two defeats and a victory

[trochee]

So this evening has been a real mixed bag.

trochee blows a meeting
I got distracted at the end of the day (reading phonetics) and forgot to go get on the bus for a committee meeting for the TV studio. Whoops. I feel bad; it's a volunteer operation and I should really show up for meetings. I wrote an email to the Exec Dir apologizing about 15 minutes before the meeting started. I hope she got it.

trochee fails to stop the thieves
So with guilt and heavy heart, I caught the bus home. Halfway there, two young teenage boys get on the bus and rush back to the back corral, where I'm sitting, reading "Principles of Semitic Word-Structure" (see my previous post). They put a backpack on their lap, and proceed to discuss where the best place to get "sick" headphones are (at "Bose", pronounced /'bozi/, heh), and rifle through the contents of the backpack, pulling out bit after bit and holding it up and admiring it. And these items clearly did not belong to these boys: one item was a woman's silver bracelet that incorporates a watch, which one said "oo, I want that, I'll wear it just for the time." The other snaps it around his own wrist and admires the look, and he actually said "dayum, bling bling". I finally couldn't hold it any longer.
"Hey, that backpack can't possibly belong to you guys."
"What! how would you know?" one said belligerently, confirming my suspicions.
"Um. that bracelet really suits you, you know. It looks like it's just your style. The first thing I thought when you got on, you know -- 'that guy, he looks like the kind of guy who always wears women's jewelry." The boy looks at me sideways (is this guy serious?). The other looks at me sullenly, and puts the things back in the backpack. "Where did you get it?" I ask. The first boy joins the second in staring at me darkly, but there are advantages to having more rings in my tree-trunk than the two of them combined, and I continue to look at them openly and directly. But nothing happens. They sit. I finally relent, and point out to the boys that the bus we're on isn't going where they want to go anyway: the bus behind goes downtown, but this one stops on the Hill.
"oh s**t, man, really?" Suddenly, they can both speak. "Oh man, let's go -- ring that bell -- we'll get off here." These guys move fast. After they get off, I walk up to the front of the bus to talk to the driver.
"They didn't steal it on the bus," says the driver, after I explain. "Not much I can do." Feeling a little defeated, I go back and ride the rest of the way home. I'm not much of a hero.

trochee is accepted to a conference
When I got home, I got the news that my abstract was accepted to the Linguistics Society of America conference in San Francisco in January. I'll be presenting in the Computational Linguistics session. (There are keynotes by Ladefoged, Bybee, and Lakoff!) Nice to be recognized in this area. The downside here is that now I have to prepare the talk, not just the abstract. I was prepared to be rejected because I figured they wouldn't know how to use what I'm doing.

Comments

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I've done most of the work. But I want to add some gee-whiz bits so the talk is better, and I have to actually write the talk. Luckily, it's a 15 minute talk with 5 minutes of discussion, so it's not necessarily that hard. But it's work I haven't scheduled in for this quarter. Ach, who needs sleep?