Misadventures in LSA-LSA-land

[Attention conservation notice: long, rambly entry featuring nefarious deeds follows.]

Wow. Where to even begin. Last night ranks VERY high on my personal list of surreal nights. Before, I get into it, note that
the album is finally up!

[EDIT: I'm told that the photo captions in the album are full of typos. I did them in a hurry, so sorry about that. I'll get around to fixing them up soon.]


OK, so yesterday (Wednesday, July 4th) was a day off between the presession and the regular session, with a 4pm BBQ for everyone attending the LSA Institute. I think a lot of people had plans to do fun stuff, but the fact that it was July 4th meant that everything was closed, or not running (i.e. public transit). So we hung out here and tried to get ahead on our readings for the regular session coursework...rumour has it that it's the readings that'll kill you, and there are definitely a lot of them!

So Alan and I went to hang out in this gorgeous little courtyard that's right behind our room. Out there we met Mike, Abbie and Dave. Mike's from Philly. He's actually a salesman, but has long been interested in sociolinguistics and variation. He's tired of being an "amateur" and wants to take it to the next level, so he's here checking stuff out before he applies to grad school. Abbie's from New Zealand and is finishing up her MA. She knows Ash & Ida and is angry that we (Canada) stole them. HA! Dave recently moved to Seattle and will be starting his PhD at U of Washington. He's a big gay funny sociophoneticist. No really. He's freaking hilarious, and a really sweet guy. We all hung out, chatted, discussed linguistics and my general suspicion of exemplar-based theories of language and memory. Good times. After that we all headed to lunch where I met more people from this seriously fun crew. Bryan and Dave have only known each since meeting here, but they've already got a habit of spontaneously breaking into song, and doing other funny things. I definitely need more gay people in my life. [EDIT: Just to be clear, Bryan's a gay Jew, who matches his t-shirt and yarmulke everyday. He pretty much rocks.]

Post-lunch Alan and I played frisbee with Jess, Abbie and Sun Jin (SJ). Dave and Bryan were supposed to join us, but got distracted finding a place to buy booze within walking distance.

After frisbee we all walked across campus to the BBQ. I was a bit disappointed to find that there was no actual grilling going on. They just had those buffet-style hot platters laid out on several tables in the middle of a field. The food itself was quite fine, though...burgers, salad, etc. I purchased 5 drink tickets and used them on a somewhat mediocre red wine. (tsk, I naively expected better, given our proximity to wine country)

After the BBQ, the adventure began. Five of us (me, Alan, Dave, Bryan and Zack) struck out to find booze to bring back to the rez. En route we were accosted by Tony (cue frightening music), a rather sketchy dude who talks in gangster (seriously, he used the word "shorties" in reference to women several times, and non-ironically), and is apparently the kingpin of the little mall where he works. It was pretty clear from the outset that Tony's plagued by a virulent homophobia. He kept wanting to start up with Bryan and Dave, and Bryan, who's not the quietest dude you'll meet (bless his heart), wasn't necessarily helping the situation out.

Anyway, once Tony saw what we were up to, you could hear the gears turning as he realized that he had a rare opportunity to impress someone from out of town with his power. He scored us two cases of Heineken sans frais. No joke. He just walked into the store, waved at a few people, grabbed two cases and walked out. Needless to say, we were all a bit skeeved out by Tony, and anxious to get as far away from him as possible. Sadly, 'twas not to be. Tony didn't want to let us go until we drank ALL of the beer. So we sat there chugging beers and not talking a lot. Major fun, as you can imagine. I was a little concerned that at any moment he'd come out with something like "Here's the rest of my posse, you can handle payment with them", but it never happened.

So we finally start walking back to campus, and Tony decides to follow us. Awesome. As we got to campus, Bryan and Tony got into it pretty good. Nothing really bad was going to happen, since there were five of us and one scrawny one of him. Nonetheless, it was a not fun scene, and we were glad to part company with Anthony The Kingpin. Here is where my memory gets somewhat hazy.

From what I hear we wandered across campus back to the rez, generally being loud and annoying on the way. We got back around midnight (the adventures happen early in this part of the world, apparently) and then sat on a rez [EDIT: apparently "rez" means First Nations' reservation in the States. I should be saying "dorm"] porch and drank two bottles of wine before hitting the sack. Dave, who's awesomely animated and a great storyteller apparently recounted our tale over and over, and it seems that rumour of our escapade had spread to most of the rez within a few minutes of our arrival.

So today, as you can imagine, was even less fun. Bleah. I made it to one of my two classes, but have since read the slides from today's lecture and got summaries of the content, so I'm all good. Computational Linguistics (the one I made it to) looks like it's going to be really good, but it's, like, a 25 minutes walk from the rez, so I have to leave super-early to get there in time.

Anyway, the hangover was inexplicably bad, given that we didn't really drink THAT much. I didn't manage to actually eat anything until dinner time, and even that was touch and go. Nonetheless, here I am now, blogging it and feeling pretty much alright again. I spoke with AM and she seems to be doing quite well. She's got friends to hang out with and is enjoying the Ottawa Bluesfest. Fred is happy.

Tomorrow it's pre-breakfast tennis (who am I, right?) again with Alan, and then two classes before lunchtime. Simulation (which promises to be sweet), and Computational Psycholinguistics, which I'm pretty curious about, as there's been nothing posted about it thus far.

So it's 11:00pm and definitely time for bed now. Peace out, be excellent to each other, and I'll catch you on the flipside.