So Decreed

The phrase ‘Door Busters’ is hereby forbidden – to be sealed away in a vault along with the Jonas Brothers, Vice Presidential candidates that wink, and various other boogums. 

It’s not that I object to the phrase itself, necessarily, but more that every single retail outlet ever is using it in their ads this year.  Seriously!  Was there some sort of conference or smoke-filled room meeting that I wasn’t aware of?

And speak of shopping, where was I at 5am this morning?  Sleeping in mah bed!

The Countdown

Although I’d expected the time after the election to be a countdown to when Dubya gets to exit Washington butt-first (and this is true), the real question is not how much damage George will manage to do during his final days, but how much damage Henry Paulson will do.  Specifically, how much taxpayer money he’ll give away to businesses with virtually no oversight.  Thank God we’re not socialists, ya know??

The Fed announced a program today where they’re giving money to ‘consumers.’  And by giving to consumers, they mean ‘giving to banks.’
And then having the banks lend to the consumers via credit cards.  So like, you give them tax money, and then they lend it back to you at 19.95% interest.  And of course, if you have bad credit, you can’t get it back at all!

It’s good to know that will all those billions of dollars flying around, We the People don’t have to worry about getting hit by any of them.  Paulson is making damn sure of that!

/cheer

Boing Boing reports today that Obama’s transition team for the FCC are not only major Net Neutrality proponents, but also active WoW players.  While I don’t care so much about the WoW explicitly, it’s a HUGE relief to know that questions of Net Neutrality are going to be in the hands of people who actually know what the internet fucking is. 

As an added super bonus, Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens is almost assuredly gone, and he’s been AT&T’s biggest Paid-Off Bastard in the Senate, lobbying to give ISP’s the keys to the internet.  Being that the man’s 85 and knows as much about computers as John McCain, I’m very glad for this particular changing of the guard. 

I’m still reeling from this idea that the president isn’t out to get me any more.  Not only isn’t Obama actively tearing down this country, but he appears to even be *gasp* trying to improve it.  I hadn’t realized how used to the idea I am that the president is evil – not just incompetent or uninterested, not just advancing his own agenda.  Bush I, Reagan, I don’t believe they were fundamentally bad men.  I think they ran the country with ideals different than my own, and I do think they made selfish and greedy choices.  But I do still think that they saw themselves as performing a duty, and there was some sense of stewardship.  On the other hand, I think Dubya honestly just doesn’t care, and that Cheney would murder children for fun if he could get away with it.  

Eight years is enough time to get used to the idea that callousness, greed, and evil are normal, and frankly that’s pretty frightening.  I feel like an abuse victim, slowly and confusedly coming to grips with the idea that it’s possible to have a president that doesn’t just want to hurt me.  And might even want to join my guild.  😉

Bleargh, Revisited

So the conference has pulled a complete 180, and everything from the poster presentation onward has been pretty much solid fun. I wasn’t really stressed out about the poster itself, but the process of fetching the poster from the Kinko’s, making and printing the handouts, and other such stuff, all while starved and half-asleep was very draining and frustrating.

But! The poster went great – the people that visited liked it a lot, and many of the big names in Sociolinguistics stopped and asked questions, including several people whose work I’d used in the thesis. As a special bonus, Dennis was one of the keynote speakers this evening, and some of what he talked about was based off of my work (and my name was mentioned), so I got some further positive press. 🙂

Last night a bunch of MSU folk went to Dolce Vita, one of the most commonly named Italian restaurants in the world. It’s the equivalent of naming your Mexican restaurant “Mexican Restaurant.” Nonetheless, the food and the company were delightful. We had appetizers of different fish and cheeses, plenty of Italian wine, and I had Orrechiette for my meal, which is little ear-shaped pasta that’s good at soaking up sauce. It cost literally six times less than my meal the night before at Hotel Zaza, and was better to boot!

Today I got caught up on sleep, skipping many of the morning panels to sleep and do schoolwork. I of course have a big assignment due Monday, and so I’m trying to make it so I’m doing as little of it as possible tomorrow night. I’m not overly optimistic. 😛

Got to see panels with nearly all of the big names, including a talk given by Bill Labov, the father of pretty much the whole field. For that one I even got to have a chair, unlike about half the room. 😉

Also kinda cool was that one of my profs in undergrad was here, and I introduced myself to her. Of course, she’d forgotten me, but at least she knew that one of her studentlings had grown up to follow in her footsteps.

Overall I’ve gotten to meet a lot of people, and put faces to many of the names I’ve been reading. For the most part I’d been drastically wrong in my visualizations of them – Walt Wolfram does not, in fact, have a huge bushy beard, and Carmen Fought, another big name, could’ve passed as one of the grad students. It was especially fun to be on the dance floor with most of them at some point during the evening. 🙂 There was a party tonight in the Houston Museum of Art, of all places. Although it’s a little early to be done partying, the shuttles back to the hotel stopped running at 11:30, so that was when I had to turn back into a pumpkin.

But yes! The conference has overall been very fun, despite the living hell of pre-presentation Friday. I feel like they should give us a practice day to figure out how the heck to get around town before they start the actual conference. I feel good because I think all of the central conference purposes have been achieved – fun has been had, names have been dropped, nets have been worked, and people with letters after their names know who I am. 🙂

Bleah

So I’m at a conference in Houston, where I’ll be giving a poster in a couple hours. I’m supposed to be enjoying myself, but I’m mainly just annoyed and wishing I was home. Everything’s expensive, and the hotel where the conference is at is luxurious but awful. So dark inside it’s practically a cave, almost no windows, and freezing. They’re trying for this weird sensuality by having pictures of Frank Sinatra and naked ladies around, but it feels more like a menagerie than a speakeasy. It’s like Buffalo Bill’s basement from Silence of the Lambs, only with people flitting around that call you sir all the time.

I’m staying at a different (cheaper) hotel that actually has natural light and food that doesn’t cost $60 a meal, but overall I’m just not having much fun. I know virtually no one here, and I’m a glaring outsider to all this – I feel just like I did at MSU where I’d go to sociolinguist functions and feel like an ignorant moron that had come to sit at a table where everyone else had known each other for 350,000 years.

Moreover, I have two major assignments due for my classes on Monday and Tuesday, and so as fun as it is to galivant around in one of the dingiest, most dangerous-looking cities I’ve ever visited, I’d really rather just be home getting my damn work done. Now I get to do the work, but feel like an anti-social jackass as I either miss going to panels or miss going to parties and social functions so that I don’t fail my damn classes.

This entire trip I’ve either been starved, sleep-deprived, or both, and that shows no signs of letting up. I wanted to take a nap this afternoon, but I have to get my handouts ready and pick up my poster (and I have NO FREAKING IDEA how I’m going to get to the Kinko’s), and I also need to eat.

This means that when I meet up with the MSU sociolinguists tonight (the ones I feel like a loser around), I’ll not only be timid and left out of the discussion, but also falling asleep.

This fucking sucks.

THANK GOD