Fairy impersonator? (friday foto finder: insect)

When I was a sophomore in high school in California, I had a truly excellent biology teacher. The assignments were creative and varied, and the lessons I learned stuck with me long after the class ended. One of the major units we covered in that class was about the insect world. We learned about all of the orders of insects. A major assignment was to collect, identify and classify insects from as many of the orders as we could. For some orders, it was ridiculously easy to find specimens. Hymenoptera (which includes ants, bees & wasps), diptera (including mosquitos and houseflies), coleoptera (beetles), lepidoptera (moths & butterflies) were a dime a dozen, with multiple species of each of those orders crossing our paths regularly. Others required a bit more persistence, hunting through the grass and under rocks, or stalking the porch light at night.

My best friend and I participated in the project with the same competitive/collaborative spirit that drove our academic success, collecting and comparing our insects with interest and enthusiasm. She, who felt revulsion for earwigs, collected her dermaptera specimen with triumph. I, with my aversion to moths, likewise felt satisfaction in including a feathery-antennaed hymenoptera specimen in my own collection. I don’t remember how many orders we each managed to represent in total, but I want to say that it was somewhere around 17 or 18. (I seem to recall that my friend managed to find one that I hadn’t, a fact which she playfully lorded over me.)

That project forever changed how I look at insects.

Living in the woods in rural Massachusetts, we sometimes get wildlife in our yard and around our house. Sometimes, the wildlife makes its way into the house. Once such bit of wildlife was this character, which turned up in our kitchen one June evening in 2010. It had a long segmented body, perhaps 2 and half inches long, and large lacy wings. I was, naturally, fascinated.

Hi.

John and I captured it in a plastic tub with the aim of releasing it. I took a few pictures of it, but sadly, they are blurry in the poor lighting conditions. Also contributing to the blur was the fact that the insect was moving constantly, and I found it hard to get my eyes to focus on it, let alone my camera. The long body and the dramatic wings had an ethereal look to them, and I wondered if sighting of such creatures in the wild, fluttering about in people’s peripheral vision, may have contributed to belief in fairies. (Compare this little guy to the mummified fairy remains highlighted on Raincoaster. If you want to study interesting specimens of humanity, some of whom claim belief in fairies, you might have a look at the comments of that post. 2220 comments to date, many of them very entertaining.)

I’m bigger than your little finger.

Having ruled out that we had captured a fairy, I did wonder what exactly we had caught.

I wondered if it might be a large mayfly, (order ephemeroptera, among the more poetically named orders, reflecting the ephemeral nature of their adults’ lives). However, I think it is too large to be one. Additionally, it is missing the long cerci that mayflies have.

Most likely, it is a kind of fishfly, of the order megaloptera. (Apparently the designation of megaloptera as a separate order from neuroptera is relatively recent–I don’t know when this separation happened, though. It may not have been among the orders I learned about in high school.) Megaloptera, as you might guess from the mega prefix, are known to be large. (They are named for their large wings.)

Can I go now, please?

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to find photos of insect(s). Unlike urban-dwelling az, who resorted to posting other invertebrates, I have quite a few photos of insects in my archives. (Ah, the perks of rural life.) I even have several posts on different insects. I have two ThThTh lists of moth things and butterfly things (order lepidoptera), plus some posts of my own photos of butterflies (again, lepidoptera) and fireflies (order coleoptera). I’m particularly fond of this one, eat or be eaten, which documents the unlucky encounter of a spider (an arachnid, and not an insect) with a damselfly (order odonata).

To see what other specimens have been caught for this week’s assignment, buzz, flit or crawl over to the friday foto finder blog.

I am weary

The past few weeks have knocked the wind out of me. I hardly know where to begin, there is so much to say. The biggest news, at least for my family, was that John’s father died. It was not unexpected. It was not fast. It was also not easy.

Just over 2 weeks ago, we got the call that John’s father was not expected to survive the night. As you might imagine, there was much travel, and rearranging of plans. John was able to travel to New York to be with his parents for his father’s last few days. I stayed home with the kids. Things were complicated by Theo having a fever one day, then getting pink eye the next, which meant missed school for him, missed work time for me, and more trauma than I would have expected dealing with the medication. (This was Theo’s first sick visit to the doctor, which itself was remarkable.) Phoebe managed to pick up her first case of poison ivy, a bad one, including welts on her face around both eyes. This led to a doctor’s trip and missed school for her, too. Then there was the funeral. Phoebe ended up missing a whole week of school. This week is her school vacation. And did I mention the stomach bug that hit Phoebe Sunday night?

These were the weeks that I was supposed to be working intensively to make a last push to try to finish my degree. Time is limited before my subject pool, the BU undergrads, is taken away by finals and the end of the term. I have now lost 2 full weeks of work time. The only day that was not taken up by sick kids or travel or memorial services and time with extended family was one that I spent shopping for something to wear to the funeral.

My days are eaten up. My energy is eaten up. My motivation and momentum for my research have all but left the building. I have been trying to push through, in the windows of time that open up here and there.

But next comes a terrorist attack in Boston, and the wind is knocked out of me again. I was not there, but I am shocked and grieving. 3 dead and over 170 injured in a blast at Copley Square, a place I know well. The news that one of the dead was a child of 8 hit hard. The news that another was a BU grad student hit hard again. The realization that my friends and family from far away might be worried about my family hit me again. We could have been there.

I am steady in times of crisis. Strong and reliable, I keep pushing through. I know that I have to keep going until the crisis time is over. But I am strained and drained. I am edgy and touchy. I am slipping.

This is not the worst crisis I can imagine. This is not even the worst crisis I or my family have lived through. I remind myself every day how lucky I am to have John and my children here with me, safe and (largely) healthy. My mother and my sister and her family are safe and well. I have financial stability, a home, and wonderful friends. I am very, very lucky. But I admit that I am tired, and I just wish I could have a few days to catch my breath. At this point, I’d settle for one.

But this method doesn’t work with a tomato.

It was my second year of college, in ’90 or ’91, and I sat at a desk in a classroom with maybe a dozen other students of second-year Japanese. The first year, the class had been much bigger, with a good 30 or 40 students. But the workload was heavy, and the grading tough. The enrollment had been whittled down.

The teaching methods were pretty old-school, with textbooks that were probably from the 50s. We did a lot of in-class drills.

That particular day, we were learning the expression “to use something as something else.” (“X to shite Y o tsukaimasu.”) The instructor gave us some examples. He picked up two pencils, and held them as if they were chopsticks. Hashi to shite empitsu o tsukaimasu, he intoned in his booming fluent-but-American-accented Japanese. “I use pencils as chopsticks.” Then he asked for more examples from the class using the construction.

“Use a rope as a belt,” someone might have said. “I use a book as a tray,” someone else might have offered.

I really can’t remember what examples my classmates came up with. Because as I sat there, I needed all of my concentration to contain the urge to giggle. The one sentence that popped into my head was: Nihon de wa, naihu to shite te o tsukaimasu.¹

In Japan, the hand is used like a knife.²

I’m sad to say that I was not called upon to share my example. I was relieved at the time, as I had not yet released my inner goofball. Also, it’s hard to say how the very serious instructor would have taken my contribution. Especially had it been accompanied by uncontrollable fits of giggling.

—
¹ Google translate helped me arrive at this:
日本 で は ナイフ として手を使います. There was once a time when I could have written this sentence without looking it up, but that day has long passed. Also, I only wrote Japanese by hand. I would have had no idea how to type any of it!
² The actual wording from the 1978 Ginsu commercial is: “In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife.”

The Accursed Book Review

Once upon a time there was a young graduate student, or if not young, at least one who as yet had no gray hairs on her head, who embarked on her journey towards the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy with great optimism and arrogance. She was confident that she would not be one of those for whom large numbers of harvests would pass before reaping the Golden Fruits of Doctorhood. Her hubris angered the gods of Mount Academia, who saw fit to place a curse that the student would forever make progress, forever see the end in sight, but forever get distracted by Other Things, until such day as her hair turned gray and her University turned her out.

Back when I started my PhD program, I imagined that I’d work through my various pre-dissertation requirements in a timely way. I mean, everyone knows it’s hard to finish a dissertation, right? But the other stuff, well that’s not such a big deal. I was already ahead in terms of course requirements, and in having completed my Master’s, had a head start on some other major requirements. Practically a Mere Technicality, the Book Review was to be something on a par with a course project. All you had to do was pick a relatively recent linguistics book, read it, and write a 12 to 15 page review.

Officially, according to the program requirements, it should be completed in the first year of PhD studies. (Not that most do.) Having received my Master’s in the fall of 2004, that was when I officially started the PhD program. I was on a reasonably reasonable schedule, picking my review book in that first year or so. I set to reading it. Slowly. Very, very slowly I read it. At some point, I lost it. Then found it. Probably realized I didn’t remember what I’d read. Started to reread it. Come 2006 I had read the book, but hadn’t yet written anything, when I experienced what might be considered a distraction from my studies. At some point later, John (my husband) tried to talk me into getting a Kindle. As a selling point, he told me about some books he found that were available. “They even have that one you keep falling asleep reading.” Yeah, that would be the Damned Book Review book.

A couple of years and another distraction later, my advisor and I agreed that I should pick a new book for the Damned Book Review. We picked a newly released updated edition by a noted person in my field. I plowed in diligently, being sure to take careful notes this time as I went. I was Determined. But then I realized along the way that reviewing a new edition should involve comparing it to the old one, which I had read before, but years earlier. I’d have to go through it again. The task went slowly. I got demoralized, thinking that I wasn’t really a great person to review the book. I mean, I had met with and corresponded with the author, who, as I said, was a quite well known person in my field. Who was I to criticize?

Come late 2010, I switched once more to a more recent book, this time by an author I’d never met! Who worked in my field, but a different analytic tradition! Yeah, I could critique that. I dug in. But I don’t know, other things came up along the way that were a higher priority. I’d read a chapter or 2, and then get caught up in some new wave of work deadlines or family crisis. Back in April or so I was provoked to make a new push to get through some more of my requirements, including the Damned Book Review. (Remind me to tell you about the Form of Shame.) I finished reading and had amassed 40 pages of notes. I was getting so freakin’ close. But not quite close enough. I had to switch gears to get ready for my trip to China and my presentation there. Next thing you know another couple of months and several new crunches and deadlines have passed before I got myself back to the Damned Book Review. Last week, suddenly free of other pressing deadlines, I dug back in.

And you know what? Today, while sitting in my in-laws’ basement and keeping Theo company while he rode a vintage tricycle around in circles and played with a pile of vintage matchbox cars, I reached a point that could be considered…good enough to send a draft to my advisor.

So, maybe not done. But 3 books and 8 years later, damn if it isn’t doner than it’s ever been.

crunchy bits and squeezy bits and cranky bits

I started this post a week ago. I have a lot of drafts of posts lying around collecting dust. Seriously, I must have well over a hundred draft posts in various stages of completion. And seriously, I think they are dusty. Some of them even have cobwebs.

–

Life has been hectic again (when hasn’t it?) and I’m trying to fit all the bits and pieces together.

A large item that’s been on my mind is that I’m finally going to try to make a push to finish my degree. Sadly, I am really not all that close, even to being ABD. I finished my coursework ages ago. But coursework was the easy part, what with the structure and the regular, manageable assignments with regular, manageable deadlines. My other requirements are larger and more nebulous, with typically much fuzzier deadlines. I have this bad tendency to push off my own research until I’ve worked my way through my other obligations. The trouble is that my other obligations manage quite easily to fill up all of my available time.

Since May, Phoebe and Theo have been in childcare 5 days a week, an increase from the 3 or 4 days they had been going. This gives me more available time. In theory. In practice, there have been more weeks than not during which there was at least one holiday, vacation day, or sick day. Since May I have travelled to a conference in Chicago for work, visited my family in California, visited my in-laws in New York several times, had a short trip to New Hampshire, a visit to New York City for BlogHer, and then most recently another trip to Chicago for a funeral. My job has kept me busy with deadlines for conferences and papers, plus meetings and running subjects. Our house continues to kick my butt, with its demands for upkeep. My head has been full of concern for family and friends.

Each time I have gone back to my own research, I have had to regroup, and remind myself of what I was doing, what I’d done last, and what I was about to do. (I’m working on figuring out better systems for keeping myself on track and moving forward, but I will probably save that for another post.)

–

I know that I can do better than this. I feel like I’ve just been making excuses. I used to be an effective and productive person. I’m trying to get there again, and right now it feels a lot like crunching. I’m trying to squeeze everything tighter to make room for my research. Honestly, all this compression has made me cranky.

One of the few places I can find time to squeeze is my time spent online. Since I rarely get to see friends in person, I’ve been clinging to my online world, the interactions with friends I see in blogland and on Facebook. But I have to cut back. I have started cutting back. (In the last couple of months or so, I’ve had several unhappy exchanges and experiences that have soured my online world and that has helped me pull back. Though, again with the cranky.)

Since I started blogging several years ago, I have spent a lot of my time offline (such as while I’m driving or doing laundry or dealing with other largely thoughtless tasks) thinking about my life online. Often thinking about posts I’ve read, or posts I’d like to write. I somehow need to shift my focus so that I spend that time thinking about articles I’ve read and papers I should be writing.

I’m not saying I’m going to quit blogging, but I can’t participate as much I have in the past. I probably will start leaving even fewer comments, even though I intend to keep reading posts.

I still hope to post here from time to time. Maybe even a couple of times a week if I can do so in a constrained amount of time. I hope to dust off some of the drafts that have been piling up for the past several years, and maybe I’ll still manage to get out some of the ones that have been cluttering up my head.

I’ve been sticking with Project 365, taking and posting at least one picture a day, and that will probably continue to be my main creative outlet. Taking pictures is something I can do in a few minutes if I need to, or that I can do during my time spent with Phoebe and Theo.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post, but it feels like I’ve been leaving my blog hanging.

This photo doesn’t really have anything to do with anything in this post, but I like it.

Advanced Topics in Procrastination

The Department of Procrastinatory Arts and Sciences at Big Urban University announces its Fall, 2008 course offerings:

PR 101: Introduction to Procrastination
Topics covered include puttering, stalling, and dawdling for beginners. Required of all students working towards degrees in Procrastination. (Requirement may be waived if the student has avoided registering for the course for 3 or more semesters.)
Instructor: TBD

PR 125: Procrastinators Throughout History
Leaders, visionaries, revolutionaries. This survey course highlights the great procrastinators of the world and the accomplishments they would have been famous for, had they ever managed to complete them.
Instructor: Putterington

PR 126: Procrastinators Throughout History II: The Arts
This course examines the works of the Grand Masters of Procrastination. Students will learn to appreciate the unfinished symphonies, uncompleted novels and half-painted canvases that might have rivalled the finished works of the artists’ better known contemporaries.
Instructor: TBA

Procrastinating 225: Special Topics in Procrastination
Details on the course topic are expected to be available by the fourth week of the semester, by which time the professor hopes to have finished writing the syllabus. Or at least started it.
Instructor: McDawdle

PR 234: Getting Things Partially Done
This hands-on productivity course will help speed you along in the steps from thinking about doing something, getting started in deciding to get something started, and starting to get something done that will look like progress towards the accomplishment of things.
Instructor: TB

PR 235: Putting Things Off
Postponed until Spring semester

Other courses, which are planned for some time later:
PR 175: The Science of Stalling and the Fine Art of Puttering About
PR 187: The Procrastinator in Contemporary Society
PR 285: Creative Time Mismanagement
PR 335: Advanced Seminar in Dawdling

———–
This course bulletin is offered up for this week’s Monday Mission, which asked for posts in the form of course descriptions.

learning some lessons (a crankiness review)

This has been a bit of a week for learning for me. I love learning. I am a bit of a long-term student. And even my career goals for after I get the PhD involve continued research. But the truth is, sometimes, the learning process can involve some crankiness. I like to feel like I know stuff, but often learning involves being shown that I don’t know stuff. Which is not always comfortable.

Take Monday. I had my violin lesson. I hadn’t had much time to practice last week, and there were 2 new, unfamiliar pieces. Worse, I didn’t practice until late in the week, meaning I more or less couldn’t remember the pieces at all from the previous lesson. And while Phoebe has lately been encouraging me to practice (she points at the violin, and then plays quietly nearby while I practice), she has less interest in listening to me struggle with a new piece that I play poorly (she kept leaving the room). Resulting in a shorter practice session. End result: Monday’s lesson was not my best. The topic of my lack of rhythm came up. Sigh.

Take Yesterday. I noticed that a deadline for abstract submissions for a big conference was today. I had meant to submit an abstract for the work I did for my master’s project. (Re-submit, actually, as the abstract I submitted for a previous conference was rejected.) I decided that I should make the push, and spent 4 hours re-writing the abstract yesterday afternoon and evening. I then sent it to a professor (one of the reader’s for my master’s project) on the off chance she would have time to look at it and give suggestions. Remarkably, she generously agreed to read the abstract, and even came back with several helpful suggestions. She said I should definitely submit the abstract, but that it would need to be “re-written.” Crap. I thought re-writing was what I’d just done. But I re-re-wrote, and was up till 2:00 in the morning. It apparently still needs re-re-re-writing, though. (The deadline was extended, so my professor will send me more comments tonight or tomorrow.) It will definitely be very good for me to learn how to write a better abstract, but, well, I hadn’t thought the first one (or second or third) were all that bad. Showing that I indeed have stuff to learn.

Take today. Another lesson in a different domain. I took Phoebe to Whole Foods this evening, as we need some stuff for a dinner we’re having tomorrow. (The aforementioned veggie dinner.) I was trying to get out the door by 5:00, with the plan of picking up some dinner for Phoebe at the store. We didn’t manage to leave till 5:15. Phoebe usually eats around 5:30. The store is 20 minutes away. I gave her some cheese before we went in the store, thinking it would hold her till we finished shopping, when she could eat some more.

We went in the store, I plopped her in a cart. Then I plopped her in another cart, because the straps on the first cart weren’t properly attached. Then we started shopping. And more time passed. Then Phoebe realized she was cold, and I’d left her sweater in the car. (It was about 90 degrees out, but downright chilly in the frozen food aisles.) But while Phoebe is generally a very happy and well-behaved toddler, she becomes less so when her needs aren’t met. Such as when she is cold and hungry. We almost ended up leaving without most of the items on the list. After buying a bit of bread and milk for her (yes, I went all out for the gourmet dinner), and returning to the car to warm up, eat and get her sweater, we were able to then complete our shopping mission in relative calm. You’d think I would’ve known providing adequate food clothing were among the basics of parenting.

Now, it’s 1:00 a.m., and I am back at work on the abstract re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-write. I’m completely wiped out and cranky and am no longer sure I can manage to get the abstract done. Is it too late to change careers?

a tale of two buildings

I’m a grad student at a large urban university in the American Northeast. This school has many buildings. Some big, some small. Some old, some new. This is the story of two buildings.

Building A and Building B are neighbors. They live on the same major street that runs through the center of the university. Between them runs a small street.

Both buildings are academic buildings, filled with classrooms and offices for faculty and staff.

Building A is an older building. It’s of a moderate size. It’s got character, mind you, but it’s a bit run down. Well, in some ways it’s quite run down. The heating and air conditioning are quirky, so it’s usually too hot or too cold. The stairways are narrow, and the elevators often on the fritz.

Building B is a newer building. Taller. Concrete. Modern. When you walk in, you are greeted by a cavernous entryway, tiled in marble. In the center is a large metallic abstract sculpture, somewhat evocative of a globe. Everything is expansive and expensive. Shiny.

When you walk into Building A, the space that you enter is a bit dimly lit. There’s a somewhat dingy carpeted sort of lounge area with some cushioned seats in front of you, and to your right, there’s a an area with a linoleum floor and a few cafeteria-style tables and chairs. Building A has a few vending machines: a soda machine, a candy and snack machine, and one of those hot beverage machines that can give you a watery cup of hot chocolate or a cup of coffee that you might turn to in a fit of caffeine desperation, but would never choose to drink.

In Building B, though, you can stroll up the sweeping double stair case with its wide marble steps to the second floor, where you can buy a scone and a caramel macchiato at a Starbucks. Or you can opt to get a more substantial lunch, or perhaps a light salad, at the gourmet soup and sandwich shop next to the Starbucks.

Building B is a showcase building for the university. Higher ups in the administration have installed their offices in part of the building. Building B often provides venues for important guest lecturers and other high-profile university events.

Building A is a respectable building, but next to Building B, it looks downright shabby.

These two buildings have in common that they house academic departments and graduate programs that focus on investing in the future. One of these two buildings is called the School of Management, and houses the business programs. The other building is called the School of Education, and houses teaching programs. Do I even need to tell you which building is which?

I’m really not making this up. The two buildings really do face each other, often seeming to me as some sort of concrete and brick manifestations of the very attitudes and trends of our society. Education programs are underfunded, schools are underfunded. Meanwhile, the focus of society is on the business of making money.

So many of our schools are struggling to make do. Many classrooms are overcrowded, many schools are short of up-to-date textbooks and resources. But a good school is not just about the size of the classroom and the quality and quantity of materials: a good school needs good teachers. It’s saddened me over the years to learn of so many bright and idealistic people who enter teaching, only to suffer burnout. The public schools, and especially the city schools, lead to the fastest burnout. Among many factors that contribute to this problem is that teachers get the short end of the stick in our society in terms of pay and prestige. In spite of the difficulty of the task, the need for commitment, the knowledge, patience and strength required to do this incredibly important work, public school teachers are typically not paid well. Certainly, they are not getting the sort of income that those who choose to follow career paths laid out in business professions.¹

Those who enter education programs, who choose to become educators, are often considered impractical dreamers. Sometimes it’s assumed that they aren’t motivated enough, or even bright enough, for other career options. It is taken for granted that teachers will not get paid particularly well.

Let’s face it. Our society values money. And pay is often a reflection of prestige. And teachers are just not getting as much of either of those as they deserve for their contribution to society.

This is just to say that I hope for a day when the pride that universities show in their education programs equals that of business programs. But in order to see that shift, our society will need to re-evaluate attitudes towards education professions.

——————-

¹ From the U.S. Bureau of the Census.²
Earnings for “Management, professional, and related occupations”

Median: $45,620 Mean: $59,139

Earnings for “Education, training, and library occupations”

Median: $31,555 Mean: $34,553

² I seem to be developing an addiction to using footnotes in my posts.

unceremonious

Lots of folks are graduating around now here in the US. From middle schools, high schools, colleges. My nephew even just graduated from high school. (No, not the one that was born in January. He’s barely in kindergarten!) All the stuff in the air about graduations has me thinking. About graduations I haven’t had.

No, no, I’m not lamenting the fact that I’m still in school. This prolonged incarceration educational endeavor is largely by choice. And I’m making progress on the schemes for tunneling my way out.

The graduations I’m recalling, or not recalling as the case may be, are ones from my past. Or that weren’t in my past. Here’s a weird thing I realized about myself that I hadn’t disclosed in my recent confessional of weirdness: I don’t have a high school diploma.

However, in spite of not actually having technically “graduated” from high school, I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. Ha! How’s that for weirdness?

Okay, here’s the story. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up. I actually went to 4 different high schools. The first was in Colorado, the second in Hawaii and the third in California. When I was a junior in high school, which was while we were living in California, my mother remarried. And my mother and I moved in with my new stepfather. In France.

So, high school number 4 was in France. It was an international, bilingual school on the IB system. I was due to be a senior. The last two years of the IB (International Baccalaureate) program were actually cumulative. But starting in the last year of the program (terminal) would have had me going in a year behind in all my courses. So they put in me première, basically junior year. I had just finished 3 years of American high school, and didn’t want to wind up in high school for a total of 5 years. However, the powers that be assured me that completing my 4th year of high school at the new school would suffice for finishing my high school education, at least as far as American universities were concerned. I could get some sort of stamp on my transcript saying I’d finished 4 years of high school.

So that’s what happened. I finished that last year of high school, and apparently got that stamp on my transcript. I never even saw the thing. But it was enough to get me admitted into the American university of my choice. (Brown, if you were wondering.)

But there was no high school graduation. I was never a senior. All my school friends in France were just finishing their penultimate year of secondary school.

Another 4 years went by, and I was scheduled to graduate from Brown. Except for the fact that I took a semester off along the way. (Following extreme burnout from working 3 jobs and raising 6 puppies. Another story.) So, in May of 1993, I did not graduate from college. However, this time, I went through the ceremony. (Hey, all my friends were doing it.) I was scheduled to finish in December, 1993 anyhow, and it wasn’t uncommon for folks to attend the commencement ceremony a semester ahead.

And yes, I did finish Brown in December of ’93, as scheduled. There was some sort of ceremony that December for the midyear grads, but really it was more of a gathering in a hall. No diplomas. Because they only got awarded in May. So hey, I got to have the graduation ceremony all over again in May of ’94. And this time, I got my diploma. Well, actually, that’s not exactly true, either. What I got was a formal-looking roll of paper with a note inside saying that my actually diploma was being “engrossed” and would be sent to me in the mail. (Yes, it the paper actually did say “engrossed.”) (And yes, I did get that diploma in the mail at some point. In fact, I just found it tonight, stumbling across it while trying to find an old journal. It’s been sitting, gathering dust, on the bookshelf next to my bed for probably several years. I had no idea it was there.)

Fast forward 10 years . I finally finished my master’s project at my current school in August of 2004, making me eligible for September graduation. I’m not even sure if they had a September ceremony. (Again, I could have “walked” in the May 2004 ceremony, but this time I opted not to. For one thing, my program doesn’t have a department, so you have to leech yourself on to some other department’s ceremony.) September came, and nothing much happened. As far as I knew, the completion of the degree had gone through: master’s project submitted, paperwork submitted, official admittance to the PhD program. But no actual evidence of a degree.

And then at some point that fall, I checked my online transcript, and the magical words had appeared:

DEGREE AWARDED
Master of Arts
Major: Applied Linguistics
September 25, 2004

Woohoo! Call me master, baby! But still no diploma.

And then finally, on October 23rd, 2004, a tube appeared in my mailbox. I remember the day well, as it was the day before my wedding. (My second wedding to John.) My mother and sister were visiting. And I had gone out to walk the dog and check the mail. In my pajamas. Flannel polar bear pajamas. And I came back in with that tube. Still wearing my pajamas, I gathered my mother, my sister and my husband (who I was about to remarry), and I sang a wordless (dooooo doo doo doo doooo doo) version of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

I opened my red cardboard tube.

I had been awarded a master’s degree.