Whoa Nelly!

I am beat. But I am feeling better and in good spirits, which is more than I could say yesterday.

An interesting thing is that, in recent years, I have come to accept and even embrace the fact that I am a huge nerd. Dork. Whatever. There's some debate on the distinction between the two (my sister and I, for example, have slightly different opinions on the matter) but really, folks, it all boils down to the same thing in the end: talk to me about some grammar or mention Chomsky, and I'll sit up straight and start taking notes. It won't matter that I have been hacking my face off all day or that I only slept for 4.5 hours last night and spent the better part of the morning in an overheated bus on windy country roads. As a matter of fact, talk about Chomsky and grammar together - in the same lecture - and I might just throw a little party in my head, complete with streamers and those annoying kazoo things. Today, I got not one but TWO golden lectures mentioning the winning combo. And we even touched on phonetics. Phonetics, guys. This is more exciting than betting it all on Final Jeopardy and winning.

I had a moment today where it actually occured to me how happy I am about choosing to study linguistics. Despite all the hoopla and excitement mentioned in the paragraph above, my realization didn't come to me in the form of a big, earth-shattering moment. It was more as if I had just sat down in a comfortable, slightly-worn chair, with a just-hot-enough cup of tea and a nice, cozy blanket, and looked around for a second and thought, "Yes, indeed. This is nice."

And that's really, really cool. I actually prefer the mellow realization that I'm doing something I enjoy to the big explosion of excitement I almost always have whenever I start anything new. This somehow feels more permanent. More real.

I'm lucky because I have enough background knowledge to follow the courses without too much difficulty, but mainly, I think I'm finding it easy because I'm actually interested. After our class today, a bunch of kids walked out of the classroom saying things along the lines of, "Man, what the hell was he talking about?" and "Wow... that was so boring."

I just kept the fact that I took three pages of notes, am planning on doing most of the outside (read: not required) reading, and have already read one of the required textbooks (for fun) to myself. No need for them to be getting to know the real me too quickly.