randomosity

[fox]

sometimes i really feel like it would help a lot if, just for a few minutes, i could turn upside down and walk around the room a couple of times on my hands.  is that weird?



an e-mail i just sent to three of my best friends:

Oh my god, you guys.  So I was freaking out the other day, you remember, about how much work I'm setting myself up for -- and not specifically for the long term, really, what was upsetting me on (what, Thursday? Wednesday?) was just this weekend -- and other people here are agreeing with me, and I'm sure [friend-in-law] would as well, that when you're setting out to do a review of the existing literature on a subject, it's really by-god frustrating to be reading along and making a note every time what you're reading refers to a paper you don't have a copy of yet ... because the list gets longer and longer, and you get all of those, and *they* refer to *more* things, and at what point do you cut them off and say Right, I'm not reading ANY MORE of this, anyone who's more than [x] degrees of reference away from where I started is just out of luck!

The answer, of course, is that you don't ever do that; you don't stop making those lists until it's clear that everything you're reading is referring to something you've already read -- it's a kind of a Zen state you're looking for, where all the reference is entirely recursive, and they only refer to each other.  I mean, this is academic linguistics, so it's totally a closed system.  It's just a question of how big a closed system it is. :-)

But that's for later -- I mean this is a preliminary lit review for a *master's* thesis (25,000 words, or about 100 double-spaced pages), and the reading and list-making I'm doing has to end some time because I have to have something *written* to bring to my supervisor on Monday, and he very kindly let me bring the thing in on Monday rather than e-mail it to him by COB on Thursday because I said listen, that's just *not going to happen* (which means, though, that what I bring in on Monday has to not suck).  So I think I'm at the layer I'm going to stop at, and one of the things I'm going to bring in will be this Huge List Of Further Reading -- but none of this is the point, really.  The point is:

An awful lot of what I'm reading -- most of it, in fact -- isn't to do with what I'm actually looking for.  I just made a big note to myself:  SO MUCH of this stuff has to do with the *word* structure of compounds in English, and so little of it (except this one paper that I started with) talks about the *sound* structure of compounds ... *and that means*, of course, that there's stuff for me to talk about.  Shock of shocks, my thesis won't be just a review of other things.  Hello, memo to me, *original* research!  I do have to keep reminding myself of that, and fifteen minutes ago it hit me again, and I was so pleased.  So I *have* something to write for Monday, which is exciting.

And then I wrote this whole thing up and then remembered that it's Saturday so this won't be reaching any of you at work until Monday.  Hope you get it not-at-work sooner than that.  It's worth a shot.


Also, I'm really annoyed at all these meth labs that buy up all the sudafed, because now the government types are restricting how much sudafed you can buy at one time, and in some places you have to show your driver's license and *sign a log* when you buy the stuff, and I'm like, listen, is the fact that I have bad sinuses going to get me on a list of people they suspect of cooking up methamphetamine?  Y'all can come take a look in my medicine cabinet -- hell yeah I stockpile the stuff, because I get a HEADACHE, you know what I mean?  Grr.  (That hasn't happened here, but I'm seeing it in the Post now, and sure enough my mother had trouble getting cold medicine to bring me that isn't available here.)

i had another thought a minute ago, but it went away.  it may have been something about how i still don't feel quite right disagreeing with what i'm reading in these papers that i'm getting out of the journals -- i mean, these are respected people with PhD's, and their work has (obviously) been published, and i have none of those qualifications.  this despite the fact that the epigram to one of the books i copied a chapter out of the other day was a quote from Morris Halle (a very very important linguist), who is reported to have said, in a conversation with a student, "Argue with me!"