Phoneticians Take Seattle

Jeez, what a week, and the fun is just starting!!

So I passed my qualifying exam last Tuesday.  Hurray!  (That means I get to write a dissertation now!  Hurray!)  I mean, I guess.  I'm excited about writing a dissertation, in some ways, I just don't know what exactly to write it about yet, so that's a little daunting.  This is partially what my qualifying exam and advisors are for, of course; I talked about my qualifying paper and the research articles I've been reading for about 3 hours on Tuesday, and then I got sent out of the room for about 3 minutes while my committee "deliberated", and then they called me back in and shook my hand and said "congratulations, you passed!" That was nice, and it feels *so* good to be done, but part of the point of the exam is to challenge me and ask me hard questions about why my work is important (or not), and of course I didn't have all the right answers, or even any answers at all in some cases.  The downside is that now I'm feeling kind of... less confident about my work after it's been picked apart by really smart people, and more than ever, I'm aware of all of the problems with it.  And yet I haven't figured out what to do next, as a follow-up, like as a dissertation.  So I'm in this weird in-between state of feeling like, "well, that wasn't quite right", but I don't know where to go next.

And now I'm in Seattle, by the way.  This week was so weird.  Qualifying exam on Tuesday, followed by brain mush and spacing out for about 24 hours, followed by reanalyzing data (again) and updating my conference poster for the particular conference I'm at this week.  Here's the new version, in case you're curious:

I don't know how much better it is, but it's a little different from the last one, anyway.

I left the house at 6:00 this morning, flew in to Seattle around 10:30, and took light rail into downtown, where I made my way to the Seattle Sheraton and promptly ran into my advisor in the hotel lobby.  "Well hey!  I didn't know you were gonna be here!"  Such a funny, fun surprise.  Then we had a little academic family pow-wow in the lobby, with my advisor and a bunch of his former students who are now new professors and a few people they know.  Then I got to meet some people whose papers I've read and whose names I've seen around, which is a weird experience that I'm still getting used to.  Like, "Oh!  You're Person X!  Of 'Person X and Person Y, Journal of Phonetics, 2008!'" or whatever.  Putting a face to a citation, in other words.

Sidenote: No one will care about this but other linguists, but on the light rail system, there's this disembodied woman's voice who announces the stops, and for every stop she says, "Now arriving, Stadium station.  Exits on my left."  Or something like that.  The weird thing was the "my left".  Disembodied voices are not supposed to use deictics that way.  I think the L in Chicago says "exit to your left", which is of course ambiguous because you could be facing any direction when the disembodied voice tells you that. So I see what they were going for, with the "my", but I've just never heard a mass transit system speak in the first person before.

Anyway, then I bummed around the conference for a few hours, met people, talked about experiments, and then started to get tired.  So I called my friend Beth who used to work at the Nature Center with me, and who lives in Seattle now and has graciously offered to let me stay with her and her family for most of the week, and she told me about this cute little coffee shop right by Pike Place Market.  So I am now sitting in a cute coffee shop by Pike Place Market, having just finished an iced Americano but not feeling much more awake yet, and waiting for Beth to call so we can go get sushi.

Seattle is really great, as far as I can tell!  It feels a lot like San Francisco, but... cozier, somehow.  Less pretentious, for sure... the barista at this coffee shop was very genuinely friendly, the people at the hotel were very friendly, the people next to me on the train were very friendly.  So far, so good.  I'll be taking pictures over the next few days and hopefully putting up a "Seattle pictures" blog post pretty soon.

The other thing I did this week (and weekend) was try to get experimental stimuli ready to go to France.  Because dude, I'm leaving for France in just over a week.  (!!!!!!!)  And my stimuli are not ready, and that will have to remedied very soon.

Well, I just got a text message from Beth, so it's time to wrap this post up.  I'm so happy to be traveling.  I love traveling.  I can't wait to go to France.  This week is going to be fun but really tiring, but no complaints.  And hopefully I'll get good comments on my poster on Thursday and I'll be ready to turn it into a talk in the next few weeks!  (Yikes!!)