Recovery Mode

I'm in recovery mode right now.  My "stupid brain" is slowly getting better, I think, and by that I mean that the absolute exhaustion and at times borderline despair brought on by the past few months of job searching, etc. seems to be receding slowly into the background.  I did my job interviews.  I submitted my manuscript.  I went to my workshop in D.C.  I'm still waiting to see what will come of those things, if anything, (minus the workshop, because I never cared about the workshop to begin with) but for the time being at least I am done.  I can rest on my potential laurels and not have to worry about any serious looming deadlines for a while, and I can recharge my powers of concentration.  The hardest part about the past few weeks was getting that manuscript in on time, because after a solid month (or two months, depending on whether my LSA interviews count) of traveling and preparing for job interviews, I just didn't have any mental juice left.  I can only concentrate for so long, and beyond that, it becomes increasingly painful to muster the willpower needed to do good work.  Can't I just do crappy work for a while?  Better yet, can't I like, zone out on the couch and watch bad TV?

I have recently learned that I am the #2 choice for both the jobs I interviewed for.  (We're #2!  We're #2!)  This is a very strange position to be in, because it means that depending on how things shake out, I could end up with anywhere between zero and two job offers.  For the first job, they told me they're "in negotiations" with another candidate, and I think what that means is that Candidate #1 is waiting to hear whether he gets any other offers so he can play hardball and then go with the best one.  If Candidate #1 takes another offer, then it will be my turn to negotiate.  For the second job, I heard through the grapevine that Candidate #1 is also currently in negotiations, but I also know from meeting with the chair of the search committee that the department has put in a request to hire two people for the position.  What that means for me is that if they can get the Dean to approve a second hire, then it will be my turn to negotiate for that one.

So in practical terms what this all means is that I'm still sitting around anxiously twiddling my thumbs, dammit, but it also means that I had a pretty darn good showing at my interviews.  Both of the Candidate #1s are a few years ahead of me, and have had a chance to get some publications out, whereas I'm still currently in the process of getting my first "real" publications.  (This is why the recently-submitted manuscript is somewhat crucial.)  If I can almost get two job offers despite not quite having any peer-reviewed publications (I mean, to my credit, I do have a rather large NSF grant on my side...) then I think that means I'm in good shape in the scheme of things, whether one of these jobs ends up coming through or not.  I have quite a few things that will more than likely be published by the end of the year, and then I will be in an excellent position to hit the job market again next year.  But that's the thing: I am so !&#% sick of the @%$* job market that it makes me want to puke thinking about going through all of this again next year.  I guess I shouldn't think about that just yet, though.  I should keep waiting, and trying not to look too far into the future, and just rolling with the punches as they come.

This week is our Spring Break and I have been doing a strange combination of working, vegetating, and exercising.  I finished another draft of my dissertation work (please let it be almost done, please), and I spent two solid days alternating between cooking, wasting time on the Internet, and reading a book (!).  I also joined a gym!  Glory be, it is actually starting to look like spring, and by that I mean that the temperature has been consistently above freezing for like a whole week now, such that there's only a few inches of snow left on the ground!  You can see the grass in some parts!  It's enough to make a person actually want to be outside, so I have gone for a run every day this week, and I'm even starting to feel like a normal human being with a functioning brain and body again.  It would be great if I could lose the five stress pounds I apparently gained over the past two months, but for now, I'm just happy to be outside and moving and feeling like eating fruits and vegetables instead of, like, hot chocolate and cookies.  Even better: J gets here next Saturday for his Spring Break, and I haven't seen him for about two months, so it's about freaking time.

So who knows where I'll be living in August (that old familiar refrain), but for now, things are looking up, at least.

interlude: a list of things

- WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PAPERS TO READ?  It is truly never-ending.  I do realize that that is the point of the whole pursuit - generate discussion to generate more experiments to eventually generate better understanding - but it's just this rabbit hole of tightly interconnected ideas and hypotheses, and you can spend your whole life trying to figure out where to start, let alone jumping in and contributing something worthwhile to the discussion.  Is this so abstract that it's completely opaque?  Now that I've decided what type of experiments I'm running for my dissertation, I have to narrow down what exact questions I'm asking, and how to set up the experimental procedure so I make sure I'm actually getting data that answer those questions, and not some other, related questions that I didn't mean to ask. I'm doing some word learning studies, so now I'm sifting through papers on word learning, and it's all so interesting, but absolutely paralyzing.  There are so many gosh darn variables, and I'm still figuring out which ones to try to ask questions about, and which ones I absolutely need to control for.  (Word frequency: should I systematically manipulate the number of exposures the kids get to each word, or should I let them get as many exposures as they need to learn all the words?  Memory consolidation: should I test them the same day I teach them the words, and/or should I make them have a night's sleep in between?  Should I test them on multiple days?  What if I count on testing them on multiple days, and then they don't want to be tested a second time?  Recognition vs. production: should I incorporate a word recognition task into the training, or just focus on word production?  If I incorporate a word recognition task, should I manipulate the phonetic details of the words they're hearing, so I get a test of whether they've generalized the phonetic information, or is that too many variables?  etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum)

- On the bright side, I'm very excited about what I'm doing, and after I sift through a few more papers, I think I'll be ready to go...

- It's a beautiful day out, and I have enough of a cold that I feel justified staying at home for the day.  So I slept in today and am now sitting in my screened-in porch style apartment with all the windows open, drinking coffee and taking notes on papers.  It's fantastic, except that there are so many papers to read (see above), and I have to take breaks periodically, because it's a lot of concentrating.  Hence the blog entry.

- I got paid last week!  So I ordered a new phone for myself!  Both things are very exciting for me, due to their very low frequency of occurrence; now that I've switched back to my fellowship, instead of teaching, I only get paid 3 times a year.  And I just never buy a new phone, because I'm perfectly satisfied being a curmudgeonly luddite when it comes to phones.  I don't want access to email and the internet 24 hours a day...

- One of my friends started a linguist intramural softball team!  So I played softball twice last week, and we have our first game next week!  It's really really fun to be playing softball again, but I'm fairly certain our team is going to be horrible, and that's okay.  It's more about the experience.

Okay, back to work.

a list of things that are happening

I never know how to spell the word 'happening'.  I guess that's right, because my spell checker isn't underlining it, but doesn't it look wrong with two p's and then the one n?  I always want it to be 'happenning."  But nope, there goes the red spell check line.  And I guess it looks even more wrong like that, anyway.

I'm tired, but my cold is finally almost gone.  I've been sniffly for nearly three weeks now, and it hasn't been a lot of fun.  I've felt mostly fine all this time, but I've had a stuffy nose and a tickly throat for a while now.  I haven't been running since September 10th, in fact, and I know that because I've starting keeping track of my mileage again.  19 days without a run!  I don't even know the last time that happened.  Probably when we first moved here, over three years ago, and I was too claustrophobic to go running on the sidewalk.

I'm going to see Robert Plant tomorrow!  (Robert Plant!!)  Do you realize how amazing that is??  I'm leaving right after phonetics tomorrow, taking the train to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and seeing Robert Plant for free.  So cool.

I'm feeling guilty because I told my friend/research collaborator I would send her some stuff by today, and I still haven't sent it.  I'm trying to psych myself up to work on it, after I put it off a little bit more by making this blog post.

I have a Portuguese test tomorrow, which means I need to do my workbook exercises.  Portuguese is going really well.  I really love it, and I would love to stick with it to the point where I can actually speak it.  It's like Spanish + French + Russian, and I'm getting to the point now where I understand most of what my instructor says, and I'm even figuring out the phonetics enough to be able to pronounce it properly.  I still have a little bit of a hard time going from written Portuguese to the right pronunciation, because so many of the words are so similar to Spanish, so they automatically come out Spanish-sounding, which is pretty wrong.  But I'm getting there!

I'm about to drink my last cup of my favorite tea.  It was Trader Joe's winter seasonal blend from last year, and I'm hoping they get some more of it in soon.  It tastes kind of like Thin Mints, but not that chocolatey.

Did I mention I'm going to Portland in January?  I can't remember, but I'm really excited about it.  I got a paper accepted at a conference with my friend, based on the stuff we did in Paris over the summer, which is what I'm supposed to be working on right. now.

I had lunch with my friend from high school today (finally)!  It was so great.  We really need to do it more often.

This is turning into one of those semesters where I wish I could just fast forward to the end of it.  Or at least until I get these two conferences and my prospectus writing done, in mid November.  If I could skip forward to November 11th or so, that would be fine by me, I think.  But one certainly shouldn't spend one's life wishing for it to go by more quickly.  That's just plain silly.  So maybe I take it back, but I would like to wave a magic wand and have everything for the next two months prepared, if not presented.

It's almost my birthday.  I'm almost 27.  :D

Huck is barking because Rye stole his bone.  I think that's my cue to go regulate.  And then maybe I will force myself to do some work.

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.

Much Ado About Nothing Much

Partially against my better judgment, I'm going to make a blog post! It's almost 10:00 a.m. as I sit down to write this, and I have to leave to go to Phorum soon (our weekly phonetics-phonology discussion group). Today is going to be weird... I have a weird schedule lined up. I already did my morning run with the dogs, and I normally have French practice on Mondays from 9:30 to 10:30 or so, but my conversation partner canceled on me today, and I now I don't quite know what to do with myself.

I have a ton of reading to get through this week, so I should probably be taking this 40 minutes to get to work on it, but I don't know if I could really get into a concentration groove enough to make it worth it. Phorum is 11:00 - 12:00, then I guess I'm going to come back home and do some reading, then there's a talk this evening from 4:00 to 5:30, followed by a wine and cheese reception. It's always hard to sneak out before the reception, so I'll probably hang around at that for a while and then come home to walk the dogs and do more reading.

I have a big paper due in the next two weeks that I'm so not ready to write. That's what all the reading's about. If I actually do background reading this week, writing the paper next week won't be quite as painful. I hope.

I had a good long weekend. Hardly did any work, which probably wasn't the greatest idea, but it was nice to just hang out. Roger picked up a new router and two new video games at Best Buy, so he hooked up his Xbox to the router and the video projector and played video games all day Sunday. It was strangely comforting, having video game background noise!

I wasted some time at Barnes and Noble on Saturday, stopped by Joann Fabric and bought some new yarn, and started making myself a hat. This was probably also not the greatest idea, because now I'm slightly obsessed with finishing my hat (and scarf! and gloves!) right when I should be doing a lot of reading. But it's going to be so pretty and match the raincoat Roger got me for my birthday...

I also made a huge pot of chili yesterday, which totally hit the spot. Unfortunately, we're out of saltines, but it's been pretty darn good, just the same.

I kind of want to talk about running, so bear with me. The weather here is so unbelievably fantastically perfect for running, and I've been doing a lot of lit lately. Well. "A lot" is all relative, now isn't it? My mileage is still considerably lower than when I'm marathon training, because that one 15+ mile run every week makes a big difference in total mileage. But I'm doing 5 or 6 days a week, usually 4-6 miles at a time with one slightly longer run of 7 or 8 miles. Yesterday I did just shy of 7, and it was so nice. The fall leaves are just now starting to be really vibrant here, and the mornings are crisp and chilly, and something about the low angle of the sun just makes me feel... special when I head out for a run. I know that sounds really weird, but when I'm running with my dogs through the chilly, leafy Berkeley neighborhoods in the early morning, when hardly anyone else is out and I can see my breath and feel my skin tingling, I kind of feel like, "All of this is mine," like the fact that I'm out appreciating the beauty of it all means it belongs to me, and like I could conquer the world one run at a time if I really set my mind to it.

I'm getting much better at the hills, too. I used to avoid the hills at least a few days a week to give myself a break, but that's really hard to do around here. The only way to avoid them is to stay within a half mile radius immediately north and west of here, and that gets boring pretty quick, let me tell you. Also, all the rich people live in the hills, so that's where all the nice neighborhoods with the pretty leaves are. It also means fewer major streets and less traffic up there. So anyway, I've been hitting the hills almost every day, and I can feel it working different muscles and slowly getting easier. On the way up, I can feel it in my calves and my hips (running uphill strengthens your hips, isn't that funny?), and on the way down I feel it in my quads, since they do the bulk of the shock absorption.

But it's kind of like starting running all over again; maybe that's why I'm learning to love the hills. Running is hard at first. I remember starting out and only being able to go for about a mile at a time, and then being so sore and even sick to my stomach afterwards! I'm so stubborn, though. When I first started, I went every single day, which is pretty much the opposite of what you're supposed to do when you're starting out, but I was 15, so the rules are probably different. I would run down to the end of the street, which was about a mile, and then walk back. Then I got to the point where I could run down, turn around, and come back about halfway. Pretty soon, I could run all the way down and back, and then I had to start branching out.

I remember what it's like when you first catch your breath while you're running. When you first start out, it's miserable hard work, and you can't fathom how anyone could ever enjoy it. And then, one day, you're running, and you realize you've managed to catch your breath. And suddenly it all makes sense - this is why people can keep going for so many miles - they're not completely miserable the whole time!

It's easy to become complacent, though. On the one hand, I still love it that I can just head out for a run, and I feel very lucky that I find it so enjoyable and easy. On the other hand, it's very easy to quit pushing yourself. You find a comfortable pace and a comfortable distance, and that's where you stay. I put in my 4 - 6 miles every day, right around an 8:45/mile pace, probably, and that's that.

So the hills are good for me. Working different muscles and getting out of breath (even though I'm starting to catch my breath on the hills too!) is good for me. I am a big proponent of shaking things up.

Well, it's time for me to get ready to go. Lots of reading to do this afternoon, lots of chili to eat and tea to drink. I hope you're enjoying your fall too.