![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Update? No, surely not!
May. 8th, 2007 06:55 pmAnd yet, yes! I update finally because I will be coming out of my unoccupied/not-happily-employed/grumpy funk. I hasten to add that I am, actually, employed, at the same bakery I've been working at since August, and I very much enjoy my job and my work. I was grumpy, however, because after I finally left CCI, I was not able to work as many hours as I wanted at the bakery, and have been feeling at loose ends. This is not helped by the fact that, although I have been applying like crazy for jobs and internships, no one seems to want me. I got as far as a telephone interview for one position (which went terribly), and a "library exam" for a really sweet library job (which I passed. I am now on a list, along with 60 other people, of applicants who "will be notified as positions become available." Hah.) However, all is well in Claraland, because in addition to applying for jobs and internships, I am also getting involved in volunteer work. In particular, I will be introducing kittens (KITTENS!!!!!!!) to preschoolers tomorrow morning, and presiding at a few kitten (KITTEN!!!!!) adoptions this month and next month. Furthermore, next week I will be going to some meetings at Planned Parenthood in San Francisco to learn about how to volunteer there. This entails everything from escorting patients to abortion appointments so they are not intimidated by fundamentalist jerks in the parking lot, to going to events and educating the public about reproductive health and the fact that Plan B does not cause abortions and send you to hell, to dressing up like birth control pills and running marathons to tell people about safe sex*. And next month I will start helping with adult literacy training through the Berkeley Public Library. You, my collective friends list (and people who read this (*coughfamilycoughcough*) will be responsible for making sure I do not flake out on these events to read science fiction.**)
Speaking, however, of science fiction, I would like to mention that my mother's friend, who lives one town over from me, has put me on to Lois MacMaster Bujold, who writes very good sci-fi/fantasy. The Curse of Chalion in particular is good, and I am putting off reading her Miles Vorkosigan books simply because I cannot quite figure out where to start. Wikipedia is not much help, although I am coming to rely on it more and more as the source of all knowledge.
I have also started reading linguistixy stuff, in preparation for graduate school***. I had great fun with Cyrus Gordon's Forgotten Scripts, a bitter account of how those ancient Mediterranean scripts and languages were decoded by great pioneers in the field who were, evidently, always being snooted and sneered at by stodgy academicians who were too stupid to recognize the genius in front of them. No, really, Cyrus, why don't you tell us how you really feel? Stephen Pinker's Words and Rules (about how regular and irregular verbs are processed in our brains) was also lots of fun, and segues nicely into George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, a description of how categories reveal the workings of the mind. I have my doubts that I'll actually finish Lakoff's book, though. His writing is really dense, and not nearly as linguistics-oriented as I had hoped from the title, which is a reference to a grammatical category in the Australian language Dyirbal. (It encompasses women, fire, and dangerous things, among others.) This sort of reading has also helped me refine my research goals, should I end up schooling myself graduately. Ancient writing systems are so cool! I remember trying to persuade my BA adviser that I should write my BA on the Glagolitic alphabet, the script that Saints Cyril and Methodius actually invented for the Slavic languages. (Cyrillic was only named in honor of Cyril; he had nothing to do with it.) My adviser kept helpfully pointing out that I knew nothing about Old Church Slavonic, the language that Glagolitic was used to write, but I was so enamored of this new script that it was hard to drop the idea of studying it. Now, however, I have studied OCS, and I think it would be way cool to research Glagolitic and what it tells us about the sound system of the various dialects of Late Common Slavic that would evolve into Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, and so on. I don't know if there's a PhD thesis in there somewhere, but I could easily see myself expanding the idea and writing about other scripts and how they are influenced or are related to each other, and how we can extrapolate from there how the sound systems of those languages behaved and interacted. I mean, this is the combination of some of my favorite things: phonology, historical linguistics, and calligraphy! How can I go wrong?
I have not just been reading non-fiction, however. I have also just finished (actually, this was quite a while ago) Henry James's The Ambassadors, which is another one of those great late James slogs that my mother cannot understand why I read. I had a great deal of fun with it, although I strongly doubt that real social interactions are so internal as he has them being. Maybe people think the things he says they think, but I strongly doubt they all play by those ridiculously subtle rules that seem to govern every social interaction. As an antidote to this style of writing, therefore, I read George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It is the epitome of the English novel, I feel: all those social classes, all those entailed estates, marriageable bachelors, girls desperate to keep from being old maids, good marriages, bad marriages, virtuous widows, vicious society dames, dark secrets which must be kept from the light--seriously, books do not get much better than this.
*This last I will not be participating in, only in part because I am not a runner.
**I put this here simply because I can't think where else it fits into my entry, which is ironic because it is about editing. I have had another response for an editing internship, and one part of it involved editing a sample text to show my prowess. And I don't believe I have ever seen such bad writing. I mean, it was dreadful in so many ways. There were spelling errors, punctuation errors, bad flow, bad everything! Even the content (which was the one thing I didn't have leave to revise) was lousy: leadership during times of change and transition. Ugh. I cleaned it up the best I could and sent it back, with a polite question as to whether this is a representative sample of the sorts of work they usually deal with. I'm hoping it's simply an example of particularly egregious writing, so that even the duds can run their spell check and feel like there's something for them to do.
***The list so far: Cornell, Amherst, Harvard, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Stanford. I'm also looking at safety-type places like NYU, but grad school isn't like college. You don't want to get bogged down in a 6-year program that's entirely optional and not what you really want to do just because the places you did want to go didn't accept you.
Speaking, however, of science fiction, I would like to mention that my mother's friend, who lives one town over from me, has put me on to Lois MacMaster Bujold, who writes very good sci-fi/fantasy. The Curse of Chalion in particular is good, and I am putting off reading her Miles Vorkosigan books simply because I cannot quite figure out where to start. Wikipedia is not much help, although I am coming to rely on it more and more as the source of all knowledge.
I have also started reading linguistixy stuff, in preparation for graduate school***. I had great fun with Cyrus Gordon's Forgotten Scripts, a bitter account of how those ancient Mediterranean scripts and languages were decoded by great pioneers in the field who were, evidently, always being snooted and sneered at by stodgy academicians who were too stupid to recognize the genius in front of them. No, really, Cyrus, why don't you tell us how you really feel? Stephen Pinker's Words and Rules (about how regular and irregular verbs are processed in our brains) was also lots of fun, and segues nicely into George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, a description of how categories reveal the workings of the mind. I have my doubts that I'll actually finish Lakoff's book, though. His writing is really dense, and not nearly as linguistics-oriented as I had hoped from the title, which is a reference to a grammatical category in the Australian language Dyirbal. (It encompasses women, fire, and dangerous things, among others.) This sort of reading has also helped me refine my research goals, should I end up schooling myself graduately. Ancient writing systems are so cool! I remember trying to persuade my BA adviser that I should write my BA on the Glagolitic alphabet, the script that Saints Cyril and Methodius actually invented for the Slavic languages. (Cyrillic was only named in honor of Cyril; he had nothing to do with it.) My adviser kept helpfully pointing out that I knew nothing about Old Church Slavonic, the language that Glagolitic was used to write, but I was so enamored of this new script that it was hard to drop the idea of studying it. Now, however, I have studied OCS, and I think it would be way cool to research Glagolitic and what it tells us about the sound system of the various dialects of Late Common Slavic that would evolve into Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, and so on. I don't know if there's a PhD thesis in there somewhere, but I could easily see myself expanding the idea and writing about other scripts and how they are influenced or are related to each other, and how we can extrapolate from there how the sound systems of those languages behaved and interacted. I mean, this is the combination of some of my favorite things: phonology, historical linguistics, and calligraphy! How can I go wrong?
I have not just been reading non-fiction, however. I have also just finished (actually, this was quite a while ago) Henry James's The Ambassadors, which is another one of those great late James slogs that my mother cannot understand why I read. I had a great deal of fun with it, although I strongly doubt that real social interactions are so internal as he has them being. Maybe people think the things he says they think, but I strongly doubt they all play by those ridiculously subtle rules that seem to govern every social interaction. As an antidote to this style of writing, therefore, I read George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It is the epitome of the English novel, I feel: all those social classes, all those entailed estates, marriageable bachelors, girls desperate to keep from being old maids, good marriages, bad marriages, virtuous widows, vicious society dames, dark secrets which must be kept from the light--seriously, books do not get much better than this.
*This last I will not be participating in, only in part because I am not a runner.
**I put this here simply because I can't think where else it fits into my entry, which is ironic because it is about editing. I have had another response for an editing internship, and one part of it involved editing a sample text to show my prowess. And I don't believe I have ever seen such bad writing. I mean, it was dreadful in so many ways. There were spelling errors, punctuation errors, bad flow, bad everything! Even the content (which was the one thing I didn't have leave to revise) was lousy: leadership during times of change and transition. Ugh. I cleaned it up the best I could and sent it back, with a polite question as to whether this is a representative sample of the sorts of work they usually deal with. I'm hoping it's simply an example of particularly egregious writing, so that even the duds can run their spell check and feel like there's something for them to do.
***The list so far: Cornell, Amherst, Harvard, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Stanford. I'm also looking at safety-type places like NYU, but grad school isn't like college. You don't want to get bogged down in a 6-year program that's entirely optional and not what you really want to do just because the places you did want to go didn't accept you.