Virtually Home

Female cricket at my field site. January started in the back lot of a Lutheran Church in Hilo, Hawaii. I recorded and captured crickets with my colleagues, counted invasive cane toads, and collapsed into bed sometime after midnight Hawaii time (hours after my friends in Europe and the continental US had finished celebrating). I spent as much time as possible on that trip snorkeling and reveling in the warm weather. Grand Canyon is Grand February was pretty quiet, but we saw the Wild play the Islanders in Saint Paul, and the Gopher men's gymnastics team take on the Nebraska Cornhuskers in Minneapolis. I caught Josh Ritter and Guster on tour. I tried not to freeze to death. My life as a lab rat in the spring In March, Jacob and I took a massive trip to Arizona. We visited his family in Phoenix, camped for three nights on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, and roadtripped to Canyon de Chelly, Walnut Canyon, and other places. We saw a lot of amazing Pueblo dwe...

It's funny how impending change makes me take a harder look at my surroundings. I've been appreciating a lot of things I've taken for granted, lately. Just yesterday I walked into Richards Hall, which is one of two Zoology buildings on campus, and noticed some stonework invertebrates carved above the door. A beetle, a crayfish, a horseshoe crab. A grasshopper, I think. I should really have paid more attention for the last five years. Hell, for the last 22.

My friend Bethan is leaving town in a few hours. We met for coffee today at a shockingly American coffee shop called, inappropriately (and in English) "the French coffee shop". They had all kinds of fancy, sugar-filled coffee drinks in addition to the espresso that is normally available. We started talking about the things we miss about home, and what we'll miss about France. I think the thing that drives me crazy about being here is the utter lack of pressure or stress that exists. There is no emphasis placed on efficiency or customer service, as far as I've seen in my several months here. All of the concentration of those people I've directly observed goes to aesthetics. Leisure. Personal relationships. Which is great for the worker or the citizen, and pretty terrible for the consumer (or, maybe, my type of consumer). Maybe my problems stem from my deep hatred for shopping and desire for blitzkrieg execution of all plans that involve buying things or services....

When I think about places and subjects, they have colors. I'm not sure if the colors are assigned based on how I feel about the places or the ideas, or if their colors influence how I feel about them. For instance, when it was time to buy notebooks and folders in school, my math folder was always red. English was always blue. Science was always green, and so was French. If I imagine a map of the United States, the States are colored in a way that would make most of my elementary geography teachers upset -- there are lots of states that touch that have the same colors. The states I'm most interested in living in tend to be green (the entire west coast, for example, through Southern CA is blue). Oklahoma as a whole is a kind of orange color, whereas Tulsa is blue and Eucha is green and Norman is sort of purple. I'm not sure what bearing this has on anything, except that last night as I was still lying awake at 4 a.m. while desperately trying to reverse my sleep schedule...

Time passes strangely here. My schedule hardly conforms to the one I kept over the last several semeseters in Oklahoma. It involves a lot of late nights and a lot of sleeping in, eating meals at strange times and bouncing between the attention span of a goldfish and marathons of one activity or another. Lately, I've been throwing all my time at procrastinating studying for my various tests and writing my paper for typology. I'm about to get to the end of a book I'm reading on lingustics, and one of the last chapters is talking about the connections that link language to race and customs in a sort of awkward way. I'm going to blame the fact that it was written in 1921 for the way it talks about race, because it's not strictly politically correct. But then, what does that even mean? Other than that, I've spent a lot of time in my room listening to Tilly and the Wall, really. When I have something to do and feel guilty about not doing it, I spend a lot of time ...

I never thought much about my accent, really in any context, until I left the place where everyone sounds like me. These days I'm meeting a lot of people who have a hard time understanding what I'm saying when I speak French, and a lot of Canadians and Brits who speak different English than I do. Combine those experiences with the fact that my classes are taught in French by professors with various accents (Congo, Naples) and mostly deal with the subject of linguistics? I've been thinking about it a lot more than I ever have. Most of the anglophones I meet in this country immediately say "Oklahoma? Really? But you don't sound like you're from Oklahoma!" The American-inclined ones might add "Actually, you don't have an accent at all." Most of these people have never been anywhere near Oklahoma, though some of them are American (Californians, I'm looking at you). It's true that I scorn the word "y'all" and try not...