nor so wide as a church door

This is going to seem very peculiar and/or suspicious in light of my last post, but I have taken the first steps on the rocky road to dropping my thesis.

Actually, I think writing that post was part of what prompted me to spend yesterday evening, and this morning, taking a long, hard look at where exactly my thesis is, and where it's going; and it didn't look good. I have a lot of work left to do, and not a lot of time to do it. If it were a matter of effort, yeah, I'll admit I would have trouble mustering the energy to really try; but I don't actually even think it's about needing to up my level of effort anymore, it just literally can't be done in the time allotted.

I e-mailed the Dean of the HCol this morning to ask him what would happen if I came to the conclusion that I could not finish my thesis; he didn't really answer that question directly, just told me to come see him. I just finished a long, teary phone call to my mother that helped me sort out a lot of how I'm feeling about it - my mother is awesome, I totally don't deserve her, but don't tell her I said that - and shot off an e-mail to the Dean's assistant to set up an appointment.

... I have to say, I feel awfully relieved. I think I do still want to work through my data, finish coding and put it through Goldvarb and everything, just because I've put too much time and work in to not learn what I went into this to find out; but it'll be a big load off my mind, not trying to force myself to finish the unfinishable. I know this is both nerdy and massively presumptuous, but I feel sort of like I'm Sisyphus, and I just got permission to let go of that stupid rock and stop worrying about it.

Now, to study for that Hearing Rehab exam I have this afternoon. \o?

There was some unexpected fail on the comics page of the paper this morning - at least, I think it was fail. Our local paper prints Ann Landers (well, the successor thereto, Annie's Mailbox) in amidst the comics, and it had a letter today from a man railing about how ridiculous it is for him to be expected to keep his eyes to himself when women wear slutty tight, low-cut, attractive clothes to work.

And the columnists agreed with him.

( The text of their reply reads: Some women think tight, low-cut clothing is attractive. Some women tease ... )

Usually, I find skimming Annie's Mailbox while I eat breakfast relatively pleasant; sometimes, they get incredibly stupid letters, and I enjoy watching the writers who've taken over deliver impeccably polite smackdowns. So it was pretty definitely unpleasant to finish this guy's screed (which included gems like "Why do young women dress to appear cheap and slutty? ... They convey a message of sexual availability. Yet if I notice, it must be because I'm ogling young girls, and shame on me," and "Women learn early on what gets a man's attention, but heaven help us if we look too long or respond in any way"), rolling my eyes the whole way, and then hit a reply like that.

( Further nattering. )

I'm not sure I'm being very articulate about this, because it's boggling me so much to be disagreeing so intensely with columnists whom I usually find at least moderately sensible. Maybe I'm just reading this all wrong? I don't know.

Anyway. In non-faily news, I have my final exam for Syntax to finish by tomorrow evening. Sadly, the class never really did pick up the way I was hoping; on the plus side, it filled a requirement, and at least it wasn't so difficult that it disrupted my thesis work. That would've sucked.

Speaking of my thesis: I did another interview this afternoon, at one o'clock, which was very long - we almost ran over the capacity of the memory chip in my digital recorder - and very satisfying. It makes up for the one I did on Monday; I forgot the recorder entirely at that one, and was too embarrassed to say so. Fortunately, I managed to contrive an excuse to talk to Monday's subjects again tomorrow, so I may still be able to get a decent speech sample from them. (Rescheduling that? One of the worst phonecalls of my life. Augh.) Also on the good side, it's possible that M, J, and K fit the criteria for interviewees - it would be very easy for me to interview them, I would get three interviews which would definitely be long enough (which is very much of the good), and it would be great to get some younger subjects, since my sample so far is not very diverse in terms of age.

So. Right. Syntax exam.

First, a little lyrics spam - I have memorized this song, and have been singing it to myself in the car on the way to and from work for the past couple of weeks. I figure I might as well preserve it for myself, in case I ever forget it.

( Lyrics to The Laughlin Boy. )

There's a chorus - listen to me, children, well, I wouldn't tell a lie - but I'm not super-fond of it, and also I don't remember between which verses it repeats, so. I'm fond of this song partly because it's the only one I can think of written in this story-of-a-hero kind of way about a conscientious objector, and partly because Tracy Grammer's voice is fine. I have got to get my hands on some more of her music, because, damn. There's something about the tone quality of her voice that I just love.

The second ep of Warehouse 13 was ( overall probably not as good as the pilot - teeny spoilers, probably no one cares. ) I think it's possible that they're trying a little too hard to be ~original~; I want to say, like, guys, it is srsly okay if you pick well-known or obvious or predictable artifacts, I am here for partner dynamics and banter. Still, I can't convince myself to drop it; I have already written snippets of ten (TEN! AUGH) Cliché-Bingo-based fics about Pete and Myka, and at least five more are trying to get out. My life is so hard.

BURN NOTICE. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. That is pretty much all I have to say about that. I know it's maybe a little silly, but I kind of love the ones where Michael wins people over through his noble refusal to leave them behind/let them get hurt/what-have-you - and also I am a sucker for Sam and Fi coming to the rescue. And his mom, OMG ♥. Madeline is MADE OF AWESOME. \o/ If I love this show any harder, I'm going to break something.

Tonight is Harry Potter Night, pretty much; my friends and I are all getting together to see HP6 this evening ... in costume, because we are all GINORMOUS DORKS. M is going to be Professor Trelawney, with scarves and bracelets and big glasses; J is going to be Tonks - she is for serious dedicated, she will be dying her hair pink; K is going to be Luna, because she pretty much is anyway; and Ka is probably going to be Narcissa Malfoy, as she is tall and pointy and blond. (Q is in Boston, doing an internship.) I was briefly contemplating being McGonagall, as I have a plaid nightgown (she totally had a tartan dressing gown on for about a page of OotP, okay, it is a TTLY VALID COSTUME), but then I had an apostrophe epiphany, and decided to be Irma Pince instead. I can totally rock a stern librarian outfit. And also I'll feel like not too much of a weirdo if nobody else besides us is dressed up, which is something I could probably not pull off in the nightgown.

In thesis news, I finally got the whole IRB thing sorted out, and made my first four calls to prospective interviewees today; I've got one set up for next Wednesday, and left three messages. \o/!

Today was nerdy fun pretty much from start to finish. I got up early to feed the pets - two dogs, two cats - as promised, only to find that my mother was already awake, and had pretty much done everything. Turns out the loose dog and the more active of the cats had been waking her up intermittently for an hour or two.

So I ended up lounging around for a while reading back issues of ... Asimov's, I think it was, a little sci-fi short story magazine; there were a few disturbing stories, a few stories I'm not sure I totally understood, and a few stories I liked, which is pretty par for the course, as far as me and short stories go.

And then I got up and mixed up some sugar water for the hummingbird feeders, before putting them out. My mom put out some seedlings on the porch to get some sun before she left for work; I checked on them, and ended up putting a skirt - yes, when I say that, I actually mean a piece of clothing, this is not some kind of fancy horticultural terminology - over them, because they weren't quite used to full sun and they got a little wilty.

And then I proofread a hundred pages of text for Project Gutenberg. :D Aside from the obvious lure of proofreading in general - I got to fix typos! And formatting! It was like heaven! - the pieces of text themselves were actually really interesting. I did a few pages from a book about a young girl trying to become a dancer; another, a very sharp, dryly funny one, about cross-examination strategies in the courtroom; an old children's book about the life of Jesus, including a lavish description of the beauty of "Magdalen" and her "courtezan" lifestyle that made me think of Inara; and another one that seemed to be pretty much a collection of discussions and reviews of equipment for helping gamblers cheat at cards. And when I say reviews, I mean that some of the pages boiled down to "A+++++++++ WOULD CHEAT WITH AGAIN". That one was pretty awesome.

There was also some fail, natch - there was another relatively old children's book about some soldiers attached to an operation to lay railroad through the Rockies, and the part I proofread was the part where they get chased by those horrible savage murderous Indians, who are bloodthirstily persistent in their attempts to take the scalps of innocent white men. ... Yeah. I think it may have struck an especially unpleasant note with me because of MammothFail.

And then, after I decided that I should probably not do more than 100 pages a day, my recording thingy, the one I order because I'm going to need it for my thesis research, arrived! \o/ Whole new avenues of distraction were opened! I don't have much of a voice to speak of, but I do like to sing, so I took the opportunity and recorded some (rather terrible) renditions of songs that I know but do not actually have - ones I learned in chorus, stuff like that. Oh, and the Mingulay Boat Song; I learned that one in elementary school, and became very used to hearing it in soft, sweet, 4th-grade girls' voices, before discovering that most of the professional recordings of it are sung by big growly men. This is a very scarring situation to be in, so obviously I needed a nice high-pitched version to keep me sane.

All told, today was kind of awesome. Shiny.

MY PROPOSAL GOT ACCEPTED! \o/ \o/ \o/ \o/ \o/

... Which means I definitely have to go to the library to ask scary people scary questions about recording equipment, and also my weekends over the summer are pretty much written off to asking even more scary people to talk so I can record them, and AUGH. But if it hadn't gotten accepted, things would undoubtedly be even worse. :D

I actually got the e-mail much, much earlier this afternoon, but then I had to go to my Astronomy final - fifty or sixty multiple-choice questions, it was somewhat less than terrifying - and then I took a celebratory nap that ended up being, um, four hours long. Hahahaoops.

Now to introduce my roommate to the wonders of Firefly. I hooked both of my suitemates into watching it, and got one of them to buy both the series and the Big Damn Movie; my last roommate watched it a little, too, although I didn't get the chance to transform her into a proper fangirl. My roommate this semester - a girl I didn't know at all, to replace the girl I'd been living with for the previous year and a half because she was going abroad, and thus VERY SCARY - has, it turns out, seen the BDM, but not Firefly. I cannot fathom this. Thus, now that both of our exams are over: time to fix that!

Kind of a lot, actually, considering how teeny an anecdote it is. See, we had these sheets handed out to us at the beginning of the year that we were meant to use to list a bunch of our favorite things and then pin to our doors; it was supposed to help us all bond. All it actually did was teach me that somebody across the hall thinks that Patrick Dempsey is their favorite actor even though they can't spell his name right, but points for effort on the RA's part.

There's a slot for favorite boardgame, and as I was going down the hall last night to get more water from the water fountain (you don't drink what comes out of the taps in our rooms. You just don't) I caught sight of the answer of the person across the hall, which made me think fondly of my own answer - Sequence, as it happens, for one very particular reason: it has become the boardgame of choice for my meet-ups with my friends from home. M, who is a peculiar combination of adept and inept when it comes to social situations - she doesn't have my paralyzing fear of ordering things or talking to people in stores, but she can sometimes be very hard to have a normal conversation with - and is very, very smart; J, who may not match up to M when it comes to academics, but has a way of wholeheartedly living her life that's kind of unintentionally charming; K, who is very nearly Luna Lovegood made manifest; and Q, who laughs at everything except her schoolwork, which she takes dead seriously. They're all a year younger than I am - I made friends with them relatively recently, during a period when I was slowly losing all the friends I had in my own grade to outside circumstances, and now they're my best friends in the world.

And I swear to god, I nearly started crying right there in the hallway. Okay, yes, I am a big squishyface; the end of HP:GoF has made me cry each of the, oh, three or four times I've watched it. But I do not usually start crying randomly in the hall! I had no idea that missing people could sneak up on you like that. I thought about it later while I was trying to get to sleep, and I almost started crying again. Good thing I only have to wait 'til Wednesday to get home for the summer. Yikes.

Fortunately, I have another anecdote, more cheerful, to balance that one out. I woke up this morning with the tail end of a dream of myself singing a song still in my head. Lyrics shortly, because it is kind of an awesome song, but there is ( also backstory here. )

The first time I heard the Beatles actually singing ... well, one of their own songs, I was shocked. Shocked! Who were these peculiar people singing King's Singers songs, and why, god, why was their tone quality so wretched? To this day, I have trouble listening to the actual Beatles, because all I can think is, "sweet god, your tone quality is like a cheese grater, where's my King's Singers playlist?" ... Elitist music-listener is elitist. :D

The song I dreamed of myself singing was not one of the Beatles', although it may have been preceded by listening to one; I don't know, my dream memory's pretty fuzzy after an hour and change. It was this one, which has been covered by everybody and their mother since it was composed in the late 1930s, based off of a poem by Jane Brown Thompson:

( Lyrics! )

Lovely song, both sad and a little funny, which is usually the sort I find the most wrenching. And, of course, to my mind, the King's Singers version is the REAL version. It's the one I heard first, THAT MAKES IT REAL.

Now, to finish up the thesis proposal revisions, and then I can e-mail my advisor to make sure I'll be able to get her to sign a physical copy before tomorrow afternoon. *crosses fingers*

*sigh* At least I had Sunday to prepare myself for it getting all warm again. Bleck.

The first half of my gym final - yes, that's right, my final exam in gym - was this morning; it involved ... well, in essence, it involved proving that I could walk nine laps around a track. The more detailed explanation: walking nine laps, aka a mile, in thirteen minutes garnered you ten points; walking nine laps in over thirteen minutes got you five. Now, presumably, the gym teacher was asking for some kind of good-faith effort no matter what, but in a literal sense, the terms of the exam pretty much say that you could take the entire class period to walk nine laps, and you would still get five points.

... \o/!

Needless to say, I got five points. I'm not sure it actually matters that much, since my understanding is that the final is worth ten points total, and you can earn the full ten points on either half; I probably could have skipped today's class and only gone tomorrow, and gotten ten points. That is, if I weren't so compulsive about academics. I was never much for rule-breaking, but I was convinced by a friend to skip class once in middle school, and it scarred me forever; I'm pretty sure I totally baffled the principal, I got sent to her office for it and immediately burst into tears, vowing never ever to do it again if only they wouldn't be mad at me! Even now, in college, where attendance isn't even taken in the vast majority of my classes, I feel wrong and dirty and wrong when I skip.

Anyway. That was obviously a super fun time. I am SO GOOD at walking in circles, it's crazy. :D

I fixed up the first half of my thesis proposal, as my advisor and I agreed I would do for today; I just sent her an e-mail asking whether I should come by with the revised pages in person or just e-mail them to her, and am currently waiting with bated breath for a response. Guess which option I'm hoping she picks!

Either way, this afternoon's going to be mostly fixing up the now-complete first draft of my paper on Saramaccan, and studying for my Literature exam.

... Sometimes I just cannot handle the raging excitement that is my life.

ETA: YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Victory is mine, victory is mine; great day in the morning, victory is mine! [/West Wing] \o/ My advisor picked e-mail, which means no meeting, which means no pounding heart, no overwhelming and unreasonable terror, no facing anybody I respect in person and watching them tell me what I did wrong. AWESOME.