way cool

My highlighter is amazing. I marked highlighter over the typed words 'Item and process' (IP) and the words literally raised off the page! They looked like they were floating over the highlighter stuff!!!

And then I touched them and realized that the paper had actually bubbled from the moisture (like that, Meredith? maybe I should have said 'moist-ness') of the highlighter stuff.

The last few days have been easy. The schedule is routine now; we've been having some interesting lectures. In the general lectures I can usually pick up the main point, but the details are lost on me. I did have breakfast with some PhD and post-doc students who were critiquing the lectures and one of the classes I'm attending. I found listening to their critique more helpful than the class, at least for getting an idea of what the academic controversies are in the field (numeric data vs. qualitative data, for example) and what academic ideas of professionalism are.

My roommate, Kyoko, is presenting a paper at a conference in Sweden. She'll be back Sunday. Saturday I'm going to be in a workshop all day. It's called 'Ethnographic Methods in Sociocultural Linguistics.' Sounds exciting, huh? At first, I was thinking I wouldn't go to any of the workshops here, just because I'm not involved in any type of research, so what would I have to work on? Then I realized that this is my chance to get exposure to all that I can, so heck, I might as well go for it. It helped too, that the profs in one of my classes are running the workshop and handed out a flyer, so I actually knew what would be presented.

Now I'll go back to studying Item and process.