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!