Today it's only six more days until we close the distance. So this is my last Sunday, Monday, etc. of being alone (at least for the next six months). Hah. I'm dropping all my things on the floor and being a slob, because my boyfriend'd very neat and I won't be able to live out my slobby side once he moves in.
I should be writing my paper on Pain Language, but I can't motivate myself at all. So my plan now is to write a blog, see how much fun writing is and take it over to my paper.
I had a bit of a crisis after the defence on Thursday. My grades have been good so far, but my prof is convinced I could do a lot better if I would just work a bit more thoroughly. He's probably right (and I've been told that since I was 10, so there must be something to it), but I just don't have very high ambitions. Good is good enough for me. I don't want to be very good and I've never actually needed to, either. Apparently he's been seeing me get my PhD since third semester, when I btw wasn't even convinced I'd ever get my BA. He told me that to get into a PhD programme good wouldn't be enough anymore, I'd have to be very good and seeing as he's convinced that I have the talent it would be sad if it went to waste or if I blocked that road for myself. I sat there, feeling very, very young and aimless and shyly told him that I didn't think I want to stay at university after my MA. He made huge eyes and asked me why I even was at uni then ("because I love linguistics!") and what I wanted to do ("If only I knew....").
Then I went home and felt bad for not knowing what I wanted to do and not having any long-term plans.
That is, I do have long term plans, but they don't involve a career as a successful language contact researcher or any career at all. I've never felt the need to be very good or even better than everyone else at anything.
When I was in school it would be "If you did your homework, I could give you an A. Now even though what you do is pretty much perfect, I can only give you a B." and I'd think "So what? Don't you think I'd do that if I wanted to have an A?"
I don't know if it's me there's something wrong with or my teachers or even why I'm not ambitious or competitive enough to work harder *sigh*
I know, I know and my mum and all my friends tell me that I don't need to figure it out now. No one has everything figured out at 23 and that's fine. But what if I figure it out and realize that getting a PhD and staying in research/uni is what I want and then my grades won't be good enough, because I figured it out too late?!
Ah, man. Growing up sucks. I just want to stay a student forever (ok, maybe a studenet with a rich husband...).
Anyway, I need to continue my pain paper. Actually that's a really fascinating topic. The only way to inform others about your pain is through language and the more accurate you describe your pain, the better it can be treated. BUT in most languages, there are very few words that originally mean hurt or pain and most often we use metaphores: burn, sting, explode, break, etc. Single moment pain is almost never described with the original pain verbs, because they describe a state and that doesn't work for single moment pain.
I compare Polish and German pain verbs I took from the autobiography of a man who escaped from Auschwitz (it's in the sad nature of the topic that there are quite a lot pain descriptions in the book). A
Also in Polish, you can't really say "You're hurting me." I mean... there are obviously ways to say that, but you would have to say something like "You're causing me pain" or "What you're doing is hurting me" or simply "That hurts!", but you can't use the hurt-verb with 'you'.
Fascinating. I had never actually thought of it before.
YAY, Linguistics!!!
PS I think I feel motivated to work on my paper now. Linguistic typology is freaking fascinating (I used to be a grammar/syntax fangirl until now, but typology is a lot more interesting than I thought).