Fat Lady Much?

So, it's all over. HUGE FRICKEN SIGH!!!

I graduated (magna cum laude, and departmental honors mofos!) last Saturday, and am now drifting aimlessly in the world.

I figure i'd try and get a job in my chosen career, and eventually (like in 10 years or so) come back to grad school and get a masters in library science, and eventually a doctorate in something or other. My largest problem about gradual school (as Robin Williams said in Life According to Garp, it's where students go to gradually realize they don't want to be in college anymore) is that i have no idea what i'd be focused on. I like English, but i don't want to get a doctorate in teaching or any specific area. Not to mention the idea of a dissertation makes me want to run away screaming.

My honors thesis ended up at a solid 35 pages, 40 with work cited. I still need to put in a source (yeah, imagine my horror during the defense when I was asked about a source that was not in the freaking works cited page) and restructure the introduction a bit to show how it ended up changing, but it's purty good.

I'm done at Big City Magazine, and managed to end up with a byline in the latest issue (suweet!).

And oh yeah, i'm done with school!!!!!...!!!. (that punctuation sums up my feelings pretty accurately). I got my grades back and it turns out i managed to break my annual spring slump, rounding out BOTH semesters at my university with 4.0 scores. yeah, i'm badass.

Coffee House is working out ok, but I really need to get a career type job soon if i'm going to continue to afford my apartment. Yeah, i have an apartment, and not with Crazy Lady, Friends to Horses, or Once and Future Roommate. It's with someone I found on Craigslist, Law Student. She seems nice so far, but we'll see, I guess.

Well, that's my life in a nutshell. What's up with you?

Lotta Stuff Going On

I've been asked (well, actually, i've been told, more or less, by the director of the honors program) to present my thesis at two separate expos towards the end of April. the actual expo dates are fine for me, i should be done with everything but the defense and the crying at that point. My problem is that the abstracts/applications are due in at the end of March. yeah. this month. the month wherein the bulk of my writing is occuring. i've got section 1 and 2 to finish before next wednesday, as well as a magazine article to write and edit, and another article to research for the shared byline. Plus, you know, work and junk.

On the other hand, i have spring break coming up, which is a nice chunk of time where all i need to worry about is the thesis and work: no internship, no classes, and some theoretical free time. And i've been told that it'd be a good idea to get practice presenting my paper, and there's the possibility for cash prizes at one of the expos.

On the other hand (man i feel like tevye), this is my LAST SPRING BREAK. i've never gone out and done crazy college stuff over spring break, and i won't ever get another chance (unless i go into teaching; a definite "hell no" there) to do an epic road trip of movie proportions.

meh. what will be will be. que sera and all that jazz

written while writing the thesis of doom

As i get further into my thesis (i'm in section 1 of 3 right now, excluding intro and conclusion) i realize that the reason i'm having so many issues with just writing is that i'm fighting the discourses taught to me throughout my academic career. Using I without retribution in an academic paper is blowing my mind, but it's a component part of explaining my purpose and use. since i'm not writing literary analysis, most of my argument comes from other people (esp in sections 1 and 2, section 3 is my contribution) and that's difficult to stick with. i was taught to avoid saying "in this paper, I will show" but that is EXACTLY what i'm supposed to be doing.

i understand why we are taught this way (especially after reading and editing some of my peers' papers who aren't inclined to writing) but it's kind of like going to calculus after pre-cal. You've learned the hard, difficult way, and now it's time for the short cuts; only problem is it feels like some kind of cheating or cheapness.

very frustrating. (my general writing kinda sucks today anyways - cheapness? really?)

Of Poets and Parts of Speech

As an aspiring editor and an avid lover of the phenomenon of Language, not to mention a person immersed in the literary world of an English major, I occasionally have a geek out in which i start to think of Stuff I'd Like to Write a Paper On - or rather, Things I'd Like to See Other People Write Because I'm a Lazy Sonnuvagun. One such geeking occurred yesterday, so i thought i'd blog rather than actually do research and junk :D (oh emoticons... how i love thee).

In my 200 level Linguistic class (the introductory class to linguistics rather than a grammar or history of the language course) we used the first two lines of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky to emphasize the way we can classify parts of speech by using an innate sense of sentence placement, so we can recognize words that we have never heard before as a noun or verb as long as it is in a context using function words. The example was :

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves 


Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;


All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky" lines 1-4

Snow my god!

It's snowing. In our state. in our portion of our state. this is not a frequent event. Actually, it's sticking as i watch, which leads me to believe in global warming (apparently, it's not just for heat anymore!). So, seeing as how i don't particularly want to read over my linguistics stuff (even though i love it), and hell has apparently frozen over (see beginning statement), i thought i'd take the opportunity to update my rather lame blog.

Bitch Bitch Moan Moan

i'm a horrible student.

well, not really. i'm a fabulous student... when i go to class. i'm one of those people who cannot STAND the awkward silence when a professor is desperately trying to avoid flat out giving all the answers and the students are desperately trying to avoid flat out thinking. This occasionally makes me "that guy" - you know, that one person who always has to say something and you can tell he just hasn't prepped or loves hearing his own voice (usually given nicknames by the rest of the class without their knowledge like "that girl with the teeth" or "stupid guy" or "y'know, the one that keeps bringing up sexual preferences?")- and i have to admit one of my biggest fears in the social scene is being labeled "that guy." At the same time, I still just can't let the silence build. It may be a linguistic thing (did you know that Americans cannot let silence be? after an average of 4 seconds of silence, an American will blurt out whatever they can to just... end... the... silence) but whatever the reason, i'm big on class participation. I love to learn, I don't really mind the reading (except when i do), and i'm of a quirky mindset that routinely leads to odd metaphors that helps others grasp concepts... like Robert Brown's Schroedinger's cat of morality (one of my favorite papers ever, even if it was for a 200 level class).

On the other hand...

An Update in which Capitalization is Arbitrary

When I walked into the office this morning at Big City Magazine, my boss (the editor) wasn't in, so i decided to do the young go-getter trawling for work thing (but with less hooker overtones). I went and talked to Ad Lady, who is Boss Lady's bud in the magazine and much more organized. She set me up with some advert busy work involving reminding a list of clients that our deadline for production is this Friday. I was grooving along, calling random strangers and struggling to keep my verbal stalls to a minimum, when Boss Lady walks in late to an Important Lunch Meeting that AL and BL both need to attend. BL tells AL that i'm doing work for her (i'm on my last name at this point) and they head out the door.

So now, I have nothing to do because Boss Lady is one of those fabulously creative tragically disorganized people, and she left me with nothing to do. I'm about to go ask Editor Lady of Affiliated Magazine if she needs anything done, but first i thought i'd do a post so i wouldn't forget too much stuff for my end of term intern project (what i actually get graded on by the university).