An Award :)

First, if you haven't heard yet or you're still on the fence, please join me and Charity for the HONE YOUR SKILLS Blogfest on March 16th. It's a chance to try your hand at a short story, get feedback from fellow writer-bloggers, and encouragement to try and publish it. We'd love to have you, so just click the link above or on the sidebar to join.
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Last week, I was given an award from Allan Russell at Publish or Perish AND from Michelle at Perfecting the Craft...

UPDATE: I also just received this award from Kristina at KayKay's Corner. Man, am I feeling the love or WHAT?

Kristina also gave me this award:

Thank you so much, Al, Michelle, and Kristina!

For those of you who don't know Al, he is the author of Veiled in Shadows, the beautiful cover of which is staring at me from the top of my to-read pile. Then again, maybe I'm just a sucker for the big blue eye :)

(On a side note, stop by on Monday for a guest post by Al.)

According to the rules of the award, I should tell you seven things about myself and then pass it on. Here's a random assortment of things you may not yet know about me. I'll limit myself to non-writing things this time. For other random Rosie facts, you can check out these other posts: from here, here (the the truth behind it), here, and one more.

1. As a recovering linguist, I'm a language junkie. I'm not fluent in any language (I sometimes contend that I'm not even fluent in English), though my husband likes to argue this point with me. Anyway, over the few decades of my life, I've studied (in no particular order) Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, Macedonian, and Welsh officially. If I have a dictionary, I can usually read Czech, Slovak, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian well enough. I also know lots of random syntax facts about Icelandic, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Dogon (my friend is currently working on a Dogon grammar).
2. I'm a graduate student in my last semester of coursework. There exists about a 2% chance that I will write a dissertation (with a 3% margin of error).
3. If I were ever to write a dissertation, I would write it on Polish syntax and the reflexive particle się. (I promise, it's a little more interesting than Wikipedia makes it out to be.) Last summer I got to meet Norbert Hornstein, whose most recent syntactic framework is called MOVE! (yes, with the exclamation point), and talk to him about my ideas using his framework. We argued a lot. We disagreed even more. It was fun and discouraging.
4. My graduate employment consisted of teaching Russian for only one year. I have never worked so hard. I taught in the 2007–2008 school year. Many of my former students were freshmen that year, and so are seniors now. I occasionally run into them on campus, and sometimes they even invite me out for a drink to catch up. :)
5. My current GA employment is working as the Managing Editor of the for Journal of Slavic Linguistics for Slavica Publishers. I prepare journals and books for publication. In addition to the journal, which I have worked on since 2006, I am currently preparing a book on Macedonian. It should be finish in the next month and be published by summer.
6. I have never published anything regarding linguistics. I've only edited other people's work. This doesn't bother me, though my colleagues think it should.
7. I had no intention of this turning into a Rosie's-grad-school-life post. Just to mix it up, I'll tell you that I got new glasses last week. They've got the Transitions lenses, too. I can't begin to tell you how excited they make me :)

Okay, now for passing on the love.

Carol at ArtziCarol Ramblings
Jan at Crazy Jane
Sallee at The Highly Educated Housewife
Medeia at Sharif Writes
Charity at My Writing Journey
Dezmond at Hollywood Spy

Thanks again to Al, Michelle, and Kristina for the award. :) Have a great Wednesday!

Odes To Those Which Sustain Us

This summer I've been taking intensive Macedonian (it's Slavic, not Greek, I promise).  A couple of weeks ago our instructor was trying to find videos on YouTube to show us how one of the national dishes of Macedonia—burek—is made.  It's pretty crazy, kind of like stretching unbreakable silly dough and then stuffing it with meat!

While we searched, we also came across this:




How AWESOME is it that Ali En—a Macedonian singer/rapper that my instructor has never heard of—dedicated an entire song to one food?  And not just any food.  I'm mean, we're not just talking about bread here.  It's a national dish, full of patriotic pride.  I can't really think of anything comparable for the US (apple pie, maybe?), but it would be like writing a song to shepherd's pie in Ireland, or mole in Mexico, or borshch in Russia.

The only other remotely ode-like song I can think of (help me out here, folks) is That's Amore, but that should hardly count because 1) it's about love, not food; 2) it references lots of different foods, not just one exalted dish; and 3) no one involved in the creation of the song was Italian.  While number 3 shouldn't make-or-break it, 1 and 2 do.

So, in honor of national foods, I have decided to dedicate the following Drabble (a story of exactly 100 words) to... the Polish Pierogi.


Pierogi!

Oh, pierogi!
How I adore the smell of thee!
Let me count the ways
In which your potato filling
Oozes
Upon my plate and tongue,
Or your sweet cheese stuffing
Slides down my throat
Like flower petals
Along my skin,
Or your ground meat
…oh, well, that generally makes me sick…
All topped with butter and
Smalec** and
Thick sour cream.

Or how about your sweet, fruity dessert-self
Filled with strawberries,
Raspberries,
Blackberries?
A sprinkle of sugar makes you
Perfect
For my digestion.

Oh, most versatile and wondrous pierogi!
Your dough is so simple
And yet you taste so extraordinary!


**In this case, smalec is crispy, fried pork fat.  Think of tiny, chopped bacon bits without the meat part.


What songs/poems/stories do you know of that are dedicated to a particular food?  Is there a food you would like to pay tribute to?  Feel free in the comments section :)

YouTube Love

For my Macedonian class, we put our longer assignments online on a blog.  We're also encouraged to add other things, like reflections about what we're learning.

Well, I went to YouTube heaven on this one.  For some video entertainment, check out my other blog.

If you watch nothing else, please take a look at Valentina Hasan and Nevena Tzoneva.  Both are impressive, though for very different reasons.

*wink*

Calling All Members of the Geek Squad!

Imagine, if you can, a particular signal in the sky, calling you to the special secret meeting place.  Is it a bird?  Is it a plane?  Is it a poorly-written footnote with an incorrect bibliographical reference?  If you're a true member, you already know.

Today's been odd at best.  This morning (and when I say morning, I mean 9am to 1:45pm), my Macedonian class met at Kroger.  Yes, at Kroger.  I now have pages upon pages of food vocabulary to memorize on top of my delinquent backlog of vocab from three units of my text book.  Luckily, random things like cilantro (coriander) are (transcribed) koriander, or mango, or banana.  But I digress... 

While sitting in the wacky little cafe-like area at this particularly over-sized Kroger (like a genetically engineered watermelon/lubenitsa?), I open my planner to write down my homework, and there, written in my usual, messy, pencil scrawl, is a note telling me I have a meeting with one of my linguistics professors at 3.

Crap!  (I think I actually said that out loud in the middle of discussing our favorite movies.)

Yeah, I forgot.  Camping and migraines certainly didn't help, but I don't need to make excuses for myself.  I just plain forgot.  And what preparation had I done?  Zero, zilch, nada, nic, nishto, nichego, rien, ingenting...  (If anyone has any other languages to kick in, I'll happily inflate my list.)

So I rush home from this morning's grocery-store antics, flip open my computer, rummage around trying to find the right files full of half-baked Polish clitic data.  I've migrated computers since I collected the data, and I couldn't remember where it ended up, so it took an extra couple of minutes.  I had enough time to print off two copies of the data, eat my lunch, and read a handful of today's blog posts before I had to hop on my bike and head to campus.

And was it worth it?  So very, utterly, completely worth it!

Yup, I'm a geek.  Possibly the queen of geekdom.  Why? you ask.  Well, because I'm taking an incredibly complicated problem (the one that guides almost everything I write anymore**) and trying to work it into an up-and-coming new alternative framework.  And you know what?  It might not work.  And that's friggin' cool, because it means that I get to adapt the system.  Oh, yeah!

On the other hand, it means that I need to be WAY more organized with my life and my time.  No more three-day stints of laying on my couch for eight-hour stretches and trying to increase the sexual tension between my characters.  Nope.

*sigh*


The Priorities List: (the order is subject to change without notice)

1) Study for the class I'm actually taking right now!

2) Work.  Yeah, I have a job.  I usually forget about it since it's relatively freelance and my boss is infinitely more disorganized than I am (meaning, he doesn't check up on my progress).

3) Friggin' awesome linguistics research.

4) Writing.


I hate that writing comes at the end of my list, but surely it must at the moment.  We'll see how well that sticks, but I need to try for a little while.  Blogging should probably also come in as #5, but... well... a girl needs her cyberfolk, right?  Here goes nothing...


**...that's not fiction. Although it might be fiction.  I'm not sure.  Most graduate studies that abstract past the point of sanity could (should?) be considered fiction.  But that's probably a topic for another blog post.

Broken

*sigh*

What was supposed to be a relaxing weekend—with a camping trip and a bridal shower—wasn't.  Actually, the bridal shower was fine (minus one of those people who just keep talking and you try to walk away but they follow you to keep talking to you...  a pat-yourself-on-the-head, Seinfeld kind of moment).  And the camping was fine, too.  It was me that wasn't fine.

I am a chronic migraine sufferer.  In December I finally went off my daily, preventative medication that I had been taking for four years.  That was a huge breakthrough, to not need that anymore.  And, usually, I don't.  Since December, I've now taken three trips of note—one to a conference, one to visit family, and one camping.  And each trip has found me gripped by migraines almost every day.  Luckily, I have my Wünderdroge (sumatriptan to the rescue!), so normally this isn't much of a problem.  Get migraine, pop pill, stir, wait one hour, and serve up to social obligations.  No problem.  It does make me as loopy as a slinky, but hey, I'm not in pain.

So, Saturday?  No problem.  I drove with my migraine (it wasn't too intense yet) to the bridal shower (1hr 30m), and took it when I got close enough that the loopy after-effects wouldn't inhibit my driving.  Twenty minutes in to shower, and migraine was gone.  No one ever had to know.

Sunday?  Uh oh.  The pill I took yesterday was my last one.  And it's a long weekend.  And the pharmacy with my scrip isn't open on Monday...

*sigh*

So, I spent most of Sunday handling a slowly growing migraine, only tempered by over-the-counter baby meds.  I spent most of Monday lying on my couch with an ice pack on my head (it really doesn't do much, but it makes me feel like I'm doing something proactive).  Usually my migraines can last up to three days, so I was planning a trip to my walk-in clinic to ask for the insta-shot this morning.

The other thing about my migraines: if I don't move much, they're not quite so bad.  Bending over, shaking my head, walking can all cause spikes of pain.  But sitting on the couch or lying in bed make it "better".

So, grouchy?  Yes, I was pretty grouchy.  And so not only was my head kind of broken, but I also broke my pledge from Friday:  I opened Word.  It was easier to focus on the glowing screen than on the pages of the book, and I had had a few ideas over my two computer-free days.  Fifteen pages later, I have no idea if it's decent, and I don't care.  Sometimes you have to do things to help your soul, and I needed Anabelle and Marcus in my time of grouchy pain.

This morning, I got up later than expected, and my wonderful husband drove me the pharmacy.  The migraine wasn't as bad as the past two days, so I didn't think the shot was necessary.  I picked up my scrip and took a pill before I even left the place.  Then I went to class.  I couldn't concentrate, almost fell asleep, couldn't remember vocab in Macedonian that is IDENTICAL!!! to it's Russian AND Polish counterparts (which means I have absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not knowing it).  And so I went home early and slept a few more hours.  And then spent some more time with A&M.

It's a fun scene, and there's a ridiculous amount of sexual tension.  Who wouldn't want to work on it?

Starting tomorrow, though, I'm going back to my pledge.  I will close Word.  I will not write about A or M.  I will read.  I will clear my mind for creativity.  And, to add to my pledge, I will study my Macedonian vocabulary.  I pledge this in the name of all the spirits who guide... well, not me, but Anabelle and Marcus.  They're the ones who need convincing, anyway, right?

But feel free to remind me.  I might need it.