In

You're not supposed to choose a grad school based on your hope of working with one specific professor, they told me. He or she* might move on to greener pastures (ahem, JC I am looking at you), or it might turn out that you don't work very well with this person after all. I pretty much ignored this advice, and I came out here with the notion that I would be working with the Badger, our resident logician. (I am calling him that because he is badgerlike and probably Google searches his own name from time to time, because don't we all, and he doesn't need to read what I say about him.)

The Badger is extremely terrifying, a quality I appreciate in a professor. He has very courtly manners but always seems to be shouting. He calls me "ma'am." His photograph on the faculty faceboard in the lounge shows him from behind, looking out the window, and probably brooding. I feel a subdued wish to have him tell me how to run my life, and for this reason it is probably for the best that the Badger is not my adviser ... yet.

Therefore I am pleased when the Badger appears to take an interest in me - when he says things like, 'as one logician to another' or offers to let me read the drafts of a paper he's working on, or invites me to participate in a Philosophy of Mathematics discussion group. Because of this last, I am reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It is every bit as long and confusing as the Philosophical Investigations, but without the classic thought exercises and compelling metaphors. Not to mention, who is more dreamy:

or

I thought so.

*On the subject of "he or she," I read an interesting article yesterday in Bitch about gender-neutral pronouns, as an alternative to the clunky "he or she", the "ungrammatical" singular "they", or the sexist "his." Although I am, on the whole, supportive of attempts to make our language as inclusive as possible (for instance, I supported Smith College's decision to change "she" to "the student" in our school constitution), I cannot get behind these gender neutral pronouns. No one uses words like "zie," "per," or "hirself," and speaking as a linguist, rather than a feminist, they should not be made to. New words are introduced into English all the time, but as a rule they are not these sorts of words. Pronouns are structural, and while new pronouns can evolve naturally (the article points out that "they," "them," and "their" were originally from Scandinavian) they cannot be introduced artificially.

That said, if I should meet somebody who really wants to be addressed using gender-neutral pronouns, I'd probably give it the old college try, because I am nice like that.

THINGS I LOVE:

1. The way my subconscious mind is busy cranking out answers to things even when I am not paying attention: I tried to take a nap this afternoon but was shaken from a doze when I figured out how to do one of the proofs on my set theory homework.
2. The skin that forms on top of milk when you heat it
3. Baked lentils with cheese
4. Watching due South
5. Reading Laurie Colwin with a cup of cocoa -- I mean, reading Kant. Yes.