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.

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...

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!

life during wartime

I got some groceries, some peanut butter to last a couple of days

all swallowed in their coats

Good morning, world! I am getting ready to walk 10 minutes to my office.

POP QUIZ: how many layers am I wearing here?
a. 3
b. 3/4 of a sheep
c. NOT ENOUGH
d. all of the above

(No, I am not going to shut up about being cold.) I feel like I have American Nesting Syndrome, where I try to put on as many layers as possible all the time. You could probably reassemble the sheep all my wool things have come from.

And you guys, this is DECEMBER. It's going to get colder. I have a couple of American friends, one of whom is from Virginia; she's been wearing two (wool) coats already. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO IN FEBRUARY

but we are 78% water, even our pumping hearts

While the rest of the world seems convinced that the world has ended due to last week's 5 inches of snow over six days and yesterday's sudden onslaught of a proper New England-style snowfall for about 3 hours, prompting the university to strongly urge me to "not venture out of university buildings" (verbatim quote) and not one but two snow days in the past few days, I am generally unfazed, and therefore the only one in the office so far this morning. In fact I'm relieved that things are back to normal.

Come have a cup of tea with me, as we're out of coffee, and I have about 6 more cups of tea to drink throughout the day to stay awake anyway.

happy thanksgiving!

In solidarity, today I am eating a turkey sandwich for lunch (& looking fairly demonic, sorry about that).

Tonight I am going to a seminar over at Glasgow Uni and then I am going to my second Thanksgiving dinner with some international friends; I'm very excited. Thanksgiving is something I think everyone can get behind when you present it as "eat a lot and drink a lot until you think you will explode, take a nap, AND THEN EAT MORE."

jive turkey

Happy Thanksgiving week, blogfolks! Continuing on the theme of my blog as a food blog...

I was worried that I was going to miss Thanksgiving and be sad about it, but this was not the case! Instead I am going to not one but two Thanksgiving parties. The first one is tonight, with the Scottish Lesbian Army & Friends. My international friends are having a Thanksgiving party on actual Thanksgiving, which is going to be a lot of fun - they really like the concept of getting everyone all together in one space.

On the whole the UK is very confused by Thanksgiving, which is adorable. They get the concept of it, but not much else. They don't really get the customs or the food you'd eat. But I have a bunch of friends who are also Americans, and we've been trying to explain it as "everyone gets together, gets dressed up, drinks a lot of wine, eats a fuckton of food, watches tv, takes a nap, and eats more". Everyone likes the idea of it, and we've told them to think of it sort of like Christmas, but with more food. Christmas is their big holiday, with turkeys and stuffing and whatnot. I had a "Christmas sandwich" yesterday, which was chicken, ham and stuffing. (And probably mayo.) Close, guys...

We have cranberry sauce here, but it usually comes in a small jar and is very expensive. Dried cranberries are pretty easy to come by, but nothing beats a good cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, right? It took four stores in two different parts of town, but finally found some! LOOK AT THIS:


I bought three bags of them, had to go hunt down nutmeg, and ran home to get down to business. My flatmates thought I was NUTS. They watched me do it, deciding that I was in fact making cranberry jam. Not quite... All my friends (except for the Americans, they are clearly excited too) think cranberry sauce is "mental" and simply cannot wrap their minds around it. I hope they are ready...I just tasted it & it's delicious.

I feel it in my bones

It is November and I am freezing already. I have many more months of this, and I understand it is only going to get worse.

You would think that after 22 years of bitter New England winters I would be prepared for Scottish winters. I thought I would be! I'm a pretty hardy New Englander. Being cold doesn't really bother me - I am prone to opening windows in February in New Hampshire. In fact I don't think I ever thought to myself "holy HELL, it is cold." In New England, it's a really windy sort of cold - the temperature will drop really low and you can feel the cold on your skin.

Glasgow shares a latitude line with Moscow. Which, by the way, is in Russia. But I was assured that we get a "nice Gulf Stream warm-up" from being so close to the Atlantic. This was a lie. Every day I think "Holy HELL, it is cold." (On paper it doesn't sound terribly cold here - the temperature's been hovering around 45 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn't terrible. I would daresay that 45 is a pretty good temperature for the fall, especially this time of the fall.)

But it's not the same kind of cold. This whole country wears wool coats all the time, because it's the only way to keep warm(ish). By mid-October, I had to go out and buy a wool coat because my New England-Acceptable ski coat wasn't keeping me warm! It's not a windy sort of cold here - though we do have wind sometimes and then you just sort of want to die - it's more of a damp cold that seeps through your bones and into each individual muscle and you wonder if you will ever be warm again. Suddenly I understand the wool coat thing, they sort of act as insulation for your body.

In light of my blog slowly but surely becoming a food blog, this brings me back to soup. As you might know, I love soup. It's good for you and warms you up - what else can you ask for? Unfortunately, as I know all too well from my previous visit to the UK, the only sort of soup you can really get is Cream of Blank soup. Even straightforward things like minestrone soup is more like Cream of Minestrone soup. If you order chicken soup expecting chicken noodle soup you are going to be very disappointed, because you've actually got cream of chicken soup. Some cream of blank soups are delicious - cream of broccoli, for instance, is a magical thing. And then there are others that are just surprisingly lumpy in ways you don't want. (I imagine the Brits find American soups to be terribly weak.)

As a result of being cold all the time, I spend a lot of time around lunchtime thinking about how much I would like soup, but I would not like the cream form of it. (The last time I did this I got cream of lentil soup, which I would like to not eat ever again, thanks.) I would look around at the soup selections in the grocery stores, thinking, "This would be great if it was not going to be cream of blank." (I realize I could make soup myself, but that sounds difficult.) Imagine my surprise when I found pumpkin and coriander soup the other day!
yes, I do eat in my room rather than in the kitchen.

Pumpkin is not A Thing here - I saw a few of them for a hot second around Halloween, but they're not very popular, whereas you are all drowning in pumpkin flavored everythings. So naturally, this is all I have been eating for the past few days. Admittedly this is also a cream of pumpkin situation, but that is totally the correct way to do this. I am very pleased. All is right with the world again, or at least until they take this pumpkin soup out of the stores - it's a "limited release".

send you off on a big adventure, Xs lead you to the treasure

HI FROM TARTANVILLE
actually, no, HI FROM STARBUCKS
you read that right! STARBUCKS. I am trying really hard to not be an obnoxious American, but I can't help it if the only places to get wifi are Starbucks. There are a bunch of them around here. I don't really get it, coffee's not a big thing here, but there are a lot of Starbucks.

Basically, I don't have the ability to load websites until I register as a Strathclyde student, and I don't want to register as a student until I've actually figured out a course of action (am I taking classes? yes? no? I'm still not sure), this way I can avoid fixing any mistakes I might make. And, like, I have all week to do it. Somehow I have email, Skype, and AIM access from my flat. (get at me.)

I'm still getting settled, but my apartment is nice. It's small, very purple, but it's nice. I have three roommates (we all have our own rooms) but only two of them are here so far. One is from England and the other is from Ireland (& I'm an american). We're betting that our next roommate will be Scottish, if she ever shows up. It came with more stuff than I had anticipated, like a pile of cleaning supplies. However, there are some weird things about it - we have to turn on the hot water before we can use it. So, someone has to wake up at least 30 min ahead of whenever they want to take a not-freezing shower. We've been informed that in the winter we might need to do this an hour ahead of time. I  think the idea is that we will save energy (how green of us) and $$$ -- we pay for energy usage - by not heating the water all the time.

As for living in the city, it's going well. I'm decidedly not a "city person" - I like suburbia; it doesn't bother me to have to drive 20 minutes anywhere. It's kind of nice in it's own little boring way. (I went to university in a place that was possibly more boring than my hometown.) I live in a very nice part of the city, close to the major shopping streets. Apparently Glasgow has the best shopping in the UK outside of London. I still have some trouble crossing the street, though (which way am i supposed to look? OH GOD A CAR); usually I just wait until someone else shows up and move when they do. You walk on the opposite side of the street too (this is more complicated), and I have no idea what to do when I get to a staircase - which way do I go?

I live in a really gay part of the city - they weren't kidding about that! - my neighborhood (is it a neighborhood?) is covered in rainbow flags. (A sign on the hairdressers' next to me says "gays, straights, bisexuals, no problems here; it's bald people we have trouble with"). My street has a lot of indian restaurants and I am across the street from the BBC symphony hall. I'm not far away from campus, either, which is nice too.

This week I am meeting a lot of the other postgraduates for dinner/drinks/coffee. They have all been very friendly! I'm looking forward to meeting them.

I haven't gotten a chance to walk around and take pictures yet. I will do this soon, I promise! Here is a picture of my key to the laundry room. Yup.

for security reasons, all unattended bags will be collected and destroyed

GREETINGS FROM GLASGOW, everyone!

I am in a hotel in glasgow city center with Mom. I was freaking out a little bit when we were about to leave Logan, which I think is understandable, but our flights are fine, we are safe, etc.

I originally wanted to sort of live-blog this journey (or be like, a Travel Writer, but I don't know how to make things interesting) but limited wifi access without paying ~$20 for wifi at Heathrow would have made this difficult. Also, there is no wifi in the sky.



8:30 PM EST, Logan Airport. LOOK WE ARE EXCITED TO START THIS JOURNEY

2:30 AM EST, On The Airplane
I don't sleep on airplanes -- instead I am watching Late-Night-Transatlantic-TV-Programming. So far I have seen the end of a Queen Latifah movie which severely lacks a discernable plot - though I might have missed it when i went back to reading my book - and I have just watched a game show of some sort where two children are given towels to throw wiffle balls into inflatable water ring in a studio. at 3:30 AM they start showing The Office (American). NOTHING ABOUT THIS MAKES SENSE.


10:05 AM GMT (5:05 AM EST), Heathrow Airport
we have been awake since yesterday morning including a 6-hr flight + 5 hrs of time zone changes

13:35 PM GMT our plane from Heathrow to Glasgow has been delayed. we were supposed to be on it right now. We do not have a departure time for the next hour.

13:40 PM GMT THE POPE IS ON TV. Apparently he is here too. Mom claims that his car is called the Popemobile. I doubt this.

14:00 PM GMT WE ARE BOARDING THIS PLANE... in 20 minutes. At least we have a gate for departure now. GLASGOW HO!

14:45 ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzcoffee!

15:30 GLASGOW! Hello! You are pretty!


16:15 Check in to hotel. How do we make the light switches work? We have been awake for nearly two days now. (spoiler: we figured it out.)


LATER TONIGHT I am meeting the English Department! And maybe sleeping again! I would like this very much.

i don't pretend to know how time zones work, so you will just have to bear with me for a bit while I figure out how to change all my accounts.

something about airplanes

this is my mother & i. we frequently wear the exact same color combinations, though not on purpose.

On September 15 we are flying from Boston to London to Glasgow!

quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock

In case you were curious, the Tour De La Bibliothèques is still ongoing. Here is an illustrated guide to my life as a professional reader.

This is what I am researching, explained with dinosaurs and probably much more helpful than my previous post about it:
(from dinosaur comics by ryan north)


I go to Widener every week or so to get copies of articles to read. I look at an on-line catalog, request items, wait for them to arrive, make photocopies of them, return the items, and repeat. Here I am making sure I have all the pages of one article.
If I want to borrow a book, I have to get Dr. Green to sign it out for me. Then I bring all of this home with me.

During the rest of the week, I come to Wheaton College's library, where I sit in the basement with the history books to read and take notes on my computer. Today I am reading about lying.
Because I am super-nearsighted, I have to wear my glasses when I read. Even though I wear contacts in my daily life, my lenses hypercorrect for distance and then I can't read. As you can imagine, this is counterproductive.

That's it! This is what I do every day instead of having an actual job. There's not much to say about being a research assistant. I don't have to get dressed up or anything; I just sort of sit somewhere, listen to music, and read. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I figured it was time to talk about something other than mail fails.

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.

It's feeling byzantine

Greetings from my town's public library (the first public library in the nation... aww yeah!) where I am hanging out with Victorian-clad (?) ladies, about an eighth of my high school's graduating class (we're all awkwardly smiling at each other to say hello but all actively pretending we don't know one another), and writing my latest column for The Examiner!

After five years and the left temple of my old glasses breaking not once but twice, I finally got new frames. I am very excited about them, mostly because five years is a long time for glasses, but I don't wear my glasses often. I hope as an early family-bonding exercise my parents took me premature glasses-shopping as a baby - Mom and Dad have awful eyesight too. I can't remember a time before corrective lenses. I've been wearing them since I was 7 - switching to contacts was amazing because it meant I got to wear sunglasses!

An Annotated Diagram of the Freelance Writer

Welcome to Day 1 of Living the English Major Dream! Normally I would be sitting around my house, but I decided to drag myself to my local coffeeshop to work.

Just kidding. I totally don't like lattes. That was black coffee.

EDIT (6:28 PM) my column just went up! you can see it at http://www.examiner.com/x-53217-Boston-Linguistics-Examiner

we're half-awake in our fake empire

moving out for the last time. i loved this room.



(graduation updates coming soon)

i am turning in my thesis today.

this is my thesis. it is 15 pages long. i wrote it in 6 weeks.

i guess I should start de-post-it-noting these library books then.

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!?