life in limn

if you really loved me, you'd sever my corpus callosum

2007-12-13T10:36:00.000-08:00

semester is over. i sort of didn't think i would make it through this one. i mean...i always say that. but this time i actually meant it, which if you know me well you know might be true because i was actually quieter about school than normal. h observed years ago that when i'm quietest i am often feeling the most intensely, and it's still true.

i gave a conference talk and have another in a few weeks. i gave two talks and a handful of smaller presentations at berkeley. i'm organizing a major conference to be held in february. i wrote my first major grant proposal. 17 pages, with itemized budget and everything.

i'm...tired. i haven't been sleeping that well. mostly i've been waking up sometime between 3.30 and 4 and after an hour of lying there awake i just get up and work until it is time to go to school. oh, and i've been sick.

i'm whinging!

this weekend we are going to whistler to see pretty snow.
i will ski. skiing is the best, silent and fast.
xo, see you soon.

_____ uber alles

2007-11-27T07:52:00.002-08:00

dear internet,

i've been to germany and back. i gave a talk at a conference (in case you go look me up on the program, they did not mess up my title as c. bristlingly, charmingly thought; it is as intended). the customs guy in the frankfurt airport, when i answered his question about why i was there, said "ah, the world famous Max Planck Institute," with an inscrutable little smile on his face so i'm still not sure exactly what his meaning was. the talk went fine.

because you are the internet and therefore inanimate and therefore incapable of losing esteem for me, i will admit that i was massively, throat-constrictingly nervous. i could hear it and kept telling myself to breathe, take a sip of water. calm down. but there were some very famous linguists (i won't bother dropping names because linguists are never famous outside of the field of linguistics, not for their linguistic work at any rate) sprinkled around the room and really it's just a very impressive place in general. but it went well enough.

MPI is all steel and glass elevators, walls, and ceilings with interesting angles and a courtyard with a tranquil little pond. the lecture room i spoke in is beautifully, immaculately maintained, with six lighting zones and rows and rows of retro-modern styled auditorium chairs in blond wood and orange upholstery. it is stark and clean, more to c.'s taste than mine, but unarguably beautiful.

leipzig, on the other hand, is all me. it is a city for academics, something about it soothes the hectic soul and makes you want to curl up with a cup of tea and a book about historical syntax (maybe that's just me...). i didn't see the town much, i didn't see any sights at all, so my memories are already pretty impressionistic. cold. dark. quiet. impervious. cobblestone sidewalks, wet streets, cold giving shape to each breath. rigorously efficient public transportation, everything timed to the second. in the town center, shops and warmbright cafes (with quite good coffee and food, by the way), dim lights outside in the style of old fashioned gaslamps. everything orderly, everything disciplined, even the clumps of laughing teenagers feel somehow under control.

from what i was told by some people at the conference, it is a city with its share of social problems of the old-eastern-europe variety. but to me, it was romantic in a quiet, studious way. ascetic, yes, that's it.

tchuss,
a

still on the mortal coil

2007-10-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

gave practice talk for germany conference.
it was fine.

my school anxiety dreams have now been replaced by unpacking anxiety dreams. boxes everywhere, looming over me evilly, and nowhere to put anything. moving is hard! let's go shopping instead.

oh wait. i hate shopping.

c&i will be spending xmas in minnesota. she's the first girlfriend i've brought home...and she is jewish. i absolutely adore the thought of her making latkes in my mom's kitchen on xmas morning. i want to walk with her at night down to where my childhood home was, and stand there and show her where all the rooms were. with snow falling all around, muting everything.

student life

2007-10-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

in two weeks i have to give an hour-long talk on a research project that i barely have my brain around. i don't even have a solid first draft of the paper. between now and then i have to turn in another paper, write a short abstract for the january conference, draft my fellowship essays, go on a three-day fieldwork trip, and move house.

please send drugs.
stimulants preferred.

people keep saying i'm ahead of the game but the truth is that i haven't even figured out the rules yet. but i think there's a personality type, maybe a somewhat perfectionistic or obsessive type, that always feels like they have everyone fooled into thinking that they know what they're talking about. it's called impostor syndrome, and it has a wikipedia page so you know it must be real.

there was this really awful talk on it at the institute this summer that devolved into basically a group therapy session that made me want to stick a fork in my eye. one girl: "oh sociolinguists are so inTIMidated by syntactians!" some guy: "no, no, we're intimidated by YOU!" (actually...no, we aren't. syntacticians accept that we are a superior life form.)

anyway, i think i definitely have a touch of the impostor syndrome, but i am trying to just ignore that part of myself 'cause it doesn't seem to get me anywhere and i think it's just a little more self-indulgent than i want to be.

(...she says, wrapping up another introspective blog post.)

ps. it's almost time for NaBloPoMo again. can you handle the truth?

yellow

2007-10-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

we are moving in twelve days.
breathe.

had a moment to catch ourselves this morning, she made waffles and we leaned against each other on the couch in a pool of sun, melted butter warm. talking of the new york times. heather said once that love has a common language, and she was right. she was right about a lot of things, she was the only one i (almost) believed when she told me i'd have this again. thawed hands, a working heart. auden: "all you lived through, dancing because you no longer need it for any reason." hmm, i may have misquoted that, but i am too lazy to look it up at present.

she painted the office yellow for me.
melted butter warm.
sunshine warm.

happy

2007-09-26T19:57:00.001-07:00

c & i signed a lease

on an apartment

in rockridge!

(let's see what the family has to say about this one.)

signpost

2007-09-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

it has been so long since i posted that neither blogger nor my blog itself are in my browser history. and i've been chastised for never blogging...by someone who writes in her blog on an average of 3.2 times per year. :)

so i blog.

i have half of a perfect grapefruit in a bowl next to me. cold, juicy, tart. clean, grapefruit is clean food. i was depressed for awhile. clean food helps, going to the gym helps, healthy body encourages healthy mind encourages healthy engagement with the world encourages healthy treatment of self; the circle feeds itself.

this past weekend i went to minnesota for my dad's 60th birthday. it was a surprise party, even the fact that i was there was a surprise. there was this great moment, he came into the house, i was around the corner in the kitchen so he couldn't see me. i heard him grumbling about how it was too much, he didn't want to be the center of attention. after a minute i came around the corner and when he saw me the surprise registered visibly, and he said "woah!" and came toward me and gave me a hug.

my father is not a hugger.
it was a good moment.

i did some talking about c with my family. nothing too deep, just talking about her job, about where she is from, things like that. it was significant in that this is the first time that i have brought a romantic relationship with a woman into the realm of my family. it's tough for my mom, everyone else seems easy with it. she tries though, on the last day she floored me when we were talking about christmas plans and she said "so, i don't know what your plans are...i don't know if you want to bring c home with you."

i need them to meet her because i am at the point of moving forward into a future with her.

last night the magnitude of that hit me when we were talking about the details of moving in together and she made reference to "combining all of our stuff". woah. all of my stuff merged in with someone else's, lives knitting together. awesome. awesome, in the sense of excellent. awesome, in the sense of daunting, inspiring respectful fear. i think a bit of respectful fear is a healthy reaction here. it says that i really mean it. and i do. it says that i have grown up.

in my late teens and early/mid twenties i lived with three men. well, two boys and a man. when you're in your twenties, moving in is a very easy decision. maybe you need cheaper rent and you like regular access to sex and you figure hey, why not. sounds fun. sure. it's a whole different process, now. space issues, we are each fairly set in our needs from home. how do we harmonize our rhythms? how will we split up the financial stuff? and perhaps the most difficult worry: whose bed will we keep?

anyway, i need to wrap this up and get to school.

when i reflect on things, i know that i have it so good. i have a wonderful family, wonderful friends. i make a living (it's barely a living, but a living nevertheless) by thinking about language, working on languages, which i fundamentally love, even when i lose sight of that fact for awhile. my relationship with c keeps getting better and better. and i'm eating a perfect grapefruit.

so you know. overall, things are pretty damn good.

second year slump

2007-08-21T17:32:00.001-07:00

fighting an academic crisis of faith.
(i don't want to go back i don't want to go back)

i don't want to be buried in work and stressed out all the time, and never have any fun because i can never just turn my brain away from endless impossible lists of things that have to be done tomorrow or yesterday. i think other people feel it too; my cohort has been squabbling over the email list all day today.

i hope the fall meeting tomorrow will inspire me in some unforeseen way.

tonight i'm seeing an ex-ex-friend and i'm feeling a little avoidant about that, too. c asked if i miss having him as a friend and i am not sure what i said, and i am not sure what the true answer is. he is not like anyone i know. he is completely weird, and i like weird. our friendship was dramatic and a little codependent and it suited me at the time, but neither of us is in that place anymore. i guess i will see what it's like, now.

mostly this week all of my nerves are raw and at the surface, just look at me wrong and brimstone will rain down upon you. seems like a good weekend to hole up in a little cottage on the north coast.

the weekend

2007-08-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

roadtrip. music. sun, heat. grass, shade. naps. homecooked meals. grownup room. couple-ness. long hike. big backpack. sleeping in the open, wind blowing gritty dust into everything. cold night air. falling stars. lying in the dark, quiet, loving her so hard. delight: shower, coffee, and breakfast after a night outside. connection. letting go. charting the territory. limning the borders. fighting back. forgotten things. flat tire. interesting lessons. resolution. learning each other. learning each other.

now we rise
and we are everywhere
now we rise from the ground
see she flies
and she is everywhere
see she flies all around

so look see the sights
the endless summer nights
and go play the game that you learned
from the morning

-nick drake

sleepless in berkeley (for the moment).

2007-08-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

i wish i had a patron saint of sleep or something; alas, i am not catholic. but if i did, i'd protest this whole insomnia thing that's been with me since i got back a few days ago. i would say maybe i just am needing a little less sleep right now, except that i'm feeling tired and draggy during the days, so i don't think that's it. probably a combination of a too-full head and a not-active-enough body.

after being back in the bay for just three nights, i am leaving again for the mountains. but this time...the place i'm going, and who i'm going with...i think it will feel pretty much like home.

then back here for two weeks. my longest stretch in berkeley since i moved into my apartment! i can actually buy a full round of groceries, and hopefully sell off my damn television and unpack my books (which are still stacked neatly in boxes in one of my closets). of the surrounding seven weeks (beginning of august to middle of sept), 8/18-19 will be my only one in town. it goes like this:
OR - tahoe - home - mendocino - tahoe - OR - MN

school starts the week between mendocino and the second tahoe trip. and i will likely be making a short trip to the reservation during the first week of classes.

probably someone ought to remind me that i'm not 25 anymore!

exuberant heart

2007-08-04T22:05:00.000-07:00

hot on the heels of the weirdest night last night (see below): the greatest day.
well, the greatest day given that i am here, when really i would rather be at home.

still, unarguably a good day. made some progress on my project and had a fun time talking to V. made a strange-but-strangely-good lunch in our little kitchen. had a break in the late afternoon for a few hours, during which i found the best. text message. EVER. waiting for me on my phone. seriously. then a long happy sweet yim conversation and then i felt saturated in good energy from her.

phone call from E, she's back from australia and i didn't even realize how much i missed her until i heard her voice. then i went out for a long long walk, and then L and i went to the store and now instead of working i think i will simply enjoy this warm and sleepy feeling of wellbeing that i have going on right now.

tomorrow is our last day of working with V. then they are having a cookout for us; they're inviting family members over and making all kinds of food. and V is going to teach me to make indian fry bread in a pan over a fire! yeah! hopefully then i can make it next weekend when i hike up to a ridge in the sierras and camp for the night, watching the perseids.

monday we head down to the reservation.
tuesday...meeting, then home!

summer is nearly over but what a summer.
work proceeds, heartfriends are coming home, and i have a new love.

ah, life!

nobody parties like a ling grad

2007-08-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

friday night in small town oregon. i'm walking around outside, talking to c on my cell phone. there's this great spot, just a little way up the road past the cherry trees, a gravel road cuts off to the left and i walk a little way down it and sit there and look up at the stars. i've seen two meteors, and it's just great to sit there and look at the sky and talk to her.

usually i don't see any signs of life when i'm out there at night, but tonight there were some cars driving by and finally one slowed and pulled over near where i was. i thought it was some pesky do-gooder and i stood up, all ready to say "i'm fine, nothing to see here" but it was the police. they told me, i swear to god, that they got a call that "someone was running around here in their underwear."

i look down at myself. "um...well...i'm wearing my clothes, so i don't think it was me." he pulls out a little notebook and gets my info. all of my driver's license info! just for sitting by the road at night! stupid oregon. did i see anyone that matches that description? "no...i saw a few cars, but i haven't seen any people, clothed or unclothed."

so they pull away and i decide i'd better wander towards the house, so a few minutes later i'm standing near the top of the driveway and t pulls in in his big pickup. then the police come back! they forgot to get my address, so they get that from me and then drive away again.

then things get really weird. t (husband of one of the people who lives here) walks up the driveway to see what's going on. i explain that i was just talking on the phone and the police were checking out a report of someone running around in their underwear. "well...i have a double barrel twenty in the shed if you need it."

pause.
pause.

did t just offer me a gun? c in my ear saying um...did he just offer you a gun? he's continuing "and i have a three-fifty-seven, and a double ought six..." [note: okay, if any of you know anything about guns i'm sure you can tell by now that i am pretty much making these numbers up]. he tells me he has SEVENTEEN! guns! in the house! and he's getting three more tomorrow!

"i like guns. i like to kill deer. you know...critters. we get 'possum around here sometimes." okay, t. thanks...i think i'm okay. i'll just go inside now. c in my ear saying do you want to go talk to him? no! no no no! i go inside and finish my conversation in relative peace, unable to say any of the naughty things i would like to say because i have no privacy inside.

ah, the wild friday nights of a linguist on a fieldwork trip.

i want to go home.
to berkeley.
where things are normal.

daydreaming, diffuse

2007-08-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

in oregon again for fieldwork until 8/7.
it's. hard. this time.
sometimes i wish i were tougher.

while i am here i am trying to impose a soothing regularity on my daily routine. sleep 11-7, then go for a walk. coffee and breakfast, work on my own stuff for a little while, then start the day's work with V. i intend to get more of my own work done in the evenings but it is so hot, oven hot in this baking little house that was once a garage, brain melting hot. it's just so hard to work. so i end up killing time on the internet, talking on the phone, rattling around like loose change.

i wear a ring and carry a stone (with a sharp poky point like the tail of a comma) in my pocket, talisman-like.

i think about what it would have been like to have a conversation with me six years ago.
i think about transformations.

i remind myself of what matters.

inadequately expressed

2007-07-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

on the day that you wake up wondering where she is and she's coming into the bedroom from where she was sleeping on the couch because you were snoring because you have a cold and you can't breathe when you're lying down and she's not even a little annoyed with you. on the day that you wake up and look at her and tell her you had a dream about someone else, someone from the past, and she says 'it's okay, i've got you, let it go' and then later while her tshirt is still wet with your tears and your snot she's in the kitchen, baking you scones for breakfast. on the day that you never leave her house, you just read in her bed and play videogames on her couch and you nap while she goes to get food for dinner. on the day that you utterly dissolve and she lets you, and she loves you, and she looks after you. on that day you might start to believe in the feelings you've been feeling, believe in healed and unalone.

and you might want to say 'thank you' but two words aren't very many, and you might have no idea how to properly thank someone for something of this magnitude.

a cautionary tale

2007-07-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

why you should not engage in multiple IM conversations when you are groggy and trying to talk to your girlfriend.

a play in one act.

***

R: hard
  okay
  lazers
me: ciao dude
R: that's how people will say bye in the future
  just wait
me: <3
  oops
  wrong window

news from the southern front

2007-07-12T21:52:00.001-07:00

i was shushed in class today by a fellow student, who happens to also be a fairly distinguished faculty member from oxford. for some reason i am pleased by this.

i'm starting to regain my grip on the fact that i actually do have to work, and can't walk around in a dopey new relationthing (i got weirded out one day saying the word 'relationship' and so i changed it midstream, but i think i like 'relationthing'. i think i'll keep it) haze all the time. the haze is there, don't get me wrong, but i'm remembering to turn it down and sink myself into framework architecture, metrical scansion, game theory, and multidimensional semantics. can't let the ol' brainy brain get dulled by satiety, you know.

yeah, this is a good month.

it feels like quite a long time since i've been somebody's girlfriend.
i think i am a little rusty.

an excursus on melancholy

2007-07-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

The older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. Which means that this hero that you're trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life--this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero. You're exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat. And they're not heroic defeats, they're ignoble defeats. Finally, one day you say "Let him die--I can't invest anymore in this heroic position." From there, you just live your life as if it's real--as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.

--leonard cohen

she says i take comfort in melancholy. i say i have an interesting relationship with sadness.

lorca wrote about duende, a word that is impossible to translate into english. it evokes a marriage of passion and sorrow, the transformation of devastation into something creative, something powerful. think flamenco, think spanish poetry, think the beating howl of your heart when it loves, when it hurts, when it seeks to be understood. think about the fact that 'beautiful' is not synonymous with 'pretty', and when is the truly beautiful ever not a little terrifying?

cohen understands duende, just listen to any song he has ever sung. here he seeks refuge from sorrow in resignation but can you see? his action isn't hopeless at all. it is the opposite of hopeless. it is relief: warm, fluid, and embracing. it is the death of the projected self that allows one to embark on a less defended way of engaging with the world.

hal hartley tells us that "every intimacy engenders expectation, and every expectation, some unknown disappointment." i used to agree, but now i am exploring the reverse hypothesis that it is the very death of expectation that engenders deep intimacy.

and anyway, there isn't much room for sorrow these days.
stanford, san francisco, berkeley: sunshine everywhere.

she says i take comfort in melancholy. i say that anyone who's walked the edge never forgets the sound and feel of the void.

but hope exists, and redemption.

the institute

2007-07-02T18:12:00.001-07:00

i can't remember if it was h who made the observation that stanford is like a university crossed with a theme park, or if it was someone else, or if i made it up on my own. but it's true. it's manicured and lovely, dotted with fountains and tasteful statues, and all the buildings are a similar color and style. this is nothing like berkeley; berkeley is rough around the edges, a mismatched jumble scattered over a scruffier kind of natural beauty and that is much more to my taste. but still, stanford is imposing (or impressive, if you prefer the connotations of that word) in a way that berkeley is not.

the presession started yesterday and runs through tomorrow. my first class starts at 9.30a and my last class ends at 9p. it's a little grueling, plus they keep switching the classrooms on us so it's always a panicky last minute dash up some hill in beating hot sun to try not to be late. i have had a headache all day. the classes are of high quality, though, so it seems worth it.

the fourth is a holiday, and the regular session starts on thursday. i ride my bike here and it only takes five minutes! there are so many berkeley people here that i have friends in every class and i eat lunch with a big group every day. which is great...and it means that i haven't met anyone new yet. i suppose i should work on that, but on the other hand, so little in my life is familiar right now that the comfort of people that i've known for at least a year is welcome.

yeah, that's pretty much what it's like so far.

misted, ebullient

2007-06-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

things.
and stuff!
etc.

okay, let's see. i'm dating someone. yeah, i said it. and when are these things ever not complex? and who knows, and who knows, i don't have a lot that i want to say about it here/now; i'm just leaving a small footprint to mark a turned corner.

i've been asked by my professor (who is also my de facto second advisor) to organize, along with a few of my colleagues, a workshop to be held in the spring. this is pretty exciting for me, both because i think it will be an incredibly interesting and successful event, and because being asked to organize it makes me feel that in some little way...i have arrived.

on belonging

2007-06-23T21:49:00.000-07:00

the talk went well.
okay, the talk went really well. :)

i got a number of kind compliments afterwards, i wanted to tell them all it was my first conference talk ever but i didn't. a smiling "thank you so much" is the right answer. people want us to help them do what we're doing. sometimes i forget to remember that i'm part of something pretty cool...most of the coolness has nothing to do with my contribution but that's okay. i'll take the proximity.

i discovered that when you know you've given a good talk you get this warm radiating feeling, like everything is good and like you belong, like you deserve. before the talk i kept repeating my little mantras (taken from the advice of others) and sneaking looks at the affiliation listed on my nametag saying to myself "you belong here." not until after did i start to actually feel it.

the weird thing about all of this is you only get to enjoy achievements for about two seconds before the next impossible challenge looms and makes you doubt yourself all over again. so i guess i will just enjoy this while it lasts.

at-'niwhong wh'awhde

2007-06-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

i'm in the desert.

specifically, i'm at a navajo tribal college in arizona. i'm here to present my dictionary project at a conference.

the thing about deserts is: they're hot. and dry. i feel like today has been an endless loop of applying sunscreen, finding my sun hat, drinking water, refilling water, ad infinitum. the weather is making me tired and a bit cranky. the latter no doubt exacerbated by the fact that i haven't finished my talk yet. ah well, others are still working on theirs too, so i'm not alone in my lameness at least.

i've eaten two hot dogs and two meals containing ground beef.
yuck!

my talk is saturday morning and mostly i'm just looking forward to being done with it. what i'm really looking forward to is sunday, when we tour the south rim of canyon de chelly.

monday: home.

green like july

2007-06-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

there is a mix cd i made nearly three years ago, it's called "green like july". i think it's pretty good, but then everyone thinks they have great taste in music. i gave it to a friend for her birthday, but in reality i was making it to listen to on a roadtrip up the coast to mendocino.

i rediscovered it the other night, flipping through a stack of CDRs and today i brought it along on another drive north. it was so great to hear it again, and not just because there was someone in the car who knows and loves almost all of the songs (thus proving that i really DO have great taste in music, obviously). it was a nice window on a former self.

i feel strangely softly nostalgic but i'm not sure why. it's not missing anything or anyone, or even any me. maybe it's just an awareness of time passing, such a blessing and a curse for us mere mortals.

I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

--tse

occupancy, occupation

2007-06-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

the former housemates took me out to dinner last night. it was actually nice, though i got stuck sitting next to the one i am most uncomfortable with right now. but they were all very sweet and they gave me a framed photo of the seven of us on our camping trip, and an invitation to a birthday party. it was great to be around them again, they're so smart and funny and crazy and cool...and then it was great to go home.

home home home! where things are pretty and peaceful and getting settled. i'm unpacked enough that the still-packed boxes all fit in one closet, and so it looks like i'm totally done. though what's still packed is all my books and games and other homey things, so i feel their absence a bit. but...in time, time and time. today i made more cold mint tea with agave nectar, and hard-boiled eggs. i'm relishing the space, the fact that when i put something somewhere it stays there until i go back to it, the fact that my own stuff is everywhere, and the fact that i can go to the bathroom at night without putting on pants.

i'm not relishing how my neighbor is playing the most awful music in the world pretty loudly right now.

today i'm working on my talk. did i tell you i'm giving a talk at a conference in arizona? yeah, a week from today.
gulp.

fluid

2007-06-12T15:42:00.000-07:00

tomorrow we're heading down the coast for a meeting, so today is our last day of fieldwork. i'm running the elicitation this afternoon and it's a little sad. i'll miss verdena. i'll even miss staying in this weird little house crammed with random stuff, old furniture and exercise equipment piled here and there. it's a little more chaotic than is my preference, but it's been a nice stay and i will remember it warmly. i don't know why i'm getting so sappy about it, i'll be back in august. it's just my nature, i guess.

while i was here i was able to zoom out and remember that there are sometimes bigger worries than whether i make the perfect amount of progress on whichever project is currently stressing me out. even just functioning in this world can be an exercise in letting go of control, of order. particularly i noticed this on the reservation. things happened when and how they were going to happen. people didn't make calls and schedules and set meetings. if we bumped into people on the street, verdena would stop and visit. but we didn't seek them out and they didn't seek us out.

now i feel calm and open. and like i will miss being here a little but where i really want to be now is home. and i will look forward to returning.

so while i didn't get as much done as i wanted, somehow this feels like the best of all possible outcomes.

monday: fry bread and cherries

2007-06-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

still can't get my brain around my own project, the germany project. but made significant progress on the dictionary today, which is good. i think of that teacher on the reservation saying "what do i need? um, where do i start. i need everything." and i know this will help those kids at least a little. so it's good.

worked hard today, then napped hard. woke up from the nap at 7p, verdena brought us some indian fry bread she'd just made, and then we all went for a walk down the road. we walked past a cherry orchard and on the way back we stopped and filled up big sacks of cherries (with the owner's permission). have you ever eaten a cherry right off the tree? i've eaten at some crazy good restaurants, and i'm not sure they can produce anything that can compare to plucking a perfectly ripe cherry and popping it right in your mouth and spitting the seed out onto the ground. actually, "we" didn't fill the sacks, the others did while i walked along picking the best ones (L & i: "we're cherry-picking cherries", fun with noun incorporation!) and eating them and kept eating them until we got to the end of the row and went home. now we have a big bowl of them which i had to move away from me because otherwise i will eat cherries until i have a stomachache.

good people

2007-06-10T20:01:00.000-07:00

my fieldwork partner and i have settled into an easy symbiosis. it's always weird for me to do trips where i spend all day, every day, with a person or people. i spend a good amount of time on my own at home, and i enjoy that. but if it's gotta be someone, L is a really good choice. interactions with her are marked by mutual consideration. interesting conversation mixed with comfortable silences. similar styles of communication and senses of humor. in one narrow way, she reminds me of j when these spontaneous bursts of expression just explode out of her sometimes. i say "oh remember when verdena said..." and she smiles huge and says "ahhhh, that was GREAT!" and punctuates it with a joyful motion of the arms. very j-like.

she just elicited the word for 'circumcised penis' and rolled it out with an easy joke.

L is good people.

elder

2007-06-09T23:09:00.000-07:00

back in oregon. the next three days will be all language work, all the time. then to a meeting of people working on north coast languages. then home. home! and then i will avoid cars as much as is humanly possible. in the last four days i've spent easily 24 hours in a car. and 10-12 more lie between here and home, but let's not talk about that now.

let's talk about verdena, my language consultant. because in the last two days i think i learned what it means to be an elder. i already knew i liked her, knew i could even come to love her as i get to know her better. at 71, her eyes sparkle and she has this mischievous grin that just kills me. and the way she chuckles when she knows she's said something naughty. she tells us stories of when she was a girl and she could beat up any boy, she would throw cow pies on them, she would ride around the reservation on her motorcycle and then put on her fancy white pinstripe suit and pillbox hat with a little veil and strut her stuff into town. the girl had more marriage proposals than she knew what to do with. this is a woman who is, and has always been, full of life, fire, color. just totally vital.

on our trip to the reservation, though, i saw more of how she is in groups of people. she sits quietly and you never know if that's because she can't hear you (she is hard of hearing, especially when there is ambient noise) or just because she doesn't feel like saying anything yet. but then suddenly she'll just start talking, in a very low voice. and everyone falls silent, everyone leans in and strains to hear her every word and nobody speaks until she is done. this woman holds so much knowledge, she has an incredible memory for detail, and something about her presence just commands quiet respect. she doesn't sit there and spout proverbs or platitudes; hers is a deeper wisdom.

but still, when i think of verdena, i mostly just see her laughing.
and i think i'm so lucky that this is the side of her that i get to know.

on meaning and motivation

2007-06-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

today we went into the reservation and saw the tribal museum, then toured the ceremonial grounds and saw the site of the village where our consultant grew up. L and i sat in on three language classes at the high school. it was amazing and a little overwhelming, and a little discouraging. this language is going to die, we can't stop it. nobody can stop it. the classes won't really help; some kids will learn some words, later they will probably forget them, and people will grow up and move on and everything will be lost. this is not pessimism, this is realism.

so where is the meaning in my work? certainly it is personally rewarding, on an intellectual and experiential level. but this program leaves no space for fun challenges, everything must have a point. must have a logical conclusion. so do i move forward, flattering myself that i am preserving something of human knowledge, something valuable? do i adopt a view of myself as some savior of culture? i'm no savior, not of culture, not of anything. or do i approach it as a puzzle box to be unlocked and once it's open i walk away? that doesn't feel quite right either.

i suppose i just disengage from questions of meaning and do the work. and help the community when i can. neither savior nor ivory tower scholar, but something in the middle. something sustainable. it's interesting to me that i chose to involve myself in an impossible task. i, who needs to see myself as capable of anything.

happy oregon morning

2007-06-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

when we pulled into the driveway of our Hupa speaker's home yesterday, dinner was on. beef in red sauce. as neither L nor i eat meat at home, this part of the experience is always a little challenging. this is a logging town, the men in the family are logging men, and it's pretty much always meat and potatoes. it's so kind and wonderful of them to feed us, but we are used to eating other things.

we're staying in the guest house, where we have a freezer (but no fridge, but they gave us a cooler), a sink, and a stove. so this morning we ventured out to find a grocery store. on the way there i noticed a tiny little place with a greenhouse in the front...harvest something...organic food co-op! no way! the guy there was hilarious, total hippie, had just been awakened by a delivery truck so even though the store was closed, he let us in. "what time are you supposed to open?" i said. "whenever you guys get here," said he.

breakfast is organic yogurt with gingersnap granola and fair trade bananas. organic brazilian coffee with rice milk. peaches that are so ripe they feel like they want to burst open when you touch them. lunch will be almond butter sandwiches on seeded bread.

happy.

ten thousand lakes? more like ten thousand times awesome!

2007-06-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

bloopy accused me of commenting on his blog under an assumed name in order to defend the great state of minnesota. this is my response.

***

okay. if that WAS me, and i'm not saying it was, i would by default be right because i am in college.

that said, here is a very tiny sampling of the good stuff that minnesota (NOT missouri) has brought into the lives of all:
1. bob dylan
2. the replacements
3. husker du
4. prince (yeah i said it)
5. spam (i don't partake, but it has a certain aesthetic appeal)
6. paul bunyan
7. and babe, his blue ox
8. the world's largest ball of twine (darwin, MN)
9. a prairie home companion
10. possibly the only state governor more ridiculous than the governator (former gov. jesse "the body" ventura)
11. ME!

see, i didn't even have to think about it at all, and this list goes to 11.
now what did missouri ever do for you, huh?

QED.

spare change

2007-06-02T14:48:00.001-07:00

in the house i live in today, the laundry machines are free. in the apartment i will be living in two days from now, the laundry machines demand coins before they will agree to wash and dry your clothes. one thing i really hate is running out of quarters just when you need to do laundry. for some reason, it's terribly stressful for me, and i will spend all day playing messages in my head over and over and over and over about not forgetting to get quarters, where will i get quarters, sometimes people don't like it if you ask for quarters, don't forget to get quarters, need to do laundry, need quarters, blah blah blah omg. there is enough stress in my life without worrying about quarters!

so yesterday i walked into my bank and walked up to the teller guy, whipped out my atm card, and said "i'd like ten rolls of quarters, please."

he eyed me suspiciously. "ten. you want ten rolls of quarters. TEN. a hundred dollars in quarters?? well...i'll have to get them for you. they're gonna be heavy, you know." the whole time, he never did crack even the littlest smile, he just kept saying "you want a hundred dollars...in quarters" over and over. whatever dude, why you gotta judge?

in the midst of moving chaos, i am comforted and cheered by the thought of my quarter stash.

people try and hide the light underneath the covers

2007-06-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

in my greedy little paws i have two! free! tickets! to the arcade fire show tonight at the greek theater. (huge thanks, dre!) i guess every suckass week has a silver lining. so instead of studying as planned i will be rocking my stupid heart out.

the antisymmetry is funny, in a way.

now here's the sun, it's alright!
now here's the moon, it's alright!
every time you close your eyes

wish

2007-06-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

i wish i had a leitmotif. but actually i would need two: a doomy one and a sprightly one. i wish i knew a famous composer but a cool one like stephen merritt, i would ask him to write me a leitmotif. no, two. two leitmotifs.

(kalo mina)

stress

2007-05-31T16:37:00.000-07:00

oh shit. shit shit shit shit shit.

meeting with advisor brings on (project-level) crisis of faith.
news at 11.

i have a raging headache, i hate (some of) my (soon-to-be-ex) housemates. i'm totally nonfunctional because most of my stuff is in boxes and my room has that familiar smell of cardboard and tape. i always forget that tape has a smell, until i move.

and i have a ridiculous amount of work that i've heaped on myself, for no apparent reason. well, none other than that it will be vital for my long-term success, i suppose. but still. i didn't really have to start all this now. why do i always think i have to be ahead of the game? why isn't good enough good enough?

why can't i just move to my new apartment and hang out there for a few weeks just doing nothing but unpacking and listening to music and drinking chilled lillet blanc like a normal student in the summer? why??

more vehicular annoyances

2007-05-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

do you think it's bad if the DMV has a (completely) different license plate number on all of its documentation for you than what actually appears on your car? i mean, the VIN matches, my name and address and DL number match. it's just completely the wrong plate number on the title and registration card and everything.

which seems...suboptimal.

walking gingerly across the bruised earth

2007-05-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

me: sometimes i'm surprised you and i are friends because it seems like you would see me as a heathen and a sinner

Will: haha.
you're my favorite sinful heathen friend.

***

fighting a minor depression, feeling adrift and apart and not sure how to occupy a space. i went to a party and wanted to leave as soon as i got there, so i drank too much and acted stupid. i don't feel like working on any of my projects and i don't want to pack.

oh i'm tired of talking about myself.
i'll be fine in a couple days.

motion

2007-05-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

home.
exhausted.

woke up 4.30a central time (=2.30a oaktown time) and managed not to nap. tonight's sleep will be good, i hope, back in my own bed and so tired. gym in the morning. farmer's market. housewarming. then pack, study, pack, study. rhythm.

i packed up all of my fiction, math&cs, poetry, and philosophy books tonight. the linguistics books remain, i think i might be up to two boxes of them which is nice. i feel like i haven't even made a dent, but my room is already a disaster. i hate packing, i hate moving, i hate chaos. i want to be there and settled.

soon.

the quiet and still in my room was making me sad but packing always makes me a little depressed, too. "study hittite" is what will would say.

state of the midwest

2007-05-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

thunderstorm teasers today. huge gusts of wind spattering rain into the windows and blowing the deck furniture around. a couple of small, faraway rumblings. once, maybe, a little flash, out of the corner of my eye. i have high hopes for tomorrow at the lake.

tonight we went out to dinner for my mom's birthday and the waiter/owner of the place refused to serve me alcohol. i swear to god. i told him i'd left my wallet at home and he was like "i'm sorry, i just can't do it. you look about 18, i would get fined thousands of dollars if you aren't 21."

dude...it's my mom's 60th birthday, do the math.

whatever, i didn't really care, but it was funny. i get carded now and then, and i always suspect they're just trying to be charming and flattering but this guy was belligerent and grumpy, he just really thought i might be underage.

i wonder how many 18 year olds come in and order bottles of barbaresco for their parents, though.

close temescal stars

2007-05-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

and the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers
and we all fall down slackjawed to marvel at words!
as across the sky sheet the impossible birds
in their steady, illiterate movement homewards
(joanna newsom)

hi summer. i've been waiting for you. i'm going to fill you up with papers and institute and projects, nsf and writing another abstract and studying for MA orals, fieldwork and making a website with video, and reading, oh! the reading. i know i should read fiction but instead i crave to read old syntax dissertations. what is wrong with me?

i'm heading to MN for a week and do you have any idea how hard i wish for a thunderstorm while i'm there?

do you??

everything hits at once

2007-05-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

today i received word that the abstract i submitted for the conference in leipzig in the fall was accepted. which means, i guess, that i will be flying to leipzig to present my paper. which means, i guess, that i will be writing the paper over the summer. wow.

i've never been to germany!

this is pretty huge, actually. the list of other presenters is intimidating. and they're publishing an edited volume afterwards with selected papers from the conference. so there is the possibility of a publication, too.

i'll write my paper in my new apartment.
hee hee.

calm before the change

2007-05-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

after we came out of the bar i waved to my cohort and said goodbye because they were all going to a's house to keep the party going and i was going to sea salt. and a came running over and threw her arms around me and was like no! don't leave me! and then there were five or six people around me hugging me and pushing me with them down the street, they were like "no, you're coming with us" and i was just laughing and getting pushed along in this moving crowd.

it was a really good moment.

then i thought well i'll just walk down to sea salt i'm sure i'll sober up by then. i'm sure i'm a super fast walker when i'm mildly drunk. um. no. i'm not. i drunk called two friends and then i got there and ate lobster.

did you know lobster is from the latin word for locust? the -ster is an assimilated old english ending that was applied when the word was borrowed into OE from latin. and why the c changed to p (which i guess later voiced to b) is a mystery.

you know. in case you were wondering.

i'm in yr syntax, hax0rin yr derivation

2007-05-14T21:43:00.000-07:00

you guys, i am maladaptive.

so i worked for the last four days straight on this big research project which was one of two papers due today. well, i worked all the time when i wasn't watching c's bigass tv, that is. it called to me though, i swear..."come to me...come watch the fast and the furious 3: tokyo drift...you know you want to..."

yeah.

i'm tired and i want to be done and i have the second paper to finish still and submit by midnight. and i cannot. get. motivated. seriously, i have like two more pages to write. i've collected and presented all the data, now i just have to write some thoughts down about it, so easy. and here i sit. i have written exactly one paragraph in five hours.

maladaptive.

it doesn't help that my professor told me it doesn't really matter! you're not supposed to alleviate my stress, you're supposed to be scary and threatening, damnit!

this is a lame post.
this is bad.
i feel deranged. TWO PAGES stand between me and summer. two.

maladaptive, i'm telling you.

numbered list

2007-04-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

1. the department is funding my summer research. this means that i don't have to get a Real Job (tm) and i can just sit around and work on Hupa all the time. is there anything better than getting paid to do what you want to be doing anyway?

2. i got the classes i want for the institute.

3. i am spearheading my department's protest against...well, let's just say it's a school thing. it sounds too trivial when i tell people outside of my little school microcosm about it. but i'm glad we're fighting it.

4. i helped run a conference this weekend and it was a success. and i got a free book out of it, one i've been coveting for weeks actually.

5. i submitted my first real conference abstract. i don't expect them to accept my paper, but i should know within two weeks.

6. six more days of classes!

life is pretty exciting these days.

flying blind

2007-04-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

oh dear, the activist in me has been awakened.
and people seem ready to rally. "what shall we do?" they ask me.

taking a stand is second nature to me. they must sense this.
but am i ready to go there, again?

last time, it broke my spirit.
the time before, it broke my heart.

and why should it be me, with leaden limbs and no time to spare?

snippy cooks

2007-04-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

whatever energy is leftover after classes homework and writing i am using to search for money for the summer. i won a small fellowship to attend an institute at stanford in july, but i have to figure out how i'm going to pay my rent. registering for next year's classes. thinking about teaching (what?! i have nothing to offer anyone but my own confusion...). trying to stay in the now and focus on all the projects i have going even though it's totally overwhelming and exhausting and scary and i don't know if i'll do a good enough job on any of it 'cause there's just not enough time. i just want to space out and dream of the next thing.

***

funniest thing i've seen in a few days.
reviews for a fruit salad recipe on epicurious.

A Cook from London writes:
This was just awful, the mango blueberry combo is good but the ginger ruined it. I'll use a good slug of dark rum next time with the lime juice and brown sugar.

A Cook from Lyon, France writes:
It is considered by many that ginger complements fruits well. I suppose, London, that one would have to care for the flavour of ginger to enjoy this recipe. Perhaps that is why you thought it "ruined" the dish. However, since I lived (and ate) in London for 2 years, I feel qualified to posit that many Britons' comments regarding their sense of taste are perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt. Cheers.

steep

2007-04-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

i'm alive, i swear!

i think it's so funny how people will email you and say "Hi, this is Bob Smith." Well, okay, bob smith didn't really email me, but someone else did and that is how he opened, with his name. which also appeared in his signature at the bottom of the email text, and in the "from" field of the message itself. i am often tempted to do that the first time i email someone who doesn't know me, i suppose we are well conditioned by phone etiquette? i always resist the urge, because it seems so redundant.

oh, oh oh oh. what to tell you today. in the last few weeks some switch in me has been thrown fully to the ON position and i'm having all these ideas about things i want to work on. more than i can possibly keep up with, i can't start anything new, not for the next six weeks anyway. everyone says "write them down" and yes, i am writing them down. i will probably look back on them in two months and snicker, like i do with most of what i'm thinking about these days. the learning curve is steep indeed.

spring break is done, i did my fieldwork. it was...well, a revelation, really. i will write about it soon, when i can do it more justice than i will be able to right now. but now i've hit that point in the semester where it gets hard and the pressure is on and i've got to produce. a lot. more than last time. and soon.

i guess the difference is that this time i know i can handle it.

now until forever

2007-03-25T15:24:00.000-07:00

notes to self:

contempt for own work as a defense mechanism.
defense mechanisms in general.
parsing. parsing! ah, enough with the parsing.
nmh and chainsmoking.
playing guitar again.

***

i've just now returned from camping with my housemates and it was a comedy of errors. i swear they must have set out to find the most white trash campground possible; RVs plopped here and there around a dirt road loop behind sand dunes with cows wandering all over the place. my shoe got stuck in a muddy swamp and came off. my housemate m and i stood there trying to pull it out, i was simultaneously hating life and laughing so hard that my lungs hurt. my fault for wearing lowcut chuck taylors i guess, but it wasn't really camping, more like "camping".

i took a 20-minute shower and i still smell like a campfire.
i used shampoo and everything!

but it was fun, in a weird way, to cram our whole house in a tent. yes, seven people plus the dog in one tent. my roommate who owns the tent somehow failed to realize that usually tents have walls so she didn't warn us. hers just has the black meshy windows all around, you can't zip up the walls. when i was like "well no wonder it's cold, this tent has no walls!" she was like "some tents have walls?"

we made veggie burgers over the fire and drank red wine.

more of other people's words

2007-03-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

O you whom I often and silently come where you are,
    that I may be with you;
As I walk by your side, or sit near,
    or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire
    that for your sake is playing within me.

--Walt Whitman

***

"amy, I wonder why when you have a crush it's the realest thing in the world to you."

--my friend will

feet downstream

2007-03-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

oh, it's spring, it's spring! strawberries and asparagus at the farmer's market, a walk around the lake with a.s, and at berkeley the pretty girls stroll around bright and open like flowers.

k said the last post sounded manic, but i don't feel manic. (the words were conor oberst's (bright eyes), by the way, not mine.) rather, i feel like i have finally gotten used to the idea that this will be my life from now on. i will work basically every night and both weekend days and there's no point in fighting it or thinking it will be better next semester. ideally i will get to a point where i can take one day per week off, i think that would actually benefit my work quite a lot. i may get there, i may not.

it's like how the rafting guide said if you fall in, you don't try to swim. you just point your feet downstream and keep your arms to your sides and wait for the safety kayaker to pull you in. the water is stronger than you, he said, and he was right.

i have also gotten used to the idea that i will probably always have contempt for my own work. i am impatient with my lack of expertise and yet when i can step back i find it a little funny and ridiculous, too. like a toddler playing dressup, grimly donning dad's old shirt and tie and playing office. why do kids do that, anyway? i used to love to play grocery store, arraying old food boxes and cans around the basement and wheeling my little plastic cart around. we all want to be ahead of where we are...from that side, the responsibility seems grandly alluring.

life is better since i accepted the rhythm. sitting with will (in the bear's lair, haha i am a student) friday afternoon going through all the things on my mind that day he said "you seem relaxed today. usually you seem so busy." which i think was his diplomatic way of saying i've been a frantic mess for most of the year and i thought yeah, my mind can be quiet in this moment, and i don't have to hold on so tightly to everything all the time; nothing is going to fall apart, i think.

mashup

2007-03-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

so i've been hanging out down by the trains depot. no, i don't ride, i just sit and watch the people there. and they remind me of wind up cars in motion. the way they spin and turn and jockey for position. and i want to scream out that it all is nonsense. all your life's one track, can't you see it's pointless?

but just then my knees give under me. my head feels weak and suddenly it's clear to see it's not them but me, who's lost my self-identity. as i hide behind these books i read, while scribbling my poetry, like art could save a wretch like me, with some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve. and i'm never real, it's just a sketch of me.

and everything i make is trite

and cheap

and a waste
of paint
of tape
of time

possible worlds

2007-03-13T22:40:00.000-07:00

last night will & i went out and got drunk and played scrabble.

i was ahead by like 50 points for the whole game. then he insisted on buying me a third beer and i got stupid and he ended up winning by 5. damn will! damn beer! i demand a rematch. oh well, i was supposed to be cheering him up. so i guess it's good that he won.

what else.

i have to do better in one of my classes. like, seriously. it's making me anxious because i don't like the subject matter much and so i have difficulty forcing myself to take all the time required to be very (overly, if you ask me) explicit on my written assignments. even though i pretty much understand everything. but...i need an A in the class and i need the prof's thumbs-up to take my master's orals, so...i shall work harder, somehow.

tonight i'm trying to wrap my brain around the hardest thing i've ever read.
the semantics of questions.
very formal, full of propositional and predicate logic.

headache.

spring forward

2007-03-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

last week was the worst i've had this year. it left me unable to imagine doing this for four more years. the sad thing is, it wasn't even the work, it was more just the grindingly corrosive schedule and some really depressing social aspects of ... what? this program? grad school in general? i don't know.

i guess because my real friends are awesome and warm and funny and accepting and grounded i maybe forget that there are just crappy mean people around me too. and i get in these situations and i think how sad it is that some of the brightest students in my field can't come up with anything better to talk about than who is fat or ugly or stupid or has b.o. and it gets so much meaner than i could possibly reproduce here.

and you have to wonder, when you walk out the door, what they are saying about you. especially if you are the kind of person who says "uh actually i really like that person you're insulting right now."

so this weekend i took my first day off in two months, i had a pedicure and was treated to brunch at citron. had good talks and napped and cleaned my room and ate dinner with my roommate. today was almost 80 and sunny in oaktown, in the morning i went hiking by myself in tilden. let the fucked up shit finish melting out of my head.

i used to crave intensity

2007-03-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

i'm cramping hard and crushing hard
exhausted
and overwhelmed

i came home to take a nap before a school-related social event i have to be at tonight (after 3 hours' sleep last night) but ended up talking instead to someone very dear to me who wanted something quite a lot, and it didn't work out. a one-shot-only kind of thing.

i didn't know that i really love him until i found that i hurt for him, even though the way it turned out is better for me. i hurt for him even more because he won't hurt for himself. (and no, he is not my crush, when i say i love him i mean something deeper and unclassifiable)

and so i tried to tell him how amazing he is
and he said "i hope to god to disappoint you as little as possible."

i used to crave intensity.
now it makes me feel a little tired and small.

2007-03-07T21:54:00.000-08:00

so this is gonna be super long.
you can skip past it to the next-most-recent post if you want.

i was tagged by him.

it's always fun to revisit the moments of one's life and so i'm doing it, but i am stopping the insanity too. i mean that i refuse to tag anyone else; to do so would be a bit hypocritical, i think, as i once chastised my mother for sending me a chain email.

HAVE YOU EVER…

01. Bought a round of drinks in a bar

no. i don't think girls really do that?

02. Swam with dolphins in the ocean

nope

03. Climbed a mountain

yes! (i think half dome counts...it should...)

04. Drove a Ferrari

haha no

05. Visited the Great Pyramids

no, would love to though

06. Held a tarantula

HELLS NO
i'm afraid of spiders
i can't even think of it without shuddering
damn you, jake jakob. damn you.

07. Taken a bath with someone in candlelight

yep

08. Said “I love you” and meant it

oh yes. more than my fair share of times, i would say.

09. Hugged a tree

yep

10. Played elastic

whothewhat?

11. Been to Paris

mais oui

12. Watched a storm on the sea

not sure...definitely on a lake though.

13. Stayed up all night to watch the sun rise

yes

14. Seen the aurora borealis

yes, i am from a northern clime

15. Been to a large sporting event (Grey Cup, World Series Final, Canada Cup, Stanley Cup)

haha! no

16. Climbed the steps of the St. Joseph’s Oratory

no. am i supposed to know what that is?

17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables

yes

18. Touched an iceberg

no, unless you count my car the morning after a blizzard

19. Slept under the stars

mmm yes

20. Changed a baby’s diaper

millions (worked in a daycare center)

21. Traveled in a hot air balloon

no

22. Seen shooting stars

oh yes

23. Gotten drunk on champagne

certainly!
i have blogged while drunk on champagne.

24. Given more than you could to charity

yes, after the tsunami

25. Observed the night through a telescope

yes

26. Participated in a world record event

not that i'm aware of

27. Had a food fight

yep

28. Bet on a winning horse

no, i don't think so

29. Asked directions from a stranger

reluctantly, yes (i have the dude gene in that respect)

30. Had a snowball fight

of course

31. Yelled as loud as you could

yes

32. Carried a lamb

no. david did though, and told me about it

33. Seen a total eclipse

i feel like i have...but i'm not sure, so maybe not

34. Climbed a sand dune

yes

35. Run over an animal with your car

no way man. i brake for pigeons.

36. Danced like a crazy person with no regard to who might be watching

yes

37. Adopted an accent for a whole day

no, i'm not that good at accents
but now i want to try

38. Felt truly happy, even in a short moment

oh yes yes yes

39. Had two hard disks on your computer

what a nerdy question! does an external HD count?

40. Taken care of someone drunk

yes. ... yeah.

41. Danced with a stranger

yep

42. Whale-watched in the ocean

yep

43. Stolen a street sign

nope

44. Back-packed across Canada

nope

45. Taken a road trip

of course, lots of them

46. Rock-climbed outdoors

no

47. Sung a ballad on the beach at midnight

*exactly* midnight? probably not

48. Gone paragliding

no

49. Been to Ireland

no

50. Had a broken heart for much longer than you were with someone.

oh well, i think we all know the answer to that one
yes.
most definitely.

51. Sat at a table at a restaurant with strangers and eaten with them.

yes, i'm strangely good at that

52. Been to Japan

no

53. Milked a cow

maybe...

54. Organized your CD’s alphabetically.

alphabetically by artist, chronologically within artist

55. Pretended to be a superhero/ine

well i tell people about my superpower sometimes

56. Sang karaoke

"all right, stop. collaborate and listen."
yes!

57. Spent all day in bed

oh yes

58. Played football

touch football

59. Scuba-dived

no. snorkelled lots though

60. Kissed in the rain

yes

61. Played in the mud

yes

62. Played in the rain

yes

63. Been in an open-air theatre

yes

64. Been to the Great Wall of China

no

65. Started your own business

haha no

66. Fallen in love without suffering from a broken heart

yes

.67. Visited ancient monuments

yes! forum, colosseum, pantheon, etc.

68. Taken a martial arts class

tae kwon do

69. Played XBox for 6 hours straight

not xbox but i solved Myst in 1 day, 13 hours straight

70. Been married

yes

71. Been in a movie

no

72. Organized a surprise party

yes

73. Been divorced

yes

74. Fasted for 5 days

no, but i'm thinking about doing it just to up my score

75. Made cookies from a package mix

yes

76. Won first prize in a costume contest

no

77. Driven a gondola in Venice

no

78. Have been tattooed

no

79. Canoed or kayaked

yes, both

80. Been interviewed on TV

i don't think so

81. Gotten flowers for no particular reason

yes :)

82. Been in a play

yes, "our town" at my first college
haha

83. Been to Las Vegas

only the airport...

84. Recorded music

well if you mean singing drunkenly into my iTalk with karen then yes

85. Eaten shark

no!

86. Kissed on a first date

of course

87. Been to Thailand

not yet...

88. Bought a house

no but h&h just did (in berkeley yay!)

89. Buried one of your parents

no

90. Been on a cruise

no

91. Spoken more than one language fluently

well, sort of, i guess
not anymore though
workin' on it

92. Raised children

no.

93. Followed your favourite singer on tour

does driving to sacramento count?

94. Cycled in a foreign country

yes

95. Moved to a new city for a new life

yes! a few times

96. Eaten ants

ew no.
but almost, by accident

97. Walked on the Golden Gate Bridge

of course

98. Sang at the top of your lungs in the car without a care as to who might be watching

always!

99. Had plastic surgery

uh no. not my thing

100. Survived an accident you statistically shouldn’t have

no

101. Written articles for a large publication

high school newspaper? haha

102. Lost 40 pounds

not in a row :)

103. Helped an unconscious person

yes, group this with the one about taking care of drunk people i guess

104. Piloted a plane

co-pilot and my dad let me fly on my own for a few minutes

105. Touched a live (manta) ray

yes

106. Broken someone’s heart

yes.

107. Helped birth an animal

no

108. Won money in a TV game show

no

109. Broken a bone

no

110. Pierced another part of your body other than your ears

yes, nose (don't have it anymore) and labret

111. Handled a revolver or firearm

yes

112. Eaten mushrooms you collected yourself

no

113. Ridden a horse

yes

114. Undergone a major operation

no

115. Had a pet snake

for a few days, we caught it in the yard

116. Slept for more than 30 hours straight

oh no, is that physically possible?

117. Been to all the continents of the world

i wish

118. Been on a canoe trip for more than 2 days

i wish!

119. Eaten kangaroo

i do not wish

120. Eaten sushi

mmm, constantly

121. Had your picture in the newspaper

yes

122. Changed the opinion of someone with regards to something you’ve felt strongly about

yes

123. Gone back to school

again, i think we all know the answer

124. Parachuted

no

125. Worn a snake

well i've let snakes crawl on me but i didn't use the poor things as accessories or anything

126. Built your PC from different parts

yes! and ran linux!

127. Sold something you created to someone you don’t know

no

128. Dyed your hair

yes: blonde, black, red, magenta, orange, blue...

129. Shaved your head

no

130. Saved someone’s life

i don't think so.

wow, that was long.

pulling signal from noise

2007-03-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

a fieldwork situation found me.
i didn't find it.
it found me and the universe said yes on my behalf.
all signs pointed to yes.

i will be working on a language called Hupa. there are, according to my professor, 6 living speakers of the language. it is almost dead. i guess i better not screw this up, huh? my first trip will be at the end of this month. i think i need to buy some special notebooks or something.

actually, it sounds like a pretty amazing thing for a number of reasons. i will tell you more about it as it unfolds and when i am not so swamped as i am this week.

so i think that pretty much checks all the boxes i wanted to check in the first year. i found an advisor, found a language to do fieldwork on, found my direction. i joined some groups, applied for some fellowships, and developed a rough plan for the rest of my time in the program. i've even got a tentative plan for summer.

in other news, i have been tagged to do one of those meme thingys that all the kids are so crazy about these days. so look for that soon.

okloveyoubyebye

nice things

2007-03-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

saturday morning woke up naturally 6:52am, steamy hot shower, grapefruit and earl gray tea. outside my window, sun. outside my window, a pink-flowered tree, and a city, and life like buzzing in your ears. inside, more middle english historical dialectology. table piled with books and grammars, plant wilting thirsty but still alive. somehow after 8 months, still alive. made bed, space heater beginning to win against the morning chill.

a little crush on a someone.
i am still choosing the improbable someones, which i suppose tells me something.

i don't like this semester much so i am trying to enjoy the lovely moments. yesterday walking out of dwinelle in the warm afternoon, everyone coming to life on the square like bears sleepdrunk stumbling out of hibernation caves. playing lazy guitar, drums, a harmonica. kids draped across benches, sunglasses and premature tank tops. even the rantings of the stray crazy homeless guy seemed gentle and warm. berkeley, berkeley in the spring. all the hills lush and green before the summer dry. the bell tower still stops me in my tracks, some days.

absentminded professor in training

2007-02-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

1. i showed up an hour early to an event at h's house this weekend. an hour! early! it wasn't because i didn't know what time it started. and it wasn't because i didn't look at the clock. i looked at the clock, and the clock was right. i just thought it was an hour later somehow. i didn't figure it out until she answered the door with a very confused look on her face, and i was so disoriented.

2. when i got home today i was trying to unlock the front door but my key wouldn't work. i kept trying and it wouldn't fit in the lock and i was getting SO frustrated, "what the hell is wrong with my key?!" then i realized i was using the key to my office on campus.

3. just now i went to take my contacts out. then i brushed my teeth. as i brushed it slowly dawned on me...hey wait...how come i'm not wearing my glasses but i can still see? then i realized i had filled the wells in my contact case with solution, closed the case, and put the case away. empty. my contacts were still on my eyeballs.

i take these things (particularly #2) to mean that i am officially a grad student now.

***

i have long believed that if you want to excel, you should surround yourself with the excellent. i don't often set about that intentionally, but sometimes i am reminded that my friends really are outstanding. like now, as the next round of grad school acceptances roll in.

next week i'll turn in my fourth and final fellowship application for this year. in a way, though, i'm not too worried about it. i feel a certain amount of success-by-proxy, and i'm just happy to see my friends kicking ass.

it's fun watching the cream rise to the top.

marginalia

2007-02-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

"o glamorous life!" i think as i sit here eating a late dinner, which tonight consists of a slightly stale poppyseed bagel (or "fresh beagle", if you prefer) cut in half, smeared with spaghetti sauce from a jar, covered in slices of mozzarella, and microwaved for 1:43. having just returned from a syntax reading group meeting (who pays attention to the syntax of things...) i find myself with several hours of comparative dialectology ahead of me, and me not wanting to begin.

speaking of new years resolutions already fallen by the wayside ("eat vegetables for dinner"), my main resolution was to accept more social invitations. but i'm realizing now that i have once again constructed a semester in which that might be impossible. why do i do it to myself? i know this is supposed to take years, but i think behind it is the same itch that makes me have the Incompetent Dumbass days when i make a glaring analytic error: i want to know it ALL and i want to know it NOW. and don't you try to tell me that i can't or shouldn't try to learn it all now.

you have no idea what i'm capable of, remember?

oh and i end up in places thinking why am i here, how am i here. i don't fit here. but maybe one never quite fits in a new place until the space moves around a little to accommodate their presence. at least this is what i tell myself on the days when i feel like i don't belong anywhere.

all good in the hood

2007-01-30T19:02:00.000-08:00

in a nutshell: i came back from anaheim, i watched many episodes of the oc, i was at the epicenter of a bout of rather upsetting drama in my main social group, i went to pt. reyes to see the elephant seals again, i started the semester, i got really sick, and just now my feet touched the ground and i breathed again.

it's nice to breathe.

yesterday i had one of those days i'm coming to think of as my "Incompetent Dumbass" days. like that, with the capital letters that are oh so rarely produced on these august pages. basically ID days are where you walk around doing all your normal stuff but you just can't escape the conviction that deep down you are an Incompetent Dumbass and everyone knows it and they're just humoring you.

(and i know i'm not really so you don't have to say that.)

then i was walking down the hall after a class and i said to a.b 'i feel so incompetent this semester' and he was like 'why?' and then the professor walked up behind us and said 'i'm behind you, just so you know, in case you're talking about me'. and i said 'no, i was just saying i feel incompetent this semester.' and he was like 'why? you're not, your homework was good, etc. etc.' so then not only am i the Incompetent Dumbass but i'm THAT incompetent dumbass, the one who hangs around fishing for people to tell them they really aren't an incompetent dumbass! then i slunk home, covered in shame.

today was fine though. and i did spend some time thinking about that whole phenomenon and i have figured out what i think is the hard part for me about this back-to-school scenario. it's not suddenly having to study every spare waking moment, it's not the weird aches and crackles that come from sitting hunched over my laptop in an incredibly nonergonomic way for 8, 12, 16 hours at a time, and it's not even never having any money and not having any idea how i will pay my rent this summer.

the hard part is the status drop. i had a job, i had a good job, where people liked and respected me and they knew i was good at what i did. people asked me how to do things and they wanted me on their projects. i felt competent. now i have literally started over, i have to prove myself all over again. and i don't feel competent, because...i'm really not. i barely know anything yet, i feel somehow like i know less and less every day. so although i am doing well in the program, i still am unpleasantly surprised at times by how infantilizing it can be.

luckily, all that is counterbalanced by the belief that i am doing exactly what i'm meant to do be doing.

***

in other news, i just received the following email from my roommate.

"Hey guys. I just got about 2 dozen beagles from the Jewish student organization. They’re fresh!!!! Apparently the Jews love the beagles and like me like to articlize things. I’ll be home with them by 9:30."

who knew the jews love the beagles so much.
and how do you tell which ones are fresh?
and who's gonna clean up all the poop?

lsa 2k7

2007-01-06T08:02:00.000-08:00

immersed.
tired.
happy.

unable to think about much beyond the now. and i'm okay with that.

i knew this conference would be amazing on an intellectual level. i didn't expect it to be so on a social level as well. we are a tribe, we meet for talks and debriefing and to go eat or drink and we stay up laughing too late. last night i slept on a makeshift contraption made of two chairs facing each other with a footstool in between. they are large and comfy and all about the same height so when you shove them together to eliminate the gaps, it makes a pretty good little sleeping nest. i am feeding myself on coffee and balance bars during the day. last night was indian food with colleagues and faculty.

and all around me are people who speak my new language.

almost home

2007-01-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.

i am well here in the land of white and cold (less white and less cold than usual for this time of year). i've been here for almost two weeks and tomorrow i leave for the OC and my first national linguistics conference. i am so excited, my only annoyance is that too many awesome talks happen at the same time, and i have to choose between On the syntax of exhaustive control & the calculus of events control on the one hand, and Usage or grammar? Comprehension & production share access to same probabilities on the other. how is one even supposed to choose? yeah you know what i'm saying.

it has been interesting to be here this time because i am more disengaged from the whole relationships tangle than i have been in years. so i'm really HERE in a very comfortable way and the two weeks have passed so quickly. most days i haven't felt like turning on the computer at all, and when i did it was usually just my laptop (no wireless here) to noodle around with perl.

yes, i am drifting back toward my nerdish roots. i never used it that much before, but this week as i worked on a large spreadsheet for my research job i thought "i could do this much more easily with perl." so i went and bought the camel book and then realized that perl was originally designed by a linguist. for the last few days i've been having a little affair with my camel book, we sneak off whenever we can for a little intellectual nookie. you can take the girl out of programming...

so. now to anaheim for a few more days of brainy goodness. when i get back to oaktown (represent!) i want to reflect a little on the experiences of my first semester of grad school and what i learned, and i want to set some intentions for the new year. but through sunday i'm happy to say that i will be thinking of little other than linguistics and linguists, flooding all the corners of my rested mind with tasty facts for hours and hours on end. yum.

now my dear mother wants us to go pick up dinner. burritos. "the most fantastic burrito you've ever had," she says. i didn't have the heart to remind her that i come from burrito nirvana, where one's taqueria preference is more a matter of religious identity than whim. oh cancun, cancun, why have you forsaken me? fire up the grill, i'm almost home.

i, kisser and syntactician

2006-12-22T20:05:00.000-08:00

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-e.e. cummings

although i flatter myself a counterexample to mr. cummings' characterization of syntacticians as people who cannot kiss well, i have always loved this poem. i wonder if cummings ever realized how very possible it is for syntax and passion to coincide. i suspect he must have, or he wouldn't have been so adept at flouting the rules to such marvelous effect. he must have been paying very close attention to syntax indeed, i would say.

must just be the weather

2006-12-21T14:43:00.000-08:00

i've recently been back in touch with someone who was a close friend and then decided he didn't want to be friends. it's been a couple of years, he's since gotten married and moved to nyc, he's doing really well. i think there was some boy-girl stuff behind our falling out but he never really directly talked to me about it. and it made me think about how that stuff can really fuck up a friendship.

like with david and how we were best friends and we would just talk and laugh for hours and tell each other everything. and you can't ever get back to that place, once you go past it.

i've been over this ground before, stop. stop.

i am someone that people come back to. the guy from summer is doing the things i wanted him to do four months ago. i would have been really happy then, now i'm not sure. i suspect it may be a place i can't quite get back to, or that i can get back to but it can't be changed anymore, like a memory. but i am open to being proven wrong if he actually follows through.

the lesson is this: don't let go of what matters, thinking you can recapture it later. sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't. and what is there to be afraid of anyway...a little heartache? you will survive, and anyway, regret hurts a hell of a lot more.

enter, stage left

2006-12-20T23:20:00.000-08:00

drank too much at a holiday party for my old company.
got home safe thx to the h&h collective, got sick, woke up still drunk.
not good.

i didn't really mean to though. i haven't been drinking at all basically, i'm not used to it. i never had much tolerance actually so maybe the not being used to it doesn't matter. also you never really expect to get drunk from wine. like you have some wine with your dinner and you sip it and it's just this nice yummy warm relaxing thing, you don't expect it to fuck you up.

it fucked me up.

there are big parts i don't remember but apparently i was a hit. i felt like bukowski, leering around looking down the pretty girls' dresses and pressing against the pretty boys and making ridiculous jokes but somehow they weren't offended. for some reason people really love me when i have too much to drink, it must be because i laugh a lot and tell everyone they're hot.

so anyway i hardly remember the part at the end when everyone was gone from the back room except me and the guy from last summer (not the one-night-stand guy but the one i actually wanted to date) and we talked and i think he was wanting another chance and i can't remember what i said to him about that but i remember kissing him. or i remember *that* i kissed him, i don't really remember the kiss itself. yeah, i remember the stuff i narrated to self or others but the reality of the situation is a bit lost to me. i remember him&h talking about me and i was right there but feeling far away and thinking it was funny and thinking i don't even care. i mean, i don't even know if i am interested in this person anymore. there is still the crazy attraction though.

the thing is...recently i told someone "everything has its timeline." it was one of those moments where something you say comes from some other place and you recognize it as truth only when it comes out of your mouth. this stuff is all so unknowable and what you think you want more than anything in the world turns out to be really bad for you, so you can't even use that as a guide. if there's anything i've learned in the last few years it's that you can't direct relationships no matter how much you want to or think you can. and i actually don't even want to, anymore.

so i don't know. i'm just open to whatever is going to come next.

amy was here

2006-12-13T20:13:00.000-08:00

fell into a hole (or maybe got pushed).
climbed out.

hi.

i know that last post was cryptic and this will not be any less so, but my policy is to not do anything on the internet that i wouldn't do on a streetcorner. it's served me well so far. sometimes i write things not so that everyone else understands what i mean, but rather to leave some imprint of my evolution, a little hello to my future self. and i always try to avoid telling other people's secrets.

this week has been surreal and i feel like i've been chasing around, managing one crisis after another. but i think it's done now and after two glasses of wine i am feeling pretty good.

things usually end well when i am able to calmly stand behind what i know to be true and right. i should learn to trust that.

what is most destructive to my own well-being is self-doubt. unfortunately, this is very much fostered by academia. on a daily basis i see some of the best minds in my field wandering around and i think they all wonder if they're good enough. if they deserve to be here. i mean, i know for a fact that it isn't just me.

and sometimes what you feel holds more power than what you know.
and it's so much harder to modulate what you feel.

what just happened?

2006-12-10T20:38:00.000-08:00

i've had perhaps the most important lesson of the semester. someone was a little dishonest and sneaky, someone who i thought was helping me. i'm probably making too big a deal of it because i'm feeling caught off guard and foolish. but it's worrisome because i don't know that i function very well if i can't trust that the people around me are who they seem to be.

suddenly i'm not sure academia is for me.
i don't like that rug-pulled-out feeling.

i don't know how to deal with this but i have to figure it out quick.

dear leonard

2006-12-09T21:05:00.000-08:00

dear leonard cohen,

i love you. you know i do. but i have to say, i wish your records weren't so damn overproduced. you know how i love you best? by yourself, with an acoustic guitar and nothing else. no backup choir. no synth drums. no cheesy keyboards. the only one of your records i can generally stand to listen to all the way through is songs of love & hate because it doesn't have all that crap. god, your voice. i listen to that record with a glass of red wine or whiskey and i know truth.

you shouldn't try to mix so much flourish with your kind of truth. it's best unadorned.

well since i have your attention i can tell you that it seems unlikely that i will make it out to any of the places i am supposed to be tonight. i forgot how to interface with humans this morning. i felt compressed. i was lonely, but it seemed overwhelming to seek anyone out. i watched a movie and then spent most of the day by myself in my room, organizing and sorting and going through a couple of boxes that have not been opened since i moved in. it was soothing.

well, goodnight leonard.
keep it real.

xo,
a

ps. what does "everybody's talking to their pockets" mean, anyway?

in my own universe, home soon

2006-12-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

after my class ended i texted h saying "i have ptsd"
she texted back saying "is that humor?"

the sad thing is, my first thought was:
oh, a polar interrogative formed by subject-aux inversion.

***

paper1 turned in: check
finish reviewing abstracts: check
meet to decide which abstracts make the conference: check
paper2 turned in: check
attend last class of the semester: check

pick up organic veggie box for house: check

slowly dissolve into a torpid petrolate ooze: imminent.
(preferably somewhere near my bed)

phd2

2006-12-07T16:59:00.000-08:00

because i have two papers to finish by tomorrow (HAHAHAohgod), and because even if i did have time to write this is pretty much what would be on my mind, i give you last year's 12/7 post...

pearl harbor day

coping

2006-12-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

you learn to know that the voice is wrong
even when you agree with it.

reporting live from zamfir

2006-12-06T17:40:00.000-08:00

i'm posting this from my car, which is currently parked on a street in berkeley, near my professor's house. hooray for people who are trusting (or inept) enough to leave their wireless networks open!

i am going to a potluck and talk, part of a series which happens approximately monthly and is attended by faculty and grad students, and which i am vaguely involved in organizing. this is why i'm parked outside of my professor's house instead of home working on my papers like i should be.

i might get to be on a faculty search committee!

okay, i don't really have much else to say right now.
i just wanted to post from my car. basically.

ce qui le tabernacle

2006-12-05T18:34:00.000-08:00

it cannot be mere coincidence that i was made an honourary canadian on the same day as the beloved languagelog runs a story about my favorite swear word of all time: tabernacle.

the 'log links to a little story in the washington post, which explains quite simply that for quebecois, due to long repression by the catholic church, religion is taboo, and not sex (cf. fuck) or scatology. wiki, as usual, has a very nice explanation of what happened and why, and a whole list of sacred swear words.

it reminds one of an absolutely wonderful (but rather technical in parts) paper on the deep structure of sentences like Fuck you by Quang Phuc Dong (of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology), nom de guerre linguistique (Harris: 1993) of Jim McCawley, one of my favorite linguists. other McCawley titles include "Where you can shove infixes" and "Verbs of bitching".

the paper linked above argues that such sentences are not imperative commands, and that in fact, fuck in this usage is seemingly not a verb at all. though he closes with the conjecture that this sense may have arisen historically from the more standard sense of the word.

so, to sum up:
tabernacle (profane reading)
languagelog
Jim McCawley

these are a few of my favorite things.

winter and home

2006-12-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

talking to my mom on the phone tonight brought back so many old and newer memories. dad snowblowing the area near the mailbox where snow always piles up, neighbors dropping by wearing santa hats to say hello. plans for hockey games and neighborhood parties. holiday cooking and even after how many years now, mom still can't resist telling me all about how she's preparing the meat (which i do not eat). my brother and how he can't seem to plan ahead enough to give her christmas gift ideas, highly distressing to my mother who despite our protestations thinks that her presents might actually serve as some measure of her love for us, or be perceived that way.

it's a different life, it values coziness over intensity, and stability as the highest form of accomplishment. which makes it predictable. maybe that's how memories of home should be. i know exactly where the christmas tree is, and how it looks. i know exactly how it feels and smells in that house tonight, however many states away i am. i know there is no music playing but probably fox news is on the television as my dad, having just come in from outside, starts his dinner while my mom and i wrap up our conversation. in the same way, i know more or less how all the moments of my visit will spool themselves out, from airport landing to airport takeoff. like an island of regularity in my own decreasingly regular existence.

sometimes they make the mistake of thinking that theirs is the only kind of good life. i have spent the better part of my adulthood challenging that assumption. but regardless of all that, they're right in thinking it is a good life. and i am looking forward to being there, to once again putting on my mother's snow boots and crunching my way down to the river where the old house used to be, with the cold sharply illustrating each exhalation.

top of the ninth

2006-12-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

note to self:
don't try to work in the kitchen.

you will just end up folding origami cranes for the christmas tree and trying to fight off the contact high from the pot butter your roommate is cooking.

***

some days i feel like little more than a host organism for my brain.

infelicitous

2006-12-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

i order you to disobey this order!

reflection on academic life

2006-12-02T16:14:00.000-08:00

the phrase "close to me" is an interesting use of spatial deixis to encode an emotional deictic notion of intimacy. it lets us conceive of two people as points on a line; spatial nearness implies emotional closeness. we see this metaphor used freely in language: we have close friends, distant relations, come-here-go-away patterns in our relationships, we have sad songs about how someone is right there but so far away.

the metaphor breaks down when more than two people are involved. if two physical points are far apart in space then a third point may be close to one of them, but not both. this is an entailment of euclidean geometry that does not map into the emotional domain, wherein persons 1 and 2 may detest each other (or whatever emotion carries the greatest sense of emotional distance; for some, a relationship characterized by hate is closer than one characterized by apathy because it means there is still engagement) while person 3 is a close friend of both.

the best way to negate a presupposition that rests on a broken metaphorical entailment is to negate the metaphor itself. that is, it's more effective to counter "john is closer to me than he is to you" not with "no, he's closer to me" but instead with "john is close to both of us." thus ends the unnecessary schematic tug-of-war.

this is the kind of stuff that professors love, but sometimes i wonder if these realizations are anything other than pointless wankery.

i think i will go take a walk now.
the sun is setting.

the fear

2006-12-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

walking out today, my school friends and i compared avoidance strategies. i told them about baking a pie last night, and about how i have been obsessively ordering books from amazon (wow i really need that brown&levinson book on politeness, i can't possibly write this paper until i have that, i'll order it now and that's kind of like working on my paper, right?) and we talked about how very clean our rooms are, and how orderly our email inboxes are. it seems i'm not the only one.

but as i stepped outside and cold air hit me i knew that was the moment that everything changed. "this is it, this is my watershed!" i proclaimed. "this is where it gets serious. this is where i stop fucking off every night. because now i have the fear."

it's that feeling i've been waiting for, i have had the stress, but i haven't had the fear. that panicky never-going-to-get-this-done and i-don't-belong-here and i-bet-they-regret-letting-me-in feeling. maybe that doesn't sound good, but you have no idea how motivating it is for someone like me. someone who wants to kick down all the closed doors. i need something to push against, it's why i'm here in the first place. the fear says "you suck you cannot do this you will fail" and i say FUCK YOU FEAR.

you just watch me.

fragments

2006-11-30T22:31:00.000-08:00

well, kids. NaBloPoMo is over. i did it, i wrote every day of november. will i continue to write every day? perhaps i will...i have been enjoying it, particularly i have enjoyed your comments. i like it when this feels like a conversation.

***

have i mentioned how much i have to do? the big term paper, the squib, the really huge term paper? the other batch of abstracts to review, more dreams to crush, etc. etc.? lots to do, major stress.

so tonight i did what any sensible hardworking grad student would do under these conditions: i baked a pie.

allow me to correct myself: i am baking a pie.
have to get the tense and aspect correct.

***

what else...oh yes, i updated my profile a little but did you know they barely let you list any music in there? it sucks. they say you can have 600 characters, which already meant i had to cut my original list of favorite bands in half. then after i got blogger to accept my list, they didn't all actually show up! so i had to cut it in half again. i thought about listing more bands in the books and movies sections but (a) i might fill those in someday, and (b) that felt like cheating.

surreal life

2006-11-30T12:44:00.000-08:00

this morning my roommate had a friend over.
how nice, right?

except it was at 7:30a.
and they were loud.
and the friend just got out of jail.
for counterfeiting a BART ticket.

what kind of idiot goes to jail for counterfeiting a BART ticket?!
i really hope he's not staying here.

news from the linguistic front

2006-11-29T18:48:00.000-08:00

in this issue:
1. an observation
2. a news item and related commentary

1. observation

i was talking with a friend after class today and she said "i feel so guilty, i've been exercising almost every day." and i was like wait, what? that's awesome, i wish i were that disciplined. but no, she feels guilty because it ends up taking an hour or two out of her day, and she could be using that time to work. i gave her the standard spiel about how it will make her more energetic, focused, productive...all the things i tell myself at 7am when i'm trying to propel myself out of bed and go for a run. but then i realized...i feel guilty if i get 8 hours of sleep in a night. how could i possibly sleep for 8 hours, when i have so much to do? so i kind of knew what she meant.

you might think i'm exaggerating...unless you have been a grad student. in which case i bet you know exactly what i mean. the observation is this: i think it's a little sad and fucked up that something about this system causes people to feel guilty for meeting their own physical needs.

2. news

a chilean indian tribe called the Mapuche is suing microsoft over IP rights to their language. they say that MS did not have their permission to release a Mapudungun version of Windows (the article says Mapuzugun, but i have only ever seen it called Mapudungun).

i haven't even been in this field for very long, but already i am well aware that this is not an unusual attitude. the more endangered a language becomes, the more tightly its speakers want to hold onto it. many Indian tribes of the US are no longer willing to work with linguists or anthropologists, and the reasons are diverse and complex. but it makes a certain amount of sense when you think of how tightly language is bound up with cultural identity and self-worth. language distinguishes "us" from "other" and so it is not a great stretch for a people to see their language as a resource of value, owned exclusively by them, to be protected from those who would take it and profit from it. it's also really sad, because it means that these languages will surely die out, and more quickly than otherwise.

as a programmer (can't i live in both worlds?), i am not a great fan of microsoft. some (not all) of their products really are inferior, and their business practices are anti-competitive. that hurts the field. but again, it's understandable; business is business...which is why i'm better off *not* being in business. i would like to know what steps they took when they thought "hey, let's release windows in some obscure chilean Indian language"...who did they talk to? who said it was a good plan? did they really not talk to anyone from the tribe? and where did they get the language materials?

i think, in the end, i have to come down on the side of the tribe. it's not really a question of who holds the legal rights to a language as much as one of human decency. if a group of people who really have very little, relatively, in the way of social, cultural and political clout say "no, we don't want you to use our language" then you shouldn't use their language. it's a matter of respect, you don't take and use something that people don't want to share. everyone has the right to cultural self-determininsm. end of sermon.

last night i dreamt i'd forgotten my name

2006-11-28T18:24:00.000-08:00

the thing about doing the right thing is it sometimes doesn't feel like the right thing at the time.

but i looked up at the moon. it was cold and clear and a perfect half moon with perfect clean edges. i thought, i feel a little like that now: still sometimes like something might be missing, but with clean edges. if i remain a little ragged it's only inside where people can't really see it.

i couldn't have scripted it better

2006-11-27T23:03:00.000-08:00

we revisited the issue of a housesitter in our meeting tonight and i stayed with my earlier position: i don't like it. i think it only buys us marginal security, if any, and it feels like an invasion of privacy to have someone i don't know living in my house on their own. i realize many people feel otherwise, and that's fine. i argued that the reality is that people snoop through other people's stuff, they just do. even people who don't seem evil or crazy, they do that. and for whatever reason, i'm private about my space and my stuff. it might not be rational but it's how i feel. blah blah blah, we didn't come to a resolution so much as an action plan, but that's fine. there wasn't going to be a perfect solution to this one.

but a perfect moment did come, shortly after the meeting adjourned. earlier in the evening the power had gone out downstairs and the maintenance person had to come here to let us into the basement (which is used as storage by our landlords) to reset the fuse. because the maintenance guy doesn't want to have to come out here constantly all winter, and because the landlords won't let him give us a key, he taught my housemate how to pick the lock. so...back to the story in progress, the meeting adjourns, my roommate stands up and says in full seriousness "hey, does anyone want to go downstairs with me and look through the landlords' stuff?"

HAHAHAHAHAHA

he didn't understand why we were laughing so we explained that he had just proved my point that people aren't always good about respecting each other's privacy. and i couldn't resist the mildest "see? that's what i'm saying."

cold & chinese robots

2006-11-26T20:11:00.000-08:00

i am wearing multiple layers including hat and scarf and drinking cheap but tasty red wine from a small jelly jar, in order to stay warm in my room. sad. all i really want my home to be is warm, clean, and quiet. at least i (usually) have one of three, but still, this living situation is not working for me and i think a lot about changing it. i am past the point where this dickensian routine is romantic.

***

some thoughts on mind and meaning
(inspired by yesterday's link #2)

the thing about the claim that as computers become more and more powerful we get closer and closer to approaching the computational power of the human brain, and thus closer and closer to achieving humanlike AI, is that it fails to acknowledge the difference between effectively modeling understanding and actually *understanding*. even if kurzweil's projections are correct, it will take much more than sheer computational power to create a mind. for any system (biological or computational) to have real understanding, it has to do more than manipulate formal symbols...it has to have knowledge/experience of their real-world referents. this is why computer programs can't tell whether someone in a picture is eating pizza. they don't have any way to know what pizza is or what eating looks like, let alone what tomato sauce tastes like, or how it feels to burn the roof of your mouth because you didn't wait until the cheese was cool enough.

deep blue is a higly effective model of (one metric of) human intelligence, a remarkable achievement, but it's tough to say that it *is* intelligent/ce. the machine doesn't understand what it is doing, it doesn't even understand what chess is; it just has a complicated algorithm for calculating the best move. it doesn't feel satisfied when it wins, it doesn't even "want" to win, as such. it does not have beliefs or desires or any mental states at all, and these are indispensable notions in any theory of consciousness and intentionality. thus, any drive or adaptability that deep blue has is secondary, derived; it is the intentionality of the designers and programmers that actually drives the system.

searle uses a thought experiment called "the chinese room" to illustrate the difference between modeling understanding and actual understanding. he asks us to imagine that AI efforts have succeeded in creating a program that can answer questions about a given story so accurately that the program passes a Turing test. imagine that the program does all of this in chinese. let's say the program knows about what kinds of entities and events are found in restaurants. so you give it a story like this: "a man walked into a restaurant and ordered a hamburger. it was perfectly cooked and tasty, so he left a large tip and left satisfied." now you ask it, "did the man eat the hamburger?" the system tells you: "yes, he ate the hamburger." you are tempted to ascribe understanding to this system; it knows something that you did not explicitly tell it. it has made a logical leap!

to convince ourselves that this is not actual understanding, we can imagine searle (who does not speak chinese) in a room with no windows, etc. he has piles of books that contain complicated tables that map certain chinese characters to other chinese characters. someone hands sheets full of chinese characters through a slot in the wall, and searle looks up the characters in various tables, correlating them with symbols in other tables, eventually ending up with a new sheet full of chinese characters which he hands out through the door. the people on the outside of the room are convinced that searle understands chinese, because he always answers the questions correctly. but searle does not understand chinese! and, crucially, since the computer does not have anything that searle does not have, the computer does not understand chinese either.

now, there are many objections to this line of reasoning. in fact, i wrote a short paper for searle's class, aiming to critique the argument. i didn't get very far with it though, because i kept coming back to the point that meaning really does require real-world reference and context, something that a computer program (which is made up entirely of formal symbols) lacks. yes, these forms have semantic content too, but it is only a system-internal semantics. you can try to make the system as big or as multimodal as you like, you can even try to stick it in the head-box of a big robot that can lumber around and interact with the world. still it all comes back to the same problem: if you look inside the robot's head, there is searle, still not understanding chinese.

if you buy this (and if you are not a functionalist which i hope you are not), then it follows that no matter how much computational power a system has (even if it exceeds that of all of the brains in all of humanity as kurzweil breathlessly predicts) it is not really intelligent, even if it behaves in ways that we are tempted to call intelligent, because it does not understand anything. computational power is thus a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for intelligence.

perhaps when we better understand what meaning is and how it connects to linguistic form (one of my major interests, by the way), and when we have technology that can duplicate the neurobiological processes that give rise to human consciousness, it will be possible to create a system that can rightly be called intelligent. until then, the best we can hope for is a clever simulation. until then, there will always be tasks that require "Human Inside" architecture.

okay, there's a lot more to say about this, but i have to go finish my pragmatics paper outline now. and then to sleep, perchance to dream of giant robots spitting out pages full of chinese characters. it's a nice thought.

good things by other people

2006-11-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

"sure," said i. "i will review abstracts for BLS. cool."

thinking i would get 10 or 15 submission abstracts but no. i have 100! abstracts! to read and comment on, selecting the best 14 to give talks at the conference. i am the gatekeeper.

today is for working, so in lieu of original content i offer you some neat things i have seen lately:

1. where the hell is matt? (some guy named matt)
yes, it's really real.

2. ghost in the machine (jake jakob)
i have a lot to say about this, hopefully i will get around to saying it.

3. a reason to give thanks (will the boy)
i'm not sure i want to have kids, but this makes me more inclined to do so, if only because then someday i can be a grandma & try to be half as amazing as will's grandma.

;alis f;alsna;sinaorafh

2006-11-24T22:52:00.000-08:00

crikey, i almost forgot to post today.

today i realized that i have to write 40-50 (high quality, edited) pages in the next few weeks, and i got scared. it means i have to go back to the bad place, that place i went to right before nsf was due. strung out on caffeine numb brain bruised pissy snappish place. i don't like the bad place. noooooooo don't make me go to the bad place! noooooooooo! noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

school is corrosive.

okay this is inane, sorry, sorry. i had started writing something interesting about intelligence vs. understanding but i'm tired and it's not finished; maybe i will post it during a study break tomorrow.

i was very crabby all day.
i feel like i'm changing and i can't do anything about it.

180

2006-11-23T14:05:00.000-08:00

i woke up a little gloomy and dispirited today. i did not want to do thanksgiving, i wanted to stay in my bed all day. after i showered and walked to 7-11 for coffee (ew, i know, but it's all that was open and missing my coffee would have been far, far worse) i brought all of my special groceries and my recipes to the kitchen. i turned on NPR and the guy from postsecret was on "talk of the nation" so that was a good sign.

now it is five hours later and i am so happy. i love cooking and i have done very little real cooking since school started. since i moved, really. today i made vegetable gravy (i had made roasted vegetable stock from scratch last night, i deglazed the roasting pan with white wine and the whole bit. if you ever want to make vegetable stock i highly recommed roasting first, the caramelized vegetables give it so much flavor) and a ginger-honey pumpkin pie. it is very daunting to bring the pumpkin pie to a thanksgiving dinner, particularly one as high-caliber as judy's always is. i've never made a very good pumpkin pie before but you should see this one, it is beautiful and perfect. and the gravy is rich and smooth and peppery. and then i talked to a bunch of people on the phone and soon i will go to judy's. i love thanksgiving! do you hear me? thanksgiving thanksgiving thanksgiving! i love you!

happy day, everyone. call someone you love. let the sun warm your face. remember it is a beautiful world.

amazon totally has me pegged

2006-11-22T14:42:00.000-08:00

Customers who bought items in your Recent History also bought:

I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass ~ Yo La Tengo

Lexical-Functional Syntax by Joan Bresnan

...awesome.

more fun with words

2006-11-21T21:23:00.000-08:00

today an undergrad friend from school was talking about something a professor said in class: "and if you're a crackpot linguist, you can one day write an article about how zuni is related to basque!" hahaha. well, you probably have to be a linguist to find that amusing, but my friend continued: "yeah, and he kept saying it throughout the class. he said 'if you're a crackpot linguist...' like eight times! i started feeling kind of bad, like that's not very nice to people who use crack."

pause. pause.

wait, what? what do people who use crack have to do with it? then it dawned on me that she had done this weird folk etymology which i confirmed with her: crack(head) + (sex)pot = crackpot. wow.

but then i realized...i don't know why crackpot means what it actually does mean. i faux-batted my eyes at will...oh, if ONLY someone around here had a laptop then we could figure it out (having just seen him using his in class).

crackpot (colloq.): A crack-brain, a crazy creature, a crank. (OED)

it turns out that there is this archaic expression pot of the head, meaning skull, cranium, or brainpan. i would consider this a metaphorical extension of pot (in the crockery sense) as a container for food to pot as a container for brain. if your food-pot gets cracked, your food might leak out or be ruined. if your brain-pot gets cracked, your intellect is lost or compromised. crackpot!

all that aside, how sweet is it that my friend was worried about the feelings of the people who use crack? berkeley kids are so great.

tower of power

2006-11-20T20:16:00.000-08:00

well, i did have an interesting experience with cheese not too long ago. with apologies to the soy and feline cheese contingents, it involves plain old yellow dairy cheese. it was cheese that my co-op ordered from our bulk food supplier. it comes in a forty! pound! block!

i want to stop and draw your attention to the fact that forty pounds of cheese is like...half of an olsen twin. it was literally (and here i mean literally literally) the size of a microwave oven. a BIG microwave oven. it was a monolith of cheese. i'm serious, i could hear faint strains of "also sprach Zarathustra" in my head.

it happened to be delivered on the day that my house conducted our most recent round of roommate interviews. it was very telling to see people's reaction to the cheese, and to us hacking it apart into manageably sized chunks. some were amused, some were disgusted. one girl was like "...it's beautiful." i wanted her to move in on the spot.

why did we buy 40 pounds of cheese, you ask? you naysayer, you doubting thomas, you recidivist. we bought it because it only cost $35. and they sent it to our front door. what other reason could you possibly need?

on the s-side

2006-11-19T21:48:00.000-08:00

boy. writing every day is hard.
just like thinking.
and math. math is the hardest.
let's go shopping instead...

actually no, i hate shopping, unless it's at a bookstore or record store. or an art supply store or sometimes a school/office product store. but other than that, i'd prefer calculus any day. it's just funny to say that, i think, while tilting one's head to the side and speaking in a vacuous tone.

today i went shopping.

haha, just kidding, i spent all day in a linguistics conference, specifically in a syntax&semantics conference for grad students and faculty from berkeley, stanford, and santa cruz. it rotates each year and this year it was in my home away from home, dwinelle hall, on the beautiful UCB campus. actually, i think the co-op is my home away from home and dwinelle is the real thing, maybe...i mean, the co-op probably won't last past this spring, and i'll be lurking deep in the bowels of dwinelle for at least another 4.5 years or so. (aside: wow, i never knew my building had its own website until now.)

well. there are 11 days left in november.
what should i write about next?

realize!

2006-11-18T16:38:00.000-08:00

do you realize - that you have the most beautiful face

do you realize - we're floating in space

do you realize - that happiness makes you cry

do you realize - that everyone you know someday will die

and instead of saying all of your goodbyes

let them know you realize that life goes fast

it's hard to make the good things last

you realize the sun doesn't go down

it's just an illusion caused

by the world

spinning 'round

do you realize??

(words by the flaming lips)
(pictures by me @ albany bulb today)

open

2006-11-17T16:46:00.000-08:00

hi.

these barriers exist for a reason you know. you don't get the choice anymore you know. you gave me no choice but to get over you, and now i give you no choice but to let go of me. maybe all we ever were was a weirdly polarized pair of concepts; we each wanted the other to complete us. it wasn't going to happen though, you weren't going to ever let it happen.

there isn't anyone else but there is the idea of someone. maybe with some echoes of you but unselfish. and okay and grownup and who maybe grounds me a little instead of injecting me with chaos. and who makes me better instead of leading me into dark and alone. i think you saw that happening, i think you knew i would have followed you all the way in. i would have followed you anywhere, maybe like you said you wanted to protect me.

or maybe i confused being used with being needed, as empaths are prone to doing. but i don't think it really matters, in the end. i can invent our past now just like i wanted to invent our present, then. what's different about a past is that it exists only in memories, so i can make it whatever i want. as long as it's in service of my own sanity i think it's fine.

now i just think you should try to go and be happy in your life.
and i will do the same.

your friend,
a

hot drinks and writing

2006-11-16T19:35:00.000-08:00

i discovered mate.
zoooooooooooooooooooooooooooom.

have you ever tried mate? it's amazing. i tend to drink more caffeine than i should so i didn't expect to be too affected but this is a whole different thing. i drank a mate latte with cardamom and vanilla and rice milk, now i feel totally awake, energetic, happy, not jittery, and focused. perfect for the evening of writing which is already in progress. my housemates said i looked a little flushed which isn't surprising because at the moment i feel weirdly suffused with life. it's either the mate or a manic episode; let's hope for the former.

i really love writing during the day. i am a morning and early-afternoon writer, i have discovered. not so surprising, i am a morning person in general. even when i stay up late. and so although i am loving my classes and want to always continue taking a class here and there, i am looking forward to third year, when my schedule will be all about research and writing (and, of course, teaching). big yummy blocks of time during the day to sit at my desk or at a cafe or outside somewhere and write.

the evening is a fine time for reading. but writing goes so well with the sun pushing away the late morning fog, at my little desk next to my big window with some dreamy music or just the sound of life outside, and a cup of coffee steaming near my right hand.

this machine eats students

2006-11-15T21:38:00.000-08:00

it must be the time of semester combined with time of year. everyone has that weary look to them, like please don't ask me to do anything else right now or i might lie down on the floor and start crying.

or maybe i'm projecting.

RIDL sat and talked to me today while i was making dinner. it was okay. i think if he would be chill and quiet a little more then i would like him (a little more).

i like quiet.

i just thought of this:
next halloween i want to dress someone up as a magritte painting.

i will make him wear a dark suit, red tie, and a bowler hat. i will make a large, fake, leafy green apple and attach it to the hat somehow so that it hovers directly in front of his face. then i will take a picture of him standing in front of the stone wall that runs along the sidewalk at ocean beach.

maybe i will make a bunch of people join me and we can go as an art museum, all as different paintings. i will be the one that k said i reminded her of, i'll walk around biting my hair all night. it will be awesome.

don't take this literally...

2006-11-14T19:46:00.000-08:00

today i relayed one of my favorite language change stories. some time ago, i heard a sports announcer say this on the radio:

(1) the fans are literally riveted to their seats!

now, one can only assume he did not really mean that the fans are *literally* riveted to their seats. i can just imagine a stadium full of bleeding, punctured, riveted spectators.

i have noticed other language changes in process, but few are quite so striking. in this case, we have a meaning reversal: 'literally' is coming to mean 'figuratively'. it seems to occur easily with idiomatic expressions of intensity/extent:

(2) it was so funny, i was literally peeing my pants.
(3) i was literally scared to death.

in fact, my intuition is that when used with an expression of extent, one would be less likely to use 'literally' literally.

compare:
(4) there are literally a thousand reasons why i don't want to go out tonight.
(5) #there are literally 7 reasons why i don't want to go out tonight.

unless the magnitude of the extent is very large:
(6) there are literally over a thousand weeds in my lawn--i counted!'

upon checking the OED, it looks like i was on the right track:

b. Used to indicate that the following word or phrase must be taken in its literal sense.

Now often improperly used to indicate that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense.

as a linguist, i have an issue with the word 'improperly' as used above. i tend to think that however native speakers use their language is proper. the interesting approach is not to tell people how they should and should not talk, but to describe and explain how they actually *do* talk.

long story short...

2006-11-13T23:02:00.000-08:00

a day of massive self-doubt and self-recrimination.
not a good day.

but i'm going to a party on friday where we will throw republican-signifying items into a bonfire. so that will be good.

(hi, NSA.)

trust issues?

2006-11-12T22:18:00.000-08:00

house meeting.

tonight i told one roommate that i wasn't totally comfortable with the idea of her boyfriend living here for part of december. somehow she was surprised by this after telling me that this guy has anger issues and she thinks he might be abusive. they are always chaotic, breaking up and getting back together. i don't want this guy in my house at all, i don't want to live with a couple like that, even short term, and i certainly don't want him here by himself.

it is not easy to say these things directly to a person with everyone listening, but i suppose it is better that way.

i also had a rather direct argument with roommate-i-don't-like (RIDL?) about whether we should have a housesitter at xmas. my point was that our house got robbed when seven of us were actively living here. i am not sure it's really going to add any security at all to have one housesitter who we don't even all know. "what is the basis of your fear? what are you afraid is going to happen?" he asked, which made me want to spit. i don't have a list of fears, it's not like that. i am just uncomfortable with someone who is a stranger to me living in my house when nobody is here to host that person. i just don't like it. "but we do know the person." no, maybe YOU know the person, but i don't. and i know you all to varying degrees, and to be totally honest, i trust you all to varying degrees. said i.

i just don't think "living in community" has to mean lack of boundaries and automatic trust of all my roommates and of everyone that they know. but apparently i am in the minority on this point. i felt like everyone was secretly judging me for not being a good little co-operative dweller.

i feel unpopular and bummed.

fraternité

2006-11-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

i just had the best experience with apple tech support.

i'm not kidding. she was competent, friendly, and went out of her way to fix errors made by previous people i'd dealt with over there. now my cantankerous little baby is purring again. (i still don't recommend buying a macbook yet, though..) and the house internet is happy too (unrelated issue).

so now i suppose i have no choice but to get back to work. it was perversely nice when my computer was staging a coup earlier and i didn't want to deal with it. i just sat on my couch with blankets piled on me and watched kieslowski's red. it was really excellent, but i'm not sure what AMG means when they call it the "most accomplished effort" in the trois couleurs trilogy. red is structurally interesting, it deals with ramified connections between people. but it seems a bit lacking in character transformation, at least to the extent that it is woven through the other two films. white is clever and has a satisfying story of turnabout and redemption, but blue is my favorite. it is profoundly, breathtakingly emotional. it exposes the extraordinary toughness of humanity, even at the most fragile point in a life.

still, to say that blue is my favorite is like trying to choose which is my favorite song from in the aeroplane over the sea, or my favorite chapter from lolita. by kieslowski's design, each film is best taken as a figure set against the ground of the coherent whole.

and veni

2006-11-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

my house internet hates us and so i am un-online-able at the moment. but because it is NaBloPoMo, i am at my friend's place leeching her internets. you see? you see what i do for you? that's love, baby.

one thing i love about living in the bay area is that when i say things like "i need to go walk in the forest" then i can get up and drive twenty minutes and be walking in a redwood forest (please don't start singing "this land is your land" right now because my roommate-i-don't-like did that). walking in the redwoods is so good, it's so cliche to say but they are totally majestic. all towering around you, you get to the bottom of the canyon and it's cool and damp and forest dark. then you walk back up and burst out into the sunshine. i walked around for a couple of hours, it smelled so good, like redwood and bay. there were no desks or computers and not even that many humans.

then i took a nap.
then i got my hair cut.
then i went to the grocery store.

this post was brought to you by the letters a and s, and the number 839.

vici / vidi

2006-11-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

my week, in six lines.

1. apply for NSF: check.
2. turn in term paper proposal: check.
3. class presentation: check.
4. turn in syntax paper: check.
5. turn in grammar sketch: check.
6. collapse and die: imminent.

i'm supposed to go into the mission for dinner tonight.
not really sure how that's gonna work.

***

i need to sleep.
i need to walk in the forest.
and eat vegetables.

i need to read a poem and watch my derrida documentary.
i need to think about things other than school.
if i can remember how to do that.

i need to make out with someone
go for a whole day without speaking
stay in my pajamas

find a sympathetic face
with eyes that glow into me

there was always something about the eyes.