Why xkcd is my fav comic of All Time

link is here.

No, I'm not married yet

(You may resume breathing now, Nations.)

We had a great time in South Africa. I will tell you all about it tomorrow, but right now I am tired, and kind of tired of talking about it because I just spent 3 hours on the phone with my mom telling her all about it.

I'm feeling much better having had a mental break from all the wedding stuff. It's about to hit me in the head again full force, but at least I'm rested and I've had a chance to gird my loins. or something.

Here is something to make you happy, though: we bought my wedding ring! and here it is:



White gold, filigree all around, and 21 tiny, tiny diamonds to make it sparkle. Gold and diamonds both being cheap in SA, and the awesome buying power of the English pound on our side, we got a great deal on it. And it's perfect, and exactly what i wanted.

We still haven't picked out Pirate's ring yet. That's going to be a whole 'nother project. Silly sot has no idea what he wants, just that it has to be unusual.

Also, here is the meme that Da Nator hit me with:

1. Grab the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the first 5 sentences and write them down.
4. Then invite 5 friends to do the same.

So here are mine:

"Indeed, she also accepts lines with even less regular alliteration, such as 305, which she considers to be metrically satisfactory because of its alliterative linkage with both the previous and the following lines (304 alliterates on /b/ and the final stave of 305 (besekes) echoes this; 306 alliterates on /a/ and the second stave of 305 (Arthure) anticipates this):

Thane the burelyche beryn of Bretayne the lyttyll
Counsayles Sir Arthure and of hym besekys
To ansuere the alyenes wyth austeren wordes (304-306)

Or take, for example, the couplet found at 4151-2:

He es eldare than I and ende sall we bothen
He sall ferkke be-fore and I sall come aftyre

Hamel's note to this couplet reads: 'The alliterative pattern of these two lines is aa:ax/bb:xa; no emendation is necessary.' "


Look, I'm at my computer. Where I work. The nearest book was one I'm currently using in my research, which at the moment is a metrical study of Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess." The above exerpt is from "Studies in the Metre of Alliterative Verse" by Ad Putter (my supervisor), Judith Jefferson, and Myra Stokes, c. 2007.

Tagging: Miss Melville, Annie Rhiannon, Big Dave, Michael, and Murph.

NOT a wedding post

This one's titled "Why I have the most awesomest academic supervisor in the UNIVERSE"

or "The Ostrich Effect"

I had a meeting with The Putt today. I haven't done fuck all work for months. I am behind.

I am so far behind that I'd even begun ignoring his emails. I kept telling myself "as soon as I have this awesome piece of work to show, I'll go pop in to his office." I didn't want to go in without work to show, because then he would know i'd been slacking off, but if I went in with another 20k words, all would be well.

But of course one can't write 20k words in a weekend. And so i didn't go. And kept falling further and further behind. Like a pile of dirty dishes in the sink that spills over on to the counter, you eventually think "I don't even know where to begin," and close the kitchen door. That's what I'd done on my PhD work for the past several months. Not. Good.

Finally The Putt phoned and ordered my ass into his office. Tail between legs, I went. I am sooooo glad I did. The man is wonderful.

He was grinning, and I could tell by his grin that a) he wasn't as disappointed in me as i'd feared (anger i could deal with, but letting down someone you respect the absolute worst), and b) he knew exactly what had been going through my head.

Through tearful sniffles I explained how embarassed and ashamed I was. He ordered me to stop feeling embarassed and said, "You're going to sit there and I'm going to fix you a cup of tea." Being a very gentle sort, it was incredibly comical how forcefully he said that. I couldn't help but crack a weak smile.

And then we talked business. My punishment is going to be to do some of the dirty work on his latest research. Fair enough. He's been exploring an idea in relation to alliterative verse, and he wants to see if it holds true in the more continental style of Chaucerian verse. Chaucer's Bitch to the rescue!

Oh, and I told him about the wedding and explained that wedding plans had been partly to blame for my absenteeism. His response? "That's wonderful! Getting married is far more important than a PhD, but as your supervisor I'm not allowed to tell you that. But I'm glad you've got your priorities in order. Also solves the visa problem if you need an extension. Good on ya!"

What a guy, what a guy, what a guy.

Ack!

Bad Idea! Bad Idea! Danger, danger Will Robinson! *waves arms mechanically in air*

This is so backwards I don't know where to begin. (I was going to post this on QE, but I just wrote a new post there, so I'll stick it here instead.)

More faith schools are NOT the answer! This is the government passing off it's responsibility to provide decent education. Fix the bloody schools, you cowards, instead of turning them over to the hands of people who will use them to confuse science and religion in the minds of young people and indoctrinate them into silly ideologies they can use as justifications for killing each other later.

Help me, Obi-Wan Dawkins; you're my only hope!

God help the next generation

i know i promised you all that when i got back stateside i would blog all the interesting tidbits of my trip to europe. instead, i'm going to take a page out of herebe's book and ignore that promise for an indefinate period of time while i keep you in suspense and blog about irrelevant and unrelated crap.

first, my ph.d. i just got an email from my future advisor who loved my latest research proposal, and is now just waiting for the final grade of my ma dissertation. thank god i'm not the stressful type, or i'd have bleeding ulcers by now.

second, the haircut. mom says it "looks a bit dykey," but since i don't consider that an insult, and since there isn't a man in a thousand mile radius that i would waste even 15 minutes of my life with, i don't really give a shit.

finally, the job. god help the next generation: i'm a teacher. ok, just a substitute teacher. but when my old honors brit lit teacher found out i needed a temp job, she sent me straight to the high school office to register as a sub. she'll be gone for 3 days this december, and there's no one on the current sub list who can actually teach an english class. mostly all the subs do is hand out busy work and make sure the little angels don't kill each other, or if it's a really good sub, destroy any school property. I, on the other hand, will be teaching. Mary Ellen Miller declared me "one of the best students I've ever had in my 21 years of teaching," and promised that she would make all the other English faculty request me if they get sick. Now that my ego's been stroked the rest of me is wanting a turn.

moment of truth

"The popularity of the new genres spawned or accelerated certain linguistic modifications. An upsurge in the number and frequency of intensifiers has been linked to the genres of fabliaux and satire. This may be a function of one of the major characteristics of these genres: exaggeration. Absurdity requires a certain degree of overstatement, for which intensifiers are always extremely useful."

*sigh* I love me.

getting punchy

after having reformatted my dissertation more times than a bonobo gets laid in year, i'm finally in the home stretch. after putting in a 14-hour day yesterday i re-titled one of my chapter headings, "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right: Defining Middle English and the Middle Ages." This morning when reality dragged me from my bed kicking and screaming I was forced to admit the likelyhood that whichever decrepit, humorless academic winds up grading it won't get the reference and will dock me for my lack of professionalism. bastards. but they can't stop me from referring to the massive phonological shift of the 13th and 14th centuries as the Great Vowel Movement.

The guns... they've stopped!

Location: Almost there...
Mission: Distinction on my MA dissertation
Strategy: Turn off targeting computer, close my eyes, pray like hell the Force is with me, and put that goddamn fucking womp rat in its place.

The silence is eerie, Harrison Ford is not going to bale my ass out, and I am alone in the universe. I have 10 days left. Almost there...



ps. Happy Anniversary, mom and dad! I hope that when I've been married for 32 years I'm still as horney as you two.

Damn you, Jane Austen

I have a confession to make. I got distracted from my work last night by a Jane Austen novel. I told myself “just one chapter, and then back to work.” Yeah, right. Four hours, two teabags, and jar of Nutella later I was weeping and breathless as I read the words in Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne, “You pierce my soul.” Yes, I know that Austen’s novels are formulaic. They all have the same 8 characters, the same plot twists, and the same endings. But Christ, it’s a good formula. I fell asleep last night dreaming that Edward Ferrars, Mr. Darcy, and Fredrick Wentworth would all knock on my door at the same moment, simultaneously professing, in elegant, early 19th C. rhetoric, their undying devotion to my figure, sensibility, and character. And I awoke this morning to a demanding cat with a foot-fetish, a torrential down-pour, and the knowledge that my dissertation is due in, um, 20 days?, and I wasted all last night fantasizing about useless, rich, well-spoken gentlemen. Crap. Back to work.

The Final Countdown

With only 24 days remaining until my MA dissertation is due, I stumbled last night onto an article on the study of literary stylistics. Now, I’ve been fairly thorough in my research, and for the last 6 months I’ve been reading everything I could get my hands on regarding the relationship between language and literature, particularly the Medieval. And somehow, SOMEHOW, I’ve completely missed the very existence of an entire (albeit obscure) academic discipline which is just that—the relationship between a work of literature and the language in which it is written. And it’s called stylistics.

The article, dated 1976, provided some basic definitions and broke down the discipline into subcategories. To my credit (I just love tooting my own horn), I had managed to construct my diss. utilizing almost the exact same disciplinary divisions; divisions I created having spent 6 months reading superfluous and barely relevant material. What the article did do, in addition to giving me a dozen new avenues to explore, was to provide me with a whole new set of nomenclature for my work. I knew before what I wanted to say, and now I have the words to say it.

I’m completely pumped up about my work, I re-wrote my entire Ph.D. research proposal in my head at 2:30 this morning (and damn, what a doozy!), and I’ve got 24 days left for the dissertation. It’s a sprint to the finish. I’m into the last 500m, my quads are on fire, my vision is blurry, and my throat feels like I’m breathing hydrochloric acid. I was down by a length at the half-way, but I’m coming back and rowing through. I’m gonna lay the field to waste. As Herebe says, “game on.”