a bored update

I am still un-caught-up on reading livejournal -- I'm probably about ten or twelve days behind; I haven't been catching up. I turned in my thesis yesterday, finally putting a lid on the sprawling research project that my MA turned into. It's a full 150pp. To recap what's happened in my life in the last few weeks, to kill time while I sit (without internet connection) in the San Jose airport, on my way to Baltimore:

July 29: practice talk for thesis defense. It is a disaster. But that's why we practice. I begin entire rewrite of the talk.
July 31: I receive notice that my paper submitted to the Vancouver HLT/EMNLP conference was accepted. Am pleased, and adjust my talk to indicate this acceptance, but frantically write the talk until late at night.
Aug 1: Defended the thesis. This actually works out. My committee requests only one additional experiment, and I scramble to finish additional experiments requested by my committee before going home. My committee signs the departmental warrant for my graduation (yes, that's what they call it!).
Aug 2, late at night: left for Maine on a red-eye, with imtboo, to spend some time with lapartera, trombo2, and _dkg_.
Aug 3-9: While there, did some requested rewrites of the thesis. But I didn't have comments on every section from Advisor, and I really wanted to try to relax. I had some good success there -- at least on the relaxation front. I have internet access on only two days while there, and only by walking a mile to the island's tiny gourmet grocery/coffee shop and mooching off their connection. I use that time online to correspond with my committee, and my fellow authors of the Vancouver paper.
Instead of work, I read most of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; I kayaked around the island with imtboo, and cooked and ate good food with the whole group. imtboo made herself instantly at home by eating a lobster as fast -- and completely -- as lapartera, no small feat.
Aug 10: We returned from Maine, and I threw myself into final rewrites, and discussions with my fellow Vancouver-paper authors regarding the revisions.
Aug 11: I pick up the preliminary draft I'd dropped off at the grad school. They have formatting changes -- ironically, the parts they want changed are all in parts of the LaTeX template that they distribute. I hack the template myself. I have good intentions of sending these changes back to the guy who maintains the template. [as yet, they have come to nothing]. The big sadness here is not the edits, it's that the signature pages on my thesis need to be changed -- and re-signed.
Aug 13: A saturday; I worked all day but had a social evening; blackwingedboy and imtboo and I went to the lgtheater cabaret, hosted by the lovely and funny jaegerlicious, watched erin80 and llcoolray in their awesome Eleqtro-Lyte reunion, as well as a few new numbers: LYLAS, a girl-on-girl pie fight that involved daisy-duke shorts (uh, yeah) and Celene with serious songs. That woman is an amazing songwriter and a very good singer. She's going somewhere. We go to a party at J&S's house after the cabaret, and have a lovely time with our hosts and a few guests who can hang on until very late. imtboo and I argue after going home, and some heavy language is thrown. This startles both of us enough that we re-ground.
Aug 14: back to the grind: I needed to get the thesis done by Monday morning so that I could do battle with University paperwork all day Monday. I nearly finish, and also find some extra time to go over to Reader #1's house and get her signature. Her 3-year-old can read (!) and interviewed me about where I was born so that he could put a little sticker on his world map, and he showed me his fish-robot Legos, and I made him giggle by telling him that one of the pieces looked like the faucet on the bathroom sink. D. comes over after I'm done for the night, and, after checking in, we have a quiet evening while I read Zelazny and she makes notes on her play.

continued in another post...

the big day (thesis submission)

More newsy diary of what happened on the way to my thesis submission. This is the day of submission, so I'm almost done.

Reader #2 does me a favor by volunteering to come over to my apartment to sign the revised signature pages.
I go to campus and pay the University an "optional fee" (yes, they call it that, but it's required if I want an MA).
I revise my acknowledgements and dedication one last time. I've dedicated it to Bud, King of Bashan, mentioned back in March in this journal.
I take the warrant over to the department (it was accidentally not delivered) and the administrator who has the database access to acknowledge this departmental approval of my degree broke her hip on Friday. Rather than a 5-minute drop-off-and-celebrate, it turns into an hour-long treasure hunt in order to find the graduate coordinator (nope, she's an acting dean), the acting graduate coordinator (nope, he's out of the office), the chair (nope, she's on sabbatical) and finally the acting chair, to have her send an email to the database people to appoint the office coordinator as an acting administrator. ("With all these "acting"s", I said to imtboo, "I wonder if I'm going to get an acting MA. Presumably this is not the same as an MFA in acting." They straighten it out eventually.

I finish the last edits, skipping a lab meeting, pace around nervously as they print, muttering to myself about whether the wax in the printer will last, sign the quote slip, insert the now-signed signature pages, and gingerly tuck two copies into oversized envelopes. I carry them over to the grad school (with beckyb as a cheerleader) and present them to the clerk. She takes them out of the envelopes, looks at every single page, and says, finally, "looks like it's a keeper!"
The desk clerk on the way out offers me candy, and I take some for imtboo at her instruction: "take some for your sweetheart, for being so good and putting up with you working so hard on this."

I walk out lighter, emotionally and physically -- the thesis is 150pp double-sided, and I was delivering two copies, so I carried over a substantial chunk of paper that will someday turn up in the U library. But much as I might like it to be, my day is not done. I return to the lab and continue work on the Vancouver paper. beckyb and imtboo try to schedule a celebratory drink, but Mercury is in retrograde, and we end up all three in an email crankiness session, with missed communications and crankinesses aflyin'.

I get most of the edits done; Advisor drops a few more on my desk. I tackle those [forgetting one, only remembered on the plane today], and now the paper is half a column too long. I zip up the document source so that other co-authors can look it over and strip it out. Advisor is doing that now.

jet set

okay, another entry in my series of tedious posts catching up on what's going on. I'm definitely treating livejournal as a write-only medium right now -- I had internet access only briefly today, in the San Francisco airport, for which I paid, thinking that surely the San Jose and Chicago airports would have access on the same program. Sadly, no.

Here's the reason I'm in so many airports today. It's a bit tedious; I'll probably cut all these entries.

I'm going to visit some researchers in Palo Alto for a few weeks. I was originally scheduled to arrive in the Bay Area (to SFO) on Sunday afternoon and start work on Monday. In addition, I was supposed to fly today (Tuesday) from PA to MD to go to some summer-summary talks at Johns Hopkins (just for a day, my jet-setting self). But my thesis work (see the last few entries) kept going and going like the energizer bunny, and I hadn't heard anything from the PA researchers about where I was going or what I was doing or even where I should show up(!), so I started to panic a little, earlier this week.

After some discussion with Advisor, we decided to change my SFO leg so I came down this morning, giving me time to finish and submit my thesis (time that was apparently necessary, although it is probably a good rule-of-thumb that revisions expand to fill all available time). Thus, today I was up at 3:20a to catch a shuttle to the airport, flew at 610a from SEA to SFO, rented a car at the SFO airport, and drove to the San Jose. I haven't driven a car for months, so that was a strange experience, especially with a car I wasn't sure about. I had a scary moment on an exit ramp when the brakes didn't work as effectively as expected, and I heard a tire squeal at the same time (I'm not sure it was my little Dodge Neon, but it still scared me). From SJO I caught a plane to Chicago, where I'm writing this as I wait for a flight to Baltimore. After tomorrow's conference talks at Baltimore, I'll catch a return flight to Chicago and thence to San Jose again, where my rental car awaits; by then I hope to know where I'll be staying -- if not, I'll rent a room in a Motel 6 near the lab and grill the HR people there -- and report for work at the Palo Alto lab on Thursday morning.

young and bored and hopeless? join the Navy!

On my flight from SJO to Chicago, I sat in the very last row, and shared the back of the plane with a dozen or so very young men and one rather androgynous young person. I didn't realize this was an organized group, but I was introduced to this cadre by the young gangly blond boy who shared my row. "I'm going to boot camp," he said, with the blustery mode that told me that (1) he was desperately eager for me to know about it and (2) he also wanted me to think it was no big deal.
"Wow," I said. "That's pretty intense."
"Oh," he says, "y'know." he shrugs. "It's something to do." He sees no irony in this expression.

He seems so young, so fragile and birdlike. He's barely shaving; he might be eighteen. He exults "aw, man, that's tight" when we discover that the seat between us is free. He studies his Navy-produced day-planner with a neighbor who comes back to visit; he asks "what's a keel? that's not in here."
"It's the boat's backbone," his seatmate says.
"Oh, yeah, and the hull is like the skin."

His fellow enlistees psych each other up: "you know., man, there's no turning back now! we're on this plane," says one.
"Yeah, but it's a free flight," says another. "There's no other way we would get to Chicago."
"As soon as we get on that bus," says another, obviously channelling bootcamp movies, "we're all gonna be like 'oh, shit, what was I thinking', but we can all get through it if we just have the willpower."
I bite my tongue and resist saying "bootcamp is about having your will broken, kiddo."

I spend the rest of the flight wishing I was carrying the Quakers' flyers about conscientious objection. I think I will start doing that.