17 November 2009

Shoes!?

Today is turning out to be a pretty productive Tuesday. I have:
  • Marked some papers,
  • Gone to the doctoral training seminar to invite people to present in the workshop I help run,
  • Got my transcript out for a workshop that I'm doing next week
  • Studied a bit of French, and
  • Begun work on an abstract for the metaphor conference in Amsterdam next June.
While making the announcement at the seminar, my colleague and partner in crime for the workshop said, 'Both Stephen and I are PhD students in...' and I was taken aback. I'm a PhD student? When did this happen, I thought. It was weird and weird that it caught me off gaurd.

After this, I went to the library to look at the materials for the French class I will be taking because I haven't been sent them yet. I have a TMA (tutor marked assignment) of reading and writing due on December first, so I was a bit worried, but after looking over the material I am less worried. Unlike Japanese, when you look at a French sentence, the grammar is pretty self-explanatory. The words look familiar. If you need to look a word up, in Japanese, this is a very time consuming process, especially if you're reading, and requires knowledge of at least one 40+ character writing system. French? Well, you just type it into bablefish. Bam! You have your answer. Anyway, I don't think it will be too difficult. At least for the first book (there are six). We'll see though.

My abstract is also coming together well. I thought last night, as I was going to sleep, if I had to explain what I was doing to someone who had no knowledge of metaphor theory or linguistics or ethnography or discourse analysis, how would I explain it. This was a very good exercise because it reminded me why it was that I am interested in what I'm interested in and what it is, exactly, that I'm trying to accomplish.