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Wordvomit.
Sep. 8th, 2011 09:53 pmHoly hell how is it only 9pm.
I got up at 6 this morning to finish the homework due in the 8am class. (This tardiness was not my fault; I was exhausted last night and the download for the audio part was going to take like four hours. Anyway.) Class ended at 9.15 at which point I buzzed up to midtown to get my silicon mold injected with wax a couple times. This took so long that I ended up leaving the mold at the casting studio and coming late to 11am Sociolinguistics.
At first SociLing was really discouraging; there are six students in the class and the other five have all been in school longer than me. Three already have linguistics MAs. I am also, I think, the eldest student. What am I even doing here? I asked myself. What do they all know that I'm going to have to scramble to keep up with?
In the second half of the class, we touched on gender and language use, and the question of whether you can tell someone's gender from hearing them speak came up, and the immediate class response was 'yes: a man's larynx is bigger, so his speech is pitched lower.'
Which I didn't make an issue of. I took a breath, two annoyed notes, and let it pass. But I went up to the professor afterwards and just said, "I had a problem with connecting 'larynx size' with gender instead of sex on the whiteboard, but I didn't want to derail you." And he said, "Yes, well, for example [the boy behind you] is dedicated to studying only formal syntax, and it would have taken at least twenty minutes to sidetrack and explain things to him. We'll touch on that later."
So... yeah! I may be the oddball out, but I'm at least putting together a thesis that he said is "definitely a sociolinguistics topic." Which is apparently not true for at least three out of five classmates.
And I have thought about other things than my PhD for some part of the last three years. So there's that too.
Anyway class was out at 2pm and it was back to the casting studio*, and then BACK down to campus for a mostly unsuccessful textbook run - but I did get school supplies! Footsore and weary from hitting up four bookstores for Weber's Protestant Ethic (among other things,) I settled my butt at an Italian barstaurant that serves unlimited and delicious fingerfood to anybody who drinks there between 5-7. The bartender – not Maurice. Maurelio? Argentinian dude – was just starting work that day. On hearing that I'd just snagged a new job**, he refilled my lemon ice vodka on the house. So of course I tipped 50% and still only paid $10 for two sexy drinks and a healthy dinner in Manhattan. I call that a goddamn win.
After that I cruised on over to the student center to print out my Weber*** and hit up the Comic Book Society. A cute group of undergraduate nerds, but when your 5-person officer board is all-male and your club attendance is 80% female it says something. We'll see what the gender balance is like next week when there isn't free pizza. Assuming I go back, of course – I plugged my bookstore and let them know about Kate Beaton's book party, but they're not my crowd. They still think DC is salvageable and Whedon can do no wrong. Do I really need to be a grizzled voice of bitter reason? I think not.
Then again, I might want to submit something to the quarterly student anthology.
*I also picked up wax carving tools at the neighboring metalshop. Because I totally needed another crafting hobby.
**New job: On the weekends. More details to come, maybe. I will not have free time this semester.
***Printing out Protestant Ethic at ten cents a double-sided page: $4.20. Copies of same in your standard bookstore: $20 and up. You know, some days I just can't wait for Print-On-Demand to put pricing like this out of business.
I got up at 6 this morning to finish the homework due in the 8am class. (This tardiness was not my fault; I was exhausted last night and the download for the audio part was going to take like four hours. Anyway.) Class ended at 9.15 at which point I buzzed up to midtown to get my silicon mold injected with wax a couple times. This took so long that I ended up leaving the mold at the casting studio and coming late to 11am Sociolinguistics.
At first SociLing was really discouraging; there are six students in the class and the other five have all been in school longer than me. Three already have linguistics MAs. I am also, I think, the eldest student. What am I even doing here? I asked myself. What do they all know that I'm going to have to scramble to keep up with?
In the second half of the class, we touched on gender and language use, and the question of whether you can tell someone's gender from hearing them speak came up, and the immediate class response was 'yes: a man's larynx is bigger, so his speech is pitched lower.'
Which I didn't make an issue of. I took a breath, two annoyed notes, and let it pass. But I went up to the professor afterwards and just said, "I had a problem with connecting 'larynx size' with gender instead of sex on the whiteboard, but I didn't want to derail you." And he said, "Yes, well, for example [the boy behind you] is dedicated to studying only formal syntax, and it would have taken at least twenty minutes to sidetrack and explain things to him. We'll touch on that later."
So... yeah! I may be the oddball out, but I'm at least putting together a thesis that he said is "definitely a sociolinguistics topic." Which is apparently not true for at least three out of five classmates.
And I have thought about other things than my PhD for some part of the last three years. So there's that too.
Anyway class was out at 2pm and it was back to the casting studio*, and then BACK down to campus for a mostly unsuccessful textbook run - but I did get school supplies! Footsore and weary from hitting up four bookstores for Weber's Protestant Ethic (among other things,) I settled my butt at an Italian barstaurant that serves unlimited and delicious fingerfood to anybody who drinks there between 5-7. The bartender – not Maurice. Maurelio? Argentinian dude – was just starting work that day. On hearing that I'd just snagged a new job**, he refilled my lemon ice vodka on the house. So of course I tipped 50% and still only paid $10 for two sexy drinks and a healthy dinner in Manhattan. I call that a goddamn win.
After that I cruised on over to the student center to print out my Weber*** and hit up the Comic Book Society. A cute group of undergraduate nerds, but when your 5-person officer board is all-male and your club attendance is 80% female it says something. We'll see what the gender balance is like next week when there isn't free pizza. Assuming I go back, of course – I plugged my bookstore and let them know about Kate Beaton's book party, but they're not my crowd. They still think DC is salvageable and Whedon can do no wrong. Do I really need to be a grizzled voice of bitter reason? I think not.
Then again, I might want to submit something to the quarterly student anthology.
*I also picked up wax carving tools at the neighboring metalshop. Because I totally needed another crafting hobby.
**New job: On the weekends. More details to come, maybe. I will not have free time this semester.
***Printing out Protestant Ethic at ten cents a double-sided page: $4.20. Copies of same in your standard bookstore: $20 and up. You know, some days I just can't wait for Print-On-Demand to put pricing like this out of business.
