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!