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cosmolinguist27 What aphorism or saying is helpful for you right now?
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it" the last couple of years, which sounds really bleak and awful but honestly isn't. It has been useful because my emotions were getting in the way of things that really did have to be done, like laundry or going to appointments or whatever. I was eaten up by procrastination and avoidance, and I was hating the things all the more after they had all that engativity associated with them.
So sometimes when I'd think, e.g. "I need to do laundry or I won't have any clean clothes," I'd catch myself thinking "I don't want to" and going okay, that is fair, it is not fun, and your life has been short of fun lately. And it would help a little. I'd still find myself thinking, or if I was by myself sometimes actually saying "I hate this," but I'd say it while I picked up the laundry basket, or whatever. It helped to acknowledge my feelings without always letting them dictate my behavior. It helped not to feel like I should wait around for the magical point where I really felt like writing an essay, doing the dishes, or making a phone call. Because I know damn well that magical time is never going to show up.
--
First day back at uni. I've got one lecture in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a huge annoying break between them. Today I can spend it writing my essay...or at least I should, but I'm writing this instead because, guess what, I really don't want to work on that esasy. It's confusing and that makes it scary so isn't it nicer just to avoid it? Ugh.
Anyway, my first lecture was okay. It's the only one with a new lecturer to me, and he seems pretty cool though I can already tell where the accessibility problems are going to be. And the class, which is on historical linguistics, means more fucking corpus work, which I don't seem to be able to get away from. I thought I liked sociolinguistics because I love people and I value the different ways they use langauge, but it turns out sociolinguistics is just databases and spreadsheets which are both Not My Thing but more importantly Barely Accessible and That's If I Do Lots of Extra Work.
I tried talking to him at the end about how difficult I've found tutorials that teach this kind of stuff, how often I'm behind and confused, and he didn't get it at all -- he said something like "oh, you don't really learn to use it until you go away and do it on your own!" despite me trying to tell him that I can't go away and use it on my own if I haven't gotten anything out of the tutorial... I miss the really awesome TA I had last year, the last time I had to do this shit.
It didn't help that, since this guy's new to Manchester, he kept asking us what else we'd studied. And since I sit in the front and answer questions when the silences get too awkward (both sitting at the front and answering questions are traits that got me clocked as a mature student by the group I had to work with last year, by the way!), I was probably pretty noticeable when I noddded along -- yes, I've done LFG, yes I've done corpus work, yes I've read Chaucer. Mind: I never fucking understood LFG, I am sick to death of corpus linguistics, and I only did Chaucer in my failed attempt at an English degree almost twenty years ago, yet the combination made him look at me when the random example text from a corpus was the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale and he looked at me and said "Have you studied this?" and I answered, like I was confessing a murder, "It's my favorite Canterbury Tale." But it is! But he now thinks I'm a genius (and the rest of the class probably think I'm a wet and a weed.
But having a favorite Canterbury Tale doesn't make fucking AntConc work on my laptop, so this should be intresting.
I talked to my parents last night and Mom asked what classes I had today. I told her I couldn't remember, which is half true (is it Langauge Contact or Language and Mediality I have this afternoon? they're taught by the same lecturer so I'm kinda thinking of them the same which is bad) and half I didn't want to try to explain what "historical syntax" is (especially since it turns out it isn't just syntax? it is (for historical reasons, ha) morphology and pragmatics and like eveyrthing, so the name is really misleading?).
So she asked, "Are you doing a language?" I thought by now they knew I wasn't taking any more language classes, but I guess my parents are still shook from me doing Arabic my first year. I said no, so she said, "So you're doing all... English classes then?" My dad was forever making jokes about English majors and I guess that's what they still think I am. Nothing wrong with English majors! But sheesh, I can examine the imagery of a poem or write an essay on Frankenstein through the lens of feminist literary criticism a fuck of a lot easier than I can do all this shit with spreadsheets and databases. And nothing I've taken all year has been even about English per se; the Romance langauges class is most specifically not, but last semester I took "language policy and planning," forensic linguistics, and as I say now langauge contact, "language and mediality," and historical syntax.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it" the last couple of years, which sounds really bleak and awful but honestly isn't. It has been useful because my emotions were getting in the way of things that really did have to be done, like laundry or going to appointments or whatever. I was eaten up by procrastination and avoidance, and I was hating the things all the more after they had all that engativity associated with them.
So sometimes when I'd think, e.g. "I need to do laundry or I won't have any clean clothes," I'd catch myself thinking "I don't want to" and going okay, that is fair, it is not fun, and your life has been short of fun lately. And it would help a little. I'd still find myself thinking, or if I was by myself sometimes actually saying "I hate this," but I'd say it while I picked up the laundry basket, or whatever. It helped to acknowledge my feelings without always letting them dictate my behavior. It helped not to feel like I should wait around for the magical point where I really felt like writing an essay, doing the dishes, or making a phone call. Because I know damn well that magical time is never going to show up.
--
First day back at uni. I've got one lecture in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a huge annoying break between them. Today I can spend it writing my essay...or at least I should, but I'm writing this instead because, guess what, I really don't want to work on that esasy. It's confusing and that makes it scary so isn't it nicer just to avoid it? Ugh.
Anyway, my first lecture was okay. It's the only one with a new lecturer to me, and he seems pretty cool though I can already tell where the accessibility problems are going to be. And the class, which is on historical linguistics, means more fucking corpus work, which I don't seem to be able to get away from. I thought I liked sociolinguistics because I love people and I value the different ways they use langauge, but it turns out sociolinguistics is just databases and spreadsheets which are both Not My Thing but more importantly Barely Accessible and That's If I Do Lots of Extra Work.
I tried talking to him at the end about how difficult I've found tutorials that teach this kind of stuff, how often I'm behind and confused, and he didn't get it at all -- he said something like "oh, you don't really learn to use it until you go away and do it on your own!" despite me trying to tell him that I can't go away and use it on my own if I haven't gotten anything out of the tutorial... I miss the really awesome TA I had last year, the last time I had to do this shit.
It didn't help that, since this guy's new to Manchester, he kept asking us what else we'd studied. And since I sit in the front and answer questions when the silences get too awkward (both sitting at the front and answering questions are traits that got me clocked as a mature student by the group I had to work with last year, by the way!), I was probably pretty noticeable when I noddded along -- yes, I've done LFG, yes I've done corpus work, yes I've read Chaucer. Mind: I never fucking understood LFG, I am sick to death of corpus linguistics, and I only did Chaucer in my failed attempt at an English degree almost twenty years ago, yet the combination made him look at me when the random example text from a corpus was the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale and he looked at me and said "Have you studied this?" and I answered, like I was confessing a murder, "It's my favorite Canterbury Tale." But it is! But he now thinks I'm a genius (and the rest of the class probably think I'm a wet and a weed.
But having a favorite Canterbury Tale doesn't make fucking AntConc work on my laptop, so this should be intresting.
I talked to my parents last night and Mom asked what classes I had today. I told her I couldn't remember, which is half true (is it Langauge Contact or Language and Mediality I have this afternoon? they're taught by the same lecturer so I'm kinda thinking of them the same which is bad) and half I didn't want to try to explain what "historical syntax" is (especially since it turns out it isn't just syntax? it is (for historical reasons, ha) morphology and pragmatics and like eveyrthing, so the name is really misleading?).
So she asked, "Are you doing a language?" I thought by now they knew I wasn't taking any more language classes, but I guess my parents are still shook from me doing Arabic my first year. I said no, so she said, "So you're doing all... English classes then?" My dad was forever making jokes about English majors and I guess that's what they still think I am. Nothing wrong with English majors! But sheesh, I can examine the imagery of a poem or write an essay on Frankenstein through the lens of feminist literary criticism a fuck of a lot easier than I can do all this shit with spreadsheets and databases. And nothing I've taken all year has been even about English per se; the Romance langauges class is most specifically not, but last semester I took "language policy and planning," forensic linguistics, and as I say now langauge contact, "language and mediality," and historical syntax.