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!

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.

Addiction

Today was the first day I went running this week. I couldn't believe how strong I felt... like I could run - fast - for hours. I've been working a lot this week, and it's actually felt really great. I finally got clearance for my research (barely in the nick of time, since we have to present our qualifying paper research to the whole department on Monday...) so I've been at the preschool every day this week, running my speech perception experiment with little kids. They are so gosh darned cute. Some of them are so focused on the task and they try really really really hard to do a good job. Some of them couldn't care less and they just want to jabber and jabber. This one little girl told me, "I have a cat! She's like a grandma cat! Except she didn't have any babies." I took that to mean her cat was old. And then I tried to get her to listen to some more sounds. :)

Anyway, running. So I've been leaving the house around 8:00 this week, and getting home around 6:30 or 7:00, and that's a lot of working for me. (I have to say "for me", because of course Roger works way more than that, so it's all relative.) I can normally do at least some of my reading at home, so it feels less like work, but this week being out and about all day, and running back and forth between the preschool and my classes, and trying to keep 4-year-olds on task for several hours at a time has been exhausting and exhilarating all at once. It's been really fun, and I'm kind of looking forward to my presentation on Monday (after I put a few more hours' work into it). But running, running... I just haven't been getting up early enough to do it. I think it's great timing though, because I just realized today that it's only been a month since my marathon, so I should still be taking it somewhat easy anyway. The training rule of thumb is to take it easy for about as many days as miles in your last race - so for a 26.2 mile race, you should take it easy for about 26 days afterward. I think I took 4 days completely off after my race, and then I started going for easy runs again, and I felt totally fine, but I dunno, maybe a little tired. I think I had a little less spring in my step, but it was only really noticeable on the hills.

So today I headed up into the hills for a good, solid 7 mile run, at a good little clip, with my sweet dogs in tow. Poor guys have been home alone a lot this week, and only getting one decent walk a day, when I get home in the evening. They were so happy to be out running today. Just smiling and tilting their heads back like they were riding in a car with their heads out the window. I hadn't done a good Berkeley hills run in a while, so we went way up into the hills, around this gorgeous, wooded park with trails and trees and a creek. It rained last night, but the sun was coming out this morning, and Northern California in the winter is so green and lush, so the sun was streaming through the trees and the little rain drops falling off of the leaves were catching little glints of light and just sparkling as they fell to the ground. It was gorgeous, and so peaceful, and I just felt so good. Then we came downhill a little bit and went by Indian Rock Park, this big boulder with a little park area around it, and the view of the Bay literally stopped me in my tracks. I stopped, and stood, and looked, and breathed in the cold fall air, and I almost started crying, to tell you the truth. Here's an idea of what it looked like, poached from Google images:

As I stood there, perfectly still with nothing but the sound of my own breathing and the breeze rustling the leaves, I realized my whole body was just buzzing. I have no other way of describing it... I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and felt this strange, zen, buzzing calmness. I was so completely in the moment, and all I could feel was the chilly air and this very low key humming sensation just emanating from inside me. I know this sounds completely weird, but it was just... warmth, and light, and peace, and calmness, and like nothing else in the whole world mattered except that moment. I just looked down at the Bay, and looked at my dogs looking down at the Bay, like they too could stand there peacefully forever, and I was overwhelmed with the wonderfulness of being alive.

When I took off again, I realized that the buzzing sensation had to be my body's response to not running for a week and then suddenly getting hit with the endorphins of going for a long-ish, hard-ish run. I've talked before about how I feel sluggish if I don't run for a few days in a row, but if it goes longer than a few days, the sluggishness mostly goes away and I feel pretty normal. So from this strange slightly otherworldly experience, I think I must conclude that I am physically addicted to running. I've noticed it before, but today I think was the most extreme instantiation of it. I think I trained hard enough for long enough that I got really used to having that regular rush of endorphins, and then I suddenly took long enough off that I had minor withdrawal (in the form of sluggishness) for a few days before I readjusted, and then bounding up into the hills today must have made the normal endorphin rush much more potent than usual. Jeez, who needs drugs when you can go running?

Okay, it is noon and I need to take a shower and go by the grocery store and make some food for a pre-Thanksgiving potluck tonight. And I should probably crunch some numbers and work on my presentation for Monday. So that's all for now, but I'll do my best to write again soon, even though the semester is going to be somewhat insane from here on out...

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!

Ow. I rock. Ow.

You guys! I ran a marathon today! And it was awesome!!

I must say, I finished today's Nike Women's Marathon feeling the best I ever have after a race that distance. I mean, it hurt at the end, but really not that bad. I think that means I could've pushed it harder, but you know what? I am very, very satisfied with my performance and my pacing. Play-by-play in a minute, but first, there's this:

When I went to pick up my race packet in Union Square on Saturday, I saw a ton of women gathered outside of Niketown. They were all pointing and taking pictures. So naturally, I'm like, what is going on? There's this big wall, all along the side of the building with these pink lines all over it. On closer inspection, look what I found!

Me! I've been on the exterior wall of Niketown in Union Square for who-knows-how-long. That's pretty cool! That also had some pretty nifty posters for sale with everyone's name on them in teeny tiny print, which is really impressive given that this race draws around 20,000 people, but I decided against buying one. Partially because I wouldn't know what to do with it, and partially because this whole race was one, big, commercialized, Woman Power Extravaganza. Still not entirely sure how I feel about that, but I'm leaning towards "annoyed".

So, let's see what I can say about the race that might not be boring. It was a really great race! The course was really nice, and different enough from the San Francisco Marathon that I'm glad I did it. The main thing is that the first half of the course is disproportionately harder than the second half. I think that's better than the other way around, since you have more energy at the beginning, obviously, but it made it hard to figure out how to pace myself. The weird thing was, I was feeling a little worried throughout the first part of the race, because it was hard. And when you're running a marathon, you're constantly doing this weird "body check" thing. It's like you're running, and you're going, "Ok, how are my feet? Feeling okay. Am I chafing? Little bit. How's my hydration level? Probably ought to get some Gatorade at the next pit stop. Am I out of breath? Can I keep this pace up for the next 19 miles? Should I push it harder, maybe? Ooh, calf twinge, definitely need to hydrate. Do I need to pee bad enough to stop?" etc. etc. ad infinitum. And things were just not particularly coming together for the first half of this race, which is odd. Usually the first half is when you're feeling really good, because you've got all the adrenaline going, but I did have a little calf twinge around mile 9, and I've struggled a bit with calf cramps in my last two marathons, so it seemed like that was a very bad sign so early on and I should run cautiously and hydrate early.

You know what, though? I started feeling weirdly good right around 10 miles. It has never before taken me that long to get warmed up and get into the groove of things, but something just clicked right around 10 miles. Once we got through the hills in Golden Gate Park, we had several long, slight downhills, and I just kicked it in and never looked back. I was nervous about doing that so early on at first, but I was feeling so good that it seemed like a waste not to. But my pacing was so screwy - I finished the first half in a little over 2:00. And since my goal is always to come in under 4:00, this was not a particularly good sign. Plus, it's rough to run negative splits in a full marathon, I think. So I briefly prepared myself for the mental disappointment of coming in over 4:00, and I knew it might be a reality I would have to face. I thought if I could come in under 4:05, I could still be fairly happy with that time, since it was a fairly demanding course.

But I just kept getting faster and faster. It was so weird. In past races, I've started to have leg cramping issues around 21-22 miles, but not at all this time. Granted, the weather was very cool, and I was pretty careful with my hydration (not too much, not too little), but I just powered it all the way in. I was even able to put in what felt like a pretty darn good kick at the end, which has never happened to me in a marathon before. Usually I'm just trying to hang on to my pace as best I can, but I picked it up a fair amount for the last 1.5 miles, and I easily came in under 4:00. Something around 3:56 or 3:57, I think, but the official results haven't been posted yet. I couldn't believe how good that second half went! And I really couldn't believe how good I felt at the end. I mean, it hurt, it always hurts, that's why we do it, but none of that debilitating, ready to collapse-and-or-puke stuff that usually happens. I grabbed a big bagel and wolfed that sucker down (usually I get really nauseous at the end of a long race and can't eat anything substantial for quite a while), and I guzzled the most amazing, delicious bottle of chocolate milk I've ever had (and likely ever will have) in my life.

And oh! The firefighters! At the end of the race, there are firefighters in tuxedos that give you your Tiffany necklace (instead of a medal). It was pretty funny, and they were pretty cute. I found this picture online.

There were also foot massages and other goodies at the end, but I just wanted to get the heck out of there. More on that in a minute.

Despite my satisfying performance and my overall very respectable time, there were unfortunately a few things that kind of sucked about this race, and that keep me from recommending it wholeheartedly. For one - and this is not the fault of the race, obviously - it was raining. At first, it was just a few drops, right around the time I hit Golden Gate Park, near the middle of the race. Then it became a drizzle, and that actually felt kind of nice. Then it steadily picked up until the end of the race, when it really was legitimately raining. This wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't about 58 degrees out, which is a little chilly for rain. It was definitely tolerable while I was still running, but as soon as I stopped, I was pretty miserable. Now, where I take issue with the race itself is because it finishes on the very west side of the city, along the Pacific Ocean, which is cool and all, but there's not much public transportation out there. So they provided shuttle buses back to the east side of the city, except the buses were not there when I finished. Instead, there was a huuuuuuge line of people waiting for buses, most of whom said they had been waiting over an hour. There was no possible way I was going to stand in the cold rain for over an hour having just run a marathon. (Flashback to Big Sur last year.) Thankfully, I brought a change of warm clothes, so after I managed to locate my bag, I was able to put on a dry long sleeved shirt and a thermal fleece, along with some flannel pants, and that felt much better. I also put on one dry sock, but it was actually pretty hard to bend over and get my shoe off at that point, and as soon as I managed to get my shoe back on, my nice dry sock was completely soaked from my sopping wet shoe. I should've seen that coming, but I wasn't really thinking clearly and was so tantalized by the idea of dry socks. So I didn't even bother with the second one. Instead, I wore soaking wet shoes and socks until I finally managed to get home about 2 hours later.

The other thing that was weird about this race was that it's really mostly geared toward middle aged women running a half marathon. Apparently it's "the 10th biggest half marathon in the world". And it's all about "girl power" and "strong women" and "you are beautiful and powerful"... which... okay, I'm all for empowering women. And I'm all for people getting out and getting some exercise. But really? It was kind of annoying. Like, can you please stop walking five abreast with your fanny packs and CamelBaks and stopping in the middle of the road to take pictures, because actually, y'know, there's a race going on, and I'm trying to run it. At one point we went under an overpass, and this woman behind me starts yelling, "yeah girls, let's make some NOOOOIIIISE" and I'm like, "really? really?? what is this, 6th grade? can I please just run through a tunnel without my eardrums being shattered by inexplicably boisterous fanny pack-wearing, pink-clad women?"

So... yeah. It was kind of weird when we split off from the half marathoners, because it suddenly got really quiet, and way less crowded. It was nice and peaceful at first, but then once we hit the Great Highway, which runs along the ocean, it was just this seemingly endless stretch of gray, and it might have been nice to have a little more... energy. Thankfully there was entertainment every mile or so, so that helped break it up. My favorite was either the breakdancers or the really gay dudes in rose-pink body suits jumping up and down yelling "San Francisco loves you!"

So now I'm home and I'd love to share pictures with you, but they're not up yet, and neither is my official race time. And also I'm hungry again and Roger's home, so I think I'm going to make some popcorn and watch Mad Men.

But today was really great, and I'm already thinking about my next race. Maybe I'll do the Marin Marathon in March... it winds through wine country in the spring, and it looks really gorgeous and peaceful and pastoral, and probably more my style in a lot of ways.

I leave you with this shot of me I nabbed from the Oakland Half Marathon I ran back in March. I think it's the only halfway decent shot of me running I've ever had taken. Race photography is such a weird phenomenon, and I try to not really support it by never giving them my money. So this is the thumbnail version I stole from their website.

Oh, funny, I just this very second got an email from Nike saying I finished in 3:57:12, which is a 9:03 pace. I also apparently came in 377th (not bad!) and my split times got significantly faster (29:03 for the first 5K vs. 25:58 for the last 5K). I was dodging tons of people for a good 5 miles at the beginning of the race, so there's that to consider too, but it's hard to argue with a sub-26 5K at the end of a marathon!

Now. If I can just stand up.

I am a caricature of myself.

Probably homeless woman in the grocery store parking lot: Got a few extra bucks?

Me: (lying uncomfortably, as I always do) No, I'm sorry...

PHWITGSPL: (looking at my groceries, then at me, somewhat disgustedly) You don't smoke cigarettes, do you?

Me: ... No.

It is true. I had a grocery cart full of fruits and vegetables, and I'm wearing running shorts and Chacos. I do not smoke. This was apparently quite obvious.

This reminds me of a funny conversation I had with some friends a few weeks back, about how it sucks to realize you're just part of a "demographic". We were talking about how we love Trader Joe's, but we hate that we love Trader Joe's. TJ's is a grocery store (the one I was at today, actually) that sells what I would describe as cutely packaged, fun convenience foods for a generation that revels in Americanized ethnic food.

"Why yes, Trader Joe's," I concluded ruefully. "I am a 20-something white person who likes bright colors, convenience, and Thai food. I cannot resist you."

It's weird to realize how much the culture you've grown up in has shaped your identity, and also the fact that there is an entire super market chain directed at you and all of your friends.

Time to go play frisbee!

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!

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.

Rolling with it.

Indeed I am rolling with it. Even though my 20-miler last weekend (as in, 8 days ago) went swimmingly and I wasn't sore or anything, I decided to take the day off running yesterday. Just for the heck of it. I ran 5 days last week, only taking Monday and Thursday off, for a total of around 40 miles for the week. That's a lot for me. And then on Saturday night, I had a mini adventure with some friends and found myself thinking, "I don't really feel like running tomorrow." And since my 20-miler had gone so great and I'm feeling pretty ready for this race with about a month to go, I decided to take the lack of enthusiasm as a sign that my body wanted some rest, and I just plum took the day off.

About that mini adventure. My friend John and his girlfriend found this crazy little thing called "Forage SF", which is a group of self-appointed foragers that collect food in the Bay Area. Basically there are so many fruit trees and edible plants here that it truly is a shame to not take advantage of it, so this underground market thing has sprung up to ameliorate the situation. Roger said eating stuff that fell off of trees is pretty much "against everything he stands for"... and it is... so a small group of us went to check it out without him. It was fairly interesting, and quite good, but also fairly expensive and quite packed, so I have no plans to go back. Fun to do once, but not worth the hassle of doing it again.

Anyway, they had this sign there.

It made me picture little kitties in harnesses, pulling a plow or something. But I didn't actually catch a glimpse of any working cats, so I unfortunately can't fill you in on any details there.

We have a working dog, though.

I don't know if you can tell what that is, so I will explain. Roger accidentally broke the dogs' water container the other day, and threw it outside so it didn't soak the whole living room. Rye decided he liked the challenge of working for his water, so he's been lying down and sticking his little tongue in as far as he can to get at the water. He has a new water bottle, mind you, he just likes the challenge, I guess.

And this is one of those pictures that makes me wish I had a better camera with me. The light was so lovely this evening, with the pink fog settling on the hills as the sun went down. It truly, truly feels like fall.

Why am I so tired?? I got a good amount of work done today, so that's good, but I didn't get quite as far as I wanted to on one project, so I've been staring at the computer for several hours now. I recorded stimuli for my qualifying paper experiment today (exciting!) and then I managed to find some scripts that split the words up into lots of individual sound files so I didn't have to do it by hand. Maybe half an hour of fiddling with scripts, but it saved me several hours of labeling and naming by hand, so it was totally and completely worth it. Now I need to edit the files so that they're all the same length and loudness, and that's the part I'm having trouble automating. (And no way am I editing several hundred sound files individually.) I think if I tackle it with fresh eyes tomorrow, it'll be easier.

I took a break to do some cooking this evening, and it was really nice. I made an Italian-style fish and bean stew (friggin' delicious) and some pesto to go with the loaf of bread I baked yesterday. Miss Suzy Homemaker, right here!

Well jeez. I'm pooped. I'm gonna stretch out my legs and go to bed.

Someone is murdering bunnies!

I'm sure animal control just loves hearing from this person.

The 'random pictures with phone camera' thing is working out well so far, don't you think?

I've had a pretty great weekend. It feels so much like fall here, which is somewhat surprising considering it pretty much always feels like fall here. But right now is especially fall-like. September and October have got to be the best months in Berkeley, because it's generally pleasantly cool instead of slightly unpleasantly cool. And there's even the possibility of it being actually warm, which is a bonus. Although I've heard that our weirdly cold weather is going to continue... but it's supposed to get up to 78 today, so I'm hoping that continues.

I had a great run yesterday! I was a little worried because a small group of us went out on Saturday night partly just for the heck of it, partly for a friend's birthday, and I was out until 11:30 and did a little too much celebrating. I only had like 2 or 3 beers, but that's actually a lot when you're supposed to run 20 miles in the morning. Then I woke up at dawn on Sunday and couldn't get back to sleep, so I eventually figured I might as well get out of bed and hit the road and see what happens. I was a little woozy, but I drank some water and ate a pancake left over from Saturday's breakfast and decided to go for it.

I've been taking the dogs with me for part of my long runs lately. It works out really well because they're good and tired after 10 miles or so, and then I can stop by home to drop them off, get a drink, maybe change clothes, and do some more. And then for the second half I don't have to worry about dogs and I can either let my mind wander or listen to music. Yesterday I had mapped out a run down and around Lake Merritt in Oakland, which comes to about 14 miles. So I decided to do 6 miles in North Berkeley with the dogs and then do the Lake Merritt part by myself.

I was a little worried at first because my stomach wasn't very happy for the first mile or so, but then I started feeling really good and finished the first 6 feeling great. Dropped the dogs off, ate some pita chips (mmmm salt), filled up my water bottle, and hit the road again. Let me try to find a picture of Lake Merritt...

There you go. That's what it looks like from up above. It's really pretty big - one lap along the water's edge is a little over 3 miles. And it's about 5 miles from my house to the lake, so running down and around it and then back home comes out to about 14. It was totally and completely worth it, though. When you run down College Avenue and then Broadway towards Oakland, it's mostly slightly downhill, so you see the small patch of tall buildings in the distance and then as you get closer to them, you start to see the lake and the beautiful trees and parks surrounding it through the buildings, and suddenly you're in this lovely little oasis in downtown Oakland.

I told you Oakland is nice!

So I am definitely doing that run again. (And again.) I also had the nice surprise of making a running friend. I ran into him just after passing the Rockridge BART station, so just on the border between Berkeley and Oakland, and he smiled and said "hello! beautiful day for a run!" or something like that, and I said something like, "it is, isn't it? I'm headed down and around the lake, how about you?" And he was too, which was somewhat surprising because we were still about 3 miles from the lake at that point. He was going considerably slower that I was, but I slowed down a bit and he sped up a bit and we chatted for a while, and he was a very, very nice guy. Probably about 50 or so, big bushy beard and smiling eyes, and he's been running for literally decades. So we talked running, and then we talked life, and he asked me about linguistics, and we talked about the differences between Chomsky and Lakoff, because that was the only passing knowledge he had about linguistics. It's funny for me to talk about Chomsky and Lakoff. First because I think Chomsky's an idiot and a jerk, but he's usually the only connection people have to linguistics. And second because Lakoff is also... a controversial figure, let's say... although I'm much more closely aligned with him linguistically than with Chomsky. And third because I know George Lakoff, like we stop and chat in the hallway when we see each other, and I say this not for the name-dropping aspect, believe it or not, but because "George Lakoff" the philosopher-linguist-politician is a totally different person from George, the guy I chat with in the hallway, and it's hard to talk about him as "George Lakoff", if you know what I mean. So I found myself having this conversation about "Lakoff" where I couldn't call the guy by his last name, like you're supposed to when you talk about a Big Thinker's ideas. I'm like, "Yeah, Chomsky basically thinks A B C, but George is like, no no no, X Y Z." But then I felt kinda like a jerk for calling him "George" instead of "Lakoff". Like, I wouldn't call Chomsky "Noam". Whatever.

And fourth, this conversation was particularly weird because generally I don't care or think about Chomsky or Lakoff. That's just not what I do. But it's hard to explain to people that I'm interested in sound patterns and models of learning and category abstraction... kind of a conversation stopper, usually.

Anyway, Martin With The Bushy Beard was really nice, and we did a lap around the lake together and exchanged email addresses before I headed home, so we might get together again in the future. The miles go by so much more quickly when you've got company.

The rest of my run was fine too. Although the slight uphill for 4 miles back into Berkeley kind of sucked, and I neglected to fill up my water bottle before leaving the lake area, and of course didn't see any water fountains on the way back home. As I ended the uphill portion and turned west toward my house, I found myself thinking, "Hmm, I kinda don't feel that good. My stomach's a little upset and my legs are kinda tired." And then I thought, "Dude, I just ran 19 miles. If I were feeling any better, that would be positively weird." So with that perspective, I realized that I felt pretty fantastic and I could suck it up for less than a mile back to my house.

And I feel so good today! This was my first 20-miler of this training cycle, and I thought it would knock me out more, but I didn't even stiffen up at all yesterday and am only very slightly stiff today. So I don't know what happened, but I'm feeling totally ready for this race (knock wood) and like life is pretty sweet.

Now I should probably get off of the computer, because I need a shower, and I'm going to the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park today! Life is pretty sweet.