condensed trip report, plus questions.

have returned from what i try to make an annual trip to the stratford festival. my usual stratford companion, C, couldn't join me this year, as she was in mexico for school (she's a phd student in art history, specializing in pre-colombian meso-american architecture) until today, and my classes begin tomorrow. however, my college roommate K, who hasn't been able to come along in previous years, came with me this time.

( we both arrived in toronto on thursday. )

also, some time ago now, datlowen asked me five ( questions: )

So you all know the rules for the interview, right? Leave a comment that you'd like five questions; I'll think up five questions; you'll answer them in your own journal and restate the rules.


classes begin tomorrow. i had an e-mail from a student today addressed to "Ms. Fox." it gave me a little frisson. i don't meet the first class i'm teaching until monday, but tomorrow i have two of my own classes and the lecture on which my discussion section depends. full day. so now, off with me to bed.

today's wisdom:

-- from a professor (a native speaker of English) telling a native speaker of Russian that her handwriting might be sloppy and romanized, but was to be properly cyrillic in his class:

"There's no greater fanatic than a converted fanatic."

;-D

[eta: also, i'm glad to see, in the midst of ongoing budget cuts, mid-season tuition hikes, hiring freezes, and so forth, that the university can afford an entire fleet of new computers in the library. grr, argh ...]

mid-day update:

1. those of you who don't know my good friend datlowen are unlikely to be aware of his new journal wperoundup -- in which he presents, in digest form, the previously-digested news items appearing in Washington Post Express, a free publication for people who are too lazy or whose attention spans are too short to read the real Post [edit: or who prefer not to contort themselves into the positions required to read a broadsheet in the metro and thus risk incurring lawsuits by elbowing their fellow passengers in the face]*, but who still have enough self-respect not to be seen reading McPaper USA Today or The Washington Times. wperoundup is very, very funny. it makes me laugh and laugh. it's not quite The Onion, but it's daily!

*okay, jgesteve and fafou? happy now? ;-)

2. mearagrrl said: (Am confused though--the travel bit ends with "may get bumped"--did you?) and What are you going to be teaching??, highlighting the fact that my trip report entry may have been incomplete.

i did not, in fact, get bumped off any planes on the way back from canada. this is just as well, as i was sleepytired (slept for an hour in the airport, in fact, probably looking like some sort of vagrant, curled up across two seats with my bag straps wrapped around my arms) and very pleased to be home on time.

i'm teaching two sections of a one-hour optional discussion the kids can take in addition to the introduction to linguistics course for which i am the grader. i am determined to do a better job at this than the girl who graded the lecture and taught the discussion last year when i took the course; she was a flake and an airhead and consult your thesaurus for other criticisms, and i know of at least two people who'd been considering minoring in linguistics and changed their minds because of her. personally, since i wasn't taking the discussion for credit (i couldn't, since it wasn't available for graduate credit, but i signed up for it non-credit anyway), i eventually just stopped going. near-total waste of my time. i intend not to waste my students' time, as this seems to me to be a complete bummer.

3. it's strange, the way i type. i type by touch, but not "correctly" -- i do 95 wpm with two errors per page, when i get going, so the fact that it's not "correct" isn't really an issue, but i'm noticing now that i really type oddly. i use my left pinky finger for the left shift key, and otherwise not really at all; i use my left ring finger for the letter "a" and nothing else, not "z" or even "q", which is actually to the left of "a"; i use my left middle finger and index finger for everything else on the left side of the keyboard, but i use my right hand for "v" sometimes, and my left hand for "b" other times. the word "my" i spell with my right index finger on "m" and then my right middle finger on "y". i use my right ring finger hardly any more than i use my left one -- "o", apostrophes and quotation marks, backspace, and maybe the occasional backslash or semicolon or bracket. sometimes for commas and periods. my right pinky hits "enter" and that's it. my right thumb hits the space bar and nothing else, but i guess that's not really unusual. my left thumb is completely unemployed.

not that many of you are probably too interested in the mechanics of how i type. but i thought i'd share. i will now go get a soda and something with chocolate and peanuts in it before going to my afternoon class ("language development", which will be History of French; this pleases me, as i had "histoire de la langue" in my senior year and for a variety of reasons only some of which are extremely my fault i got a C+ or possibly even a C. it'll be good to have a clear indication on my transcript that i'm a Better Student now.).

4. unanticipated but very welcome result of brutal summer 7-hour days in the classroom: a 50-minute class feels like nothing.

in which the happy first day ends with a resounding thud

that french course? "language development"? with the following description --

Careful applied re-study of the structure of the French language based on recent theories of communication and meaning. Investigates, and makes practical use of, general notions regarding levels of language, semantic vs. lexical fields, meaning in situation, rhetorical figures and discourse, etc. All forms of communication are considered, including oral and visual signs.

?

it has nothing to do with the structure of the french language. it's about literary analysis. it has nothing to do with my focus on structural and theoretical linguistics, and my french is way too rusty for me to do well in this class with six hours of other courses and three hours of sitting-in-on-the-lecture-i'm-grading and two hours of teaching per week to go along with it.

the other linguistics courses being offered this semester either (a) i've already taken, (b) aren't available for graduate credit, (c) are taught in languages i really don't speak, rustily or otherwise, (d) have similarly little to do with structure and theory and are way heavier on the anthro and sociology than i can stomach, (e) suppose (i expect) on background i don't have (such as psychology), or some combination of these.

i'm supposed to graduate in december. even if i don't, i have to have nine hours in order to count as full time.

[cries]

and other things you might want to think twice about:

never send a woman with PMS into a grocery store by herself.

no, it's fine, it's fine. i did get what was on my list, and the candy that wasn't on my list -- well, it's fat free.