Transneptune

I think those are the truest self-identifications ever applied to me. Everything else about me is relatively ancillary.

Yesterday, I got to take the first steps on actually being a teacher. Today, I got to resume being a student. I’m taking two classes this semester: Syntactic Theory with Barbara Fox, and History of Linguistics in the 20th Century with David Rood.

Both classes have a historical bent, the latter obviously, but the former in that it is taking us through the development of discourse-functional syntax from the seventies (when people began to think that Chomsky’s approach might have some weaknesses) up to now, decade by decade.

Barbara was giving an overview of some of the ideas in discourse-functional syntax, and one really interesting idea stood out: some people have described syntax as being fossilized discourse. I find this idea wonderful—it opens, potentially, a mechanism for answering some of the “why”s that have, in my experience, always been dismissed or hand-waved as part of the set of arbitrary systems in language. Of course, as Barbara warned us, in this field, there are many more questions and notions than answers. That’s OK by me.

History of Linguistics was interesting, too. We had occasion to read some in French, and I am looking forward to reading de Saussure in French. Sadly, no one in the class speaks German—David was thrown for a bit of a loop there, and is gonna try to find some translations or workarounds for all the Prague-school stuff he was going to have us read in German.

This should be good.

Tags: academic quips, cognitive linguistics, learning, teaching by kit
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So, I’ve met some nice other grad students—an Aerospace PhD student named Sibylle, a Ling Masters named Iris, and then … then I bumped into a friend from Swarthmore who’s also starting here, Fletcher. So there are at least five Swatties in town, including him and his girlfriend. The circle widens, or the world gets smaller. Depending.

Tags: people, small world by kit
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So, classes, and thus TAing, begin Monday. I’ve been going to some How to TA meetings, and it’s been good. I’ve realized that I have some relevant experience, from explaining ling to my friends all the time, to wrangling classes of 4th graders, to GMing games. As to classes, I remembered that I took a ling grad seminar at Princeton while I was in highschool. I can do this. It’ll be great.

Tags: cross-training, linguistics, teaching by kit
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We went to Boulder Meeting today, and it was good. It was full of people from the homefront, it seemed: people who’d lived in Bucks County, Montclair, and even someone who was a fellow Buckingham Friends School alumnus. The world is small and weird.

There were some new people in town, as well, so we all chatted. I sense impending community.

Tags: quakers, small world by kit
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I’m in Boulder, now. The server is, as you can see, back up. There may be some issues with the new networking setup to iron out; if so, email me and let me know.

Boulder is as great as ever. Tonight, we had a celebratory dinner at Himalayas, the best restaurant in town. I’m full of the best chai and yak momos. Life is profoundly good.

Tags: yak momos by kit
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Billionaires are pledging massive giveaways. Google is canceling work on Wave. California’s absurd Prop 8 has been found unconstitutional.

All of these bits of news today made me double-check the date. The Wave one is the only bad one, and it’s offset by promises to open-source a lot of the work so far.

And I leave for Boulder in mere days.

Tags: lgbt rights, philanthropy, wave, weirdness by kit
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My brain has been eaten by the preparations, and all the small problems that arise in same. But basically: moving back to Boulder. I’ve managed to begin the process of seeing people back here I should have seen the whole time—I got to DC, and saw some friends I’ve not seen in years (and ran into random people I knew in the metro, too. What a small town.)

I’m pretty excited for being back in Boulder. I can’t wait to see y’all there. And for those I am leaving—let’s try to see each other before I go, yes?

Tags: cannot brain, waiting sickness by kit
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I have been a fan of Werner Herzog before, but I’ve never seen any of his movies until tonight. I watched Fitzcarraldo, which was fantastic in the layers upon layers of meaning present in it. It explored issues of madness and divinity and cultural contact and was just fantastic. I don’t think I quite realized you could fit that much in a movie.

Earlier this year, I saw Kick-Ass and I thought it was the best movie I’d seen all year. Then, I saw Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) and I thought it was the best movie I’d seen in the past few years. Now, Fitzcarraldo has blown them both away.

I wish I could say more about it. Ultimately, you should just go see it. It’s too dense and I’ve not yet digested it enough to say more.

by kit
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The internet is a weirdly wonderful place sometimes.

I was playing TF2 last night, and first off, I ended up playing with some of my internet idols: Lore Sjöberg and Mark Rosenfelder. I knew I was playing with Lore—both recognizing his voice and having his steam username. But when I was playing as a medic and healing someone with the username Zompist, I knew it was Rosenfelder, and was excited.

And the internet makes that kind of contact easy—we were all there to play a game together. I just happened to wander into the right place. It’s not like there was much meaningful communication, as we were mostly focused on the game, but that’s almost the point. It was casual.

Later, with different people, there was another weird and awesome moment. In an arena game, it had gotten down to a Sniper and a Heavy. Without words, they faced each other and the Heavy swapped to melee. So did the Sniper. And they duked it out hand-to-hand. The Heavy even gave the Sniper his Sandvich.

OK, that paragraph won’t mean much to you unless you know TF2. But it was cool.

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On another note, I’m increasingly thinking about grad school and what I’ll do there. I’m quite excited. I have an apartment, I have friends, I have research questions. The latest notion to pop into my head is that twin languages are really interesting. We’ll see if I keep at that, but it serves as a good reminder for me of all the strange little corners of human language that don’t get enough attention.

Tags: brunching, research questions, tf2, twin languages, zompist by kit
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I went to a bit of Swarthmore’s Alumni Weekend. Two-year reunion for me, and five-year for my friends in ’05, many of whom were there. It made me think about (among many other things), my recent trip to Ireland.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” as Santayana put it. I think it’s quite easy to forget one’s own past, and visiting old friends and old haunts, as I did today and as I did in Ireland, reminds one of things.

In both cases, though, I very much felt like I was intersecting those past experiences from a new angle. Of course, figuratively—I had new experiences and thoughts and such under my belt, and so do the other people involved, and things are always changing. But also literally—in both cases, I interacted with the physical space differently, different spots had meaning. I feel like I should say something about memory and thought being at least partially physically instantiated, but I am not entirely sure I want to go that route. It could be a side effect of the recent high dosage of Swarthmore.

I feel like I’ve become more clear to myself lately. Some people say that self-discovery is not, if you’re doing it right, pleasant. I’m not so sure. What one sees may not always be pleasant, but honesty has, for me, an intense joy. Or perhaps this isn’t self-discovery, but self-understanding. I’m being purposely vague, but ask me about these thoughts if you care. The essence is that one’s past self does things that make more sense seen not just in hindsight, but from the different angles afforded by returning to past sites and people. Reunification. With friends, and, if I want to be pretentious enough, of the self.

tl;dr version: I like my friends. They help me better understand myself.

Tags: Friends, history, ireland, swarthmore by kit
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