Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

I am not talking about it here, though.

Interestingly, Sasha’s most recent comment motivated me to write a long response on site, which basically turned into my statement. So, yeah, thanks Sasha.

I guess since I have disappeared for the last little bit, I should give a few quick updates. First, my final list of schools I am applying to is University of Arizona (in Tuscon), University of Washington (in Seattle), UCLA (in…LA), Northwestern University, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Ohio State University (Columbus). Sorry, Emily, but not UT. So, with the application fees and costs of sending transcripts and the cost of the GRE and the extra score reports…roughly 740 USD just for the simple privilege of being considered. Applying to grad school is great.

Planning and carrying out my experiment for advanced phonetics and phonology has become a full-time job for me. I’ve spent most time in the back of the classes I don’t like preparing stimuli and writing the introduction section of the paper. It’s funny I am spending so much time working on it, since it’s doubtful it’s going to be any good (by publication standards). In fact, my professor said as much to us when she assigned it. We’re expected to kind of stumble through it, ask her for help, and continue screwing it up.

I finished Assassin’s Creed over the Thanksgiving break. Wow, that game blew me away. It’s the kind of game that keeps me up the night I finish it researching all the symbolism. Take any Metal Gear Solid story and multiply the weirdness by seven. It was pretty awesome. Maybe I’ll write a review someday. The other game I picked up is Mass Effect. Chances are good that I won’t have the time to play it until the non-denominational-winter-coinciding-with-Christmas break, but when I get a chance to really get into it, I will report. Space opera, ftw.

Anyone living in Utah over the age of 18 who has not taken any Arabic care to be a research subject for me?

…write a statement of intent for grad school?

There has a been a popular thread on the Utah Masonic Electronic News board the last several days concerning the state of repair (or disrepair) of the Salt Lake Masonic Temple. It was an interesting discussion. I am obviously not the only Mason in the state of Utah who is troubled by how our building falls apart around us. As the thread is private, I won’t mention any specific examples of what was said, but I will paraphrase a little:

· Nothing is getting done. We keep forming exploratory committees and spending money for architectural consulting, but we then ignore anything those committees or consultants say. We create a hell of a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy.

· We point to the big things that have been done, but ignore all of the all of the little things that are adding up, ultimately trumping the fact that we have a new sound board in the auditorium: the paint, the carpet, the electrical system, the walls, the fact that our roof is, as one brother put it, a swimming pool.

This last Friday, I took my mother and my aunt on a tour of the building (maybe someday I will blog about the bureaucracy I had to go through to get that to happen). I couldn’t help but feel slightly embarrassed by the large, gaping holes in the walls, the tattered, faded, and torn carpet. I don’t know what to do. Masons in Utah, especially brothers of the six lodges that meet in the temple, love to point to this building and talk about how great it is that we have it. Strangely, we don’t do anything to improve it. Part of me feels the improvement of the building is beyond our control. We entrust its care to a cold, seemingly heartless entity run by old timers who fail to see the changing local economy and fail to think of creative ways to improve the building. I could talk for hours about the failings of this organization alone. Anyway, sorry for that piece of rambling.

I have started work on the major portion of my two big projects this semester (for phonetics and for sociolinguistics). For phonetics, I am investigating L2 subjects’ perception of foreign contrasts, in this case plain and pharyngealized alveolars in Jordanian Arabic, based on the acoustic cues on the preceding vowel, with the hypothesis that subjects will exploit their knowledge of front and backed vowels to discern the difference.

Strangely, given the fact that sociolinguistics has become the bane of my existence this semester, I am most excited for the project I am doing for that class. I am studying stop insertion in Utah English between nasals and sibilants in an optimality theoretic model similar to Ito and Mester’s lexical stratification. Optimality theory is an interesting model. It has the ability to account for fact about human language that traditionally have been neglected or seen as inconvenient facts. Chief among these, is variation. In this case, stylistic variation, since I can’t think of anything about socioeconomic status or gender or ethnicity that predicts the use of this feature. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Also, reason seven why I don’t go into any medical field.

Today’s Penny Arcade strip about the Nintendo DS version of the game I most greatly anticipate is priceless.

Kind of I’m feeling emo today. I really can’t place my finger on why exactly.

I’ve been encouraged by some readers of the blog who I see frequently in the RL to have an occasional less intelligent post. I honestly never found this to be an entirely intelligent forum in the first place, mostly incoherent ramblings of a tortured genius. The tortured genius thing is sarcasm, by the way. My ego isn’t that big.

So, instead of talking about, say, gradient judgments of well-formedness or animal language, I’ll discuss a few non-linguistic things on my mind:

I usually endorse candidates and such before big elections, since, you know, my opinion carries so much clout around here. Honestly, I don’t care to this time. There are really only going to be two things on the ballot: the mayor and vouchers. The results of both of these shouldn’t be surprising. I can only think a few situations where a) Dave Buhler will win and b) referendum 1 will pass. The probability of any of them is low. So, yeah, why bother endorsing anything?

There are a couple of things I really don’t like more than anything; a) talking on the phone b) mass gatherings. I try to avoid doing any of these except under rare circumstances. In a bizarre twist of fate I found myself doing both at the same time this weekend. It was out of the ordinary for me.

So, wow, that’s it. I don’t have anything else on my mind. Honestly, though, my brain is mush today. I really can’t think of anything to say. Comments are welcome.