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.)

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!

Crise Résolue

A minor update to my minor "crisis" post. I had a fantastic day today, for many reasons. It was the first day of classes, and it was just a breath of fresh air. I'm taking phonology with a professor I've never had before, and she is fantastic. I normally am not a big fan of traditional phonology (or anything traditional in linguistics, really), and I didn't get much at all out of our last phonology course, so I was a bit worried about this one. But I'm taking it because 1) they changed the requirements on us and I basically have to, 2) I thought it would be good for me, since if I'm going to be a proper phonetician I should know more about the big talking points in phonology, and 3) I've talked to this professor several times and really like her, but I'd never had the opportunity to take a class with her.

So anyway, we had our first class meeting today, and I found myself getting really excited about the class. All of the topics we're covering are interesting, and she's chosen a great selection of articles that I know are going to be very helpful and interesting to me. I might even enjoy some of the readings!

Then I had a pow-wow with my advisor and it went so well. He is so great. As you know, I think, I had been waffling on whether to change my qualifying paper topic, and he was totally supportive and encouraging of my new idea and said I should go for it. And I am so relieved. I am so excited about this new project, and I think it'll be super interesting and much more in the direction I'd like to go with my "academic career". Because yes, my doubts about staying in academics are way down after my great day today, and I might even stick with the professor thing after all. (We'll see. I have to like, write a dissertation first.)

Also. Ok. This is totally silly, but I'm going to put it out there anyway. So we have this new grad student from France and he is so, so nice and seems really interesting, and I told my friend John a while back, "man, I really hope he's willing to speak French with me, but I don't want to be a weirdo about it." And all of that is true. I would love to be able to speak some French again, and I don't want to be a weirdo about it. I don't want the poor guy to think I only want to talk to him because he's French; that sucks. He seems like a really cool guy too, like in addition to happening to be French. But anyway, John and I were talking to him at the departmental meeting on Monday, and John totally outed me, saying, "Hey, Melinda really wants you to speak French with her, so I'm telling you that because she probably never will." And then I blushed. And I was like, "Ummmmm welllllllll yes. Thanks John." But when I passed him in the hallway today he said bonjour and it completely made my day. Like, to a ridiculous extent. I think I said this before, but I didn't realize how much I missed French until I started taking Spanish, and then the bonjour in the hallway today totally confirmed it. French, I have missed you.

Then I got home and one of my friends sent me a text message to say that apparently my syntax professor mentioned the paper I wrote for her class (2 years ago) in class today. I was really surprised because I hate syntax and I thought that paper was kind of crap, but apparently she wasn't just being nice when she gave me an A. So that was a pleasant surprise too.

And finally, I would like to direct you all to this website, http://lennonmurdertruth.com, which is all about how Stephen King killed John Lennon and the government has been covering it up but also leaving secret clues about it in nationally circulating periodicals for the past 30 years. This dude was rocking out on campus today, standing in between a guitar and a boom box blaring songs from the 60's, screaming along to them, with a sign that said "lennonmurdertruth.com" on one side and "DARE TO CARE" on the other.

Ahhhhhhhh Berkeley. I gotta admit, it's fun being back.