a wolf angel is not a good angel

I am, very slowly, putting all the stuff I don’t need in boxes. All my linguistics papers: boxed. (With the exception of about three, which I need for my conference next week. Next week! Ack.) My clothes are all put away (or in laundry baskets). I even threw out some stuff I no longer need, although not quite enough.

I took everything off my bed, which had been my storage place, and put my sheets in to be washed. Next will be my duvet cover, which will undoubtedly kill the dryer, which needs two or three run throughs for ordinary laundry.

I wish I could dry them outside, but they’re still doing construction, so it would just get all dirty and dusty.

I hate packing things. I am a packrat, and no matter how much I sort of want to, I can’t let go. That philosophy paper I wrote when I was 17, that sounds exactly like a 17-year old wrote it, and that I’m too embarassed to reread? Yeah, I still have it.

Oh well. Slowly slowly. I got a fair bit done over the past few days. I have bagsful of garbage, which is usually a good sign that I’m doing something.

Tomorrow at 11 someone’s coming to give me an estimate of moving expenses. So that’s why I’m doing it now. Still, it’s not a terribly bad idea; it will save me lots of time in May. And then I can have people over for a big goodbye thing . . . it’s such a depressing thought.

But my room is cleaner, and it smells of lilac (candle) and hyacinth (real), and I have pizza in the oven, and I’m going to Europe next week and I don’t need to take the train to the airport. How much better could things be?

5-2 against Boston, to tie the series.

Game 7: Monday in Boston.

Oh, wow.

I just found this thread on Cholla, a graduate student in English who is planning to leave his program after the first year.

Now, he didn’t really go into graduate school for any of the right reasons.

I went to graduate school because upon graduating I had no idea what to do with myself. I was drawn partially by the idea of the academic life — the way I looked at it, being a professor was just the inverse of being a student. I liked the idea of all that free time. I had always thought that the institution of academic English was kind of BS, pointless, and divorced from reality, but I was willing to give it a shot.

Not knowing what else to do with yourself is, perhaps unwise, but more common than people would like to think. And there is draw to an academic life, though the free time is mostly imaginary, as far as I can see. (Not the freedom to schedule your own time, something I will miss.)

Going into English when you thought it was BS and pointless boggles the mind, though.

Still, good on him for getting out while the getting is good.

In defending himself from the accusation of having taken a spot away from a more worthy candidate, he says this:

I don’t have any qualms about taking the university’s money for the remainder of the semester while planning my getaway. Universities hire far more graduate students than will ever get tenure-track jobs, and they know this. Why? Because a teaching assistant can teach a class for far less money than a full professor would. The academic labor system is morally bankrupt, but that’s a topic that’s been dealt with more eloquently and fully than I have the space to do here. Suffice it to say, I’m glad I’m hitting them in the pocketbook.

And a respondent agrees:

After all, if some grad school offers you a free ride, why shouldn’t you take it? It’s their nickel, not yours, and if you decide to leave later, that’s your prerogative … you are not bound to the academy like an indentured laborer for the rest of your days. Given that there is no longer any loyalty on the part of the academy to faculty members (or “faculty-to-be” members), then why the heck should entering graduate students be bound by any kind of reciprocal loyalty?

The academy doesn’t owe anyone a job, so why should any entering grad student be expected to have any sense or feeling of obligation to the grad school?

And a final comment:

Of course, it is “they” who are the root of the problem. They shouldn’t be offering graduate-student fellowships. Instead, they should be hiring more faculty members, so that graduate students don’t have to teach so many classes, and so that there are more faculty jobs available when the graduate students get their degrees.

I’ve left off some of the other side, but there’s a great deal of that, too.

One person said “I think most people need to experience grad school to know whether it is for them.” This was certainly true for me. And, like Cholla, moving away and living somewhere entirely different made me learn what considerations I had about where I was willing to live.

What amazes me — I’m convinced this is a gender difference, in general — was this:

So it’s not like any harm has been done here. My confidence isn’t at all shattered — I know I’m a bright kid, otherwise I wouldn’t even be here. Academe and I are just a bad fit.

Wow. Why the hell can’t I feel like that?

I shouldn’t've let my cats stay in Montreal this month. I have a mouse in my room. Why hasn’t my roommate’s cat killed it in the time she’s been living in my room? Bad Miri.

I’m not cleaning up that part of my room now. Maybe it’ll leave now that I’m spending lots of time in this room.

I was in Berlin, which was actually not Berlin, exactly, but this weird pseudo-city that fills in for various European cities in my dreams. Last time, if I recall, it was Zurich. Once it was Paris. It’s a little weird.

In any case, I was in fake-Berlin, and I had forgotten to bring all the copies of my handout. I had remembered to bring my copy, but I had already marked it up with all the comments I was going to make during the talk. And I couldn’t find a photocopy place, because I don’t know how to speak German.

Probably this means that I should, oh, edit my handout significantly so that I can make 50 or so copies before I leave. I forgot that Krifka is *in* Berlin, so I’ll need to much more fully justify my using kinds instead of objects . . . at least in the question period.

I was worried I wasn’t getting an MA for a while — my advisor, as I had mentioned, was not interested in putting much effort into my work once it was known I was leaving. Without a paper, I’m not supposed to be able to graduate.

But apparently they feel that perhaps *I* should not be punished for the faculty’s laziness. (Another person on my committee also wants to do nothing, so will sign off on me if my advisor says it’s a good idea.)

Which means, in essence, that I’m getting an MA without any kind of paper or comprehensive exam, just 2 years of courses. Which isn’t really the point, but I suppose I can’t complain. Much. Sort of.

I realised yesterday and today that there are a lot of people here I will really miss, and the community aspect of being here I will miss. For various reasons, I spent little time in the department this semester, but the past two days I have and it just struck me. I like my cohort. We used to go out to dinner, get together to see movies . . . I like other people in this department. And I know that I will never see most of them again. I’ll be away for two weeks, and then here in May, but moving. I said goodbye to some people realising this was probably a real, forever one.

Finally got some of my archives up (blog-city sucks, so I need to edit them myself). July through September are all there. Yay, but ugh. Now I need to finish up with October through December.

But it’s beautiful out now, so I’m going outside.

Since I was going on and on in my comments about regional pronunciations.

How to pronounce where I live:

MUN-tree-awl. It’s just the first syllable everyone gets wrong. Well, not people from Quebec or parts of Ontario.
And it’s kuh-BECK. Not KWEE-beck. Pronounce the w if you must, but don’t make that first syllable long.

You’re also always welcome to pronounce either of them as if they’re French, but it’s a little weird. It’s normal to pronounce every other city in Quebec as if you were speaking French, though.

I have been told that, when reading data from other languages, I have a French accent. This is possibly why.

How to recognise people from Montreal:

Incidentally, you can tell someone’s from Montreal if they pronounce the word bilingual with 4 syllables (bye-lin-GHYOO-ul) instead of 3 (bye-lin-GWUL). This is unlikely to be useful knowledge to you. Also, I get marks, not grades, we mark things, not grade them, and the marks are (for instance) 3 on 10, not 3 out of 10. If someone drinks a soft drink, they’re from Quebec.

Other places with specific pronunciations:

Orry-gun? I thought Oreh-gun. (I need IPA now.)

Canadian vs. American pronunciations:

Only Americans turn all the a’s in foreign words into awh. You eat pawh-stah, we eat pah-stah. Etc. This is usually one of the first things Canadians living in the US lose. I started to overgeneralise around the same time I started saying “eh” more and was more consistent with Canadian raising.

Sociolinguistics, how much pointless fun you can be.

When I was planning to move to the US from Canada, I didn’t think it would be such a big change. After all, I’d spent lots of time in the US — often two months in the summer, and then Labour Day,Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Victoria Day, maybe St-Jean-Baptiste . . . a lot of time.

Vacationing in the US isn’t like living there. I’m not an idiot. I realised that much.

A friend of mine had moved to Australia. I knew that sharing a language wasn’t enough.

But I didn’t realise how much of a change it is. How *different* places are. I’m fairly middle-of-the-road in Canada — maybe a bit liberal for Canada, a little conservative for Quebec — but overall, fairly average.

In the US, I’m a flaming left wing pinko commie. (Not so much on a campus — it verges to the left some — but off.) And I never felt so much like a religious minority as I have here. So many people are so evangelical.

I hate having to drive everywhere (except the grocery store. That’s luxury). The politics are getting horribly ugly (though no one’s called anyone a reptilian kitten-eater from another planet yet). It’s just — the whole feel is different. And two years on and I’m still not feeling comfortable here.

A friend from Australia told me she feels that Canada is much like home, while the US is not. I am not much surprised.

Edit: right wing, left wing, whatever.