You know what's weird? I've heard it before, but this time I really believe!

I was going to make this post all about how lovely the weather was tonight (very windy, cool but not raw, slightly foggy) and how fabulous I felt coming out of Step with Ann (super fabulous! bouncy and bendy with my lungs full of air!), and how pleasing it was to pick up a package at the front desk (thanks afropuff!), but then I opened my mailbox and found an official DEAR STUDENT that told me one of my scholarships was being returned DUE TO INSUFFICIENT CREDIT HOURS and my step sort of lost its spring. Apparently I took too long in getting someone to sign me into Thesis Writing, and apparently nine credits isn't good enough for everybody—though I've found it to be working so nicely for me. The terse communiqué is dated January 13 and I'll spend my day tomorrow first at the Office for Student Financial Affairs (JOY) to see if I can get the money back if I register for more credits (because on the grand master list of Things To Do, "owe the University a couple of thousand dollars" is duking it out with "invest in some syringes and work on a heroin habit" for dead last), and if so I will, you know, register for more credits, possibly thesis writing, and barring that, possibly anything I think I can get away with jumping into three weeks after the start of the semester.

What I'd originally planned to do tomorrow was, yes, go casting around for a thesis advisor (am I really serious about this? I mean really?) and then, like, come up with a thesis TOPIC, and then hand in my degree application. Because I want one, please. The application itself is quite a lot of fun: a single sheet of all the degrees offered by all the colleges of the University, and you check off the one(s) you're applying for. At face value, there is nothing to stop you from saying, "a Master of Agribusiness! I'd like one of those! Or a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine? And maybe a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering to round out my collection." For a few minutes during my freshman year I strongly considered double-majoring in history and astronomy; then I would have graduated with a BA and a BS, and won at life. So much for that. I'm a little stumped as to how exactly I want my name to appear on the diploma. First and last name only? Middle name? Middle initial?

Coming out of the gym the other night I ran into a high school friend that I've kept in touch with sporadically while we've been up here, and after we confirmed that yes, we were on the four-year plan, we agreed on just how much we were ready to go. It's senioritis all over again; what was familiar last year is stifling this year, the freshman are alien, I'm tired of strangers living with me, and I'm really tired of Turlington Hall. This is about pacing too. I meant to be here four years, and it's almost four years, and I'm done with this now. This doesn't necessarily mean I don't want to go to graduate school now, or take classes ever again, because I felt impatient and outgrown all through my last year of high school but never thought of not coming here. This graduate-school ambivalence has more to do with not getting letters, not moving to take the GRE, not investigating; a general stalling-out. And if I'm not sure what I want to be doing or where, I don't think just going anywhere is really the answer. I keep mentioning the political language think-tank, and everyone keeps mentioning it back to me, but do I really want to spend my time analyzing political language? Not only following politics, but paying attention to what politicians are actually saying? There are few things I enjoy less. I wonder if dictionaries would have me, going out to collect words and usages.

The primary question is what do you want to do? and my answer has always, always been I DON'T KNOW. In second grade when everyone confidently declared their intentions to grow up and be doctors and firemen, I wrote a poem about how great it was that I didn't have to decide on a career now because I sure as hell didn't know. I'm pretty sure what I don't want is to get a job and stay there for fifty years, climbing up whatever ladder there is to climb until retirement and social security and fuck-all. I come from Florida. I know I need to work because I need a source of income to keep myself clothed and housed and fed, but as for something that I want to do with my time, as for what would keep me active and engaged from day to day? I'd need to either be creating something or discovering something—making connections, finding out what makes something work, or happen, and why. I like learning, I like talking about what I've learned, and yeah, I might still end up a college professor and lecture on phonotactics all day because isn't it COOL? The other problematic part of the traditional job search-and-selection process is the necessary narrowing down and subsequent falling off of all my options. What if I like everything? Why do I only get to pick one thing? Who thought that up? There's supposed to be this divide among linguists, between the phonologists and the morphologists/syntacticians, and you either love one component or the other, but to me they're all variations of each other, and I like them all. I like, actually, every facet of linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, social-, psycho-, neuro-, and historical. I liked algebra and geometry equally too. I've read the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, and I often find myself thinking specialization is for insects.

Out walking today I thought about the latest airing of grammar and language-usage pet peeves in helenish's journal, and I had a small epiphany that linked linguistics to history (that is, my understanding and experience of them): as every linguist has to explain to everyone who asks, we study language; we study its components and synthesis and inherent processes; we study how language changes, and in many ways language operates like species: it has reproductive isolates, it has evolution but no direction (something people refuse to understand in biology as well), and it must change; like any species, the only language that's done changing is an extinct one. We have a radical approach to usage, because we say we cannot judge what is or is not "proper"; we don't tell speakers how to speak, we only observe how they do speak and try to generate rules that describe that usage. If people don't actually make words and sentences that way, it's the rule that has to go. My classes have made me aware of the prescriptive rules of grammar as shibboleths of education, de facto markers of class and intelligence. And generally I find that the people who moan about the plebes who insist on spelling words wrongly, using words improperly, and making up new and ugly words, those people are all for language change! just not in their lifetimes. Once I got a sense of how many of the words we use unthinkingly today were considered abominations in other ages, and that any time English teachers have to drill a rule into the heads of their students it means the rule is dead to all parts of language except for the contexts where you need to show you paid attention in English class, I can only be amused at the contortions people get themselves into about "commentate," because I know they'll lose. They will always lose. Anyway, what I thought of while out walking was the quote from Flaubert that I try to keep in the forefront of my brain: "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this."

If everything goes as expected, this will be my last semester and I will never register for classes here again. Classes that I regret never having taken ( by department: )

And for something completely different, a link from the mash_slash community to daegar talking about all the things she noticed while watching M*A*S*H with the laugh track off.