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.