My awesomeness on the first day of school

So today was the first day of my second semester of graduate school. Last semester was really really hard, and that was partly my own fault for not being as dedicated and motivated and hard-working as I should have been. This semester I vowed I would do better. I would come to class every day prepared and on time--which is why I was fifteen minutes late for my first class today and didn't even have a notebook with me. Or my textbook. Or, really, anything.

The story goes like this:

I've been sick all break, and I'm still recovering, so I slept in until a little after 9 this morning. I didn't have class until 11, so I figured I had plenty of time. I sat around for awhile watching my nieces dance and talking to my sister.

Eventually I took a shower.

By the time I got out, it was after 10. Then I showed my brother-in-law some stuff on my laptop since he wanted to use it while I was gone to class.

Then I did my hair and my make-up. 10:20. Time to be out the door (it's a 20 minute drive from my house to campus). I looked around my room for notebooks or paper or something to take to class to write on, but all I could find was a small yellow journal I got for Christmas. I threw it in my bag with my wallet. I looked for some breakfast, and I was fortunate enough to find a banana I could eat on the way. 10:30. I was out the door and off down the snowy streets of Orem.

I got to campus and drove around for awhile looking for a parking space (apparently a lot of people come the first day). Finally, I found a student walking to his car and stalked him to his parking space. I was really lucky to get it, too, because about ten other cars had just given up on that row of parking stalls before I got there.

Once parked and out of the car, I checked my schedule to find out where my class was, and here I made my fatal mistake: I assumed that my class (like all of my previous classes) was in the JFSB, so I only checked the room number, 1107. I thought it was a little weird that the classroom was on the first floor of the JFSB when most classes are in the basement, but whatever.

When I got to the JFSB, I wandered up and down the halls of the first floor looking for room 1107. But the numbers kept skipping, and there was a long row of windows where 1107 should have been. I found a map of the first floor next to the restrooms. I located 1107 on the map, but when I went down the hall, I still couldn't find it. Back at the map, I decided that 1107 had to be inside suite 1100, which was actually a set of classrooms and offices. Suite 1100 was the Family Life Sciences lab, so it really didn't make any sense. I decided to give it a try anyway--it was already 11:10. I entered the Family Life Sciences lab, walked down the hall, and found the missing rooms 1103, 1105, and, at last, 1107--which turned out to be a restroom.

At this point I decided to check my schedule again. I discovered that my class was indeed in 1107, but not in the JFSB, instead it was in the JKB (formerly the JKHB), next door.

I felt like such a freshman, misreading my schedule and going to the wrong building--although while I was in the JFSB I did assist another person in finding their classroom, so daily service points, I guess the trip wasn't a total bust--still, I've been going to that school for how many years now, I pull a stunt like that?

Needless to say, I was very late. I entered class in the middle of introductions--that obnoxious part where everyone says where they're from and what their major is--and had to stumble over everyone else's stuff to get down the aisle to my seat. One guy actually had to move his baby out of the way for me. It was fun.

At the end of class, we were supposed to turn in a sheet of paper with a bunch of lame information about ourselves like hobbies and career plans. I wrote down my information in the yellow journal I had brought because it was the only paper I had, but since it wasn't spiral-bound, and the paper was actually meant to stay in the journal, I had a very difficult time tearing it out. I considered begging a sheet of traditional, lined notebook paper off one of my classmates, but I thought they might all be annoyed with me since I was so late and I trampled all over their stuff to get to my seat and then I sniffled and coughed through class because I'm still a little sick. I turned in my sad, ripped, unlined, half-size sheet of journal paper and left.

My second class was immediately after my first class, and it was in the basement of the JFSB, and I was on time. But then the professor gave us a pre-test. It was specified on the test that it was alright if we didn't know any of the answers. I didn't know any of the answers.

I listened to the pencils and pens of everyone around me writing. Quickly. And occasionally I dared to glance sidways at my neighbors' papers just to see how much they actually knew. They knew a lot. Their papers were filled with potentially intelligent answers; my paper had my name on it. I stared at my paper until the professor said we could leave when we were finished. I left. I was the first. Other people kept writing.

So another semester, another good start. Looking forward to the awesome days ahead.

Self-Control:

It's official, I have none.

Even though I had a million hours worth of studying I should have done this weekend (which for me includes Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday), I still found time to

1. Go to the store . . . three times.
2. Beat my high score on Mahjong--which took a lot of tries because I had a very high score.
3. Play two or three hours of Scramble of Facebook. (Anyone want to play me?)
4. Watch a new made-for-tv movie on the Hallmark channel (totally cheesy), most of The Cheetah Girls: One World (I don't even like the Cheetah Girls), two new episodes of Disney channel shows, a rerun of Gilmore Girls, and at least one rerun of Seventh Heaven (although it might have been more).
5. Sleep in past 9 every day except Sunday--I have church at 9:30.

Of course, I refer to everything listed above as "breaks" from studying, but some days it's more like I study during my breaks from totally wasted leisure time.

So, in an effort to reduce my "breaktime" options--and therefore reduce my break time?--I removed Mahjong from my computer. I hope don't have to resort to removing the Scramble app from my Facebook page because I'm really good at Scramble, and I enjoy beating everyone I know at something. And I don't really have any control over the existence of the television (and it's many fascinating cable channels) in my home. So I'm just going to have to learn not to touch that oh-so-seductive remote during study hours--good luck to me on that.

I'm hoping that at some point in my life I will become a dedicated student, or really a dedicated anything. But for now, I'm just going get some sleep and re-align my priorities tomorrow.

Curse of the Pink Shirt

Many years ago (like back in the Southridge days), I had favorite pink, polyester shirt that I wore frequently. And although I really loved the shirt, I noticed that weird things happened when I wore pink, as opposed to other colors. More people talked to me--classmates, random strangers--and when I walked through the quad and the Wilk, I was targeted more by the people handing out flyers and promoting . . . stuff. The difference between the number of flyers I received on pink shirt days versus other color days was disturbing. And I concluded that something about the pink shirt made me seem more approachable--not always my goal in life.

Fast forward to today:

I went to the Cougareat to finish my reading assignment for my next class. I chose the Cougareat because I wanted to be able sit at an actual table and eat while I studied--which isn't possible in most campus study areas. However, since it was 11:00 on Thursday (opposite the Tuesday devotional), the Cougareat was particularly busy. Hoping for some level of seclusion, I chose a small table against the wall on the furthest end of the seating area.

Twenty minutes into to my reading, a guy I've never seen before, asked if he could sit at my table. Of course, I was fine with that. I could see the tables were pretty well full, and I don't care if someone else wants to quietly eat their sandwich at the same table as me.

Unfortanately, this particular person did not eat his sandwich quietly. He asked me what book I was reading. Then he asked about my field of study. Then, of course, I felt obligated to ask him about his life. I tried to return to my book--Language Universals and Linguistic Typology--several times, but Stan, the senior in manufacturing engineering from Colorado who will be working in Seattle for Boeing when he graduates in December, just kept the conversation going. Don't get me wrong, he was a very nice person, and we could probably be friends, but I really needed to finish my reading assignment for my next class.

When I got to class, I was explaining to my classmates why I didn't finish the reading, and I glanced down and realized I was wearing a pink shirt--not the bright polyester one from before, obviously, this one is cotton, baby pink. But pink, nonetheless. And pink is the cursed color when you don't want to make friends. Pink is approachable.

So next time I know I need to study between classes, I will choose my wardrobe more carefully.

School Started Last Tuesday

And although I spent nearly my entire Saturday diligently working on homework, I will be up very late tonight (probably into the early morning hours) finishing assignments for tomorrow.

Yay for graduate school.

(The preferred spelling is actually yea, but so many people confuse yea with yeah that I often choose the more colloquial spellings of yay and ya. And the scriptural yea means something completely different and further adds to the confusion--just in case anyone was questioning my knowledge of the English language. In addition, since the yay spelling resembles the word hooray, it further suits this particular usage.)

Big Sigh of Relief

I'm starting a graduate program in linguistics one month from tomorrow. As most of you know, I did my undergraduate in English, which is a little bit different. And since it's been awhile since I took a linguistics class--or any class for that matter--I decided I might want to study up a little before school.

So back in about May, I pulled out all my old linguistics books and decided to start reviewing the textbook from one of my favorite courses, History of the English Language. The book is called A Biography of the English Language by C M Millward.

Now the author's name, "Millward," should have tipped me off to something because Millward just sounds like a really old, stuffy-type linguist, the kind with the monotone voice, she probably has the same haircut she wore in the sixties. Millward is also probably socially awkward since she spent all her time alone in her room studying runes and Old English pronunciation. She has probably read Beowulf aloud. To herself.

And to others--which is worse.

(There are actually a lot of "interesting" people in the linguistics world, and sometimes when I meet them, I question whether I really belong in this field. So much more comfortable with the English crowd.)

Now if I didn't take a hint from the author's name, I should have at least noticed the pale, split-pea-soup cover of the book. It doesn't exactly scream, "Read me! I'm fun!" (I would post an actual picture of the book here, but you would fall asleep looking at it.) Inside the book there are about five maps/diagrams and the rest is text. No pictures. No color. Just big chunks of text. Text that goes on and on and on forever.

I tried really hard to read A Biography of the English Language, but, frankly, I was bored out of my mind. And I had no idea what it was talking about. And I quit reading it, and ignored my linguistics studying for awhile.

But I was a little concerned about the fact that I am starting a graduate program in linguistics and the linguistics book I tried to read was pretty much death. I mean it would be at least slightly inconvenient to finally start graduate school and discover I don't even like subject.

However, a few months after my failed reading attempts, when the book was buried deep under a pile of clean/dirty clothes, I remembered a very important fact from my History of the English Language class: We didn't use the book.

We had the book, but we didn't actually use it very often. Our assignments and tests were lecture-based, and the lectures were really interesting.

With that wonderful idea in mind, I pulled out a different linguistics textbook earlier this week. Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. This textbook has not one, but four authors, all with interesting, or at least normal-person-sounding names like Adrian Akmajian and Ann K Farmer. I could be friends with them. The cover is bright yellow with blue and yellow designs on it. It's a pretty happy textbook. Many graphs and diagrams, some of which could almost be considered pictures. Still no color inside, but the brightness of the cover makes up for it.

And the really good news:

I started reading the book, and I love it. Chapter 2, "Morphology," is so fascinating. I'm actually looking forward to the exercises at the end of the chapter. I'm pretty sure I'm going to do awesome on them because I totally get this stuff. I'm actually registered for a morphology class this fall, and now I really excited for it.

So I really do like linguistics, and I really can study linguistics in graduate school.

Good to know.