, which is good since I skipped yoga in favor of food shopping yesterday.  I really need to get to yoga on Thursday, I miss it.  I was pretty stressed out pre-gym, and I’m happy to say that working out calmed me down.  Also, I came home and cleaned our room (which was a complete disaster) so I’m feeling pretty accomplished!  Here’s to hoping I can keep up this level of optimism for the rest of the week.

cognitive dissonance

My brain feels full of ideas and future.  It’s hard to get anything done, though I know there are a bunch of things to do in the immediate future.  Lots of things I don’t really want to think about anyhow.  Papers, students, section… I’m ready to explode out of my body and take flight with my ideas and disappear into the sky.  And I’m completely tied down by the snails pace of time and heavy blanketing of reading and teaching.   Ech.   Some days will pass, and some papers will be written, and I shall reap my sweet summer reward.   3 weeks?  Yikes.

gibby gibby

I’m one exhausted but satisfied Laurie!

Met our professor this morning at 7:30 and made it to Stanford in two hours flat.  Stanford is a really nice looking school in a very pleasant little town.  The conference itself was really enjoyable.  The talks were nice, the company was good, the food was tasty, and we met lots of interesting people.  Got a ride back to Oakland and took the train home from there.  All in all, a really enjoyable day.

Perhaps I’ll have more to digest from it in the next day or two, but right now, I’m just so tuckered out and ready for bed.

Living Notoriously Well

It’s going to be an early night, and thank goodness, cause I’m exhausted!  I made it through midterm week.  Midterm went well, and I spent about six hours grading yesterday with one of my favorite linguistics people (and co-TA) Ariel.  We squatted in Sudwerk and had some drinks and snacks, and our waiter was even a linguistics major!  Very surprising.  Anyway, I got the rest of the papers graded this afternoon, and thus I am done with midterms!  Yay!

No one came to office hours today, so I had a really relaxing day.  Actually I was dreading section this morning, but our sort of short day of essay topic stuff went over really well.  Students were engaged and amused, and I got to talk to each one individually about their topic choice, and it was nice.  They didn’t even notice how close to being out of time we were at the end of class!   So good times.  Walked around the beginnings of the Whole Earth Festival that has taken over campus today.  It’s way more intense than I anticipated – I knew Davis had a bunch of hippies, but this was pretty crazy!  So we escaped after partaking in ice cream and some free sewing machine repair advice.  Came home and cooked up a chicken I had thawed.  I had meant to roast it yesterday, but ran out of time, so I was getting nervous about leaving it sitting around all uncooked.  Made a spicy fried chicken instead, and holy crap was it good!  I’m not a big frying-things fan, but damn, sometimes it just hits the spot.  Mmm.

It’s gonna be a busy weekend.  We’re going to a conference in Stanford tomorrow morning, because one of the professors in the department asked us to come with him.  I’m not super keen on spending a whole surprise day at a conference, but Lewis and I weighed the lost time and stressful weekend against the probable benefit of bonding with a professor we both like, and meeting some of our peers (it’s a meeting of the graduate students and faculty of Stanford, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz) and decided it’d be worth it.  So we’re meeting at the train station at 7:30 tomorrow morning for our carpool to Stanford, and then I think he’s going to drop us off at the end of the day somewhere in the East Bay so we can take the train home.  Should be exciting!