Wugs Are Back

So... after our quasi-disastrous foray into intramural sports with our linguist softball team last semester, we decided to try our hand at something we're actually competent at: ultimate frisbee.  A rotating group of us has been playing ultimate one day a week for the past few years.  It started my third year, I think, so I guess that means I've been playing frisbee once a week for about 2.5 years now!  We were all pretty... not that great when we first started, but those of us who have kept at it have actually gotten pretty decent over time.  We usually play 3-on-3 (or 4-on-4 if we're lucky) for about 2 hours on Sunday afternoons.  One of the guys who started playing with us last year was on an actual ultimate team back in college, so he's actually legitimately really good, and he's been helping us and teaching us stuff for the past year, too.

So Actual Frisbee Player decided to cajole us into fielding an intramural ultimate team.  I was pretty reticent, because softball was a little disheartening at times, and I wasn't too excited to get my butt kicked for an hour a week again, this time at something I feel somewhat competent at and would rather be able to keep having fun with (and not suddenly feel completely incompetent at).  But... we went for it.  AND OH MY GOD WE JUST TOTALLY WIPED THE FLOOR WITH THE OTHER TEAM WE PLAYED TONIGHT.  We actually felt really bad about it, because our team was having a blast, and they were obviously having quite a bit less fun than us, and we positively trounced them (13-0!).  I know that not all of our games are going to be like that, because we saw the two teams that played after us, and one of them in particular looked pretty darn good.  But we are definitely good enough to be competitive, and that makes me feel so good!  Here's a sport I was definitely not that stellar at to begin with, and now I'm good enough to play on a winning intramural team!  I'm good enough to launch a disc down the field and have somebody catch it to score!  Good enough to stick on the person I'm guarding and swat the disc away from them a few times!  Good enough to make a break for it and catch a few points!

I'm so proud of us!  Go Huckin' Wugs!!

All 7 of us on the line (I'm second from the right, in the shorts).

Alex and Jevon getting ready to jump for the disc.

Pile up!  Dominated by the dude in the weird tank top.

Jevon throwing the disc and me (in the pink shoes) running off in some direction.

lazy Sunday morning

All told, this has been a pretty good week.  I've been feeling down lately, so I decided to have some people over for dinner last night.  I haven't done a whole lot of entertaining here, just because my place is pretty small for entertaining, but gosh darn it, we had a really good time last night.  I made a pot roast with potatoes, leeks, onions, and carrots, and people brought various kinds of roasted veggies (and homemade Irish creme liqueur!), and we feasted on fall food in my little apartment.  It was really, really nice, and (I don't know if this is relevant at all) I made a point to invite only women.  I recently read this article that a friend of mine linked to on Facebook a while back, and it's had me thinking about women friends.  I don't agree with everything in the article*, but I've never really been one to have a lot of female friends, and I do think it's worth wondering why.  I've usually had one or two very close female friends, but never a whole group of them.  So I was thinking about how I've been feeling down lately, and how I know all of these awesome women that I love and respect so much, and also how no one cares if your place is small or messy or crappy, people just need food and a place to gather, and they'll generally have a good time (and my place isn't even remotely messy or crappy - just small).  So anyway, I had a great night hanging out with some awesome, funny, smart people, and I have resolved to do it more often.  Especially since a couple people I really wanted to come weren't able to make it.

* I find it especially weird that she goes on at length about how you shouldn't be petty and catty with your female friends, but hey, bullet point #10: "Don't let your friends buy ugly outfits or accessories you don't want to look at when you hang out."  Uhh...?

Anyway, in other 'improving mental health' news, I have my first appointment with a counselor tomorrow, and I'm mostly looking forward to it and feeling curious about how it's going to go.  I've never been to a counselor before, but we get free counseling through our health insurance, and I feel like, if ever there were a time when I should check out counseling, it's got to be now.  I'm (very) slowly getting back to normal, but god, it's so slow, and it's so schizophrenic.  I'll be doing really well for a few weeks, and then I'll just be devastated for a few days, kind of out of the blue.  And then it'll take me at least a few days to get back on the up-and-up, and I'll be good for a few weeks, and then I'll have another really horrible week.  Well, I'm totally sick of the horrible weeks.  And I know it's normal, and it's going to take a long time to process everything, and I'm okay, and so on and so on, but it would be really nice to get some practical tips from a mental health professional about how to get this show on the road, y'know?  So we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

So, today.  Today is beautiful, in that "isn't it supposed to be fall? oh right, Bay Area Indian Summer" way.  It's been chilly and foggy for weeks, and suddenly it's 80 degrees today.  I have a fair bit of work I need to get to, but I'm not quite ready to dig in yet (which is why I'm still in my pajamas and blogging at 12:30).  I think, though, it's time for a shower, and another cup of coffee, and maybe a little bit of pleasure reading before I do some work today.  I have an abstract to write, and some work to do for D-Lab, and plenty of academic reading I could be doing.  So I will sit in my sunny apartment with the windows open wide, next to the bouquet of flowers my friends brought me, and enjoy this beautiful day.

Annular Eclipse

I had a great day yesterday.

Yesterday there was an annular solar eclipse that was visible from the western half of the U.S., and we're about 2 hours south of the zone where it was a "total" annular eclipse, meaning the moon was positioned squarely in the middle of the sun, so there was a perfect ring.

We drove straight up from San Francisco, into the gray zone on this map.

If we had been able to look straight at the sun while it was happening, this is what we would've seen.

A small group of us decided to drive the 2 hours north so we could get the full effect, and it was such a fun trip.  Our original "plan" (or lack thereof) was to drive up to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, because it was just across the border of where the total eclipse happened.  We got there around mid afternoon, walked around a bit, and still had a bunch of time to kill, since the eclipse didn't even start until about 5:15.  We had all completely forgotten that once you leave the immediate Bay Area, it gets hot in the summer, and it was so nice to feel the hot sun beating down and be sweating a little bit.  I'm used to 60-65 degrees temps year round now, but I still miss seasons!

We didn't see too much wildlife, but I did snap some photos while we were walking around.  It was really nice to be on a little mini hike-adventure with friends.

Jack rabbit!  (Or something like it.)  Look at its long ears!

When you gaze across a California landscape, you can usually see some mountains in the background.
It's still pretty weird to me, even after several years.

Action shot.  Melanie reading about California wildlife and Jevon looking slightly skeptical.

There were little lizard guys everywhere!

Then, because everyone I know has iPhones, we discovered that just a few miles further north, there was a county fair going on!  So we decided to hop back into the car and spend the afternoon at the Glenn County Fair.  That made it really feel like summer.  It was hot and sticky and smelled like livestock, and we ate funnel cakes and corn dogs, listened to the live music, and played around at the fair for a few hours.

The baby goats.

Melanie doing giant bubbles in the kids' play area.

Eventually it started to get noticeably darker out, so we knew the eclipse was happening.  We brought some index cards with little holes poked in them, so we could project the image of the sun and see where the moon was covering it up.

What we weren't expecting was all of the awesome shadow projections everywhere!  I had no idea this happened during an eclipse - when the light gets filtered through leaves or other small openings, there are tons of projections of the image of the sun all over the ground, so we ended up being able to see the eclipse everywhere we looked.  It was so cool.

Then as we were leaving, there was a group of people that had brought a welder's helmet for people to look through, so we all took a turn looking at the sun and we could see the moon still covering up part of it.  It was really cool.

Yay Glenn County Fair!  Yay Eclipse!

barreling through

it smells like rain and
maybe a new beginning
is this really fall?

*****

Oh my goodness, I am so excited about today.  I'm serious, I feel like there are endless possibilities, and they're all magnificently boring, and it's the greatest thing.  My plan is to get caught up on some of the most important things missing from my life for the past 3 weeks.  By this I mean: drinking tea, listening to NPR, playing the piano, going grocery shopping, cooking, taking a nap, watching Six Feet Under, doing laundry, and maybe even reading something that doesn't have to do with phonotactic probability.

I turned in an incomplete version of my dissertation prospectus yesterday.  I still have a lot to add to it, but the structure is there, and that's the most important part.  Now I'm taking the day off (mostly, probably).  It seems like everyone had a really rough week this week.  Thankfully I ran into F in the hallway yesterday around 5:00 (I was admittedly trying to run into him, by going by his office) and we booked it over to Jupiter for a beer.  I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it was probably the greatest beer I've ever had.  We sat upstairs by the window, overlooking downtown Berkeley in the fall twilight, and munched on olives and mused on life.  After a while at Jupiter, we headed to the Albatross and met up with a small group of people who also had a rough week, and we somehow stayed out until 1:00 am or so.  We were a little haggard and pathetic, I think... it seemed like most of us were at least partially falling asleep at some point... but it was so nice to be with friends, laughing and not thinking or stressing about getting my paper done.  It's definitely close enough that I can take today and tomorrow off, I think.  Then I'll work on it all day Sunday and Monday, and it'll be done for real.  Done.

I had a glorious run in the rain just now.  Absolutely beautiful.  Not particularly far, but it was so nice to get out of the house, get some blood flowing, and just feel wonderfully, primally alive.  When I sit at my computer all week, reading and writing and thinking, I start to get antsy and dissatisfied.  People were not made for sitting at computers all day, and some part of my caveman brain knows that and gets grumpy if I suppress it for too long.  Anyway, I woke up around 7:15 this morning, because apparently I have accidentally retrained myself that hey, 5 1/2 hours of sleep is probably enough.  (It is not.  But I digress.)  And I just had to go.  So me and the dogs did a little loop up and around campus, and it started drizzling about a mile in, but it was this nice, soft, spring rain that makes everything smell fresh and dirt-y and new.  By "dirt-y", I mean it literally smells like soil, and I love that.  Then I came home and actually cooked myself breakfast and made some tea, instead of subsisting on coffee and baked goods, as I have been for about two weeks now.  I turned on NPR and sat down and ate my eggs and it was good.

You know what it is time for?  Piano.  And then a nice warm shower, and then lazing about in flannel pants and my Illinois hoodie, watching Six Feet Under until the rain lets up.  Then there will be groceries and listening to music and cooking, and (nearly) all will be right with the world.

Some Sundays are pretty perfect.

I have no complaints about today.  I have few complaints in general, really, but today is pretty fantastic so far.  I had something like 20 people over last night for homemade deep dish pizza, and it was so fun.  I hope everyone else had a good time, because I had a really good time.  I love cooking for people, and I have the greatest friends in the world, and the pizza was pretty delicious, if I do say so myself.  The funniest part was probably that almost everyone who came brought a six-pack of beer, so the entire bottom half of our fridge was full of beer, but we worked our way through most of it over the course of about 6 hours.  And 5 pizzas!  5 of 'em!  Grad students are a hungry, beer-guzzling people, it turns out.  I was also really pleased that the dogs were overall quite well behaved.  A lot of the people here were dog people, so they seemed comfortable with them and were good about petting and patting them when they deserved it and telling them to get their noses away from the food when they deserved that, and the dogs were so happy to have so many people here.  I think a good time was had by all.

So despite all the revelry, I was really good about drinking lots of water, and I woke up feeling weirdly good this morning.  I did about 6.5 miles up in the hills yesterday, and we're playing frisbee this afternoon, so I didn't want to overdo it, but I felt better than I expected to, and I did a good, quick little 5.5 miles with the dogs this morning.  It is a gorgeous day out.  The sun is shining and there's a nice, cool breeze, and it's somehow beautifully warm and cool at the same time.

Now I'm home and I made myself some coffee and pancakes and I put on some new music I treated myself to - the weekend before last, after frisbee, one of my friends invited me to an impromptu concert thing in San Francisco.  And despite the fact that it was Sunday night I had plenty of things to do, I went anyway, and I was so glad I did.  So anyway, I bought the EP by the girl we saw, and it's really nice Sunday morning pancake music.  I don't think she was intending that, but it works.

I'm starting to get really pumped for Napa Valley.  This is almost certainly premature, because it's in a little over 5 months, but I'm starting to get really excited about marathon training again.  I didn't know if that would ever happen again, because after each marathon, I've been ready for a mental break from running for a while.  I love it, but those 4 hour runs really cut into your life.  The thing about a 4 hour run is that it's a whole mental journey.  The physical exhaustion only really kicks in for the last 2-3 miles or so.  It's making yourself head out the door when you know you're going to be gone for 4 hours, and making yourself keep going when you get kind of bored and tired of running, that's the hard part.  And after you've broken through the mental barrier of knowing perfectly well that you are capable of running 26.2 miles, you don't even really get the mental charge that comes from the accomplishment itself anymore.  It almost becomes a bit of a chore: "Aw man, I'm supposed to do another 20 miler this weekend," like "Aw man, I really need to tackle that pile of laundry."

Anyway, now that it's been over a year since my last marathon, I'm totally ready and anxious to do another one.  It's been a long time since I ran 20 miles, long enough that I miss it.  There's something so meditative about settling into a pace and just holding it for several hours.  Your mind drifts all over the place, and then you get to the end and it almost feels like waking up from some weird dream.  Running that far is definitely a completely different experience, physically and mentally, from normal everyday runs.  And I have to be in a certain mental space to actively want to do that, and I am suddenly feeling like I'm in that mental space again.

I think it must have to do with how busy I am this semester.  It's my whole momentum phenomenon; now that I'm back to doing a lot of school work all the time, I'm just feeling generally more hard-core and like running 20 miles is probably a good idea.

Also, I really want to go run through Napa.  It's going to be so gorgeous, and the idea of running through the countryside early in the morning is just so appealing to me right now.

Running, running, running.  I didn't think this post was going to be about that.  I thought it was going to be about how I'm leaving for San Diego and Boston a week from today and I'm not ready for either of those conferences quite yet, but in a way this post is about the fact that I'm in a very good place, mentally, right now.  I have a lot to do, but I feel really good about it, for the most part, even though I could easily be freaking out if I let myself.  It's a good feeling to be at a place in my life where I can think about all the stuff I have to get done and just be ready to buckle down and do it without worrying about whether/how it will get done.  It will get done.  And I will do it.  But I'm not going to worry about it in the meantime.

And so some Sundays are pretty perfect.  You wake up without an alarm clock, take your dogs for a run through the Berkeley hills, fix yourself some coffee and pancakes, listen to some lovely piano music, and then you plan the rest of your week before you head out for some frisbee with your friends. I can't really think of a much better day than that.

cozy sleepy day

It's raining!  I accidentally left the kitchen window cracked open over night last night, and now I'm sitting at the dining room table with a big bowl of delicious steaming coffee with a lip-smacking swirl of creamy milk in it, listening to the rain sprinkling against the pavement.  I can't believe it's raining!  September in Berkeley actually feels like September is supposed to feel, à mon avis, because it's this weird transition time between the dry season and the rainy season, and it's our Indian summer, so it's usually a mix of genuinely hot days and the usual chilly foggy days, and now we even have rain, so it's like... weather.  A little.  It's great.

Well, I updated my department webpage the other day and am rather proud of it, so I'm going to put a link to it here.  I'm supposed to go into one of our departmental professional development classes this week and talk to them about how I made my webpage, so I thought it would be nice to revamp it.  That, and I went to a meeting about "the academic job search" last week, and one of the more forthcoming (read: snarky) professors in our department was looking at people's webpages and CVs and critiquing them, and it made me think a lot more about the purpose an academic webpage is supposed to serve, which led to many changes.  I still have to finish updating my CV and put it up there, but I'm pretty happy with the format, anyway.

Yesterday was really fun.  So now that I have a piano, I proposed to my friend who had lent me his piano over the summer that we work on a duet together.  There are some really great classical piano duets out there, and that's one thing I've never really done before; the one time I played a duet was when my friend Laurie and I accompanied the school choir back in... 6th grade?... and the piano accompaniment was a duet.  We had such a blast practicing and playing it, and I've been having such a good time just being able to play again, so I thought it could only get better if I brought a friend in on the equation.  Playing music is great, but playing music with other people is even greater, and it's been so very long since I've done that.  So anyway, my friend came over yesterday and we worked on this piece (which has been stuck in my head for several days now) and it was really fun and a little goofy and I learned some new French vocabulary.  (French music vocabulary is just silly, in case you were wondering.)  It's weird to run through a duet for the first time, because you've been practicing the parts separately, and then you sit down to play it with someone else and it's really surprising and distracting.  Like, oh! that's how those parts fit together!  Really fun.

And then we went to a housewarming party for some other friends, and there was a cookout, and lots of good food and great people and a little too much drinking, and then I slept in until 10:30 (!) and woke up feeling like my cold was back full force, but now that I've got some water and some food and some coffee in my system, I feel okay.

(Another nice thing about having someone over yesterday is that I cleaned a little bit, which always makes everything feel nicer and homier!)

So, today.  Today I am not going to play frisbee, because it's raining and I don't feel that good anyway, so I think I'm going to grade some homework, maybe do some reading, and maybe finish knitting my current sweater project while I watch some Six Feet Under.

I've missed the rain.  What a lovely day.

"If you know it's called 'Brittany', why didn't you just say that?"

Edit: I started this post on Monday, but am finishing it up on Friday.  So it was ridiculously hot when I started it, but it has been absolutely gorgeous the rest of the week.

Hoooo-eee it is a hot one in Paris today!  98 degrees Fahrenheit as I type this, and no air conditioning, bien sûr.  Now that I checked the temperature, I feel a little more justified in starting to feel kind of gross.  I mean, I am sitting here in a small pool of my own sweat, and I was starting to think, "Jeez, I'm a gross little piggy, just sitting here sweating for no reason."  But if it's 98 degrees out (and in), it is completely acceptable that I'm sweating for no reason.

Anyway.  I had a great weekend in Brittany visiting the French-American family I used to babysit for in the U.S.!  Brittany is a long, long way from Paris, it turns out.  You kind of realize that when you look at the map, and I already knew it would take about 4.5 hours by train to get there, but Brest is actually nearly 400 miles directly west of Paris.  I was waaaay out in the "arm" part of France, where I had never been before.  It was a really lovely train ride, and fun to watch the French countryside shift from very Midwestern looking to very Irish looking over the course of my journey.  The west coast of France is so beautiful (well, most of France is pretty beautiful...), and the friends I was visiting were kind enough to take me out and about a bit to get a good look at it.  We drove out the Pointe St. Mathieu to a really cool lighthouse, and I was able to get some nice pictures of the coast and the countryside.

The lighthouse we went up into.

Shadow from the lighthouse and an old church on the same grounds.

The very western edge of the French coastline, looking north towards Le Conquet.

Cutie pies!

The kids were every bit as sweet as I remember - just really nice, fun boys, and it was great to catch up with A and S too.  A was a grad student in linguistics at the U of I when I was an undergrad, which is sort of how we made a connection, and then I wound up babysitting the boys for about a year while she worked on her dissertation.  It's crazy how much they've grown up, of course - the youngest one is now older than the oldest one was when I used to watch them, but they still look and act so much like I remember.  It's cool that their personalities haven't changed much, and it was really neat to see how much they've grown and matured.

Oh, the title for this post comes from a conversation I had with the older of the boys, who is now 8 (8!).  One thing I found myself thinking a lot about during and after my stay with them was the amount and type of code switching going on.  You can look at the Wikipedia link for more info if you're interested, but basically it's pretty normal for people in an environment who share multiple languages to switch in and out of those languages during the course of conversation.  I find code switching really fascinating from a linguistic point of view and also just really fun to do.  The thing is, as an English-dominant person living in an English-dominant environment, my opportunities for code switching are normally extremely limited.  I did it a lot more when I was living in France with a bunch of bilingual Americans, naturally, but what was interesting to me over the weekend was how different this family's code switching is from how mine is, and how my group of friends' was.  The rules were just different, and I couldn't get a handle on how much of it was competence driven, in the case of the boys, and how much of it was conscious vs. below the level of consciousness.  For example, they pretty much never switched languages in the middle of sentences, which is something I find myself inclined to do, given the opportunity; the switching was more on the level of the whole conversation, meaning there were many cases where one person asked a question in one language and it was responded to in the other language, and no one really seemed to notice or care, whereas for me, switching languages is more of a stylistic choice, I think.  Sometimes there are certain things that happen to sound better or are more readily expressed in one language or another.

Anyway, I was talking to the older boy in the car, and I had a whole sentence in English but inserted the word Bretagne in French.  He kind of paused and then said, trying to be helpful, "The word for that in English is Brittany."  So I replied cheerfully, "Oh, I know, but thank you."  He looked bothered by this, and said, "If you know the word in English, why did you say it in French?"  I had to think about it for a minute.  Why did I do that?  I often don't actually know why certain things want to come out in one language or another, but it is fascinating to me.  In this case, I was able to come up with a plausible explanation: "I think I did that because usually when I talk about Brittany, it's in French."  And I think that's true; I'm nearly certain I've heard and used the word Bretagne more times than I've heard and used the word Brittany.  Also, Brittany is French, so it feels like its name should be French.  Just like it feels a little weird saying "Shee-cah-go" for Chicago or how I really didn't like people calling me "May-leen-dah" when I first moved here.  It's just silly to say things in the "wrong" accent if you know how to do it in the "right" one.

That made me wonder if the boys were only switching languages when they couldn't come up with the right way to say things in one or the other language, which is what P's comment would suggest.  And it made me wonder if they always notice when someone switches languages, and what they understand the rules for switching to be, if any.

Well, that will be enough discussion of that, for now.  I've been doing a fair amount of reading this week, and I think I might turn back to that now before my friend Emily gets here.  It's made me a little sad, turning back to my reading this week; it's easy to forget I'm in Paris when I'm trying to concentrate on my reading (but I need to keep slogging away at it, with the whole "dissertation" thing coming up).  I feel like I should be out walking around and enjoying being here more, but it's good to get some work done, too.  I have 2 1/2 weeks left before I leave, and I've gone running every morning this week, and I'll be out and about all weekend with Emily visiting, so I'm getting out and seeing things plenty.  I just somehow feel a little guilty sitting inside reading when I love being here so much and I know I have to leave in not too, too long!

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.

Ahhhhhh...

That is a happy, contented sigh.  My goodness, I feel positively lovely right now.  What a fantastic day this was.  I spent more of the morning than I would have liked reading and re-reading my poster, changing a word or two here, adjusting the formatting a tiny bit here and there, and then finally around 1:30 I decided it was time to be done with the thing.  There comes a point in time where there's just no way to make substantial improvements.  You've really read and re-read the thing so many times, and there are maybe a few tiny things that you're not altogether satisfied with, but it's really a matter of diminishing returns.  You get to the point where no matter what you change, it's not going to improve the thing.  And at that point, you're just wasting time and driving yourself crazy.  So I sent it to the printer on campus, which means it's literally out of my hands, and promptly started checking Facebook every 15 minutes or so.  That got old pretty quickly, and a friend of mine and I were essentially having a conversation on each other's Facebook walls, and come on, that's a little silly, especially when he lives about a 15 minute walk from here.  So I texted him and we went to this little tea shop on College Avenue in Berkeley.

I may have mentioned it before, but this place is so cozy.  So ridiculously, perfectly cozy, with these little tables and chairs and cushions scattered about, with houseplants and photographs and paintings on the walls, and little bookshelves with books and tea and tea settings.  It's like going over to your grandma's house, if your grandma were a spritely little Japanese woman with cupboards full of different kinds of teas who put interesting subdued music on in the background and left you to your own devices.  They have a huge tea menu - overwhelmingly huge, really - but we settled on a green one, and you don't even pay when you order.  You just pick a tea, find a corner to park yourselves, and they bring you all the tea equipment on a platter.  Every table has this cool Japanese tea hot plate thing, so you turn it on and set the kettle on, and it keeps the water at the exact right temperature.  Then you can just keep re-infusing your tea for as long as you like, or until it's really spent, and then you can ask for some more.  It's way easy to spend a few hours there, sitting on the floor Japanese style, shooting the breeze and figuring out the best English-French/French-English translations for things.  It is so nice to be using my French again - it's like a long lost friend!  It's like a part of me has been missing, and it's been missing for so long that I even forgot that it was missing.  It probably sounds silly (and you're probably sick of hearing about it, but this is my blog, so I can beat a dead horse as long as I want to), but I really feel more like myself now that my second language is coming back.  It's like I spent so long acquiring that thing - really sinking several years of my life into learning it, and getting to the point where I felt comfortable using it, and making it a part of me, and of my brain - that it's a non-negligible part of my identity.  This sounds... snobby... and oh-look-at-me, and whatever (but again, my blog), but there's something really cool about feeling like a real honest-to-goodness bilingual again.

This is a term I've been thinking about a lot lately, due to the direction my research is taking.  What do you call a kid who grows up speaking only Chinese at home until age 4, and then starts preschool and acquires English at breakneck speed for a few months?  By the time he's 4 1/2, he can have a pretty decent conversation in English, let me tell you, but he sounds a little weird and there's plenty of stuff he says that you have no hope of understanding.  Is that kid bilingual yet?  He'll certainly be bilingual very soon, and if he grows up in the US, by the time he's a teenager, he'll probably be far more comfortable in English than in Chinese.  He might even not claim to speak Chinese.  But he's certainly not a monolingual English speaker (although I would consider him a native English speaker by that point... just not a monolingual one).  What about me, do I count as bilingual?  I don't usually feel like one, because we think of bilinguals as people who grow up speaking two languages at home, I think, and I definitely haven't felt very bilingual for the past few years, since I got back from France.  And yet when I'm having a perfectly normal conversation in French and even get to the point after a few minutes or so where I don't notice what language is being spoken anymore, I can't help but think back on it and realize that that probably qualifies me as bilingual.  If I think of a non-native English speaker who had my level of French when speaking English, I would consider them bilingual, to be fair.  This is not to say that I'm anywhere near a balanced bilingual - that's another story completely.

All of this is so interesting to me on a scientific level, too, really, and it gives me insight into the types of questions I want to ask in my research, going forward.  I experience all these weird phenomena that make me think about how the brain works, and that make me much more aware of... the nuts and bolts and machinery behind language processing, in a way.  When you only have one language (and also when you're a normal person and not a linguist), I think you're not very aware of Language in general.  You just talk.  And it usually comes out fine.  And you think about ideas and conversations, and not all the backstage calculations that go in to making a conversation work, because they're so natural.  But at least for me, when I have two languages to juggle, it's just really interesting to see what my brain does with it.  There's this one extremely bizarre and jarring phenomenon where my brain freezes up and I can't come up with a word in any language.  It's not like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, where you know there's a word you want, but you can't quite think of it.  This is like being some primordial infant who has only a vague concept or feeling and no way to express any aspect of it.  It's like someone pouring a bucket of ice water on your head, and all you can do is gasp and sputter and wait until things start working again.

Anyway, tea.  The tea was really great.  And then I wasn't even hungry, but we were in a very lovely part of Berkeley, where there are lots of cute and yummy restaurants, but where I don't normally go because it's a bit of a trek to get up there.  Maybe 30 minutes by foot, so totally do-able, but far enough that I don't do it very often.  But we were right by this Italian restaurant that one of my other friends always raves about, so we thought about giving it a shot, and we walked in to ask how long the wait was and were just bowled over by the smell of roasted garlic and warm bread and everything delicious in the world.  So it was kind of like, well, we obviously have to eat here now.  And we did.  And oh my god.  It was so. so. sososo good.  Probably a good thing it's a bit of trek from my house, because I definitely don't need to be eating there as often as I would like to!  Easy way to go broke and gain 10 pounds!

Well, it is late.  And I am full, and starting to get a little sleepy and maybe ready for bed soon.  But my oh my, what a nice day this was.  Spring break is off to a great start!

(Post re-edited slightly on Tuesday morning, just for kicks.)

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!

Can't sleep.

Why am I blogging at 4:30 a.m., you may ask? Well, I will tell you. I seem to have developed this very unfortunate problem where I can't sleep after having had any substantial amount of alcohol. It's so weird, and it's happened to me multiple times now, to the point where I think my brain has created a pattern out of it. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy now. Anything beyond two drinks and I wake up after just a few hours' sleep, and I can. not. get. back. to sleep. And I'm lying in bed going, "Hmm, I guess I'm going to do that thing now where I lie in bed for 5 hours and can't get back to sleep." Whereas if I didn't think that was going to happen, maybe it wouldn't happen.

Anyway, I had a great night tonight. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm hopped up on adrenaline. And I guess in general if I've had a few drinks, it's because I've been hanging out with friends for a long time, so when I wake up, I'm thinking about all the great conversations I've had, and what a nice night it was. It was such a nice night tonight. I invited some people over for what I think I referred to as an "Un-Halloween, Fall, Guess-I'm-26-Now Party". The idea was that I've wanted to have people over for a while, partially to celebrate my birthday (which I couldn't really do the weekend of my birthday because I was running a marathon), and it finally came together this weekend, except that today (yesterday) happened to be Halloween, and I didn't particularly want to have a Halloween party. Halloween is fine and fun and all, but I'm lazy and didn't want to come up with a costume idea, and I didn't want to force other lazy people such as myself to feel lame for not having costumes either, so I decided to just go for it and have a party anyway and put "Un-Halloween" in the name.

The point of this story is supposed to be that I love my friends. We had a better turn-out than I expected, with something like 10 people here, and it just makes me think that we need to do it way more often. I love cooking, I love entertaining, I love having an excuse to go cheese shopping (especially when certain French-speaking graduate students indulge me and go cheese-shopping with me). And I think a good night was had by all. One of my frisbee compadres gets the prize for cutest costume idea, in my opinion - tin foil hat with tea bags hanging off of it. He was a tea partier. In a tin foil hat. Love it.

So yeah, cheese-shopping was interesting too. We have this cheese co-op in Berkeley called the Cheeseboard... yes, a cheese co-op. This is Berkeley, after all. It's collectively owned by all the people who work there and has been open for something like 30 years and is semi-famous, at least locally, as the place to get your cheese. They also have a pizza co-op affiliated with them, and people rave and rave about Cheeseboard pizza. I'll tell ya. It's fine. You know, I feel like it's mostly gimmick, with fresh, seasonal, interesting veggies and good cheese. If you want to call that good pizza, then yes, it's good. I mean, it is good. As a food. It's just not what I think of when I think of a pizza place. They make one kind of pizza per day, always vegetarian, and there's always a line all the way down the street. So you wait in line for 20 minutes or so and pick up your $20 pizza straight from the oven, which they just crank out constantly all day long. They post the day's toppings on their website; Saturday was apparently sweet potatoes, yukon potatoes, caramelized onions, mozzarella, gruyere, garlic olive oil, and fresh herbs. All delicious things, to be sure, but do we really need to put them on a pizza?

Anyway, aforementioned Francophone graduate student was rather easily convinced to go check out the Cheeseboard with me on Saturday, and it was pretty fun. I've had cheese from there several times, and I'd been to the pizza place, but I'd never actually been in the cheese shop. It was somewhat overwhelming. It's a huge cheese counter, and there's a HUGE blackboard with a list of all the kinds of cheese they have, but unfortunately that doesn't really help me. I mean, I know basic kinds of cheese, but I don't really know names of cheeses. Like if you tell me something is brie or gouda or tomme or whatever, I know basically what to expect, but if you give me the name of some monastery or farm or middle-of-nowhere village, disons que ça ne me dit pas grand chose.* So we walked in and sort of made our way around the cheese counter, just scoping out what all they had, and the cheesemongers were clearly completely ignoring us. I already felt kind of lost, and that wasn't helping me. Then I realized people were yelling out the names of playing cards - "10 of diamonds! ... Queen of hearts!" - and then I realized that there was a stack of cards at the counter, and that you had to take a card in order to be waited on. That's apparently their take-a-number system, as opposed to, mmm, numbers.

So once we figured it out, it was fine. They let you try anything and everything, so we kind of took our time trying different stuff and wound up with three very different cheeses; a soft, creamy, less-than-mild sheep's milk cheese, a harder cheese I can't quite remember now, and a surprisingly tasty gouda. I was eyeing the tomme de savoie because tomme was my first experience with real French cheese, way back when I first went to the French Alps in like 2001, and so I've always had a soft spot for tomme. So in French, "tomme" is pronounced basically like "tum", like Tums, or tummy. So I asked the lady if we could try some "tum", and she gave me one of the blankest stares I've ever seen in my life. So I tried again and went for the other extreme, trying to sound as American as possible, and she still had no idea what I was talking about. This is a minor problem when you know how to speak French. When you encounter French words in English, you don't know how to say them in English anymore (if you ever knew in the first place). It's also a problem when you're speaking French, because they borrow so many English words, and then you have the choice of saying them the way you would in English (in which case you feel like you're not trying at all and being like oh-look-at-me-I'm-such-a-cool-English-speaker), or saying them with a French accent (in which case you feel like a complete tool).

Anyway, after some pointing and some more variations on "tum", she went to get some tomme de savoie, and I turned to Florian, and I'm like, "Why was that so hard? How do we say that? How am I supposed to say that?" and of course he's laughing and going, "shit, don't look at me, you're the one who's supposed to be helping me with these things".

Okay, now I'm starting to get a little tired, which is good, because it's almost 5:30 and I've only slept about 3 hours. I'm going to try to go back to bed, and maybe my brain has cooled down enough that I can sleep now. Bonne nuit!**

* (Let's just say that doesn't really mean anything to me.)

** Good night!