Hi. Waiter Rant is my latest blog find. Read and laugh! (And then forever feel an obligation to tip well!)

Lately, I've been thinking some summarizing thoughts about my degree in Linguistics. A month and a half from now it will all be done. I will not be learning anything more about linguistics in an academic setting (barring the possibility of grad school). So, what do I know about linguistics and language?

I know it's really complicated. I know that for almost every detail that I know about it, there is a competing theory. I know some really good questions to ask about it. Here are a few:

1. Language Acquisition: How do we learn our first language? How do we listen to a sound wave and distinguish between the babbling idiots (parents) who are freaking out about how impossibly perfect their new baby (you) is and going "coochie coochie coo!" from actual words? Why are there some mistakes that ALL kids make (e.g. "I falled down" instead of "I fell down") and some mistakes that NO kids make (e.g. "That's the way it's." instead of "That's the way it is.")? Why do we sometimes have slightly different grammars? For instance, I can say "Are you coming with?", but my best friend cannot. She has to say "Are you coming with me?" or it sounds wrong. We grew up in the same area. Our parents are native speakers of English, from the same area. What gives? What was different?

2. Processing: How does our brain do all that language stuff so fast? Your brain has to parse a sound wave into consonants and vowels, put that into morphemes, put that into words, build a sentence, pay attention to intonation, figure out if the person talking to you is being sarcastic, figure out if they're alluding to something, think about your relationship with the person talking to you, think about the setting, EVERYTHING, all in about 300 milliseconds. And it does, everytime. Most of the time, it does it perfectly, and seemingly without effort. And that's not even half of what's involved in comprehension!

That's way too fast. We're having trouble just teaching a computer to do voice recognition to convert speech to text. We're barely even trying for comprehension. We're certainly not touching discourse-level comprehension yet. We talk about our brains like they are sophisticated computers, but they do things that we can't even fathom reproducing. They don't seem to work like computers at all, so what are we doing when we build these models that compare them to computers? (Well, okay, sort of like computers. But there's a lot more to it, and we're missing those parts.)

3. Syntax/Semantics Interface: We have this idea in Minimalism (current leading theory about linguistic syntax) that syntax has to be finished before semantics comes into play. This idea bothers me. I don't know where it came from, and I can see plenty of reasons for throwing it out. (Reasons against throwing it out? We would have to re-work a lot of stuff.) I mean, when I compose a sentence, I have an IDEA, and then I compose a SENTENCE STRUCTURE, and then I convert it to SOUND (or text, clearly). So wouldn't semantics come first? I would be happy with saying that these are parallel processes (syntax and semantics), but I don't like the idea of saying that we build a sentence structure, and then plug an idea into that structure. That seems really counter-intuitive, and there are a lot of cases which show that syntax is sensitive to certain semantic issues.

For instance, the sentence "The shit seems to have hit the fan" is grammatical. The sentence "The shit tried to hit the fan" is not, for purely semantic reasons. "The shit" in this instance is an idiom. That's a semantic thing. Yet these sentences (yes, these precise ones) come up in my Grammatical Theories class as a syntactic issue. Tell me once again how syntax is not aware of semantics? Clearly it must be. So where does this idea come from? Why is it a foundational assumption? What are we doing here?


Anyways, it's this type of stuff that we think about in Linguistics. Half the time I tell people what I'm studying, their first question is, "How many languages do you know?" It's not about languages. It's about language.

Okay, I'm off to read a billion articles about spelling. And I'm going to grumble about it because it is my birthday week and I'm allowed to grumble if I want to! HMPH!

(I secretly like grumbling. Don't tell anyone!)

You know it!

Dinner party at Jim's last night:


Highlights: quiche, lasagna, Agnes's chocolate cake with coffee icing, port wine, pina coladas, Sam's sketch books and caricatures, Toby the semi-shy orange cat.

I downloaded Season 1 of The Sopranos last week and have started watching them and HOLY HECK they are written well. I can see why they've been so popular. The characters are strong (and funny!), right from the get go. I may have to revise my "TV is stupid" stance, to more of a "reality TV and sitcoms are stupid." I've been impressed with the following shows lately: Veronica Mars, The Sopranos, Lost, The West Wing. If all TV were like that, I would be addicted. As for now, I bittorrent them and avoid the commercials. Is that stealing? It seems to be a grey area. I could watch them for free anyways, and you're not legally bound to watch the commercials... seems to be more of a grey area than downloading music, anyways.

I've got a secret
and I cannot keep it
I've got a secret
and I cannot keep it

I want to tell it, I want to say it, I want to show it,
want you to know it

Yep, really old Newsboys song in my head today. I DO have a secret, and it's a gooder, and I've been sitting on it for a good six months now. Didn't even tell Chris about it, and let me tell you, I was dying to. Anyways, soon! The proverbial cat is on its way out of the proverbial bag. :)

I've been feeling better lately. I had a dream last night in which,
a) Chris and I were broken up, and
b) He was being fairly nice to me, and
c) I wasn't yelling at him.

A good sign, no? Maybe my subconscious has started to move on. I was having dreams for a while where I was chewing gum and would try to spit it out but there would be so much gum that it would fill my mouth. I would try to pull it out with my fingers, but it would stick to my teeth and I would have to dig it out and there was always more and it was frustrating and gross. Google tells me that it's a pretty common dream when you're stressed out and things are feeling out of control. Anyways, those dreams have stopped. Things seem to be settling down.

Five more weeks of university. I can do this. Soon it will be summer and it won't be bitterly cold like when we came home last night at 2AM, and I won't have to read a billion articles every week, and I can sleep and read fun books again. My roommates are going to teach me to draw. Yay for OCAD students!

Yes, Birthday Week has commenced! The Birthday Party Date has been set for 05 March 2006 (one day past my actual birthday*), and there are many people who I would love to invite but you are all silly and live in crazy places like OTTAWA or PRINCE GEORGE or BROCKVILLE or WEST CHESTER or CHICAGO or ESPECIALLY MONTREAL or other such nonsense. Sometime you'll come to your senses. (Right?)

*Because somebody's moving on my actual birthday! But I want her to be able to be there. :)

I wrote a midterm/exam today, again in 1/3rd of the time allotted (1 hour of 3 given). It went pretty well. This week I know more about the brain and language-specific regions than I ever will again. Anyone have a question about aphasia? Now's the time to ask.

Reading week last week really made me realise that I need a break from school. People keep saying that that's what the summer is for, but I'm not sure that that's going to cut it. I'm thinking at least a year. Metachatters assure me that they are eternally grateful for having gone to grad school despite not using it at all in their jobs, and I will have to keep that in mind. I do tend to think extremely long-term and to discard ideas that don't seem to lead towards solid employment (current degree excluded), and perhaps that's not always the best idea. For now, I just might have to take a few months off and then begin applying to every bookstore in sight. For some reason that seems like the ideal job right now. Go to work and think about books and talk to people who read, and come home and think about whatever I want to. Yep, sounds like a huge relaxing change.

So why'd you fill my sorrow
With the words you borrowed
From the only place you've known?
And why'd you sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to you
Why'd you sing with me at all?
Damien Rice, Delicate

Boring, unattractive & illiterate seeks same - 29

What can I say, I find Craigslist entertaining. I do try not to take it too seriously though.

Tonight is the CBC Poetry Face-Off. I really wanted to go, but I have a midterm Friday, and it is sold out now. I would like to find out where to go for other poetry events during the year though. I always thought of poetry readings as something to do with teenage angst, something boring and silly, but every time they play a promo for it on CBC, I'm amazed. It's full of literary allusions and clever rhymes, and the occasional line stolen from hip hop, and it sounds like a lot of fun. In the same vein, I wish rap hadn't been taken over by the masters of bling. I listen to the stuff on CPI's Libations for the Gods mix and it's absolutely incredible. I've heard rumours that French rap is generally intelligent and political. Too bad my French is nowhere near good enough for that speed or level of slang.

For my birthday, I may just have to buy myself a Great Outdoor Fight shirt from Achewood. Ray is my hero. Actually, Phillipe is my real hero. He is a good communist!

Happy 56th birthday, Dad. (And congratulations to Melissa on your father's birthday!) Here is my favourite photo of my father. Our beautiful square grand Chickering piano (which has prettier legs than this one), the sideburns, the look of concentration, the brown church hymnal that I forget the name of though I remember liking to play song 369, and the blue shoes that I now covet. Somewhere there's a picture of me as a toddler, sitting on his lap as he plays piano. I need to remember to steal that when I go home next.



*This is the correct (otherwise known as Dutch) pronounciation.

Marta has been sending me incredibly entertaining emails, and she promises to send me phallic crocheted presents in exchange for my Crocheted Vulva Pattern, a deal which I am most happy about. The internet is awfully funny sometimes, and I like it.

Lately, I have been attempting to read Outrospective, which is in English today, but is generally en français. His blog has reminded me of my two favourite French words:

truc n.m. < tryk > : 1. thing n. 2. thingamajig n. 3. whatnot n. 4. gizmo n. 5. gadget n. 6. doodah n. (UK) 7. doodad n. (US)
machin n.m. < maʃẽ > : 1. thing n. 2. thingamajig n. 3. doohickey n. 4. contraption n.
(definitions via ultralingua)

When you forget a noun in French, simply insert truc or machin and you're set! It's like saying, "Don't forget to put that thingy away." These two words got a ton of mileage when I was taking French in college, let me tell you.

Another recent discovery was murmertoronto, a site with clickable hand-drawn maps of some neighbourhoods around here, and you can click to hear stories about various places. Much fun!

Also enjoyable: The Daily Show's recent headline, Cheney's Got A Gun. Now that song is stuck in my head, and it makes me laugh.

My Birthday Week* starts on the 25th. Is everyone ready for the Birthday Week goodness? I have no idea what I'll do for my birthday. Half of the people I would want to have over live more than 3 hours away. (Mylissa, Janice & Mike, Chad, Doug, Trevor, Sandra & Steve, Holly, Gabe, Jason, Shmelanie, Aaron, Gina, etc.) I wish it was either warm enough that we could all play outside, or there was enough snow to make snowmen, preferably those inspired by Calvin & Hobbes. I need something cheap yet entertaining for at least 10 people. I'm starting to be sick of events which only centre around food.

*Birthday Week, for the uninitiated, is my best invention ever. Any day which is within a week of your birthday is part of Birthday Week. Thus, it is 15 days long, starting a week before your birthday, and ending a week after it. Since mine is on March 4th, it starts February 25th and ends March 11th. During your Birthday Week, one can make requests of other people with the justification of "but... but it's my Birthday Week!" With just the right amount of little-girl pouting, this can be quite effective (this offer void if birthday person is male).

I'm in the process of updating flickr account. I'm realising I need to take more Toronto photos. There are so many neat sculptures and interesting scenes around here, and most of my photos are of the ex's (adorable and missed) cats. I'll have to fix that once the windchill isn't quite so harsh, and the sky isn't so grey.

I went to She Said Boom! yesterday, one of my favourite used bookstores in Toronto, due to their fine selection and reasonable prices. I bought The Size of Thoughts, a collection of essays by Nicholson Baker. An excerpt from one of those essays, called 'Rarity':

Has anyone yet said publicly how nice it is to write on rubber with a ballpoint pen? The slow, fat, ink-rich line, rolled over a surface at once dense and yielding, makes for a multidimensional experience no single sheet of paper can offer. Right now dozens of Americans are making repetitive scrolly designs on the soft white door-seals of their refrigerators, or they are directing their pens around the layered side-steppes and toe-bulbs of their sneakers (heads bent, as elders give them advice), or they are marking shiny initials on one of those gigantic, dumb, benevolent erasers (which always bounce in unforeseen directions when dropped, and seem so selfless, so apolitical, so completely uninterested in doing anything besides erasing large mistakes for which they are not responsible), and then using the eraser to print these same initials several times, backward, on a knee or forearm, in a fading progression. These are rare pleasures.

And then someone mentions several kinds of rubber penmanship in his opening paragraph. Has a useful service been performed? A few readers, remembering that they did once enjoy taking down a toll-free number on the blade of a clean Rubbermaid spatula, react with guarded agreement: "Yes, I guess I am one of those not-so-uncommon people who have had that sort of rare experience." Infrequent events in the lives of total strangers are now linked; but the pleasure itself is too fragile, too incidental, to survive such forced affiliation undamaged. Regrettably, multiplying the idea of a thing's rarity is nearly identical in effect to multiplying the thing itself: its rarity departs. Some readers may never again engage so unthinkingly in this particular strain of idleness. It is no more common than it was before I brought it up, but it is more commonplace.

What I like about Nicholson Baker is that he notices these rare things, and writes about them in a way that highlights their pleasurable qualities. He can write an entire book about one trip up an escalator (The Mezzanine) and make it absolutely fascinating, funny, and ultimately a pleasing experience.

In a similar vein, Annie Dillard tends to highlight the common yet unnoticed details of life. Her focus is usually on larger things than Baker's minutiae, like those of population sizes and relative significance of one person's life, or the vast amount of time that has gone before us, or interplay of these numbers in our lives and meditates on our lives with this larger perspective in mind. In For The Time Being, she writes:

We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out. You and I will likely die of heart disease. In most other times, hunger or bacteria would have killed us before our hearts quit. More people have died at fishing, I read once, than at any other human activity including war. Now life expectancy for Britons is 76 years, for Italians 78 years, for people living in China 68 years, for Costa Ricans 75 years, for Danes 77 years, for Kenyans 55 years, for Israelis 78 years, and so forth. Americans live about 79 years. We sleep through 28 of them, and are awake for the other 51. How deeply have you cut into your life expectancy? I am playing 52 pick-up on my knees, trying to find the weeks in a year.

What do these numbers mean? How often do we actually sit down and think about them, or about the pleasure of writing on rubber erasers?

I like these writers because they highlight the things that we all have in common, the things that we rarely slow down long enough to notice. I think this is also why I like JD Salinger. He has a preciseness to his writing, an attention to which details are required to give the reader a good impression of what is going on. There's a scene in Franny & Zooey where Zooey is talking to his mother as he's shaving in the bathroom, and Salinger interjects just enough details of the shaving so you can practically see it, in the middle of this long and involved conversation that has nothing to do with it at all.

This summer I'd like to read:
- Samuel Beckett: I want to read a lot of his works, but I'm not sure where to start. How It Is caught my eye, particularly because it's fragmented and written without punctuation, somewhat like bpNichol's journal.
- William S. Burroughs: But I need a good place to start.
- Marcel Proust: Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis.
- Annie Dillard: An American Childhood
- Fredrick Buechner: Godric (First sentence: "Five friends had I, and two of them snakes." My favourite English prof would absolutely swoon over that opening.)
- Sylvia Plath? I'll have to at least attempt The Bell Jar and see what all the fuss is about.

Maybe I should find a cozy bookstore job next year. Wouldn't that be lovely?

So, the best thing to do on Valentine's Day ends up being this:

- ignoring it, and
- having roommates who will bring you vegan chocolate cake (surprisingly good!).

Oh, and having an "internet date" with Doug, in which we discuss racism and sex education (and the lack thereof in certain Christian circles) and bullying. Woo! No skipping ropes though, so I suppose it wasn't "double dutch" after all.

I'm reading The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air by Steven Clayman and John Heritage for my independent study right now. It's a good example of Conversation Analysis. It deals with news interviews and how they've changed over the years, and how they're set up differently than 'regular' conversations. They discuss how journalists can ask leading questions or set interviewees up to be argumentative, and how interviewees can dodge questions or challenge implicit ideas in the question. There are a lot of examples from both British and American interviews, some notable ones with George Bush Sr. and Dan Rather, and Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair, and Margaret Thatcher. I'm thinking of taking their methodology and analysing Jon Stewart's appearance on CNN's Crossfire a while back, because that was an interview that didn't go at all according to plan. Something about the interviewers being referred to as "partisan hacks" and Jon pleading with them to "stop hurting America." :) Oh, and the show got cancelled soon after. Yay Jon!

It was interesting watching that again today after having been studying this lately, because Jon basically attacks them for two things: being too antagonistic with their guests, and not "holding politicians' feet to the fire." The hosts protest that this is a contradiction, but it's really not. The antagonism stirred up in these 'debate' shows is a charade. We bring out two wildly extreme-viewed people and make them fight, and call it "fair and balanced." We never hear the middle ground. We don't engage in intelligent discourse and debate, we just call each other names and engage in moral outrage. This is on the news because it is entertainment—it's about the ratings. Whether it's Survivor or The Bachelor or Jerry Springer or Crossfire or election campaigns, the media is all about controversy for the sake of controversy.

Now, "holding politicians' feet to the fire" is not controversy for the sake of controversy. The point there would be to actually get to the bottom of things, clean or dirty, acceptable or politically damaging. There's a difference between fighting for the sake of ratings, and being firm with an interviewee for the sake of uncovering the truth. Even there, something has changed in interviewing. Some quotes from The News Interview:

"The working hypothesis almost universally shared among correspondents is that politicians are suspect; their public images are probably false, their public statements disingenuous, their moral pronouncements hypocritical, their motives self-serving, and their promises ephemeral." (Epstein 1973: 215)

Jeremy Paxman of BBc Television's Newsnight: "When he started as a young man on The Times Louis Heren was given a piece of advice by an old hack. He was told you should always ask yourself when talking to a politician: "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" I think that is quite a sound principle from which to operate."

Interviewers have become increasingly adversarial over the years. Part of what Jon Stewart is complaining about are people like those on Crossfire that play the part of hard-hitting investigators, but are actually part of the system and not exposing it. It's also interesting to see the defiance with which the current Bush administration deals with the press. It regularly lies and later says "oh yeah, uh... didn't mean that" without apology. For an example, compare the initial statements about the Cheney Shoots Hunter story with what's being reported today, and with what comes out next week, or what the Bush administration has said about the domestic spying program in the past, and what's coming out now. Hell, the WMDs in Iraq story is a good example. Has anyone ever acknowledged that they lied to the UN and the press about that? Does anyone even care anymore? What happens to a country when its citizens aren't surprised when their president lies about such things?

It's a confusing time. Half the time, I don't know where to even start with what's being reported in the news. Should I blindly trust them? Should I suspect them of constantly lying, or promoting a certain ideology? How do I get balanced information? Sometimes the more we study these things, the less certain we become, and that's kind of unsettling.

Anyways, time for sleep. I have a date with Cat tomorrow to go to the Ontario Science Centre and see Bodyworlds2, and then a dinner/art gallery date with Kathy the Fabulous One. My success with setting up playdates with girls, and the fact that all the nice boys in linguistics are either gay (so many!) or taken... uh, it's causing a bit of despair. What do the well-adjusted straight boys major in? Someone, tell me. I have enough girl-dates, time to switch it up.

Yay, everything works! Welcome to my new domain. :)

So, I am rather dreading Valentine's Day this year. I get the feeling I will be home alone all day. I'm actually missing living on res at bible college, where girls would get together and wear black and be snarky all day. However, I have girl-dates for Wednesday AND for Thursday!

The great unveiling of the new domain name:

CuriousLittleMonkey.com

It is all done, except that I haven't yet moved the blog over. I had to wrestle with an Apache server and tell it to let me use Server Side Includes (oh, the mighty .htaccess file!), and I have prevailed.

I'll be moving the blog over just as soon as I learn how to make 404 errors go to a page of my choosing instead of the York site. Then people can be redirected instead of losing me altogether.

Now, the new website has not yet been tested in Internet Explorer. If you are a user of the Accursed Browser from Hell, you should:
a) Get a real browser, and
b) Let me know if good ol' stuck-in-the-HTML-dark-ages Microsoft is having trouble reading my code.

Yay!

She purrs in her sleep. It's pretty cute.

I watched the Opening Ceremonies last night, and you've got to wonder... who comes up with this stuff? It's so WEIRD. Full of symbolism, I'm sure, but do even a quarter of the people watching get the references? You just know that somewhere out there there's a PhD student looking at themes and symbols in Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

I'm working on my new website, and laughing at old letters to Dalton. :)

A story by Anthony de Mello, via Church of the Churchless:

The priest announced that Jesus Christ himself was coming to church the following Sunday. People turned up in large numbers to see him. Everybody expected him to preach, but he only smiled when introduced and said, "Hello."

Everyone offered him hospitality for the night, especially the priest, but he refused politely. He said he would spend the night in church. How fitting, everybody thought.

He slipped away early next morning before the church doors were opened. And, to their horror, the priest and people found their church had been vandalized. Scribbled everywhere on the walls was the single word, "Beware."

No part of the church was spared: the doors and windows, the pillars and the pulpit, the altar, even the Bible that rested on the lectern. "Beware." Scratched in large letters and in small, in pencil and pen and paint of every conceivable color. Wherever the eye rested one could see the words: "Beware, beware, Beware, Beware, beware, beware..."

Shocking. Irritating. Confusing. Fascinating. Terrifying. What were they supposed to beware of? It did not say. It just said "Beware."

The first impulse of the people was to wipe out every trace of this defilement, this sacrilege. They were restrained from doing this only by the thought that it was Jesus himself who had done this deed. Now that mysterious word "Beware" began to sink into the minds of the people each time they came to church.

They began to beware of the Scriptures, so they were able to profit from the Scriptures without falling into bigotry. They began to beware of sacraments, so they were sanctified without becoming superstitious. The priest began to beware of his power over the people, so he was able to help without controlling.

And everybody began to beware of religion which leads the unwary to self-righteousness. They became law-abiding, yet compassionate to the weak. They began to beware of prayer, so it no longer stopped them from becoming self-reliant. They even began to beware of their notions of God so they were able to recognize him outside the narrow confines of their church.

They have now inscribed the shocking word over the entrance of their church and as you drive past at night you can see it blazing above the church in multicolored neon lights.

What does this not apply to?

In Linguistics, listen to Chomsky but beware. In democratic countries, listen to capitalist philosophy but beware. Listen to your professors, but beware. The process is not the thing itself. Tradition is only that.

I am not Christian, yet these stories resonate with me. I'm going to explore the Church of the Churchless some more. I'm not looking for religion, but I'm looking for something more than simply not thinking about life, morality, death, etc.

I'm going to talk about being smart, and I'm going to feel like I'm bragging, just because I'm admitting it. Oh well.

I wrote a midterm this morning, in my Topics of Grammatical Change class. Now, this is a 4th year syntax/historical linguistics class that is also offered as a Master's level course. The midterm, which I didn't feel especially well-studied for, was an hour and a half. I was done in half an hour.

Now, that's pretty normal for me. I'm generally done in a third of the time allotted. I suppose I just expected things to get harder. I did awesome on that midterm. It didn't test half of the stuff I was panicking about on the way in. And I don't think it's just that it's an easier course, because half the time when I'm reading the articles, I'm thinking, "This stuff is so full of jargon and dense syntactic theory that it should be absolute gibberish to me, but I understand it and that's so weird."

Yesterday, in my Grammatical Theories class, I finally stumped my Syntax prof. It's taken me three years, but I've done it! We were talking about this recent theory by Hornstein, and I asked her a question, and she said, "hmm," and then gave me a pretty decent answer... until I realised that her answer had exactly the same problem as the original proposal, and that was it. It was a problem without an answer, one she hasn't seen raised in the literature yet. Kristan's sitting next to me, nudging me and whispering, "Dude, there's your PhD thesis! Seriously!" She might be right, too.

The thing is, the reason I've never stumped that prof before is that she's always been able to say, "Well, we haven't gotten to that part yet. You'll understand next year, but let's just assume it makes sense for now." Then the next year, I have an 'aha!' moment, and it's all good. The stuff we're doing now, though, is recent stuff. No one's had an 'aha!' moment yet. There are holes in the most recent theories, and it's up to my generation of LING students to deal with them. The Chomster can only take us so far.

The fact that my profs are starting to say, "Yeah, we don't know. That's the big question these days." means that they're actually trusting us. There's not going to be a subsequent class where they tell us that the theory we just got through is actually defective because of certain data, and here's a better one. There is no better one. This is what they've got. And I understand it.

I keep waiting for school to get hard, and one of these days, maybe I'll just admit to myself that I'm cut out for this. I was always told that, oh, when I get to high school, it'll be hard. When I get to college, it'll be hard. University, it'll be hard. Fourth year, that'll be killer. Master's level, ooh. But you know what? I'm doing four 4th year courses right now, and I'm going to keep that A-average, maybe even improve it. And two of them are Master's level courses, and I'm doing fine in them. I'm beginning to suspect that there isn't a subsequent level where I'll get disqualified.

I don't know why this is. I don't know why some people work their asses off and fail, and I go with the flow, and consider a B+ a bad mark. I don't know why some people try and try and can't get it, and I go, "Ooh, neat, a puzzle! This will be fun!" I don't really want to believe that the world is like that. I don't want to think that I'm smarter (even just in this academic way) than other people, because this type of intelligence affords me certain opportunities that other people don't get because of what? Genetics? I didn't do anything to get a brain that finds math fun. It just happened. I don't work harder. Well, if I do, it's not because of determination, it's because I'm having fun doing my syntax assignment. It's because I get curious. I'm the kid who emails her profs over the summer with questions related to classes she's already completed because she's still curious about how things work. Sometimes Google doesn't know the answer and I have to email them.

I think, having come from a family where academic acheivement isn't stressed, and the mantra of "academic intelligence isn't the only kind of intelligence!" is repeated a lot, I don't really know what to do with academic intelligence. I feel kind of awkward about it. On the one hand, I sort of expect everyone else to have my understanding of things, because I've always just been this way and it feels normal to me. I don't feel that other people aren't smart. It's my default expectation that other people are doing well in their classes and are interested in them, and when they're not, it surprises me. On the other hand, I know that I am at the top of the class and that it'll get me some amount of privilege, whether in terms of scholarships or a mitt full of various skills that gets me jobs, or the fact that my profs know me and recommend me for jobs and I don't even need to go through the interview process, or how people offer to write reference letters for me and I don't even need to ask. I feel somewhat uncomfortable with that, in the same way that I feel awkward not really knowing if Toronto is racist or not because I'm white and wouldn't be discriminated against even if it was.

Anyways. I'm starting to think favourably of grad school again (now that the deadlines have passed, goshdangit). Maybe I should just go where my gifts are. Or perhaps I should crochet for a living instead. I'd probably have just as much job security, at least for the first 5 years. Oh, the irony.

I knew I didn't imagine that sign! We drove through Maine over ten years ago, and I've been snickering about the welcome sign ever since. Beautiful.

Pandora: Online radio station with a twist. You tell it what bands you like, it finds bands similar to it. If you tell it that you dislike a song, it learns to play what you like. (via Meredith)

Names in my family that I'm not sure about passing down (though some are tempting): Arie, Johannes, Wouter, Jan, Peternella Wilhelmina (girl), Imkje, Baukje. I think I'm most tempted with Johannes (yo-hun-nus) and Imkje (im-kyuh), though probably as middle names. I think passing down family names is a good thing. I also like Wout, but that might be cruel. :)

Rolled: sushi. Unrolled: scarf. Craftsters are clever, and just a bit silly. Now I'm wondering how I can take this idea and exploit it.

Student Doctor Network - Things to Learn from Patients in the ER: There are some seriously funny stories in here. And, let's be honest, some very disturbing stuff.

Time to go write more about control and raising predicates... huzzah for 4th year syntax!

Today's blog title is courtesy of the theme song of Veronica Mars*, which is now stuck in my head because I watched the whole first season this weekend, not because of any personal drama. Relax, people.

Charlie: "Put down that weird flashy thing and scratch my head, woman!"


Charlie here has decided that she owns me, that the comforter on my bed is a perfect place for shedding, and that instead of studying, I should be meowed at until her head is scratched to her satisfaction. In the morning, I pet her and she wakes up with that half-meow half-purr sound, and it makes me smile. She's a talkative little thing, which it's taking a bit of time for me to get used to, after Watson's years of silence (unless trapped on the balcony). In any event, after a month of socializing, Charlie was brave enough to receive pets from Linda, Jonathan, Meredith, and Julian last night, which is VERY BRAVE for a nervous kitty. She even half-rolled over for belly scratches!

Ah yes, last night. Last night we had a wee party, which was an interesting mix of my friends, OCAD people, InterVarsity people (psst, Doug, it's like Campus Crusade* plus beer and minus "I agree with ____" campaigns), and just random assorted friends. My introverted self was happy to talk with a few people at a time in quieter places in the house, or laugh at Jim and Brett laughing their asses off at whatever they'd gotten up to. I had very little to drink, considering how much was available. I think I'm realising that I rather like the fact that I've never had a hangover, and it's okay that I'm quieter in those situations. I'm not knocking it, people had a lot of fun last night. It's just not really my thing. Oh, and I can't dance and I fear to try. Perhaps in the summer. I'm sure Kathy's going to be asking me every time I see her until I break down and agree anyways. :)

This wool used to be grey:


I really like dying yarn. I did some nice bright green stuff this week, and see that blue one in the middle of the tin with the pink bits? Yeah, I'm experimenting with how to make variegated yarn. I'm going to have to toy with it a bit, but I think I'm on to something. Maybe that's what I'll do all summer: dye yarn and sell it online or something.

Still waiting for the new website to be totally set up. I'd like to get this show on the road.


*Veronica Mars: I like it. I think. Most of the time, yes. It has snark appeal.
**Which, come to think of it, is a horrible name for any organization that wants to spread peace and love instead of memories of wars and witch hunts. Or should we say Muslim/Jew hunts? I'm not up on my crusade history.

From Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3:

MACDUFF He has no children. All my pretty ones?
 Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
 What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
 At one fell swoop?

Aha! I am not a complete nut for wanting to call people "chickens" when I am fond of them! I am cultured, drawing on allusions to Shakespearian tragedies! NOT crazy! (Smile and nod, my chickens. Say it with me now: "O hell-kite!")

I've been using this procrastination hack from 43 Folders for getting work done. I've adjusted it a little bit, due to having a timer that works in 5 minute increments only, so I'm working for 15 minutes, playing for 5. I'm using this five minutes to blog, in the middle of writing a report about Verb Raising in Shakespearian English. Hence the Macbeth quotation!

Okay, I have one minute left, so this will be short. I met some boys today on my lunch break, very briefly, but they were cute and talking excitedly about some English classes and sitting at my table in the cafeteria and I talked to them and it was fun, the end.