There are moments sometimes, squeezed between pressures as thick and solid as boulders, when I have time to myself. These days, I am battling thesis, coursework, a job that I love, conference preparation, doctoral program applications, Icelandic lessons, and my unyielding goal of being an author one day. The night falls sooner, the cold gnaws away at my chapped fingers, and I am left a beast of the wild and busy day.
This is a typical week in my life, from Monday to Sunday, spanning a conference and my drafting my thesis while trying desperately not to feel misplaced in this MA program, as though it was a mistake to admit me. That feeling is always lurking over my hunched shoulders while I type away at work. What if I was a blunder, an oversight, a gaffe?
I derive peace from my Icelandic studies. I signed up for a class online, and I was willing to pay a bit extra to have access to a wealth of materials that will assist me in my long-term goals. This is my trajectory for the next few months, as I prepare for a conference on historical linguistics in Reykjavik next year. I’m submitting an abstract, but even if I am not accepted, I will attend as a participant. That’s bullet point number one once I get through the High Desert Linguistics Society conference this weekend.
Today is Monday, and I am working on my poster for HDLS. I’m making fonts bigger, swapping out graphics here and there, and trying not to worry about testing the waters with it tomorrow in my usual Phonology Lab meeting. The poster is about tonal polarity, a topic that captured my heart a year ago and hasn’t let up. I’ve done the readings, I’ve done the statistics, and yet I worry that somehow I’ll be exposed as the unkempt fraud that I am. I’ll be editing the poster until tonight, as it is scheduled to go to the printer tomorrow at noon.
Other parts of my day:
This morning, I awoke early, as I do, and logged into the Icelandic course to read all about counting and telling time and talking about the statues around Reykjavik. This little crumpet of learning has kept me going for two weeks, and it ends in December. Then, I’ll enroll in the next course. In the afternoons, I do Spanish, working these days on verbs and building my vocabulary enough to talk about my research. It’s a quaint tradition: I get up, feed the cats, who are never satisfied with the time of their breakfast, play Wordle, sip some tea, and listen to Icelandic.
I catch the shutttle around 7:00 in the morning, letting it bump and convey me towards work. Since the last week in the life that I did, I’ve found employment in a place that really matters. I work in the Indigenous Child Language Research Center, devoting my hours to the study of how children acquire Navajo. I can thank this job for launching my career — I really do think of it in these bold and saturated terms — and for launching my MA thesis. My coworker, Toby, chatted with me one day about tonal polarity in Athabaskan languages, and it’s sparked a smooth-hearted love affair with Athabaskan phonology ever since.
Because I am off of work right now, the next step in my day is to finish the dregs of lukewarm tea puddling in my mug, and do some actual writing of the thesis. Right now, it’s in a dangerous state of being scattered across numerous documents, and my goal this week is to wrestle it or otherwise coax it into coherence. I’m using statistical methods to analyze theories of tonal polarity. What if that doesn’t work and I’ve been left with the proverbial egg oozing down my face? I can’t answer that, not this week.
After class, which is Statistics for Linguistics, I will head along to my office hours as the Council Recorder for the Graduate and Professional Student Association, where I will be working yet again on the thesis. This week in particular, I’m factoring in time to read a new journal article every day, one related to my beloved computational psychophonology. In truth, I’ve amassed so many books from the library that I need to get through, but who has the time in this life? The goal for this week is all about the interface of synatx and phonology.
Construction continues on the next novel. It’s a 1960s romp. I can’t help but be fascinated by people who have their lives together enough to write book after book without the plague of stop and start, stop and start. I exist on a sort of merry-go-round of put out a fire here, dart to the next corner and put out the fire there. Sometimes, I dedicate more time to school, and sometimes I dedicate more time to writing. Nonetheless, I do not have a job anymore: I have a career, and I am taking steps to nurture it, to raise it into the shady vines that paradise my heart.
That’s it. Get up, drink tea, go to work, write, study, try and fail to text my sisters. Driving lessons are taking a hit. Once this poster is done and I can hide my face again, maybe then I’ll be better about driving around the parking lot.
Somehow, in all the chaos and all the work, I’m becoming the poem I’ve always wanted to be.
