the mind and language

life being what it is, this blog has fallen by the wayside and there it will likely remain. sitemeter tells me that people still visit here, and i think it fair to tell you that after this, i probably won't update here anymore. but for the sake of symmetry i offer the following.

fall semester ended rather torturously, but successfully. i got the grades, i got the letters of recommendation, i finished the apps. i was accepted everywhere i applied. i guess it was a combination of a genuine love for the field, playing the game reasonably well, and some amount of dumb luck. hopefully i can preserve all three of these factors as i go forward, beyond the pale...

you might expect that once you get accepted everywhere life becomes sunnywarm and easy, with butterflies lighting softly on your shoulder and birds singing songs just for you. but i am here to shatter your expectations. it can be really hard because then you are confronted with figuring out why you are REALLY in this. how you want the next 5-6 years of your life to be. and what position you want to be in at the end of that time. you have to make sure you're serious and you have to get very comfortable with making a leap of faith in practice, not just in theory. finally last week i committed to a program, and then immediately collapsed on my couch in a swarm of migraine and infection. will said once that school is corrosive, and i guess he was right. but it's so worth it, says the me with antibiotics percolating happily through the blood supply.

in the fall i will be starting the ph.d program in linguistics at uc berkeley. i'm just auditing one class now, and not very faithfully. but i'm reading like mad. for me, this is living the dream.

and i've never felt such a sense of accomplishment, in all my life.

thanks for reading, you few tenacious optimists.

xo,
amy