On Surprises, Big and Small

I finished grading this week and have been busy querying my database. Doing so has been easy, but organizing everything to be able to analyze the results  consists of lots of copy and paste commands to organize the data into analyzable chunks. As the week has progressed, so have my frustrations.

I am trying to write an abstract for a competitive conference. I submitted an abstract to this conference two years ago and it was rejected. This year, I'd like the organizing committee to accept my work, so I have been concentrating on writing the best summary of my work that I can. I need to query my database so that I can provide data for the general trend resulting from my research. I thought that this would be easy, until I started over-analyzing the whole project and realized that I am making too many assumptions to clarify in a measly 20-minute presentation. Thus, this was the beginning of my frustrations for the week.

Copies of student papers were due on Monday. I clearly specified the due date for each of my courses to the minute, but two students were late. I accepted their work, gave them the 100% they earned, and wished them a merry Christmas and a relaxing break. In general, I enjoyed reading my students' final papers. They were clear and to the point, and many added personal touches that made their essays much more exciting to read. I was amazed at the high mean for class grades and thought maybe my courses were too easy. But, wait, no semester can end without complaints of final course grades! I do what I can to appease students, but some just leave me with a sour uneasiness that sits with me for a few days. It's always the same thing:
Me:  Here is the breakdown of your grade again. I will not and cannot change your grade. You knew my grading policy and I clearly communicated your progress with you all semester. This is the grade you earned. If it makes you feel any better, I really liked having you as a student and would be happy to write a letter of recommendation on your behalf, which in the long run, will do you more good than a slightly higher grade on a transcript unless you are applying to med school.
Student: Yeah, but I really wanted to X, Y, and Z/ you ruined my GPA/ now I don't get retro credits/ this hurts my scholarship.... blah blah blah... You ruined my semester.
Me (to myself): I take back that offer of a letter of recommendation. The only thing I would recommend you for is a slice of humble pie.

End result? More frustrations. I read my student course evals today since I had submitted grades and am not changing any of them. They were overwhelmingly positive: my favorite instructor/ super energy and enthusiasm in the classroom/ very clear/ made an otherwise dull subject interesting and enjoyable/ very approachable and friendly. Wow, thanks everyone! Unfortunately, it's the three or four negative comments that stick with me: She taught the whole class time and never let us go early (Well, I think that still reflects positively on my teaching)/ attendance shouldn't be mandatory for a college course (it's not, you just don't get discussion points when you don't add to the discussion, which happens when you're not in class)/ I stopped working hard after the midterm because it was a joke (ouch!). I know I can't make everyone happy, but after months of planning, grading and trying to make a general required course as interesting and useful as possible, it still hurts to read that someone thinks the class sucked (and wanted you to change their grade since it's obviously my fault that the class wasn't of a high enough caliber to feed their unstimulated intellect.) This really shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was. *sigh*

On a positive note, Hubby and I unexpectedly received a box full of cool, old German books in the mail yesterday. Hubby is excited about the Goethe and Eichendorf tomes to add to our personal library, whereas the science journal from 1889 caught my eye. Yay for thoughtful friends with unwanted treasures.

Finally, my other frustration of the week was with Indy, who e-mailed me to see if I would be around and then never responded when he wanted to meet with me. Finally, I marched up to his office door today, knocked and was pleasantly surprised with him opening the door, smiling, giving me a present, and saying, "Merry Christmas, let's meet in mid January. I take back my frustrations toward him. Maybe he's just really shy and I've misunderstood him these last 5 years. Thanks for the headphones and German candy, I needed those in my office.

On Ending Another Semester

I taught my last class of the semester today and am starting to remember everything I have to do other than upload grades before next Friday. I have stacks of books that I need to return to the library (only to check them out again on January 2nd). The books are either in my office or in my study carrell (which I haven't visited in about a month). I have to make gifts for my committee members by Friday so that I can continue letting them know how much I appreciate their help. I figure any positive reinforcement I can provide will work in my favor and this is my last chance to suck up without it being completely obvious before my actual defense. I still have to grade finals, which are slowly trickling in. I am 1/5th of the way done. I used to prefer receiving everyone's final exam on the same day, but like being able to grade some "early" now that I gave students a take-home version. Their responses have been great so far and I have enjoyed reading their essays.

It's strange to think that I won't meet with students for another 6 1/2 weeks. I enjoyed both of my classes this semester and am sad to say goodbye. Two students stayed after class to shake my hand on Monday night and this afternoon, a student hugged me goodbye. I don't think anyone at the university has given me a hug before! All three students thanked me and said I was their favorite instructor. Aw, shucks! Thanks, guys! Even better compliments have been "My friends are taking your class next term because I told them how great this one was" and "What are you teaching next semester so that I can take that too?" Time to look forward to reading course evals and hope that I'll have something good to scan as a .pdf for job applications.

In general, I have a hard time with endings because I focus on whatever is next. I've occupied my mind with research to-do lists for the break and paper work for the start of next semester. Once the spring semester starts, I have two weeks to apply for graduation. I met with Indi yesterday who agreed that I can apply for graduation (YAY!). I just secured my 5th committee member for my defense and am ready to apply. Wow. I even scheduled my next dental cleaning for May 16th, given my anticipated May 19th graduation date. Most semesters end with long blocks of grading, exams and lots of beer, but this semester is ending quietly. If it weren't for advertisements reminding me that Christmas is in two weeks, I think I'd end up in my classrooms ready to teach next week too. Instead, I have extra time to work on my to-do list. Between now and Christmas, I plan to write my literature review and a conference abstract. Writing the abstract involves querying my database for patterns which I hope will make up 1/4 of a chapter I plan to work on in January.

Yesterday's impromptu meeting with Indi went well. I submitted two chapters last week and he hasn't had time to read them. Nevertheless, he assigned me the task of brainstorming lists of anything that people can attack me for as far as my research is concerned and said I should aim for spring break as a deadline for having a complete draft of Geraldine.

Another semester down and one left to go. Looks like I'll have a good transition into 2013.

On being ahead of schedule

Last blog for the month and for the first time since the spring, I am ahead of schedule! The last time I met with Indi, he made the comment that I might not graduate until summer. Our meeting covered many topics and the comment regarding summer graduation was a minor side conversation in the day's topics. Nevertheless, the idea of graduating in summer is so overwhelmingly unexciting that I am trying my best to do everything within my powers to avoid it. Most of my reasons for disliking the idea of a summer graduation are purely social, but there are negative implications for my academic future as well. Besides wanting to walk with friends with whom I've shared the ups and downs of coursework and dissertating at graduation, a summer defense is harder to coordinate and would delay my recovery. Instead of enjoying a summer holiday in the mountains and on the beach, I'd be stuck in my office beating my head against my desk for unnecessary additional weeks or months.

I would much rather defend in late April, make revisions and submit Geraldine to the graduate school so that I can walk in May, have a party, and relax for a few weeks before transforming Geraldine from a dissertation into articles I can submit for publication in some fancy-pants journal. Plus, it's way cheaper to fly to an exotic location in May than August. :) Besides, defending in summer means that no one else would be around to say congratulations, Dr. Kelsie when Indi finally walks out of the defense room to welcome me back in. That's the moment I'm looking forward to the most, and it's what I find myself fantasizing about when I'm not planning a trip to fantasy island that I'll never be able to afford. I imagine waiting for the outcome of my defense surrounded by friends who are glad they aren't the ones waiting for the decision of pass or fail. A summer defense means the option to walk in the winter graduation ceremony. By that point, I don't think I would care anymore.

So, in order to do whatever I can to avoid a summer defense, I've been writing, writing, writing. 20 pages plus references later, it is with great pleasure that I announce the completion of a full draft of a second chapter: the theoretical background. Oooooh, aaaaaaaaaaaah. Indi wanted complete drafts of the theoretical background and the methods chapters by the end of January. I am two months ahead of schedule. This leaves more time for revisions and a better final product. Time to relax and enjoy the weekend (and a glass of Glühwein). Happy Friday!

On dinosaurs, explanations and intelligibility

There is a Monty Python sketch about theories that I frequently think of when writing academic works. The sketch is a comedic interview with an academic, who has a theory. It takes the academic forever to finally explain what her theory is, as she is very protective of her theory and wants everyone to know that it is hers, she thought of it, and it is good. When she finally reveals her theory, it concerns dinosaurs: they are small at both ends and big in the middle. The sketch is dumb, but it is a good example of poorly communicated research, theories, and the like.

Although Geraldine has nothing to do with dinosaurs, I often have to stop myself and think about my writing. Is it clear? Do my ideas make sense? Are there enough examples? Did I explain why I wrote what I did? Did I choose the right words or is my writing ambiguis? Are my decisions transparent? Can anyone read what I wrote and understand it or do they need to be a linguist? Does it relate to my hypothesis? How does what I'm writing fit into the bigger picture of linguistics, cognition, and the human experience? Most of the time, I find at least one equivalence of "Dinosaurs: small, large, small" in my writing. Thankfully, I usually find these before anyone else sees my writing and am able to improve it quickly. So often I worry about how to start writing something, which word to use, or how many pages can I pound out before my day is over? All of these thoughts are distractions from what I should concern myself with while writing. Page length isn't important, clarity and quality are. Don't worry about sounding too formal or too informal, you can change it later. Write whatever you think of at first and eventually it will turn into something you can use and be proud of. I know all this, but it is nevertheless a circular process each day: Where do I start? What do I need to fix? How much can I write before ______? Does this make any sense? What is this article/chapter/paper about, anyways? Does this flow right as a whole? How should I reorganize everything? Write an introduction. Write a conclusion. Pat yourself on the back and start all over again.

Today I made it to 'What is this chapter about, anyways?' I spent time outlining Geraldine chapter by chapter and came back to a catch phrase of a former German professor of mine: Was ist dein Zweck?! What's your point? We asked authors this question frequently and she told us to ask ourselves this question throughout our writing. Dumbeldore advised us to make at least one point in our papers and build our papers around the point. In attempt to end my day on a productive note, I spelled out the point of each chapter of Geraldine and then sat back and admired my page of notes. Then I outlined the current chapter I'm working on by asking questions about what I need to make clear to my audience, my point, how it fits in to my hypothesis and the bigger picture, what I need to define and so on. Before I knew it, I had another page of notes which I also sat back and admired. I didn't write anything else this afternoon that contributed to my daily page count goals, but I left myself a guide to finish a complete draft of my second chapter first thing when I arrive in my office tomorrow. (And for the record, I wrote another 2 pages before leaving for lunch and spent a good 4 hours on task today)

Writing about writing about writing. Sounds circular, but it helps create a better product (and I still got to include dinosaurs!).

On Moments of Dissertation Enlightenment

I think I should feel guilty this month, but I don't. It's the end of another month and usually I would panic at this point, but I'm not. Maybe it's the weekly acupuncture treatment, the extra herbal tea I drink now that it's cold outside, the daily workout, or the wonder-supplement flax seed oil I take with each meal. Or maybe I just have a grip on my dissertation for once. It's probably the having-a-grip bit, but I think the other proposals above contribute to my general sense of balance and well-being. The end of November hasn't sent me into moments of heightend anxiety and it's a great feeling.

In my last post, I wrote about taking time off. With a holiday weekend, I took advantage of time to myself for relaxation and hobbies. I spent hours spinning yarn (I have bags of sheep, alpaca and camel fiber in my attic) and have enjoyed relearning how to spin. It gives me a sensation of connection to hunter-gatherers and agricultural societies who have spun animal and plant fiber in this manner for centuries. I also spent some time knitting, cleaning, baking and canning (pickles and jam). I baked cookies for the first time in at least 6 months on Wednesday and have even been able to avoid eating them. I also played with bunnies, spent lots of time with Hubby and talked to friends. And last, but certainly not least, I worked on Geraldine (but more about that later). Perhaps the biggest change is I stayed home for 5 days in a row. I haven't done that in at least 6 months either. A few days ago I felt anxious about having to return to the office, but tonight it's no big deal. That sense of balance and well-being is key.

There are three more weeks of instruction until finals week for fall semester. When I realized this last week, I wondered how I would manage to finish everything. Yestserday I decided to take a friendly professor's advice and to challenge myself to work on Geraldine for 45 minutes every day. When I started dissertating, I worked on Geraldine for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. Now that I teach face-to-face again, I haven't come close to that amount of time on task working on Geraldine. Mondays and Wednesdays are teaching days, and I don't have time for Geraldine. I always take Sundays off, and Fridays tend to fill up with other tasks- reading groups, meetings, etc. If I push myself to work for 45 mintutes every day, I think I'll get a lot done, and feel a sense of accomplishment. It's working for me this weekend, and I think it will work for me until I go into ulitmate panic mode in mid-March.

The way I see it, there are 5 stages to being a dissertator. Stage 1 is preparing for the proposal. In this stage, it took 4 hours each day to collect materials, read and sort through it, and collect data from 160 languages. Stage 1 lasted 5 months. In general, I felt good about myself and confident about my progress. Stage 2 was recovering from my proposal defense. My committee asked me to change my theoretical framework and collect more data. Both came as a surprise, and I felt lousy about myself and my progress. Professor Jolly Green Giant told me that Stage 2 was the incubator phase of writing a dissertation, and it was normal to feel lost and confused after a proposal defense. I think Stage 2 lasted 4 months and it was the time to clean up all of my mistakes. I still managed to work every day, but I never felt like I was making progress. Eventually, I understood enough of the new theoretical framework to start talking about it, and I finished collecting data. Onto Stage 3! Stage 3 was organizing data and pre-writing chapters. Luckily, that only lasted 2 months and it was relatively easy. And now, I am in State 4: writing my chapters! I anticipate this lasting until mid-March, when (I think) Stage 5 will come: super-ultra-stay-up-late-every-night-and-have-no-time-to-do-anything-else-panic-mode (AKA proving to your committee chair that you`re ready to defend).

I thought that writing the chapters would be the hard part, but so far it`s not that bad. I write in blocks, then work on something else for a few days. I need time between writing and reading my work. If I have to write for more than 1 day in a row, I have to discipline myself not to read what I wrote before. If I start reading, I start editing, and then I don`t really accomplish anything. Therefore, I have to leave myself to-do lists for the next work day and outlines on what to work on next. So far, it`s working for me. I used to be scared about submitting chapters because that`s when others would start to critique my work. I also felt like that`s when Geraldine would stop being mine, but then I realized that was a stupid thought.

Today I took a day off from writing and worked on my database, which led to huge moments of dissertation enlightenment. The biggest realization is that the problems I thought I had to fix in my database aren`t problems at all. I just thought about the data the wrong way. For example, the computer already does things for me, so instead of trying to stop it from doing so, I just have to stop myself from doing the same work. (analogy: if you put a penny into a gumball machine and twist the lever, the gumball comes out. You don`t have to reach through the hole and try to extract a gumball by your own secret awesomeness). Also, I don`t need a graduate school margin friendly version of every report from my database queries. I`m the only one who actually needs to see my queries, because it would be stupid to have a chart appear in a chapter for every time the word for `hand`is the same for 'arm'. I just need a chart that lists 'hand is same as arm' and the number of times it occurs, and I can do that in Word, just like I have for every paper I've written in graduate school. Duh. There were many smaller moments of enlightenment today as well, so I decided to write them down in a log before I forgot about them. Ahhh, feelings of pure genius. I will relish in the moment because I know they will be replaces with feelings of failure in a day or two. :0)

As for the best feeling of enlightenment from today's epiphanies? All I have to do now is write. Finally!

On saying thank you

I look forward to Thanksgiving all semester each fall term. It has always been a much needed time to write term papers, catch up on reading, take a break from teaching and even fit in a day to relax. This year's holiday hasn't been as productive as years past. Last week, I had food poisoning and spent a lot of time in bed. Returning to work was difficult and I lacked motivation all week. Usually I watch movies, drink tea and knit when I'm sick, but this time, I couldn't even sit up. It seems that my subconscience is telling me that I missed out on a few days of relaxation and it would be better to sit around knitting and baking than dissertating. That's great for my subconscience, but not for my dissertation progress. Especially since the last time I met with Indy, he said we need to start thinking about a summer graduation instead of a spring one. Well, I thought about it, and I don't like the idea, so work, work, work I must. But how do I ignore the ingredients in my pantry that I bought in the pre-Thanksgiving grocery sales?!?! And how do I ignore the cute, fluffy bunnies running around my house? (We're bunny-sitting for the weekend). The short answer is, I don't. But that doesn't mean I can't make progress either.

With all the talk of being grateful and giving thanks, I decided to write my acknowledgements section today. It seemed early, since I still don't have a 5th member on my committee and I'm sure that more people will help  me as I continue to work on Geraldine, but I'm glad I worked on it today. It's tough to write a thank you that's big enough to express how I really feel and doesn't give away too much personal information. After all, I do hope that a lot of people will read Geraldine, not just my committee members. It took about an hour, but I mangaged to write an acknowledgements section under two pages, and I think I thanked everyone I needed to. If not, I have a list in my office with names and reasons that I started over the summer, knowing that I would forget someone. Boy am I glad I got that out of the way now instead of waiting until April or May.

I re-read my methods chapter and am still pleased with what I wrote two weeks ago. I added to it and started thinking about whether or not I will need to run statistical analyses of my data. Good thing there's someone on my committee that works with stats. Indy said that I should be done with my methods and theoretical background sections by the start of spring semester (end of January). I aim to be done with both by the end of fall semester (in three weeks). I opened my rough draft of the theoretical background chapter on Wednesday, but I haven't read it yet.... :0(  Good thing there are still 2 more days to go before Monday. I also spent time working on my database this week. So far, the appendices for Geraldine are 139 pages. That might be longer than the content of all the chapters.

Now that I think about it, I did a lot this week. Time to stop feeling guilty and start playing with bunnies.

5 months, 20 days and counting

I realized today that my defense is less than 6 months away. That means that I have been a dissertator for 10 months and I'm almost 2/3rds of the way through this process of becoming Dr. Kelsie. I even think I could celebrate that idea right now, as I feel confident with my progress, my committee and Geraldine. I think Indy was right, after the data collection, checking and re-checking nightmare ends, writing the damn thing isn't that bad.

I just finished my first complete draft of a chapter and I am very satisfied with it. ( Oh, thank you, but you don't have to applaud). There were many times that I thought this moment would never come, but it has, and it feels great. I've been working on my methods chapter for the past two weeks or so. As I am presenting my dissertation research to a big group of scholars tomorrow in the library (part of my library fellowship), I figured the methods chapter would compliment my presentation preparations. I've spent time balancing preparing slides for tomorrow's presentation and writing sections for my chapter and it has been going well.

As I don't want to brag and would prefer to let everyone reading this feel better about themselves, let me know describe my organizational routine for writing this chapter. I wrote a lot and came up with new sections as I went along. That's no surprise though, that's how these things usually work. After I was nearly done writing everything I thought I needed to write, I read the methods chapters from three dissertations from previous PhD graduates from my university. I figure if they passed, I can just copy their organization. I realized that my chapter needed to have more "I will talk about this, then this, then that, then this and then I will tell you what I told you about" material to it. So I fixed that, and then realized that I had to re-order most of the sections of my chapter. First I printed everything out with department resources, then I started cutting and taping things together in a new order. Because everything in my chapter was numbered, moving it around was tricky. So instead of cutting, pasting and then forgetting what goes where, I opened a new document and changed the color of the font for each section. Section 1 was dark red, section 2 was red-orange, 3 was orange, and so on until I got to section 10 and used black. Not only was my chapter in a better order, it was pretty too! But then I changed all of the numbers in headings and tables and quickly changed the font back to black before anyone could walk into my office and make fun of my for my technicolored font fun. Yep, I'm still a dork.

As far as preparing for my library presentation, I gave a practice run-through to both of my classes on Monday. In the first class, half of the students seemed interested and the other half were falling asleep or texting. I then retaliated by giving the sleeper/texters an F for participation for the day and changed my slides before my night class. My night students seemed much more interested in my work, but after the first 15 minutes, their attention started to fade and I could see that I was losing them one by one. How to remedy the situation before tomorrow's talk?! I reworked my slides again and added more data, keeping Dumbledore's sage advice close to heart: talk about things that someone will want to share at a cocktail party. Help people feel smarter after listening to your presentation, even though I am the expert and they are not. Good advice, Dumbledore, thanks.

So, wish me luck tomorrow. I hope my audience doesn't resort to playing solitaire on their mobile phones during tomorrow's presentation. I'll re-read my chapter next week and e-mail it off for review afterwards. And in case you're wondering, the acupuncture is doing wonders for my stress levels, back pain and I've even been able to work out for 4 of the last 5 days. (Gotta look good under that big doctoral robe and hood after all). Over and out!

On October's Progress

I realized that I haven't written anything for a while, mostly because I have been very busy. Time to recap.

When I last wrote, I was about to meet with Indi. Our meeting resulted in me bursting into tears after he asked incessant questions regarding specific etymologies. He gave me the impression that I was supposed to have everything memorized. As I am working with roughly 300 etymologies, from 10+ different sources, memorizing everything is beyond any normal person's capabilities. After I started crying, he said he didn't actually expect me to know the answers to everything. It would have been nice if he had explained that to me up front. Instead, I embarrassed myself and it took me a week to get over it. Besides the dip in my self esteem, the meeting resulted in me identifying and copying the most important etymologies into lists according to pattern. It probably would have been faster to type everything, but the mixed writing systems made me think otherwise. Every word has at least one special symbol and many of the symbols aren't in IPA. The idea of constantly toggling between IPA, Greek, and multiple sub and superscripts was depressing, so I hand wrote everything, then wrote and typed a cheat sheet. It took three weeks to complete, but it's done and submitted. I felt a lot of relief once that was over.

Meanwhile, I started writing two chapters. In early October, I started a theoretical background chapter. In one weekend I managed to write roughly 10 pages about metaphor and metonymy (something I knew nothing about before August). It's weird to write about something so authoritatively that I've never directly studied in a class. It makes me realize that being a doctor of linguistics doesn't just mean knowing all about my subfield, rather being able to have an intelligent conversation about any topic in linguistics and knowing how to learn more about something. I submitted my draft to Professor Jolly Green Giant, who liked it. Wow. Positive feedback, who knew that was possible! Regardless of the positive feedback, it's more than likely that nothing that I wrote  will appear in that form in the final draft of the chapter, but at least there is a decent start.

I also started rewriting my methods chapter. I hadn't touched it since May. I reformatted and reworded everything I wrote for my prospectus and expanded on most of what I wrote. Again, I'm learning about the art of editing. It is so tempting to copy and paste paragraphs or pages from a previous draft. There's such a rush when my page count increases from 2 to 15 pages with just two mouse clicks, but I constantly have to refrain from doing so. When I write new information without looking at the older drafts first, I write better. But it's so hard not to look at something I previously wrote, especially when I think everything I'm writing is pure crap. Learning to turn off my brain's auto-edit mode isn't easy. Then again, nothing about writing a dissertation is easy except clicking 'send' when parts of it are attached to an e-mail for someone else to deal with. I worked on my methods chapter all day today. I started from scratch and now have 11 pages. The rest is in in the document in outline form, waiting for me to expand it in prose. I hope to finish it this week.

I've been busy preparing for my library lecture on the 9th. I spent a lot of time taking screen shots of my work and incorporating them into presentation slides. I thought I had everything ready, but then I talked to Dumbeldore, who told me I need to include more data from my research, not just my research methods. She said that people like to have interesting things to talk about at cocktail parties, so I'd better include some interesting tidbits to help people's social lives. :)

I also gave two midterms last week and finished grading. Thank goodness that is over. I hate grading. Luckily, it wasn't that bad reading students' essays this time around.

If you haven't seen me this term, you might not be aware I've had a pinched nerve for the last two months. It is mostly affecting my wrists and seems to be aggravated by excessive typing (like right now). There have been days that I haven't been able to turn my head, and others that have been difficult to do most of anything. I started acupuncture treatment three weeks ago and it is helping. I've been avoiding the steroids my doctor prescribed but am thinking I might need to reconsider. Apparently dissertation stress isn't good for spinal injuries either.

Because I don't want to finish with negative news, let me leave with an account of last Saturday night. I invited myself to a friend's Halloween party, thus joining 60 or so other pirates. Together we pillaged the city with our pirate gear, a sound system, and a recording of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Mostly we went bar hopping and performed the Thriller dance everywhere we went. It was a blast. We also sang pirate songs and consumed lots of pirate food in liquid form. I spent all day Sunday recovering.

Life is good, I'm on track with Geraldine, and I can still bust out the Thriller dance for another 36 hours before I become lame again.

On Time...

It's October! My student informed me of this today when he e-mailed me a picture titled "Octobear." It was a drawing of an octopus with a bear head, and it will be the perfect example of how to analyze morphemes next week in class. We'll see how many students still think that 'catsup' has something to do with 'cats' after seeing that picture...

Anyways, it's October! How did September (and August, July and June) fly by so quickly? I re-read my dissertation proposal last night and laughed at my timeline. At the end of my proposal I wrote that I would write chapters 4, 5 and 6 in June, July, and August. Ha! Before September ended I made myself start a new introduction (chapter 1). I made it to three pages. *insert sarcastic cheer here* In May I thought I would have completed 2/3 of my dissertation by now and I have written a mere 3 pages. And more than likely, nothing I wrote will even make it in to the final copy. It's probably a good thing I didn't know back in May that I'd only have 3 pages written come October. Even if I had known it then, I wouldn't have believed it. So what have I been doing if it wasn't writing chapters 4, 5 and 6?

A LOT! If you want to know the details, keep reading. If you want to skip to the next paragraph, do so. I learned two new computer programs to store my database. I then had to separate the information in each cell of my Excell spreadsheet so that it would be computer (and committee and general user) friendly. That consisted of pressing Cntrl = ENTER about 10,000 times, along with cut, copy and paste. Then I read all about metaphor, metonymy, semantic and pragmatic theory and read about computer language stuff so that I would be able to use my database. After that, I read 10 etymological dictionaries and took notes on every entry remotely related to my dissertation topic. About 300 note cards later, I re-read the theoretical stuff on metaphor, metonymy, semantics and pragmatics (and that time I took very, very good notes, which I apparently didn't do the first time around, I just wrote comments to myself all over the library books). After grasping all the theoretical stuff and being able to explain it in 5 sentences or so, I organized those 300 note cards and made tables matching what Linguist A and Linguist B (and C, D, E, etc.) had to say about the history of the Lithuanian word for 'fishing hook' and the like. Then I looked for patterns, highlighting like a mad woman, and writing myself more notes (but this time not in library books). Since then, I have identified many patterns in the historical development of the Indo-European languages' words for body parts and grouped them into 5 categories explained by metonymy. I also somehow managed to turn the hideous spreadsheets from my dissertation proposal into a massive, searchable database that will knock the socks off of my committee.

Until yesterday, I felt lousy about my progress. Since last night when I could finally start searching my database, I have felt incredibly awesome. My database works and it is fantastic. I am pleased. My committee will be pleased. I have a working hypothesis. I have testable data. I have an excellent theoretical background. Everything that sucked about my dissertation proposal has been fixed and what I have now is better than anything I ever thought I could come up with. I suddenly love my committee and hope they all get a raise.

Tomorrow morning I meet with Indi. Let's hope my enthusiasm and self-assurance lasts for at least the first30 minutes of our 90 minute meeting.

A Hopeful Ending to an Ominous Week

Anyone who saw me this week probably heard about one of the weird mishaps I experienced. In case you missed out on all the craziness, here's a recap for you. After replacing my radiator on Papa Smurf on Tuesday, a Pyrex dish shattered in my kitchen on Wednesday morning. The explosion sent glass, water, soy sauce and tofu to all the ends of my kitchen: oven, floor, sink, ceiling, and my lunch. Hubby kindly helped clean it up for me because I was late for my office hours and had to teach. That night I took myself out on a date  for Vietnamese food (Hubby was attending a concert without me). The foot was great, I got my daily fix of tofu, and walked home happy and full. When I arrived home, I discovered that the rabbit had chewed through wires to our stereo. While inspecting the wires, I received a big electric shock. I found electrical tape and in a hurry, I taped the wires and plugged them back in only to be the unhappy viewer of sparks flying across the dining room, a loud BOOM and a blown fuse. And the stereo stopped working. Ugh. Then on Thursday night, my keyring someone became uncoiled as I unlocked my backdoor and my keys flew across the back porch and stairwell. I have no idea what I did wrong this week, but apparently something or someone wanted me to know that it thinks I suck. :( Luckily, Indiana wasn't that something/someone.

I had a meeting with Indi on Thursday morning. He pretty much repeated everything he said in our last two meetings together, which were in July and May. That was fine by me, I needed the repeat and reassurance. It still seems like everything is on track, despite not being able to getting any work done due to the craziness described above. Indi told me to start making tables of my historical data and then gave me a new paper to read which he authored. I had no idea how to make tables for historical linguistic data, but after reading his paper (which had at least 10 tables of historical linguistic data in it), I had I better idea.

After spending all of Saturday afternoon and evening working on transferring data from note cards to tables on used computer paper, I am more than hopeful about the same pattern I've been trying to explain in various ways for the last 5 years. Until now, my explanation of the pattern was lousy. The theory I had used isn't widely accepted anymore and I couldn't account for all the non-example cases in the data. After spending a summer reading about other theories from pragmatics and semantics, I can now account for the non-example cases. The pattern is in both my cross-linguistic data and in my historical data. This is equal to the scene in a detective show in which the detectives have been staring at the same pictures of evidence and the crime scene for days and finally figure out the missing link. They still have more work before they can get search permits and permits for the criminal's arrest, but they know they have the right bad guy. There is no bad guy in my research, but my next steps are much clearer and I'm well on my way again. I still have a lot of data to sort through and more to collect (Greek and Russian), but the reoccurence of one pattern across the historical data has made my outlook on this week much brighter. (Of course the ice cream and shopping for new kitchen items last night with a friend also helped tremendously). Here's to feeling confident again and weeks of more tofu in new cooking ware.

Geraldine and the Quest for the Holy Hypothesis...

There have been many farces produced over the years in which a quest for something grand in a far off land drives the plot. I'm finding that writing a dissertation this semester resembles such films, as there have been monsters, temptations, wounds, duels, good deeds and fluffy black bunnies galore. Luckily, my big, black, fluffy bunny hasn't tried to bite my head off with her fangs, but she did try to bite my thumb off yesterday when I forced her to have "couch time" with me while watching another dorky German made for TV movie. I now have a cracked thumb nail.

The semester started with injuries to both of my index fingers. I cut one and burned the other. These minor flesh wounds healed quickly and didn't slow down my quest for a holy hypothesis. Three days later I realized that the funny feeling I kept having in my arms wasn't due to my clothes cutting off circulation, I was suffering from nerve pain. For two weeks I haven't been able to carry books, a backpack or fluffy black rabbits because doing so increased the pain shooting through my upper limbs. It turns out a disk in my neck is pinching a nerve, which is causing pain in my arms, elbows, wrists and fingers (which oddly also happen to be half of the body parts my dissertation focuses on...). My mornings have been spent at the chiropractor's office. The pain is mostly gone and I can type and hold a pencil without cringing again. It seems that stress triggers my spinal chord injuries to flare up. My word of advice for avoiding such irritants: don't fall off the roof of your house.

On the first day of the semester, my secretary was missing and someone new has been in her place ever since. This has led to being asked for help with many menial tasks, such as making tables and calendars, while waiting for water to heat for my daily tea. Meanwhile, students keep asking for favors (I couldn't make it to class, can I still get points??? kind of favors) and I wish that I could turn such students into newts (they'll get better).

The office computer that sits on my desk broke. I have no idea what happened to it. It won't turn on. The IT department is supposed to fix it but is taking forever to set up an appointment. I finally had an appointment this morning, but my car's radiator broke and I had to fix it before riding the bus to school today. My faithful steed, Papa Smurf, is supposedly healed and being held in captivity until I can pay the proper ransom. Until then, I can utilize the set of coconut shells hidden in my closet at home. As for the computer, maybe it will be fixed with a herring sent to the IT department.

I outsmarted the mean librarian so that she would give me a key to my study carrel. Her "none shall pass" attitude quickly changed with the mention of African swallows.My study carrel has proven to be the proper place to accomplish a lot of work.

My quest for a working hypothesis has been much longer than I anticipated. I am running out of rations and need to meet with a certain adviser. I just sent out a plea via SOS and hope the response doesn't come back in an annoying French accent. In the mean time, I don't think movie references will help me write about metaphor and grammar, but it does make me feel better.

The first week back

Summer is over and I can stop feeling guilty about the time I am spending focused on Geraldine. My first week back on campus was fun, productive and reassuring.

 For most of the summer, I felt lousy about the progress of my research. Sure, I learned about databases and rebuilt my database. I also copied entries from too many dictionaries to list here. I read a little and wrote nothing. I haven't produced any fancy reports from queries of my data, which means I can't really show off my database to my committee (or myself for that matter). The heat certainly distracted me and prevented any dreams of ultimate progress I had conjured up before the summer started, and it took me three months to come to terms with the new direction my committee wants me to take with my research. I also felt anxious about fall term starting again. I wanted to start writing in August but I wasn't ready. Would my committee start to doubt my ability to finish? Would I start doubting my May graduation goal? I have joked about my thoughts regarding the low number of people who will actually read my dissertation since I started this project, (5 if you count my committee, 6 if someone agrees to proof read it for me, 7 if I get to include myself, 8 or 9 if I apply for the Joseph Greenberg dissertation award for linguistic typology and maybe 3 more people will actually read it because they are interested in it) but all summer the "it doesn't matter, no one actually reads dissertations" feelings have been replaced by "my dissertation won't be worth reading." Perhaps this is why so many people write fascinating dissertations and then are never heard of again. A former professor of mine used to joke that people just buy farms in upstate New York after they write dissertations and that's how they disappear forever. I'm beginning to understand those people. When working on a project intensely for a few years or more, everyone must wonder at some point if their dissertations are worth reading. Pondering this topic not only makes me feel better about my work, it reminds me that it's time to throw myself back into my work again. Indi always tells me, a good dissertation is a finished dissertation. If I can finish it, it will be worth reading.
I worked for 4 days this week. 3 days were strictly devoted to Geraldine and the 4th was spent teaching my new class. Teaching was great. I had fun, my students smiled at my antics, and there were no teaching nightmares before my first class. I will meet my second group of students on Monday night. On Wednesday, I finally convinced the gate keeper of the library to give me a key for my own study carrel. Her responses to my pleas evolved as follows: 1) There are no study carrels available. 2) There are very few study carrels available and even after resubmiting an application, you may not get one. 3) There are no study carrels available on the 3rd floor. 4) I found a key to an open study carrel on the 3rd floor, west wing. Here is your key. You will be charged $25 next fall if you don't renew it. And with that, I received a key and had fun hunting all over the 3rd floor for my new carrel (FYI a study carrel is a glorified closet in the library with a desk, a lamp, a chair and a waste basket). I finally found it and you know what? It is five steps away from the two rows of books I consult most frequently. My carrel has one brick wall and three white walls with coffee stains left over from other academics who loathed and admired their work as much as I do mine. I have officially crossed the threshold to tenure-track bound awesomeness. I also now have the power to slip in and out of the stacks without anyone knowing where I came from. It's almost as cool as being able to teleport around campus.

I saw Indi briefly. He pointed a finger at me and walked away to a meeting. I think it was more of a greeting than a warning, but I e-mailed him an update just to make sure. I saw most of my friends and a lot of former students. My friends, it seems, didn't do much academic work over the summer and I feel better about myself. My former students' faces lit up when they saw me and they told me repeatedly how much fun my classes were and that they learned a lot. Again, I feel better about myself. Even one of my current students passed me on the way to the library and acted excited to see me. And at our first choir rehearsal of the season last night, my choir director announced my library award and gave me a newspaper clipping of myself. This can only mean one thing: This year is going to be my best year of school and I am graduating in May (okay that was two things... I lied). Now to keep up the positive energy that only the first week of fall term can bring and make it last until I write the first 4 chapters of Geraldine... Here goes!

The Last First Day of School

It's here: my last first day of school as a student. It only took me 24 years to make it to today. There have been a few last first days of school, but today is the only real last first day of school because by this time next year, I will be Dr. Kelsie.

The first day of school my senior year of high school was unmemorable. There are pictures of me from that morning in pajamas with my hands above my head. I must have been cheering when the picture was taken. I don't remember much about that year or the first day of school.  I drove a truck named Bubba, I was rarely on time to my first period class, I learned to tie my shoes while driving, and German and auto shop were the only classes I didn't skip. The rest of the year is best not remembered, but the picture of me remains.

The first day of school my senior year of college was spent running around campus, tracking down higher ups who could process my credits from Germany to determine whether I would graduate as planned. The new history department chair signed paper work for me that allowed me to get a history teaching license, the department of education gave me a BS reason to retake a stupid class about how not to teach because they made an error, and at some point I probably attended class. There was no picture taken.

Then I decided to get an MA and on the first day of school during my second year as an MA student, my office mate declared it "The year of us" because it would be the cool year of graduate school. And it was (except I took 5 graduate classes and taught three German classes that semester). No one took a picture. I think I had secret plans at that time to get a PhD, I just didn't tell anyone.

Last year the first week of classes was insane. There were long lines and crowds everywhere and I found myself asking where all of those students came from and how long it would be until they stopped attending classes. About two weeks later they disappeared and campus seemed normal again. Because the first week was a headache last year, I debated coming to campus today. In the end, the fact that it's my official last first day of school convinced me I should come, which was a good choice.

So how has the first day been? We mysteriously have a new office manager as of today. I spent the morning showing her the file system in the department office. My department chair informed me of his intent to split Kelly and I apart after being office buddies for 5 years so that two incoming TAs who teach together can share an office. I haven't decided who should move yet. I probably have 3 times more office accessories to relocate, but he has bigger books. As most of my graduate school career resembles Harry Potter, this must be like the the time Harry left Harmione in the tent and then got trapped in freezing water under ice. Therefore, I conclude that Kelly leaves the office and I continue to see how much useful stuff I can fit in here... Returning to today's events, I made a to-do list for the day related to Geraldine and completed half of it. I now know what to work on tomorrow. I also ran into a former German student of mine, which was a pleasant surprise. And he still speaks German (kinda). He has decided to take linguistic classes and I am convinced that my students do enjoy my classes after all. Other highlights of the day include riding my bike for 15 miles, arguing with someone who works in the library (no surprise), developing a random aversion to broccoli and being accused of having fully acclimated to this region of the US.  So, in retrospect, it was a such a good first last day of school, that I might come back again tomorrow. :) And there's a picture to mark the occasion.

Advertising Geraldine

About two weeks ago, someone from the library contacted me about advertising my talk for the library in November. As the talk is connected to the scholarship that the library gave me, I had to think carefully about how to advertise Geraldine. I finally got around to writing an abstract and title yesterday, but the library wanted a picture as well.

At first, the title and abstract were a challenge. Knowing that I have to present my dissertation research to a group of non-linguists, I had to come up with something that sounds both impressive and comprehensible. Geraldine has an official title, and comming up with it was a feat in itself. Early on while reading articles and book chapters for Geraldine, I decided to never name anything with a title that required a colon. For some reason, it is a growing trend in academia to name publications in the following manner:

Something catchy and/or funny goes here: this is where it says what your research is really about

The part before the colon serves the purpose of making researchers feel better about their work (as if having a witty title will make more people read the paper). The second part of the title is much more dull, but it gets to the point. It is the only part that interests the people deciding whether or not to read the article. Half annoyed with having to type long titles into my bibliography and half not wanting to join in as a trendy title groupie, I named Geraldine wisely and have had a difficult time coming up with variations for other presentations that don't sound exactly the same. No one wants to read 10+ titles on a CV that only differ from eachother by one or two words.

The library employee sent me example posters from past presenters and scholarship winners. Some of the abstracts sounded overly boastful "award winning dissertation research", "top doctoral scholar of the university" and the like. I suppose that I did win an award for Geraldine and I had to be the top applicant to do so, but I don't need that advertised with my face attached to it. I wrote what I hope is a modest abstract that gets straight to the point but is interesting enough to attract a diverse audience.

The picture requirement was more fun. It seems that I don't have a wide range of serious pictures of myself as a scholar. I entertained myself at the end of my work day today with hubby's camera. Below are a few highlights, as well as a few examples of me on a typical work day.



Typical day teaching one of my classes

  

Archiving really important stuff



Conducting linguistic experiments

  

Saving bunnies and guinea pigs from weird experiments





Presenting at conferences (notice no one is sleeping)

 

  



Collecting Data

  





What I really do all day long



More of what I really do all day long

What I usually wish I were doing instead

 

And finally the picture that I actually submitted:

It's all Greek to me!

It's another hot summer day here in the middle of the country. I made it into the office today to get some work done, mostly because there were big books waiting for me in the library and I didn't want to take them home. Just how big are these books? They are as wide as balance beams and I could use them for about 10 different calisthenic exercises (and thus help myself fit back in to my slacks before the fall term starts). I already exercised this morning though, so I decided to give myself a big mental exercise while reading the dictionary today instead.

Today's dictionary is in German and it has word histories of old words related to Germanic words. The second volume is a key to the first volume. Because I don't speak Indogermanic, I use volume 2 to look up the words I want to find in volume 1 and, if the word is listed, I am given a page number. The words in volume 2 are listed alphabetically by language. My adventure today had me looking up word roots from Geraldine's database in German, English, Russian, Old Church Slavic, Latin, Italic, Old Irish and Greek. I saved the Greek for last. Actually, I was going to ignore that it was even there and hope that no one noticed I didn't look up Greek etymologies when they read the drafts of my dissertation. Since that was a stupid thing to hope for, I checked the department office to see if the coast was clear to make copies of what I need from this dictionary. My secretary was still around, so I pouted, then started reading Greek. Greek is complicated because a) I've never studied Greek, b) it is the only language listed in this dictionary with a different script, c) I transcribed my Greek notes into a Latin script about 3 years ago, d) I never attended a university with a Greek system to help me recognize the Greek alphabet, and e) I hate math. Not wanting to let the fact that I never attended a toga or frat party hold me back from this last year of college, I suffered through the Greek section and found about 5 more roots that weren't cross referenced in the other terms I found. Yay! About a month ago, my office mate and I wasted a good afternoon taking dorky quizzes online to see how much random knowledge we had (and of course see who knew more useless knowledge than the other). We took a Greek alphabet quiz and earned 100%. It seems that between watching Revenge of the Nerds and being forced to take 4 math classes in my college career, I can fake my way through reading Greek words. Won't Indi be proud of me? Maybe I'll keep the I've-never-been-to-a-toga-party part to myself for a while...

Then again, maybe I should host a massive toga party this year. We can be like the philosophy department a floor above us and have a party in our offices late at night. Only our party will be better because we're not the philosophy department and two other linguists around here want a margarita bar in their office.... Hmmm.....

While walking from the library to my office, I passed a fountain that appears on every campus advertisement the university publishes (probably because it's one of the only pretty things on this whole campus). As I passed the fountain, I was overwhelmed by an urge to run through it, splash, swim and laugh. I resisted and fantasized doing those activities with flippers on my feet and a snorkel in my mouth on the first day of fall term instead. Or maybe I'll wait until I pass my dissertation defense. Indi can pronounce me Dr. Kelsie and I'll run directly to the fountain and start a new department tradition.

These may seem like random ideas, but as the summer comes to an end and I start my last year as a student here, I keep having moments during which I realize that I won't be a student again after this. This will be my 9th year of college and, unlike the other times I graduated, there isn't another degree to earn after this. Instead, I'll be the professor deciding who is able to earn a degree. As that approaches, I'm becoming aware of the gaps in my knowledge. A person with a PhD should be able to read some Greek and Latin. Even though it was difficult and I have a Greek dictionary waiting for me at home, maybe I shouldn't be so intimidated.

With that written, I'm going to the department office and making copies and I will ignore that my department chair is still in his office next to the copy machine on a Thursday night, after house, in summer. Maybe he can read Greek too and help me out.

On having nothing to say except UGH!

I write this at what I hope is the end of a period of distractions from working on what I'm suppose to be doing this summer. The fluctuating weather stiffled my motivation to work on anything and I haven't been able to concentrate on much since returning from Kansas. Some days the only thing I can do is sit on the floor in front of a fan wearing next to nothing just trying to keep cool. On the days that the temperature finally is low enough to accomplish something, I find myself overwhelmed with everything that piled up during the week. Everything is dirty (it's amazing how messy things get around here when the fans are turned on non-stop), I have to go grocery shopping and try to cook as much as possible before the next heat wave comes, and the only thing I want to do is sleep. Just the same, I feel enormous pressure to make progress on Geraldine. Lately this pressure combined with heat exhaustion has left me feeling cantancorous and overwhelmed. I feel like a complete failure at least once a day, mostly because I haven't produced anything. Since when did production become measurement for academic achievement?

Although I haven't been able to keep up with a 4 hours a day/ 5 days a week dissertation work schedule, I have worked on it daily. For the last week and a half, my major accomplishment has been copying etymologies from 6 dictionaries. For the non-linguists, I'm copying the dictionary in languages that I don't speak. Most of the time, this menial task is interesting, but I find that I cringe everytime I have to write down something in Greek (and every dictionary entry I copy refers to Greek). I still have German, Latin, Greek, Indo-Germanic, and Russian dictionaries to go through. Because this task can be so dull, I distract myself with Netflix. I watched all 23 episodes of the first season of Ugly Betty in a week. Watching TV while copying the dictionary slows me down a lot, but it makes me feel better about myself. After all, copying the dictionary isn't exactly something to brag about. On occasion I run in to acquaintences who ask about my activities. Sometimes an "I'm writing my dissertation" suffices, but when these people want more details, I try not to admit that "I have to look for more data" means "I'm reading the dictionary for 4 hours a day every day."

Just as I finished the first season of Ugly Betty, the Olympics started. And there are hours and hours and hours of competition for more than 30 sports available at any given time. Ah... distractions...... Maybe if I just forced myself to spend a whole day locked in my office I would be done copying the dictionary already (it's air conditioned there!) but so far that hasn't happened.

Meanwhile, I'm also suppose to write a paper about Irish body part terms and how they have changed over time. Again, I think I'd rather watch the Olympics, but how does one go about explaining that to a publisher???

At the end of each day, I want to be able to look back and feel a sense of pride in my accomplishments as a dissertator. Instead, the only thing I feel is best described with UGH!!!!!! So far I haven't fallen victim to banging my head against the wall, but I don't think that's far away. Maybe I'll feel better in August.

On Databases

Okay, so I totally failed at blog compositions this month. This failure generally corresponds to my feelings regarding progress on Geraldine this month as well. Until tonight, I felt like I had made no progress on my dissertation since driving 10 long hot hours back from Kansas without air conditioning. Rather then lament about my lack of achievement, I'll write about what I've really been up to for the last 3 weeks. As a side note, don't worry, there will be a post for Kansas Part 2. I just haven't written it yet.

Before I left for Kansas, I had wild fantasies of learning about databases and potential database programs. I thought that within two weeks, I would have uploaded my database into a new program, clicked a few buttons and viola! had a fancy schmancy database with which I could generate ooooooohs and aaaaaaaaaaahs from my dissertation committee. Much to my dismay, I discovered that I committed the number one mortal sin of database design: Thou shallt not enter more than one piece of information in a database field. This error in database design meant that I did not have a working new relational database before I left Kansas. *sigh*

Now that you have each read my public confession, know that I have spent the last three weeks serving database penance. Dividing my data into more cells has taken about 100 hours full of the computer commands: CNTRL = r, CNTRL+X, CNTRL+C and CNTRL+V. With the most menial tasks aside, I had to assign everything a numeric language code as well as a semantic code so that the new database program would recognize it. I finally finished this penance today and uploaded my data into one of the two new programs. To my surprise, this was lightening fast! Now all of my data is stored in a new program and the old program. AND it's backed up on an external hard drive. There was only a slight problem. The data doesn't show up in the second new program. I must have missed a step. Oh well, I'll figure it out another day.

Despite feeling like I have accomplished nothing during the last three weeks, the two committee members I've met with are pleased with my progress. They were happy to hear that I went to Kansas to fix my eye-sore of a database and are even more pleased that I will have a working program before I defend in the spring. My new fantasy is to have a working database in the new programs from which I can run queries and impressive reports so that it looks like I've actually done something before the semester starts in a month and a half. I hope this is a more practical fantasy. If not, I guess that's why I'm calling it a fantasy.

As I mentioned above, I had two meetings with members of my dissertation committee. The first meeting was a week ago with Indiana. He started the meeting by opening his office door for me and greeting me with my name. This is a common way for him to start meetings. Sometimes I wonder if he just doesn't know what to say, others I wonder if he's trying to remember who I am. How could he forget me? He said I'm the golden child of the department! Well, he called me Kelly not Kelsie but at least he made up for it by being complementary of my work during the rest of the meeting...

*Side Note: I'm not sure why people never get my name right, but the number of times that people have referred to me as Chelsea or Kelly when they meet me outnumbers those who get it right with Kelsie. On top of that, most people don`t pronounce my last name correctly when they meet me, and no one can spell either of them. I never correct people, I just wait for them to figure it out on their own. I think being in classes with 4 Kelseys and a Chelsea for three years of middle school made me impartial to correcting people.

...(now that the tangent is out of the way) Indi pulled out notes from my prospectus defense. It was much easier to listen to the information with a month and a half since the proposal defense. None of the comments were surprising this time and I had questions other than a blank stare. In short, Indi still thinks my work is good, he sees no problems with my timeline and he expects me to kick some serious ass with this Geraldine.

Since last week's meeting with Indi, I'm happy to announce that I have 5 HUGE Indo-European historical reference books. They make excellent weights for tricep workouts between linguistic geek-out sessions at the dining room table and on the living room floor.

On Monday, I met with Professor Jolly Green Giant. He was also complementary of my database work and cleared up a lot of issues I've had regarding definitions with the material he assigned me to read for the summer. Now I have a much better idea about the direction in which my dissertation is heading. *Phew!* Further, Prof. Jolly told me that the "incubation period" I've been in since my prospectus defense is completely normal and that I am managing my time well.

Now that this database drab is out of the way, maybe I'll finally get around to figuring out what it is exactly that I want to say with Geraldine. I plan to start writing by Mid-August. Here's to hoping that the next month is more interesting that July.

On Kansas, Part 1

Most of you reading this know that I was in Kansas for two weeks. My decision to go to Kansas was last minute (for a Kelsie trip at least) and a good investment. After I won the library fellowship, it became clear that I needed to research relational database programs, select a program and receive training. As I looked at my options, I couldn't figure out which program would be good for linguistic research. Demo videos included tasks for average businesses: sorting by address, quantity, and the like. I felt overwhelmed with options and a general lack of knowledge concerning what exactly relational databases do. I also didn't think that I'd be creative enough to transfer database designs from a general business template into my Geraldine research. Rather than hang my head in shame, I decided to go to Kansas for a linguistics institute which offered two workshops on database design.

My first dilemma in going to Kansas was deciding how to get there. There used to be a direct flight from my locale to Kansas, but it seems that the airline that offered this flight pattern no longer offers it. Tickets were  expensive so I figured I would take the train. The train tickets were sold out. Sold out?! People actually take the train in this country? How can seats be sold out... and to Kansas?! They were, so that option was out. I decided to drive instead.

It is roughly a 10-hour drive from my house to Kansas. The air conditioning in my car, Papa Smurf, is broken and Kansas is hot. Likewise, Papa Smurf has a radio and no other form of music player. At first I thought I'd try to catch a ride with other friends driving to Kansas (note: these people were linguists attending the same institute, I don't know copious amounts of people who go to Kansas for a summer vacation). This would have worked out, but my friends were leaving on Wednesday and I didn't want to find housing for 4 extra days, or spend 3 weeks away from Hubby. So I drove... alone... on a Sunday... through hours of corn fields... there was nothing on the radio except bad country music and people reading passages from the Bible...and finally made it to Kansas.

Many people are aware of my snake phobia, but I have another phobia that dates back to 6th grade: corn fields. More specifically, corn fields in Nebraska. In 6th grade I invited myself to a birthday party sleepover. All of the cool kids were attending this party but I wasn't invited. So what did I do? I called the birthday girl, asked her about her weekend plans and lamented over having no plans for myself until she finally told me that I could invite myself over to her party. So I did. It was a fun party full of boys, truth or dare and horror movies. We watched Children of the Corn but I fell asleep. Thankfully, no one froze my underwear that night, but I did wonder how the movie ended. AND my friends made fun of me. So what did I do? I begged my dad to rent the movie for me so I could watch it and not feel left out. And he did! And I've been afraid of corn fields, Dairy Queens on Sundays, towns where everyone attends the same morning church service and Nebraska ever since. No one is sacrificing me to a corn field demon. To make sure that this never happens, I avoid corn fields. I was able to avoid driving through Nebraska on my way to Kansas, but not corn fields. Of the 10-hour drive, at least 6 hours consisted of nothing but corn fields for a view. Combined with the scripture reading on the radio AND it being a Sunday, I tried not to stop. I thoughtfully packed a cooler full of cold beverages and food for my journey before I left and stopped after about 5 hours to use the bathroom when there weren't any corn fields. I left the bathroom proud of myself for avoiding the corn fields. And what did I find? A 2-foot long snake skin next to the bathroom door. I ran back to Papa Smurf and didn't exit again until Kansas.

Unlike the terror-filled journey there, Kansas turned out to be a fun place to spend two weeks. No wonder the train tickets there were sold out. Geraldine ended up being a super popular topic of conversation at the institute and I learned about databases. It seems that Geraldine will be even bigger and better than planned with a new database, but building it will take a while. Lucky for me, it's hot where I live and my office is air conditioned (whereas my house is not). Perhaps the next 50-hour of pressing the 'enter' button on my keyboard will be more tolerable than originally planned.