lately i have been thinking about academia

"Decide that you like college. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life."

-- Lorrie Moore

After this ridiculously crazy no-sleep, no-social-life, all-work thesis process I can't help but wonder why I have signed up for five to seven more years of masochism. And then I think about how rewarding of a process it is, but how truly frustrating it can be. It takes so much self control to not punch people in the face sometimes.

I think everyone should have to write a thesis / do some sort of equivalent senior capstone project in whatever discipline they choose to study -- way too many people float through college. Show me that you actually learned something while you were here rather than drank yourself to death every weekend. And take some goddamn pride in your work!


I am almost done with my thesis. I have a few minor things to tweak, but I'm very close.

come on skinny love, just last the year

In incredibly sad news, my dear friend Jacko's mum died on Saturday night after a very long battle with liver disease and kidney failure almost 18 years to the minute after giving birth to her first son. So, I'm taking a brief pause later this week from thesising to head home for the wake/funeral on Thursday.

Jacko is one of the strongest people I have ever met. Her dad died in a car crash when she was 16 and she has had custody of her now-16-year-old sister for the past few months. When I called her on Sunday to see how she's doing, she told me that her whole family was sitting around watching Jerseylicious. She and her aunts were trying to figure out what to do with the remains - though there was speak of cremation, she knew that would end poorly. Someone would accidentally knock her mum over and spill her everywhere, so that was out of the question. Love love love -- These are all fairly normal responses I would expect from her, so if these are the responses I get, I shouldn't be too worried or concerned. Her life really is some sort of black comedy, but she's given up and is just embracing it.

(Jacko joked that she made it through my thesis presentations to make sure I could do it. I did it, Maureen! I'm sorry you won't get to hear how it went.)

Rest in peace, Milly- i miss you.

Hey everybody, come check out how great I am!

My presentations yesterday went really well. (This is a blog about my thesis right? Guess what - you get to hear more about it!) Unfortunately, my project is not the most self-explanatory thing ever, so even though I had a sweet 32x40 semi-shiny sheet of paper, I usually had to walk people through it. This is fine unless more people show up halfway through my spiel, but I'm not complaining - a lot of my friends dropped by the poster presentation and a whole bunch of people came to my presentation to the English department. Thanks for checking out my work!

My parents The Scientists came up for the day, which provided almost unending entertainment. Some background: My dad is a PhD chemist and my mother is a biochemist who did some early work on the human genome project in Canada. These days they are writing manuals for scientific instruments, but the liberal arts are not their thing. Watching them try not to kill themselves during the four hours of the English Department Honors Conference was hilarious - the better a presentation was, the more they looked like they were going to put hot forks through their eyes. They are very intelligent people, but this is quite simply not what they do.

HIGHLIGHTS:
- Mom and Dad sitting next to Dennis Britton at the English department thesis reading, who is prone to flailing when he gets excited about things - especially the analysis of female and male sexuality in Spencer's The Faerie Queen
(to be honest, that was the longest amount of time I had ever seen Dennis sit still)
- Sarah Sherman, interim honors director for the English department, who was just so over this whole situation. "This is blah blah and they like this. their thesis is about this. sadly, there are still eight more presentation after this." (Not a direct quote, but close.)
- Mary Clark sitting behind me, having a grand time: "Hmmm. I don't think so. hmmm."
- the look on the English department's collective face when I introduced an equation to their lives. HILARIOUS. Luckily, we switched back to words quickly. (Meanwhile, Mom and Dad were celebrating the fact they finally understood something happening.)
- Mom and Dad finally meeting Shelly. Shelly and my mom could possibly be the same person - they have the same mannerisms.

Here is a very picture of me explaining my research to one of my many advisors (left) and my friend Kallie (right)

a time line

Presumably if you've been following my blog lately this post is a little bit unnecessary. But, whatever:


a month ago, I restarted my thesis from word one, page one.
three weeks ago, I started writing thesis 2.0
last week, I had a 17-page first draft
As of Monday afternoon, I sent my URC poster to print
As of yesterday morning, I had a URC poster
Tomorrow I'm presenting my research not once but twice!
and as of this weekend I will have a second draft.

even though the last few weeks have felt like this:

(you probably saw me wandering around campus looking like this)
I am pretty damn proud of myself for accomplishing so much in such a short period of time.

& a month from today i'll be graduating.
how does this happen!?

In my mind, the URC is like a very large-scale science fair. I hope someone brings a paper-mache volcano.

When I signed up for the Undergraduate Research Conference in March, I hadn't planned on having to restart my thesis. I also assumed that a poster presentation would be a fairly straightforward thing, which is why I decided to do a poster presentation AND a thesis reading. This may have been an error in judgment. But, there wasn't much I could do about it.

Last Thursday I very sleep-deprivingly drove to every nearby place that would print a 32x40 semi-gloss professional poster. Due to my tiny department of 35 students and three professors, I was in charge of my own poster. Conveniently, UNH offers these printing services, but they said they needed a 5-7 day turnaround time. This was the 5-7 day turnaround deadline before the URC, and I had nothing to give them. Worried, I went to Kinko's and Staples to get quotes. For the convenience of approximately a 2 hour turnaround time, I would pay nearly three times as much. I had planned on working on my poster the week I got back from spring break. I didn't even start rewriting until two weeks ago.

This weekend I started working on my poster. I sent it to print an hour ago.

To be honest, the nature of my project is that it is quite simply not accessible to everyone. There aren't a lot of pictures which are applicable to native and adopted locative prefixes. It requires a lot of very wordy explanation. There is no way to make this "user-friendly". I tried, believe me. It was a stretch to come up with two graphs.

Helpfully, the last time I used Powerpoint for ANYTHING was middle school, and we all had to make a metaslide that showed we knew how to use powerpoint. I had no idea how to make a poster using it... but there is no time for a learning curve. Luckily for me, someone compiled a How-To. Beverly, my old and rather crotchety computer, decided that this was a good time to let Powerpoint crash every 20 minutes or so. This was frustrating.

But, Shelly approved of my final poster draft while I was in class this afternoon. I ran to get it printed through UNH's copy center, which apparently is three days ahead of schedule and not costing me $92.25 for 32x40 inches of semi-shiny paper with things printed on it. So this is all going very well; much better than anticipated, really.

legs to make us longer

I took a thesis vacation yesterday evening.

Basically, I'm trying to drink less. Due to this one-month-ish time constraint (my thesis is due on May 10), I can't afford to go out drinking mostly because of the time commitment. I have things to do, and I can't be hungover while doing them - it's a miserable experience. And, I'd rather not do this very serious, important work while drunk. So I have generally been showing up at parties kind of late, trying not to stick around for an exceptionally long time, and am limiting myself to no more than three beers, and especially No Being Drunk. I have been to a lot of parties and bars soberly these days, just to take a bit of a break from thesising. Look at me, being responsible!

So my choices last night were to go to a Joint Birthday Party, as two of my friends are turning 21-and-12-months this upcoming week, to go to a bunch of bars with another friend, or to see Kaki King in Boston.

Friends: I love you, you know this. But I took the Kaki King option. Even though a group of my friends are seeing her in Portland on 4/20 (ahem...) it was in my best interest not to do that. I have work to do, and I can't afford to lose all that time. I'd feel much better if it was on a weekend... so I went down to Boston with my friend Nicole.

And you know what? it was totally worth it. I ended up in front row, three feet away from her. She's this tiny, hot, ferocious woman (totally unexpected, by the way) who can fucking rock. I've liked her for a long time; I went to this concert to see her reproduce her albums' beauty. I left this concert with an intellectual and musical boner for her. Holy shit. opening with this song - disregard the Jimmy Fallon bit, sorry about that -


This happened too. No big deal or anything...

She ended her set by turning Jessica - a soft, light song, into a 7+ minute rock out. AMAZING. and then closed her encore with a dance-party version of Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers. So, I'm in awe and stuff. And I only see awesome concerts.

my thesis beard has been coming in nicely

this has been the best twenty-nine cents i have spent in a long time.

(to see a picture of me where i look exactly like my father, please click here).

I can't stop, that's why I'm hot

One of the side effects of thesis-writing is a sheer and utter disregard for things happening outside your little thesis cave... which is how i almost forgot about the commencement fair yesterday.

Incidentally, I had also forgotten that I'm graduating in a relatively short period of time. (Another side-effect of thesising is that you get so engrossed in your work you don't have time to worry about anything other than your thesis.) This is very convenient in that you don't have time to freak out about graduation or allow senoritis to kick in.

Though I am very sad I did not personally take this picture, I did stand next to this woman while waiting in line to get my cap and gown at the commencement fair. The Alumni Association really wanted us to go on a "Last Hurrah Lobster Bake". And by "wanted us to go" I really mean they had found middle-aged ladies to wear lobster hats and run around screaming excitedly about eating lobsters with your BEST FRIENDS FOREVER for the last time. Also it was $10. Obviously I am not attending.

And, despite my insistence that everyone should stop inviting me to everything ever, I consistently find myself alternating between linguisticking and Social Identity Awarenessing. I've decided I'm not attending anything unless I personally gain something from it. This vague "something" can be personal edification or food, saving me a food-journey. It turns out many social justice-oriented events also feature food, and my ideal event/linguisticking break involves both personal edification AND food, so if you are hoping to get me somewhere anytime soon, you should probably look into combining the two.

Which is how I found myself at the LGBTQ pancake breakfast this morning.. Despite my sheer dislike for Gay (adj.) + {Noun or Verb} to make a noun or verb phrase (Gay Marriage, Gay Lunch, Gay Parking My Car -- credit to Liz Feldman), I definitely attended Gay Breakfast today rather than sleeping. Free food > sleeping, and by waking up early/napping (far more realistically, this is what I've been doing) I have more time to work. Right?

For those of us keeping track at home, I have written eleven pages of my thesis from Saturday into Tuesday. This morning I've been editing my thesis as a whole, in preparation for Judgement Day With Shelly tomorrow, and I'm sort of amazed at what I've produced. In approximately three weeks I have not only restarted my thesis from word one, page one but synthesized four different theories into a working understanding of linguistic productivity, wrote a total of 17 pages out of my expected ~20 pages (one word and a period on page 17 totally counts) and have been loving every second of it. Despite my sometimes-vocal claims that this is exhausting and I can't wait for it to be over, I really do love this. Either I am delusional - probably from too much coffee, not enough sleep, or some combination of the two - or I have a very successful academic career ahead of me.

Dear Dimond Library,

I missed you. I'm glad we're back together for the next few weeks.

Love,
Heather

story of my life.

How many times have you said to yourself, "Oh good, I'm done working on that..." and then continued to stare at a screen of some sort?

PhD comics = academic truth. Sometimes I feel like a grad student already, albeit with infinitely less work.

sticking it to the man

You have probably figured out by now, dear reader, that i like social justice; I'm very passionate about it. I have probably gone on a few too many Angry Feminist Rants already on here. But, if you don't want to hear about it, that's fine ... have fun being ignorant.

So you can imagine my surprise when the US Census Bureau announced that for the 2010 Census, they were not counting LGBT(Q)* identities. This is supposed to be a portrait of Identities of People who Live in the United States. And so, as their ads say, we can't figure out how many classrooms the United States needs unless we know how many schoolchildren are there. But, we also can't see how many people are affected by not recognizing LGBT(Q) identities in socio-political discourse. (Yeah, I said socio-political discourse on my blog.)

Which brings me to the Queer The Census movement. The Queer The Census movement - a product of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force - is mass-producing free stickers for everyone who wants one to identify themselves to the Census Bureau to show them a population of people who are not-straight, and want their identity to count.** (Conveniently, almost a full month into the Census, the Census bureau announced if you were an LGBTQ in a long-term, committed partnership and wanted to list yourself as "married" rather than "single", it is okay to list your partner as your husband or wife. Way to devalidate any long-term same-sex partnerships for anyone who submitted their census form in the first month.)

If you have your census form sitting in front of you and you don't have a sticker, you can download a PDF from their website and use packing tape to put it on your form. You have the option of checking off lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or a straight ally - an identity that almost everyone can categorize themselves under, even if it's a little limiting or broad. Below are pictures of me Queering the Census. Please do this - it's really important.






* I'm notating (Q) as such because Queer and Questioning are sometimes a little too broad in categorization. This is not a bad thing, but if we can get everyone to identify predominantly on an identity which is easily quantifiable by the whole country? That would be so wonderful.

** In a similar act of ignorance, Hispanic/Latino/Latina identities are equally as ignored in the category of "Race".

Dear my lunch (or maybe dinner, i'm not sure)

i might love you. Cheap beer and chinese food - how could you be wrong??

Dear take-out gods and/or Town of Durham, NH:
Thank you for finally having good chinese food within walking distance. you have improved my quality of life by at least 15%. Take-out gods: I offer my bank account as a sacrifice.
puppies, daisies and kittens,
heather


Judgement Day with Shelly went well today. After two weeks of reading, writing and thinking about a stack of academic texts and a week of mathing (yes my thesis is about math - enjoy the irony here), i am not only I on the right path but I'm exploring some really interesting things and have full permission to go forward with what I'm doing. Shortly after this announcement, Adam and G captured me and took me to a coffeeshop in Dover; it was like being a real person again for a little bit. Being a real person - rather than a thesis robot - is really, really nice sometimes.

this is how my week has been:

You can also buy Joy To The World for $1500

While taking a short break from my life of calculating things (yes, you did read that correctly; somehow my thesis became about MATH. what do I thoroughly dislike more than most things? MATH. why is my thesis about math? please refer to this post. this falls under both #1 and #2) and before I have to run off to lead a workshop on homophobic language (really, this is my life; I couldn't make this up if I tried), I am here to tell you about The Heifer Project. Apparently UNH has decided to participate, and furthermore decided to inform us about this by having a giant chocolate fondue fountain and fresh fruit at lunch to "raise awareness about this important project".

The Heifer Project is - predictably? - a project wherein a group raises a bunch of money and buys an animal for an impoverished third-world country. This is generally a good idea in that a privileged country with indoor, attached-to-the-building restrooms and clean drinking water is helping an underprivileged place by donating them a goat, sheep, oxen, a flock of geese, water buffalo (I'm reading the site - I don't know either. What do you do with a water buffalo??), or; best case scenario: an actual cow.

The last time (that I'm aware of) I was a part of an institution that was involved with The Heifer Project was my high school. I distinctly remember that we didn't raise enough money to buy anything useful like a flock of geese, a water buffalo, a trio of rabbits or even "Trees" (just trees. really.). We sent some impoverished third-world country in Asia - I forget which one or if it even still exists any more - a swarm of bees. Yes. Someone had to take a swarm of bees, box them up, put them on an airplane, and mail them to this country. And then someone in this place had to open a box of bees.

I really can't take this project very seriously after that experience. Whenever someone mentions The Heifer Project and how I should really truly consider donating to it, I just imagine an indigenous person being attacked by Franklin High School's Swarm of Bees and cursing our existence for sending him a box of pain and misery.

My non-denominational public university is closed for Easter.

Easter is one of those holidays I really just don't get. Your leading prophet died... which is somehow a positive thing (Good Friday) and then 48 hours later he rises again (Easter), which somehow actually means bunnies, jelly beans and chocolate. Right.

At least my holiday (Passover) makes moderate sense: A bunch of plagues happen because a large group of people are being oppressed; and in order to be spared from the final plague (death of the first-born), Jewish families had to mark their doors so they would be passed over (PASSOVER). From there, the Jewish families escape their oppressor by fleeing the country. This seems like a much more reasonable holiday. All of the traditions at least fit the [percieved] historic background.

But I digress. Apparently my non-denominational public university is "closed" for Easter weekend. This means it operates much like a curtailed-operations day; only "Essential Employees" are here. Granted, there aren't a lot of people here - unless you don't celebrate Easter or live too far away to go home for the weekend, not a lot really needs to be going on. But why couldn't you have TOLD us, UNH? We could have planned ahead. I was surprised to find myself kicked out of the library until 4 PM tomorrow without any warning. I wasn't the only one there, either! There is work to be done; where are we supposed to go? What if I needed something there tomorrow?

If I was an angrier person I would probably call the university out on being oppressive to those of us still here and/or not celebrators of Easter. But I am not that angry of a person, and I suppose it IS unfair to anyone (read: nearly everyone) who celebrates Easter to make them work. But, really! What would happen if I were to celebrate every Jewish holiday? "No, I can't go anywhere tonight or tomorow; it's Shabbat and I don't do anything which could quantify as 'work' until Sunday morning." "I can't. It's Yom Ha'atzmaut. I'm celebrating Jewish independence. I have to go light twelve torches." This wouldn't fly! I barely get any sort of university recognition on Hannukkah; I'm amazed every year when the dining halls when they designate a Passover-appropriate section, which mostly features matzah for build-your-own matzah adventures featuring the rest of the dining hall.

I think I'm just mad because nobody provided a heads-up in case you were planning on sticking around. That would have been nice. I know it's difficult, New Hampshire, to recognize difference sometimes. But I had work to do, and planned to be here in hopes of getting it done.

Character Study: Dr. Lieber

Since Shelly keeps coming up as a Major Character in my life, I think it is time to define her for you, dear reader.

Dr. Lieber is kind of a big deal.

And when I say that, I mean it- She studied under Noam Chomsky at MIT in the 1970s and while there, developed the prevailing system of understanding underlying linguistic structure which basically says that the properties of each individual word item, both within the word itself and how the word functions in a sentence, are inherited by morphology (the study of word-parts, which is what I've been working on) and syntax (which is the organization of words into phrases which turn into sentences). In picture form, this structure looks like what is seen to the right: Any time a letter (N, P, V representing nouns, prepositions, verbs) is repeated that means it allows for phrasal attachement. This can be applied to word-parts in that you can separate little bits of words which make sense individually and allow for attachment and word-formation. If this makes your head hurt, imagine taking a class strictly devoted to things like that picture. Shelly teaches this class at UNH, and is notorious amongst the 35 or so Linguistics majors on campus for using all of her example sentences about Fenster and wombats.

(Which brings me to the next related thing to talk about - this picture, brought to us by someone in the UNH linguistics department in front of the English building. If you can't read it, it says "Fenster kissed the wombat" in IPA. This is a linguistics joke and a funny one at that - mostly because nobody knows we exist, nor will the rest of the English Department understand it!)

Shelly's work is mostly in morphology despite her important strides in syntax. She co-developed the prevailing formula to measure productivity of affixes through corpus study (in Not-Linguistics-Speak this means "what my thesis is centered around: The Formula.") This - among MANY other things related to word-formation and how it functions - is her main focus of research. She's been working on assorted projects of word-formation rules and how they are understood to speakers of language for a very long time.

She is very, very well respected in her field. So going in to see her today was an intimidating moment, as you have hopefully understood. I have weekly "homework assignments" for her related to Thesis 2.0; this past weeks' was to read three of her articles on word-formation and synthesize a methodology of measuring and understanding word-formation techniques in regards to her own research. But - for those of us keeping track at home, the work I brought into her was described as "on the correct path" (translated from Thesis Advisor-Speak that means "Yes, you're close. Now do this that and the other thing and it will be better. But yes, mostly.")

I AM DOING SOMETHING RIGHT!