ZZZzzzzzz...

If last week was all about the "ahhh" sound effect, this weekend has definitely merited a "zzzzzzz".  (But not in a boring way - in a good way!)  I am ready for a nap, but instead I'll type up this blog post while I wait for my tapioca pearls to boil.

My conference went great!  It was fun, and I got to meet a lot of cool, interesting, smart people and hear some very cool talks.  I'm really glad I got to go this year, and I think I'll definitely go back to this conference sometime in the future, but it's not quite the conference for me.  I guess I knew that going in, since it's called "The CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing", and I don't really do sentence processing, I do sound processing.  There were a few more phonetics-oriented talks, and I got some good feedback on my poster and saw some other cool posters on bilingual speech processing.  Man, bilingual research is totally the way to go.  It's just so fun.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to be able to stay with a friend in Palo Alto on Friday night, so we kind of had a psycholinguist girls slumber party.  It was great, but I didn't get too much sleep, and then I went to a birthday party last night and didn't get home until ... 4:00 this morning.  (!!!)  I left the party at a somewhat reasonable hour (around 2:00, probably) with two friends who live somewhat in my neighborhood of Berkeley, and the three of us walked the 3 miles or so home, since the bus service is so limited late at night, the weather was pretty nice, and a walk just sounded good.  And it was a nice walk, with nice people, and we stopped to talk on the street corner for longer than I realized, and pretty soon I was walking in the front door at 4:00 am.  I crashed right away, but since I just can't sleep in anymore, I woke up around my usual time, at 8:30, and couldn't get back to sleep.

So today has been lazy and long and sleepy, and I took the dogs for a really long walk late this morning, listening to NPR news and wandering around Berkeley in the cool breeze.  Then I decided some bubble tea sounded good, so I went to Berkeley Bowl and bought a bunch of tapioca pearls, but it turns out there's a difference between instant tapioca pearls and, I dunno, infinite cook time tapioca pearls.  These things have been boiling for like an hour now, and they're still not done.  And I want my bubble tea, dagnabbit.

Speaking of culinary adventures, though, I made the greatest pear tart yesterday, in about 50 minutes flat.  While I was sitting in the conference, my mind kept wandering back to the tart pan I splurged on this past week.  A good friend of mine just bought an apartment in Chicago, so I sent him some French-style café au lait bowls as a combination housewarming/early birthday present, and while I was picking them out, I saw this great tart pan.  A tart pan is one of those things that you don't need, but they're just so pretty, and every once in a while, I want to make something that would work much better in a tart pan.  So I got it, and I must say, it was an excellent purchase.  The pear tart I made was pretty dang good, if I do say so myself, and just so impressive with its fluted edges and browned top and crumbly crust, even though it wasn't hard at all to make.  I wish I had a picture to show you!  But I'll be making one again soon, so maybe I'll get a picture then.

Well, bubble tea is done, so I think I'll try to get some reading done, unless I fall asleep.  Today might be a lost cause...


Completely unrelated P.S.: I think I'm taking Portuguese this fall and am starting to get kind of excited about it.

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.)

CUNY, here I come...

I made this!  It's for the psycholinguistics conference I'm going to later this week.  I asked a few people to look it over and give me comments before Tuesday, but honestly, I'm so tired of messing with it that I might not change it anyway.

I think it just might be good enough.  (Finally.)  And that's good enough.  :)

Edit: I updated this post with the actual final version, which I just sent to the printer a few minutes ago.  Soitcan'tchangeanymoreandI'mgoingtostopthinkingaboutitforgod'ssake.

Songer à Paris

I have Paris on the brain today.  I had a dream in French last night, for no apparent reason, and today I turned in an application for a summer research grant so I can spend some time in Paris this summer.  I'm going to England for sure, but I really want to go spend a few weeks in Paris after that, collecting data from second language learners.  So if I get the grant (and I guess my chances are somewhat decent, from what I hear), then it'll be time to actually buy plane tickets and train tickets and find a place to stay.

So tonight, just for fun, I was looking at places to stay in Paris.  There are websites for tourists, where people rent out their apartments over the summer for somewhat exorbitant amounts of money.  Cheaper than staying in a hotel every night, but not that much cheaper, really.  Then I decided to try searching in French, and I happened on a few websites for Parisians looking to sublet their apartments for a month or two or three at a time.  That is totally the way to go - you can find a perfectly nice place, in a great area, and there are lots more choices, for less money per month than you'd pay per week in a vacation rental.  The only weird thing about it is the idea of subletting from someone in a foreign country.  Subletting is kind of weird anyway, but doing it in a foreign country just seems... slightly extra weird.  But whatever, once I hear back from this research grant and get closer to actually going, I'll contact some people, and you can generally get a feel for people over email.  If anyone is creepy, I'll just not rent from them.  There are definitely enough places that I can afford to be somewhat choosy.  So how crazy-awesome is that??  Spending a few weeks in Paris in my own apartment!  Who knows if this will pan out, but for the moment, I'm fairly excited about the idea of spending some time in Paris again, over the summer, getting to explore some of the things I didn't get to last time.

I was just telling my mom on the phone yesterday - I'm excited about the idea of going back to France, because I feel way more laid back about it this time around.  I was so nervous about making mistakes with my French last time, and always trying to be perfect, and I just have a totally different attitude now. Part of this is having two people (two!) in my life now who I can speak French with, and even though my level of French is somewhat lower than it was the last time I was in France (having forgotten a fair number of words between then and now), I just feel more... accepting of myself.  Like, whatever, people make mistakes when they speak a foreign language, and no one cares.  And I always knew this on an intellectual level, but I feel like I truly accept it more now.  And it helps having actual friends/acquaintances that I can just have a normal conversation with in French, because then the focus is much more on communicating ideas rather than talking just for the sake of practicing a language, which is so artificial.  If you try to say something you actually want to say, and you mess it up, then your friends can tell you how you should actually say that, and you learn something from the experience.  It's way better.

Let's see, what else is new... I started research in a new preschool today.  This is definitely my favorite of the three preschools so far.  The people at this place are so laid back and fun.  It's totally my style.  They had a Fat Tuesday parade today, and all the kids wore the masks and beads they made, and marched around banging their drums they made out of oatmeal cartons while some awesome zydeco music played and everybody danced.  The research is a little more challenging there, because they don't have a dedicated research room, so I have to set up shop in the "dramatic play" room (which is where they keep all their dress up clothes and costumes and musical instruments and things for playing pretend).  There's no door to the room, so sound floats in from the hallway, and there's a little bathroom in there, so one kid had to come in and go potty while I was doing an experiment.  It's probably okay, but it makes me a little nervous with my reaction time measures - I have no idea what that microphone is picking up, I'm just trusting that it's not firing too often from the background noise.  When I tested it back at the beginning of this project, it seemed pretty good at only responding to very close noise.  But I'll have to go back and look at my numbers from today and see if they look reasonable, or if they're kind of all over the place.  Let's hope for the former.

Well, I think that's all I've got for now.  Time for some chamomile tea and bed.  Bonne nuit à tous et à toutes!

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!

(... going to England in June?)

Ok, so, I'm still going to England.  But I've also had a hell of a few days trying to get this qualifying paper done.  The problem is that I was really sure of what I was going to argue!  It all came together really nicely and made sense!

And then suddenly, yesterday morning when I was about to polish off my conclusion and submit it to my two readers, I re-checked one of my baseline measures and - oh hey, look at that, it had changed!  Substantially!  In such a way that I really don't think I can argue what I spent 20 pages arguing!

So now what?  Well, slight despair yesterday, for one thing.  But I think I was thinking about it the wrong way.  I was trying to think of a way that I could argue what I wanted to argue (especially since I already wrote a 20-page paper on it...) but then I thought, ok, be a real scientist about it.  If you're going to be a good scientist, trying to find a way to make your data fit what you want to say is the exact wrong thing to do.  But I wanted to argue that! my whiny inner voice kept protesting.  But no, grown-up real scientist voice has to say.  This is about being ethical and a good researcher and following the data wherever they take me instead of trying to use them for my own personal agenda.  Even if it's an interesting agenda and it would be much easier to ignore the thing I discovered yesterday, slap on a conclusion, and call it a day.

So now... I have decided to (try to) stop worrying about it and go back to the drawing board.  I'm gonna take a deep breath and try not to think about the fact that I've been staring at these numbers for 4 days straight and start. over.  With no assumptions or expectations, and just try to see what I would have (should have?) concluded if I had been looking at this newly discovered evidence from the beginning.

On a related note, a mental note for myself: when I'm started to feel a little overpressurized and panicky and like I need more time, often the best use of my time is actually to go for a run.  I finally went for one this morning and am feeling better now: more capable, confident, determined, clear-headed.  There's something so soul-cleansing about physical exertion.