read­ing

I thought I had it all under con­trol. I really did. Then my syl­labus finally arrived for “Language and Culture.” All 27 pages of it. Oh man. This is sup­posed to be a killer course in both con­tent and its effect on the stu­dents. But I wasn’t pre­pared for:

Gigli­oli, LaSC: *Hymes (21-44); !Goff­man (61-66).

Blount, LcaS: Hymes (248-82, esp. 255-69)

Sil­ver­stein & Urban, NHD: 1-17.

Duranti & Good­win, RC: Good­win & Duranti (1-42).

Goff­man, Erving. The inter­ac­tion order. Amer­i­can Soci­o­log­i­cal Review 48.1-17 (1983).

*Lyons, LS: ch. 1; ch.2, sec. 2.0-2.1; ch.9, sec. 9.0-9.3.

Lee, TH: Intro; !ch. 1 (1-39).

!Bauman, Richard & Briggs, Charles. Poet­ics and per­for­mance as crit­i­cal per­spec­tives on lan­guage and social life. Annual Review of Anthro­pol­ogy 19.59-88 (1990).

That’s for this week. Part of that is due for class today. Which starts in about an hour and a half. Less actu­ally. I’m off to read.

For those count­ing I did a quick tally and it’s easily over 200 pages of dense mate­r­ial. Wel­come to the Social Sci­ences boot camp Matt.

one day down… lots to go

Yes­ter­day came and went and with it, the first day of class. It went well. The obtuse read­ings came back into focus very quickly once I under­stood the con­cept and goals of the course.

I’m cur­rently wait­ing for my second class to begin.

As to the ques­tions raised about how to get wire­less going, my under­stand­ing is to follow these steps:

• Get a wire­less card and install it in your computer.
• Leave your com­puter on and wander into a wire­less zone.
• Let your com­puter do the rest.

  That’s about it. Until some­thing goes wrong I typ­i­cally don’t get into the nitty gritty. So right now the entire thing is magic.

Speak­ing of com­put­ers, mine is sick. The tablet fea­tures aren’t work­ing cor­rectly. So I’m pack­ing it up and send­ing it to tech sup­port today for about 5 days. While I’m pretty bummed about this, it seemed like a better idea to do this now and get it resolved rather than wait­ing until I get later in the quarter.

piggy back

I’m blog­ging thanks to an unse­cured wire­less account in my apart­ment. If this keeps up I might not need to get a home inter­net account. Let this be a lesson to you folks. For those with wire­less con­nec­tions: lock them down! For those poor grad stu­dents like me: live like a par­a­site and save money!

So a ques­tion came in through the com­ments: What are you study­ing? And I real­ized that this is some­thing that I had not talked about in a while. The short answer is the social sciences.

That leads to ques­tion two: what are the social sci­ences. From the U of C’s per­spec­tive its:

• Anthro­pol­ogy
• Arche­ol­ogy
• Eco­nom­ics
• His­tory
• Polit­i­cal Science
• Psy­chol­ogy
• & Sociology

This leads to the third ques­tion: Ok, so which one are you doing? And the answer is: I don’t know. My pro­gram is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary pro­gram in which my courses are based on my research interest.

Which leads to: OK wise guy, what is your research inter­est? Great ques­tion. To sum it up its:

How do groups observe and inte­grate new tech­nolo­gies? How does that adop­tion effect group behav­ior? And how do those changes in behav­ior effect the devel­op­ment of the technologies?

How that splits up among the sci­ences remains to be seen. Oh well, I’m head­ing back to campus to work on my read­ing for a bit.

So much for my time off before classes

I’m sit­ting in the library as I type this. Why am I in the library you ask? Because I’ve been dealt the first sur­prise of my grad­u­ate career: that I have read­ing assign­ments due on the first day of my classes. And what makes things more com­plex is that cer­tain classes cur­rently do not have syl­labuses avail­able. So I’m going to need to wait until a day or two before the class begins before I know what I need to read for that class. Or where the class is being held, for that matter.

This is all part of the school’s effort to put a fear of God and the pro­gram into us. Dis­cus­sions have focused on how much work is about to come our way. Judg­ing from the read­ing, it’s true. For exam­ple, my Per­spec­tives in the Social Sci­ences class has nine full books and 75 arti­cles asso­ci­ated with it. I’ve been told I should expect to read a min­i­mum of 300 page a week. And that’s before I get to the writ­ing assignments.

Still, I plan to explore Chicago this week­end. But for the moment, it’s nose to the books. And tomor­row I’ll be taking a bus tour of Chicago spon­sored by the MAPPS pro­gram. I’m told it’s quite good and that the tour guide is quite saucy.

I’m heat­ing up the ol’ MC3 and will start to post some videos and pic­tures of things really soon.

brief breather

I’m taking advan­tage of the University’s wire­less net­work to blog. I’m cur­rently on the third floor of the Pick build­ing in the MAPSS (Master’s of Arts Pro­gram in the Social Sciences)lounge. It’s also appar­ently the only place on campus with com­fort­able seats. Today is the second day of ori­en­ta­tion, the first specif­i­cally for my program.

My brain is full. Like about to spill over.

On the cool side, the hall that I was packed into was used to film an early seen in Raider’s of the Lost Ark.

I still owe a blog on what hap­pened with the move. It’s coming, some day. Oh, and I have yet to open Yahoo Mail. That’s some­thing for this afternoon.

close but not quite there yet

ok. so I’m in Chicago and moved in, but don’t have a ke or access to my apart­ment until Monday. a long blog will follow soon, by soon I mean within the next few days, to explain what exactly hap­pened. But the short, short ver­sion is it was all my fault and the fault of trying to save money.

a bear in his nat­ural habi­tat! a stud­abaker! (aka. moving right along)

Well I’m typing this from Toledo OH, taking advan­tage of the Hamp­ton Inn’s wire­less net­work. Things with U-Haul did resolve them­selves, though not with­out some addi­tional drama that will not be dis­cussed at this time (because it gets back to my own stupidity).

Yes­ter­day I packed the last bit of my apart­ments and with Drea as nav­i­ga­tor set off for Chicago. We made it more than half way, ended here in Toledo around 9.20pm. We ended up after a few minor mis­ad­ven­tures find­ing a place called Jeb’s Bar B Que for dinner. While there wasn’t much BBQ, they did have deep fried pick­les which we availed our­selves of.

In a few moments we’ll be depart­ing for the final leg of the trip. Then the unpack­ing phase. Oy… I can’t wait. Seri­ously. Don’t expect any more blogs until early next week as I don’t know what my con­nec­tion status will be.

Oh, as a final treat, I present in my opinon, the ulti­mate road song:

Kermit:

Movin’ right along in search of good times and good news,

With good friends, you can’t lose,

Fozzie:

This could become a habit.

Kermit:

Oppor­tu­nity just knocked, let’s reach out and grab it,

Together we’ll nab it.

Fozzie:

Ya! We’ll hitch-​hike, bus, or yellow cab it.

Kermit:: Cab it?

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along

Kermit:

Foot-​loose and fancy free.

Gettin’ there is half the fun; come share it with me.

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along!

Kermit:

Doog-​a-​doon, doog-​a-​doon

We’ll learn to share the load.

Fozzie:

We don’t need a map to keep this show on the road.

Kermit:

Movin’ right along we found a life on the highway,

Fozzie:

And your way is my way–

Kermit:

So trust my navigation.

Fozzie:

Cal­i­for­nia here we come, come pie-​in-​the-​sky land.

Kermit:

Palm trees and warm sand–

Fozzie:

Though sadly we just left Rhode Island.

Kermit: (spoken) We did what?

Fozzie: (spoken) Just forget it.

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along

Kermit:

Hey, L.A., where have you gone?

Fozzie:

Send some­one to fetch us, we’re in Saskatchewan.

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along

Kermit:

Doog-​a-​doon, doog-​a-​doon)

You take it, you know best.

Fozzie:

Hey, I’ve never seen the sun come up in the West.

Fozzie: (spoken) A bear in his nat­ural habi­tat! A studabaker!

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along

Fozzie:

We’re truly birds of a feather,

We’re in this together–

Kermit:And we know where we’re goin’.

Fozzie:

Movie stars with flashy cars and life with the top down.

Kermit:

We’re stormin’ the big town.

Fozzie:

Yeah! Storm is right, should it be snowin’?

Kermit:(spoken) No, I don’t think so.

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along

Fozzie:

Do I see signs of men?

Kermit:Yeah, “welcome” on the same post that says “come back again.”

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along

Kermit:

Foot-​loose and fancy free.

Fozzie:

You’re ready for the big time–

Kermit:

Is it ready for me?

Kermit & Fozzie:

Movin’ right along!

Movin’ right along!

(repeat to fade)