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.)