QP approved!

Hey!  My QP was approved!

That is so great!

I mean... that doesn't make it any better of a paper.  (There are still plenty of things to fix.  In the future.)  But now I can check that off my list, and I just have to take my exam on Tuesday.

I'm strangely not that nervous about my exam.  In fact, maybe I should be more nervous, so I'll study/prepare more.  But... I'm feeling pretty good about things.  My exam chair said there will be about an hour of discussion about my QP, then about an hour of discussion about the annotated bibliography I submitted to my examiners, then about an hour of discussion about what my "dissertation plans" are shaping up to be.  And "if you could prepare an outline of your dissertation plans, that would be very helpful - the more you prepare, the better, since that will give us more to talk about".  Uhh yeah.  I have some ideas, and I know the general direction I'm going, so I can talk about that, but I am in no way prepared to make up an outline.

So... I need to think about that some more this weekend, and make up a little outline of issues/questions that came up in my QP to help organize my thinking some more.  And write a conference abstract by Sunday night.  And probably at least start on my poster that has to go to the printer on Wednesday.  (I'm leaving for Seattle next Monday - yikes!)

But!  For now, there is graduation tomorrow, and it's breezy and sunny and I'm going to curl up with some more reading and some tea.  One of these days, I'll read a novel or something, but for now it's more articles about bilingualism and lexical access.  (I just ordered a statistics/programming book off of Amazon that I'm intending to read over the summer.  I never thought I would be perusing statistics books in my free time... of my own free will... partially because I want to.  But I kind of like it.)

QP (re-)submitted

Well, I turned in another version of my qualifying paper tonight.  Every single day this week, I really thought I would get it done.  I mean, it was already done, how long could it take to make some revisions, right?  Wrong.  Decidedly wrong.  It could take 7 days straight of working on it 4-7 hours a day, in fact, if you were wondering.  Including 8-12 and 2-7 today!  But: it is mostly done.  Unless I totally messed up the statistics (which is by no means impossible), it might - might - get approved in its current version.  And that would be great, because then I can stop rewriting this paper at least for a few months, and come back to it this fall sometime with fresh eyes and new data and no looming due date.  Oh how nice that would be.

Now I just have to prepare a short presentation for my meeting about our Paris project at Stanford in the morning (and I get to catch the train at 7:27!), but I think I'll have plenty of time to throw it together on the train(s).  And then I have to get my annotated bibliography ready for my meeting with the chair of my exam committee on Tuesday (lord help me with that... the bibliography, not the meeting, the meeting will be fine), and then I have a week to prepare for my qualifying exam, which will be on Tuesday the 17th.  And then (then!) I get to throw together my poster for the conference I'm going to in Seattle, because it has to go to the printer on the 18th.  (Oops.)  And then I have 4 days to get my Paris experiment ready before I leave for Seattle, then 5 days in Seattle (which I'm really looking forward to, especially once my poster is sent to the printer!).  Then 4 more days at home getting stuff ready for Paris, I guess, including a second poster which will have to go to the printer while I'm actually in Seattle, come to think of it (oops).  And then, before I know it - Paris!

Lovely, lovely Paris.  I'm so excited, but there's so much stuff to get done between now and then.  I decided I'm not even going to try to work on my conference presentation until I'm actually in Paris, because I'll have 14 days while I'm in Europe to work on it, and I think that should be plenty.  It would be nice if I could collect some more data on my kiddies before I leave, but I'm not gonna hold my breath on that.  Because that would have to be sometime this week (when I should be studying) or sometime at the end of next week, when I might be scrambling to get my Paris stuff ready to go.  We shall see.

Shoot, it's 11:00?  Where does the time go?  At least I got to play some frisbee tonight!  It's so great that it stays light so late now - we played frisbee from 7:00 to almost 9:00 tonight, so that was an excellent break.  I am so glad this frisbee thing has been working out.  I look forward to it every week, and I'm going to miss it this summer!

Oh well, time for bed.  G'night.

happiness a-splode

Too bad I said I'd give it back when he comes back...

I'm having trouble typing right now because I've literally played the piano for 6 of the last 16 hours.  It's kind of starting to feel like acute carpal tunnel syndrome, so I should probably cool it for a while, but I just can't stop.  Ohmygodit'ssogood.

My friend Florian left for France this morning, so that makes me kind of sad, but I get to babysit his piano while he's gone, so that makes me ecstatic.  It's actually a really nice, full sized keyboard with weighted keys and everything, so it sounds and plays a lot like a real piano.  I went and picked it up from his house last night, got it home around 10:00, and played the darn thing until 1:15 in the morning.  I just kept going, "Mmmmmmm maybe one more song."  And then 10 or 15 minutes would go by, and I wasn't ready to stop, so I'd find another one.  I even downloaded some sheet music online and I can already play it fairly well, and I was just re-figuring out the chord progression to "Ice Cream" by Sarah McLachlan.  I actually came home from campus around noon instead of doing work because I was so tired from lack of sleep and couldn't stop thinking about playing the piano anyway, so I thought I might as well throw in the towel and play some more.  But it's getting to the point where my fingers aren't responding very well and my wrists hurt a little, so it looks like 6 out of 16 consecutive hours is approximately my limit.  (For now.)

So what does a sleepy, hand-crampy girl do at 2:00 on a beautiful, sunny Friday afternoon?  Eat a bowl of cereal, for one thing.  And blog.  And once that's done, I think I'll actually do some cleaning around here, since the little piles of dog hair and unopened mail and dirty laundry are getting a little ridiculous.

I had a pretty excellent week, all things considered.  I got comments back on my qualifying paper from both of my readers, and they were pretty good.  I've got some semi-major revisions to make, but nothing I wasn't expecting, and now I have some guidance as to how to go about making them.  I met with my advisor yesterday, and as always, it was a pretty great meeting.  And actually, I met with my new advisor today - I recently asked the other professor reading my paper if she would be willing to be the co-director of my dissertation along with advisor #1, so I officially have two thesis advisors now, and I am also officially starting to use the phrase "my dissertation".  Yikes.  I hope I don't regret the "two advisors" thing - I know people have enough trouble trying to get a dissertation approved by one professor, let alone two of them.  The thing is, ultimately it's going to be a much better dissertation, and it's going to make me a better researcher, and I know that, and that's why I did it.  But I'm also trying to be realistic about it and remember to not freak out when I'm trying to please two very smart people who are telling me different, perhaps sometimes conflicting, things.  Hop là, c'est parti!  Too late to turn back now!

I bought my plane tickets for Seattle this week, too.  I'm going to Seattle for a conference during the last week of May, and I'm pretty excited about it.  I don't know what exactly I'm putting on my poster for that conference yet, but I've never been to Seattle, and I have some friends there now, so I'll have fun one way or another!  (But I think the conference itself is going to be pretty great too.)

Well jeez.  I'm pretty sleepy and spacing out, so I might do some laundry and even (gasp!) get out the vacuum.  Unless I get distracted by my new piano again.  Which I'm going to do right... about... now....

Deep in the Heart of Hipsterdom

Last night, a friend of a friend of mine's* band was playing down in Oakland, so three of us went out to see them.  There's this thing called the "Art Murmur" in Oakland, the first Friday of every month.  You know those bumper stickers that say "Virginia is for Lovers" or whatever?  There's got to be one somewhere that says "Oakland is for Hipsters".  Holy cow, the number of flannel shirts, trucker hats, tattoos, and bad haircuts in Oakland is astounding.  Often when I'm out and about, the thought occurs to me that these people are just trying really hard to look like they're from Oakland.  It's this dirty-kitschy-so-ugly-it's-a-little-cute-but-mostly-still-ugly look that just screams Bay Area.  I think whenever we move somewhere else, I'm going to be pleasantly surprised but a little sad at how normal, non-Bay Area people look.  It's kind of like when I got to Paris and the way people dressed and got their hair cut was really foreign at first, and then after a while, you start to get it, and it becomes so normal that you don't notice it any more, until you leave.  (Not that Oakland people dress like Parisians!  Although the weird half mullet haircut is somewhat similar.)

*I love that this sentence is perfectly grammatical in English.

Thank you, SFWeekly and Joe Mande for this visual.

So, the Art Murmur.  It's this thing that takes place over a few city blocks, maybe half a mile north of Downtown, where there are some art galleries that open their doors, and people out on the streets with various artsy things, and bands playing in bars and on the street.  Last night there was a troupe of (traveling?) musicians who called themselves The Homeless People (which may or may not be accurate, it was hard to tell), who were singing in the street.  They were pretty good!  There was an upright bass, an accordion, a violin, a washboard, and a saw.  I always wanted to learn to play the saw.  And the upright bass.  And maybe the accordion.  As I was saying this out loud, I thought, hmmm, I am a little hipstery at heart.  But nothing like these people.  If my nose piercing were a ring going through the middle part of my nose instead of a stud in my nostril, and I had at least four tattoos, and a random inexplicable third of my hair were shaved off and spiky, then it might be time for me to start looking for a place in Oakland.

The band we were actually going to see was really good, I think, but it was hard to tell because the acoustics in the bar were absolutely awful.  The bar itself was this really long, narrow room, with concrete walls and a staircase mostly cutting off the back half of the room from the front.  Well, they had the band playing behind the staircase, in the back half of the room, facing the concrete wall.  It was somehow all reverberate-y and muffled and mushy sounding at the same time, and it hurt my head, but I wanted to like them because they were clearly good musicians and were having a good time.

So once they stopped playing, we left and wandered up Telegraph Avenue to this bar called Kim's Back Yard.  It seemed to be run by a Korean woman and her mother.  I had never been served beer by an elderly Korean woman at a bar in Oakland before.  It was interesting, but so kitschy.  The walls were 100% wood paneling, and there were mirrors and Christmas decorations everywhere.  There was indeed a back yard, too, where we hung out for a while.  I mostly felt like I was at someone's house and it was 1972.

Once Kim's Back Yard lost its charm, we headed to yet a third bar in the same row, and this one was a real trip.  The walls were all blood red, and there seemed to be some sort of Halloween theme going on, because there were some little plastic skeletons and spiders around.  So this place, the Stork Club, apparently has a burlesque show every Friday night.  Let me tell you.  Slightly goth hipsters doing burlesque?  Definitely worth a look sometime.  The first two acts we saw were women just sort of writhing around on stage, and then eventually they started smearing fake blood on themselves, so I was really hoping there was a Halloween theme going that night, but then none of the other acts were like that, so I think we just happened to get there during the hipster vampire set.  The last girl up there was actually pretty good, but most of them made me feel very slightly vicariously embarrassed.  Well, I take that back.  They were having a great time, and it was fun to watch them having such a great time, so I think I was just surprised to be reminded that there are people in the world who would voluntarily get up on stage in weird lingerie and dance around (badly) for a room full of strangers.  Obviously not my cup of tea, but more power to 'em.

Speaking of dancing for a room full of strangers, after the burlesque show was over, we got up and danced, but then I noticed at one point that we were the only ones dancing.  Oh well.  The floor was creepily sticky, so that was interesting.  And then the music kept getting worse.  And worse.  And worse.  And we realized there was some guy who didn't seem to know what he was doing just choosing songs from an iPod or something, and they really were not very good or even particularly danceable songs.  That's the problem with kitsch - well, one of them - it means you have to listen to 80's music that was so bad the first time around that it's not even good in a nostalgic way, 25 years later.  It's got to be a nostalgia thing and an ironic thing, right?  No one actually likes bad 80's music, right?  (Right?)  Although Man from Mars by Blondie is acceptable once in a while.

Well, that was my night.  Oh, no, we also got approached by a really drunk guy when we got off the bus on the way home.  He decided to tell us a joke (ahem... "joke") about the devil, and playing golf, and a hunchback, or something.  I dunno, the devil took the hunchback's hump, and then there was a series of interactions with a whole cast of characters, and then the hunchback did something, and the devil was like, "Well here's your hump back! Haha."  I think my version was funnier than the original.

Ok, that was my night.  Life is interesting.  And good.

So good, in fact!  Because I turned in a draft of my qualifying paper yesterday!  So I don't know what to do with myself this weekend.  I think I'm gonna drink tea and get some reading done, and probably go for a long run tomorrow.

Day Off

Yesterday, I said screw it and did next to no work.  The only remotely work-like things I did were stop by the preschool where I do my research and had a really nice chat with the research director about how everything has gone really crazy but really interesting this week, and how I'm going to be around continuing my work for a long time (more than likely doing my dissertation there), and then I mailed off my passport so I can get a new one before I leave for Europe in June.  I started looking at plane tickets the other day so I can be sure to get the best deal, but then I realized I still hadn't changed my name on my passport since getting married (since I haven't been abroad in... 5 years now).  Normally you can just get your plane tickets in your maiden name and it's totally fine, but I'm going to have to get reimbursed for everything by UC Berkeley and various grant sources, probably, and that might be a pain if my tickets are in a different name.  So whatever, I have time, I decided to just bite the bullet and renew the thing.

Then I went out to lunch with a friend from high school who just finished his PhD in physical chemistry at Berkeley, and he's now a post-doctoral researcher here working with lasers and nanoparticles and all sorts of awesome things.  We decided to make it a long lunch and trekked up to North Berkeley to this awesome little kiosk called Grégoire, where they have the most amazing fried chicken sandwiches you will ever taste in your life.  No joke.

While taking my long lunch and purposely not thinking about my QP, I got a text message from another friend who had wanted to go to lunch, but since I missed it, I basically went straight from a long lunch to a long coffee break.  (Although I don't really know if you can call it a 'break' if it's not interrupting any work.)  We met up in the linguistics lounge, this cozy little room in our department with couches and a whiteboard with markers where people hang out periodically.  We were having a rollicking discussion about accent marks in various Romance languages.  Accent marks in French denote the quality of the vowel, for example, but accent marks in Spanish tell you where the accented syllable is, and apparently accent marks in Italian do a little of both.  Then a few of us got coffee and I finally got back to my office around 4:00.  It was such a lazy, Mediterranean feeling day, in the very best way possible.

I decided to ride my bike home and let the dogs out before heading out again last night.  So I did a little laundry and listened to the Jackson 5 and let the dogs run around outside before leaving for San Francisco.  Aforementioned coffee friend and I went to this random bar/café thing in the Mission District of San Francisco, which is the most predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of the city.  He knew a Russian (opera-singing) girl who's visiting our department this year and does work on African languages, whose language consultant is in an African band.  So I'm in a vaguely Indian-themed bar called the Bollyhood Café in the Mission District of San Francisco with a Russian opera singer and my French friend listening to a band called Voice of Africa which is led by a Guinean Jesuit priest.  Have I mentioned how much I love my life?  The band was pretty good, and after a little while we even got up and danced.  Then afterwards we wandered around the Mission and eventually went into a different random, subdued looking bar and sipped on some sangria until it was time to get the last BART back to Berkeley.

We talked about life and Paris and moving and languages and friends and karaoke.  We're going to go do Japanese karaoke one of these days.  We talked about going tonight, but I'm kind of sleepy today, and we have our prospective grad students arriving tomorrow, so it's going to be a long few days.  On the one hand, I love it when the prospies come.  I'm hosting one from the University of Colorado at Boulder starting late tomorrow night, and I also volunteered to lead a campus tour and take the people interested in phonetics and phonology out to lunch on Tuesday.  Then there's possibly my favorite party of the year at one of our professor's house in the Berkeley hills, and another student-hosted party on Tuesday night, and we're all usually pretty dead by Wednesday.  So on the one hand, it seems like a terrible idea to add one more thing by doing karaoke tonight.  On the other hand, I'm going to be dead by Wednesday anyway, so why not add another fun thing in there?

Right now, though, I need to take a shower, and clean the house, and probably go by Old Navy and exchange my jeans.  (Why can't you even be internally consistent in your jean sizes, Old Navy?  I finally found some jeans I really like, so I ordered two of the exact same size and style from the website, and they don't fit.  Which means they've changed their sizing from last year to this year.  Harrumph.)

Anyway, I'm feeling much better about the QP situation after having one crazy, fun day completely away from it.  (And after meeting with both of my advisors last week, who are such helpful, understanding, eminently reasonable people.  And also after having an email conversation with the person organizing the England conference, who was totally cool with me changing the title of my talk to reflect my recent change in findings/minor upheaval.)  So now I'm going to step back for a few days, have some fun hosting prospies and hanging out with my friends that I love so dearly, and then be ready to attack those reaction time measurements and collect some new data next week.  La vie est belle après tout!

(... going to England in June?)

Ok, so, I'm still going to England.  But I've also had a hell of a few days trying to get this qualifying paper done.  The problem is that I was really sure of what I was going to argue!  It all came together really nicely and made sense!

And then suddenly, yesterday morning when I was about to polish off my conclusion and submit it to my two readers, I re-checked one of my baseline measures and - oh hey, look at that, it had changed!  Substantially!  In such a way that I really don't think I can argue what I spent 20 pages arguing!

So now what?  Well, slight despair yesterday, for one thing.  But I think I was thinking about it the wrong way.  I was trying to think of a way that I could argue what I wanted to argue (especially since I already wrote a 20-page paper on it...) but then I thought, ok, be a real scientist about it.  If you're going to be a good scientist, trying to find a way to make your data fit what you want to say is the exact wrong thing to do.  But I wanted to argue that! my whiny inner voice kept protesting.  But no, grown-up real scientist voice has to say.  This is about being ethical and a good researcher and following the data wherever they take me instead of trying to use them for my own personal agenda.  Even if it's an interesting agenda and it would be much easier to ignore the thing I discovered yesterday, slap on a conclusion, and call it a day.

So now... I have decided to (try to) stop worrying about it and go back to the drawing board.  I'm gonna take a deep breath and try not to think about the fact that I've been staring at these numbers for 4 days straight and start. over.  With no assumptions or expectations, and just try to see what I would have (should have?) concluded if I had been looking at this newly discovered evidence from the beginning.

On a related note, a mental note for myself: when I'm started to feel a little overpressurized and panicky and like I need more time, often the best use of my time is actually to go for a run.  I finally went for one this morning and am feeling better now: more capable, confident, determined, clear-headed.  There's something so soul-cleansing about physical exertion.

blah blah blah

I am so tired of reading!!!

Since there are no classes this Monday for Presidents' Day, my Stanford class is meeting twice this week.  That means that not only do I have to go down to Palo Alto again today after just being there on Monday, but I also have twice the amount of reading to get done this week.  I'm trying to do it all, I really am, and I'm trying to concentrate on it and actually get something out of it, but dude.  I am so tired of reading this stuff.

I also really need to get a finalized version of my qualifying paper in to my readers so they can give me suggestions and we can try to get it approved really soon, but I still need more preschooler data before I'm comfortable reanalyzing and updating my paper.  Because I don't want to go through the trouble of reanalyzing, drawing conclusions and re-writing the whole thing only to find that I have to do all of that again once I get more data.

And I was supposed to hear back yesterday from the conference I applied to in England, but they said on the website that the decisions will be going out today instead.  Except that it's 1:45, which means it's like 9:45 in England, so it's not looking good for today either.

Harrumph!

In happier news, we hosted our annual conference over the weekend, and it was really fun, but I got next to nothing done and am feeling so behind on everything.  I'm enjoying this semester and am excited about getting my QP finished, since I'm excited about the work I'm doing, but it will be really nice when this semester is over.

Exciting!

I just submitted my first abstract to a real conference! I'm so excited! The main, biggest, most well-reputed psycholinguistics conference is being held at Stanford this year, and since Stanford is like a 90-minute train ride away and I have some results from my qualifying paper experiment now, I thought it was pretty much my duty to submit something. Worst case scenario, I get rejected, and I have a decent abstract I can submit somewhere else. So that's really exciting - I might get to present at a big psycholinguistics conference in March!

We'll see if I still think it's exciting if I get accepted and then I'm flipping out in March because I have a zillion other things to do and also have to be nervous about presenting research in front of a bunch of psycholinguistic big-wigs for the first time. But hey, we all gotta start somewhere.

I just sort of dropped in to shoot the breeze with my advisor today, and he was so great and warm and encouraging, as usual. I'm feeling excited about my burgeoning academic career these days; presenting some of my own stuff at QP Fest last week was really energizing, and now I'm thinking about getting my work out there and presenting it at like, real, big time conferences, and that's exciting too, albeit a little scary. It's such a weird process. You get this idea and are worried it might be a hare-brained scheme, so you look into it some more, and it's like, hey, this might actually make sense. So you pursue it and pursue it for weeks and months - thinking about it, writing about it, doing the research, thinking about it some more, and all the while you're finding all these little holes in your logic and potential problems with your argument, but you're too invested now, so you keep going. And then you get some results. And they're not what you expected, and you're not sure if that's because your premise was wrong to begin with, or maybe some of those many imperfections in your research procedure caused this weird result. And part of you doesn't even really care anymore and you kind of just want to stop thinking about it and make it go away, and "why did I ever think this was a good idea in the first place?" and so on. Self doubt, loss of self confidence, why-am-I-in-grad-school-and-do-I-really-want-to-be-an-academic-anyway, etc. etc. But if you're lucky, you're forced to turn all of your thought processes and doubts and slightly flawed methodology into a presentation somewhere in there, and if you're lucky, you get really excited and encouraging feedback from people whose opinions you really care about. And suddenly you're all excited again! Like, oh yeah, that's why I got all excited about this! Because it's cool! And maybe those little flaws aren't as big of a deal as I thought and I shouldn't fixate on them too much and maybe these results are pretty interesting after all.

The life of an academic, friends. It's a strange mental world we live in.

Before and After: Melinda Version

Here's a picture of me right after I got my hair cut a few weeks ago:

And I here I am after I got bored yesterday:

I'm a redhead on the inside anyway, I think.

I should get back to work, but I'm (still, again, always) working on putting together stimuli for my QP perception experiment, and you can only stare at lists of made up words for so long. Bowp, chuss, pake, beel, mide... starts to drive you crazy pretty quickly.

So the only other thing I will add is that I got a group of friends together to play Ultimate Frisbee on Friday afternoon, and it was so fantastic. I think everyone had a great time, and I certainly did, and I can't wait to do it again. It was so freeing - running around in the grass with friends on a sunny afternoon. There are few better things in life, in my opinion! And at the end it was starting to get a little muddy, so a bunch of us took off our shoes and I could feel the cool, soft grass underneath my feet and the mud squishing between my toes. So good.

The only embarrassing part is that I am still sore! From frisbee! All of that changing directions and jumping up and down and chucking a disk around... much higher impact than I'm used to, and different muscles, I guess. Then I ran 20 miles yesterday (last time before my race!) and that actually made some of the soreness go away, except I'm just slightly tired and hungry and out of whack today.

So now I will go back to drinking my tea and staring at made up words.