The Laursonian Institute

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

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

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

Yay, it’s election day tomorrow!

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

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

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

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

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

Oh daily blog, what happened to you?  I wish I weren’t so busy and so frustrated around bedtime when I should be relaying to you all the triumphs of my days.  I don’t recall the last time I wrote.  Suffice it to say that several days have passed, included within them Halloween, the midterm for my TA class, and Lewis and I’s fourth anniversary of dating.  Seems a little crazy to be embarking on year five already!  Woot to that.

Today was good.  I got up early so we could drive to the Bay Area to go to the SF Opera with our old work buddies Charlise and Nina.  Turns out I got up an hour earlier than intended (5:45?  Goodness me.) so I got a lucky extra hour of sleep after that once I realized my time shifting mistake.  But we were still up and out of the house fairly early, and made it to the Bart with just a few minutes to spare to make our perfect train.  Ran into Nina at McArthur while changing trains, and then ran into Christine and Kim on the escalator coming up from Civic Center… turns out all four of us were on the same train!  Quelle surprise.  So we made it to the Opera, found Charlise, and had a lovely brunch at Citizen Cake.  Got to see Charlise’s apartment in the city for a moment, and had some coffee and purused books at Books, Inc. / Peets.

We got to go stand in line for a few minutes to get in the good standing-room-only spots (though Charlise had already reserved herself the first and second spots…) and we got to see a pre-opera lecture (short) about the work we were going to see.  Saw Boris Godunov, which was okay, though I didn’t like it as much as the last one we saw there, Ariodante.  But the company was superb and I had an excellent time galavanting around the city with our pals.  Yay Ask, and yay San Francisco.  Made me want to go Christmas shopping being so close to Union Square!

Okay, enough dallying… I really ought to get a little work done today while I still can.  Off to transcribe…

November 2nd, 2008 | Tags: anniversary, friends, halloween, opera, san francisco | Category: life | Comments Off

Hooooboy.  It’s a week.  It’s midterm week for my chilluns.  I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but work for this class in the last week (overlooking, of course, our oh-so-important data gathering fieldtrip Sunday I failed to write about).  I spent all weekend grading papers and homeworks and writing the midterm for this Friday.  Blurg.  I got no reading done, and have been generally lacking in sanity for a number of consecutive days.

I just need to focus on getting through tomorrow, and get through Thursday.  I have some freedom thereafter.  No sessions on Friday, one class canceled on Thursday.. if only I didn’t have to present a few papers that morning anyway.  Sigh.  But it’ll be alright.

I guess I was just hoping that I’d feel footloose and fancy free after the scariest part of my quarter, collecting data, was over.  But instead it felt like the last milestone before the marathon.  I didn’t know I could “buckle down” any more than I have been, but there you go.  A few nights worth of being up at 8 am and working till midnight is starting to wear on me a bit.  But I think I can hold out till Friday.  Which is also Halloween.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to carve my pumpkin that afternoon?  Seems sad that it would happen after Halloween…

I did sign up for classes today, and pretty much get (finally) caught up on my work that’s been slippery-sloping (if you will) since last week.  Pretty soon here I need to pick my paper topic for my theory class and get moving on my research.  Classes for next term are looking really neat.  I’m taking Advanced Semantics, the Philosophy of Language (why do I do this to myself?), and the introductory Functional Cognitive Imaging (where I get to learn to read fMRIs from a cognitive science standpoint) …  It’s quite a load.  Also, I’m the reader (as in, paper grader) for Intro Phonology, which ought to be righteous.  I’m a bit nervous overall, but it should be good to sink my teeth into some serious theory and stretch my wings / broaden my horizons into the more concrete brain science business.  I hope!

Alright, it’s midnight already and by my count I’ve finished everything on my to do list today and more.  Quite a bit more.  Go me.  Go me, to bed.

October 28th, 2008 | Tags: classes, grading, halloween, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

I’m sitting here, listening to the ‘Cab, wearing my Sonic Boom shirt, and thinking about a place far away.  This has been a hell of a week… I’m really sort of starting to lose my “everything is going fine” shine and feel like worry is setting in thick and strong.  I sort of finished grading my essays today.  Finished in that I have the initial grades done, but they need to be looked over again and compared against the other TAs grades to make sure we’re on the same scale.  I also maybe got the microphones for Sunday secured… lets hope so.  I’m going to sign up for classes next week.  Next quarter is sounding really great to me these days.  Three classes… no TAing.  Phew.

There’s a part of my soul that feels cowed.  Like I threw my hat in the ring, and now that I’m in the ring, I’m not sure what I’m doing here.  I feel like I’ve spent the last 6 years working for this moment.  And I’m not feeling very exuberant.  I’m feeling scared, and stressed, and cowed.  I hate to think I’d give something up solely because it seems to hard, but I’ve been called a quitter before.  And it would be disingenuous to suggest I never quit things for being hard.  I’ve done it pleanty.  But I don’t think this is one of those times.  I worked too hard to be here, and I really don’t have anything without this.  This time, there is no “normal” to go back to.  Trying harder is really all there is, because my whole life looks like chaos without grad school.  I don’t think I could ever stomach failure on that grand of a scale.

But god I’m tired. And I feel so inadequate.  And nights like this, part of me sees going home to Seattle as an easy escape.  A place where people don’t have expectations of me, and everything is familiar and calm.  How ridiculous that I feel like I fled Seattle because people had expectations of me I didn’t want to deal with.  Life isn’t always very straightforward.

October 23rd, 2008 | Tags: fear, malaise, tired | Category: life | Comments Off

This whole week has been ones of those where at the end of my day my whole body just shuts down.  I sit down to blog, knowing I have lots of stories to share, and my eyes slowly close, I sink in my seat, and my brain starts to run, run….

The last several nights I’ve had a hard time getting to sleep despite being as tired as I am now.  At some point work tapers off and exhaustion sets in, but my brain never stops worrying about what I’m doing, or need to do, or should do, or might forget to do.  There are so many tiny pieces of input into my day I really need a better way to organize them.  I like to think I’ve got a good short term memory, but with as much reading and learning and the all-exhausting taing I’m doing, there just aren’t any neurons left to fill that purpose.  Things just fall right our of my head, like a sieve.  It reminds me of laundry day, where at the end of the day you’ve folded so many socks you can’t carry them all at once, but you try to anyway.  No matter how big of a handfull or armload you think you can carry, you inevitably drop a bunch of socks on the way to the drawer.  Those socks are my thoughts.  And they keep spilling on the floor.

Wednesday has to be my worst day.  I know Fridays I teach more, but they have this added bonus, a character of flippancy almost, because they’re Fridays.  I know that all I have to do is make it through that two hours of teaching, and I’m really off free for almost three whole days.  Nevermind that I do more work in those three days than the remaining four, but there are no social obligations which takes the pressure off quite a bit.  Except, of course, this weekend.  But sociolinguistics just wouldn’t be what it is if I didn’t have to do something as partially terrifying as asking pointed questions about strangers’ lives.  And this is the one and only time I have to do this.  In the forseeable future.  Ish.

I don’t really feel like talking about class today.  I did a lot today.  I’m now two-thirds done grading essays.  I remembered (whoo!  remembering anything!) to print out a bunch of papers I need for my 260 project.  I even read half of one.  I got my section done, and it went pretty well, despite my total lack of semantics knowledge.  I did a million tiny tasks this morning… tried to set up an email list, sent some emails I needed to do, and this evening I got my schedule for next week up. My schedule for next week looks, if at all possible, scarier than this weeks.  But I think after this, it levels out.  I present in 260 on Tuesday, and that’s the only thing I need to do (officially..) besides the final project in any of my classes.  Phew.

But really the only major happening of my day was that my tire was again (arg!) flat when I got out of section.  And I put new tires (actual tires, not tubes) on my bike just two days ago!  Anyway, it did make it obvious that my 5-times-patched tube was inadequate, and I was meaning to get new tubes anyway.  So I took it to the bike shop (by which I mean Davis has about nine..) and they had just enough time to change my tube before they closed.  Yay.  My bike always rides so well with properly inflated tires, and it turns out I was way under inflating the new tires.  My old ones were 65 psi, but the new ones go up to 100, which is way firmer than I’m used to.  Rode home like a dream.

Came home to my wonderful Lewis, who hugged my stressful day away.  And then made me delicious dinner.  The ol’ quinoa stuffed baked squash bit of heaven.  So tasty.  And I am so ready for bed.  Here’s to tomorrow, an easier day than today.

October 22nd, 2008 | Tags: bike, list, mind running, schedule, sleeplessness, taing, tired | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Redwoods this time.  Not so many semantics trees.  I’m feeling rather too tired to post anything proper as I didnt’ get any sleep last night… and I spent all day grading and reading.  So instead I’m going to post this picture of the Redwood Grove I took today and pretend that my life and my brain are as serene as all that.  Enjoy:

Is it me or do none of these trees branch?

October 21st, 2008 | Tags: tired, trees | Category: life | Comments Off

What a wonderful day!

Got up early, but spent most of my day grading the first set of homework.  That stuff really burns me out… but the kids seem to be getting syntax more than I feared they might, so that’s great!  Maybe we won’t have so much work to do this week to get syntax whipped into shape.  Yay. I also made cider this morning! It’s delicious and it makes the whole house smell nice while it steeps. I even used our own homemade apple juice from a big bag of jonagolds I juiced a few days ago. So tasty.

As soon as I was done with that, I was ready to get out of the house!  Lewis and I borrowed a car and got ourselves down to a bike shop to fix my poor tires.  Turns out I have an abnormal tire size, so the first shop sent us away with a referral to a different shop.  Second shop only had one set of tires that would fit me bike, so that’s what we’ve got now.  They’re “slicks” (as in, have no tread) which I’ve never ridden on before, but as the guy at the bike shop helpfully pointed out, the barely treaded and now worn down tires I was using were essentially treadless anyway.  Gave the bike a test drive this evening with the new gear, and so far so good.  It’s also nice to have brand new tires that don’t have any structural problems or previous wounds.  If only I could say the same for my tubes!

Anyway, after the bikeventure, we took ourselves to a pumpkin patch to pick out some halloween friends!  Getting there was a bit of an adventure, actually, since Lewis and I had borrowed the manual transmission Bug, and neither of us have driven stick for quite some time.  As it turns out, all my years of Giles (approximation here, not my car, but an identical looking one) played out in my favor. New VWs have touchy clutches, though the actual shifting is much smoother and less of a workout than my dear Giles. That poor guy had such shifting trouble! Anyway, I ended up driving to the pumpkin patch cause the stick was getting the better of Lewis. Must admit, it was fun!

Pumpkin patch was great. Lots of good gourds, lots of families and kids, and baby animals! In addition to a pumpkin patch, this particular place had a petting barn! We didn’t pay to go in (since going in pretty much meant the petting, not the looking portion, and it was mostly under-8 types), but we did wander the perimeter and admire all the cute things. They had baby rabbits, chickens, and kittens, and even a baby goat no bigger than our Boo. A very nice touch! So we made it home with our two-gourd bounty (mine, a traditional and stalwart looking pumpkin, and Lewis’ some sort of green gourd) for way less money than I anticipated. Yay!

Came home and sort of completely crashed, as is wont to happen. Failed on the dinner front, though I was all excited to make “Clare Hall Soup” today. Perhaps tomorrow. But importantly, I did manage to finish the reading I had set out for the night, and that puts me in pretty good stead for tomorrow. The Lawyers’ are coming over as well tomorrow for some general maintenance, so it ought to be a busy one. Ah, the weekend.

October 18th, 2008 | Tags: bike, cider, driving, grading, pumpkin, repair, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Oh beloved Friday, you have come to bless me again.

Class was great today.  We started semantics and it was really bueno.  I haven’t done semantics formally before, so it’s great to get a little primer before I take semantics next quarter from the same professor.  I’m really looking forward to it!

Had a delightfully social day after that.  Dionne came by my office hours to chat about our plan for next week to see if we needed to prep anything this afternoon.  We didn’t – hurrah!  Lewis came by shortly thereafter, and then we met up with fellow grad student Ariel to chat a bit about how classes are going and set up a Friday drinks plan for one of the upcoming weeks.  She’s in our 260 class with us, so it was nice to comisserate about certain things together.  She also is TAing this semester, and we’ll be TAing together in the spring.  Woot.

Sessions actually did pretty well!  Much better than Wednesday, despite feeling like it was going to be a flop.  Seems like maybe the Friday kids are whittling down to just the few who want to participate whereas maybe the Wednesday session still attracts those who feel like they should attend but don’t really want to.  Not sure.  Anyway, it’s always relieving to have another week behind us, and moving on towards the weekend.  Next week in sessions we’re talking about semntics, so that’ll be a bit of trouble, but after blazing through syntax today and for once feeling like I know what I’m doing, I’m read to tackle semantics for sure.

Came home and had some vino with Lewis while watching out most recently netflixed movie, Buster Keaton’s “The General”.  How much do I love Buster Keaton?  A lot!  I laugh so much more in his silent movies than I do most of the contemporary “comedies”.  It’s really amazing how much he can do with his face, and how acrobatic he is!  Good times had by all, for sure.  I’m hoping to get a few household-type projects done this weekend in addition to the regular work load.  I think I worked too hard last weekend and it really burned me out this week.  So I’m going to make cider this weekend, and attempt Clare Hall Soup #1.  Really not sure what I’m doing there, but it’s always worth a go.  Maybe some day I’ll figure out their secret daily-changing-but-always-sort-of-the-same recipe!  Also have a little home maintenance to do with the landlord/inlaws, and maybe my first sewing fix-it project.  Oo – and if we can borrow a car — to the you-pick pumpkin patch!!

What good stuff I have in store!  Yay!

October 17th, 2008 | Tags: class, crafts, movies, pumpkins, semantics, syntax, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off