Help a fellow graduate student.

This guy is trying to measure the speed of memes, which apparently has something to do with blogging, although I'm not exactly sure what because I am technologically DUMB. Help him out by copying his link into your blog and pinging Technorati (via the link from his blog), so that the software program he's written can generate his results for him and he can present them to the MLA folks.

APPROVED!

My human subjects protocol was approved by the IRB at my university. This basically means that the powers that be believe that I will not be torturing or otherwise inflicting any unnecessary harm upon my respondents. Which I'm not.

So on with the biggest challenge of my dissertation: Find speakers of Endangered Language Z! A typical cold call goes like this (translated from language B, which I am much more fluent in than Language Z):

Me: Hi, are you Y?
Y: Yes
Me: I'm (insert my name here). I got your name from (insert random contact here, anything from actual human being to web site) I'm doing research on Endangered Language Z and wondered if you knew anyone who spoke it.
Y: Yes, there are people who speak it.
Me: Cool! Wanna meet with a total stranger and discuss this?
Y: (dead silence)
Me: Okay, I didn't really say that. Would you be interested in meeting and discussing this further?
Y: Sure
Me: Where do you live?
Y: (obscure town in Orange County)
Me: Oh, I don't know (obscure town in Orange County). Is there a Starbucks there?
Y: (with some condescension) There are Starbucks everywhere (moron).
Me: (typing away on Starbucks website) oh, there's one at such and such avenue. When's a good time for you?
Y: tomorrow
Me: (crap, I have a doctor's appointment for my son that I've been waiting months for)--No problem! See you there at one. (it should take me an hour to get there which means I really hope we're done with the doctor's appointment, crap crap crap)
Y: (who the hell are you?) okay, see you then.

Whether or not Contact Y will be able to lead me to speakers of Endangered Language Z remains to be seen, but this is how my life is going to go for the next month.

Oh and Contact G is going to Hawaii for two months.

And Contact F is out of the country until the end of January.

Looks like I'm going to be doing a lot more cold calls. And reading.

PROPOSAL DONE. NOW WHAT?

I submitted my proposal, finally, which was 78 pages long including back matter and bibliography because my adviser wanted me to flesh out about three chapters worth of reading material. So I have now foisted this upon my motley committee of five for their reading pleasure. Yippee!!! Once I am given the official blessing from both committee and Institutional Review Board alike, I can finally stop farting around and go find some people who speak or may have at one time in their lives spoken Endangered Language Z and figure out what the impact of transnationalism and additional language acquisition may have had on this.

It's been hard to find people. Especially since I am not looking right now since I was immersed in the proposal stage. That really makes it hard to find respondents, that not looking thing. You know? But now I am ready to go track down some wary indigenous people who, if they are in their right mind, will tell me to fuck off and go bug someone else. Although the people I have gotten in contact with have been very nice although by now they are probably completely confused because I haven't gotten in touch with them BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN WRITING A PROPOSAL. Which I present to the committee on December 8th.

The big question is not: do I do PowerPoint? because of course everyone does PowerPoint, but rather, should I include animation effects? Not the sounds, the sounds, they are oh so unprofessional. The flying letters thing, that would probably be stupid too. But maybe a few melting words would make this crazy project have so much more impact. Ya think?

Okay now I have to go to my other blog and write about my son.

A DREAM DENIED, OR, I GUESS I'LL HAVE TO WRITE MY DISSERTATION AFTER ALL.

Lately, thanks to a professor of mine, I've been flirting with the possibility of going on the job market a year early. Just to apply for one job that happens to be near where I live now (not so rare since I live in THE STATE WITH TOO MANY PEOPLE) and happens to be in my field (quite rare). After various emails between my adviser, this professor, and myself, and after my husband, a/k/a Dr. Cuy, gave me some hard-edged reality checks, I'm realizing this is probably not such a good idea. Number one, because I will never, ever finish my dissertation if I took this job. And it's not like this dissertation is as important as my child, but I do need to have one in order to work in this field. Number two, because if they offered me this job and I decided not to take it after all, that would make both me and my adviser look very bad.

It's tempting because I'm OLD and I'm tired of being a freaking graduate student, but I just have to hang in there and finish (hell, start!) this thing if I'm going to have any chance of getting a cool job in the future. Even though I have no idea what the job market will look like next year, I have to take that risk and for the first time in my life not jump at something just because it seems like a cool idea at the time because then what if I actually get it? (hello, Foreign Service! hello, teaching high school Spanish in violent and impoverished neighborhood!).

So, it's back to the drawing board, to get my proposal polished up for the viewing and butchering by my adviser, and to continue to apply for funding that I really hope I get next year because otherwise I am going to sit down and cry for about a year. And then I really won't get any work done.