This post is about happy things

Small, happy and inconsequential things that make life a little better.

1. I turned on the AC and cleaned my room tonight, simultaneously fulfilling my need to clean when I'm distressed and alleviating part of said distress (the heat)
2. My choir is singing the Chichester Pslams for our next season
3. Honey dissolved into cool water makes my throat feel better
4. I have purchased bus tickets and made (nice! classy!) hotel reservations (did I mention we're staying right by the White House?) for our weekender to DC next weekend
5. Did I mention the AC?
6. I had Indian food for lunch today.

Ugh

Not funny, New York. Not ever funny.

Is this what being old feels like?

I just did a bunch of stretches designed to help alleviate/prevent carpal tunnel and now I can barely move my fingers.

Seriously, I'm 22, what the hell.

Work work work

Today at work I accidentally added my boss to the "spammer" database. Also, my neighbor's CPU caught on fire. No, true story.

Man, I love my job and I love the people I work with even more, but I swear to god it's going to kill me one day. I wonder if the company's health insurance covers a prescription for Xanax.

April is National Poetry Month

And because I suck, I have not posted a single poem this month.

Thus, I present:

<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED


(Please to read aloud as:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.)

Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

Happy National Poetry Month.

Edited 4/25: I neglected to credit the creators of this poem, who are noooooooot me because I am not nearly this clever. The internet tells me it was first published in Infocus magazine in 1990. I'm pretty sure it was forwarded to me by a friend at some point, but I have since forgotten who it was - I saved it to my computer because I loved it so much. Whoever you are, thank you.

Crazy eyes, indeed

The trouble with writing fiction is that it builds on itself.

Not in a good way, most of the time, if you're me. I've reached right now what I call the "fractal" stage of writing, in which each train of thought spirals off into three more thoughts, all of which need fleshing out, and then once you go down that road you have to deal with all the spirals that come off the first spirals, and then there are exponentially yet more spirals until oh my god you're telling a completely different story than you were a couple thousand words ago, and in the meantime it's four AM and you're really supposed to be writing a paper about Irish emigration in the 1980's, except nothing is more interesting than the shit going on in your head, and also now there are all these thoughts that came from the spirals, so you might as well just keep writing since you'll be thinking about them anyway, and then Jesus Christ the birds are chirping, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU GO TO BED, APPARENTLY SLEEP IS IMPORTANT.

The fractal stage of writing is actually fun, really, if you're neurotic and into masochism, and don't have, like, other things to do, or friends, or a job, or a social life - all of which (I like to think) I have. Of course, the fractal stage of writing is immediately followed by the crazy eyes stage of writing, which then leads directly into the I HATE EVERYTHING stage of writing, at which point you're pretty much fucked and you should go have a glass of wine and write something else.

The point is this: right now, there are so, so many things I should be doing instead of what I am doing (see aforementioned paper, PS it has to be twenty pages and is due on Wednesday, I dare you to guess how many I have). I'm not doing them.

Crazy eyes, indeed.

I like open letters, what can I say

Dear World,

Putting Holy Week and Passover in the same week has made my job really, really hard. Nobody is taking any of the stuff I send out for the weekend, and all our translators want the week off. Even the Canadians. Particularly the Canadians. I have a 10k job into French for Canada and NOBODY will take it. They're all making quiche, or something. Silly Canadians.

Of course, this would be the perfect week for a big Arabic job, but no, I haven't had one of those since Mubarak resigned and none of my favorite Egyptians (all our best people are Egyptian, I have no idea why) had internet access.

Stop messing with me and current events! Argh.

Oh god please no

AHHHHHHHHH.

So I am in the process of putting together a powerpoint for this research conference I am required to attend on Friday in which I present my thesis. Because I have basically given up caring about anything related to the thesis at all, "putting together a powerpoint" now equates with "screenshotting parts of my .pdf to copy-paste into a powerpoint in lieu of doing actual work, because I honestly could not care less, and yes, I am this lazy."

EXCEPT FOR THE FACT MY SCREENSHOTS HAVE TYPOS. EFF MY LIFE TIMES INFINITY.

Exhibit 1. Note the last sentence.



I normally would just fix it, except I have already submitted this to the department. This version. With the typos. Also, I seriously care so little and am so blasé about the whole thing that I am just keeping this incorrect version in my powerpoint. What the hell ever, man. The day I willingly ignore typos has arrived.

Good god.

I'm too young for this

Today I bought a French baguette at the Union Square Greenmarket. I wish now I had paid more attention to the stand where I bought it, because - and this is a small miracle - this baguette actually tastes like the French baguettes I remember. I want to go back for more, forever, now that the taste is stuck in my mouth and my brain. There's something very particular about the texture of the crust of a baguette, the slightly dry dusting of flour on the bottom half of the bread, the way it crumbles when you tear off pieces (and, if you're me, the way the breadcrumbs then rain down all over the floor, your shirt, and everything else nearby). It's glorious.

When I was fourteen and then again when I was sixteen, my summers in Paris tasted exactly like this baguette - smeared with nutella, jam or butter for the morning tartine, accompanied by a nice chèvre or fromage bleu at lunch, alongside some bad Beaujolais or cheap rosé in the long light of the evening, or even just plain whenever I got hungry, standing in that sunny Paris kitchen that was even smaller than my Manhattan kitchen is now. I ate bread that tasted like this bread every day during those summers - it's absurd that such a small, daily and unremarkable thing has triggered such a bizarre reaction in me now, years later and an ocean away.

I wish I knew where I could get more bread that tastes like this.

Tu veux du pain? Moi j'en veux.

To the asshole riding the 6 today

Dear sir,

I know riding the subway is hard. The trains, you know - they move, they stop and start and sometimes the cars move side to side too, sometimes there are lots of people and strollers and grocery bags and crazy people and all sorts of entertaining and distracting things to look at. Welcome to the snapshot of New York, etc. etc., whatever, we've all heard it all. It's always an adventure: it starts the minute you swipe your card and push through the turnstiles, when the artificially-stale air blows your hair back to signal an approaching train, when people lean dangerously out over the tracks to look for the express. I know I know, the subway is awesome, and for a lot of people it's a daily trek.

You want to know what makes my day and my commute even better? Assholes like you. The kind who pretend to be drunk as an excuse to "fall" on me when the car jerks suddenly. I know you're larger and heavier and stronger than I am, I don't need an actual physical reminder of the fact, thanks though. And then you squish yourself next to me, closer than you should - the kind of closeness that's really only permissible on really, really packed trains, and then etiquette dictates that you keep your hands to yourself and your eyes down. You? You did neither of these things, on a half-empty train, and I'm sorry, but your feigned drunkenness fools no one, especially not me. You ignore my cues - I shrink in on myself, pull my purse onto my lap like it'll keep you away from my body, curl in my shoulders and bow my head until the position is almost fetal - all in an effort to move myself away from you, and then I start counting how many stops until I can get off the train. It's a pretty goddamn clear message, I think, but do you get it? No, of course not.

You know what you do instead, of course. You start talking, loudly, to your friend - who's still standing and looking around the car with an embarrassed half-sheepish expression, an unspoken apology for your behavior that does nothing for me - about how much you like women. About how many, you know, fucking hot girls (your words) there are on this train, you know, man? And how you're going to get fucked up tonight (again, your words), and how much you just wanna get some chicks, you get me? (also your words), and several other choice phrases I don't care to repeat, all while you're pressed right up against my side. I don't know what's worse, honestly: either you think I'm stupid enough to have my iPod turned up so loud it blocks the ambient noise around me (of course not, do I look dumb? no, I look fucking hot, in my black pants and black jacket, thanks ever so), or you want me to hear what you're saying. Either way it makes you an asshole, a predator, and it makes you the reason for my pissy mood on an otherwise-alright Friday.

People like you remind me why I appreciate New York in the winter, the fall and the spring. Because for all you rubbed up on me this evening, you never touched my skin - for which I am eternally grateful, because if you had I'd be in the shower right now scrubbing off your touch with steel wool and bleach. You don't even win the award for the biggest pig I've ever encountered on the subway - but you do win the award for the person who most ruined my day today, and that would mean a lot more if you had seen what I was dealing with at work this afternoon. I'm really glad I was permitted to pay $2.25 for the pleasure of being something pretty for you to look at. You asshole.

I always wonder what exactly is the point - do you do it just because you can? Am I supposed to feel flattered, to feel special? Am I supposed to treat it like a come-on and give you my number? Is it supposed to make me feel insignificant and unimportant and downtrodden? It makes me feel none of those things, you realize - it just makes me mad, because this is 2011, I am not a thing, I am in charge of my own body and you can just fuck right off, please. The worst part, of course, is that this encounter is filed under the "not so bad" incidents of my life and the overall female experience. It's truly lovely.

To everyone else on the train - thanks for lowering your eyes and thinking, At least he isn't bothering me. To myself - way to stand up for yourself, maybe one day you'll grow a pair large enough to do something besides make yourself smaller and to not lower your eyes when it happens to someone else; I have no illusions about my hypocrisy here. To American society - what the fuck makes us think something like this is okay?

Love,
me

So I submitted my thesis

This is the last post I will make on the subject. I promise.

So... yeah. It's done, it's over, lah-dee-fucking-dah. I am moving on with my life. I am still not sure it was worth it, all the angst and sleepless nights and whining and the fact that by all rights I should have no friends. I'm really glad you guys still answer my calls, let's just say. Anyway, so I dedicate it to you all, and even though most of you will never read the actual thesis I want you all to read this. Because I wrote it for all of you. Mostly the last bit.

(If there are typos in here, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HOLD YOUR PEACE I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THEM, no I am serious, don't even think about it.)

Anyway. Thank you guys. I truly love you all.

Acknowledgments

I would first and foremost like to extend all my thanks to Dr. [name], who has been my advisor in this project and an invaluable resource and mentor throughout the course of my research. I would further like to recognize Drs. [name] and [name], who served two years each as Director of Undergraduate Studies during my time in the [university] Linguistics Department, for all their sound advice and academic guidance over the past four years.

I am also very grateful for the support, both academic and financial, of [name] and the members of the [scholarship] panel, and I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude for the grant they awarded me to conduct this research. I owe many thanks and much recognition also to my five anonymous speakers for lending me their voices and their time in this unpaid experiment. Without them, after all, this work would not exist.

And of course, all my love and greatest thanks go to my friends and family for the continuous aid and encouragement they provided throughout this project. I have been blessed with the immeasurable patience and unfailing support of my parents and my brother, who endured my jargon-filled discussions of grand linguistic themes and phonetic minutiae with laudable tolerance and humor. And to all my friends, both linguists and others, who encouraged, nagged, praised and berated me - you know who you are - I would be considerably less sane without you. Finally I extend my particular thanks and much love to my mother, who has been and always will be my first and most trusted editor and who is always willing to read my writing, even when it is over fifty pages long and about vowels.

FUCK YEAH I WROTE A THESIS. I am going to go get drunk now.**

**Obviously I leave the determination of whether this last line is included in my Acknowledgments to your imagination.

Thinkity think think

So a few days ago, I received a package from my university.

Said package was your standard slightly squashy padded envelope, bent in half because our mailman does this thing where he is determined to fit everything into our very small mailbox, even if it involves, like, origami. ANYWAY. In this envelope I discovered two tassels. You know, the kind you wear on your cap when you graduate. From college.

Maybe this is just further proof that I'm actually slowly losing my mind, but ever since I opened that goddamn envelope and pulled out those two (two? why two? do they think I'll lose one?) knots of silken cord, I have not been able to stop thinking about them. I think it's because they are the first tangible proof I have that in a month and a half I will be done with school. I don't have a class ring, after all, or a cap and gown (yet), or a diploma (also yet, you know, in theory) - but those fucking tassels have like invaded my brain. I abandoned them on my desk for a few days, refusing to deal with them - yesterday I hid them away in a drawer of my dresser in the hope I would forget about them, but had dreams about them anyway. Now they're hanging on the corner of the mirror of my makeshift vanity. I still can't stop thinking about them.

They're soft, real silk or something like it, and heavy - not like the crappy ones we wore in high school. In all honesty, they sort of look like they really belong on cushions or curtains - certainly not on something that goes on my head, I mean. Each one has a little purple, white and gold medal on it attached to a metal band that ties all the little strands together. They are so innocuous yet I am so preoccupied by them. I'm sure a psychologist could give you a bullshit reason regarding the fixation; my reason is that my mindset right now is "Eek I'm graduating - better not fuck it up now!" and that's what the tassels represent. Or something.

So, yeah. I have tassels. I'm graduating. The world is increasingly bizarre, and I'm not sure I know how to deal with it.

T-minus five days, oh my godddddd

This is me doing the dance of I-never-have-to-devote-another-weekend-to-this.

Sunday:
Finish all my stats/math stuff, update my paper accordingly
Write an extra section about the maintained distinction

Monday:
Screw with my numbers in Excel in an attempt to make plots of them
Write an abstract, apparently I need one (oops)

Tuesday:
Meet with my adviser for his comments
Make any changes he wants

Wednesday-Thursday:
Print off a draft, carry it around compulsively for editing purposes

Friday:
SUBMIT IT and rejoice.

Ahahaha oh god

Sometimes I feel like the internet can read my mind. A recent xkcd comic:



Credit: xkcd, duh

You guys you guys, this is what I do all the time, I don't do anything else anymore on this blog, I am a blog failure. What has happened to me, everybody knowwwwwws.

Of course, if the internet could actually read my mind, it would mostly look like this:



Credit: hell if I know. LOOK, DUCKS.

Spam spam spam

Well, I just broke 50 pages.

In celebration and presented without further comment:

We are

Ode

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties,
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration,
Is the life of each generation.
A wondrous thing of our dreaming,
Unearthly, impossible seeming-
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising.
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man's soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man's heart.

And therefore today is thrilling,
With a past day's late fulfilling.
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of tomorrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing;
O men! It must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry-
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God's future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the corners
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers,
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamt not before;
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

More invented words

"Articulatory correlates of ambisyllabicity in English glides and liquids."

The above is the title of a legitimate paper I am citing in my thesis.

Ambisyllabicity? For real? Just saying, right now my computer is underlining that word in red...

Oh god I am so close to being done, arghhhhhhhh...

So close

I just have to get through this weekend, and then I will be here:

Insignificance

God, okay, I swear I do other things besides bitch about my thesis. (I've forgotten what these things are, but people tell me I at least used to do them.)

BUT.

I'm now in the stage of determining whether or not my results are Significant. It is very important to be Significant when it comes to things that involve math and data and... things. The process of determining Significance involves more statistics than I have ever exposed myself to, and now I'm realizing why. However, I think the best part of this whole ordeal is the word choice. Results, you see, are either Significant or Not Significant.

The number of times I have typed "insignificant" is uncountable at this point. I'm sure there are still some of them in there, hiding. I feel so good typing out the fact that this ENTIRE THING IS INSIGNIFICANT.

Oddly, the more Not Significant my results are the better I feel. It's probably because the more Not Significance I have the less work I have to do. Yes.

Literature

This post brought to you by I Hate My Thesis.

The book I am reading: In a response that will surprise nobody, I am currently re-reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte because it is the novel of my heart, forever.

The book I am writing: Well that depends on your definition of "book," really, but it's either the one about a messy, discordant Long Island family over the weekend of the memorial service for their dead patriarch, or the one about the three twenty-somethings living together in a house in northern California and their various dysfunctions and hilarities. Or the one about telephones, but that one has no literary pretensions whatsoever.

The book I love most: Mmmm tricky. It might be Wuthering Heights but I think the book I actually love the most would be The Lord of the Rings because I am, in fact, incredibly cool.

The last book I received as a gift: The Collected Works of T.S. Eliot from my mother, because she wanted her own copy back.

The last book I gave as a gift: I recently re-gifted my copy of a city guide to Madrid to a friend, does that count?

The nearest book: A Course in Phonetics, fifth edition by Peter Ladefoged (ugh thesis!) is sitting directly on top of my roommate's copy of American Gods by Neil Gaiman, both next to me on the couch. I feel like this is actually quite telling.

AND NOW: back to work!

Second verse, same as the first -

...a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

Also known as, This weekend I have to write ten more pages of my thesis.

10:39 AM: 0 pages

11:32 AM: 1 page Also: 1 cup of coffee made.

12:14 PM: 2 pages After I write one more page, I get to make pancakes and eat them. Yes. Motivation.

12:40 PM: 3 pages PANCAKES.

1:45 PM: 3 pages I am now full of pancake. Onwards! (The plan: after I reach 6 pages I take a shower.)

2:31 PM: 4 pages An interesting side effect of this "blog your thesis" plan is that I am unintentionally keeping a record of how long it takes me to write each page of this thing. Apparently I average a little under an hour per page. Adding in breaks for coffee and food, I should have completed this week's thesis portion in 6 hours. I'm not sure if this is comforting or intimidating. Something tells me I won't be finished by 8:30 tonight. At least it's only Saturday, I guess.

2:54: 5 pages HAHA I prove myself wrong, but in the best way possible! Excellent. Half-way to being done with this for the weekend! (Which is... half-way to being half-way, which is... 37.5%, I think?) Yesssssss. Now let's just hope I don't run out of steam. (One more page until I get to shower...)

3:20: 6 pages I AM ON A ROLL. However, since I am also still in my pyjamas, I am going to go shower. I have decided that if I finish two more pages (for a total of EIGHT written today) and it's still light and not unreasonably cold outside, I will go shopping. And possibly buy myself something nice. Something nice, and useless. And then I will come home and write two more pages. Yes.

3:58: 6 pages Starting up again! I hope.

4:43: 7 pages At this point I am just sort of outlining because I've written all I can without actually doing any sort of analysis (oops). The outlining is still helpful, however. And comforting in how many pages it takes up. I should start the acoustic analysis portion of this disaster tomorrow, because I can't deal with it today...

5:14: 8 pages GOAL REACHED. I can now join the land of the living. Hopefully more tonight! With the added bonus of actual analysis. Maybe.

Whine bitch moan, moving right along

Things that are not helpful in the thesis process:

Having to email all the people in the department who are supposed to be "supporting me" and "mentoring me" on a weekly basis and begin the email with, "Hi again, ____, I'm sorry to bug you about this but I was wondering if you had the ______ you mentioned last week to send to me..." or, "Like I said before, I'd really like to come in and meet with you, please let me know if you're available on Thursday afternoon," or, "I was wondering if you'd thought about the question I emailed you about last week," all the while including the entire chain of emails leading up to this one I have sent that have gone unanswered in an attempt to GUILT these people into replying to/helping me.

ARGH.

If I had more time I would just stalk them at their offices, but I can't even do that.

I know writing a thesis is supposed to be difficult, but my god sometimes it feels like I'm talking to ROCKS. Really unresponsive rocks.

I should have expected this

First of all, this post is brought to you by the fact that there is no hot water in my building. So, instead of taking a shower, I am posting on the internet. My priorities, let me show you them.

So! Part of the requirements of the grant I received to write my thesis is presenting at a research conference in April. I have to apply for the conference by tomorrow. At the end of the application, there are these instructions: "Please check up to four categories under which your project would fit." My options are as follows.

New York City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change
The Politics and Economics of Education
Gender Studies: A Global View
Contemporary Global Conflict
Global Issues Past and Present
The International Workforce: Issues in Labor and Economics
Issues in Law, Justice, and Government
Neural Science
Health and Development: Science at the Crossroads
Social Concerns in Health Care
Molecules of Living Systems
Interpersonal Relationships
Literature Through the Ages
Learning and Behavior in Mammals
Access to the Arts: Displaying, Preserving, Performing, and Interpreting
Music: Tradition Meets Innovation
The Urban Divide
Molecules and Materials

Of course, my project fits into not a single one of these neat little categories. Currently I think my best options are "Learning and Behavior in Mammals" (humans are mammals and speech is a behavior, right?) or "Gender Studies: A Global View" (the preferred option to just completely mess with this whole process).

MY MAJOR: Defying categorization since the 1970s!

(Disclaimer: I have edited this thing like 5 times already for typos. It's early and I HAVEN'T SHOWERED so I get a free pass on my not-so-awesome writing skills right now, okay? Okay.)

This sort of worked last time

So. Today I am writing the first ten pages of my thesis. Not the actual first ten pages, of course, just any ten pages. It must happen, because I have A Plan to get this thing written, and apparently public embarrassment is enough of a motivating factor. Because if I can't bang out ten double-spaced pages of bullshit about something I know a lot about today, what does it say about me that just this weekend I wrote 10,000 words of a gratuitously musical short story for my creative writing class like it was nothing? I have my priorities straight, is what it says.

SO HERE'S HOW IT'S GOING TO GO.

1:00 PM: 0 pages. It begins.

1:14 PM: 1 page I copy-pasted part of my funding application into a word document entitled, I kid you not, "THESIS - WHAT." It counts, though. ONWARDS.

1:23 PM: 2 pages More copy-paste, this time from an email conversation I had with my adviser. If only this entire process would go this quickly! On another note, I have realized I don't actually know how to write a thesis. For my methodology, can I include a list of all my target words and sentences? That'll take up four more pages. Awesome.

1:31 PM: 3 pages THIS IS AWESOME. I copy-paste stuff I have already written, change it to double-space, tweak it a little, look up, and BAM there's another page. Bizarre, yet amazing.

1:37 PM: 4 pages Copy-pasted my wordlist in here. No wonder so many people plagiarize from the internet, this is the easiest thing I've ever done. Bonus points because I'm plagiarizing from myself. This Methodology section is kick-ass.

2:26 PM: 5 pages This last page came entirely from my own brain, which is why it took so long. But now I am officially one-tenth of the way there! I'm not sure if I'm excited or daunted by this number. Both, perhaps.

And now I am going to go take a break and shower. I'm hoping to get another five pages by the end of the day. WE SHALL SEE.

3:28 PM: 5 pages I am out of the shower with another mug of tea after my break. Now begins Thesis Sunday, Part 2: Electric Boogaloo. HERE WE GO.

4:19 PM: 6 pages I have been listening to the Kyrie eleison section of the Mozart Requiem on repeat for the past hour. It is simultaneously comforting in its familiarity and utterly terrifying each time a new "Kyrie" section starts. Basically excellent motivation, really.

4:56 PM: 7 pages Yes, seven pages, THAT'S RIGHT. However, to disabuse you of the notion that I am actually succeeding in this, I present you with an excerpt of what I have just written. (Know that, when I am writing, I write notes to myself in all caps so that I will see them when I go back and do some editing. I have a recurring nightmare in which I submit a paper and I have forgotten to go through and take out all the side-notes. You will soon see why.)

It is well known in THE FIELD OF WHAT that in many dialects of English the presence of a nasal consonant will raise the vowel it precedes or follows. Pre-nasal vowels will often take on a nasal quality even though English does not have nasal vowels, only oral ones. ALSO I SHOULD CITE THINGS HERE. LIKE PAPERS. OR SOMETHING. The presence of a nasal consonant causes the speaker to lower the velum to allow air to pass through both the nose and the mouth. Through the process of WHAT - ASSIMILATION? ARGH PHONETICS most speakers of American English will leave the velum at least partially lowered when articulating a vowel when it is immediately near a nasal consonant, producing a semi-nasalized vowel. This effect is generally most notable in pre-nasal vowels. UM, THEN I PUT ACTUAL WORK HERE?

Yes, really.

What happens at Dewey's never goes back to the office

Last night I went out after work with my co-workers to the bar they apparently frequent a lot (they knew the bouncer and bartenders by name, which is always a good sign) and we collectively got what would charitably be termed "drunk in a bonding exercise." It was quite fun, actually, and also completely hilarious. I discussed fountain pens with Coworker S and choirs with Coworker D (she invited me to their next rehearsal, which was exciting!) and the perks and drawbacks of having a semi-androgynous name with Boss B. The non-smokers mocked the smokers, who had to get all bundled up every hour or so and briefly step outside, and at some point someone ordered calamari, which was delicious. The best part of the evening was the stories I heard about the company Christmas party, which I guess is an event nobody ever speaks about mostly because nobody remembers it. There were photos, though - one person said the words "Christmas party" and immediately they all whipped out BlackBerrys and iPhones and Droids to show me some rather incriminating pictures.

Moral of the story: work is good, and these people are hilarious. There is always lots of food in my life (Boss A's sister works for Cake Boss, which is amazing and also means the office is always full of pastry and sweets), and I get to speak French and Spanish with my coworkers and I'm working up the nerve to ask Coworker S to speak German to me, slowly. I've started getting small baby assignments to manage, which is fun because it means I don't have to just sit around and shadow everyone all day, and I'm starting to learn names. Soon I will feel like I have worked there forever, I am sure.

Yay gainful employment.

One of ten, ten of one

I woke up in the city that doesn't sleep

Back in New York! It is quite cold here.

You thought there might be real content, but there isn't. There might be later. It's hard to say.

For now...

All in Black on the Streets of New York

It camouflages fat. That and timidity.
Also subway grime, fear and the pastel optimism
you wore in high school. It's cover for the thick

books you've yet to read, the opaque philosophies
you only grasp in bits. It's an answer to the push pull
question, set yourself apart or blend. It belies

the open sky you miss, birdsong, your mom's roast
in thick brown gravy while you nibble virtuous
brown rice meals. It's for the guys, clad like you,

dark side out, who touch then leave your heart exposed.
It signifies insomnia, matches your coffee, says
this place that's braced for loss is now your home.

Ona Gritz