Let the Sunshine In

I drafted out a really whiny blog entry last night around 10 p.m, because I was feeling the stress of the semester already descending on me, because I was sure that this is the Semester From Hell, because I had too much syntax homework, because I was supposed to do 100 pages of reading on phenomenology and I don't even know what that is, because I was reminded, knowing that I was exhausted but still had several more hours of schoolwork to do, of my undergraduate years, when I worked far too hard for far too long, and spent far too many nights in the library testing how long I could go without eating. I even went to far as to quote a tidbit I read in Harper's magazine once, a heartbreaking suicide note from a Japanese fifteen-year-old: "because I am already tired."

I don't have the internet at home, though, so I couldn't publish my self-pitying reflections until the morning. And, because this is just the way things go, when I woke up in the morning the first thing I saw was the pattern that light filtering through trees outside my window creates on my wood floor, and by the time I had showered and eaten and dressed, I was awake and ready to tackle a little before-school syntax, and by the time I left it was eight o'clock and the sun was up and the fog was burning off and the bus was on time, and by the time I got to school I had thought of an elicitation topic for my afternoon session and decided how to coordinate volunteers for the conference, and by the time I got to class there were soft ginger cookies and a view of the entire East Bay from the window, with the sun sparkling on the unloading cranes in Oakland, and I felt positively Frostian in my change of mood.

It's still the Semester From Hell, sure, and on the one hand I'll never get to do anything but study without my internal guilt trigger going crazy with all the work I should be finishing, but on the other hand, sometimes the light streams in through the window and life, even phenomenology, just glows.

Like Hope, Only Different

The inauguration, by all accounts, was a rousing success. Hearts were touched. Spirits were uplifted. Lives were changed.

Or so I hear. Yes, that's right: I ignored this particular National Moment, a fact that I'm sure my children and grandchildren will bemoan. After so many months with a crush on Obama, and an even bigger crush on Michelle, I'm all burned out on rhetoric. So, the morning of, I woke up at 7, read about syntax while eating breakfast, and biked to school in time for my 9.30 class, where I happily chatted with classmates, catching up after the break since it was the first day of school, waiting for our professor to show up.

And waiting, and waiting. After about ten minutes with no professor, one of my classmates pulled out his laptop and turned on the rest of the inauguration coverage, which, at that point, was adoringly documenting Barack's First Bill, with all the enthusiasm of first-time parents watching their child, their perfect, brilliant child, take its first steps. After thirty minutes with no professor, one of my classmates left: "call me if he shows up," he said as he walked down the hall to his office. After an hour with no professor, we were all still sitting there, watching the coverage of the inaugural lunch, staring off into space, and talking, or in my case FREAKING OUT about the conference we're holding and how nothing's going right in our preparations. (Seriously, it's going to be a disaster and it's going to be all. my. fault.) After an hour and fifteen minutes with no professor, a few people started to shift in their seats and mutter, "maybe he's not coming." The true believers reacted instantly: No! There's five minutes left! He could still show up and at least pass out a syllabus!

After an hour and twenty minutes with no professor, students from the next class started coming in. That was it, class was over, and we all shuffled out, a little disappointed--not even a syllabus?

I realize, now, that this blog entry is structured such that you all now think I have a lesson to teach here, something Godot-esque, something about the value, or maybe danger, of expectations, when really I just wanted to tell a funny story about how a room full of students quietly waited for their no-show professor for the entire class period. Maybe it's meaningless, maybe it's not, maybe it's all symbiosis, who knows? But there is this: we had a very pleasant morning together, united in our belief that someday our professor would come. So even though we never got that syllabus we so desperately wanted, where was the harm in our great expectations?

Time for you and time for me

I was in the institute building's gym last night, happily stretched out on my stomach writing a paper about language use in terrorist texts, when the door swung open and a few of my graduate student friends marched in, single file, with the one in front carrying a pumpkin. 

"Petra," they cried, "come join us! We're going to throw this pumpkin off the roof!"

I needed no more encouragement than that: I jumped up and fell in line, solemnly processing up the stairs to the roof, where we gathered around the edge as E. flung the pumpkin down with all his might.  We quietly waited through the splat on the pavement, sighing with satisfaction, and then just as quietly shuffled back downstairs to our study spots.  

My world goes a little crazy at the end of a semester: I've slept at the institute building two nights in a row now, curled up in chairs with my computer on my lap, trying to eke out just one or two more pages before sleep overtakes me. Normal functioning is forgotten: no dishes, no laundry, no errands, just research and just writing. 

But somewhere in the middle of all that research and writing is time for craziness, time for staying up until 4 am talking, time for kicking a basketball around the gym pretending to be Pele, time for belting out Les Mis songs with other stressed-out grad students, time for testing whether men and women really do walk up stairs differently (yes!), time for giving blood and Christmas caroling and live nativities, and, of course, time for flinging pumpkins off the roof.  

Secretly, I love the end of the semester: it's when everyone else is tired enough to indulge me in wackiness.  If only I didn't have all these pesky papers to write, these would be good, good times.   

Close Encounters of the Diverse Kind

I just devoted my whole summer to Arabic, day in and day out, working hard, with blood, sweat, tears, and everything in between. For all that work, I got a certificate in the mail, an evaluation of "advanced plus" from a third-party language tester, and that sweet, special feeling of being able to say "I speak Arabic."

So what do I do, upon getting back to Berkeley, to keep up my Arabic, to prevent the attrition that happened last time around? Enroll in an advanced Arabic class, right?

Wrong. I, on a whim, sign up for beginning Vietnamese. Commitment issues, anyone?

Vietnamese, though, is awesomely fun. The language, meh: I hate vowels, and suck at tones, so I just have to keep reminding myself that this is good for me, if only because I now know how to pronounce "pho."

The class, though, cracks me up, mostly because it is so. freaking. Asian. The teacher quietly and politely calls s tudents to the front of the class, where they quietly and politely read the assigned dialogue out loud, after which we quietly and politely applaud. Really, though, I find it so funny because the class roll looks something like this:

Kevin Nguyen
Lisa Nyugen
Michelle Nguyen
Steven Nguyen
Tiffany Nguyen
Hannah English Surname
Joseph Tran
Linda Tran
Phyllis Tran
etc
etc
etc

That's right: I am the only non-Asian student in the class. We did a speaking exercise the other day about our nationalities, and we went around the room answering, which sounded a bit like this: "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-Cambodian-American." "I am Vietnamese-Indonesian-American." "I am Vietnamese-Chinese-American." "I am...American?" Good thing the word for "American" has a rising tone--if I sound underconfident, well, it's just the language.

You know that entry in Stuff White People Like about how white people like being the only white person around? (Now you do.) And about how ethnic restaurants are only judged to be good if they're full of non-white people? Well, maybe I should start judging my language class experience by the same criteria: it may not be the most effective teaching in the world, and I may be miles behind my classmates the heritage speakers, but at the very least I am having an authentic experience.

****

(Oh, and I'm going to write about my trip soon, I promise. Until then, I'll whet your appetite with this picture, taken in Bethlehem:

I think my new strategy for blogging about this trip might just be to, every post, promise that I will blog soon, and include a picture with the promise. It's not a bad strategy--if I post every, oh, few days or so, I could get through my pictures in only a few years!)

Hannah In Real Life

I am back in Berkeley after my travel adventures, and have been thrown directly into the thick of things; let's not go over what I've been trying to do this week (compensate for a week of missed classes! get over jet lag! see friends! settle into my apartment! find a purpose in life!) except to say that I feel a bit like this:

Tiny. Inadequate. Taking on the impossible. In fact, I should just attach a Demotivator-type slogan to that picture and hang it above my desk: "GRAD SCHOOL. What Made You Think It Was a Good Idea?"

I promise an update soon--soon! really!--because I have lots of whos and whats and wheres to talk about: Syrian Bedouin, Iraqi border guards, hot Spanish tourists, Israeli soldiers, Jordanian taxi drivers; biking, walking, talking, photographing, laughing, sleeping, and definitely not eating; castles, churches, tents, mosques, markets, and dirty, dirty hostels. Give me time, though, to collect my thoughts (and my pictures!) and to get my real life a bit more in order.

And in that real life? You know, where I'm a mature, responsible adult and etc etc? Right now I have green paint on my shin, and purple on my elbow. My right arm is covered with splashed Otter Pop juice, and my left calf is smeared with bicycle grease. Oh, and I smell like chlorine. So I guess real life isn't so bad: grad school woes or not, this is my kind of Saturday.

Grad Student's Lament

Adam Gopnik has this bit about writing in his book, Paris to the Moon, that I absolutely love:

Writing isn't the transformation of stuff into things. It is just the transformation of symbols into other symbols, as if one reads recipes out loud for dinner changing the proportions ("I'm adding fifty goddam grams of butter!") for dramatic effect. You read out the recipe and the audience listens, and pretends to taste...Sometimes, if you change the proportions dramatically enough--nothing but butter! no butter at all!--people gasp, as though they really could taste it. (This is the way Burroughs and Bukowksi write.)...Writing is a business of saying things about stuff and saying things about things and then pretending that you have cooked one into the other.

And that's just it, this week: I've been sitting around, trying to finish (okay, fine, start) my papers, and thinking to myself, what am I doing with my life? I can spend an entire day--like today--working hard: reading Australian language grammars, writing long lists of Indonesian words on the whiteboard, staring at the wall while thinking about morphology, and then, fianlly, get to the end of the day and realize I have done nothing but say things about stuff ("privative suffixes are cool") and stuff about stuff ("Indonesian morphology is cool") and pretending that that was not a total waste of a day.

It was not a total waste of a day. Oh, wait: yes, it was. What am I doing with my life?!?

And I can't think anything, at the end of the semester, but how tired I am of thinking. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true: I can't wait for my papers to be finished (badly, but who cares?), turned in (without staples or the needed appendices, but who cares?), and forgotten (which is not supposed to happen in grad school, but who cares?). I can't wait because when my papers are done, I will not have to think; instead, I will get to do. I'll move apartments, go to Bakersfield, visit with The Dancing Newt, go to Boston, tour San Francisco with The Duke, work on a dictionary, run a half marathon, teach phonetics to California Indians, and go to Jordan.

Only one more paper stands between me and a glorious month of activity. I can do this. Yes. I. Can. But until then? I'm adding fifty grams of butter.

Normal, Shmormal

One of my major life goals, on entering grad school, was to work as hard in grad school as I wanted to work for the rest of my life; at this point, school is my job, paid and all--er, thank you, U.S. Department of Education--and so I might as well treat it like one. For people who sailed through their undergraduate days partying, that might mean amping up the work level, but for me, the sort of student who dedicated all her time and energy to the pursuit of As, that means learning to take nights and weekends off. I'm not perfect at it yet, at the very least, I no longer spend every Saturday working in the library, or thinking about working in the library, as I did as an undergraduate.

(I hesitate to admit that; what if my classmates should read it? Oh, the guilt! I am a terrible graduate student!)

When I described last weekend, the end of spring break, to my father--I made Moroccan food, I went to a movie, I helped a friend weed her backyard, I went running, I helped host a dinner party for ten people, I went to a baseball game, I read a book--my dad's comment was, "Wow, it's like a normal person's weekend!" I liked that--imagine, I could be a normal person!--and so, I set about making that my goal for this and future weekends.

And I was on a normal person roll this weekend. My biggest accomplishment was trying, and succeeding, at honey cookies, a recipe which I remember fondly from childhood visits to my great-grandmother's house. Unfortunately, she baked them from memory, and the most specific recipe we got from her before she died was elicited in a conversation something like this:

"First, you need some flour."

"How much flour?"

"Enough flour. And then you need some sugar."

"How much sugar?"

"Oh, as much as you need. And then you add the honey."

"How much honey?"

"It should sound like this: glug, glug, glu-"

So I spent some time on Sunday afternoon messing around with flour, sugar, and honey, constantly tasting and asking myself, and occasionally my roommate, "Is this anything?" until I decided that yes, it's something. And so now, for any of my relatives reading, I can make a decent approximation of Great-Grandma H's honey cookies.

Not that honey cookies were the only thing I accomplished this weekend. On Friday evening, I went to a baseball game--again, can you believe? I'm practically a fan now--where my friend Two* and I sang, danced, and generally made as much noise as we possibly could, which, trust me, is a lot. On Saturday, I cleaned my apartment, grocery shopped, read a book, talked on the phone, spent far too much on running shoes, went running in said shoes, only to find that they make my feet go numb, stood up, alone in front of my computer, as part of the solemn assembly, did some reading and homework (okay, so I'm not perfect at my goals yet), watched a movie with Two and The Onion, after which I slept on their couch rather than walking home, and spent a good chunk of the evening calling and driving around Oakland looking for a battered woman's shelter for a girl I met on the bus to Two's apartment. Sunday I listened to some of conference, began organizing the stack of books and papers next to my desk, fell asleep on my floor, music blaring, surrounded by unorganized books and papers, did dinner and games with some friends, and ended the day by donning a serious contender for the most ridiculous pajamas I've ever worn**, which is saying something for a girl who owns a Hello Kitty nightgown, three muumuus, and an endless supply of brightly-colored sarongs.

See? That's totally a normal person's weekend. And now, like any normal, weekend-enjoying person with any normal, weekend-free job, I can feel free to dread Mondays. At least I've got Great-Grandma's honey cookies to get me through.


_________________________________________________________



*There are two reasons for this nickname; Two will love one of them and hate the other. Then he will try to claim that he loves them both, just to prove that I cannot predict him. Two, if you're reading, I'm sorry; I'm a brat for even mentioning this, I know, but it's just so easy. Plus, you know how to avenge yourself.

**One of my favorite things about being single is that no one ever sees me in pajamas. This leaves me free to dress, as tonight, in skintight, ankle-length green leggings and an oversized, very oversized, green Obama T-shirt, which, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, actually says "O'Bama." I feel like I need to go politically organize some leprechauns. Maybe next weekend.

Feed a cold, starve a fever, _____ midterms

It's been a little crazy here in the Petraverse over the last week or so; all those papers and projects and presentations I was ignoring at the top of the mountain came crashing down on me when I returned. One night early last week, I made a list on a notecard of all the major tasks I had to do--excepting all my ordinary reading assignments, short problem sets, church activities, classes, etc--and posted it on the wall behind my computer, which means that every day I can look at it and count eleven major tasks--papers, presentations, project abstracts--due within fourteen days. Then I can understand where that pesky eye twitch is coming from.

I arrived home late Monday night and noticed the smell of my apartment. Not that it smelled bad, just that the smell, formerly so homey, was foreign to me again. Then I counted and realized I had spent a grand total of eleven hours at my apartment since Friday morning--11 out of 84 isn't bad, right? That mostly means I stayed at the institute building a lot--on Friday, after a late night studying there, I was simply too tired to walk home, and so fell asleep on the floor of the attic upstairs, and got a full night's sleep there, interrupted only when a freshman downstairs asked, very loudly, around 4 AM, "Did anyone see Hannah go home?" On Saturday, I hung around the building until afternoon until a friend came by; I should have stayed there to work more, but I suddenly couldn't resist the idea of lunch, and so was lured away to eat mashed potatoes visit a bookstore sale. On Sunday, I showed up to church with my laptop in tow, planning to write a paper that afternoon. Instead, I wrote a beautiful outline, and then spent several hours with friends, making dinner, eating dinner, and cleaning up dinner. This is me, after years of striving to be The Perfect Student--fun dutifully postponed until after work, every single homework assignment, regardless of how inane or trivial, compulsively done, every paper drafted weeks ahead of time and taken to the teacher for comments--flirting with irresponsibility. Or, rather, flirting with having a life outside of school. I like it. I'm interested.

Unfortunately, I still must have a life inside of school, and the balance is killing me. Sunday night was the closest I've ever come to pulling an all-nighter. (Can you believe that I got through four years of college taking 18 credits a semester, working two or sometimes three jobs, writing an honors thesis, and trying to have a social life without ever once staying up all night to finish a project? Neither can I.) After dinner, I holed myself up in the attic of the institute building again and started my paper. When I say started, I really mean it: I hadn't even collected the data I was writing on. So I got about an hour and a half of sleep that night, meaning that it wasn't a true all-nighter, but I still feel it should be commemorated in some sort of scrapbook of my life. Just imagine the page: "Baby's First All-Nighter," scripted in a cutesy font, complete with candid photos of the night, from me sprawled across the papasan chair in the corner, sleeping soundly, to me taking an hour-long break to chat with a friend who stopped by around midnight, to me deciding, at 4 am, that I desperately needed to find a video of Tammy Wynette singing "Stand By Your Man," to, finally, me doing a Walk of Shame--9 am Monday morning, walking home, still in my church dress, eager to shower and change and be back to campus for class by 10.

Oh, and top of all this schoolwork craziness of the past week, I did something to my foot while running, meaning that not only can I not run, my main source of relaxation and sanity, I can barely walk, my main source of transportation in all times. (That's another reason I didn't go home on Friday night: just the thought of walking on my foot was unbearable.) So I've been hobbling around town begging rides from all and sundry--including, one memorable evening, from a friend who has a bicycle, not a car--and since the diagnosis, now made official, as of yesterday's doctor visit, is plantar fasciitis, who knows when the limping will end. Or, more importantly, when the running will begin again. I may need to find myself a different sanity-preserver. Drugs, anyone?

But it's all almost over--spring break in two weeks!--and I'm beginning to breathe a bit easier, though that may just be because I'm too tired to hold my breath any longer. And, heck, maybe I'll convince myself to stop flirting with irresponsibility. I think it's time to quit being such a tease and just commit.

Woke Up, Got Out of Bed

And now for something completely the same: a day in the life of a not-busy-enough grad student.

4.01 AM. My alarm goes off.

4.06 AM. Again.

4.11 AM. And again.

4.16 AM. Yet again. I'm awake, really, I'm just trying to pretend that I'm not. I don't usually get up this early, but I was too tired last night to write up the problem set that I spent about five hours solving. I drag myself the three feet across my bedroom to my computer, turn it on, and start writing: syllable structure in Chaha blah blah blah...

4.57 AM. My roommate, who has been working an early-morning shift at her retail job, stumbles out of her room to find me in the kitchen stirring cottage cheese into spaghetti. For some reason I am always starving when I wake up early, and oatmeal just won't cut it. "Good morning!" I say brightly. Once I'm out of bed, I'm a morning person. It's annoying.

5.36 AM. I'm only three pages into my writeup and am beginning to worry that it won't get done, so, of course, I take a break to reply to some emails. I'm trying to set up a Visiting Teaching appointment for later in the week, so my companion gets some bright-and-early scheduling details.

6.01 AM. I hate Chaha. Curse you, speakers of Ethio-Semitic languages! And I hate how frequently I'm using the word "generate." I check thesaurus.com and decide on "produce." Grad school kills prose style.

6.43 AM. I've already solved this problem; can't I just explain my solution to the professor orally? It would take five minutes, tops. I hate writing, and the sun hasn't even come up yet. I'd rather be somewhere, anywhere else.

6.44 AM. I find off-season plane tickets to Algiers for only $900. It's not like anything important will be going on in school in March anyway, right?

7.01 AM. On Thursday mornings I go running, and I won't let phonology stop me from that. I throw on some sneakers and head out. I can think of more synonyms for "generate" on my way. Effect. Cause. Induce. Engender.

7.29 AM. It was a short jog this morning, thanks to Chaha. I start writing again. Page five. I am a slow writer.

7.41 AM. A friend emails me, looking for dating advice. I reply. Why do people think I might have constructive advice about dating? I am a solid friend but terrible at romance.

8.03 AM. Marrakesh for $850!

8.56 AM. Panic! Panic! I have class at 9.40 and I still haven't showered or dressed or packed a lunch or packed up my school stuff. I put the finishing touches on my homework and jump in the shower.

9.26 AM. I'm leaving slightly later than I hoped, so I run. It's a rainy morning, not too cold, which I love, so I'm loping across downtown Berkeley with a huge grin on my face, my backpack bouncing up and down behind me. I don't pass any protests this morning, not even Code Pink, which is unusual. I guess that brouhaha has mostly died down, which is a pity, because I always enjoyed passing that intersection when someone was holding up a "Honk to Impeach Bush" sign. Nothing like every car horn in the area honking to get you ready for class.

9.46 AM. I am always late to class. I should have given up being late for Lent.

10.01 AM. Due to my fancy-schmancy graduate education, I now know the Yurok word for a Pacific lamprey. I totally love this class.

11.31 AM. In my next class, we get distracted from our discussion of case-marking in Australian languages as the professor tells a story about a six-foot long goanna charging at her. What's with the wildlife today? Not that I'm complaining.

1.07 PM. In my third class, my professor, who be administering the phonology section of our MA orals, says, very slowly and clearly, "You can't graduate with even an MA in linguistics without knowing that Finnish has transparent vowels." Finnish. Transparent vowels. Check.

2.00 PM. Classes are over for the day. I wander over to the student store to buy Kleenex, cough drops, and various Vitamin C tablets and lozenges and juices that, all told, constitute about 4000% of the recommended daily value. I'd really rather not get a cold right now. Or ever, for that matter. Bring on the Vitamin C!

2.11 PM. I check my email. Gmail is advertising tickets to Jakarta for only $810. I am tempted.

2.30 PM. I arrive at the Institute building, which is close to campus and boasts several comfortable study spots. I settle in to do some reading about nonconcatenative morphology. Isn't that fun to say? Nonconcatenative! Nonconcatenative!

4.51 PM. I am struck by guilt that I have all this time to sit around reading. I should be doing research or working or something, even if I have no idea what I want to research or where I could work. I just feel like a lazy underachiever.

5.01 PM. Speaking of which, I give up trying to fight the nap.

5.20 PM. My alarm goes off. I know not to hit snooze this time or I'll be late.

5.36 PM. I step on a bus heading north, wondering if this time I'll actually see the intersection or if I'll have another one of my get-off-the-bus-a-mile-too-late debacles. Last time I ended up having to run the extra mile, and I've had quite enough "I'm late" running today.

5:59 PM. Success! I am actually on time! I'm babysitting for some friends during stake temple night. They only have one kid, and he's ridiculously cute and good-natured. After his parents leave, I put him in his stroller, and we go out walking.

7.30 PM. This kid has a long attention span for sitting in his stroller, and I have a long attention span for walking around aimlessly. We're a good combination. I give him a bath, put him in bed, and sit down on the couch with some articles to read, amazed at how this was the easiest babysitting job ever.

9.30 PM. Home again, home again, jiggity jig. My apartment is, as usual, a mess, so I spend a few minutes washing dishes and folding clothes, glad I've only got one person to clean up after.

10.00 PM. I love wasting time on the internet. I reply to a few emails--if you're reading this, yours probably wasn't among them; I'm sorry--read some blogs, look up recipes for this week's Sunday dinner, continue winning at Facebook scrabble, chat with a friend, and find plane tickets to Australia for $1000. I want a six-foot goanna to charge at me!

11.15 PM. Time for bed, which really means time to brush my teeth, wash my face, floss, read my scriptures, and then read a novel for a half hour or until I conk out, whichever happens first. Lately it's been the latter, which explains why it's taking me so darn long to get through the 600-page novel a friend recommended. I should have saved it for spring break.

12.00 PM or thereabouts. I fall asleep thinking about living in a white house in Algiers, one of my ultimate life goals. I'd better start saving for those plane tickets.

No Direction Home

I'm a big believer in positive thinking, so I'll start with this: I'm good at many things. Like acquiring totally useless skills (coughBraillecough), or whistling loudly, or sleeping. Yes, that's right, sleeping. I'm an amazing sleeper--I can sleep anytime, anywhere, through anything. In the middle of the afternoon? Check. On my floor? Check. While my computer is blasting loud music at me? Check.

I clearly get sleeping skills from my father.

So does Klement.

Luckily, we don't get this from him.

But this isn't about sleeping, much as I would like it to be. This is about things I don't do well. So let's start with the biggest one of all: directions. I am functionally retarded at directions. Roughly half my personal anecdotes start with "so this one time I was really lost," and there's good reason for that. I can't tell left from right without looking at my hands, I can't visualize directions that people are giving to me (though I can read a map, for the record, if I rotate it enough), and I can't for the life of me remember paths I have taken before. It's like other people have in their heads a video of a certain route, where I only have a series of poorly-lit Polaroids, not necessarily ordered correctly, and not necessarily covering the entire route. This means I can remember what certain locations look like--usually based on the signs in the area, since I, as ever, am most drawn to words--but the connections between those locations are beyond me. My family used to make fun of me because one of my most commonly said phrases--besides, of course, "I've read a book about that"--was "hey, what is that doing here?"

I could go on forever about times I have been lost--the time I couldn't direct my grandmother to the library and my three-year-old brother could, the time I went running and ended up two towns away, the time I took a wrong highway exit three times in a row--but I'll spare you that. I will say, though, that my graduate department is housed in the world's most confusing building, period, and that that has caused me a lot of grief. Or, more specifically, a lot of being late to class. For those who went to BYU and remember the JKHB, let me tell you, it's got nothing on Dwinelle. It seems like two buildings stuck together, one of them with four floors, labeled 1-4, and lots of classrooms, labeled with two- and three-digit numbers, and one of the with seven floor, labeled A-G, and lots of offices, labeled with four-digit numbers. Of course, four floors and seven floors do not match up, so to get to floor 3 you have to take the elevator to either floor F and walk down a flight of stairs, or floor E and walk up a flight of stairs. What's more, both sections of the building are squares that only connect in one corner, so when you take the elevator to floor F, good luck finding the flight of stairs. Plus random hallways shoot off each side of the square, and they all look the same. Plus the building is set on a slope, so each entrance from the outside leads to a different inside level. Plus I deeply suspect that, like Hogwarts, rooms and staircases move around at night.

All this means that I spent much of last semester comically confused about where my classes were. I mostly just showed up in my department, whose outside door I finally managed to find, hidden behind the service truck unloading area, and waited for one of my classmates to walk through on their way to class. When nobody walked through, I was in trouble. In fact, I had two of my classes, each meeting once a week, in the same classroom, and I didn't realize it until about a month after school started. All classrooms look the same, you know, and I came at it each day from a different direction, and left each day through a different door, which I think excuses me. At least a little.

So you can imagine how things went the other day when an undergrad approached me in the hallway of my department and asked how to get to room 86. I knew enough to know that room was in the other half of the building, on another floor, and to know that I'd never be able to just tell her how to get there: after a few seconds of me going, "Um, I think you walk straight, and then maybe up some stairs? And then you turn? Left? Or maybe right?" I finally just said, "Let me take you." So we set off on a Dwinelle adventure, with me pretending to be confident and the undergrad sweetly following along, not getting annoyed when I, first, walked us right into the backstage of the theater; second, took us to a dead-end door leading into the courtyard; third, found a set of stairs that didn't lead to the level we wanted; fourth, walked us around the square of the French department, twice; and fifth, gave up.

"You want to know how I find my way around this building?" I asked. She nodded. "I find my way around this building," I said. So, together, we found the nearest exit, walked around the outside of the building, and entered through the door on the level she wanted. For future reference, I told her, she should just memorize that door and never enter through any other one. Or she should find an older grad student, or one with a sense of direction. I'd be much more useful, after all, if she needed someone to take an emergency nap.

Grad Students Who Know

with apologies to Julie B. Beck

Grad Students Who Know Write Papers

Grad students who know write papers. While there are those in the world who decry the old values of "publish or perish," in the culture of graduate school good students still believe in writing papers, preferably as many as possible. The wisest advisers teach that first year graduate students should not postpone writing papers, and that the requirement for righteous graduate students to multiply and replenish the library remains in force. There is academic power and influence in writing.

Grad Students Who Know Honor Academic Obligations and Commitments

Grad students who know honor their academic obligations and commitments. I have visited some of the most prestigious universities on earth, where grad students fulfill all their responsibilities, despite walking for miles or using sketchy public transportation. They drag themselves onto campus no matter how little sleep they got the night before or how unfinished their course projects are. These grad students know they are going to classes and seminars, where free food might be offered. They know if they are not going to class, they are not impressing their professorial colleagues, and, also, they might go hungry.

Grad Students Who Know are Studiers

Grad students who know are studiers. This is their special assignment and role within the plan of a university. To study means to observe, analyze, contemplate, or learn about. Another word for studying is procrastinating. Procrastinating includes blogging, talking to friends, and, sometimes, in times of greatest stress, washing clothes and dishes, scrubbing floors and toilets, and keeping an orderly apartment. Studying grad students are knowledgeable, but all their education will avail them nothing if they do not have the skills to procrastinate. Grad students should be the best procrastinators in the world.

Grad Students Who Know Do Less

Grad students who know do less. During the last few weeks of the semester, they permit less of what will not bear good fruit academically. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less social activity, less leisure reading, and less time devoted to the basics of hygiene, nutrition, and exercise. Grad students who know are willing to live on less so they can spend more time with their homework: more time thinking, more time reading, more time writing, more time talking to their adviser. These grad students choose carefully, and do not try to choose having a life outside of academia. Their goal is to get their PhDs, so one day they can prepare a rising generation of grad students who will take their pet theories into the entire field. That is influence; that is power.

It is my sincere hope that we all, in these last days of the semester, can strive to become graduate students who know, and I testify that the dean will reward us for doing so.

Let One Interpret

I never know how I get involved in these things. One minute I'm sitting in Indonesian class, nodding yes, yes, yes, Ibu Professor, I am listening, and I do understand you, and the next minute I'm doing simultaneous interpretation of a traditional Javanese shadow puppet show (or wayang) for an audience of about 500 people.

I think I should be more careful when I nod.

This wayang show was mostly a performance of the university's gamelan group, but, to make gamelan music sound ever so slightly less intolerable to a Western audience, they had invited a dalang to put on a wayang show. (The translation for dalang that Indonesians tend to prefer is "shadow master"; that sounds more like a badly-translated Japanese video game villain than a mild-mannered Javanese artist, so we'll stick with the Javanese word, okay?) That way, the show would not simply be two hours of random banging. It would be two hours of random banging AND PUPPETS!!! That distinction is key.

(I should note, here, that gamelan is an intricate and ancient art form that is certainly not just random banging. Even if it does sound like it.)

In any case, those running the event realized that wayang isn't any fun to watch if you don't understand it, so they called up my professor to ask if she would translate. She agreed, and then instantly assigned three of her students, myself included, to do it instead. Because, really, what are grad students for, if not doing the unpleasant parts of a professor's job?

I've done simultaneous interpretation before, but never quite like this. The dalang and his shadow screen were up on stage, along with the gamelan players, while I and my classmates knelt at the side of the stage, with a laptop, typing, in English, what the dalang was saying, as he was saying it. The laptop was then connected to a projector, and everything we typed was displayed on a screen hanging on the back of the wall. Yes, that's right--everything. I've never seen my typos so, um, huge before.


The dalang was kind enough to give us a script in advance, so we had a rough idea of what was going on, but, of course, true to both Indonesia and the art of wayang, he started deviating from the script about five minutes into the performance and never went back. Also true to Indonesia, he refused to stick to only Indonesian; even though he knew none of his translators spoke Javanese, every. single. conversation started in Javanese, at least for the first two sentences. That means at the beginning of every. single. conversation the translators looked like idiots and the audience was confused. And every time he did it, at least when I was translating, he looked over at me, made eye contact, smiled, and started in on (to me) gibberish.

I forgive him his little bilingual jokes, though, because he put on such a good performance. I've seen plenty of wayang, and, frankly, once I get over the initial "hey, this is cool and foreign!" factor, I get bored. That happens, of course, when you don't understand what's going on. With this wayang being in Indonesian, though, I actually understood not only the plot, but also the jokes. And, it turns out, wayang can be funny. Maybe I was just punchy from the stress of simultaneous interpretation, but at one point I laughed so hard I cried. (Okay, fine, at several points. I just don't want to have to admit to laughing at the fart jokes. Though, come on, farting puppets? Hilarious!) The performance was made even better, if I may say so myself, by the interaction between the translators and the dalang--whenever he spoke English, we typed commentary on what he was saying. As one character recounted what you'd need to get to America, my classmate typed a bullet point outline on the projector screen. "First, you need to get a passport." ($$) "And be sure to apply six months in advance, since getting a passport takes time." (Time=$$) "Then, you need a visa." ($$) "Then you'll need a plane ticket." ($$) During another segment, a long fight scene, I "translated" the dalang's fighting noises: Bam! Pow! Biff! Ka-zow! Holy fighting puppets, Harjuna Sasrabahu!


Now, of course, we weren't perfect; I did need the occasional whispered vocabulary item from my professor, and at one point I missed the line in which a character said the name of the gamelan song that was about to happen, and was then highly confused as to why all the musicians on stage were suddenly hissing "Golden Rain! Golden Rain!" at me. I think, though, that I have a decent excuse for the occasional mistake: three and a half hours of kneeling on a hardwood floor concentrating with all your might is no cakewalk, people. The performance was supposed to be two hours, closer to the attention span of an American audience, but, again, true to the Indonesian idea of time ("jam karet"), the dalang had other ideas; a real Javanese wayang performance begins around sundown and runs until sunrise the next morning, so, frankly, we were lucky to leave before midnight. In fact, I feel lucky in general: lucky to have seen such a performance, lucky to have translated it, lucky, even, to speak Indonesian.

But I'm still going to be more careful about nodding in class.

Subterranean Grad School Blues

I spend my days feeling dumb
As the baby of the class.
I don't want to get glum,
But my classmates are kicking my ass.

Chorus:
Oh, I've got the 1st year of grad school blues,
I wish I could work 9-to-5.
I can't even drown my sorrows in booze
I don't know how I'll survive.

My schoolwork is syn-taxing
And I live hand-to-mouth;
I've got no time for relaxing
And my social life's headed south.

Chorus

So much work to do, Lordy,
I'm stressed out, cranky, and tired.
I know I'll be at this 'til forty
And when I'm done I'll never get hired!

Chorus

Ohhhh, grad school,
Why you gotta be so cruel?
Ohhhh, grad school,
Why was I such a fool?

Fun With Phonetics

We're working on narrow transcription of English in my phonetics class this week, so I spent most of my weekend sitting at my computer listening to sound files of various American English dialects. By my iTunes's count, I have listened to the sentence "she had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year" precisely 1,023 times in the last two days. (My "Top 25 Most Played" playlist is now no longer entirely Okkervil River.) That, of course, is not counting all the times I listened to the sound files in programs like Praat or WaveSurfer, or all the times I listened to them on my classmate's computer, or all the times I simply listened to snippets, focusing closely on "had your," "had your," "had your."

I think I'm losing it. As I tried to listen in church today, my mind ran a constant loop of
wɑʃ wɑɾə˞
wɑʃ wɑɾə˞
wɑʃ wɑɾə˞
wɑʃ wɑɾə˞
wɑʃ wɑɾə˞
WASH WATER

and so of course I listened in sacrament meeting even less than usual, because while the speaker was telling us what she learned from her nephew's baptism, I was thinking, did Speaker 8 really articulate the "r" in water? And was there some rhotaciziation in "wash" for Speaker 3? And why on earth would someone put any kind of suit, dark or light, in greasy wash water for an entire year?

And now it's nearly 2 am and I'm still thinking, exploded or unexploded? Stressed or unstressed? The answer, at this time of night, is clearly "stressed," and, in a few minutes, "exploded." I think it's time for bed.

The Return of the Native (Speaker)

Now I know that everyone feels inadequate at the start of graduate school--or so everyone has claimed--but in my case it's true. Of the eight new students to my department this fall (not counting the two visiting scholars), six have done graduate work in linguistics before (one of them even to the point that she had a finished and approved dissertation proposal, apparently), and six have taken classes in the department before. I'm the only one that doesn't fall in either category.

This leads to many conversations which I can't participate in, conversations that start either with, "when I was writing my master's thesis on phonology," or with "when I was taking a class last year with Professor X*." I do a lot of listening.

But yesterday I found my niche in the class. I was sitting around, listening to the German girl and the Italian guy talk about, I don't know, something complicated.

"So, you see," he said, "when people are treated with this type of therapy, there's less chance of a...how do you say...a going back?"

I leaned in. "Relapse," I said.

"Right!" he said, and continued with the conversation.

A few minutes later, the German girl was saying something. "So blah blah blah what's that called...the person being treated...?"

"Patient," I said.

"Thanks!" she said, and they were off again.

So I'm good for something: I'm a native speaker. I may not have a master's degree already, and I may not quite understand what, exactly, the Korean guy wrote his thesis on, but I can respond with complete confidence when, in phonetics class, he leans over to ask me what "big toe" means. Hey, I'll take what I can get.





*I bet you didn't know he's a linguist!

Ubicada

Today was orientation day at Unnamed U, both the campus-wide "We welcome all 3,000 of our new grad students and want to make them get to know each other RIGHT NOW!!!!" and the much smaller, much saner department orientation, which was essentially the same thing, only with "3,000" replaced by "9, only 7 of whom are actually in attendance."

I had a very pleasant morning, if such a thing can be said, at the campus-wide orientation; in some ways, i.e. the part where we offered one factoid about ourselves for each M&M we ate, it smacked of freshman orientation at the Lord's Undergraduate Institution, or at least I suspect it did, given that on that day so many years ago I lasted through precisely thirty minutes of get-to-know-you games before I snuck off to the library to read Georgette Heyer novels.

In other ways, though, it was probably a good preparation for grad school in all its many glories: I had to sit through fifteen minutes worth of information that took two hours to present. I learned lots of new stuff: this year, Indian foreign students outnumbered Chinese foreign students for the first time. The incoming class has students from 49 states, all of them except Nebraska. I live next door to where Jack Kerouac used to live. (Literally. He was at ***3 and I'm at ***5.) Oh, and I met some interesting people, from a bearded white guy with an Indian accent, to a hyper-friendly electrical engineering fourth year who comes to new student orientation just for the buzz of meeting new people. And, of course, I suffered through the obligatory Northern California indoctrination: "If we can solve it in California, we can solve it for the world." Right. Maybe Unnamed U needs a new slogan: "Let there be misplaced idealism." Or maybe "A voice of one crying sustainable living in the wilderness." Or maybe just "Truth."

(Ha, ha.)

Most of all, though, the orientation, especially my department orientation, left me overwhelmed and, frankly, terrified. You can only take so many hours of grad students telling you their life as a first year was Study Hell before you start to feel nervous, with that sneaking, sinking sense of oh, wait, I'm going to be stressed out. And, just in case I wasn't worried enough, I'm the youngest and least experienced of my entering class, which consists mostly of foreign students (4/9), students who have already finished a master's degree (at least 3/9; I'm not sure about some of the others), and students who have spent years working; I'm the only one who's not a California resident, and one of the only ones who hasn't spent time at Berkeley before; the only Mormon, clearly, in a place where, when that comes up, people say, "yes, but you're not a practicing Mormon, right?"; and one of only two girls. Oh, and the one is a German girl who looks like a supermodel, and who is very nice to boot. And here I thought I could at least match the looks of the average Ph.D. student. Curse you, Germany! Quit ruining the average for the rest of us!

And, of course, I feel like everyone is vastly more prepared--or, at least, able to project that impression--and as I left the building, after getting a residency lecture from the graduate secretary, who was sure to emphasize that I should save EVERYTHING, every receipt and every piece of mail and every, I don't know, package of ramen, I was already practicing my deep breathing, thinking, what on earth have I gotten myself into? And so I rushed home, stopping only to buy massive amounts of sugary items, changed into a Hello Kitty nightgown, and curled up in bed with my favorite Georgette Heyer novel. (Yes, I'm the youngest of my cohort; what of it?) I think I'll stay here until school starts. It's much easier to be orientated when there's only a book to face.