thankful

I am so incredibly thankful for all of the wonderful people in my life.  I had a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving, surrounded by people that I love so much.  It's been an incredibly hard year in some ways, obviously, but it's also been a great year, in lots of ways.  I am continually reminded of just how many fantastic, loving, funny, giving, clever, fun people I have in my life, and I am so very grateful to know them all.  On nights like tonight, I just feel myself wrapped in a cocoon of warmth and love and laughter, and I never want it to end.

Friends and family: I love you all, and I am thankful for the joy, support, and comfort you bring me.  This is such a special time in my life, and I want to savor every moment of it.  I don't know what the next phase of my life will bring, but I know for certain I will always look back on this year, and these people, with gratefulness that our paths converged for a time.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  May your cups and your hearts run over.

Photo by Nico.  (Thanks, Nico!)

I love this woman.

I generally shy away from being overtly political (on Facebook and on my blog).  But I am pretty happy with the way the election turned out, and Rachel Maddow is amazing.

up and down and up and down

Oh my word, what a day.  What a week, really.  3 main issues making me feel like I'm on a mini (not that great) roller coaster:

1) The part time job I have taken on - I don't want to write any specifics about it on my blog, because it's not appropriate to talk negatively about it in a public forum - while providing me with some really nice extra cash, has just been way too much thankless, frustrating work to be worth it.  I put in my notice this past week, saying I won't be continuing beyond this semester.  The thing is, I was feeling really good about the work we're doing after the two meetings I went to this week.  I felt like things were finally starting to move along, we were all making some progress, and maybe it would be worth it to stay on for next semester.  And then this afternoon I get sucked into another backandforthandbackandforth email exchange, and I'm ready to be done now.  So I get to go to another meeting tomorrow!  (grumble grumble)  I will stick it out this semester, but after that, no more!

2) Earlier this afternoon, I found out my dissertation study has finally been approved!  So I was super excited, and I emailed the research director at the campus preschool, and she suggested I call her immediately, which is never a good sign.  I just got off the phone with her, after a very long chat (I just love this woman, she's wonderful), and it turns out UC Berkeley has decided to privatize their child care system, effective immediately.  So people are being laid off and everyone is freaking out, and some of the parents are boycotting the research program because they're totally powerless and don't know what else to do.  I can hardly be angry at the parents, but my immediately reaction is nevertheless, "WHAT?!  Are you kidding me??"  The week my study finally gets approved is the week everything goes to hell in a handbasket, and it is suddenly rather up in the air whether I'm going to be able to find enough non-boycotting children to participate in my dissertation study.  I was already cutting it pretty close, but feeling confident I could be done collecting data by January or so, and now I just have no earthly idea.  What a mess.

3) Plus, as if I needed this day to be weirder, I drove down to the Alameda County Courthouse and filed our divorce paperwork this morning.  Honestly, it was a refreshingly/alarmingly sterile process.  I stood in line for a few minutes, went up to a window, handed over the paperwork, signed some things, and I was basically done within half an hour.  California has a 6 month waiting period, so on May 2nd, I will officially be divorced, and I can finally legally change my name back.  I thought I would be more upset about filing, but it actually feels pretty good.  It's been this weird, supremely unpleasant thing hanging over my head for months now, and I'm pretty tired of dealing with the two last names problem, so it just feels good to have done it.  It's still sad in some respects, obviously, but I've been feeling so sad for so long that it's like my sad muscles have given out.  So instead I just feel relieved, and like it's time to move on now.

You know what?  F*** this day, man.  I'm going for a run.

Go Wugs!

We lost again, but it was still pretty fun.

random phone pictures

I tried to capture the coolness of the view out my kitchen window this morning, but my phone camera just didn't cut it, and my good camera's battery was dead.  The rain/fog was really awesome, and then there was this strip of blue sky below it, and below that you could see San Francisco.  I'll try again sometime, now that my battery's charged.

A car parked on the street right by my house.

Pelicans.  Chillin'.
(See the guy perched on top of the outhouse structure?)

An awesome display in someone's front yard as I walked home from campus the other day.  In retrospect, I totally should have played with the dinosaurs and signed the guest book.  Probably would have made some kid's day.

I'm really tired, but I don't know if I can sleep yet.  I had a really productive day, despite the fact that the amount of time I spent working was fairly short.  I heard back from the IRB (finally!) and I don't have too much to change about my dissertation study before it gets approved and I can start collecting data.  So I did all my revisions and re-submitted my protocol, and I'm hoping I can start collecting data in November!!  Wow, I typed that and then realized it needed an extra exclamation point, because it hadn't really sunk in yet, but that is really exciting!

I also roped an undergraduate research assistant in to recording the voice stimuli for my experiments, and we set a time to meet later this week, and my friend who's drawing my picture stimuli is hard at work on them, so they should be ready to go in the next week, too.  I also managed to do a little bit of writing today, and am hoping to have my methodology chapter done (or at least in working order) by the end of this month.

We lost our softball game tonight, but I was still really proud of us.  We played totally respectably against The Best Team in our league (they actually recruit players... ugh) and had a pretty good time, too.

And then I walked all the way home (it's a bit of a hike from the softball field), and some of the packages I ordered with birthday gift cards had arrived.  Yay new dishes and silverware!  And then I read through a dissertation chapter written by a friend of mine, because she needed feedback by tomorrow.

So now it's time for bed, and sleep, hopefully, and an early start tomorrow.  What a day!  Good night.

winding down

It is wonderfully quiet in my apartment tonight, and I didn't know it when I bought it, but the cheap little globe lamp that sits next to my bed on the nightstand gives off a lovely muted glow.  It's a warm, Berkeley, fall evening - sort of like a cool, Illinois, summer night - but really the only similarity might be the temperature.  It might be 65 degrees or so, but somewhere in my bones, I can tell the difference between the cool breeze that follows a midwest summer thunderstorm, and the cool breeze that blows inland off the Bay.

Out the window, there is the constant low hum of late night traffic, punctuated by the whisking and whistling of the BART train as it passes through the underground station across the street, and the clock in the corner soldiers on, marking each passing moment with its unending series of regular, muffled clicks.

Sometimes I am struck by the sense that I don't know where I'm going, but I sure am going there, and I think it's somewhere good.  Time passes all too quickly these days, but I do try to stop and look around and appreciate the glorious buzz of life that has me wrapped up in it.  I don't know where the weeks and months go, and someday soon I'll be leaving Berkeley, setting off for some as yet unknown new land, where I'll be starting all over again.  It could be scary, but it's not, really.  It's just somewhere else to explore, something new to learn about, new people to meet and love and be annoyed by and keep with me in my heart.

It's a good place to be.  I feel safe, and I feel calm, and I feel ready.  I feel like I can do this, whatever it is.  I can write a dissertation.  I can teach a class.  I can find a research job.  I can move wherever my life takes me.  I might mess it up sometimes, and I might feel like I'm faking it more times than not, but the funny thing about faking it is that if you keep it up long enough, you're not faking it anymore.  Whatever it is becomes real.  So I'm trying to make sure I'm faking the right things, you know?  I'll act like I have a plan and I know what I'm doing, and eventually, I'll feel like I have a plan and I know what I'm doing, and then someday, I'll look back and realize that I did have a plan and know what I was doing all along.  I think.  I think that's how it works out.

My eyelids are droopy with sleep, and my body is tired from exercise, and stress, and a cold that keeps lingering.  So I will try to quiet my mind now, to give it some rest while the clock clicks and the train whistles by, and I will wake up tomorrow and do it all again.

linguist in-jokes

I designed these shirts for our intramural softball team!  And they just arrived!!

Trust me.  That is a quality linguist joke.

good (non-productive, oops) weekend

There were so many things I was going to do this weekend, and yet, here it is Sunday night, and how many of them got done...?

Well, one, at least.  I accidentally started my dissertation today, I think.  I was going to write an abstract, but instead it came out too long and detailed, and I think it's now an introduction.  So hey, that's pretty awesome.

One of my good friends and her husband were also in town, and I got to hang out with them today, eat delicious Nepalese food, and talk to her about my dissertation experiment.  She's a great artist, and also a child language researcher, and she has agreed (happily, it seems!) to draw the pictures for my dissertation experiments.  I'm teaching words to preschoolers, so I need lots of fun, colored pictures of real words and the ones I made up for the experiment, and I think my friend is uniquely qualified to draw those for me.  They also helped me brainstorm about games I can play with the kids to teach them the words, and we came up with some really good, workable ideas.  So that was actually pretty awesome too.

And oh yeah!  I received the news today that the course I proposed has been approved for summer semester 2013, which means I'll be the instructor of record for a course on Language Acquisition for Berkeley undergrads this summer.  No direct supervisor, no one else in charge of organizing, giving lectures, deciding on course material and readings, just little ol' me.  I am teaching my very own class at UC Berkeley!  And I am ridiculously excited about that!

And I went out for Ethiopian food on Friday night with Jevon and another friend, and it was so so so good.

So really, I had an excellent weekend.  And it wasn't even that un-productive, I just... wanted to get some other stuff done and didn't quite make it.

Oh well.

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.

Whoo! Good. Day.

Today was so good!  I went to my weight lifting class this morning and it made me feel like RAWR I can do anything, which is always a great start to the day.  Then I had a meeting about a (paid!) project I'm working on for the up-and-coming UC Berkeley Data Lab, which also made me feel capable and productive.  And then I read an article about word learning, thought about my dissertation for a bit, then had another meeting with our department's undergraduate advisor because I'm designing a course to teach next summer about language acquisition, and I want it to appeal to as many undergrads as possible.

Then I was so excited about my class that I worked on the syllabus for longer than I probably should have, since I have other things to be doing, and then I realized I was getting hungry, so I came home.  And now I am drinking a beer and making a stir-fry and listening to Wilco and life is good.