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

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

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

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

I don’t even think there’s anything amiss, other than it’s been raining for a solid week.  Maybe that’s enough to bring a girl down in this land of bright sunshine and relative warmth.  Partially I know it’s because I’m stressed out about the semantics presentation I have to give next week, though that in itself isn’t either very important or very difficult.  Maybe it’s just the only thing I have to stress about?  I’m feeling underworked again.  Like my quarter is filled with people who have low expectations of me.   This makes me tired, and perpetuates this feeling that I have nothing to give.  I’m not a person who can run with an idea very long without guidance or support or counsil.  I have to monkey-bar my way up the ladder, I don’t sail on my own.  And I’m lacking those in-between-y grips.

I guess when it comes right down to it, I’m always just me, swinging into the unknown again and again.  And there are a lot of days I don’t feel like I have anything worth sharing.  And lonely on these bars without someone on the ground watching.  All I can do is keep swinging, and wondering where these bars lead, and how soon and how far I’m going to fall.

I got invited to give a talk to a student-run forum of phonologists and phoneticists at Berkeley and I’m not sure what at all to do with that.  On one hand, I don’t have any phonology research of the empiricle bent to present to these students in the next few months.  On the other hand, I’m deep in the murky depths of this theoretical phonology paper, and that might be interesting to share.  Provided I have some conclusion hammered out before that point.  Which is part of what’s making me so cranky this week… I’m definitely at an impass on my QP research and feeling fairly overlooked by the professor who is supposed to be overseeing that.  But I think a little distance and some time to think about it will do me some good.  Anyway, not sure what I’m going to tell Berkl folks at the moment, but it’s an interesting opportunity, and I’ve been invited to attend the ongoing events.  So if nothing of my own presentation happens, I could at least attempt to make some connections and see what folks are up to over there.  Unfortunately their meetings are at a really inconvenient time, at least for me to be in Berkeley.  *shrug*

Other less exciting things happened today.  I went to the dentist and got a thumbs up from everyone.  I went to my morning neuroscience class and felt pretty uninspired, but I partially (or perhaps even mostly?) blame that on my neuroscience midterm ennui from yesterday and my professor’s lack of preparation or enthusiasm this morning (he had just flown in from San Diego before class).  Made it through that, and I had intended to catch the very-much-seeming-important colloquia on “the functional anatomy of auditory processing” but I failed on that count.  It’s information I can gather elsewhere, and my mind was too burned out and unfocused for it to have done me much good.  Besides, it was the only chunk of time I had to get lunch before the dentist.   And goodness, getting to the dentist was a mess.  Sacramento isn’t really made for rain squalls… the freeway just about whited out and started flooding almost immediately.  I was really glad I only had a few miles left to go, and escaped the majority of the hard rain on the way home as well.

So I came home, made brownies, and watched movies on TV all night.  I just didn’t have it in me to be doing any more work.  I’m really just about at the end of my wick for whatever reason.  It feels like my restful night was already beneficial, if I may judge by my current state of relative complacency.   I think that’s a sure sign that I need to take it easy this weekend and prepare myself for my last midterm, and second half of this quarter.  Phew.  I’m ready for summer vacation already.. but I suppose I can at least look forward to spring break.  5 more weeks?