Transneptune

I spoke for what I think is the first time today at meeting. It was not really a choice. The message was from me, from somewhere inside of me, but it was not my choice to speak it. Consciously I didn’t want to, but at a certain point, part of my brain said “you’re a Quaker, so get up and quake.” And I did. It was short.

At the end of meeting, lots of kids came in, all the kids from the First Day School whatnot. And I just had to smile; I love seeing old people and young people all intermixed.

Tags: mixed ages, quakerism by Kit
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Language Log informs me that today is International Talk Like a Quaker Day, and so I think I’ll take the opportunity to think about plain speech, and what it means to me. I don’t think that thee-ing (not, as Language Log discusses, thou-ing) is really appropriate in the modern age. I’m generally against orthopraxy, and I think that the idea of plain speech is to set you apart not by strangeness, but by clarity, honesty and directness of speech. Continuing to thee really misses the point, as far as I’m concerned.

So, do I speak plainly? I try to. I fail in many ways, though: I certainly respond reflexively with clearly-false absurdities in many cases talking with small-f friends. I think I also, generally speaking, talk too much, and don’t allow time to consider my statements and what I’m responding to.

I’ll take today as a reminder to talk less, and mean more.

Tags: plain speech, quakerism by Kit
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I’ve never understood the Quaker use of First Day for Sunday. It makes sense only if Saturday is your sabbath—He rested on the seventh day, right?

However, that’s utterly irrelevant to what I intend to write. Today was the first day of my real graduate student career. I had a TA meeting and attended the lecture for the course I’m TAing. Bhuvana gave a nice lecture, for introductory linguistics, and I observed it, I realized, with a different eye.

The material is all well-known to me. So rather than being focused on ideas and concepts, I focused on the structure of the lecture, and the projected structure of the semester. I began to have thoughts about how I might, someday, teach an introductory linguistics lecture. I began to see this as an apprenticeship. I have had four (well, more than that—seven?) years of seeing college teaching from the student’s point of view. Now, I get to see it from a semi-teacher’s point of view.

So, I’m inaugurating a new category for posts: teaching. Linguistics, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Tags: linguistics, quakerism, teaching by Kit
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I’m there again.  Sick, again, of being here.  I’m enjoying Austin being here, but I know he’ll be leaving and, frankly, I want to leave with him.  There are a lot of things that go into this.  One which I know is contributing to my foul mood, but which I think I should discount, is the simple fact that when I am working on a software project and it feels blocked (in this case, by my inability to grok the stupid stupid world of GUIs and the particular brain-dead library I’m using, because it’s the only thing with good sound-playing support I could find), my mood gets real bad—I enter a pretty persistent funk matched only by the joy I get on the other side, when I make things work.  But in the realm of GUIs, there’s something profoundly unsatisfying about getting them to work; it’s just fiddly crap, not satisfying wrapping-your-head-around-an-algorithm stuff.

So that’s part of it.  But part of it is feeling intensely like, despite being here, going out, doing things, trying to be here in an honest fashion, and trying this for 6 months, I’m still not succeeding.  I have made beginnings of friendships, and shied back from them, or found them uninteresting—even out of the people I knew back East who are out here, I’ve seen all but one of them, managed a few times, and then, really, lost interest.

And then, on the other side, I need more singing.  I think if I had managed to keep going to Meeting, I might have enjoyed the occasional singing there, but it runs deeper than that in any case.

There’s the one thing that really gives me pause, though, and that is the fact that my job is basically awesome, and it’s hard to envision a better way to be employed*.  So… do I risk that?

(A somewhat strange realization: one of the things I am particularly missing right now is late long summer evenings on Karl’s porch singing and picking.  It’s almost bringing tears to my eyes right now.)

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* I choose my words carefully; for me, the idea of working for someone else is a little strange, since I grew up with self-employed parents doing something that they basically made up.  This seems to me the ideal.

Tags: community, computers, discontent, location, music, quakerism by Kit
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