Work and Play

Susan Garnsey is a really awesome professor of Psychology at the U of I. When I was there I had the wonderful experience of being a lowly undergrad worker in her Language & Brain lab (I ran ERPs for a comparison study of Japanese and English on garden path sentences).

I remember one of those stereotype shattering moments in my early academic career when I was sitting on the couch next to Gary Dell and some graduate students at one of Susan's Parties. We were talking about some such crazy thing related to sentence processing when I looked over to Susan's CD collection and was struck by her musical tastes. I pulled out a copy of the Magnetic Fields' 69 love songs which spun the group's conversation into a totally different (and totally awesome) realm.

Suddenly, I was no longer in an intimidating professor's home in some nerve-wrecking conversation where, at any moment I was in danger of saying something stupid that was going to make evident how little my undergraduate brain knew about sentence processing. Instead, we were talking about the qualities of Stephin Merritt's voice and his multi-talented cast of friends, a conversation I may have been having with peers at some house party later that weekend.

I guess I should have probably taken advantage of my surroundings that day and maybe gained a little more insight on the wonderful world of psycholinguistics, but it was pretty cool talking about music with these people who spent a large part of their week lecturing to undergraduates like me and grading our homeworks, and doing cutting-edge research. In a very profound way, it made a carreer in acadamics actually seem within grasp. These people could be so well versed in the processing literature AND know about Stephin Merritt? They didn't have to spend all of their time with their nose in a journal?

Sometimes I feel like that's really not the case, that I was imagining that whole event, and that I'll spend the rest of my life in front of the computer, typing, committed to the reality that popular culture is going to escape further and further from my ability to know it, understand it. At times like these, I fire up my PS3 and play some video games, assuming netflix hasn't sent me my next movie yet.