and you may ask yourself, well, how did i get here?

For all of us who are curious about what I do all day:

One way or another, i have found myself essentially doing computational/corpus linguistics, albeit in the least high tech way possible: database building. Database building isn't hard, but it is slow going.

Here I am cross-referencing my database with a program that I used to build my database.

it's metaphorical!

Admittedly I study some really obscure stuff. Literary linguistics is a very small field, comprised of even smaller fields. A lot of people in literary linguistics are really interested in metaphor and figurative language (how it works, what it does in a text, how we understand it, etc), and I know a few people who are getting their PhDs in metaphor (yes, really.) I subscribe to a few literary linguistic mailing lists- these mailing lists are ridiculous; someone with the last name van der Boom manages one of them (I love getting emails from Ms van der Boom for entertainment value alone.)

Sometimes I get emails like this:

"The 2011 [redacted] Metaphor Festival
Thursday 8 to Saturday 10 September

The [redacted] Metaphor Festival is an annual conference on the use of figurative
language, arranged by The Department of English at [redacted] University. It
brings together researchers from a broad range of academic disciplines, working
within different theoretical and methodological paradigms -literary as well as
linguistic - in a creative, internationally oriented and friendly atmosphere.
The importance of figurative language is now generally recognised, and the
Festival offers an opportunity to present and learn about research findings
concerning figures of speech in different types of discourse, and their
cognitive, cultural, narrative, poetic, rhetorical, social or textual functions."

I don't even know where to start with this.

Listen; I am currently working in corpus stylistics, which is not a big field in my already-tiny subfield of the intersection of linguistics and literature. It's like a subfield of a subfield. But it's always comforting to hear there's people working on something much more ridiculous than me.

don't walk around at night

Glasgow is pretty far north, more northerly than you'd think. Here's a map of Glasgow Vs Other Northern Places.

You will note that Glasgow is close to Iceland, Norway and Sweden and kind of on par with Canada. I'm from the Northeast of America, which is (relatively) much more southern. While this explains the fact that it's always cold - I had no idea that we were so far above the inhabitable parts of Canada - a side effect of being this for north, there is not a lot of sunlight during the winter months. Seriously, in December the sun set at like 3:30pm - you get maybe 7 hours of sunlight on a good day. If it's raining, which it might be, you might not get sunlight for days. It takes some getting used to! (I would not recommend having Seasonal Affective Disorder here.)
Okay! So what is the #1 piece of advice for living in a city? "Don't walk around at night."

As you can imagine, this isn't very helpful, because it means that you can never walk around after 4 pm. (Obviously there are places in a city - any city - you shouldn't walk alone in at night, and I know that.) This strikes me as being rather inefficient, especially as the places I would be going are safe/well lit - I live quite near the big shopping streets (the high streets, as they're called here) and if I'm coming from/going to another major part of the city I'll be on public transit, so I generally try to disregard this warning, but I've studied rape stats and all that long enough to not be a little bit wary sometimes.

Luckily, the sun's been setting at more reasonable times (4 pm) now that we're inching into springtime. However... this means that in the summer, the sun will stay out laaaate - like 10, 11 pm late. All this nighttime takes some getting used to; I imagine 10+ hours of daytime will take some adjustment too.

enter the haggis

Happy Burns Night! Though it has been pointed out to me by a number of native Scots, Scotland doesn't really do holidays. Well, I mean, they do, they don't feel remotely obligated to celebrate anything ever. Scotland is a really apathetic place, unless it is something about being "English", in which case they get VERY nationalistic about not being English. As a result I just sort of figured that everyone would get VERY excited about today being birthday of their almost-patron saint, poet Robert Burns. (They did not, in true form.) Today is one of those would-be big holidays that people supposedly do things for, but they're not required.

What do people do to celebrate a poet, you ask?

They hold Burns Suppers which are formal dinners with a bunch of thoroughly absurd traditions, including an entire speech devoted to addressing the haggis, ceremonial slicings of the haggis itself, toasts to assorted members of the table and bagpipe interludes. I guess when you are drinking your weight in whisky this seems reasonable. From wikipedia, this is the order of a traditional Burns supper (click for links):

• Start of the evening
• Host's welcoming speech
• Entrance of the haggis
• Supper
• Immortal memory
• Appreciation
• Toast to the Lassies
• Reply to the Toast to the Lassies
• Other toasts and speeches
• Works by Burns
• Closing

I couldn't find any big public Burns parties - I think it's sort of like a traditional Thanksgiving celebration; it takes place at home. But that didn't stop me from having a Burns supper! A bunch of my international friends and I got together at a local, traditional Scottish pub to celebrate with haggis neeps & tatties and whisky. We didn't have to address any inanimate objects and we got to eat a lot of haggis (which is actually delicious). So maybe we sort of missed the excitement of the night (there were no never-ending toasts, replies, etc), but it was still nice.

And there was a lot of whisky...so we must have done something right.

"we must commute the pasta"

I like being around people who speak more than one language fluently, because it often means that they make some interesting constructions in their non-native language(s), as a result of knowing so many other languages. Similarly, some of these little phrase quirks carry over into one's native language. Although I don't speak any languages other than English, I can read and write in a few others (Old English, French), and I know that my feeble attempts at forming phrases are entirely based in my own language; you often end up making fairly clunky, literal word-by-word translations.

Though occasionally (as a native English speaker) it can get frustrating to try to use some advanced metaphorical language, on the whole, most people are pretty fluent in English. A number of my friends here speak English as well as their native language, and what's cool is that you can almost see what they are literally translating from one language to another. For example: Two of my friends are French and they'll often use gender pronouns to describe inanimate objects ("my chair, she is broken"). My German friends have less difficulty with this, perhaps as a result of the fact that German and English are linguistically really close. (Interestingly enough, my German friends all speak English with American accents.)

My friend Stefano speaks Italian, German, and English fluently, with Italian obviously being his first language. Although his spoken English is not perfect, it is very, very good (and as a linguist he's always interested in hearing how English works for a native speaker!) Sometimes he says some strange things, but they're all very reasonable and logical when you think about it- today I ran into Stefano in the department's kitchenette while he was preparing his lunch, and I asked him what he was making. He explained the dish to me, and as he moved the pasta from the microwave to a bowl, he told me "we must commute the pasta". This is a wonderfully formal sentence to say that you are moving the pasta into the sauce, but it makes perfect sense: you are moving the pasta from one point to another in a large group, and there's a lot of them, so it could take a collective pronoun.

English is hard to learn, you guys - I'm not nearly as confident in other languages as my international friends are! I'm always impressed when I meet non-native speakers whose English is as good as (if not better than!) mine, even if they do sometimes tell me that we must commute the pasta.

dispatches from hipsterville

I sometimes joke that living in Glasgow is a lot like living in Brooklyn, but with more hipsters and more ridiculous accents. I'm only being semi-facetious when I say this- as far as I can tell, the #1 leisure activity in Glasgow is "attending gigs" (#2 might be "Experiencing Art in Every Form", #3 is "knowing DJs", which is rather derivative of #1, #4 is "Seeing Films", and #5 is "Talking about art, films and music"). And beyond that, every month there's some sort of big festival based around a theme - the current festival is Celtic Connections, which is a 3-week-long folk music festival.

It's like Extreme Brooklyn, I'm telling you. Basically, there is no shortage of things to do here.

There are a million pubs, and almost every pub has gigs; on top of that there are whole bunch of bigger concert venues- no matter what kind of music you like, I imagine you can find something that you'd be interested in - like, this is just SOME music coming up in the next few days - that link lists some of the more popular music venues, and you can see that tickets are generally affordable.

And a lot of it is super indie and interesting! This is the same city that produced Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, and Franz Ferdinand ("wankers", according to all native Glasgwegians), and probably 7 thousand other musicians - this should tell you something about the music scene. As you can imagine, if you don't pay attention you can miss a lot of awesome stuff. You often end up scrambling at the last minute to see stuff, because who can keep track of all of those dates? I know I can't!

What I'm trying to say here is that seeing live music all the time is a totally normal thing to do. Tomorrow I've got tickets to see Ani DiFranco, and originally I was going to go see Sleigh Bells on Saturday night, but I'm going to a conference all day and then out for dinner with the conference-goers, so it looks like I'll miss that. I've actually missed a bunch of gigs because I had prior engagements: I missed Beach House back in November because I was going to a Thanksgiving dinner party - I wonder if that's part of the experience of the Glasgow music scene? Sometimes things just sell out entirely before you're made aware of them to buy tickets (The National, Arcade Fire), or you hear about it too late (Foals). Am I disappointed? A little bit, but then you see something awesome. And that kind of thinking is exactly what's going on in hipsterville: yes, it sucks if you miss a gig, but someone equally as exciting will come along.

The next big gig I'm hoping to go to after this weekend will be Lykke Li, but there's an up & coming riot grrl band playing at a pub near me in early February, and I have tentative plans to go to Sunday Afternoon Jazz and Dubstep Thursday at two other pubs soon. Do you see what I mean about Glasgow being a music town? In the fall I saw a whole ton of local musicians, KT Tunstall, MEN, LCD Soundsystem, among others... and we haven't even covered some of the great guest DJ spots I've heard. Welcome back to Glasgow! Can't stop, won't stop...

aye, welcome back to glasgae!

Getting back to Glasgow was only 7000% easier than trying to get from the UK to the US a few weeks ago, despite the 2+feet of snow we had in the Northeast the day before I was flying, so we'll skip over that, as it's pretty boring ("Sitting on a plane!" "This plane is leaving the airport!" "We are landing!" "Welcome back to Heathrow DID YOU MISS US" "Scotland!"). I am still super-jet lagged and that's going to be ongoing for a while, unfortunately -I went out for pints earlier and nearly fell asleep on the table, came home, slept for an hour and a half, woke up panicked, and now can't get back to sleep...

But anyway.

You know what? Scotland's a ridiculous country. Like, I legitimately have no idea how this place manages to function, but I did miss it in it's own little way. While I was home I found myself longing for kettles (how do we live without these?), pub life, how small things are "wee", the ridiculous unpreparedness for any weather event that is not rain, mayo or butter in everything, severe Scottish liberalism about everything ever... even not entirely understanding anything anyone says to me again is kind of fun! (I admit I did not miss having everything close at 7 pm.)

And, you know, coming back and having friends who are excited to see you is nice too - it makes it a lot less scary than the first time I landed, knowing nothing about the city (and only one person on the continent!). This semester a bunch of people I know from UNH are doing study-abroads in the UK, so I think that this will prove to be a little less alienating. It's nice to know other people in the same time zone as you.

I think I've been doing really well at assimilating to Scottish/British culture. Glasgow's a mad city, as the Brits would say, but it's almost starting to make sense.

The cars were just lumps on the snow

Okay, listen up, Britain: THIS IS WHAT I MEAN BY A LOT OF SNOW.

This is 48 cm (19 inches) of snow & counting; it's still snowing, too. I'm supposed to be flying back to Glasgow tomorrow night, so this will get interesting. At least if I get stranded again, I'm near home...

from this position I can see the whole place

I don't talk about my work often on the internet, mostly because I want to maintain some anonymity in this space. I'm working on building a website about myself & my research, and I am on what could most accurately be called "a facebook for academics", so I guess if you're really interested you can check out my work on there. (If I ever finish that website I'll be sure to let you know.)

While I am home - technically I am "on holiday" - I still have work to do. Yes, you read that right. I've been working on a chapter (10,000 words) of my masters thesis while I'm home. Anyway, while I've been home I've also been seeing some old friends, who have been inquiring about my work. I proposed a really big project for a 12-month Master's thesis, and it's been cut down a lot to something really specific since then. This was fine, in fact, that's the nature of research. Unfortunately, it meant that I didn't really know how to explain to people what I've been doing: I was explaining it as something between my proposed project and what I thought I was striving for.

I'm not going to lie to you - no matter how interesting and invested in your work you are, when that's all you do on a daily basis, it's hard to see outside your narrow field of focus sometimes. Sometimes it's kind of boring. My research involved building a database, and that was all I did for a month. You can really only look at words so many times before they start to lose their meanings, you know? It took some time to step back and really see what I had been doing every day. And then I realized that I hadn't been doing what I thought I had been doing all along... in fact, I was doing something very different. So now I have a new(er), more accurate description of what I've been working on, which fits and feels much better.

It's also good to get a different perspective on what I've been doing. Glasgow's great because there's a lot of linguistics going on, but I'm not entirely working in linguists and I'm not quite an English literature student - I'm kind of in the middle. I mentioned to a couple other grad-school-going friends lately that I'm having a hard time finding conferences and publications to be looking at, only because my field is so very small. And they all brought up an important point - you WANT to be the one of the only people doing what you're doing, because when you're done you'll have participated in an entirely new approach to your field. (This is very good for my ego, I'll have you all know.)

snip snip snip

The last big thing I did in 2010 was to get a haircut. I no longer look like any of my six ID photos, which is awesome/strange. (I still have to take a double-take when I catch myself in a mirror sometimes.)


I haven't had bangs since I was a little kid:

'sup 1992?

Strangely enough I am frequently mistaken for being between 24-27 years old while in Europe/The UK, which seems unlikely, but it's true. (I have friends who were convinced that I was 27-28 when I first met them. I'm 22.) While this often works in my favor, as I'm never ID'd for anything, but I secretly wish I was 23, as that sounds so much more convincing than 22. Meanwhile, here in the states, I get ID'd at the movies, at bars and restaurants I frequent, etc. Somehow I manage to look both younger and older than I actually am, depending on what continent I'm on, which is really strange. It'll be interesting to see how old I come off as!