dude. i did not kill anyone in my psych of gender and race class tonight, even if they deserved it. on the other hand, we were running behind, so there was only a half hour of the supposed topic. i don't know what the official name of the topic is, but given that the assigned reading is Real Boys and Guyland, it's basically the psych version of BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ? my copies of the readings are full of angry margin notes, and I was lucky the professor didn't randomly call on me to get my opinion, because the only answer I have to "what did you think about the reading?" is pretty much "i wanted to throw it against the wall." pray for me, flist - next week we're going to spend all class on this, and I think I might have a rage blackout if I have to talk about why making sure teachers don't ignore girls in the classroom prevents boys from taking on their god-given position at the top of the pyramid. (plus, so much of the data is bad: all those studies that fearmonger to the white UMC parents about how girls go to college at higher rates than boys fail to mention that in that demographic, it's the same, and it's only once you break down the stats by race and class that you can see where the disparity really lies.)

( so then i came home and watched grey's anatomy, which, for all its melodrama, does not suffer from the 'what about the menz' problem )

and now I am going to go to bed and sleep for like 10 hours. i was going to get up early and go sort of crash a linguistics conference, but the paper I really want to hear presented (as opposed to just 'ooh, syntax') isn't until saturday morning and I need the sleep more than I need to hear about obscure details of wh-movement. the conference is here on campus, which is nice because it's a five minute walk to get there, but on the other hand, it's sort of being run by our grad students, a lot of whom know me, which makes the crashing the conference plan a little more fraught.

( criminal minds )

ETA: unrelatedly: ...and there go the Houses of Parliament, to the sound of 1812. Oh, school. Oh, school.

My history professor (the cool one, not the one that makes me crazy with rage) just announced that the idea of incest was much more 'in the air' in the Middle Ages than it is now.

...

yeah, speak for yourself, buddy. maybe in the circles you hang out with.

Do you ever wake up and say, man, today I really want to talk about gender in pop culture? No? Just me? Well, okay, here I go.

( First up: Merlin! Sort of vague spoilers for the most recent two-part episode, but nothing that's not in the preview )

( Rampant, by Diana Peterfreund. Cut for spoilers as well as some discussion of rape. )

( White Collar )

1. On Thursday at practice, I did something sort of unthinkably stupid and got hit in the face. I was fine through practice, then I had a bit of a freakout later about just how fucking stupid that was and how badly it could have gone, then, after that, I spent some time worrying that I was going to end up with bruises on my face, which would have been a problem because of reasons (2) and (3)

2. On Friday, I had therapy in the morning (which was mostly kind of blah, but near the end I had one of those moments where you're just talking, you know, and you say something and you're like "holy shit, is that what I actually think?" to which the answer is "yes" and "but now that I know it I can root it out, because I deserve to get the things that I want, dammit") and on my way out I walked basically straight into the corner of one of the low dividing walls (leaving me with a bruise 2x10cm on my thigh that has gone through a whole range of colors: red, purple, green, yellow (and not euphemistic purple, either: i'm talking the colors of red and purple grapes))

3. On Saturday, I spent all day in the company of practicing psychologists talking about race. Much of it was neither thrilling nor boring, but one of the keynotes put me to sleep (there were a lot of statistics, okay?) and one of the sessions ended up as a truly fascinating discussion about biracial identity (someone brought up how the US Census defines Hispanic, or how it deals with biracial/multiracial people, and a dude in the audience stood up and said basically, "yeah, i work for the census, and we know how we define things now doesn't work, and we're trying to fix it). also, i overslept my alarm by like an hour and was only saved by being an hour late by a lucky run-in with a be-car'd classmate going to the same conference.

4. have spent way too long pondering whether it's ethical to flirt with the super hot grad student who keeps coming in to where i work to look at reels of microfilm that the lending library won't let us check out to him. this is all hypothetical, of course, because i am obviously not suave enough to flirt on the fly.

5. but that's all okay, because I have watched the pilot of White Collar once twice more than once and it more than makes up for the suavity that I lack. i have such an unreasonably gigantic crush on Neal, i cannot even deal. (have i ever mentioned that I really really like heist films?)

Obama is coming to my campus on Friday to talk about energy. (No, I'm not going - it's an auditorium that seats 1250, on a campus of 10,000 students. The odds were not in my favor.) We found out last night, and now everytime I go somewhere on campus, by the return trip there are signs up about buildings or rooms being closed on Friday. I'm hoping no one does anything stupid - mix a campus full of students who are long on ingenuity and short on common sense, who think they have a god-given right to be anywhere on campus, including roofs, tunnels, and shafts, with the Secret Service and things have the potential to go horribly horribly wrong. I'm sure I'm not nearly as excited about all of this as the Secret Service is, though. (I much prefer the president at a distance.)

I met with a professor today about grad school. (I haven't been posting about it, but I have been back and forth and yes and no on the grad school thing over the past several weeks.) "Let me give you a list of places you should think about," she told me. She gave me three to apply to for sure, and then a list of others to think about. She also warned me off some schools - "they have people doing interesting work, but their students don't go anywhere," she said. She also told me that I can't stay where I am - they almost never admit their own undergrads. "Not written in stone," she said, "but written in wet cement." Bah - I would have liked to stay here.

Finally: The problem with LJ: We all think we are so close, but really we know nothing about one another. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

ETA: Do you know what's amazing about syntax, the field? How often you'll be reading a paper on a contentious issue only to find "are you calling me racist?" and then the counter response will be "yes, I am!" or "no, you're just dumb". Were it not for the months-long delays, it would be prime f_w-style stuff.

1. I am taking a class with professor A. He invites professor B to give a guest lecture. Then, on the homework assignment, prof A sets a problem based on prof B's lecture - a problem proposed by prof B. Only, last year I took a class from prof B and we covered this topic, and prof B is lazy so this question is one that was already assigned to me - and I typed all the homework for that class, so I still have my response from last time. It is ethical to copy and paste: yes/no/only if I note that that's what I've done.

2. I'm going to this conference on Saturday. It's required for one of my classes. It's a topic that I am interested in but not super knowledgeable about, and I'm an undergrad in a different field, so my goal is to sit in back, pay attention, and not embarrass myself. I don't need to network or impress anyone, but I would like to be sort of respectable-looking. What do I wear? Pictures or descriptions of clothing items I already own upon request.

3. Twice in the last week I've found myself looking for a particular word, and I can't work out what it should be. I need a word that describes a man that presents with many of the stereotypical qualities of a gay man, but I'd prefer it not say anything about sexuality, and that it have neutral or positive connotations. I would use 'camp', but that carries a connotation of performance of artifice that I'm not wild about for the contexts I want to use it in. For the parallel case of a woman, I might use 'butch'. Anyone got any suggestions?

4. I went to the MFA on Saturday with my mom while she was in town. The theme of our trip was 'creepy infants' (or possibly 'things Laura hates about the MFA poor display decisions on the MFA's part, in Laura's opinion'). I was going to write up some things about my Totally Uninformed Opinions About Art, but it loses something if I can't link to the works of art I'm talking to. This wouldn't be a problem, but we have to add 'their website' to the list of things I hate about the MFA, so it might take a while to pull together. Seriously, if I look up a work of art and you tell me whether it's on display and where, why can't I get a list of everything on display in a certain room, rather than having to look through every fucking painting, on a website that takes a minute and half to load each page, in order to find the one I want?

1. FULL VERSION OF ALPHADOG AND OMEGALOMANIAC!!!!! YOU GUYS, I AM SO EXCITED!!! this was my favorite song on the mixtape and I am thrilled to get the whole thing! \o/\o/\o/\o/\o/

2. I spent the (long!) weekend reading the first three Kushiel books, and I have requested the next three from the library. I should probably feel shame about this, but I don't, because they are sort of a lot of fun. No one told me there was politics! and intrigue! and pining! (I was warned about the kinky sex, but fandom has corrupted my standards to the point where I'm like "....really? that's what gets labeled porny these days?")

3. love meme!

I woke up this morning to discover that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, I'm a pretty big fan of the dude, but, uh, what the hell just happened?

Today was the second day of fencing, which, delightful! Only not really because we're still doing lots of running and lunges and squats and oh god my quads and glutes and hamstrings. But I was prepared for that! I knew that I would have to go places very slowly and avoid unnecessary stairs for a while - I've done this before, I know how it goes, I can handle that.

Except, there's one thing the sabre squad has a reputation for (other than the *ahem* efficiency of our parties) and it's the rate at which we get injured. Once, the entire women's sabre squad was injured at once. I had chronic shin splints my freshman year, which meant I had to go to practice 20 minutes early every day so I could get taped from the ball of my foot to my knee. Someone concussed herself walking into a door. Someone broke their wrist in a relay game. Someone spent 80% of their freshman year out with injuries, and on crutches for a fair bit of it.

Which is to say, in keeping with the tradition of really stupid injuries I did something* to my ankle at practice today. While playing pickup basketball, which is a sport I don't even understand. I hate the world.

*I'm sure that's the correct medical term. I landed funny and it hurt, but I could walk without pain after practice. After I sat down when I got home is when I first suspected that this was going to be trouble.

I am still sick and still pissed off about it. On the other hand, I'm about 80% recovered, which is nice, especially since it means that I can say I probably didn't have swine flu. (it's been going around. I think it's only a matter of time, frankly.) (I went sore throat/congestion/runny nose/loss of voice/more congestion/cough, in about that order. One of my friends came up to me and was like, "I have what you have! Headache and achy bones, right?" and I had to break the sad news to him that he did not have a cold like me.)

Today was also the first day of fencing practice, which, &fencing;. I shouldn't have gone, in retrospect - it was a lot of jogging, calisthenics, stretching, and so forth and there was some not-so-okay breathing sounds happening by the end. but, &fencing;

In less sickly news, I went on adventure this weekend! Okay, it was not a very grand adventure, but there was live theater! A friend of mine, and fellow bitter mathematician, had heard about a show called Truth Values, which is an autobiographical show about a woman who left math grad school to go into theater. There was pretty much no reason not to go once we found out that the Arts Office would give us free tickets. (Of course, we had to go to the Arts Office to pick them up, which is staffed by very friendly, very enthusiastic women who wanted to tell us all about all the programs they offer.) I enjoyed it a lot - my favorite part of the show was when she talked about her Fashion Experiments, when she wore more and more outlandish outfits to work to see how badly her male colleagues would react. It runs one more week, and I would probably recommend it, if you're local and into that sort of thing.

Goddammit, I was going to post this entry and I was interrupted by the fire alarm. That would be annoying enough under normal circumstances, but we had a fire drill not two hours ago. >:(

1. I'm sick. I hate being sick, and I'm not very good at it. Luckily, I don't get sick very often, but it means that when I have a cold like I do now, it leads to a lot of metaphorical blank stares at my body for letting me down.

2. I opened up the pdfs of all my readings for next week, and I've been slowly working through them, but I keep opening up new articles about Piraha instead. This all is the fault of my syntax TA.

2a. I went to the optional syntax recitation on Friday, thinking I might get a chance to ask some kind of off-the-wall questions that I didn't want to derail the lecture with. Since I was the only person to show up, I got to spend 45 minutes asking questions about whatever i wanted that was even tangentally related to the lecture. i win.

2b. This is why I have all this reading about Piraha - the prof mentioned that there are claims that Piraha is a language without recursion (which in turn means that a lot of UG would have to be rethought) and so the TA and I spent 15 minutes talking about what it would take to show something doesn't have recursion and so forth. We concluded that we are sort of skeptical about lots of things that Everett claims. (The dude argues that the Piraha people - who are a very isolated people in the Amazon - don't count, don't make art, don't have recursion, and don't talk about things that are not present. When anthropologists make claims about the people they have discovered and how they are new! and different! and Other! I get very skeptical.)(Also, I'm a pretty strong believer in a lot of the syntax that Chomsky has done, so I'm skeptical for those reasons too.)

( 3. I also asked about the thing I was talking about in my last post, which the stress differences on nouns and verbs. )

4. In retrospect, my first clue that I wasn't feeling well should have been the sudden desire to watch or re-watch huge chunks of Grey's Anatomy. Oh, self.

ETA: Dude, actual quote from the paper I'm reading: "In this paper, we disagree with Everett on every one of these points. Indeed, the simplest summary of the present article can be obtained by placing a negation in front of each claim summarized above. Some of Pirahã's supposed "inexplicable gaps" (both linguistic and cultural) will be argued to be illusory or non-existent. The remaining inguistic "gaps" will turn out to be (in all likelihood) real, but shared with anguages as diverse as German, Chinese, Hebrew, Wappo and Adyghe. Since these are languages spoken within cultures that do not share the key properties of Pirahã culture as described by Everett, no arguments for Everett's "startling" or "severe" conclusions will remain."

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

In my syntax class, my professor made a claim that made me raise an eyebrow and write "....really?" in my notes. I'll probably be harassing all the people I know in RL about this question too, but it'd be awesome if you have a few minutes to take a poll and satisfy my curiosity. Behind the cuts are five pairs of sentences, then a couple of questions about each pair (as well as a couple of demographic questions).

( the sentences )

( the questions )


I have a theory, but I'm not sure it'll be borne out by the data. When I get back from class tonight, I'll write a few sentences up about it and leave them in comments (as not to bias poll takers).

I GET TO LEARN UYGHUR THIS TERM. It's our language for the Field Methods class I'm taking, so we sit around for three hours a week with a cool dude who's a native speaker, asking questions like, "so, what if it's plural? How would you say 'the birds fly'?" and he tells us and then we try to work out the grammar. It's super interesting and there's no regularly assigned work - we have a final project where we get to explore one aspect of the language, but that's pretty much it. And it's the most ridiculous class - it's co-taught by a professor and a grad student, plus the native speaker, and then there are a grand total of three students. I was worried I was going to be missing some background, but I have the most background of any of the three, so that should be fine.

I also had Spanish today, which is going to be a long hard slog, but I knew that going into it. I'm much more excited about knowing Spanish than learning Spanish. The other class I had today was Intro to Ancient and Medieval Studies, which looks like it will be a mixed bag - it's taught by three professors, one who I've had before and really liked, one who seems a little blah, and one who seems incredibly young, incredibly enthusiastic, and incredibly queer. It's also interesting to put faces to names, since two of the three would be in a list of top 10 users of ILB, although I did have the good sense not to go "oh, so you're the dude who once returned 40* books all at once!" when they introduced themselves.

*not an exaggeration. I was left wondering how he got them all from point A to point B.

Curses, school, why must you cancel the classes I want to take in the week before classes start? My schedule was beautiful and perfect and now it isn't. :(

I was going to take Science of Race, Sex, and Gender on TTh afternoon, but it got canceled. On the other hand, they've added Psychology of Gender and Race, which sounds like a reasonable substitute, but it's on Thursday evening, which means ducking out of fencing early so I can get to class, and then being stuck in class for 3 hours during my prime dinner-eating, homework-doing time. Argh. On the other hand, I have no classes on Friday, so it's not like I'd need to be doing work during that time - can't have anything due if you're not in class. (Well, you can. But it's unlikely.)

I'd have to pack a meal, though. Anyone got any good suggestions for what I should take? Fine print: I have lots of tupperware. I do not currently have a cold pack, thermos, or insulated lunch box but those would all be reasonably easy to get. I'd be looking for enough food to count as a full meal, but since I'd be eating it during class I'd prefer it to be easy to eat and not too distracting or strong-smelling. Since I won't be in class in the afternoons, I'll have access to a full kitchen to do prep work, after which it has to stay reasonably foodsafe for 3 to 5 hours, and I could also prep and freeze things the night before. Already on my list are things like fruit, crackers, cheese, and deli meats, but I'm looking for more ideas if anyone has them.

1. My workplace finally figured out why my paychecks stopped arriving a few weeks ago. (Because I have direct deposit and I am less than stellar about monitoring my finances, it took me a few weeks to catch on, so it's not like it was a mystery for weeks, just a few days.) Actually, that's not quite true - the best explanation I've gotten is "sometimes the system just does crazy shit" - but at least I am getting paid again, which I feel is the crucial point in all of this.

2. Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time - I was really disappointed that this title slightly exaggerates what they did find. In related news, I have long regretted that I missed out on buying one of the tshirts that the physics department was selling a few years ago, with the magnetic monopole version of Maxwell's equations on the front and "We believe" on the back.

3. I want to steal Neil Gaiman's library. Do you think he would mind?

Sometimes, I wonder if linguistics is what I want to do. Am I making the right choice? Will I regret this later? I ask myself. (tbf, this has more to do to with my inability to let any moment for self-doubt self-reflection pass than anything else.)

And then I spend a couple hours reading a book** about artificial languages, and then a few hours more digging through the citations*, and I go, yeah, okay, this is what I want.

*Look, they were talking about native speakers of Esperanto. Native speakers! of an artificial language! I spent much of the next few chapters wondering about how that worked and whether the native speakers spoke differently than non-native speakers, and what parts of speech changed, and whether it was similar to the process of creolization of a pidgin (except it's creolization of a language!), and when I saw there were citations I pulled up JSTOR and LLBA so fast, you have no idea.

**The book is called "In the Land of Invented Languages", by Arika Okrent, and I'd tell you it was delightful, but I'm pretty sure I'd say any book on this topic was delightful even if it were in fact terrible. Not that this book is, I think, but I will admit that I am in a bad place to judge its broader appeal. (I will say that I found its tone very refreshing, in light of recent events - Okrent approaches some rather offbeat subcultures and treats them with respect and interest, to the point of making friends, going to conlang conferences, and learning good chunks of Klingon and Esperanto. protip: if you want to do social science and market your book to the general public, this is how you should do it. koff koff.)

This is weekend is, as anyone familiar with Boston knows, Moving Weekend, when some huge fraction of the population takes to their U-Hauls, not to mention the massive influx of college students. Then, of course, into the neighborhoods most affected by Moving Weekend, you throw a major entertainment draw, a Red Sox game, and a a carnival with parade, and you have a weekend full of traffic disasters, but not that out of the usual for Boston at this time of the year.

Now add in the funeral for a beloved local politician, which poses special security hurdles because the president will be there (not to mention all the living former presidents and half the Senate) (and "security hurdles" means "street closings" and "motorcades").

Did I mention that Boston's also going to get hit by a hurricane this weekend?

Hello flist! I feel like I have been gone for a very long time, but this is probably because I am at home for a while and that's always a little weird after being away, especially since I keep finding points where my politics differ from my family's politics and that's awkward. (Also, surprising, because I think of my family as nice liberal people who get together over Thanksgiving to talk shit about Coleman, and I don't see myself as particularly far-left, but it's possible that I actually am.) And I had a very serious discussion with my brother about Torchwood, which, what?

Speaking of fannish things, I wanted to get more into the habit of talking about fandom on my LJ, because I like fandom and I like being in fandom. So, meme! Ask me my fannish Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really! And I will answer them all in a new post.