After the fact

Right, so, yesterday I was working on my thesis.  As a reminder, I’m doing a musical/linguistic approach to the poetry of Langston Hughes.

Anyway, I was working with “Dream Boogie” yesterday and getting so frustrated with some of the rhythm assignments that I started stomping around and screaming the lines in order to maybe get a better handle on it.

But you know what, I’m thinking that I must have looked and sounded completely insane.  Let’s pretend you were one of my neighbors and only heard the following, over and over:

“Good morning, daddy!” (stomp, stomp)

“Boo-gie woo-gie”

“What did I say?” (stomp stomp kick)  followed by different versions of that line
“What did I say?”
“What did I say?”
“What! did! I! say!” (stomp stomp crash)

At this point, I must sound like I’m beating the hell out of someone, right?  And then I move from that into the “scat” portion:
“Hey, pop!” (stomp)
“Re-bop!” (stomp)
“Mop!” (stomp stomp)
“Y-e-a-h!” (stomp stomp)

That’s right, I go from loud, possibly injurious chastisement to a passable imitation of a popcorn machine.

So I sound like someone who has combined  Tourette’s with anger management issues.  I was telling M about this JUST NOW online and I think she might have possibly caused a scene herself.

Ugh

Working on my final paper for my Stress and Accent class.  This paper is also part of my thesis, which is both great and terrible.  Since it is a work in progress, my professor doesn’t expect perfection—but I still do.

The problem is that when I’m working on this part, I think of things that will work well in the rest of the thesis.  And, no, I don’t try to cram them into this paper, but I have to make a note of these things somewhere so I won’t forget what might just be an amazing insight.

Still doing the new method for analyzing musical poetry, but it’s changed a bit.  In a good way, of course, but it’s also very time consuming.  It’s forced me to redo my musical notation 5 times now, which is a huge pain in my ass.  But it needs to  be done.

I’m just so TIRED.  Tired, tired, tired.  All the time.  Look at me, it’s 4:18 in the morning and I just stopped working on this thing.  I’ve been going, on and off (mostly on) since 10 am yesterday.  My brain is threatening to leave me unless I take some time soon and watch a marathon of something stupid and trashy, like America’s Next Top Model or something.

I’m thinking I’ll be done by Tuesday night at the latest.  And then I swear I will be so lazy.

Actually, no, I don’t.  I figure I might as well keep going and pound out a really good thesis draft.  Might as well, since I’m already in that whole zone of thinking about it.  But maybe not so frantically?  That would be great.

Bittersweet

This semester is almost over.  I have one more semester left, since I decided to submit my thesis in the summer. But I don’t really have to be on campus ever again after Friday.

That feels weird.  And maybe I’ll never do anything with all this, but I’m so glad I went back to school.  I wanted to do it, and if I never had done it I would have been curious and full of regret forever.  Plus, it let me know without a doubt that I don’t want to be a professor.  It took 2 years of being entrenched in academia to realize that I don’t want to stay there.  It’s more political and cutthroat than I want to deal with for a career, and I think I would quickly burn out.

All that being said, I’ve had a great time.  I get to research and write my thesis on what is most fascinating to me. I enjoy it thoroughly!  Going back to school got C and I to move to Austin, which I love.  We were so in need of a change and we really did need to move.  C is back in school now and working toward her own career goals, which is great.

I’m going to miss grad school a little bit. And cleaning out my cubicle Friday will feel a little strange.

Finally!

It finally happened, I got a second reader.

For those of you not in the know with academic bullshit, I need at least two readers for my Master’s thesis in order to graduate.  I’ve had a first reader in the bag for months now, but no one, and I mean NO ONE else in my department was remotely interested in what I’m doing.

What I’m doing, by the way, is a musical/phonological analysis of poetry by Langston Hughes.  Same thing I presented at the conference back in November.  And, gosh, my phonology, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics professors just weren’t interested in this metrics stuff.

So my advisor and first reader, M, actually started shopping around the department for me.  Which is really sweet.  And yesterday morning I had a meeting with a professor and he agreed to be my second reader!!  He claims to be fascinated by what I’m doing, but warned me that he doesn’t know exactly what I’m talking about.  My response: “Great! That means you can call me out if I don’t explain something clearly.”

He’s very cool, he already gave me great suggestions, and he’s fine with me submitting in the summer.  And he really likes some of the ideas I have for further-reaching applications of this music notation method that I’m using.  So double yay.

Good news!

Not sure if I went into this in a previous post, but C’s financial aid for this semester didn’t come through due to a bullshit reason involving academic bureaucracy.  Money has been super tight around here for the last month.  She paid tuition and books out of pocket and picked up an extra shift at work.  That put her working 40 hours a week (4 days) and in class the other three days (11 hours).  Suffice to say, we don’t see each other except for maybe 3 solid hours per week (not including when she sleeps next to me and snores).

But oh frabjous day!  She found out tonight that her financial aid has come through!  For now, she’s keeping the extra shift at work just to build a cushion.  But if she has to schedule herself for one shift less around tests or whatever, she won’t have to take a vacation day and the drop in money won’t kill her.  And this means there shouldn’t be any problems with financial aid over the summer, so she’ll be staying in school straight through.

This is all great because now she can get her prerequisites out of the way sooner and get into a PharmD program.  Which, in itself, is a 4-year commitment.  But the payoff will be great.

Speaking of the PharmD, who knows where we’ll end up for that?  If she wants to do it at UT, that’s fine with me.  But I’m still open to her going to Xavier and moving us back to New Orleans for a while.  After that, who knows where we might land?  I vote Oregon.  Not that I’ve even visited, but it sounds nice.

Now if we can just find me a job come June, life will be going really well.  I don’t care if it’s going back to clerical, I’m just gonna need a paycheck.

Worst day?

This morning I left the house to go to class.  More importantly, to take a TEST in my first class.

Not but 2 minutes after getting onto 183 to head to campus, my car quite suddenly feels funny.  Then it starts pulling hard to the right.  I hit my flashers and manage to get onto the service road and pull into a Midas which is BOOM right there.  Lucky day.

I get out, look at my right front tire and it is FLAT.  Crazy flat, and kind of exploded looking.

Now, I have already had trouble sleeping lately.  I’m stressed, overtired, and generally not feeling too hot on the best of days.  This is enough to make me start screaming and crying right there.  Almost.

So I walk in.  “Hi! Tires, you do them?”

They do.  I sit down and proceed to email my first professor, explaining what had happened and begging for a makeup.  I email my second professor and tell her it’s not likely I can make it to her class either and PLEASE don’t think I’m just coming up with ways to get out of that class.

While I’m sitting there, the guy asks me to come with him to look at my car.  He points to my engine and tells me he is quite concerned about the fact that there’s oil all over it.  It appears I’ve blown a gasket.  Mmm-hmm, I say.  Then he points to two belts and says that not only are they very important but they’re about to have holes in them.  Mm-hmmm.

I am tired and yes, I see these things you point out to me that are wrong with my car.  Just fix them.  He gives me a list and a total and I say yes, whatever.  Fix it.  And change my oil while you’re in there.

So I finally have my car back, I am $371 poorer than I was this morning, and I look like a shithead to my professors.  Awesome.  What can tomorrow possibly bring?  Actually, that might be a dangerous question to ask.

Stubborn

I just got off the phone with my mother (hi Mom!) and had to tell her that I didn’t plan on walking in the graduation for my Master’s in May.  I could have sworn I told her this before, but she’s apparently been under the impression that I would be.

Well, I’m not.  For several reasons.

First of all, graduations are just boring as hell.  Second, UT is a huge school and even if they break up the ceremonies by department, it is going to last forever.  Third, I just don’t feel like it!  I still don’t know for certain if I want to stay for a doctorate and if I do, I don’t really want to walk for what wouldn’t be my terminal degree.

Now, I have walked in two other graduations.  One high school (okay, GED, it was lamer than you could imagine) and my undergrad.  But the second one was special and I wouldn’t have missed it anyway.  It was the Katrina graduation, January 2006, and UNO had pulled a fall semester out of thin air following the storm.  Professors scattered all over the country came together and made online courses and crazy satellite campuses and just did the damn thing.  It was very cool.  And that graduation was so celebratory for so many reasons.  We all cheered at everything, no matter how small.  We heard how the president of the university convinced the Coast Guard to bring him across the lake to the school, he and others hiked over the levee and rescued the servers.  We all cheered when they said the name of a department as the graduates walked in.  We cheered for hours at everything, but mostly our own perseverence.

However, we invited lots of our friends to that (C and I were both graduating, a feat in itself) and NO ONE CAME except for MY parents.  I would just like to point that out.  I guess I’m still a little bitter about that.

Anyway, I don’t feel especially motivated to walk in this graduation for tons and tons of reasons and no amount of persuasion is going to change that.  I told my mother that we will be visiting in May for a combined birthday celebration, we’re bringing M with us (maybe) and she can just roll graduation into all that.  Yippee.  Give me some crawfish, a poboy, and a daquiri and I say that’s good enough.

Of course, then my mother mentions that I could get presents.  I tell her I own so much crap that C and I are actually trying to declutter.  Then she switched her game and tried to tell me that my father was crying in a corner due to my new status as an ungrateful, horrible daughter.  I said, “This is neither the ending of The Natural nor The Benny Goodman Story, so I know he’s just fine.”

Not doing it.  Can’t make me.  So there.

In the bell jar

I’ve been feeling down lately.  Unmotivated, tired, cranky.  M screams at me “Clinical Depression!”  I just think it’s lack of stuff to do.  I’ve said many times that I need a certain level of stress and tension to keep going and when I’m on break, I don’t get enough of either.  Of course, when classes start again, I’ll have both in abundance and be bitching about how I need a break.  Woe is me.

I was talking C’s ear off about “I want to move to New Orleans, you should apply to Xavier’s pharmacology program, we’ll live uptown and be happy and I can have seafood whenever I want and I’ll understand the weather and be able to breathe again!!”  She quite helpfully pointed out that I apparently do this every break and to please, for the love of God, take a deep breath and chill.

I’ve had a fun couple of nights, though.  Grabbed M last night and headed to K’s house for a night of martinis, wine, movies, and a few highly amusing rounds of Scattergories.  Good times.  Tonight I delivered sushi and company in an effort to keep a good friend from snuggling up to her own bell jar.  Which doesn’t sound fun on paper, but I always have a good time with her.  Somehow, we never run out of things to talk about, it’s kind of amazing.  I also drank a michelada and have become kind of obsessed.  How beer, clam juice, and tomato juice make a tasty drink is beyond me, but hey! I drank something with beer in it.  And for those of you that know me personally, you will admit that this is a huge deal.  So yay me.

Right, then, in an effort to stave off what is apparently my constantly impending gloom, I am going to pull my panties up (I don’t like wearing socks) and get back to working on my thesis.  This is my plan anyway, I might get sucked back into watching old episodes of Doctor Who and The Office instead.  It happens.  C and I are also planning a de-cluttering of our apartment, which might help a lot of things.  We’ve been looking around and observing the massive amount of CRAP we seem to own, including boxes that we have moved twice without even opening them.  That is just silly.  Furthermore, we have a whole stack of VHS tapes that we keep moving around, but our VCR hasn’t been hooked up in almost 2 years.  That’s just ridiculous—it’s all going away.  Today I started going through books to toss (a HUGE deal, for me) and found some books that we have 2 copies of!!  Definitely time to streamline.

And that’s all I’ve got.  Holidays were good, New Year’s was fun.  Time to get ready for the new semester.  At which point I’ll start complaining again.

Awesomeness

Tonight was the party for my class to show the films we’ve been working on all semester.  It was so very cool to sit in a nice lecture hall with big screens and watch the finished versions of what we’ve been working on all these months.

Of course, I’m sitting there during my crew’s film and thinking “Oh god, that shot is way jumpier than it looked while we were editing.  The sound is funny there, what was I doing with the mike, anyway?  We never fixed that thing, did we?”

I also loved seeing the other crew’s final product, it was amazing.

And though I’m obviously relieved that it’s over (it was stressful and demanding at times) I’m a little sad as well.  I really enjoyed working with K and S, we were so well suited for our roles in this.  Being on a team with fantastic people can make an experience just spectacular.  They are and it was.

The conference

Last night I headed out to San Antonio for the SCMLA conference.  I was scheduled to present this morning and didn’t want to have to wake up early AND drive the 1 1/2 hours to get there.  Seemed worth the expense of a hotel room, most definitely.

I don’t mind saying that the prospect of presenting terrified me.  I’ve mentioned it before on here, but speaking in public just isn’t my thing.  So I’ve been nervous and stressed and exhausted.  I’ve been enjoying the work, though.  I ended up presenting “A Linguistic Approach to the Musical Poetry of Langston Hughes” which combines phonological analysis with music theory to analyze the rhythm/meter of spoken verse.

And it went really well!  I got lots of great feedback, helpful comments, and compliments.  It was a low-key, low pressure situation.  Not too many people (I think there were about 13 audience members), a small room, very intimate.  What a great way to start out.  One guy, during my question and answer period, said that he was a Lit professor and his class was currently going over different stuff by Walt Whitman.  He went on to say how much he liked my “musical notation” method and that it might be a good way to look at some of Whitman’s works as well.  Nice to hear!

So I’m just thrilled.  Also, when I got back home today, all the sleep deprivation seemed to catch up with me, and I had a fitful, on/off nap for 2 hours.

Tomorrow it’s more filming for the TX English project, and then, on Sunday, I’m not going to do anything.  Not one single thing.  I swear I’ll get back to work on Monday, I just need a full day off to do things like cook (or not), sleep, watch stupid movies, do laundry (or not).

I’m just so happy that people seemed to like my ideas.  I feel even better now about using this for my Master’s thesis.  What a relief!!