Tag: linguistics

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Personal Update

Feeling 21 (Summer Update!)

playing guitar on a stage

Gee whiz. It’s probably time for another update. Life sneaks up on you sometimes—it’s been a whole year since I’ve been back in the United States, and last month I hit the ripe old age of 21, which means I’m officially overage in all respects except health insurance and rental cars.

My oven blew up last month. It was an adequately showy coronation of my adulthood. One moment, I was studying in my room while an innocuous pan of fish filets and crescent rolls was baking, and the next—BANG! I ran out to the kitchen to see blue and orange flames bursting from the control panel of the oven. I went for the fire extinguisher (not the first time that has happened with this oven), but fortunately the flames went out before I got to use it. The fire did leave a nice black spot on our wall. I spent the night on a friend’s couch thanks to the noxious odor that the explosion released, and we luckily got a new oven from management within the week.

I’m still at BYU studying linguistics, which will probably be the case for a while. Most of my time is spent on school and work right now. Over spring term I took Japanese and grammar, which was a hefty load for the abbreviated term, but I survived Japanese and ended up getting hired on as a TA for grammar starting in the fall. This summer term I’ve only been in Japanese 202, which has honestly been enough of a handful by itself. I definitely underestimated how difficult Japanese would be, and I’m a little scared of 301 in the fall. I’ve also been working a few research jobs in addition to my desk job of linguistics secretary: I finished my religion project, edited a couple papers for a professor, and have been helping another professor in the department with a paper on Danish phonetics/phonology.

For the last couple weeks I’ve also been participating in a workshop to learn how to rate language proficiency on the ACTFL scale. It’s also been assigning homework, but I’ve enjoyed learning about the factors that the ratings are based on and practice doing some proficiency interviews myself; there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than I’d have thought. I’m still trying to find out what niche in linguistics I want to specialize in, so I’m glad I could get a taste of the assessment side.

Oh, and I joined a Celtic folk band! It turns out there’s plenty of cool musicians hiding in Provo if you know where to look. The conductor/professor is Mark Geslison, who’s incredibly fun and talented, and he also happens to be the brother-in-law of some of my favorite people in Denmark. All of the members have such vibrant personalities, and I definitely feel unqualified to be playing with them. But I reckon that feeling is always a part of being involved in music or any performing art, and ultimately I’m just happy to be there.

I also started reading Harry Potter again, which is a trap. You can’t read one of those books without reading the whole series. I wish I knew what it was that makes Rowling’s writing so engaging. I’ve got opinions though. Book Ginny is vastly superior to Movie Ginny and is honestly magnetic. And the fifth movie should not have cut the scene at the end where Harry smashes Dumbledore’s office.

No recap is complete without quotes from the semester. In the spirit of the @BYUoverheard Instagram account, there’s a fair number of overheard quotes here from anonymous strangers. Enjoy.

"And then someone makes you listen to stuff you don't normally listen to...and now I'm quite partial to digeridoo music."
"If I had a nickel for every time I've made out in the MARB, I'd have more than a few nickels."
"He's a guy. He's not a boy, he's not a man, he's a guy."
"I’m a simple woman; I like collocates and pina coladas." –Auna, Greek Goddess of Linguistics and Serial Killers
"Pax Mongolica: after the Mongols killed everyone, there was peace." –Gross oversimplification of history, courtesy of Brandon
"I'm going to do a literature review on funeral potatoes." –Ben, the third mandolinist in a row
"That joke just nailed me in the coffin. Wait" –Sals
"I’m single as an…individually wrapped cookie."

And this overheard exchange on the ground floor of the library:
"Is this floor number three?"
"Yeah."
"Why on God’s green earth is this floor number three?"

So there’s a lengthy update on where I’ve been for the last couple months. As always, I’m so grateful for my friends and family and all the people who make this journey worth taking. ∎

Categories
Personal Update

Free Financial Advice from Eric and His Parents

Image credit: Maria Orlov on Pexels

Here’s a less serious post today. And at risk of this becoming a public dream journal (see this post from a few months ago), here’s the traumatic tale of an ill-fated trip through Copenhagen.

So there I was, driving my car down the crowded Danish streets. The thing about European road design is that they really like roundabouts. The Freudian unconscious within me recognized that fact, but failed to remember that Denmark is flatter than Amsterdam in a Belgian waffle iron, and so I found myself careening down a big-city hill as steep as any you’ll find in Seattle, but with roundabouts strung down the middle of the entire hill.

Now, anyone who’s played Mario Kart knows that you can’t go around a roundabout when there’s a perfectly good path over the middle of the roundabout–and when you’re going seventy miles an hour, there isn’t much choice either way. What followed was a harrowing roller coaster ride. I survived; the car survived; I looked around for police officers; there were none; I drove away scot-free, shaking in my sleeping bones.

Or so I thought, until a ticket for $77,000 from the Danish police showed up in my mailbox. My heart sank. Sure, I’d damaged some city property in my hasty driving, but this was utter financial ruin. I went to my parents, ready to beg for financial assistance, and explained my plight. Ever the pragmatist, my dad offered, “Well, it looks like you’re either going to have to get a job that pays more, or start spending less.” I awoke with bankruptcy pounding in my ears.

So there’s the free financial advice. You can consider that a legal endorsement and everything.

What’s new with me? Well, I’m still in school, on track for a December 2023 graduation with a BA in Linguistics (so far so good). Beyond that, the details are a little fuzzy. I plan on eventually going into academia, and I’ve been taking coursework in English teaching this semester in hopes of getting some practical skills and a background in second language acquisition in addition to just the liberal arts degree. My summer plans are still up in the air. I’ll also be moving apartments in the fall, which is always a gamble, but I enjoy the feeling of starting fresh in a new place.

I’ve been working on a couple songs that I hope to release pretty soon, though there never seems to be enough time to go around. It’s midterm season, which is no fun to write about, but does take up a good deal of time. I hope it all makes me a better teacher one day. ∎

Categories
Personal Update

Beyond My Wildest Dreams

Merry Christmas everyone! The last week or two have been quite relaxed. I’m grateful I could finally slow down and take a break, reflect, and spend time with family.

Frankly, I’ve been a lot busier in the nights than in my waking moments. I think the saying “beyond my wildest dreams” is a bit of a misnomer—the things I hope for are really quite different from what I actually dream about. Honestly, I don’t know where some of that stuff comes from. Among other things, I rebuilt a house that had been turned upside down piece by piece, failed the biology class I had registered for and then forgotten about, and (particularly jarringly) kissed and got violently karate’d by the same girl on almost consecutive nights.

The other night I was sitting in a church service, and when it was time for the musical number, the musicians got up on the rostrum and started playing “I Melt With You” by Modern English (which, for the record, sounded exactly the same as the album version.) I looked around at the other members of the congregation to see if anyone was going to say anything, but everyone just sat on their pews and listened as if it were completely normal, so I did the same, and started enjoying it. Then an older woman in front of me turned around and said that this kind of music was very inappropriate for a church meeting. I didn’t want to offend the musicians, but I also didn’t want to offend her, so I just sat there uncomfortably until I woke up.

Another night, I waited after class to talk to my Japanese professor because he hadn’t understood something about English stress patterns. (In real life, this man is far more qualified than I am.) I explained that English typically used right-originating trochaic stress (I’m not sure if that’s actually true), and he said, “But what about three-syllable words that have stress on the first syllable?” and I thought about it and replied, “Those must be the words that are descended from Native American languages.” Obviously. That class had been at 9:00 AM for some reason, and I had to go to English Teaching at 10:00, but on the way there, I ran into a teacher who asked me why I was taking syntax from the other professor (this was actually my high school biology teacher), and I came up with an excuse that I had to scan the textbook—which I then had to do, so I was even more late for my 10 AM. I woke up before getting there.

I present these examples as a non-exhaustive case against the use of dreams as a metaphor for one’s deepest wishes and goals. There are many things that I long for with every breath of my soul—but reorienting an entire kitchen only to be used for martial arts practice in return is not one of them. ∎

Image: One of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts from the “Apocalipsis cum figuris” series, illustrating a scene from the biblical book of Revelation.