memo

to: id
from: ego
re: recent behavior

honestly -- must you?

it's quite tiresome, you know.  we are not the sort of woman who has ever thought that she was something less than what she could be, simply by reason of being single -- and yet you get within twenty feet of any heterosexual male friend of ours and start chattering away about possibilities, and you know perfectly well the superego is vulnerable to that kind of thing.  it's probably pointless to ask you to control yourself, but for god's sake, could you try?

bright side, bright side, bright side:

in nine hours, i will be done with this talk i'm supposed to be giving.

must make copies in the morning of the flipping powerpoint slides.

done!

well.

scheduled opposite me was a talk about the rise of verb initial word order in Old Irish, which was certainly better-researched and -prepared than mine (on predicting compound stress by syntactic and semantic means).  she got eight people, apparently; i got more like twenty, including the invited guest speaker (a moderately important professor-dude).

nervous?  maybe just a little.  but, i'm told it went okay.  (i mean, it's hard for me to say, isn't it?, whether i made any sense, because i knew what i was talking about.)  i didn't run out of things to say before my time was up, and people had questions to ask afterward, so yay.  (if nobody asks any questions, it means either you didn't say anything interesting or nobody understood you.  if they do ask questions, even difficult ones, it means they respect you enough to engage in your process.)  the first question was from Invited Guest Speaker, and plus on the way out he gave me a list of other places i could look for more sources as i develop the paper!  w00t!  and, as an added bonus, i did get one question to which the answer was a graceful paraphrase of no, i'm pretty sure i know what i'm talking about there.  (the question was, essentially, "I am not a native English speaker, but in this example I think you're mistaken about how the phrase is stressed in English."  which, hi -- 'i am not a native speaker, but i think your native speaker assessment -- actually your report of another native speaker's assessment -- is wrong'?  WTF, man.  so it felt good to be able to say 'yeah -- no, i'm totally right.'  [ggg])

will now enjoy peaceful evening of doing no work at all.  at least until it's time to open the bar.


oh! and!  if i write up my paper into a proper paper, it will count as a publication when the conference proceedings are made available online in a few months' time!  that almost makes me giddier than anything else.  (i have no publications, so the idea of having one is pretty exciting in general and also in a resume-building way.  must check if will still be able to use substantial chunks of same text for thesis, though, before doing this.)