Dum de dum.

Hum. It's been a while since I posted.

So far I'm liking this summer. Sun, warmth, some rain and cold. Everything in proportion. Lots of kisses and cuddles. He's got such a pretty head. I like it when he tucks it in my neck or armpit.

Kayyy. I'm still not particularly dreadful about travelling and presenting next week. If I truly start thinking about it, imagining what it's going to be like, planning what I'm going to say, how I'm going to introduce my topic - I still don't feel panicky! Weird.

Last summer I started fearing the upcoming presentation weeks in advance. I couldn't sleep properly for the last two weeks. It's so different now. I feel like I'm going to have a goofy smile on my face when I finally get there. Like, have fun almost.

My presentation is so much better this time around. I used colour for emphasis, and bold and italics and underlining and indentation. I put some fancy arrows on my tables and I even created a clumsy diagram. I'm so good.

I don't think I've mentioned it before, so this is where I'm going tomorrow:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/english/CL2009/

There's going to be a plenary lecture on Shakespeare, but I'm more interested in those about the lexis-grammar interface and the relationship between corpora and computing. It's going to be so good, a whole conference strictly in my field!

Of course, corpus linguistics is not a field of research, technically speaking. It's just a useful denominator, an umbrella term. There's no common methodology or theoretical framework. It simply indicates the source of research data. Perhaps a shared quantitative outlook.

Writing my presentation got me interested in research, again. There's simply nothing like it. I love the intellectual challenge and I just love linguistics. It's so beautiful.

Who knows, maybe I will write a dissertation after all one day. To definitively ruin my chances of employment outside the university. But first I'm going to stick to my latest plan of trying to find some real job somewhere else. If that doesn't work out well enough, I might go post-grad. Plan B if you will.

My parents, a certain teacher and a certain person with a pretty head would be thrilled about it. Everyone seems to be excited about the idea of an intelligent woman who would write the weirdest dissertation ever. Maybe I am just a little bit intelligent then? I enjoy being weird and crazy and goofy more, but intelligent isn't so bad.