Boo food

This cold has made me lose my appetite and its really hard to work up enough energy to go get something to eat. I really hate those people who have a cold and they’re only really sick for like one day and then they bounce back. I’ve been pretty sick for like 5 consecutive days now, and I will be at least kinda sick for another week. Not that its better today, still in the pretty sick stage. So lethargic.

I’m at the office today b/c the weather has gotten mild again and my apartment is miserable and cold and I was home all yesterday, which made me unhappy, so now I’m just sitting in the dark with my head on my desk. Enough about being sick.

I get to see my nephew on Sunday! Also my sister-in-law and my brother, but I doubt they’ve changed as much as the baby-baby. I hope I’m well enough by then to hold him and not risk getting him sick. Maybe I’ll get one of those snazzy masks that people wore during the SARS outbreak. Those were the good old days.

Nothing is getting done. My brain is completely incapable of processing intelligent linguistic thought, which is not going well for me. I really wanted to have a good outline of the syntactic half of my analysis for my MA thesis so I could present it at the conference in Saskatoon. I still have a little time, but I’m a little worried about it.

I took an online IQ test (b/c it’s the kind of crazy thing I like to do for fun) and it came out with a modest 141 and said I was a “Creative Theorist”. Maybe if I retake it at full mental capacity I’ll do better. I usually find it easy to get genius status on the online tests, which doesn’t say much, just that I have a logical mind, which probably helped a little with the math/linguistics degree. Makes sense to me. These tests never tell me I have outstanding people skills or that I’m impressively socially adept, I figure it all evens out. Oh online quizzes, the internet time waster of the early new millennium. I’m undergoing some kind of throwback, I guess.

But seriously, I have to find something to eat. I have no idea what. Most of the food vending outlets on campus are closed for the summer which means extra energy needs to be expended to locomote to somewhere people still eat. So not hungry.

Optimistic

Its time for blog recap of my weekend in Santa Barbara, California. Let’s start with how I feel right now: like crap. But its ok, I had it coming. Major league sore throat, with lots of phlegm which makes me cough, but it hurts to cough. I could describe all my symptoms, but that’s just me whining. I haven’t gotten sick for like a year (I think a year exactly) and it was time, so I’m ok with it, I just hope my brain will keep working at a satisfactory rate so that I do the mass loads of writing that need to get done this week.

A few thoughts from my trip:
I hate American money. Frickin dollar bills.
How do they fill the void left by the lack of Tim Hortons?

In the Chicago airport:
I might like America – it makes me feel thin.
They probably assume I’m one of then, oh wait, there’s a big Canadian flag on my backpack.
At least I’m not wearing something so unnecessarily unflattering.

I flew out of Ottawa Thursday morning to Chicago, to connect to LA, to finally fly to Santa Barbara. I loved all the different vegetation, they have some really beautiful trees, and I’m not really talking about the palm trees, they have the ones that shed their bark and are really smooth. On Friday I went to UCSB, got hopelessly lost on campus, finally found the building and stood around awkwardly while they were setting things ups. Watched a bunch of presentation, realized how functionalist all these people were. I’ve come to the conclusion that I like functionalists because they do very important and useful work. They collect the data and figure out the distribution of different morphemes and provide grammars on numerous little known languages. But I don’t want to be one of them. Not the data collecting part, its just that what they call their “analysis” is something I would put in the introduction of my paper. Explaining how something works in a language, because as someone who is doing generative linguistics the analysis is the underlying mechanism that connects different cross-linguistics to some kind of universal or at least an accepted structure.

Friday night I went to the beach, and just walked for a long time with my fee in the water. I saw lots of seaweed, and a few surfers. It was very nice and relaxing, made me feel like I could actually see the world again, since, for a while it wasn’t being filtered through the mess of my mind preoccupied with academic things.

On Saturday I gave my talk, and I think it went ok. I was nervous, of course, but I had gotten sunburnt from being on the beach the night before so my turning red wasn’t a big contrast from what I was looking like in general that day. I wasn’t really shaking, and I think I talked slowly enough. People told me it was a good talk, and then when I told them it was my first talk ever they changed it to “fantastic”. Everyone was really nice and encouraging.

I tried to eat a variety of Mexican food. I had this massive veggie burrito one day for lunch which had like a half cup of guacamole on it. It was interesting there because it was like a parallel to bilingual Ottawa, only the other language is Spanish instead of French. The people at the university still had class too, they’re on this quarter system (as opposed to semester) and they don’t finish till mid-June. There were crazy bike paths ALL over the campus, and you had to be careful not to walk on them b/c you would get run over.

On Saturday night we went to a party at a professors house (who also happens to be a pretty famous linguist) and there was pizza and good times. I made myself introduce myself to people and not be too shy. People whipped out the guitars and had a little ho-down, how cute. On Sunday I went to be a tourist in downtown Santa Barbara, which is actually really nice, but by this time I was sick and spend a lot of the day just sitting and people watching.

My flight home involved leaving Santa Barbara at 6:30pm to fly to Phoenix and wait for 3 hours to catch the overnight flight to Philadelphia, to wait another 3 hours to finally fly to Ottawa so that I could catch the bus and make my way home. I pretty much took yesterday off, which I hope you can all understand.

Right, so just an account of the facts. If I recall any of my painfully witty insights about the states I will be sure to share them with you.

(Always assume a certain level of sarcasm, which is often lost in written language.)

Tequila Sunrise

Half Aspie

T-3 days to Santa Barbara.

I saw SPIDERMAN 3. I really like what’s his face… smooth face blue eyes, you know, the guy who plays Spiderman. Not Topher Grace, he was Venom…. I can see his face, Tobey McGuire. Wow, I actually couldn’t recall the name. Mild anomia I suppose. Nonetheless, a very entertaining movie, I like comic book heroes. I also watched the first half of Center Stage with my aunt and cousin yesterday. Super excited to find out that they owned it.

I think the world is a little spinny and dizzy today, it doesn’t seem to want to stay still. Walking to school was more of a challenge than usual. It was even spinny when I woke up this morning. I’ve been drinking more coffee than I usually do, I think my body is getting used to the caffeine, maybe that will mean that I can drink coffee like a normal person and not crazy go nuts for hours afterwards.

Did you know that its speculated that way more boys than girls have autism b/c girls don’t show the normal symptoms? Girls natural linguistic superiority cover up the underlying disorder. So really, there might not be the boy-girl divide, just girls who get on ok without the help.

There’s also a thing called Rhythmic Movement Disorder. I found that very interesting, indeed.

The first section of my thesis is done, in first draft form. Now I’m waiting to meet with my supervisor so I can start the next section. I took all of yesterday off, hanging with the cousins, eating the good food, sitting on the comfy couches. My one cousin braided my hair in pigtails, and I was super cute. I have my moments.

My face is hot, my head feels funny, like its having a hard time staying in a normal upward position. I don’t want to go home, its cold there. Its warm here in the office. Now my hair is all crimpy and fluffy. You know milkweed? I used to love that stuff, actually, I still do, if I recall last fall when I kept playing with it on a hike through Gatineau park. I remember as a kid wanting to collect a whole bunch and stuff a pillow with it, I think I even tried it once. Its so silky and soft.

Radiohead is my soulmate

“We hope that you choke.’

Hooray for being sick and lethargic, I love it when it takes 5 times longer to complete simple task and approximately 30 seconds of prethought before I can compose a coherent answer to a casual question asked in passing in the hallway. I’ve been preparing for my FIRST CONFERENCE EVER which is next weekend in Santa Barbara. It’ll be fun to go to Cali but I’m very nervous about the actual presentation, especially since I’ve never done it before (well, in the professional sense at least).

I made the brilliant decision of have a medium coffee (which used to be the large size) from 2^nd cup this morning, you know, because I was having trouble focusing and getting down to my work. Clearly ingesting half a litre of liquid stimulant is how you get yourself to sit quietly at your desk and write a syntax paper. I hate how Microsoft Word underlines the Canadian spellings of things (colour, labour, litre, centre, etc.), and don’t tell me to change it to the Canadian spell checker, because I’ve tried that and it does NOT work. Either it resets everything and still underlies the words in question, or it doesn’t underline anything and it’s a crazy whirlwind of spelling free-for-all.

Anyone have a clever title for my MA thesis? Its on the Ojibwe inverse system. I don’t care if you don’t know what that means, just give me a title! I've asked this before, and you sit there, in front of your computer screen pondering, talking to yourself, "I'm only one person! How could I ever come up with a label worthy of theoretical linguistics?" But I'm here to tell you that you can! Anything is possible! I don’t want to use my presentation title, which is “Argument Organization in Ojibwe: A quasi-morphological approach,” but would rather have something new and catchy. I haven’t done laundry in a really long time. Its such a hassle since our machine broke and I actually have to go to a laundromat. Who wants to do that? But its getting to the point where its not a choice anymore and my sense of annoyance has no weight in the decision any longer. I especially need clean clothes to go to a conference, at least one would think.

I’ve completely lost the sense of days of the week or even time of the year. If this were last year then it would be all about exams being done, summer starting, rejoining the workforce once again. But now it’s a kind of smooth continuum of school year for the full 12 months where classes have ended but there’s still plenty of work to do and things to procrastinate from, and feel guilty about. Its all the fun of school without those pesky night classes, like the perfect situation. Or something.

My apartment is cold, they turned off the heat like a week and a half ago. I don’t think this is helping me being sick. I thought I might have had something interesting to say today, or at least could say something in a funny way, but that sense has quickly disintegrated.

I've made a huge mistake