Beans, Dry and Juicy

Did you know that if you knit a hat to fit your newborn, you will have a yarmulke three months later?

I have been thinking about beans lately. I'm still analyzing low-frequency word use, and beans were giving me trouble. A lot of the words in my seldom-used list were useful indicators of vocabulary proficiency -- like "cardiologist." But some words popped up that are acquired early and just didn't appear very often in my corpus -- like "beans."

I discarded a number of unsatisfactory solutions. Other published word-frequency lists weren't quite right for cross-checking. One well-known list looked at conversations among British adults in the 60s. (Nope. They said "bloody" too often.) Another well-known list looked at reading comprehension in fourth-graders. (Nope again. Reading vocabulary is much more sophisticated than spoken vocabulary -- you can read words you'd never use in a casual conversation.)  Yesterday I hit on a solution that I'm calling the Rule of 15s: to be included on my list a word must appear ≤15 times in my corpus of 1.1 million words, and cannot be present in the vocabulary of >15% of 2.5-year-olds, as established by a well-regarded set of norms that I'd forgotten about until yesterday. That rule eliminated 61 problem words, meaning the end is in sight for this analysis!

That's probably more than you wanted to know about my dissertation -- those are the dry beans. "Juicy beans" is Pete's name for asparagus, which he likes steamed and drizzled with a little olive oil. We are eating lots of it, enjoying the spring sights and smells. There is a mama mourning dove brooding in the corner of our porch again. Everywhere I look I find myself thinking about where I was a year ago, when a tiny tiny baby Stella was newly ensconced in my womb and I didn't even suspect it.

She's looking pretty different these days.

Our spring break was half fun and half awful. Midway through the week, I found myself unreasonably, unmanageably stressed and just couldn't pull out of it. I was so glad to come home to our snug yellow house, to my own big bed, to our pleasant little walkable neighborhood.

Ramble ramble ramble. Over spring break I thought about how hard I have been pushing myself, solely because I'm afraid that if I don't finish quickly I'll never finish. And I thought, "Maybe I can give myself more credit than that. I am a person who likes to finish things. There is no shame in finishing in the fall of 2010 or the spring of 2011 even if my original plan was to finish in the spring of 2010."

I keep telling myself "I'll slow down when..." -- and the date keeps shifting. I'll slow down when I finish the morpheme analysis. (Wrong.) I'll slow down when I finish those talks for the conference. (Wrong again.) I'll slow down when I finish the word-frequency analysis, or the midterm grading, or...

I see a pattern here.

So maybe I should just slow down now, just give myself permission to go outside with the baby and sing "Alice the Camel" or plant things or knit a sock in the sunshine instead of holing up indoors, hunched in front of the computer. She is changing every day. My transcripts will keep. My baby won't.

Comments

[Jody]

She is ADORABLE. Love the picture with her adorable brothers, too.

I think you're right about your drive to finish, and you're right about figuring out your priorities. There's probably also something worth thinking about in terms of ease-of-working now vs. later: her second and third years will also fly by, but might involve fewer naps and long stretches when she's sacked out on the carpet staring at sunlight on the ceiling.

I don't know. My first instinct was to say, hell yes, just push back your finish date. But then I thought about that mobile-toddler-with-screamy-issues thing.

I don't think you'll be wrong no matter what you do, really.

[pnuts mama]

i loathe this wrestling match of what-to-do. everytime i 'take a break' (never a real break, mind you, more doing all the other stuff that has piled up or come up that needs to be done as well) it just comes back to bite me that i put this on hold again- my problem is it's too easy to put things on hold! and a day turns into a week/month/semester. sigh.

even when i do take a 'break' (a real one, not working, just spending time with my family) i end up with the same problem- the stuff doesn't get done itself, and it just stresses me out more. i can't live like this! i need an intern! prayers for you! pray for me! i have a section to do this weekend that i have little guidance on, little idea how to start, and little chance of easy progress on. which is a recipe for procrastination!

[Ariella]

Wow, she looks just like Elwood. Adorable!

[JenA]

Oh slow down, slow down, slow down:
So quiet down dust mops, chores go to sleep,
I'm rocking my baby, and babies don't keep.

[Becky]

Thanks for sharing the sweet pictures.

[rachel]

Glad to see your silence has been busy with such scrumptiousness.
(alright, I can't resist, but I kind of hope you won't take the bait if you're busy - I'm curious about your take on Rosin, Against Breastfeeding - not the ideology but er interpretation of the medical data).

[Lilian]

Hmmm... as a fellow former dissertator and new mom, what can I say? My situation is completely different because I had my parents help me out for a grand total of 24 months, but I took a year off from dissertation work when Linton was born and only started to work on in in earnest when he was 15 months. And, as you may remember, I only finished and defended when he was practically 4, so... I guess I did slow down BIG TIME. I am with Jody, whatever you decide will be good for you and your family. You (and philosopher mom, who has 9 kids and a phd, 4 or 5 of the kids she had while getting the doctorate) are the real "Super women" one of my committee members said I was when she remembered all my academic milestones linked to my pregnancies.

Anyway... thanks for the updates!! She is LOVELY! and she does look A LOT like daddy and her brothers, but I think she looks like you too.