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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.

New Beginnings

I can't believe I only posted once last month. I can't believe December is over. I can't believe it's 2011. Can you believe it?

December went by so quickly. Like, even more quickly than most other months go these days. I remember being a kid and hearing adults say things like, "where does the time go?" and "time just keeps passing more and more quickly!" and now it really is slightly alarming how quickly the time passes. Do you realize I'm turning 27 this year? Granted, not for another 9 months, but still.

Part of the reason December went by so quickly is that I was really busy, running around a lot, doing lots of different things. One thing I finally accomplished is this:

I got a new battery charger for Roger's awesome camera. He's had this fantastic digital SLR camera (that is: a camera that takes incredibly nice pictures and gives you a lot more control over the image) for a while, and he just hasn't been using it. Well, I've wanted to get into photography for some time, and I kept bugging him to look for his battery charger but of course he has plenty of other things to do. So I gave in and ordered a new charger for the thing and have started playing around with it a bit. Admittedly, I partially just want to be one of those artsy fartsy alternative chicks that wanders around with a camera around her neck taking random pictures of things (because the East Bay needs a lot more of those...).

Anyway, this post is to share with you both what I've been up to the past month, and also some more accurate pictures of ... things. There are so many lovely things in my life, and I try to post pictures of them sometimes, but it's hard to do them justice. Unless you get good at taking pictures, and then you come a lot closer.

So, what have I been up to? Well, here's my long-ago-promised update about my marathon in October. Here's what the start line looked like:

I think it goes without saying that I did not take that picture. I'm probably somewhere around that first palm tree on the left; the line snaked down to the left, around Union Square in San Francisco. I think there are around 20,000 people who run this race. It was pretty cool.

I also pulled this down from the website:

It's supposed to represent my pacing. Except that it has no units. So what can we learn from this "graph"? 1) It sure looks like I got impressively faster towards the end of the race, but 2) graphs without labeled axes are pretty useless. It looks nice though, right?

Also, here is what one might look like at the end of a 26.2 mile foot race in the pouring rain:

Not as bad as I expected, actually, but that's probably because the image isn't zoomed in more... I think that's actually me crossing the finish line, judging by the orange cone and the woman behind me with her arms raised up in apparent triumph. That means I'm probably thinking "IT'S OVER OH THANK GOD IT'S OVER" in this picture.

Well, I did other things in December besides download pictures of a marathon I already experienced in person. For one, I went to visit my brother in Las Vegas! The view from his apartment is pretty spectacular (here's where my own pictures start):

I also snapped this one in the car, but it didn't come out very well:

Not quite the same as the real Eiffel Tower, but it'll do in a pinch!

I got to meet Jimmy's puppy, too. Oscar is quite possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen.

I also wrote a lot in December. In case you want to see the fruits of my labor, you can check it out here, in the UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report. I was very proud to be able to contribute to it this year! I'm still waiting to hear back from the two conferences I've submitted to thus far, and I'm also planning to submit two more abstracts to another conference in England in June. So... we'll see.

In between writing and visiting Jimmy in Las Vegas and visiting family and friends in Illinois, I also wandered around Berkeley one evening to play with different light settings as the sun went down.

I really love the warmth this camera can pick up, and I love playing with the different shutter speeds and ways of focusing. I had to have a dog photo shoot, too, since they're captive and generally pretty uncaring about me taking their pictures anyway.

And finally, this one came out a bit blurry, but it's hard not to smile at a little coonhound wearing reindeer ears and grinning like a fool.

So, playing with my camera and writing and visiting people, that was pretty much my December. It was nice to be home for a little while; it's easy to love Illinois in December when you can treat the cold as a novelty. I know that's a terrible thing to say, but it's true. When I got off the L in Chicago and was walking to Amtrak, it was painfully, breathtakingly, skin-stingingly cold. I didn't consciously forget what that kind of cold feels like, but my skin and body had definitely forgotten that kind of cold, and I really did need a blast of it for my internal thermostat's sake - after a week of 0 to 15 degree temperatures, it felt so warm here when I came back. And I needed that. I don't want to be one of those wimpy Californians who wears a down coat as soon as it drops below 60!

Taking Amtrak down to Champaign was really nice, too, surrounded first by the city and then by nothing but cornfields filled with clean white snow. (I was inspired to write a poem on the train that I'll post at the end.) It's so funny how much I love Chicago now! I've mentioned this before, but as a Townie at the U of I, you can learn to hate the Chicago kids pretty quickly, with their daddy's BMWs and horn honking and annoying accents and complaining about central IL. But now that I'm out here, my heart melts for Chicago accents. It's some sort of perceptual warping - while you're in the Midwest, there's an important distinction between downstate IL and Chicago, and Wisconsin, and Indiana, and Michigan, etc., but being far away makes it all blend together.

Anyway, where was I? I've been typing too long, so I'm going to sign off now, but I just wanted to add that it turns out I'm starting my semester tomorrow! (Surprise!) A friend/colleague of mine at Stanford forwarded me an email about a really great course being offered in their psych department this quarter, and I decided to jump on it and take it. The thing is, they're on the quarter system, and their winter quarter goes from tomorrow until the beginning of March. So on Mondays until around March 10th or something, I'll be taking the train to Palo Alto to sit in on a psych course at Stanford. It's called "Models of Language Acquisition" and I think it's going to be really great in many many ways, it just sort of came out of nowhere and I wasn't expecting to start classes again already. But it'll be good for me, and I have a friend at Stanford taking it too, so it should be lots of fun. And I love traveling, even just to Palo Alto once a week.

Ok, enough. Signing off for now, with lots of Midwest love.

mmmmmmm Chicago in the winter

you are sweet with your Christmas lights draped along gritty gridded streets

red and green sparkles on gray and white concrete and slush-snow

grooved and icy sidewalks and skin that stings while I wait for the light to change

you are so lovely and full of a life I used to lead

oh Chicago in the winter,

can't I call you home someday?

your cozy brick buildings keep their glowing hearths so safe and warm

you are the most wonderful kind of dirty

brick and steel and straight lines slushily nestled in a wonderland of pillowy white snow

ahh Chicago

your contrasts and extremes call to me –

I want to drip with sweat in your summer and watch my breath freeze in your winter

my heart pangs and swoons for

something I never knew that I could miss!

Nerding It Up

I just got back from a two-day symposium at Stanford. Man was it fun. It was very re-energizing, academically speaking. I guess it's been a while since I've been to a conference-y event, and it was so, so very cool to hear what these incredibly smart people are up to. I had a few passing thoughts that might be worth relating. Namely,

1) I feel so privileged to hang out with the people I hang out with. Everyone in the circles I run in now is so interesting and thoughtful. And a lot of them are even fun, too! There is nothing better than hanging out with fun, smart, nerdy, bright, hilarious people. This has several corollaries.

1a) The professors talking at this symposium ("Computational Models of the Mind: Comparing Connectionist and Bayesian Perspectives on Cognition and Language") are basically my heroes. No joke. I found myself thinking, I can't believe I'm in a room with all of these incredibly ridiculously intelligent people, with all their MIT, Stanford, University of California degrees and professorships. I love science. I have always wanted to be a scientist when I grow up, and being at a symposium like that makes me feel like I am actually on my way. Someday maybe that will be me up there talking about modeling cognition and emergent perceptual categories and la-lee-la. I sure do hope so.

1b) One of my friends from high school has just started a PhD program in Economics at Stanford, and I was able to meet up with him, and it was really great! It's so fun to catch up with people from high school, especially since it seems like we're all turning into real adults with academic careers and cool research interests, instead of just being somewhat awkward 15-year-olds. Oh, this leads me to a follow-up to (1a), which is that...

1c) ... I was imagining all the genius cognitive scientists as 15-year-old boys. And just realizing how incredibly awkward and unhappy and uncool they probably were in junior high, and now they are awesome. Pretty undeniably awesome, really. Sure, they were probably on the math team and the chess team and whatever, but now they're engineering models that get at the very essence of how the brain works, and they're giving talks in the greatest, most prestigious universities in the world, and they're certainly not lacking in confidence and even crack some pretty good jokes, but most of them seem down to earth and humble enough that you can still imagine what they must have been like as 15-year-old boys. I remember feeling painfully nerdy and like a weirdo misfit, and somehow just knowing I wasn't as cool as the "cool kids". But where are the cool kids now? Not giving or attending talks about cognitive science at Stanford, I can tell you that much! You always hear about how the nerds grow up to be the most interesting people, but it's like I'm watching it happen in real time, and it's pretty cool.

1d) I am loving being a grad student. When my high school friend and I were on campus, I bumped into one of the Stanford grad students who had been considering coming to Berkeley, and the Stanford linguists invited us over and I ended up hanging out with them the rest of the night. It was so fun! This brings me to my last corollary, which is...

1e) ... I keep realizing that these are my people now. You know when you start high school or college or a new job, and you're thinking, "Ok, these are the people I'm going to be hanging out with for the next few years"? Well, all of the grad students I'm getting to know in other departments are going to be my colleagues, like for life. I may very well be friends with these people, and hanging out with these people at conferences and meetings for the rest of my life. And I love that idea! I love these people! They are my people, it was meant to be, and I have some of the most fun and interesting conversations with them that I've ever had. It is so good to feel that you belong.

2) Palo Alto is weird, and I'm really glad I go to Berkeley and not Stanford. Don't get me wrong, Stanford is gorgeous and amazing and just reeks of money, but that's kind of the problem with it. It's so gosh darned manicured, and that's not necessarily a good thing. Berkeley is kind of grungy and rough around the edges, but that's what gives it personality. Sure, we can't just leave our office doors wide open all day long with all of our computer equipment sitting out in the open (which is what they do at Stanford - that blew my mind), but downtown Berkeley, for all its faults and oddities, is at least a hoot. You will not be bored walking down the street in Berkeley. And we're close to Oakland and close to San Francisco and our campus is all green and lush and Northern Californian. You can keep your manicured lawns and Spanish-SoCal architecture, Stanford. You know why? Because you're stuck in Palo Alto and that is lame.

2a) Really, though, I felt a little bad for the Stanford grad students in that respect. I mean, yes, they get way better funding than we do. And their building and equipment and offices are considerably nicer. But... I like our department better. And I like Berkeley better. And I think we have more fun than them and they know it. So, I take it back, Stanford. You guys can come hang out with us anytime, and we can trade superiority-inferiority complexes and talk about language and brains, and it's win-win-win.

I drank too much hot chocolate tonight, got too little sleep last night, and went to too many talks today, and am consequently feeling roly poly and sleepy. So goodnight!