Forget forgotton

I felt like I should post.

Oh busy busy life, I'm trying to wait for it to let up, hold on just until the end. Then I should by all reasonable guesses explode at some excruciating point in the future in the painful slow death kind of way. I exaggerate, I have been much busier in the past and so much more stressed out. I feel like I'm not doing as well as I should, I got an A- on my Semantics assignment -- this must be remedied immediately before the D's start rolling my way. You laugh, you think me ridiculous but a fail is a C in grad school and I just cannot explain to you in a way you will find rational my expectations of myself. I realize I'm hard on myself, but if I'm not hard on myself, who will be? That's a misfortune I'm not going to take my chances with. Are these even grammatical English sentences? Reminder: I am not an English major, I am not obsessed with prescriptive grammar -- as far as I care, if people can say it then its grammatical. Its called descriptivism. See how I did that? A little switch from prescribe to describe. Subtle, I know, but what a difference.

I have a conference next weekend at York, which is good in terms of spending a few days in Toronto. I will miss my friends who have moved away from Toronto (I'm looking at you, Dinah) and it will be like a hole shot through the memory of my former life, but I will hold on. I will let those who remain in our province's capital (province = Ontario) spread inwards from the edges of that gaping hold like fibres in around the torn knee hole of a much loved pair of jeans. Maybe I'll have a big face tattoo when you see me, maybe I will have jet black hair. Maybe I will speak with an eastern Australian accent. How could you yet know? You haven't seen me in a while. Perhaps I have taken to wearing really long t-shirts with a belt around the waist. They go well with my knee high alligator skin hooker boots with that lovely rosy tinge that makes you think of a guy who has been punched in the face and has spit out his bloody saliva on the sidewalk for you to step around the next morning.

My phonology homework awaits. I am attempting to break wide open the wonders of feature licensing in a couple of Bantu dialects. The phonological world won't know what hit them when I come along, with my predetermined data set, and fully answer the questions I am obliged to answer for my mandatory course work.

Have you had enough yet?

Good-bye prime factors 11 and 2, Hello prime factor 23

That's right, today is the last day of my youth. Mock me if you will, point out the fine lines around my eyes and the graying hair on my head. (Actually, I do have some white hair, but that is not age related, who can tell with the blonde anyway?) I'm not planning on anything special happening this year, but perhaps this is the point people stop caring about your birthday. Actually I'm just not in the mood right now, I shouldn't pawn it off on other people. There is some consolation in my brother turning even older a few days later (he always was older than me....).

And I felt like playing around with the blog template. I know its still blue, but I just don't like other colours as much. My eyes are blue so when I see blue things they are compatible with the iris filter while other things get morphed into pukey colours, so can you blame me for liking blue? I have to respect it, my eyes provide the only discernible colour on my face.

I became very upset with Linguistics this week. I heard some work from various people that just reminds me of all the bad Linguistics out there. People who only take into account one construction in one language and ignore generalizations made for other reasons thereby creating completely useless analyses. Its because of these people that the field is still Arts everywhere and hasn't been able to even break into the soft sciences (I mean, if psychologists can get science degrees its ridiculous that linguists don't). I want to do real Linguistics that actually means something, that actually gets insight on NATURAL language, and if anyone else asks me if I study Esperanto or Tolkien's elven language again then I just might freak out and give a drop kick followed by the sonic elbow.

Disaster.

I was at a conference this weekend at Concordia, so not very far away and easy to budget for. I though it would be ok, I saw a few people that I know from Ottawa, including both of my MA supervisors. I was presenting a paper I wrote with one of my supervisors this summer, and we're presenting this paper again at another conference at York. So presenting isn't my favourite thing in the world, there are many things I do hate about. Despite what some of you may think of me I do have a very shy side, but even worse I suffer from stage fright. Sometimes I am amply able to overcome my stage fright and I have been able to give even decent presentations in the past. Today this was not the case. I started our presentation, and my heart was pounding when I started but I could speak and get the words out, and it was relatively ok. As I kept talking it go soooo much worse. I turned bright red (as I always do), but I've learned to accept that I'm just someone who turns red and I'm generally ok with that. The main problem was that my voice started quarvering, I mean like rolling into big trembling gasp type sentences and this caused a problem for conveying the idea of our presentation. It was like when you're super upset, and you're about to cry and your voice goes and there's nothing you can do to control it. Now, I wasn't going to cry, but it was so difficult to talk, and I tried to take some breaths, but I didn't want to stop in the middle of my talk and do a big "Inhale. Exhale." That would have been even more embarrassing. I just did what ever I could to get to the end of my section where my co-author was supposed to take over. It was truly awful, I am so embarrassed. I felt bad b/c people in the audience felt bad for me. I took some time to recover while my coauthor was talking b/c I was supposed to take a few sections later on, but he forgot this and presented them himself, then remembered a couple sections later and asked if I wanted to do that part. I answered no b/c by that point we were on a section that was his speciality, although I was hoping to redeem myself after gaining some composure. The discussion was fine, I am much better at addressing questions, I think because it's more like a conversation and less like a performance. But I feel terrible. I apologized to my coauthor and promised this wouldn't happen at our next presentation. I don't even know why I went crazy, it was a friendly audience in a comfortable setting. I just lost it.

When I was a kid (and a young teenager) I used to play violin in the Kiwanis festival. I hate that stupid festival. It was ok when I was playing in an ensemble or orchestra, I could focus on what I was doing and blend in with the other performing with me. But I also had to do solos, where I stood up on the stage with no music and had to remember the whole song and hit at the right notes infront of an audience and an adjudicator who was scoring me. I remember once completely forgetting part of a song and freezing -- terrible terrible memories. I was never meant to preform, it is so not my forte. Unfortunately presentations will forever be a part of my life in this career. I've had a few good presentations, so I'm hoping that kind will become more and more frequent.

Today is a bad day

I was getting coffee in the student centre and this girl walked past me and bumped my bag and my elbow while I was holding the coffee. It splashed back and forth, so I thought it was ok, but they she continued her trek past me (and trust me, there was plenty of room for us to coexist contact free) and bumps me again, knocking my backpack off my shoulder and making me splash searing hot coffee everywhere, including on hands and on my pants. The worst part about this is that she didn't even turn around. She didn't care that she'd bumped into someone, and because of this did not see the disatrous effects of her gross lack of courteousy. What a freaking jerk.

My day was not stellar to begin with.

Why Georgia?

I’m going to try and post now, even though I don’t particularly feel like writing now anymore than I did before.

So vegan week was done a long time ago, and it really wasn’t bad at all. The first day after it was over I had pizza (and not very good pizza) but it was still sooo good, I do love cheese. The hardest thing was having to read labels and make sure there weren’t modified milk ingredients in things. I’m not sure how vegans go out to eat, that’s even worse. The soy latte was fine, but I got some soy milk so I could eat my cereal, and that tastes like chalk. I still have half a litre that isn’t going anywhere now that it has to compete with the skim in my fridge.

I’m presenting at a *surprise* (at least to me) conference on Saturday at Concordia. I guess this is one of the quirks of having a co-author. It’s all good though, since me presenting at anything is experience for me at this point. My fellow baby PhD-ers think I’m so experienced b/c I went to 2 conferences already, but I was like them 5 months ago so its really not a big deal.

I’m getting really nervous about submitting my article for publication b/c I saw what some reviewer marks are like and they can be way HARSH. I like my paper, but I can also see where people can pick holes in it, but I’m already at the page limit so I can’t really flesh out every forseen concern at this point.

I have to buy a new kettle, mine tries to electrocute me when I use it. No lie. I’m kinda scared to make tea now, even used a pot of boiling water instead. I drank more tea in Ottawa b/c my roomies drank more tea and would always offer, but its nice to have something warm to hold, and wait for 20 minutes to cool to non-tongue-burning temperature. I used to not let the water boil when I made powdered hot chocolate but my crazy death kettle boils in 24 seconds flat.

Maybe I’ll write more another time.