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.

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.

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.

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.

this is how my week has been:

remember: be here now

I don't think I do enough drugs to fully appropriate Ram Dass' 1971 book Remember: Be Here Now. (Nor do I think I will ever get there.) I'm also not especially interested in meditation or yoga. But lately I've been re-reading this book and remembering to calm down; even though I feel like I'm running out of time and things are going way too fast, it's going to be okay.

I tell people that I don't have a cell phone sometimes.

This is a lie - I do have a cell phone. (Sorry, friends.) It's mostly because I don't want to have to use it. I really hate the idea of being consistently contactable; I leave my room/house so I can interact face-to-face with other people. I have a landline; it's not like I can't EVER be called or call other people.

Cell phones just sort of annoy me, and though I realize I am probably infinitely more difficult to contact than I think I am, I really like living in the 90s. That, and these sort of people really scare me:


from http://cellphones.org/

Re: Twilight

The Twilight phenomenon never fails to utterly baffle me. How was this book/franchise SO POPULAR?!

this is how i feel every time i am in a bookstore

(from Alison Bechdel's Entertainment Weekly piece for their 1000th issue)