ugh

for now,
the mantras to live by are:

do not cry over someone
wouldn't cry over you.

do not be upset over
someone who is insignificant
to you.

do not disrespect yourself.

do not surround yourself with
company who doesn't appreciate yours.

follow these,
and you'll be
just
fine.

entrance essay

study abroad application essay.




I’m not going to lie and fabricate a story on how it’s been my dream to go to Europe (but to an extent, it really is) or write a sob story on how I grew up disadvantaged and going to a foreign country to study would complete my education career goals. Instead, I’m going to write about my dad and how he’s played a major role in encouraging me to study abroad.
To be honest, as a freshman, I really had no desire to study abroad, nor did I even consider it. Towards the end of my sophomore year at SFSU, my dad persistently brought up the topic of studying abroad and would ask me, “So are you looking into studying abroad?” with an expectation that I would either answer “yes”, or “maybe” at the very least. My dad has always had a “travel bug” in his system from as young as I can remember: my earliest memory is sitting in a golf cart basking in the sun with my sister in Orlando, Florida thanks to a second place win my dad scored on Jeopardy! Because of him, I’ve logged in many hours on the road on family vacations to places around the Southwest, been to the shabbiest and ritziest of airports, heard entertaining and boring tour guides recant their memorized speeches on tour buses, and traveled by train, boat, plane, ferry, taxi, motorbike…you name it. With my dad’s helpful reminders, the idea of traveling elsewhere to attend school became more and more appealing. I did independent research, looking at yearlong, bilateral, and private abroad programs and discovered the University of Amsterdam.
What I like about the university is that it is a member of the League of European Research Universities (comparable to the Ivy League here in the States), but also that their communication program is research-based, something that is constantly eclipsed by mass communication studies and difficult to come by in undergraduate curriculum. Ideally, I would like to go there for my Master’s since they have a one-year research communication program for graduate students. I have had very little exposure to Europe, and I think that this opportunity would help me to understand a different culture other than the ones I identify with, study different English dialects (I am an English Language minor), satiate my affinity for travel, and teach me Dutch!
But my dad’s influence stops here. I have collectively only had a little over a year’s worth of college, but have attained junior standing; this past semester I made the Dean’s list. I feel that these achievements indicate my academic ability and my seriousness towards my education. Not that any parent wants their child to be far away from them at any one time, I think traveling abroad would make myself and my dad very happy.

please note

a person's internal most innate affliction is towards themselves.
in a situation of loyalty, it lies not with others, but starts and ends with
me, myself, and i.
this is the greatest fault within humanity,
the notion that the world is a self-centric microcosm for them
makes everyone forget that their actions
have an effect on others.
everything has an equal and opposite reaction, if not a
disproportionate, non-equivocal sort of reaction.







----

i am better than you,
i will always be better than you.
your life is surrounded with materials,
but no real substance.
your friends are surreal,
they will not care for you as i did;
you're alone,
utterly alone, with no one to turn to.
you're living in a place you despise
and your life is made of monetary illusions.

PAULA DEEN IS TOO INTENSE FOR ME

here is a report on her for my psycholinguistics class i recently did.
















American English in the Southern Dialect, as Represented by Chef Paula Deen


Jessica Seid
PSY 531, Nelson
Summer 2008







Transcription 1: Appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, April 2008 on special location at Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida.
Speakers: E, Ellen DeGeneres, TV personality and comedienne. P, Paula Deen, TV personality and chef specializing in Southern cuisine.

E: Um, did you go ride anything after that?
P: I rode—Yes. I rode the scariest ride, y’all. I rode the merry-go-round with Jack.
E: Oh no.
P: Yes. And I…I got drunk.
E: Uh huh.
P: I got drunk! Heh heh heh!
E: Not on purpose.
P: Not on purpose! No, I was lookin’ all around and I’m standin’ up there holdin’ on ta Jack and I said, “Jack, granny is gettin’ drunk.”
E: Yeah.
P: Haha heh heh heh!
(Ellen and Paula laugh, audience applauses, cheers)
P: So I had ta only look at Jack b’cause it made me, it made me so swimmy-headed. But this afternoon after tha show, Jack ‘n Jamie ‘n Brooke, and Pepaw, Michael, who is gunna take Jack to one uh the, that place where all the rides are fuh little people…?
E: Uh huh, that’ll be fun!
P: Thas where I’m goin’.
E: That’s fun. And what about the…I would think that you’re a connoisseur of food, and since theme parks are known for their food, what do ya thank of the food here?
P: Oh my gosh I adore the food here, Ellen. Last night we went ta Univer—You know, through tha park and I got me a big o’ turkey leg.
E: Mmhmm.
P: It was so delicious. And then I had the funnel cake with the fish—fresh strawberries from Plant City, Florida y’all—they are to die for!
P: With vanilla ice cream and it was fabulous. So that was my supper.

Introduction
The Food Network’s resident Southern cuisine chef Paula Deen is known for her expertise in cooking Southern food. Having published four successful cookbooks and owning her own restaurant in addition to having several shows on the Food Network, something noticeable about Deen is her thick English dialect. Deen’s language usage and dialect is noted in her second appearance ever on the Ellen DeGeneres show when speaking naturally in response to questions fielded to her by DeGeneres. Deen was on the show to promote her newest cookbook with recipes from her sons, which came out in April of 2008. Deen was born in Albany, Georgia and currently resides in Savannah, Georgia, which is also the city where her successful restaurant, Lady and Sons is also located.
Concepts and Context
Dialects exist regionally; they are variants of a language characterized by its unique vocabulary, grammar and, pronunciation (phonology). It is recognized by other native speakers of the language as understandable, but is considered different. In the US, prominent dialects originate from the East coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, and the South. The southern dialect and its idiosyncrasies will be examined.
The southern American English dialect could also be considered a sociolect, a dialect characteristic of a particular social class. “Southern drawl” is a term often used to describe people who speak the dialect; it has a negative connotation on how speakers articulate the sounds of words to sound like there is very little enunciation, and it has very close history with the African American Vernacular English, as most slaves were African Americans working on plantations in the South.

Analysis
“Y’all” is a phrase that Deen tends to use frequently in her vernacular. This aspect of Southern American English grammar is a contraction of words “you” and “all” in the second person plural. “Y’all” is a multi-purpose pronoun, with the ability to be used in a group setting or be combined with the word “all” to augment a sense of familiarity and closeness. Commonly it is mistakenly thought that “y’all” can be used as a singular pronoun a plural pronoun. In the transcript, there is never a use of “y’all” in the singular form. Deen uses “y’all” to address the audience of DeGeneres’ show and couples DeGeneres in that term. “Y’all” is a characteristic of more modern Southern American English, stemming from the original dialects of the states that seceded from the Confederate States of America at the time of the Civil War.
Another feature of Deen’s talk is the incomplete enunciation of the morpheme /ing/. Deen tends to drop the /g/ phone. As in “lookin’”, “standin’”, and so on. This is consistent with Southern American English components such as adding extra phonemic sounds to words, or lacking distinction between vowel sounds. Deen also fails to completely enunciate the words “the”, “for”, and “to”. Instead, she says “tha”, “fuh”, and “ta”, respectively. Her incomplete pronunciation of these words has to do with sound articulation, or how words are pronounced through the respiratory, the laryngeal, and/or the vocal tract. Studying how Southern American English is, there is no concrete reason as to why these words are pronounced this way, but these sounds are produced with the custom shaping of the vocal tract when words are uttered with aspiration. The pronunciations are likely to have evolved from African American Vernacular English pronunciations, and AAVE itself stemmed from the coasts of Africa.
Deen also interjects regional lexicon of the South as well as her own personal words during her appearance on the show. In the beginning of the transcript, Deen claims of getting “drunk” off of a merry-go-round, and in context, the meaning of “drunk” most likely means “dizzy”. “Swimmy-headed” is another phrase Deen uses to describe her sensations felt from riding the merry-go-round, which also probably means a feeling of dizziness. “Pepaw” is a regional term for “grandfather”, a variant of original term “papaw”, as both are terms of endearment. Deen uses this term because she mainly talked about her grandson Jack and used his relationship to him as a reason to utter “pepaw”. “Supper” is a dated term for an evening meal, or dinner.
Deen’s Southern Georgian accent can be seen as a sociolect considering she hails from that region and her speech is thick with a Southern accent. She speaks slowly, with laughter littered throughout her discourse. Looking at Deen’s speech as a sociolect makes her seem less credible as a chef; her conversation is often sidetracked with stories of what she experienced that has nothing to do with the subject at hand, coupled along with speaking slowly with pauses, false starts, and speech errors. This speaking behavior can be witnessed on her various cooking shows broadcasted on the Food Network. Throughout her appearance on the Ellen Degeneres Show, Deen seemed to be dominating talk most of the time, giving host DeGeneres less time to interrupt Deen and ask her other questions. This made Deen seem slightly uncouth, and unaware of pragmatics, committing a social faux pas. Something odd Deen did was addressing the entire audience of the show, versus speaking to DeGeneres directly, which is fairly unconventional for a talk show (despite both the host and the guest having knowledge of a present audience). Southern American speech likes to be in the second person, as if to include others in an experience and therefore appear more outgoing and friendly.

Conclusion
Paula Deen is the perfect person to study when looking at Southern American English as a dialect. She has a “coastal Southern” accent that is non-rhotic (adding or dropping a /r/ sound before consonants in a word). Her vocabulary is flush with lexicon characteristic of Southern American English; she uses phrases like “y’all”, and drops the phonemic sounds of certain words.
Her speech behavior can be examined as a sociolect. Some mannerisms she carries while speaking is telling of a certain socio-economic status; at times her overzealousness to talk could be taken as being rude and being unaware of social rules, thus giving the idea that someone isn’t educated. Friendliness and “Southern hospitality” is something that the South is known for, and the second person voice of Southern American English alludes to inclusion and openness, to be amicable.

so this one time

on a scale from not funny to hilarious (1-10) this following story is going to be about a 3. so just a disclaimer.

anyway, recently i thought about what happened during the week of my freshman orientation at sfsu when i was staying in belmont with my aunt and uncle. my uncle is really into astronomy as one of his many hobbies; he volunteers in high schools and teaches the students there the astronomy unit for them, and has volunteered for nasa in the past. he is also the president of the san mateo astronomy club and they have star parties at the local community college where a state-of-the-art observatory was built a few years ago. the week i was up he brought me to one of his club's monthly meetings where a well-known physicist was speaking. my uncle on my dad's side is really cool, highly resourceful, and immensely intelligent, and is also the only caucasian in an all chinese-american family. his club buddies would come up to us, where my uncle had set up his telescope that he brought along because jupiter was in view at the time. i was standing right next to him and my uncle would introduce me as his niece and initially every person had this look of confusion and didn't know where to look or who's hand to shake. how does a white guy have an asian niece?

he has an asian wife, duh.

friend, n. a reciprocal, mutual relationship.

our definition of "friendship" totally differs,
but the difference between your shitty one and mine
is that i care to include you in the picture.
i care to consider your feelings,
your wants, your needs.
a friend to you is disposable,
easily replaceable--
i thought middle school ended years ago!
you're an adult and you don't know
these common concepts?
that sucks for you.
you're going to burn your bridges
faster than you can build them.

you know that feeling you get,
when you feel like time has stopped, nothing else exists, just you,
the air around you, the person you love and adore,
and nothing wrong is around, just all good?
your mind is calm, your heart is well,
you could die right then and there and die happy.
yes.

question--

i know there are numerous people who don't care and would taunt conservationists and people who are trying to conserve and protect the environment, but here's something to think about:

with all of the poverty and the imbalance of wealth in the world, how do you justify conservation efforts? ex. there is a mother trying to feed her four kids, and you go up and tell her that saving polar bears in the north is just as important as feeding her children?

not so nice

one of the best ways to show contempt for someone
is to totally ignore them.
it's the most effective way to show
how much you completely
hate,
loathe,
dread,
dislike
their presence,
their breath.



i'm insensitive, i know.

several questions--

give me some responses!

1. if you were to have a child/children, regardless of how you feel about having children in the future, what could we expect to see? (eg. you would have a girl, she would have brown hair, etc.)
2. why did your parents give you the name you have?
3. should the government substantially fund the arts?
4. who wants to help me with calculus? :)