(If you like to term your seasons Brian Jacques/Redwall style.) As a last hurrah, I'm trying to put some coherence into my previous dabblings. Class-wise, this means I'm taking an AnthSci course in prehistoric language migration. I'd been interested in linguistics prior to college, before being uninspired by a syntax course sophomore year. Syntax is the natural link to computer science. Anytime anybody ever hears me mention linguistics and my concentration (human-computer interaction) in the same breath, the buzzwords LINGUISTICS! and COMPUTERS! seem to jump right out at them and they blurt, like many who have gone before them, "Dude! You can do text processing, and automatically translate languages!"

For better or worse, syntax and text processing really just don't float my boat. Text processing is a pretty important problem facing both linguists and computer scientists today with lots of big ole implications for natural language understanding .I just have irresponsible and romantic illusions about what linguistics should be, and so I'm not interested in working in these very practical and very marketable areas. Syntax is the composition of allowable phrases and sentences in a language, without daring to infringe upon meaning, so things like "The pen defenestrated the acre." are totally allowable. I like to accuse syntax of being soulless. However, I fell in love with two courses last year entitled "Language and Thought" and "Lexical Semantics", that deal respectively with pragmatics and semantics.

[Here's where I started to explain the distinctions between syntax and pragmatics and semantics, and then started to put it into context of other areas of linguistics, and then sketched out an Illustrator diagram to demonstrate what the hell I'm talking about, and then finally told myself I have work to do and I'll produce the animated, full-color Layman's Guide to the Building Blocks of Language Study by Mo"Primo Layman"sh for you tomorrow, I swear.]

Not sure what I'm aiming for here, really... I do want to work in interaction design and "make things that help people do things better" for a while. In the meantime I want to have a bit broader knowledge of linguistics in general so I can do some reading for fun, and/or totally switch gears into grad school when the killer blue glow of LCDs has finally trumped my eyesight.

Outside of academics, I'm also taking climbing and Lindy Hop, each for an hour once a week. The rationale: this is inconvenient and relatively expensive stuff to find after college. I've climbed and swing danced about exactly one handful of times before, but always with too much lag in between to build upon the previous instance. With luck the once-a-week-for-8-weeks drill will knock some sense into that silly head.