I don't think anyone reads anymore

I don't blame you! Posting has been so staggered because of school and lack of time. I've tried to keep up with people's blogs, even if I don't comment, but forgot the password for my wordpress log-in so I haven't been able to access Tea at Ten's blog until today when I took the time to search and reset it.

Last semester of grad school for me! I'm looking forward to graduation and a job. I'm excited and scared all at once.

Conferences: Puerto Rico

I am very shiny in that photo because apparently that is what 500% humidity (if you think this is mathematically impossible, think again) does to people.

The conference was better than I expected. One weekend before I was so stressed with finals looming, a thesis practice presentation I had to give, and a couple of projects due that I almost cancelled. Ultimately the notion that it would be unprofessional and unfair to cancel my scholarship-sponsored attendance won over all the stress, so I hopped on the plane and hoped for the best (the best being a pleasant stay and no catastrophic airplane delays that would screw up my class/exam schedule).

One of my classmates put the seed of doubt in me about the conference possibly being a huge Come Work for Us! event, since it's all organized by this big contracting company. As it turns out, there was no marketing, no pushing of products, tests, or therapy materials (like they have in the big national conference, by the way). No one tried to sell me anything and as far as I know no one tried to recruit anyone. I was impressed. The speakers were amazing and since the bilingual therapy niche is still small, I guess, we had a chance of speaking to them personally after each lecture. I actually had breakfast with one of them thanks to my roommate, who was her student and the only familiar face the professor saw in the restaurant that morning.

The entire weekend was re-energizing intellectually and professionally. I was one of two graduate students in the entire group, so everybody else I met was already experienced in the field, which I was thankful for since they could give me real-life stories and advice. I'm really glad I went.

I also just signed up to go to this year's national conference for the first time, so I'm going to see how that compares.

Vegas!

I wasn't so sure about Vegas, and by the end of the first day I was pretty sure I hated it. In case you've never been, let me tell you how the non-tourist parts of the city are nothing special and the tourist attractions are pretty much all located in one LONG street known as "the strip" that is full of hotels, casinos, restaurants, and malls. That's all there is, really. Some corners smell like urine, and at night some people smell like drunks. Don't expect any high culture in Vegas.

But before you believe that I still hate it, let me tell you how by the fourth day I didn't really want to come back (yet). Once you realize that empty fun is all that Las Vegas is and adjust your attitude accordingly, the place is a lot of fun. I walked, looked at fun and pretty things, I sat around by the pool reading magazines and ate like a sumo warrior. It was lovely! My only complaint was the heat and the sun (we reached 109F), because it makes walking a lot harder than it has to be. Even if you buy the shuttle day passes, just walking from one corner to another can be really hard when your skin feels like it's on fire. I need to go back soon so I can eat and see a show and lay around again. The shopping malls are AMAZING, even though I probably can't afford to shop at most of the stores. Yet. Uh huh.

Exhibit A: My mom and I walking on the strip and being obnoxious tourists.


Exhibit B: Tastes from around the world at the Coca Cola store. There were 16 flavors, including 2 from Mexico (apple and jamaica flavors), 1 from Israel (Krest Ginger Ale), and 1 from Italy that tasted like liquor, even though it wasn't (Beverly), and which was disgusting. My favorite was a watermelon flavor from China and the Simba Guarana from Paraguay. I believe the watermelon flavor would sell really well in Mexico, too, so get on that, Coca Cola.


Exhibit C: It wouldn't be America if we didn't bastardize other cultures.



Exhibit D: But don't worry, we bastardize our own cities, too. We're equal-opportunity offenders.

Who's the adult in charge here?

Oh, right, that's me.

I was at my assigned summer camp all week, trying to remind myself to model slow and easy speech at all times and handing out bathroom permits and, hear this, coming up with a dance choreography for uncoordinated 6 year olds, and feeling like I might be doing this much better if there weren't several supervisors around watching us at all times.

I think it went okay, though, and I was told I'd done a really good job at the end of the week.

The camp I was assigned to was for children with fluency problems (like stuttering). I don't have experience with children--not even babysitting experience--so this was the first time I'd been in charge of young children, let alone more than one of them. I learned that they are mostly easily entertained (a few beads, pipe cleaners, glue, cardboard paper, and you're in business), but they have to be entertained A LOT. Going from one activity to the next to the next to the next while maintaining control of the group and the behavior is hard, but by the second day I'd observed enough to be able to use my Nice but Stern voice if they stepped out of line while trying not to smirk when they were their little smartass selves.

In about two weeks I'll be taking a little vacation with the family in Las Vegas (I will gamble a total of $1 and if I lose then I'll stop and if I'll win I'll also stop. I don't want to push my luck there, I'm not a gambler and don't find the 1/500 odds particularly thrilling. I'm just showing up for the shows, man.). I'm trying to figure out how to pack enough toiletries for four people without having to check in any bags at the airport but it's turning out more difficult than I thought, with the amount of sunblock that four people require each day. I might just have to check in one giant bottle of sunblock lotion and call it a day.

Why is it that I can have a clean desk for 2 days, but then start piling up papers on top of each other after that? Well I think it's because paperwork sucks and the mail never stops, but who am I to stop Chase, Southwest, American Express, Disney, Bed Bath & Beyond, and all the local grocery and furniture stores from sending me at least 1 dead tree each week? Every time you don't kill a tree for no good reason, you kill America.

I still have a pile of papers to sort through and shred so I'm going to stop this post right here.

Oh, and I passed my citizenship test.

My oath ceremony is this week.

(Strangely it's been such a long time and process that this feels sort of anti-climactic and I wasn't as surprised as I thought I was going to be, though I am still pretty darn happy!)

I got the conference scholarship, too!

Someone's going to the beach this summer, yay!

Oh yes and to all the lectures, too. Ahem.

Happy news

I went digging through Goggle the other day trying to find any kind of cool seminars or courses in my field that I could attend over the summer, when I came across this yearly conference for bilingual speech language pathologists. The website had a link for graduate students who wished to apply for a scholarship that would cover the cost and travel expenses for the conference, so I did (it's in Puerto Rico this year!).

I was contacted eventually by one of the organization's representatives and asked to do an English/Spanish phone interview, which I agreed to. She was extremely nice and helpful and told me about the organization, which also contracts SLPs around the country for bilingual services. She casually dropped that they also offered academic scholarships and I might have mentioned that it sounded interesting and that I would love to find out more. She basically said "Well, I have your conference application here and we're doing the phone interview, so I could just count this as your application, since it's the same process!". Okay then, that's great for me. Two weeks ago or so I was asked to mail a form for a background check, but didn't think much of it.

I got a letter yesterday saying I got the scholarship (which covers all my tuition for next year), along with an offer of employment after graduation! I can pick my location and negotiate the terms once I graduate, but man, I have a job offer! Graduation is only a year away, so I suppose it makes some sense, but I feel so excited to finish now. This is a great motivator to keep rolling. Even if I end up taking up another better offer, it feels nice to have this secured.

To celebrate I went out and bought myself some delicious, overpriced coffee. Something's gotta help me finish all my schoolwork and clinic hours so I can graduate!

I'm still waiting to hear from the conference scholarship, though. I want to go to Puerto Rico even if I have to attend a bunch of lectures to do so.

Still alive

(I don't know if anyone's reading this anymore, AHEM!)

It's been nearly a year since my blog hiatus and I'm starting to feel the itch to write here again. I'm also thinking of going back to a public blog now that some time has passed since the serious stuff was going on, but I have to think about that a bit longer and possibly think about which posts I am willing to show and which I need to hide. I think successful med school dropout stories need to be put out there for other struggling or doubting med students to see.

Things are going great right now. I got a driver's license last summer (FINALLY) and bought my first car. Shortly after, I started grad school and I'm about to finish my first year with only 7 weeks left of clinic/class. My first semester of grad school was a clean 4.0 and my most recent midterms went really well, so it's looking like another successful semester. I'm getting great reviews from my clinic supervisors, and next year I'm starting my clinical practicum at an elementary school and a hospital, and I'll be done with that by the following summer, if all goes well. In the meantime I'm trying to figure out my niche within the field, but so far I'm enjoying the neurological disorders but I'm also looking into working with alternative communication technology. We'll see, we'll see.

One more thing, I'm thisclose to being a US citizen! My test and interview are this coming May (my fingerprints must have gone through as "Painfully boring and safe", yay!), so wish me luck on that. I'm glad the process was quick, because I'm trying to have an American passport in my hands before next year, since I'm planning a graduation trip (my graduation from grad school and his from high school) with my brother to Spain and I'd prefer it if we both had passports issued by the same country, just in case. Hopefully we'll reunite the funds by then because I'm dying to go.


PS. I'm still reading y'all's blogs even if I don't always comment, because I enjoy keeping up with your lives. :)

So, it's official

I got my letter of acceptance on Friday. I'll be starting graduate school this August!

Status: P3

Apparently that means that my application has been sent to the department for review. Whatever that means or however long it takes, they don't mention. Someone in my class told someone else (so you know it's TRUE) that one of our professors said they hadn't started reviewing the applications yet.

The next step, P4, is the graduate school informing me of the decision. Until then, I'm enjoying telling everyone I meet in whispered, reverent tones that I'm "status P3" and let them wonder what kind of secret agent I am.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Why I quit medical school

I was sitting in the kitchen of our first house here in the US, a small rental house, while my physician cousin signed the sponsor papers for my permanent residence. You must have someone financially-able to back you up, you see. He kind of looked around while he discussed my plans to go into medicine and said "You should do it. You could help your family out."

Looking back I think that was a well-intentioned but ultimately unfair statement. I do believe a lot of this desire to "help out" was a big part of my decision to go into medicine. That, and I was always the smart kid who Did Things Right and medical school was just the logical next step. I could do something else, but then I'd possibly end up in the same place as those kids who got Cs and Bs in high school and to be completely honest, that was one of my worst nightmares. I had to do better than that. Than them.

I disliked medicine from the get go. I can tell you that with complete confidence. Once I was in medical school, it all hit me and I realized I did not want to be there. I never showed up to class after the first week, and trying to work through the material might have been intellectually stimulating but it would have only gotten me a little bit closer to another test, another hoop to jump (though I'm not sure there is much stimulation in memorizing, which is what medical school was all about). My classmates didn't incite much warmth in me, either. They all seemed to care about these things that I didn't: how to secure proctorships, research positions, how to keep working more and more and more. When I told one of them that my clinicals teacher, the pediatrician I loved, had invited me to her house for Thanksgiving because she knew I wasn't going home, her only question was "Where does she live, [Redacted Nice Neighborhood]?!" She wanted to know how expensive her house was. You know, that's all most of my classmates were working towards. This prestige they deluded themselves about.

By the time I was a medical student my family had gotten over the freshly-arrived-to-another-country financial hole and was comfortably middle-class once again. The motivation to help out was gone, replaced instead by the luxury of feeling free to choose a career path without taking compensation into account. Once in medical school, I started to see myself a little different. To survive here, I was going to have to deal with kissing some ass, sleep deprivation, high stress, competition...survival of the fittest, that is. I don't do any of these things well. All my life I got by on guts and logic, devouring material I liked but also easily remembering even that material I didn't. Coming out on top was never too much work for me. It felt natural and I almost--ALMOST--felt guilty about it because everyone else made such a big deal out of it. In medicine, at least from my perspective, whoever deals best with the stress is the winner. The rest of us fade into the background where we can maybe secure a primary care position among the other less motivated students. Lower compensation is probably the worst fear of any medical student with exorbitant student debt.

On my latest graduate school application essay, I make a vague statement about medicine being incompatible with my life expectations. It's not the whole story and it may sound slightly wishy-washy, but it's true. I never looked at any of my professors in medical school and thought that I wanted to be like that. On the contrary, most of them were worn out and stressed, even those who enjoyed their job. I knew I would never enjoy their lifestyles or their schedules or their responsibilities.

Looking back, I realize I was also depressed. I can't tell you whether depression was the cause or the consequence of all that I went through in med school, though. I think it was both. The more depressed I got, the less I could deal with medical school stress, while at the same time I had professors and deans on my back asking me to try harder. I asked for time off and was denied it, and either way, I don't know how I would have been able to make my student loan payments while I was on leave.

When people ask me why I quit, I tell them it's complicated. It's not a cop-out answer, it really *is* very complicated. Part of me feels like trying to justify a preference is useless. It would be like trying to explain why I like chocolate or the color blue. I just do...I just did. But if I tried to verbalize my reasons, I'd say it was because I was overwhelmed. I was only 20 when I got accepted to medical school. I wasn't even of age to smoke when I made the decision to go into medicine. Suddenly here I was, never having done anything but studied, facing a huge responsibility and commitment. Also, it is possible that I never liked medicine enough. I confused an love for science AND people with a love for medicine. I never considered other clinical fields, as I was obviously too smart to settle for anything else. At some point I had an epiphany and considered things that had never crossed my mind before. What would I want to do? (As opposed to "What should I do?") How do I work best? In what environment, and with what kind of people? As it turns out none of my answers fit in with the medical establishment.

I am writing this now because I still read a lot of your blogs. Lately, I have not written about medicine and how much I disliked it because sometimes I feel like I'm being disrespectful to my readers, who are mostly all still in the field. A lot of the time I don't know what to say in the comment sections of your posts, because I think you will think, Well, she's biased, what does she know. I want to be supportive of any medical goals and feel like a hypocrite. I want to agree with negative thoughts about medicine, and I feel like that person who quit and is trying to bring everyone else to her side. When I write posts about how happy I am now, I feel like a broken record. WE GET IT YOU'RE HAPPY NOW, is what you must be thinking. I just continue to be surprised at how much better it gets, and it DOES get better. I feel more relaxed. I look at my current professors and for the first time I actually think I would like to be like that. I want that job, their job. When I am at my current setting, I don't feel like an outsider but right at home. I wouldn't mind spending my nights in that place. I have had conversations with the professors, the graduate students, my classmates, and it all feels so much more genuine to me.

It's funny how suddenly other life choices don't seem so wild or wrong, when at some point I could have sworn on a Bible that a medical degree was the only guarantee for stability and happiness. Pff, a lot of people I knew could have sworn that, but as it turns out, we were all full of crap.

Someone's having too much fun with chemicals

Happy Valentine's Day

Sprouting?

I know you're all probably wondering how my avocado seed is doing, and it probably doesn't let you sleep at night. YOU MUST KNOW. PROBABLY. I also went ahead and tried planting some orange seeds to see if I can grow an orange tree (or three). Here are the results, almost 3 weeks later:

Do you see any start of a root down there? Me neither. **CRIES BITTER TEARS** But nature can surprise us, and the cold weather might be delaying things a bit. Let's wait a few more weeks and see what happens.

Now, the oranges.

No sign of sprouting yet. However, I planted these almost a whole week after the avocado, so I'm still hopeful.

On other academic news, I've submitted my application for the master's program. My ONE application, because I only applied locally. I don't want to move again. Besides, I love the population here and I think it fits with what I want to do both in terms of therapy and research. I've been getting really interested in the implications of bilingualism (or multilingualism, for that matter) in brain development. For children with language disorders, does being bilingual help their cognitive and abstract reasoning or does it hinder it further? Is there evidence of neurogenesis on second-language learning? How does the brain organize two different languages, both motor and phonological aspects?

So, the application is in and I'm hoping for good things.

I'm going down to the speech clinic on Monday to watch a session. Students are free to go and observe, and since the therapy rooms have one-way glass we are comfortable watching without disrupting the sessions. I'm visiting because I have to transcribe a session, this time with diacritics. In phonetic transcription, there is a whole set of additional symbols to describe any deviant or atypical articulation patterns. So if a sound is palatized, or labialized, or rounded, or retracted, or aspirated, or nasal, there's a symbol for it. There are different symbols for all the different types of lisps. It's a lot to remember, and the differences are sometimes very hard to hear. But as far as sound descriptions go, diacritics is as detailed as we can get and it's helpful for therapy purposes.

Speaking of more symbols to learn, I want to buy those American Sign Language flashcards and start learning a few of them. I won't be fluent without practice, but at least I could somewhat communicate with any deaf clients. (Oh yes, in SLP we call them clients. It threw me off at first, because it was such a no-no in medicine.) Deaf-education and therapy are a separate subset within speech pathology practice, but we will be learning some about it during graduate school and might still have to deal with people who are hard of hearing and can benefit from sign language.

Cross your fingers for me. I can't believe I'm actually doing this, finally.

Growing an avocado pear tree

I found a method to grow your own avocado tree posted on this lovely gardening blog, and I'm going to see how it works out. Right now I have this container sitting on my bedroom windowsill and warning everyone not to touch it. Supposedly it takes years before you get fruit out of the plant, assuming it survives to adulthood, but it's my last day of official vacation and I wanted to start a fun project to keep me going until the summer. I'm also going to plant a few orange seeds tonight and see if I can grow an (or some) orange trees.

Wish the young seeds luck!

I hereby ruin a movie for you

I was dragged (because no one wanted to see Sherlock Holmes again, SADLY) to see Avatar on Saturday. Futuristic, dystopian, end-of-the-world movies don't appeal to me that much. The storylines are usually too stressful, and I feel like I'm the only person sitting there hoping for a diplomatic solution. Why must they choose the path that will inevitably result in losses and death? The train of thought that leads to it never makes much sense to me, and I wonder if this whole "rational being" is more myth than reality when it comes to humans.

The movie lacked good writing (Unobtanium? Pandora?) but made up for it in special effects, if you are into that sort of thing. It was entertaining and even touching if you don't think too hard about why the natives needed salvation in the first place. That said, I think I'm heading to see Sherlock Holmes again next weekend.

Time to take that Christmas tree down

This isn't a post about me (CHORUS: THANK GOODNESS) but just a curious aside for cultural benefits.

Traditionally, where I'm from, Christmas is slightly different and slightly prolonged. See, we're not quite ready to quit partying or eating after January 1st.

On the 25th of December we celebrate the birth of Jesus and nativity scenes remain baby-less until that day. There's not much to explain here, since this is hereby known to most Americans as Christmas Day. It's what comes after that's different.

On January 6th there is what we call the Three Kings' Day, though in English they refer to them as the three magi. King Cake (which I later discovered through my first college roommate, is also eaten in Louisiana during Mardi Gras) and hot chocolate are served. The cake has little plastic baby Jesuses (this sounds funny as I type it) buried inside of it, and if you happen to get one you are due to host the party on February 2nd, which will be explained later. Because the gifts did not reach the baby until this day, it is the day when gifts are given. Fortunately for the kids, they are usually neither gold nor myrrh nor frankincense. I could imagine a 5 year old being disappointed by any one of these gifts, valuable as they might be. In order to receive gifts, children write a letter to the three magi and leave it inside a shoe the night of the 5th, and wake up to their gifts the following morning.*

Then, on February 2nd, 40 days after Christmas, the presentation of the baby at the temple is commemorated. On this day the baby is again removed from the nativity scenes, which are also removed until the next Christmas season. The traditional food in the celebration includes tamales, which you will be paying for if you were one of the lucky ones to almost choke on a little plastic symbolic baby Jesus almost a month before.

These traditions are slowly getting lost, I feel, not because of a collective disinterest in them but rather a collective modernization of the world and work schedules. Holidays in the middle of a workweek are inconvenient, and a lot of families don't live close enough to get together this often.

I'm still eating king cake tomorrow, though, and if anyone wants to send a block of solid gold my way I promise I won't complain.


*Recently, though, intelligent children everywhere have discovered that believing in both Santa Claus AND the Three Magi has the potential advantage of producing double the amount of gifts.

New Year's planning

There are so many things that I want to do this coming year, things that I've been waiting a long time for. For one reason or the other (and there's always a reason) I have yet to get my driver's license, buy a car, or get the very needed new prescription glasses. I'm thinking of trying contacts this time, because I just long to wear pretty sunglasses but, well, my face is already occupied lest I run into walls or moving cars. Prescription sunglasses are always an option, but the prescription kind of excludes many of the shapes and frames I like because then the glass would be too thick and too big.

Now that I have a job, and since it will probably still be there after the holidays, I want to save up for a car. It's too easy for car-averse me to spend that money on plane tickets or books (I may be car-averse but I am certainly not travel-averse...on the contrary). My number one goal this year is to have a car so I can feel more independent. My requirements for a car are as follows: 1) That it is affordable, 2) that it is a gas-saver, and 3) that it has air conditioner. Oh, and 4) THAT IT WORKS is a given, of course.

Outside of gaining more, um, displacement abilities and more financial independence, my other goals are more hazy. There's obviously doing well in school, but that's a given and I don't plan to do anything but do well in my classes. There's grad school, assuming I get in, which I am looking forward to. In the case that I do not get in, I'm going to get my SLP assistant license and work in the field for a year or two before trying again. I'm only applying to the local university because I want to stay home for now. It's not only the cheaper (read: fiscally responsible) option, but I've found a nice niche here with family and friends. I'm not planning on trying out new places until I've graduated and am financially secure, at least in the sense that I'll be able to get a decent-paying job where I want to go.

Things are so different right now from how they were last year I can't even begin to describe it. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it just hit me recently that I haven't had a panic attack in the last 6 months, that I am not constantly nervous anymore, that I haven't felt palpitations in a long time, and that I couldn't care about what people think anymore. I used to hesitate about getting a job dealing with the public in case I ran into any of my old med school classmates. I still felt shame. Shame at what, I'm not sure. People switch professions and change majors every single day and no one bats an eyelash. Unless you're in medicine, I guess. But I don't feel that way anymore. I don't have that speck of doubt in the back of my head, wondering what could have been, because now I'm sure that I would have hated what could have been and I'm sure what I feel right now is contentment. Medicine me wasn't me, it was someone I think I sometimes imagined myself to be. The wandering me of right now feels much more authentic, I have a better idea of what I like and where I'd like to go. But the most important thing for me is that my likes and dislikes have time and room to change. That's really the only thing I ever wanted, some room to breathe.

I might show you all the pretty things I got for Christmas, though I swear I didn't ask for anything. Unexpected gifts are the best kind of gifts. I'd show you all the food but I think I may have eaten it all. For that I am not at all very sorry. I'll try to upload some pictures for the next post, it's looking a bit drab around here lately, with me forgetting I have a blog and with my laziness about the camera. For the next post, pinky promise.

Que que?

I finally got my final grades and I got straight As (for some reason that phrase, "straight As", sounds so high school-ish). I think that'll be good enough for the application, don't you? I also got the forms needed to my LOR writers, requested all transcripts necessary, and took the GRE. Basically, it feels like I'm more than halfway done with this application.

I have been working like crazy, 40 hours each week PLUS overtime. I'm so glad the worst of the shopping season is over tomorrow, but I'm sure I'm going to miss the paychecks when I'm only getting 10 hours per week. I wish I had crazy stories about customers, but with a couple of exceptions I can think of, all of them have been reasonable and nice. Oh, and for some reason all my coworkers think I'm 18 years old. When I correct them, they say "You look so young!", which I won't complain about, ever.

Yesterday I went insane for a few minutes and decided to go out and buy new work shoes and slippers. The (old) flats I had been wearing to work had been looking quite spent and my slippers somehow got holes in them over the last few weeks. I guess they're old, too. The point is that the nearby shopping strip was crowded and the parking lot was a mess, but after going into two stores I found nothing I liked or was willing to pay my hard-earned money for. Finally, without getting my hopes up, I went into an expensive-looking shoe store where I found a pair of REALLY NICE shoes for work that were on clearance for 70% off. They were just sitting there at the top shelf, just my size, as if they had been waiting for me. Two aisles over I found some lovely clog slippers also on clearance. Clearly the gods were smiling on me.

Tomorrow will be a long day at work again, but I haven't had to close in the last two weeks (another sign I should maybe, just maybe, buy a lottery ticket) and it's the last of the busy days. I'm planning to go see Sherlock Holmes on Friday, and though part of me thinks it will be fantastically bad, I can't say no to Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr.

Did I tell you I saw "Twilight: The New Moon" a few weeks ago? Well, I did, and I laughed the entire way through.

At the lack of a good conclusion paragraph, I'm going to be lame and unimaginative and just say, THE END.

And I was even sick during the test

I took the GRE today and got a really good score, THANK GOODNESS. My quantitative (math) section score was close to perfect, according to the unofficial results the computer produced. I'll get an official copy of the scores plus my writing score (that one you don't get the same day) in about 3 weeks.

So now that hurdle is over and I can go back to the regular holiday scheduled programming of working and napping and eating and napping.

Try not to squee too loudly

A good kind of Christmas meme

I saw this list on another blog and decided that since I'm not asking for anything for Christmas, nor am I planning on spending big on others, I'd instead try to give money to people or charities that really need them. I figure it's a good way to reciprocate all the good things that have happened to me this past year.

So I figured I'd get the ball rolling here on Blogger and hopefully this year someone will give me something. So here's my wishlist for Christmas.

Dear Santa I'd like...

#1
$15 donation to St. Jude's Research Hospital.

#2
$15 Tribute donation to the Red Cross

#3
$15 Tribute Donation to the Heart and Stroke Foundation

#4
$15 to the Autism Society of America

#5
A new set of pajamas or slippers for one of your local nursing home residents. (Some homes put up trees with gift wishes from the residents, pick one!)

#6
Drop off a box of coloring books and non-toxic crayons at your local children's hospital or orphanage.

#7
A hot cup of coffee to the person outside who can't afford a cup.


Consider yourself tagged if you read this, and put up your own Christmas list. I'll try to pick something out of each list to give.

Game on

I got a 75.1 on one of my phonetic transcription assignments the other day and I'm extremely proud of it.

No, really. It was the highest grade in the class! We're transcribing speech samples after only hearing them once, and in this case we were transcribing different dialects/accents. I made a few mistakes here and there but I was surprised to get most of the transcription right, since I thought it was a pretty difficult task and was nervous about getting my grade back given how the professor isn't very forgiving when grading. It's very hard to transcribe something you only hear once and it's even harder to avoid falling into the trap of transcribing it the way you say it or the way you think it should sound.

We're getting into diacritics now, which is another layer of phonetic transcription that adds details like intonation, stress, aspiration, nasality, lip rounding/unrounding, etc. The more detailed the transcription, the better the evaluation. Speaking of evaluations, I'm doing a speech evaluation on 3-year old child. It's definitely very interesting to see how speech samples are broken down and analyzed, and it is much more detailed than I thought. I love that it combines two things I love: analyzing the grammars (is the child using nouns, verbs, plurals, negatives, past/future/gerunds, auxiliaries, etc?) and articulation, and the therapy aspect of treatment, which is very hands on.

On other related matters, I finally registered for the GRE. I'm taking it on December 14th...so that leaves me about one more month to study for it. Game on, GRE.

What I'm up to

I haven't been posting here as often as I used to. Sometimes I really feel like I have nothing to say, and sometimes many of the comments that pass through my head are posted immediately on Twitter.

But besides that, I've been writing for this blog called Lady Business under the pen name of "Mafalda." I've only posted a few articles, but I've been having a lot of fun writing for a website with a bit of a wider audience, under a pseudonym, and without any baggage. You can see my profile here.

I also plan to update my forgotten Language Prodigy blog. I hope to get into more discussions now that I have a bit more knowledge about the technicalities of language, and maybe do my own analysis of research articles I find interesting.

I think my keyboard's been more productive in the last month than it ever was in this last year.

Calavera: 2009

Uf, tantas cosas que contar,
tantas que han pasado este año,
la calaverita vino,
y se llevó la medicina al caño.

Ya pasada la calaca,
yo me regresé a mi casa,
un poco acongojada,
como una uva hecha pasa.

Pero que la calavera viene,
a decirme, "Ya está bueno!
O te encuentras algo nuevo,
o los dedos te trueno!"

"Está bien!", le respondí,
y me busqué otra carrera,
una que me viene mejor
y que la calavera no quiera.

Mientras tanto Dragonfly,
ya casi acaba la escuela,
y seguro que en muy poco
va ser la doctora mas buena.

Sara tiene un nuevo gato,
Namerovsky, así se llama,
lo tiene muy consentido,
que hasta le hizo una cama.

Xavier sigue estudiando mucho,
para ser una buena doctora,
toma mucha cafeína,
para aguantar las largas horas.

Arturo no se dónde está,
hace mucho que no visita,
tal vez esté muy ocupado,
o de vacaciones en playita.

Mientras tanto Tea at Ten,
también ya casi termina,
ya casi acaba sus estudios,
y seguro que hace fiesta en la piscina.

Ya espantada de tanto estudio,
la calavera se fue corriendo,
se regresó a su aposento,
y estoy feliz, no les miento.


(Translation in the comments)

What It Is

1. I can get my SLP assistant license after next semester. It's my contingency plan in case grad school doesn't happen right away. The local school districts have openings and the base salary isn't bad at all for an SLPA, so I'm guessing hospitals or clinics should also be hiring and paying similarly or a little more. This knowledge assuages my financial fears for the time being. If it comes down to that, I can start earning real money in 6 months. I'm sick of not having money.

2. The local SLP Master's program admits only in the fall, but the SLP program in my undergraduate alma mater admits new students in the fall, spring, and summer. I'd rather stay home because it would be cheaper and easier (another move, again? Ugh), but if the other program is only one year long (and I think it is, I just haven't confirmed) it's tempting to attend that one instead.

3. There is such a thing as "moonlighting" for SLPs, apparently. Who knew? Still, it's a nice option for additional money, if need be.

4. The GRE costs $150 and you can get unofficial results the same day. NOT THAT I'M NERVOUS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.

I don't regret being here now, but sometimes I wonder if the way things went down wasn't a bit unfair. I was expected to get myself together, but I wasn't thinking straight. I was expected to, I don't know, figure out how to fix things on my own, but pass my classes until I did. I asked for a year off, but I needed to justify it, as if emotional well-being wasn't justification enough. I was tired, and worn out, left behind, and feeling guilty for having somehow gotten myself in that place. I understand I had to do it myself, but I felt like I needed more time. Perhaps too much time, and that's why it was just not going to work out. Maybe it never would have, regardless of time. I like having space to breathe, and I knew that regardless of time I would be afforded little of it if I stayed. I know I'm happier now, but I still wonder if. Just...if. I'm human, I guess.

Because I never learn

I'm sitting here studying for a Phonetics exam tomorrow. Could I have studied earlier? Absolutely. This gives my life a bit of excitement, however, and I think in some deep and sick level that is the reasoning behind a lot of my procrastination. It's a strange rush to get an A on an exam that you studied for only the night before, or a paper you finished printing 15 minutes before class. I'm insane, I know.

We are doing phonetic transcription and I have the consonants and most vowels down, but a few of the vowels are quite problematic. Does the vowel in "hot" sound the same as the first vowel in "father"? Almost, but not quite. Is the first vowel in "always" the same as the vowel in "the"? The answer is yes, in most cases (unless you're saying "thee" as you may in front of certain words). The vowels in "wood" and "full" are also the same.

Language development is interesting, although it tends to veer towards the social science side. Basically, there is a bunch of things we think might be happening during the early years but no one is quite sure exactly how they happen. Also, my professor tends to make comments that irk me sometimes. He's made several comments about English being more difficult and more complex a language, and though on a phonetic level I may agree (see vowels above), his tone and the insistence with which he says it makes me think he means something else. We live on a border town, so our classes tend to focus on both English and Spanish sounds, since a lot of the patients are bilingual or speak, especially in the early years like so many of us did, only Spanish. We have talked about cultural nuances in development of language in the average American English speaker and the average Japanese speaker (the Asian population here is quite small, and most of them are Chinese or Filipino), but never about the cultural influences in the development of Spanish speakers. For some reason this strikes me as a dismissal of a rather important part of the problems in our area and, if I may say so, in a lot of other areas in the US.

Oh, and the book he picked for our class has a comment in the introduction page about so few of us women being ladies anymore. I'm still pondering that one. Now, if you'll excuse me, this woman has to get back to studying for a test.

Hail is NOT paved with good intentions

I am applying to grad school this year after all. I'm taking the GRE sometime next month and thinking about the interview (just one application, just one interview, yes). I've also got the two people who will write me letters of recommendation. One of them was a PhD whom I did research with back in 2007 here in my hometown. Unlike many of my classmates, I have a pretty strong science background. You wouldn't believe how many of them are career-switchers from fields like business or education, who've never taken a biology class. That's not an insult but an observation, and I'm hoping I have a slight advantage over those candidates. Anyway, the point is that I'm hoping LOR1 takes care of painting a good picture of my interest in science. The second letter-writer is one of my medical school professors, the doctor who taught our weekly clinical sessions and who was our small college leader. Believe it or not, and this is exactly what I hope this letter will prove, despite my poor performance and my dislike for most medical school classes, I liked and performed well in the clinical areas. This doctor always reiterated to me that I was very good with patients and she was supportive throughout the whole fallout process, and said she was happy to write me a letter. This particular letter means a lot to me. The letters of recommendation were the part of the process I was most concerned about, so having these two people secured is a huge weight off my back. The grades I'm not that worried about. Undergrad classes are...well, cake.

Also, I found out that I can get my SLP assistant license after I have 25 hours of undergrad SLP classes. If I don't get into graduate school next year, I have a good option to fall back on for financial support while I get ready for the second round. In terms of classes, I have been really enjoying phonetics. I'm pretty good at it, without having to make much of an effort. It sounds lazy, but it's so nice to find something that feels so effortless, something that when I study it is not fighting again every instinct I have. In the future, I may not make such a bad dialect coach.

Speaking of jobs, I did get the homeschooling job I had raved about, but I ended up rejecting the offer. They low-balled me in terms of salary, and it just wasn't worth it for the amount of work they expected from me and the distance I'd have to travel to get there. After gas and taxes, I might have ended up losing money.

Oh, and we also got golf-ball sized hail a couple of weeks ago. Cars are dented all around, insurance companies are crying, and roofers around the city are laughing all the way to the bank right at this moment. I'd never seen or HEARD anything like it. For a brief moment I wondered who the hell was throwing stones at our house (stoning is so last millennium, guys!, though I hear TPing is all the rage these days), until I looked out the window and saw the culprits falling from the sky:


The aftermath left us with dented cars, damaged roofs, beat up plants, a couple of broken lamps, and several hours of googling "HOW DOES HAIL FORM IN 90F WEATHER OMG?" and "WILL INSURANCE COVER THIS?" Thankfully this is about as crazy as the weather gets around these parts.

*As a sort of postscript, I must tell you about how I wrote this post in between classes, and after wrapping it up and saving it I rushed upstairs where my class was about to start, only to trip with my own big feet in the stairwell, thinking I could recover quickly and just keep going, and instead tripping all the way and ending up having to admit that I had indeed tripped (the floor in front of my face was a big clue) and maybe my right shin really hurt. Ouch.

It's funny 'cause it's true

Image credit: http://xkcd.com

Reading checklist

Things I've finished reading but haven't blogged about:

1. Lolita (quite a while ago, and I keep meaning to share my favorite quotes and then forgetting)
2. Like the Red Panda
3. The Sun Also Rises

I also intended to read As I Lay Dying but it never managed to hold my attention or my appreciation. I'm not sure I follow Faulkner's "stream of consciousness" style spoken in Southern dialect.

Currently reading:
1. Moby Dick (Found about 15 copies at the library, I KNOW, and I took one of them. So far I really like it and am glad I traded Faulkner for Melville.)
2. Re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in anticipation of the movie.
3. Trashy novels during my brain-decompression breaks. (NOT Twilight, though. I just won't.) So sue me.