The Laursonian Institute

The Laursonian Institute

An exercise in thoroughness

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Posts tagged nerdery

Medicated

Today was a day for doing what I ought, taking my self-prescribed medicine, and getting on with my life.  I’ve been living under this fog of being underworked and unfocused.  Like trying to start a car which is frosted over and too cold to turn over.  LA was just the little vacation I needed.  It came on the perfect weekend – I just got a whole bunch of stuff to do, but wasn’t behind on anything, and thus got to go play and get all my work done.  I got a cold my last day there, and skipped yesterday’s Quechua and today’s semantics classes, and now I’m feeling really rested, restored, and caught up.  I worked all day today.  One of those life-affirming, productive, well-paced work days.  I got started this morning when Lewis went off to class, and I worked all the way until he came home for dinner and I got a ton of stuff done.

(Now to deliniate my list in a self-fulfilling manner:) I cleaned my desk, caught up on neuroscience powerpoints, did some neuro-reading, did Quechua homework, pronounciation practice, and song practice, set up a meeting with my TAing professor for tomorrow, cleaned the living room, did some research and brain-dumping on my phoneme paper, read an article for that, prepared for my meeting with research professor tomorrow, went out to Chinese food with the Lawyers (+Emily & Andrew!), screwed around with my computer’s layout, and studied all my Quechua flash cards!

Now it’s almost 11, and I’m feeling so accomplished and vaguely prepared for tomorrow.  I can’t remember the last time I went to bed feeling prepared for my next day of classes because I’ve actually studied everything I intended.  It’s good to be TAing again (at least, having work to grade) and I’ve got midterms coming up!   Not to mention, researching for my QP always gets me all excited.  I imagine this is what archeologists get to spend their lives doing – unearthing artifacts and surprising relations between things.  It gets my brain working so quickly, it’s like all my synapses are firing at the same time.  It’s crazy, like no other feeling I know.  I think I’m built for critical analysis.  I keep discovering these quotes in papers that just make me jump out of my chair.  I want to run down the street announcing, “Hockett said it in 1942!  It’s right here!  I can’t believe it!!” and have everyone I meet be pleasantly surprised to see that a quote I’ve found proves a thing that we hadn’t thought was true.  That everything I need to know is right there, on paper, lost somewhere in the annals of history.  It’s like the Da Vinci Code, but with linguists arguing over the existance of theoretical units of sound.  That’s my new line for whenever anyone asks what I’m doing.  “It’s like the Da Vinci Code, but with linguists”.

And on top of it all, I’m feeling pretty much non-sick this evening!  Sore throat still, but all my sinus stuff seems gone.  Did I mention I’m listening to The Moody Blues?  I love The Moody Blues.  I’m a happy camper!