feuervogel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feuervogel) wrote2020-04-22 11:03 pm
feuervogel) wrote2020-04-22 11:03 pm
Entry tags:
Well.
A lot of things have changed since my last post, and, well, I have no idea if it will even be possible for me to move to Germany in September.
UGA suspended classes for 2 weeks after spring break, so we could transition to online instruction. The board of regents announced first, at the tail end of spring break, that UGA would be opening as normal the Monday following, and EVERYBODY called and yelled at them so effectively that they retracted their statement 4 hours later.
Seriously, though, 45,000 students on campus, in dorms, in close quarters. There are reasons many universities mandate meningitis vaccines. This coronavirus would have devastated the university population and the town of Athens.
Athens went on lockdown (shelter in place, only essential businesses open, restaurants take-out only) March 16. Our wonderful governor didn't announce statewide measures until April 1, and now he wants to reopen everything on Friday. He wants to kill us all.
I've been able to keep busy with teaching online classes and playing Stardew Valley. I opted not to do any synchronous meetings so my students could manage their other obligations and work at their own pace (within a set of due dates). My 4th semester class is doing a lot of online discussion posts, which I have to read and give them feedback on. They also have their regular homework, some of which I was able to set up as auto-graded quizzes on our learning management system. (I have to grade their reading comprehension ones myself, that sort of thing. But vocab? Nah.)
I miss going places and doing things and seeing my friends and roller derby. I was FINALLY getting to a point where I had concrete skills to work on and a plan to do it, then everything closed.
My dad's mother died yesterday morning, probably of covid, but the tests won't be back for a few more days. I found out from my cousin, rather than my dad, which is its own entire Thing. I don't really have an emotion about this? I'm not close to that side of the family and haven't been for a good ten years. So there's an element of "I should have been better and stayed in contact," but that's a two-way street, and after I sent her an email asking her to stop sending me the stupid conservative email forwards, I didn't hear from her again, pretty much. The last few years, she was in an assisted living facility with dementia, and Kelly told me they moved her to a nursing home in December. And she was sick for a few days, then got bad, they took her to the hospital, she spiked fevers to 104, and all her organ systems started failing. Then they moved her to hospice for 12 hours or so.
So I'm in a weird mental space of not being extremely sad, but having a societal model that tells me I should. But my sister feels the same way, and I asked a group of friends if it's weird, and they said it was understandable because of the estrangement, so I'm not a monster.
This is an absolutely horrifying article from Science Mag about how this disease affects the body. Seriously, it's horrifying; if you're not in a good mental space, do not click.
With the job problem (that is, I don't have one after May 31) and a, hmm, lack of summer employment opportunities, I applied for a one-semester job and am waiting for any word from them. If that doesn't happen, I'll apply for some online language teaching jobs or other things that use my linguistics skills.
I would honestly so much rather be in Germany, where they have adequate testing and a competent government, than here, but this isn't really the best situation to be like "hey, I'm going to move here and find a job within the 90-day limit and get my visa and all that." Jobs are less available, and, well, people aren't exactly flocking to language schools right now. Though I have experience with online instruction, which is certainly valuable right now.
So I'm trying to figure out something I can do for money. Good money. The idea I had for Patreon is now a column I'm writing for Tor.com, so I can't really use that. Though, potentially, I could do a deeper dive into the things I've written, pull them together and tease out some common threads. Maybe get a little academic in it. Though at that point, I'd want to write a book for a real publisher.
But I don't really know what sort of things people are interested in or would pay for. Which is really the problem for anyone who wants a weird internet job.
Things I know about or am interested in digging more into:
- the word "like"
- sociolinguistics of fandom
- internet language (a prof suggested "Gretchen McCulloch but for German")
- queer language (in fandom, on the internet, cross-cultural and how it's changed or not since the advent of the web)
- German and historical Germanic languages
- a very specific set of German verbs and their regularization
- language change over time (especially with verbs)
I mostly don't know how to make these a) small enough chunks for a Patreon, b) interesting for the general public, or c) interesting for an agent and publisher. (I am bad at self-promotion. This is why I really don't want to self-pub.)
If you have thoughts, please let me know <3
UGA suspended classes for 2 weeks after spring break, so we could transition to online instruction. The board of regents announced first, at the tail end of spring break, that UGA would be opening as normal the Monday following, and EVERYBODY called and yelled at them so effectively that they retracted their statement 4 hours later.
Seriously, though, 45,000 students on campus, in dorms, in close quarters. There are reasons many universities mandate meningitis vaccines. This coronavirus would have devastated the university population and the town of Athens.
Athens went on lockdown (shelter in place, only essential businesses open, restaurants take-out only) March 16. Our wonderful governor didn't announce statewide measures until April 1, and now he wants to reopen everything on Friday. He wants to kill us all.
I've been able to keep busy with teaching online classes and playing Stardew Valley. I opted not to do any synchronous meetings so my students could manage their other obligations and work at their own pace (within a set of due dates). My 4th semester class is doing a lot of online discussion posts, which I have to read and give them feedback on. They also have their regular homework, some of which I was able to set up as auto-graded quizzes on our learning management system. (I have to grade their reading comprehension ones myself, that sort of thing. But vocab? Nah.)
I miss going places and doing things and seeing my friends and roller derby. I was FINALLY getting to a point where I had concrete skills to work on and a plan to do it, then everything closed.
My dad's mother died yesterday morning, probably of covid, but the tests won't be back for a few more days. I found out from my cousin, rather than my dad, which is its own entire Thing. I don't really have an emotion about this? I'm not close to that side of the family and haven't been for a good ten years. So there's an element of "I should have been better and stayed in contact," but that's a two-way street, and after I sent her an email asking her to stop sending me the stupid conservative email forwards, I didn't hear from her again, pretty much. The last few years, she was in an assisted living facility with dementia, and Kelly told me they moved her to a nursing home in December. And she was sick for a few days, then got bad, they took her to the hospital, she spiked fevers to 104, and all her organ systems started failing. Then they moved her to hospice for 12 hours or so.
So I'm in a weird mental space of not being extremely sad, but having a societal model that tells me I should. But my sister feels the same way, and I asked a group of friends if it's weird, and they said it was understandable because of the estrangement, so I'm not a monster.
This is an absolutely horrifying article from Science Mag about how this disease affects the body. Seriously, it's horrifying; if you're not in a good mental space, do not click.
With the job problem (that is, I don't have one after May 31) and a, hmm, lack of summer employment opportunities, I applied for a one-semester job and am waiting for any word from them. If that doesn't happen, I'll apply for some online language teaching jobs or other things that use my linguistics skills.
I would honestly so much rather be in Germany, where they have adequate testing and a competent government, than here, but this isn't really the best situation to be like "hey, I'm going to move here and find a job within the 90-day limit and get my visa and all that." Jobs are less available, and, well, people aren't exactly flocking to language schools right now. Though I have experience with online instruction, which is certainly valuable right now.
So I'm trying to figure out something I can do for money. Good money. The idea I had for Patreon is now a column I'm writing for Tor.com, so I can't really use that. Though, potentially, I could do a deeper dive into the things I've written, pull them together and tease out some common threads. Maybe get a little academic in it. Though at that point, I'd want to write a book for a real publisher.
But I don't really know what sort of things people are interested in or would pay for. Which is really the problem for anyone who wants a weird internet job.
Things I know about or am interested in digging more into:
- the word "like"
- sociolinguistics of fandom
- internet language (a prof suggested "Gretchen McCulloch but for German")
- queer language (in fandom, on the internet, cross-cultural and how it's changed or not since the advent of the web)
- German and historical Germanic languages
- a very specific set of German verbs and their regularization
- language change over time (especially with verbs)
I mostly don't know how to make these a) small enough chunks for a Patreon, b) interesting for the general public, or c) interesting for an agent and publisher. (I am bad at self-promotion. This is why I really don't want to self-pub.)
If you have thoughts, please let me know <3