things I want to do, soon

National Gallery's snapshot exhibit

Spy Museum again (I have comp tickets! That expire in December!)

kite flying. On the mall? I have a kite!

People who are interested in these activities, please tell me; I like company.

baby brothers

my advice to you

this is how I recommend everyone spend their Thanksgiving:

This is the holiday of Thanksgiving. It is a day of eating food that is baked, and food that is lightly cooked in a sauté or a hot pot of liquid. If you can bear it then announce why you are thankful on this day. Remember that your opinions may seem boorish or those of an ass to every person who is here

Try not to get too clopsy on the Scotch, out there.

it's nice to be home

Montana has:
-snow
-brothers
-coffee
-wine
-dogs

Montana does not have:
-traffic
-Presidents
-taxis
-chicken bones on the sidewalk

doing math with words

As mostly everyone who has ever met me knows, I like mixing up my domains. A lot. It can get a little out of control. Anyway, hence my love of ridiculous cartoons and puns in which arcane linguistics terms are used as, for example, the names of imaginary fighting techniques.

At some point last year I was overcome by an uncontrollable fit of giggles and snorts* during a class discussion about morphology, during which it was asserted that a certain English grammatical item has the effect on a verb of "suspending its temporal profile and rendering it imperfective."

I found this hilarious and immediately began to draw diagrams and avoid the eyes of my classmates, in an attempt to not collapse in a puddle of hilarity. But it was too late, and too many vaguely threatening conversations were happening in my head. As in,

"you just watch out or I'll render you imperfective"

and

"don't make me suspend your temporal profile, young lady"



I am not at all disruptive to have in a classroom setting.

So, lately all of my energy of this sort has been focused on spoken-language phonology, because I am taking a class at Georgetown about spoken-language phonology and there are all kinds of new and enticing words for me to make up stories about. And not only words! But phrases and constructions and metaphors, etc. For some reason this happens especially much when we are talking about Rs. Vowels are R-colored (my new favorite color? R!). Last week the professor told us (kind of indignantly) that "Zero plus R equals R" so therefore we do not need a special symbol for an R-colored schwa. Math and letters and colors, all mixed up into one delicious idea. (see! Now we have cooking too!)

The main idea of this post: I am working on a new cartoon. Titled "Phonolohotonthologos". Everyone, bone up on your 18th-century British satire and your laryngeal anatomy, or you probably won't think I'm very funny.



*This did not only happen one time.

other brother

costume number 1

Venus Flytrap.

kids these days

My little brother.

d

A hero for the ages.

I'm only in it for the sample sentences

Dear Internet,

It's damp and gloomy around Constitution City these days. Plus I am vaguely ill, as per usual. I'm spending the afternoon at my favorite friendly neighborhood coffee shop, "doing homework" and "being productive".

One of the things that I especially like, in a linguistics article, is when there is a whole list of sentences that is supposed to illustrate some important linguistic point. And I almost always think the lists of sentences are extremely entertaining, especially taken as a group.

For instance, from the article I am ostensibly reading right this second:

3.19
a. Your attitude upsets/is upsetting me.
a'. Your boorish behavior upsets/is upsetting me.
b. Your clothes nauseate/are nauseating me.
b'. The smell of your clothes nauseates/is nauseating me.

Whoever wrote these examples needs to get some new friends I think.

Then, after I am done reading this article and doing my homework, I have many, many things to do this weekend.

First is a fancy reception for the NSF project I'm working with. For the occasion, I am wearing brand new, very attractive, red shoes. I should update my profile; now I have THREE pairs. The new ones look like this:



The problem with me buying fancy new shoes and wearing them to grownup events is that I inevitably just show everyone my new shoes and force them to have long conversations with me about how great my new shoes are. Rather than discussing collaborative research efforts and visual language processing and other important things that I am supposed to be talking about. Oh well.

Second is a birthday party for Julie. Happy birthday Julie! This party is the social event of the season, it seems- Julie is so popular that everyone and their brother in law is flying in from out of town for the occasion. So that should be very fun and socially rewarding. I'll probably talk about my shoes a lot there too, unless I change into less fancy garb for the night.

Third (I'm not counting things I always do like sleep and drink coffee) is, my favorite friend Keith is in town from New Orleans where he is a Professor Of Economics, so he and his lovely lady friend and I are going to eat breakfast together. Breakfast! at 10 in the morning! On Saturday! I am so industrious these days, getting out of bed before noon and everything!

Fourth is more homework. A lot of it. And a lot of laundry. My bedroom had been looking substantially improved since the last time we talked about it, but this past week was a killer and we're back to not being able to see any square inches of floor, these days.

Fifth! Sixth! and Seventh! I'm supposed to go to THREE parties tomorrow night. I'm going to have to do some social-life triage, I think, because I usually start falling asleep on my way from the first thing I try to do to the second. If I try to do more than one thing. On an evening.

You know.

Then more things, but I am bored of thinking about it all right now. It sounds so exhausting. I'll have to coax myself gently from one event to the next by telling myself lots of encouraging remarks about the availability of various beverages and how much I like talking about my new shoes to people.

Meanwhile, here's what's been going on in my article: Leon is a fool, the window is shattered, the children cried, John ate fish, the balloon popped, the sky reddened, and Mary learned French.

ink; light sabers; old age

My printer is out of black ink (or it is just angry with me; it's hard to say) and I had to turn in some homework yesterday. I tried printing it anyway, in the hope that it would just look sort of faded and old-school, but instead only the top half of each line printed so it was no good. No good at all.

So I printed it again all in blue. That was very pretty, and I a little bit want to just never replace my black ink ever again. All my homework will be printed in a variety of colors and everyone's (or at least, the TA's) day will be a little brighter.

I did try to buy a new ink cartridge on Monday, but I failed. For some reason I had decided that this one store at Union Station would sell me one. But, I was wrong. It had been a long and hot day by the time I got there, anyway, so I didn't want to give up: I looked and looked and looked and then finally went up to the counter in case they were just hiding printer accessories from all the thieving, ink-loving tourists.

They weren't. That store only sells musicky things, not computery things. No ink cartridges were to be had.

It was okay though because my day was made so much better by the small suburban-grandmother-looking woman in front of me, who spent $750 on a lot of 6-foot electric light sabers. Three red, three green. Or maybe four. She sort of stacked all the gigantic boxes around each other and staggered out into the world, lacking visibility but heavily armed. I spent the rest of the afternoon imagining her busting out the light sabers (one in each hand) in order to settle a duel, or hail a cab, or scold teenagers for coarse language.

Because everyone knows that's what suburban grandmothers spend their days doing: settling duels, hailing cabs, and scolding teenagers.

Who's a jolly good what?

Hello internet! I am very sorry I never do a good job of writing things to you these days. I'm not sure exactly why. It is probably because I am so so important and have so many high priority tasks of my own to do.

That, or it is because I am irremediably lazy and irresponsible. We may never know which.

Anyway, to some extent I have been doing things that are at least important to some people. One of the things is, going to school and doing my homework.

Another thing is getting a big fancy fellowship. I am a Pre Doctoral Fellow, now. It's pretty fun. I recommend it. I have an office and a travel stipend and everything. Whoo hoo!

So, for that, I have to do other kinds of homework. I just basically spend 93 percent of my time now doing homework of one sort or another, and the remainder of my time staring out the window and drinking various beverages. So as you can see, it's hard to carve out any spot in there where I might be able to compose and upload a post to my blog. Hard, but I am doing my best.

SEE YOU SOON!

vines

For a while, in Minnesota, I lived with a bunch of landscapers. It had its ups and downs, like everything. The downs for this situation all involved mud and lines for the shower. The ups were the winners by far: people who knew about digging, and got free plants, and were sent home from work if it was too rainy so we could all go to the bar down the street together.

So, I was in charge of the houseplants, but my role in the yard was restricted to admiring things and eating the results.

Then all the landscapers moved away, and I was left to my own devices. Which in this case meant that for a year and a half no one touched anything in the garden, and then I suddenly decided it was time to Deal With The Yard, so I dug it all up. But didn't plant anything else; the main result of that was that I had a lot of cuts from thorny things and Trisha was irritated with me for leaving piles of debris scattered about the yard.

But one thing I did follow through with, and it was the planting and training of vines. I built an arch out of branches that were knocked down during thunderstorms, and planted morning glories and sweet peas all around them, and wove it into a beautiful green flowery gateway to our nice back yard.

When I moved away from St. Paul, I was forced to leave all my house plants AND all my vines behind, much to my dismay. But, finally, this summer I planted some more vines around the tiny "front yard" area of my house in DC and now all those vines are creeping greenly up things. So I have to spend a good 30 minutes per day now leaning against the fence, murmuring encouraging thoughts to the vines and making sure the little twisty ends are pointed in an acceptable direction.

Vines are smart! In a kind of a scary way. They don't totally seem like plants, or at least they seem very slightly more animate than they really should. I don't understand what kind of math is programmed into their DNA to make them twirl around until they find something, and then stick their little viney feet to it and crawl forwards, but it makes me nervous. So to stay on their good side I whisper sweet nothings and water them with plant food.

I imagine that as a result of this, when they make it all the way up my building and into my window, they will just sort of pat me gently on the head as they pass through, rather than trying to stick their fingers in my nose or knock over my paintbrushes or something.

especially what?

Lately my bedroom is a frightening pit of chaos. Some people would say that this is not a new or noteworthy state of affairs, and they would be kind of right. But not totally right, because when I say "frightening" and "chaos" I am using my own frame of reference, in which the baseline is more like "turmoil" and less like "lived-in". And even by these standards, my room's a little out of control.

My desk has: mail; modeling clay; syllabi from last year; a water bottle; vitamins; headphones; some other cords; a set of keys to my uncle's house.

My sewing table has: sewing machine; can of root beer; photo albums; box full of beads; large can of blue glitter; tube of Primary Magenta; sponge; box of thread.

My floor has: (indistinguishable jumble of things). The jumble includes a variety of iridescent and metallic fabric, from when I was making a disco outfit for a costume party. It includes a large pile of dirty clothes and a smaller pile of clean clothes. Two pairs of cowboy boots (one fancy, one everyday) are in there somewhere, and a scratching post for the cat, and a vacuum cleaner, and Alyssa's hair dryer, and a yoga ball.

There are many books (linguistics, murder mysteries, etc) on all of these surfaces, as well as piles of paper that I need to go through at some point. BIG piles of paper. That chore is #1 on my list of things to avoid doing. Procrastination for all!

My favorite way to while away the time when I'm bored (so often!) is to play a guessing game. This guessing game is not Twenty Questions, although it is similar. In my version, one person thinks of something, and then the other person guesses what it is. They don't ask questions about it; they guess. Then the first person thinks of a comparative adjective to describe the difference.

Here is an example, from when I was playing this game with two of my brothers one time.

Will: (thinks of something)
Matt: a fork
Will: bigger
Cecily: a plate
Will: more flexible
Matt: spaghetti
Will: less edible
Cecily: a helicopter
Will: less organized

...and so on.

in the end, the answer was "Matt's hair" And this is how I prefer to think of my room, and my general methods of housekeeping. Less organized than a helicopter. But really, who isn't? Helicopters are very organized things. So of COURSE I am less organized than one.

No, I don't have any plans to clean my room this weekend. Thanks for asking.

Education, thought control, dark sarcasm

Hello! It is time to go back to school again!

Yes, that means it is time for another round of staring and glaring contests with the people in the offices in the school. This time I am going to bring flowers to everyone and smile sweetly and do as I am told without complaining.

Ha ha!

I don't actually have any classes until Wednesday. Which is good because it gives me lots of time to run around campus signing things, drink coffee, and complain loudly and in very big signs to anyone who will listen.

Meanwhile, in other whining-related news, it keeps being over 100 around here. With all kinds of dewpoints and humidities that make it all worse. These Founding Fathers were not all that bright, building the capital in a swamp. If you ask me. Which no one really has done, yet, but preemptive action is the new black, so let's not get all bogged down in details.

Okay. I'm off to deal with school, books, and dirty looks. See you.

Missoula, Montana: A place, sort of.

All my favorite friends were in Missoula last weekend, doing all my favorite activities. Like drinking beer and floating on the river and eating meat. I am very sad that I was not there.

Here is another example of what Missoula is like:

Little kid: Hey, you want to come to my birthday party? It's all about hunting and killing and stuff.
TA: Um, I'll think about it.
Little kid: Listen, your mom isn't your boss anymore.

Sherwood Street
Missoula, Montana

via Overheard in the Office, Jun 26, 2007