Monday, July 31, 2006
How Did This Happen?
This morning, as I caught up on my internet reading over breakfast, I found myself reading Roger Shuy's Language Log post about how much most linguists seem to love their jobs, which left me feeling a bit wistful about my own life. Then, this afternoon, I filled in the last 15 otherwise mostly dead minutes of my time at work writing a quick and dirty explanation of grammatical case in answer to a question from a friend. This left me feeling a lot more engaged and energized than all of the preceding 5.75 hours of my day at work, a realization that in turn made me remember a comment from another friend about how ironic it was that I had managed to get through all of undergraduate school and a Master's program without an actual degree of any sort in linguistics, despite that being what I had gone into each institution intending to study. How does this always happen to me? Why do I let it happen? I'm not terribly regretful of my undergraduate degree(s) in Spanish and Latin American Studies, but my MA-TESOL has been remarkably unfulfilling for me in pretty much every conceivable way. So, in considering further courses of study, in more fulfilling subjects, I should endeavor to remember a misread sign one of my other friends once saw: "Do not leave your longings unattended."
This morning, as I caught up on my internet reading over breakfast, I found myself reading Roger Shuy's Language Log post about how much most linguists seem to love their jobs, which left me feeling a bit wistful about my own life. Then, this afternoon, I filled in the last 15 otherwise mostly dead minutes of my time at work writing a quick and dirty explanation of grammatical case in answer to a question from a friend. This left me feeling a lot more engaged and energized than all of the preceding 5.75 hours of my day at work, a realization that in turn made me remember a comment from another friend about how ironic it was that I had managed to get through all of undergraduate school and a Master's program without an actual degree of any sort in linguistics, despite that being what I had gone into each institution intending to study. How does this always happen to me? Why do I let it happen? I'm not terribly regretful of my undergraduate degree(s) in Spanish and Latin American Studies, but my MA-TESOL has been remarkably unfulfilling for me in pretty much every conceivable way. So, in considering further courses of study, in more fulfilling subjects, I should endeavor to remember a misread sign one of my other friends once saw: "Do not leave your longings unattended."
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Honestly, I was taken aback by the misreading, "Do not leave your longings unattended." :) The truth of the matter is, it still somehow makes some sense.
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