Use your education and take an educated guess

You are probably all on the edges of your seats waiting to hear about Harvard. Am I right? HA! I knew it.

I didn't have any problems getting access to Widener. In order to be granted Library Privileges, I had to bring a letter from my public library stating that my needs as a scholar do not exist outside this one building. I was granted Reading Room privileges as expected, which means I am allowed in exactly one and a half rooms in this giant, beautiful library: the reading room and the bathroom (a bathroom doesn't count as a real room in my book; it's a little past the circulation desk, so I guess we'll call that space "half a room"). Apparently I am also allowed in a computer lab if I am not bringing a computer with me; because I am bringing my laptop that has been nullified.

Anyway, this is what my Harvard University ID looks like. (Please appreciate my terrible haircut.) I am allowed into Widener Research Library for 6 days per 12 month period. So even though this card expires a year from now, I have five more days in this library. A day is 24 hours from original swipe-in, so I am allowed to leave for lunch and whatnot. This does not quite factor in the fact that this library is not open 24 hours a day, but no matter. This is Harvard, they can do what they like.

In the humanities (or "Not-Science"), the word "research" usually is translated into "reading a lot of things." The professor I'm working for - an ancient man with an adorably out-of-date laptop - presented me with a 46 page bibliography and told me to look through it and select what I wanted to read. From there, I would find these texts in the library catalog. I am not allowed in the stacks (if you want a study carrel you have to apply for that too. This place does not fuck around!), so I have to request individual journals to make photocopies of the articles. I can request up to 10 things per hour; I don't know if anyone actually achieves this over the course of a day. Dr Green has borrowing privileges, so if I want to take any books out to bring home, he has to do it for me. He is very nice about this, if not very deaf; the rest of the Reading Room was not very pleased whenever we talked.

I spent the morning getting used to their library catalog and generally making a mess of my to-find list. You guys, this is what research was like before the internet! I filled out a bunch of request forms and looked up more things. I've used a lot of the journals listed in this bibliography... and I remembered that I didn't have to go to the Dimond Library to do so. It turns out that a few of these journals are available online through JSTOR! (Un?)surprisingly, you need a Harvard logon to use their JSTOR access, but through UNH's blackboard portal I can still use these resources. DEAR EVERYONE AT UNH: BLACKBOARD DID SOMETHING RIGHT FOR A CHANGE. WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THAT. IT'S CONFUSING RIGHT?

I was still waiting for my earlier requests to come through, so I took a lunch break. I don't know Cambridge well, so I ended up going across the street to Qdoba and bringing my lunch back to Harvard Yard. In the maybe 30 minutes I was out there, no less than six people assumed I was a Harvard student and asked me for directions. I am pleased that I look appropriately collegiate.

When I came back, my requests had come through, so I now had the daunting task of remembering why I wanted them and making photocopies. I would just like to throw it out there how happy I am that UNH put all of our information on just one card; I have a separate card from Dr Green just for printing/photocopying. It took me three different documents to figure out that the copier auto-double-sides everything. This copier had a very effective guide of how it worked (COPIES COME OUT HERE, COLLATED PAGES GO IN HERE, MORE PAPER IS AVAILABLE AT THE DESK ASK FOR HELP etc) - clearly they realize that while the world's premiere academics can think about complex things they (we?) cannot handle Xerox machines.

Anyway, Dr Green had to run off to a meeting for the afternoon, so I ended up leaving Widener around 3 pm with three books, six articles, and a fairly infinite number of articles available on-line. Basically I do not have to be in Boston every day (which is a life saver, waking up at 5 am just to get into Boston around 8 was going to kill me!) However, I am now officially calling August the Tour De La Bibliothèques while I read and take notes. On Wednesday I read thirty pages about the sentence "I love you" on my way home; Thursday I camped out in my town's sometimes-commmunityesque college and brushed up on doing pragmatics.

Doing pragmatics is serious business.

Two things today

1. this is my 100th post! I was actually planning on having yesterday's post be up for tomorrow, but I mixed up my dates. Oops. Happy 100 posts, blogotron fans!

2.

YOU GUYS I AM ON THE FRONT PAGE OF A WEBSITE click here to see it larger

Brain so good, coulda swore you went to college

I am starting a new research project with a professor at BU this week. I'm very excited, there's something wonderful about starting a new project. I don't know all of the details about my role as Unpaid Academic Slave Labor, but I do know that I will be spending a lot of time in two libraries. One of them is the BU library, which pretty much anyone can walk into.

The other one is Harvard's Widener Library.
Harvard has a lot of libraries. They all seem awfully specific. Some are more strict than others, but overall the general rule is that if you want to use one of their libraries, you just have to be somehow affiliated with Harvard and be able to prove it.

It just so happens that Widener has the strictest policy for visitors. It is "a research institution for the use of Harvard students, faculty, staff, and visiting researchers, and is not open for public visitation or tours by individuals not affiliated with the University."

If you are one of the following:
a) a Harvard Alumni
b) a faculty member at another institution
c) a doctoral student at Harvard
You are allowed in Widener. Your access is varied depending on your status (ie, alums can only use the Reading Room but not the stacks).

If you are d) EVERYONE ELSE you have to apply for visiting privileges. Even if you are a doctoral candidate at another school, you still have to apply. These visiting privileges are for six days total for a twelve month period. To obtain visiting privileges, you must present a letter to the Library Privileges Office from the reference librarian of their university or Boston metropolitan public library stating that the specific library materials needed are not available elsewhere.

Let's review for a second: I AM APPLYING TO GET ACCESS TO ONE OF THE MOST SUPER-STRICT OF LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES.

the bureaucracy parade and me: not a love story

Because I am moving to Scotland, I need to apply for a student visa. The UK Immigration website tells me this.


The visa application is a fairly straightforward document. UK immigration wants to know stuff about you: your passport information, where you live, where you're from, who your parents are, if you've ever travelled outside your country, if you've ever been a terrorist etc. Unless you actually are a terrorist, this is a pretty simple process. If you ARE a terrorist, you may as well not bother applying because I'm sure you will be rejected. Sorry.

I was impressed, though. You are allowed to list yourself in a "marriage/civil partnership" meaning that same-sex couples are recognized nationally, with all of the rights and responsibilities comparable to that of marriage. How cool is that?

But like I said, straightforward. I had planned to have this completed and filed for the end of June, giving The Bureaucratic Powers That Be lots of time to process it accordingly. This was a good idea, except for one little tiny problem: I have dual citizenship with Canada. You wouldn't expect this to be a problem. However, I've been a dual citizen since I was born by virtue of the fact that Mom is a Canadian citizen and wanted me to be one too. (This makes Mom a resident alien in the US, meaning she is effectively a non-citizen of the United States. She gets very bitter about this during election years.)

But, that was done when I was three months old. Since then, all of my documentation is American: I have an American passport, driver's license, social security number. I have voted in a few elections. I don't have anything Canadian other than that one sheet of paper. Had I accidentally renounced my Canadian citizenship? After my citizenship was announced, we never heard from Canada about me ever again. So I called the UK Embassy to find out if I should list Canadian as a citizenship on my visa application.

They had no idea. They told me to call the Canadian government and ask them if I should declare their citizenship... who in turn told me to ask the US government what I needed to declare. This went on for a month! A MONTH. Depending on who I spoke to at each embassy, they either decided I should list both and note that I was Canadian by birth OR that I should ask a different government, because they were not sure.

By early July, we still hadn't gotten a straight answer. I gave up. I filed the first half of my application and set up an appointment with Homeland Security to have my biometrics done. Whatever it was, it sounded awfully British to me.

Mom frequently has to go to Homeland Security to get a new green card, allowing her to stay in the States. She warned me that the last time she was there, they were backed up for hours. "Get there early," she warned, "And be prepared to wait."

So I did. This past Wednesday, I went into Boston and arrived at Homeland Security half an hour before my actual appointment. I walked in and immediately talked to the lady at the front desk. She looked at my paperwork and my passport, scanned my biometrics appointment notification, and said "Come with me."

We walked past a waiting area and through a second security checkpoint. She led me to a little room in the back. "Sit down." I sat. There was one other guy sitting there. He was called, and a few minutes later, I was called too. A man whose first language was clearly not English led me to a little area blocked off by those nurse's-office screens. He pulled on rubber gloves; I was terrified. What were biometrics, anyway??

YOU GUYS, "biometrics" meant "fingerprinting". Yes, really. This rubber-gloved man put my hand on a scanner and took my fingerprints. Then he took my picture. He signed off that my "biometrics" were on file. AND THAT WAS IT. I walked out, fifteen minutes before my appointment was due to start.

After all of that, today I am mailing all of my final information to the UK embassy for processing. I am getting a visa to be in Scotland! Hopefully!

Dear Linguistics, YOUR LOVE IS MY DRUG

1. So I went on that job interview. And I didn't fuck it up ... until they very end!
I talked to the ladies who currently are Administrative Assistants-slash-Grammatical Editors; they gave me a cup of coffee, an article to edit, and a red pen. It's like my dream job interview! And apparently nobody's ever done that well on their practice document before, so they were a little bit floored. Basically, they were like "We really like you, we'll let you know by Friday. Is there anything else you want us to know?"

And I was all, "Well, I'm sorry that you didn't get back to me earlier in the summer when I had full availability; I can only do this part-time right now - I've been working (will be starting to work, ahem, whatever) with a professor at BU and then I'm moving to Scotland for grad school."

Lady: (jaw drop)"Well, thanks for taking the time to come in."

And then I walked out. I haven't felt that badass in a while.


2. SPEAKING OF BADASS (this is relative, perhaps if you are not me, you will not feel the same way)
I heard back from another professor I e-mailed recently. He's been busy wrapping up this project which is essentially a corpus of Old English Poetics and language "to detect relationships between, and structures within, poetic texts in [the] Old English [corpus]". He had been away for a week, which means he just got my e-mail and apologized if he missed out on having me on board due to this fact.
But he also warned me that
a) they had run out of funding
b) they were nearly finished with it
c) I AM ACTUALLY OVERQUALIFIED TO DO THIS.


3. Oh, and Sarah Palin called herself Shakespeare and I wrote about it.

YOU GUYS, THIS IS AWESOME.

We mostly work to live, until we live to work

Previously on The Fake Palindrome:
I was fired from my job after working four days. You will recall that in an act of desperation I emailed a bunch of English and Linguistics professors at the nine million colleges near me, offering myself up as an Unpaid Academic Slave. (Does all of this sound unfamiliar? see more here.)

Who would say no to free labor? And - if I can say so - I have a damn impressive academic resume. I am insanely qualified for academic research, which is good, because I think it might be the only thing I am good at! The next day, checking my email, I had a response from a Dr Green at BU. He was on his way to the Biannual Chaucer Conference - it was love at first email.

He's preparing to write an article about Modern English pragmatics and wanted to know if I would be interested in working on a bibliographical survey for him. And, he added - "that would assure you weekly conversations and lunches until your plane leaves. It could be a way to escape the dog days of August." SIGN ME UP! I immediately wrote him back to say yes, and schedule a meeting with him. It might not be paid, but I'll get hang out at BU and Harvard libraries for a month! And it is not sitting on my ass at home, which is a very, very good thing.

***

Once upon a time, back in June, I was a viable job candidate. I had the whole summer ahead of me! I was applying for a bunch of administrative jobs, as I decided I wanted to work in an office. I don't see myself ever working in an office long-term, but it seemed like a good way to spend the summer. They would have AC, I would feel like a Real Person, and I would have some semblance of real-world experience.

Back in June, BBC* had an open position for an administrative assistant/grammarian for Complicated Science Documents Written By Scientists. Aside from Obscure Research, I am also ridiculously qualified to be your In-House Grammarian (even if this blog doesn't always show it!); I sent them my resume with a pretty good cover letter. And then I never heard back from them. So I kind of assumed that it was a lost cause and kept job-searching.

AND THEN THEY E-MAILED ME BACK ASKING ME TO SCHEDULE A INTERVIEW, the day after I had agreed to work with Dr. Green. I can only work part-time until early September. So I guess I am on my way to absolutely blow a job interview today.




*NOT the broadcasting company. This is a company near me; I'm not naming them by name for hopefully obvious reasons.

Mystery solved.

Recently Mom and I were searching for takeout menus in the kitchen. Apparently Dad had just reorganized this cabinet the other day, so we weren't sure where they were hiding. While pulling out stacks of paper, Mom unfolds the following. This one sheet of legal paper has been floating around my house for the past 19 years.

"You drew this!" she says. "You had just turned three years old in '91, and we were driving up to New Brunswick to visit The Extended Canadian Family! You drew this in the car. You were so good."
"Okay, Mom."
"Well, you know, when kids have just turned three they can't draw like this. See? It's a clown." (points to label "The Clown")
"No... I think that's a picture of Dad."
"How do you know? It's a clown, wearing a hat! See?"
"I don't think so. I think it's supposed to be a picture of Dad...because that's what Dad's hair looks like."

(source picture: Thanksgiving 2009. To be fair, Dad looked exactly the same 19 years ago, although significantly less gray. File under: 'if you ever needed kind of blurry proof I'm related to these people'.)
"No. It... Oh my god YOU'RE RIGHT!"
"I drew it, I should know."
"You were three!"
"So?"
"We need to change that immediately." (crosses out 'The Clown', writes 'Dad')


All I have to say is that bitches don't know about my 3-year-old self's artistic badassery.

Tweet tweet (Or: Now back to our regularly-scheduled deconstruction)

So I joined Twitter, as you may have figured out by now. Judge away, I don't blame you. I can claim I was doing it for "research purposes" but whatever, I have a twitter account. I was bored one day and it provides another time-waster during funemployment. For the most part, it's a depository of links to some of the articles I've written. I don't think my minute-to-minute actions are especially interesting; perhaps that makes me a bad Twitter user. I have a hard enough time coming up with things to write about on here! But at the same time I also feel like I have Joined The Internet. I am now - officially - An Internet Person.

Basically, we can boil down the twitter experience to the following sentence: Twitter has been rather lamentable but simultaneously REALLY INTERESTING, and once you get accustomed to getting your information in that way, it is very difficult to disconnect. I've been on there for about a month now, and the longer you're on it the more it grows on you. It's kind of unfortunate.

What I like about Twitter is that it offers information in an ingenious way. It's kind of like having your own personal newsfeed only about things that you care about, which is really cool. I think 140 characters is limiting - I am very bad at keeping sentences succinct, and don't text messages get 160 characters? - but at the same time it's almost a challenge to see how simply you can state something. Linguistically, Twitter is amazing! (Also, I don't shut up about linguistics.)

It also offers something called Trending Twitter Topics, which are Things Many People Are Talking About. These are fascinating, and it's amazing to see how people create new words in real-time! You can tell what is catching on and what isn't, what makes a good catchphrase and what does not. It also shows what is Really Important on a Global Scale; it's kind of like a Global Newsfeed unto itself. Another thing I do really like about twitter is that it allows you to search users' tweets for specific words, which is occasionally really helpful.

But, I'm also not following a lot of people. I'm following 40 accounts right now, which isn't too bad, but I feel like my Twitter experience would greatly benefit from having friends to have conversations with, but at the same time that seems like a wildly inefficient form of communication. Are you on twitter? You should follow me (@heatherfro).

my blog is decidedly not a tumblr but I don't think it's too much to say that this is all I ever really want out of life.

paired with some nice folk music playing in the background.

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

Once upon a time I had a job at a bagel place in my hometown. I worked for exactly four days. I was let go on my first full shift.

I had been hired to replace a girl who was going to school in Providence in the fall after working for Bagels for 3 years. By training me over the summer, I would be capable of doing everything she did. Disregarding the fact I was planning on leaving them high and dry come September - brb, going to scotland - this was reasonable. Kerri was still around - she was training me - but announced yesterday morning that she was having a hard time finding a job in Providence and she had decided to drive back every weekend to work her usual weekend shift.

As (Irrelevant) New Kerri, I was let go after my first week of work yesterday. I'm not amused. Because she's still there, they won't need me. But I'm not even really entirely terminated! I'm now permanently on-call, meaning (despite the fact that I never finished training - I can't use the cash register still) they can call me and be like "oh hey, want to work today? So-and-so called out." Fuck that!

At least my boss paid me in cash for my past few shifts, and told me that I can "totally use her as a reference". HA - yeah right.

But this presents some new problems, namely that
a) I don't have a job
b) I am not going to be able to get a job for only a little less than two months
c) It took me nearly a month and a half to get THIS job

So now it's back to the drawing board. I've been emailing English and linguistics professors at local colleges, offering my services as an unpaid research assistant (read: Academic Slave Labor). I have the resume for it, at least. I pleasantly discovered while writing a cover letter that from my majors and minor, I have backgrounds in literary theory, history of language - specifically that of English, word-formation, issues of syntax and grammar, as well as gender theory and queer theory. I am literate in Old English as well as some rudimentary French literacy. If that's not qualification enough to do academica, well, you can go fuck yourself.

From proto-Sanskrit Minoans to Porto-centric Lisboans, Greek Cypriots and and hobbisots who hang around in quotes a lot

So I write a column for The Examiner about linguistics. (you might have heard about it.) It's a lot of fun, there's a lot of freedom to write about whatever you want as long as it's relevant to your topic. However, next to nothing happens linguistically on a day to day basis, and rarely does anything especially "local" happens in my field - sometimes it's a bit of a stretch to come up with stuff to talk about! As a result, a lot of my columns are mostly extravagant concessions on my part.

Much like this blog, I have no idea who is reading my columns. I'm not really promoting this page at all, so it's often like shouting into the void. Writing for the Examiner is similar in that I'm still kind of shouting into the void, but I'm also putting all of my articles on StumbleUpon and sending a few people my articles. I'm trying a little harder. I have garnered some readership, and unlike this blog, I have some analytics available for The Examiner. I usually get about 60-90 page hits on days that I write. This baffles me, because I don't think I could think of 60-90 people who would want to hear what I have to say. Other than the people I've bullied into reading (thanks, if you're reading; I do really appreciate it, and I'm sorry if it's annoying) and a few people in my family who are sort of required to read my articles (ahem, Mom & Dad) I don't think I could come up with 60-90 people off the top of my head!

But for the first time since I started writing for The Examiner, something linguistically newsworthy happened and I wrote about it for yesterday's article. I then went to Boston for a day and a half to dog-sit with my friend KA. Upon coming back, I found out that I was on the front of the Society & Culture page and had been on the front page of the Boston Examiner yesterday, leading to my highest readership ever - just from one article! I am currently the third-most read Society & Culture Examiner behind the New York Charities Examiner. I am floored!

1,413 people were interested in what I had to say yesterday. That's pretty cool. If you've been reading all along - thanks so much.

Today in Weird Animal News

I told myself long ago that I wouldn't be the sort of person who reblogs stuff from the internet. I have more than enough mediums for doing that! but this was too good to pass up.



German Fans Want Revenge Grilling Of Oracle Octopus





POP QUIZ TIME
what is the best part of this story?
a) An octopus was predicting the world cup games AND PEOPLE TOOK HIM SERIOUSLY
b) This octopus has been getting death threats from the German people
c) There have been nationwide live news broadcasts of this octopus' predictions
d) The sentence "Not an ordinarily superstitious people, Germans became believers in Paul's possible psychic powers."
e) "Oracle Octopus" when translated to German is "Orakelkrake"
f) ALL OF THE ABOVE

Greetings loved ones, let's take a journey!

I have spent a lot of time this summer thinking about gender performativity. Gender roles are fairly simply defined by culture, but performativity is a little more specific: it requires the individual to embody society's prescribed gender roles for them. At job interviews I've been observing gender and hiring practices; when going shopping, I've been carefully noting what is marketed to men and women separately. I haven't reached any big conclusions yet, and I don't know if I ever will, but it's certainly been fun.

In the midst of all that, I happened upon a parody of the song California Gurls. I hate this song, mostly because Katy Perry needs to hire better lyricists, and because "gurls" disgusts me...but i digress. I can't stop watching this, because it presents so many opportunities to think about gender and media. By putting men in the position of scantily-clad women, they are hyper-sexualized and objectified in ways that men usually aren't. Imagine a woman dancing like this - we wouldn't think twice about it. I appreciate that "Katy Perry" is the only woman in the video - but she's not inherently voyeuristic towards these men. Crotch shots suddenly are no different than the male gaze-focused tits & ass of film-based media (TV, movies, video games, photography, etc). Girls licking popsicles - hot, right? Guys licking popsicles? GAY. But - that's the point. And I love it.

Living the English Major Dream, Part ii

After a month of collecting job applications, turning them around, interviewing, rinse & repeat ad infinitum I FINALLY GOT A JOB. Thank god, because that was an annoying process.

Anyway. In case being a columnist was not the most English-majory thing in the world, I am now working at a local bagel and coffee place. If I wanted to be snarky I would call my job title "Everything Bagel". I cashier, make coffee, and assemble your bagel's toppings accordingly.

This is inadvertently hilarious, because I can't cook at all, yet I'm working food service. I've only worked one shift, and in that one shift I only burned one thing - an egg in a microwave. Here's hoping I don't get fired for microwave incompetence.

my country tis of thee

Around Thanksgiving 2009, I started to realize that I will be moving permanently to the UK for the next five years...and maybe even longer than that! As each holiday passes, it is my Last One In The States, and I grow more and more conscious of this fact. Something will rear its inherently American head... and I'm reminded that I'm Leaving Soon.

Few things say AMERICA! as loudly as the Fourth of July. I don't always love America but I have never really seen myself as an ex-patriot. I hope I will be back one day!