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| *this was taken from my textbook - copyright Kearns, Kate. 2000. Semantics |
you start going cross-eyed after awhile (unless you're a hardcore semanticist. Which I'm not.)
So to save my mental sanity (what's left of it, anyways) I decided to take a mental break.
I never realized how good I was at procrastinating until I started my MSc. One might even call it a talent. I have baked more in the last month that I have in the last 3 years combined. I've been pumping out muffins, pies and squares like I was running a bakery. (A very high-class, high quality bakery that is...called Brittany's Baked Delights...wait, no...Brittany's Boulangerie...ok, maybe I'm thinking too much about this...). All for the sake of getting away from the piles of reading I have on my to-do list. (And for the sake of, well, delicious baking. At least the roommates aren't complaining!)
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| the delicious enemy |
I forgot how, in many ways, difficult it is to be a student. After a 3 year hiatus, it's hard getting back into the books. There's so much to know, so much to learn, and while I find everything I'm doing wildly fascinating (except, perhaps, some areas of semantics, which seems to hurt my brain more than anything), I'm struggling to fit in my readings. It's not that I don't have the time - au contraire, I have lots of it - but I have this knack for finding "better" things to do. Going to the gym, baking, cleaning, organizing my notes, going out with friends, baking, making tea, watching tv, cooking, messing around on facebook, looking up baking recipes and the like.
Take today, for example. I had no class today. None, nada. I got up at 11, went to a Body Blitz class, came home at 1:30, signed for a package for a book that I had ordered, perused said book (this one wasn't even for class), made lunch, watched TV, looked up recipes, bought groceries online, baked banana and 3-seed energy bars, made dinner, watched more TV/chatted with roommates...and then started reading, at 9pm. We're 5 weeks into term and I continue to leave my readings until about 9 or 10 at night, read for a few hours and then do the whole thing over again. 'Tis a vicious cycle.
Of course, I have no one to blame but myself, and I'm hoping to rectify this over the next while. And I'm not the only one - I know many a fellow student who has the same issues as me. But still, I'm paying enough to be here...you'd think I'd want to get as much out of it as I could! But then again, I've never really been a "books" kind of person. I like to read, just not when I have to (hence why I shied away from all literature courses in undergrad.) I've always preferred more kinesthetic learning - some audio, some visual, some hands-on. I mean, the majority of my undergraduate degree involved grammar exercises, a lot of writing (rarely in English), and listening to sound clips in the language lab. There wasn't a whole lot of reading to be done, or at least in the theory department. Here, I'm bombarded with readings in phonological, semantic and syntactic theory. And my Scots & Scottish English professor gave us a massive 2 page bibliography, and every week there are about 4-5 whole books under "reading". Yesterday I took out 4 books on Scottish dialects alone. Why do I want to read 200 pages on the grammatical structure of the Buchan dialect? Interesting as it may be, I'm not exactly looking to write my dissertation on it...I suppose the idea is for us to pick and choose what we find interesting and go from there...but I don't even know where to start sometimes! I feel my only break in reading comes from my course in Middle English (which I'm actually auditing, I was only allowed to choose 1 option course this term, which is Scots & SE). It's great fun translating manuscripts and prose from the Middle English period and analyzing all the fascinating syntactic and morphological phenomena. Well, at least I think so.
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| this is how I feel - minus the bow |
As much as I complain (and again, I realize I did this to myself), I am really enjoying being a student again. It's a cozy little bubble, free of (much) responsibility except for your own education. I rather missed the academic world, and as I delve deep into the world of language sciences I find my mind constantly expanding and growing to fit in all the new and exciting information being thrown at me. And while I've never been a big fan of nit-picky linguistic theory, I can appreciate why I'm being made to learn it and, at times, find it oddly interesting. (Although sometimes I have no clue why ANYBODY would want to study semantic propositional logic in-depth). And overall, I am very grateful to be studying at one of the best universities in the world (#20!) in one of the most beautiful cities in the UK.
Well, I think I've procrastinated enough for one night. Time to tackle some more indefinite descriptions and mass noun phrases.
And for all of you who are procrastinating by reading this blog, get back to work!
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