Productive

(subliminal advertisement) Birthday Countdown: 10 days
After a slow start back to school, at least this week has been somewhat productive. I have found myself wondering how much more I could have gotten done if I were working without the weight of tragedy on me. It seems like this is not something I should consider too much though because, well it just is. And even without the breakup with T, the horror of Katrina, the supreme court nominations, I think there would be something there. There always is. The difference right now is that it's like someone boosted the signal or turned up the volume. Or both.

And still.
I have made progress on my paper after telling my advisor that she'd have to babysit me on it. I am nearly ready to run participants for my dissertation pilot data. I look forward to having a whole mess of sound files and some cooler weather. I am set up to do analysis at home. What stops me is nothing to analyze currently and the fact that with the exception of a few deceptively nice days a week ago, it is mostly hot and muggy here. My office is a corner of my bedroom, and neither has an air conditioner. So I will wait until October for the cozy data analysis corner to get started.
Birthday Countdown: 10 days
In the meanwhile, I need to figure out some way to finish setting up the physical experimental space. I am collecting English utterances from people who are native speakers of Japanese/second language speakers of English (J1E2). At this point, it is just an exploration to see how word stress manifests in J1E2 folks' English words. For example, "OBject" differs from "obJECT" in stress placement. Native (monolingual) English speakers presumably will vary a bit in terms of whether they use pitch, duration, or loudness to get the stress across. For a totally unscientific experiment, you can try saying the words with differences along any of those 3 dimensions and you'll see that any one of them is enough to make the stress contrast clear. But Japanese is not a stress accent language. Japanese is a pitch accent language. So I am predicting that J1E2 productions will show evidence of a heavier reliance on pitch than E1 productions.

Well that is the idea. And that is phase one. Phases 2 through infinity are for later this year after I even know what the hell is going on with the J1E2 speakers and confirm what native speakers of English do. Gotta do the latter because although everyone and his brother in phonetics has a paper on how stress is encoded in English, everyone and his brother seem to offer rather disparate accounts and observations. I'm all about doing it for myself, and since I'll be measuring speech for J1E2 speakers anyhow, why not throw a few E1 folks in there too?

Brave words now. We'll see how I feel in December.

I'm hitting the radio station today to upload the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary public service announcement they sent me. This was incredibly nice of them to do. I was going to record one, but their audio engineer got in touch with me and said they'd send me one. So here it is. God that would be a great job. Audio engineer for an animal sanctuary. Holy shit. Anyhow, I'm also going to record one with a general appeal for people to volunteer to help out or fund raise in their areas. This applies to people relief as well as non-people relief. While I'm donating to the people relief, I am organizing for the non-people. I figure that sort of balances me out.

So now it is time to go be more productive. And then tomorrow I am going to skip school and go to a movie because I fucking need a little bit of a break.

The picture is of a fountain my friend M. encountered after a very long drive with a very full bladder. This was in the lobby of her destination building, between her and the bathroom. Somehow, this feels like the right image for me today.
Birthday Countdown: 10 days