a wolf angel is not a good angel

There’s a new First Person article up, on the two zoologists who were hoping to find positions in the same department in a small liberal arts school in the southeast. They found them.

And I want to be happy for them, but the tone irked me so much, I’m just annoyed.

It was worrisome; they had to wait. But they did it in ONE YEAR. The husband, who graduated last year, applied for 17 positions in the southeast. Um. I can’t say I remember seeing 17 tenure-track linguistics positions in any one field in North America in the past few years, much less in the same region.

The place where they got jobs had four job openings, of which the wife was qualified for three.

It’s hard to believe.

It was just too “look, we did it, it’s not easy, but if you’re as clever and dedicated as we are, you can do it too!” for me.

I can’t quite explain my irritation with this story.

Thinking about typing distracts me from typing, making me error-prone and slow.

I just recently explained why I can’t touch-type. I still reach over 70WPM, so it doesn’t bother me.

I learned how to in high school, but pretty much I typed 5-fingered whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. (1 finger is my right thumb.) Then I broke my right index finger. (Doctor’s first, technical description of my knuckle, when she thought my little sister was actually my daughter: “It’s shmushed.” Doctor’s second description, when she had been disabused of this notion: “You broke the knuckle into several pieces, and one was destroyed, and one was turned upside down. It’s pretty much useless.” Doctor’s final comment: “Childbirth hurts more.”)

I had an almost-immediate surgery on that finger. Sort of immediate. I forget, exactly. But then it overlapped all my other fingers, except the pinkie. And the thumb; it couldn’t really overlap the thumb.

It was always in the way. But I could more or less bend it, though I couldn’t do anything else with it. Also I couldn’t pick up change out of a change purse. Strange but true.

So I had another surgery a few years later to try to straighten it out. (Go universal health care.) This involved cutting out a pie-shaped wedge of bone, so it was bent towards my thumb below the knuckle, and then bent the other way at my knuckle, to average out sort of unbent. Conceptually: sort of gross. Practically: incredibly painful.

I’m a wimp. I’m a big huge wimp, who was ecstatic to find my littler sister is a bigger huger wimp, and a hypochondriac to boot. But we’re both right up there. So after the accident and the pain from the first surgery, I was a little worried about the pain from the second surgery. Quite reasonably. It hurt a lot, and I don’t really care if childbirth hurts more, because you get something better than a deformed finger at the end. As I was lying down in the OR and chatting with the anaesthesiologist (in French, which was weird only because both of us were anglophones), I was nervous. And my veins were scared, too, and in hiding. And she was rubbing my hands, trying to warm them up so she could see the veins and have some clue where to stick in the needle. I much appreciated that she did that instead of just jamming it in. Also I dislike needles, and I hadn’t brought in distracting reading material.

She asked me if I was nervous. Yes. “Are you scared you’re not going to wake up from the surgery?” Not until you mentioned it, no.

When I woke up, I cried constantly until all the anaesthetic was out of my system. Weird reaction. I preferred it the first time, when I was couting backwards from 10, and thinking “10 this isn’t working, 9 I’m not the least bit sleepy 8 7 ooooh, a shot of Demerol, I love you, recovery room nurse”.

My index finger now only overlaps my middle finger a bit, but I can’t bend it at all.

I use this as my excuse for why I can’t use chopsticks.

Wow. An all-nighter. I can’t even remember the last time I did that. Except usually I do them for specific (last-minute-paperwriting) purposes. This time I did this because of a singular lack of interest in sleep. Oh, yes, I put my head down for a bit, but I didn’t fall asleep.

Now I’m tired and my head feels like it’s about to break.

Still. It feels sort of cool. In a weird way.

I made cinnamon buns, but they’re not rising. Actively not rising. They’re the same size (teeny!) as they were when I set them to rise. Also, and likely relatedly, the pan is still cold. I might have to try to force them to rise in the oven at a low temperature.

I babble a lot when I’m tired. Also it tends to be fairly senseless babbling, even compared to my usual.

I keep looking on the cinnamon buns. I wonder if they follow that “watched pot” thing. But it’s been about 7 hours. And the house isn’t cold.

I gave up writing my handout. What I had already was good enough for an in-class presentation I may not even give. Also, I might not be able to sleep, but I am still tired.

Now I’m interested in sleep, too. But I can’t. Or shouldn’t. Or something.

I need to find out if people are going to my friend’s gathering/gettogether/thingie on Friday. I would like to bring some major rich dessert. I don’t know what, yet, but it will involve a lot of chocolate. And butter, since I noticed I have about 5 pounds in my freezer. What did I think I needed that much butter for? I’m not bringing 5 pounds of butter home.

Rise, damn you. I wanted cinnamon buns for breakfast. And you’ve got a 3cm diameter. That’s pitiful. That’s not a cinnamon bun, it’s — something else which is pitiful.

I mentioned: no sleep, babble.

I want coffee.

I want something brilliant to be on TV now. Also I want Kwame to win tonight.

I need a shower. Probably also I need coffee. Yesterday I took a nice long shower that felt wonderful. I didn’t have any coffee.

The dough is awfully chilly on my cinnamon buns. If I walk into the kitchen, I can warm them up AND make coffee. Alternatively, I can continue sitting on the couch.

Riseriserise.

It’s almost 4 in the morning. Am I asleep? No, though I have more typing dreams than I’d like to admit.

I am editing a handout — conveniently WITHOUT the comments I got on it, because I’m too lazy to go into another room and find them — though I don’t know I’ll actually need it. Because I am supposed to present my paper tomorrow, but, as I’ve mentioned, it doesn’t exist. So I am going to suggest giving a dry run of my presentation for Berlin. Or not talk. I don’t really care.

I’ve given it once. It took me about 90 minutes, including a lot of discussion and what amounted to a very-mini-course in semantics. I have 20 minutes. Whee!

I intended to work on this, but didn’t (depression! depression!). And, looking at it now, I wish I had. It’s solid work. I can of course still work on it next year. Perhaps I will. I can do it — I have Tagalog-speaking friends, and I think I could get access to someone who speaks Indonesian. And I’d enjoy doing it. And then I could keep my toes in a little. (Also, the next conference, after the one in Berlin, is supposed to be in Montreal again, which would mean I could keep my toes in properly, as it were.)

Let’s see how this well-meant plan goes. I have such good intentions, all of the time.

I got my paperwork for graduation today. It’s surprisingly little — two forms. I can’t get my diploma until October, since I’ve missed the May deadline (April 1).

I would like to point out, for the record, that if classes only end May 3, and exams go on a fair bit after, it’s a little fast for convocation (which I will, alas, miss, since I couldn’t go until next May, by which time I will be back in Montreal and have no interest in driving 7 hours . . . well . . . only a little bit of interest).

I need to get whole bunches of paperwork signed. I’m sort of unwilling to deal with it. I guess I will work on it later. Procrastination indeed. I still haven’t booked a place to stay in Berlin, though I’ll be there NEXT WEEK. I also don’t know where my cousin lives in London, or how to get there. But I did inform people that the first day of the conference is my birthday. Subtly, in the “See you in Berlin on April 23 (my birthday!).” sense. Yes, that’s exactly how I worded it to an advisor.

Tomorrow I was supposed to present my paper for the year. For various reasons, I won’t have a real paper. So I’m going to be presenting either nothing or my conference presentation. Which only needs a little bit (read as tonnes and tonnes) of work.

This will not be my MA paper, inasmuch as there will be one. (Problems which I avoided blogging about, but which involved the “since you’re leaving, I don’t want to give you energy” story.) It would have been my paper next year, except, well, there won’t be one. Sigh. It feels sort of terrible.

Gilmore Girls is one of the shows I watch regularly (or catch up with on TWoP).

I also, in the day, watched Felicity. Most of the first season, and a few shows of the second.

Rory has started university now. She, like Felicity was at the beginning, is a nerd. I stopped watching Felicity not because she cut her hair (Rory did too, but it looks better) but because she changed too much. As a nerdy girl, I liked watching about other nerdy girls who stayed nerdy after high school. But she didn’t. When she left her job without bothering to try to make sure it was well looked after to look for a drunk friend, I mostly gave up. I would happily do anything to help a friend — but not quite anything, I suppose.

Rory stayed nerdy. Rory (and Paris. I love Paris) went to Florida for spring break. They looked at the big party and went back to the hotel room to watch Joseph Campbell. They went out the next night and decided “Hey, getting drunk and stupid isn’t for me.” And then they went back to Connecticut.

This is what I’ve always been like. And it’s always been a little uncomfortable. I don’t like going to bars (part of the problem I’ve had here, in fact); I never have. I’ve done it, but rarely, and other than when I convinced people to go to a jazz lounge (which has since closed), I’ve never much enjoyed it and would prefer to be home, reading.

So to see this on television, with a main character — to see her not change — is really nice.

Wow. I had all these good intentions for today. Except I woke up past 11. Why do I always wake up late when I want to wake up early and early when I want to wake up late?

At least I’m not as tired as I was yesterday. That’s something.

It’s not pronounced MAWN-treal. MUN. MUN. Like fun, or bun, or shun, or as in monkey.

It’s also usually Quebec pronounced without the w sound (kuh-bek — it’s so hard to do this without IPA), but that’s a lot less annoying.

Update! I read in Sharyn McCrumb’s book The Songcatcher, a discussion of the pronunciation of Appalachia, which this has reminded me of. (From the fun search-inside-the-book feature.)

“Well, I’ll be interested to hear some stories. This is my first visit to Appa-lay-chia.”

Baird said gently, “Well, folks in these parts call it Appa-latch-a.”

Eeyore shrugged, as if the information did not interest him. “In New York we say Appa-lay-chia.”

Baird had this conversation rather often, too, and in this round he was less inclined to be charitable. The statement ‘We say it that way back home’ sounded like a reasonable argument unless you realised that it was not a privilege Easterners granted to anyone other than themselves. If a Texan visiting New York pronounced “Houston Street” the same way that Texans pronounce the name of their city back home, he would be instantly corrected by a New Yorker and probably derided for his provincial ignorance. One of Baird Christopher’s missions in life was to set arrogant tourists straight about matters like this.

“You know,” he said to Eeyore, gearing up to his lecture in genial conversational tones. “Over in Northern Ireland once I visited a beautiful walled city that lies east of Donegal and west of Belfast. Now, for the last thousand years or so the Irish people who built that city have called it Derry, a name from darach, which is the Gaelic word for ‘oak tree’. But the British, who conquered Ireland a few hundred years back, they refer to that same city as Londonderry. One place: two names.
“If you go to Ireland, and you ask for directions to that city, you can call it by either name you choose. Whichever name you say, folks will know where it is you’re headed and most likely they’ll help you get there. But you need to understand this: when you choose what name you call that city — Derry or Londonderry — you are making a political decision. You are telling the people you’re talking to which side you’re on, what cultural values you hold, and maybe even your religious preference. You are telling some people that they can trust you and other people that they can’t. All in one word. One word with a load of signifers built right in.
“Now, I reckon Appalachia is a word like that. The way people say it tells us a lot about how they think about us. When we hear somebody say Appa-lay-chia, we know right away that the person we’re listening to is not on our side, and we hear a whole lot of cultural nuances about stereotyping and condescension and ethnic bigotry, just built right in. So you go on and call this place Appa-lay-chia if you want to. But you need to know that by doing that you have made a po-li-ti-cal decision, and you’d better be prepared to live with the consequences. Friend.”

Eeyore blinked at him and took a deep breath. “Appa . . . latch-ah?” he said.

Yes, it’s less lazy to just trackback.

Dorothea, if you want advice for things to do while in Montreal, just ask. It’s a fun fun (and very vegetarian-friendly, so unless you go to a steakhouse or Schwartz’s, you can safely assume you’ll have a nice selection to choose from) city. You’re there at a lovely time (though you miss the fireworks and the Jazz & Comedy fests) — if you have time/money, stick around a day or two.

Ah, home. I really never could quite envision living anywhere else. Nor did I ever want to.

Yesterday . . . well, I got my CV done. It looks fine. I have interesting job experience, and a few conferences and publications on my record, which has to help. I got the letter done, which is also fine. I’m in the process of having it translated into French, with help from my father and a friend of mine (I owe him, big). I’ll need to translate all the technical terms, because, oddly enough, he doesn’t know how to say them in French. Nor do I. Fun!

I’m praying the whole “Hey, look, I’m an ANGLOPHONE applying!” will help, because though my background is appropriate for the program, it’s also a bit spotty prior to my last year or two of undergrad. A bit spotty = mostly As and Fs, baby. (Well. Close enough. Magic happened when I changed into linguistics. And my CS courses weren’t bad.) I have a 4.0 here, but that’s just cause they give everyone all As. Still, that part doesn’t show on my transcript.

Anyways, we’ll see. I can’t figure out how likely I am to be accepted, really. But I have a job anyways.

After this, I need to edit the letter for a school I want to go to less. I’m not sure why I am applying there, though. I have to figure out if I still should. Hedge my bets? It’s not like it’s open admissions there.

Still, I got that done. No laundry, work, or conference presentation, but bad TV and stupid computer games . . . I have no self-control, do I?

Today: go buy myself something cheap and nice. Work! Look vaguely at my handout, trying to fix the grammatical errors and getting rid of the stuff I put in to make my professor happy but probably is wrong (which would not have made her happy).