Suboptimist

Operative Masonry.

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.