Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2006 - 6:45 a.m.

I have a strict schedule for my days now. At least MWF. I'm not sure yet if Tuesday will be as structured. But I made my schedule for yesterday and stuck to it. Yay me. One day down. I even got back to work on my paper already (adding detailed morphological glosses takes a long time).

The paper-- when I first got my advisor's reaction I was pissed/ angry. But upon relfection, it really wasn't that bad. I suppose I am just ready to be done with it, and of course, he had suggestions for things I should add and/or tweak. Not that many. Either it is a compliment (he has high standards), or he really just wants me to be done with it and is afraid that if he suggests too many changes, I'll take another year to revise it. Either way, all I need to do is finish the glosses and references, clean up my discussion of counterfactuals, and say a little more about the syntactic relevance of the thing. It's doable. Really. Haba na haba hujaza kibaba, especially when it comes to glosses.

I am going to order some gold leaf-- real gold leaf!-- to use in my jewelry. I'm very excited. The thing about this jewelry. I have a fairly well-defined vision, but have some trouble getting it to come out right. A perfect marriage of text, paper, and design. Meaningful as well as decorative. A tall order. I end up staring at plain cardboard for an hour at a time-- then after the hour I don't do anything, I just get up and leave because I'm sick of staring at cardboard and not doing anything. If I could get just one perfect design, I'd have my showpiece.

And there's an annoying thing-- when people (my mother or mother-in-law primarily) want to give me suggestions for text, they always end up suggesting the worst kind of swill. I don't think they grasp my artistic vision, here. (But I don't like to say that, because it sounds pretentious, but it's true-- I have higher hopes). I really don't want these to be yet another venue for slogans, maxims, bumpersticker-appropriate phrases. Or even greeting card sentiments. No, no, no. But finding the right kind of text is actually very difficult. I'll have a design I want to try, and then get stuck on it because I can't find the right sort of text. I lost the notebook where I had kept a list of words and phrases I liked.

I really must get it started this year if I'm going to , because I feel that it is only a matter of time before some stamping magazine prints instructions for something like what I do (not as fabulous of course) and then next thing you know all of my potential customers are off trying to make their own.

Of course, if mine are truly excellent, I shouldn't worry. I just don't want them to be consigned to a fad.

I do get ahead of myself, don't I?

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