Written on April 30, 2008 by cynthia and e.
“By removing social variation from the system of language, formal linguists have reencoded the very prescriptive norms they claim to reject.” – Rusty Barrett in “The ‘Homo-genius’ Speech Community” in the book i’m reading for language&gender. doesn’t that sound like a joke name? rusty barrett?
anyway, this is highly interesting, and maybe i don’t know how to do blog entries, but the quote was just a tiny bit too long to put in a tweet. it’s a very interesting idea and i think that linguists could probably learn a lot from third-wave feminists. i am amused by my reaction to reading this though – a rush of indrawn breath, with some kid in my head saying, “ooooh!” in the same tone as could be followed by “i’m telling!” or if we were part of a different speech community, “oh no you di|n’t!” (| for a glottal stop, yes i am very very silly.)
everything still sucks. i’m doing some reading because like a jerk (a la idiolect of ej) i can’t concentrate to do anything more, even though i am So behind in statistics.
i wonder what it would mean to let myself have a blog, rather than a journal… would it mean posts like this?
ps: it’s really a very good article.
Written on April 29, 2008 by kat.
i swear i deal with the fact of falling apart more than the falling itself. or maybe there’s just an echo effect, everything doubled and hollow both times. i’m obsessed, unwillingly fascinated, with the implications of breaking down again. i tell myself unconvincingly that this is nonsense, that i will fulfill my obligations and not let go. i see a slope, and i feel a lurch. what am i supposed to think?
i’m dizzy and nauseous, terribly terribly nauseous. i know that’s perfectly explicable, since i’m on an antibiotic right now. but it feels wider, and of course experience is inseparable from its analysis. in this head at least. perhaps the analysis causes the behavior or the sensation. still, i’ve spent years learning to allow me myself, haven’t i? who is breathing down my neck looking for the slip, awaiting my self-betrayal? nobody, nobody anymore, nobody except me.
in my head i see the spinning, i see the maypole, but perhaps that is just the power of suggestion. it feels foolish to talk about these things, but i’ve got to talk about something. the silence gets stuck in my throat. in my fingers? my nerve impulses? whatever. this journal seems so intimidating sometimes, seems impossible to approach, confusing and tired out, already said. of course everything has always been said.
i want desperately to throw up my hands and break down, but i want to carry on with life and with plans even more. it’s not always about want, though that’s a part of course. i don’t know. i can clearly see that my vision isn’t clear. every day is separately insurmountable. i have no idea what will happen. i know at this point i won’t do more than the minimum, but will i do less?
me and my voice had a wonderful time this morning. i pretended i was practicing guitar, but really, i just wanted to sing. i never realized before how exclusively i play music by female artists. but there are such things as different octaves, and mostly i just like playing. this is so new and so endlessly fascinating. voice is so fundamental to personhood, to mine anyway. it’s hard not to feel like who i am is changing, too.
REM songs were most satisfying – i sang losing my religion about three times and i found some kind of open, throaty, slightly rumbly (i guess comparatively rumbly is what i should say) spot that i could just be comfortable in. finding where to go, voice-wise, is like renegotiating my relationship to myself. finding somewhere to just hang out, and i did refuse to be embarrassed which was a necessity. it can be so fun to just play, and not worry about quality, not at all.
i was really just thinking about how it felt. i always knew how voices sound so different inside one’s head, but it never occurred to me that meant it would be so completely new and alien to hear a masculine voice from inside.
it hasn’t settled yet, i don’t think. but the journey is really rich. i find myself very unmotivated to document and record and keep track… i really like surrendering to the movement, being carried by it. it’s enough to trust. i am moving, it is so clear that i am moving, and now that i’m moving i don’t need to worry about every little detail, don’t need to spend energy on making it happen.
if i am who i sound like, who will i wind up being? it’s breathtakingly exciting to be my own witness.
Written on April 24, 2008 by matt.
i had a sad thought this morning. this salsa class has one more meeting, and then i can take one more five-week session, but then i have to stop for the summer! it has become such a great part of each week, something to look forward to. a lot of that is doing it with friends, but it’s also just fun. i am getting pretty good at what we’ve been working on, and even the turns aren’t so scary anymore.
the summer is coming on too fast!
dammit, i just realized that i forgot something for group tonight. i will have to figure out a way to stop at home. or maybe i could ask someone to get it… except aeron is not home either.
it’s a long day – thursdays with groups in them are the longest – but sometimes it’s nice to be busy.
Written on April 23, 2008 by matt.
i’ve been at quite an impasse with writing for a while now. i don’t want to churn out entries that are bogged in mundanity and say things that i’ve said over and over and over again already. there’s school, and sometimes it’s scary, and sometimes it’s ok. there is so little to say about my life. sometimes i feel like writing… i just don’t know what to say. i’d like to experiment stylistically and/or with what i write about, to see if i could expand my ground. i never really know what i’m doing, though.
maybe shorter posts are some sort of key. i have no idea.
i guess things are ok, all in all. my voice is a lot deeper, and still doesn’t feel settled. so that’s fun, though slightly unsettling. i’ve hated my voice for a long time, and felt that it wasn’t really me, but i was still used to it. and voice is so fundamental. i’ve never heard a voice like this from the inside before. it isn’t bad. it just takes some adjustment, i guess. i’m excited to try karaoke again and see which songs i’m better at.
i haven’t got a grip on life. maybe i’m afraid to write for fear of giving the impression that i do.
Written on April 20, 2008 by kat.
yesterday,
i sat with a friend, painfully there
as they struggled
with not being able
to make their brain work (for homework.)
i know that place, and instead of feeling lucky, i felt jealous. to go back years, back to when the problems were bigger than the solutions
and i could drop everything
because there was really no choice.
it’s ridiculous; i’m better off; i’m happy; i’m getting somewhere. i’m able to stick with it, i have been, mostly, or something. there’s no through anymore, just me, and living. i never want to go back to that time when being suicidal swelled bigger than anything, gulping down the other problems until life was perfectly simple, was only the essentials.
but… i don’t know if i’m up for this. i have two giant projects, and weekly homeworks. i have so much to do this summer that i want to stop breathing. and it’s good stuff, it’s stuff-by-choice. i want to go back to the beginning, so that grinding to a halt
is more important
than anything else.
Written on April 14, 2008 by e.
well, i don’t know that i’ve ever worked so hard on a one-week homework before in my life, but i finished! i think it took me about 20 hours – i didn’t do anything else this weekend except the few moments of resting and trying to get rid of my recurring headache so i could do more work. but i did it! and it may not be perfect – in fact, i know i calculated the maximum likelihood estimation wrong because it should have equaled the method of moments estimation. and i really did not know what to plot exactly on one of the graphs, but i did my best, and this damn homework is supposed to be graded on effort. by and large, i feel like i actually got it. aeron said in 390 (the one for engineers) he didn’t have to do nearly as much math. dammit.
i think the moral of the story here is matt does not get to skip this class, ever. and boy, am i glad that i only have two classes this quarter. i have to get to my reading that i haven’t had time to do, for language and gender, but that’s practically recreational reading.
still, that was a scary experience so close to the beginning of the quarter. and i don’t have time to rest. there’s a lot of writing for my other class, and i really need to get to the dishes, and etc. but i’m ok. for now, i’m still ok.
Written on April 13, 2008 by e.
in response to my note about disability accommodations, my statistics prof said this: “I am not quite familiar with formal definitions of this disability (though by your short description I might have some form of it myself 
”
i also love how his smiley did double duty as a closing parenthesis.
i wish i could cry. i wish i could cut. i’m toying with the idea of trying for some bruises… but i want to be good, i want to not make things harder on myself. but i just don’t know what to do.
i’m too stupid for statistics. it’s utterly humiliating. i never realized i was a stupid person before. and maybe i’m not, in the humanities. but in the hard sciences, which many people (includingsortofusbecausewe’rebad) think are all that matter, we apparently can’t do shit. i’m so willing to put a million work in… but all the work in the world doesn’t help if i don’t know how the hell to start because i simply don’t understand, even after poring over all the materials available to me for hours.
Continue reading ‘news flash: myriad is stupid!’
Written on April 8, 2008 by jo/e and matt.
school was pretty manageable today, despite the long hours. i am pleasantly surprised at how i’m doing after having weathered both of them. i do have a headache, which i also had last time, but i think it’s probably just lack of sleep. i was only able to sleep from about 12:30 or 1 to about 5:30 this morning. it sucked, but in some ways it didn’t suck terribly. i will probably take a nap after therapy, though.
Continue reading ‘your turn!’
