Oh, I'm having a miserable day today, but I'm so excited about life! I'm excited that it's almost the end of the semester and I'm going to have a great summer of working on papers and doing research for my assistantship and hanging out with my friends in an environment so much less stressful. It will have all of the great things about the semester without the pain I'm going through now! And I'm going to travel around and I'm going to Stanford for a month to hang out at linguistic rockstar camp (aka the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute) and I can go to San Francisco and it will be so beautiful! And I'm also excited because yesterday I gave my paper on tautological compounds in Beowulf at a Medieval Studies conference and other people liked it and thought it was a good paper! And the whole conference was so interesting and it made me feel so good about Anglo-Saxon studies and scholarship in general and we talked about what we are trying to do in studying this language and literature and why we are doing it. Plus, I got to learn important things, like how "when you complement a man's sword you complement the man himself." Yeah . . .
Now today I am writing my syntax paper (again, I wrote a draft last week, but had to throw it out, because I decided that it's analysis was all wrong) and my brain is so tired because preparing for the conference took all my sleep. I present two more papers on Wednesday, at a special linguistics colloquium, then turn them in Friday. This next week is hell week, but at least I know why I'm putting myself through this.
I'm reading through I Kings and I'm on the part when Elijah is being fed with ravens and when he's hanging out with the widow and God is making her oil and flour last longer and it just reminds me that even when we think we are completely out of energy and thoughts God still keeps things coming and makes sure we are okay and I'm just so happy about that because by the time I get to end of the semester I know I couldn't do any of this on my own. . . . But that makes me wonder, how do people who aren't Christians manage to get things done? Common grace strength? I guess so, it must be scarier, though.
Sunday morning--going to church, becoming a member of NPR, breaking into office buildings. So early and so much has been accomplished. Alright, so it wasn't technically breaking in because I had a key, but my key is just for an office and I didn't think it would open the whole building, so it felt like breaking in. Oh, and I became a member of NPR so they would give me a bumper sticker, and also so Ira Glass would love me and also because Click and Clack told me that if I didn't give NPR money then Carl Kassell's coffee maker wouldn't make coffee and then Morning Edition wouldn't happen and then Americans would all oversleep and we would be taken over by Canada. So really, it was my duty as a good citizen against Canadian takeover to give NPR money, and get a sticker.
Oh my, summer does something to my brain that makes it just want to sleep all the time instead of thinking about syntax (which is very sad, this is why I hate summer). I've been listening to Mirah all day and writing writing to try to make my syntax paper come together in my brain. Went out to dinner with some people from the department last night, in honor of Friday and the Visiting Syntactician (yes, I told him that syntacticians are like magicians, but with more magic) and during the conversations around the table I realized I really want my syntax paper, on the classifications of sound emission verbs, to come more from a syntactic perspective (structure) than from a semantic perspective (meaning). This makes some things easier, because so much has already been said on them from a semantic perspective and I don't want to just repeat what other people have said, but it also makes things harder, because even though I don't want it to my brain is all drawn to semantics. I like syntax and I'm just trying to get my brain to stop thinking about things in silly semantic terms. I guess I have attached a prestige to syntax that I am somehow trying to acquire. I mean, there are a lot of great semanticians out there, but they are regarded by those more on the syntactic side of things as, well, kind of crazy. Those crazy semanticians, just makin' up stuff as they go along. Glad we have things in black and white, here in syntax, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
But sound emission verbs are rocking awesome, I mean, I am studying words like "boom" and "zing" and "crackle". It's like rice crispies syntax paper!
Okay, so by now we all know that the Eskimos (to use the word of our northern neighbors) don't really have a thousand words for snow, or however the story goes, but I am going to wend my way Whorfian and say that, if the hypothesis (that language forms and constrains thought) is true then English speakers have an obsession with sounds, 112 sound emission verbs and counting. I've heard that in Spanish they just have a verb that means "sounds," anyone know about this, or other sound emission verbs (like boom, crash, tinkle, ululate) in other languages?
Went to see the Decemberists in Atlanta last night and now I am wondering, what am I doing with my life? Why don't I spend all of my time watching the Decemberists play? Why am I in school instead of following them around the country? Alas.
They played all of their epics. It was quite the show, starting with a nice Russian song, sounding national anthem-ish, but I don't know if it was. After the heroic music died out the Decemberists strode onto the stage, clad in white suits and glory. They started with The Crane Wife parts I-III in order, then The Island. They took a bit of a break from epic and played Grace Cathedral Hill (after some discussion of cities and rats), Billy Liar, Eli the Barrow Boy, 16 Military Wives, and Valencia. Of course during 16 Military Wives we had to have the civil war of the audience members, Mr. Meloy dividing us down the middle and then having fun yelling at people to get out of the no man's land in the middle, claiming it was full of lava-spewing snakes with fangs who "especially like hipsters," then he made the two sides of the audience growl and each other and shake their fists, then he made everyone sing louder and louder and then he was done with that. They ended the show with The Mariner's Revenge Song, which I like so much more in concert, and of course there was the screaming at the whale (who also had fangs, according to Colin). They left the audience stomping on the floor for an encore and came back out to play "one more song." It was The Tain, oh yes, amazing (for those who don't know The Decemberists, The Tain is their 20 minute one-song EP, which exceeds their other single-song song-set The Island by a good six minutes). Made me think that the Decemberists could do one mean cover of Bohemian Rhapsody. And oh my goodness, it was great to see The Crane Wife in concert, not to mention The Island, made me realize how much I love them, The Crane Wife for its story and The Island for its rocking prog organ. It was a breathless concert, even with a couple small and slow songs thrown in. The audience was great, I love Decemberists audiences, they yell requests like crazy, but only to show how much they love the band, and really, you gotta appreciate that.
After the show we (Suzanne and I and Eb and Ashley, who I called on Thursday and convinced to come down for the show) went to Waffle House and tried to get enough caffeine to get us back to our respective homes that night. There was cuddling in Waffle House booths and eating of hashbrowns as well. The drive back was uneventful, but nice, I like driving at night. We got back at five, though, and I am feeling a little deprived of sleep right now, but full of love.