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So, today's classes: workshop elicitation for Linguistic Field Methods, and then a lecture for Language Learning and Applied Linguistics, a class I, uh, have yet to attend this semester.
At some point I really need to try and fix my computer in one important respect: the line out and microphone jacks no longer work. Plug something into them and the sound cuts out from the built-in speakers, but nothing comes out at all from what you've plugged in. It's frustrating, and threatens to be exceptionally annoying this semester.
Am now listening to the recording of the first lecture in Language Learning/Applied. The lecturer is a native French speaker - but in the good way, in terms of accents. (A French accent can be a good or terrible thing, to my ears; word euphony is kind of a thing for me.)
... I may have to drop this class, because it's possible I have irreconcilable clashes with the other one, which would be really annoying, I want to do them both. (And transferring into a new unit a week in would be irritating.)
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I have a few major loves in my life, and it's hard to decide which to focus on. (ADHD does not help in this.) I love history, and I'm good at it; I also love Linguistics, and I'm reasonably good at it; I love playing guitar, though I'm not very good at it at all, but I'm gradually improving, teaching myself to be better; I love photography, and I'm oka~ay at it but also improving... alongside a bunch of other various things I like and have different degrees of skill at, like craft projects and so on.
Most things become kind of random hobbies I pick up and drop when the mood suits me.
But I love history, linguistics, photography, and music.
I have no pretensions of getting "serious" about music. I'm serious, for my standards, about keeping it up; I've continued practicing with a dedication that's not normally my style, I've spent serious money on relevant equipment (e.g. my guitar, which is medium-grade for levels of expensiveness in terms of guitars generally, but extremely expensive for levels of a) guitars for beginners and b) stuff bought by me ever at all). It's a mixture of serious hobby and medical equipment, since it's important for my mental health. (As endorsed by my psychologist and proven by personal experience.)
I do have intentions of getting serious about history and/or linguistics; I'm still wavering a bit on which, for a whole bunch of reasons. I love them both, I'm slightly better at history, but career prospects are probably better in linguistics, but I kind of want to be able to use both in my life.
And what would be awesome would be to be able to combine them also with photography. Ideas like going places that are at risk of cultural obliteration and record the language, the history, the way of life - including photojournalistic-type photography thereof. (Yes, I realise that, if I'm not very very careful, this idea has high fail risk. That's not actually the risk I'm talking about in the subject, because that's a vague and distant notion.)
The thing is: photography. Right now, a hobby, but I want to do things with it. I've taken some nice landscape shots here and there, I've taken some neat pictures of animals and of people, I've taken a couple of shots I even like as photojournalistic style... but I want to do some kind of real photographic documentation.
And I had an idea, of sorts, brought up by some recent frustrations and readings and so on: a photo essay on people with disabilities. (Visible and invisible, though representing the disability aspect with the latter is going to be an interesting challenge, when you take into account the rest of what I'm about to explain I want to do with this.)
The thing being, I want to do a photo essay on PWD that is carefully constructed, as much as I possibly can, not to elicit the faintest shred of sympathy.
Because that's not what I'm after, at all - I want a photo essay that's about PWD being people. Pictures of PWD living, laughing, doing - sometimes competent and dignified, sometimes joyfully undignified and silly and having fun. Pictures of management/treatment/medical-type stuff presented in a business-like way, as a part of daily life. I want a compilation from which a hypothetical viewer will take a message that PWD have a lot of stuff to deal with that able-bodied people don't, but the point is that they do deal - with a subsection of presentation of accessibility fail areas that make the fail look like roll-your-eyes idiocy.
I'm not sure how to really go about getting people to be in these pictures, though. Some of them I can do using elements of my own life, as I have some disability issues of my own, but a lot of them I really, really can't.
Challenging concepts are challenging.Current Music: linguistics lecturer talking - am bad person, in tutorial
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Overheard before: "I've made a pact with myself this year that I'm going to attend every lecture. I learned my lesson in history last year, when I didn't attend many lectures at all. I wrote about 600 words in the exam, and then thought: I've written all I know. So I got about thirty percent in the exam..."
Apparently freshers can learn... by the time they're second-years.
Meanwhile, during: Talking about children's language acquisition, and various differences therein, my lecturer notes: children who grow up with sign language, rather than spoken, go through a babbling stage with sign, mimicking random gestures made by caregivers, before they actually get on to coherence.
That?
Is awesome and interesting and I want to know more.
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So, more pictures from the weekend. Scenery, animals, and the efforts of an extremely amateur photojournalist.
( Images below. )
I'm also adding a whoooole bunch of animal photos to my Gallery, taken at the Zoo, but I'll pick selections to post some other time.
With the exception of this one, because it's crying out for a caption:
What is this pygmy marmoset trying to tell me?
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