#I got into a grad program for speech pathology!

[h0llyw0lly]

Celebrating the first day in my grad program and impending doom debt with a drawing of THE otp of 2023 💖💖💖💖💖

#skip and loafer #skip to loafer #shima sousuke #mitsumi iwakura #shimamitsu #ships #otp #my art #Holly draws #so yeah!! #I got into a grad program for speech pathology! #im pretty excited about it #:DDD

[irismitchells]

✦ HAVANA ROSE LIU, CIS WOMAN, SHE/HER ✦ IRIS MITCHELL the TWENTY-SIX year old has been in willow’s edge for TWENTY YEARS ON AND OFF and was a FRIEND to JUNE, from the deceased family. whispers on the streets are that the WAITRESS AT SUNRISE DINER who lives in WINSLOW are said to be INQUISITIVE and SELF-ABSORBED but i guess we’ll find out for ourselves.

PINTEREST | PLAYLIST

full name — Iris Hui Mitchell nickname(s) — Her family calls her Mo for a reason she shall never divulge xx age — 26 date of birth — June 20th place of birth — Charleston, SC education level & job — Currently enrolled in a Speech Language Pathology graduate program with only a semester left. She completed a Bachelor of Science in Communication Sciences and Disorders and worked as a Child Life Specialist in the Charleston school district for 3 years. After returning to Willow's Edge a year and a half ago, she became a waitress at the local greasy spoon to help support herself through grad school. residence — Winslow (with two roommates... wanted connections incoming) family — Her father Ricky Mitchell is a local car salesman, and her mother Lisa Mitchell (nee Yue) is a reading teacher at the elementary school. Iris also has an older sister, Scarlett, who is an Occupational Therapist in a nearby town.

overview. 

Always hovering somewhere between blue-collar and middle-class, The Mitchell family has always prided themselves on self-sufficiency, independence, and a strong sense of community. They're townies through and through.

Ricky Mitchell is known for dressing up for every major holiday (Santa at Christmas, a leprechaun on St. Patrick's Day, etc.) and holding court at Smokey's. He's a bit of a Character. Lisa, by contrast, is a bit of an introverted neurotic — she most often ventures out into town to participate behind the scenes of town events. Each of their daughters was brought up with a strong proclivity for Getting Shit Done and lowkey.... loving attention and control.💗

Both Iris and Scarlett attended Willow's Edge public schools through 6th grade before they finished their junior and high school experience at a Catholic school a few towns over, so while her parents continued to be deeply entrenched in Willow's Edge society, Iris and Scarlett fell a tiny bit to the wayside as they got older.

The Mitchell family are devout Catholics in name only. The type of people who primarily attend church on major holidays and when it was any run-of-the-mill Sunday Mass, they attended for social reasons. Keep up with town gossip, trade popovers, and sip on sweet tea down in the church basement. As an adult, Iris only goes for Midnight Mass. Lapsed Catholic vibe.

But it was a boy at church that Iris fell in love with when she was 15. Sitting around in the pews during one of their Confirmation classes, each whispered joke Mason Goodwin told about Monsignor Martinez was met with nervous giggles and flushed cheeks from Iris.

They didn't start dating until they were 17 and he was her first, and still only, boyfriend. The relationship lasted for 8 years. They didn't talk about things like marriage or kids or a very defined future until that future snuck up on them. Mason's degree took him west, and he ultimately decided for the both of them that she wouldn't come with. Devastated, Iris returned to Willow's Edge.

Since her return, and nursing a broken heart, Iris took a job at Sunrise Diner. She was one of the very few people willing to wake up at the crack of dawn for the early breakfast shift, after all. Finishing up her Master's, and trying not to still think about Mason, Iris found a lot of comfort in her friendships -- and that included the one with June.

They weren't super close before Iris left for college, but they'd grown increasingly fond of each other as the months passed. June's friendship was one of the things that helped pull Iris out of her breakup blues. In turn, a kind, sweet-tongued comfort when Iris was sad and then a fun-seeking partner on the weekends when Iris needed a distraction. She was a good friend to Iris.

Which made some things difficult... Iris is bad at secrets. She loves to learn them, of course, but she isn't so good at keeping them. She doesn't run her mouth around town, but it's almost always certain that if one friend tells her something semi-secret then Iris is passing that info on to one other friend. She can't help it. And when the secret is her own, it's somehow worse. Her compulsion tells her to come clean immediately or to whisper it into several friends' ears. But her most recent secret was a little more complicated...

Iris kissed June's boyfriend Caleb. And June died before Iris could tell her.

personality.

Iris is a princess of sometimes saying out-of-pocket shit and staring at slight blemishes on your face until you're like, WHAT skjdfns. And, with her background in speech, she often analyzes your speech in her head too. Sometimes outside of her head too.

She's a bit shameless with the people she's close with, a fan of meeting and getting to know new ones, and... on a heavy dose of anxiety meds! She talks a lot because 1) she likes conversation and 2) it's half-compensation for said aforementioned anxiety.

When your anxiety manifests as a desire to be liked and friends with everyone which then reveals a real sense of self-absorption and, every once in a while, leads to weird drama... love it!

positive: organized, passionate, charismatic, loyal, curious, expressive, social

negative: condescending, impulsive, gossipy (can't keep a secret), scattered, fidgety, approval-seeking, overly sensitive

misc headcanons.

Quick list: ❤️'s weed, cooking, surfing, hiking + camping, sharing facts and feeling a little more well-informed (Wikipedia page memorizer), talking through movies, weekend trips, skinny dipping, hanging out with old people, doing Randy Newman impressions, waking up early, showing the people she loves new things, sharing experiences, watching reality tv a la Sister Wives, etc.

Oh -- and she's a Swiftie.

#willowsedgeintro

[anghraine]

I wonder if you can guide me on whether I should pursue Linguistics or Literature for my MA since you already are working on your PhD in Literary Studies? It's my dream to major in Literary Criticism and I believe I can always get another MA in Linguistics, but for now I don't want to waste my time and power on something that might not be so useful in the future. How has your experience been with Literary Studies? Would you advice a fellow academic to pursue it?

Hmm, I would always suggest getting advice from an actual advisor or committee chair if you have one. However, here is what advice I can give, with the caveat that I am a random stranger on the Internet who doesn't know you.

First: broadly speaking, if you're really sure about what your ultimate goal is, you're probably best served by doing the things directly related to that goal if it doesn't make much of a difference to you otherwise. I suspect that an MA in English literature will do more to help you get into a PhD program in English literature than a degree in linguistics.

That said, the fields are related enough that if there would be no difference with regard to GPA, what recommendations you can get, and (most importantly) your writing sample, it may not matter that much in the long run, unless you envision your PhD literary work as particularly involved in linguistics (sometimes this is the case).

But the work you do in an MA in literature is probably going to be more geared towards preparing you for further work in literature than one in linguistics. If one subject is generally easier for you to get high grades in or if you tend to have better relationships with instructors in one of the fields, that may be the best for PhD acceptance purposes.

Another concern that people sometimes don't want to talk about, or alternately are very annoying about: the current state of the job market in literary studies is dire in a lot of places (certainly in the USA, where I live). It was bad before COVID and is worse now. Exactly how dire the situation is depends on your specialization, but it's pretty bad all around.

I honestly don't know what the job market for linguists looks like, especially since there are a lot of different professions within the field (a high school friend of mine with a linguistics degree ended up in speech pathology and says it's much easier to find work in that field). I did use linguistics for technical writing credit, but that was years ago and I just don't know what opportunities look like now, pragmatically speaking. Possibly the outlook is better than in literary studies, and if so, a graduate linguistics degree might be more helpful if you don't get into a literature PhD program or do get the degree but don't get hired in academia afterwards.

OTOH, there are a lot of things you can do with an MA or PhD in English outside of academia (and those things are usually more profitable because of the defunding of the arts etc etc). Some jobs simply want the degree and don't care much what it's in, for instance.

Some do care, but are actually looking for people with English degrees. A friend of mine once got a very good job in Seattle because he had an English degree in addition to his computer science degree and they wanted someone with that kind of background to work on an online dictionary.

A friend from my grad school cohort used his literature MA to get a job in technical writing, so there's that. A graduate degree in English can help if you want to go into editing or publishing (maybe even law), though there are major issues in publishing as well. If you're interested in creative writing as well as literature, getting into a terminal creative writing degree program such as an MFA or PhD is sometimes helped by having a related MA already.

As for my experience in getting a PhD in literature, it has been very mixed. Sometimes it's fantastic, because you're in an environment that can be very intellectually nourishing, for lack of a better phrase. How actually supportive it is varies a lot (I have been lucky in that respect, but I know people whose programs had a lot of ambitious, cutthroat people and for whom it was miserable). It can be very nice and very helpful to be around people who care about the same general thing as you and who appreciate its value even if it's not their specific area of study. It's super cool to have full on tenured professors be like "oh, that's a bit outside my area, but it's an interesting question and Elizabeth would probably know more" or just straight-up have me take over teaching a class while they dealt with a crisis outside the classroom.

People outside academia (and some parts of fandom) have tended to find me deeply boring, and because I'm autistic, it's always a struggle not to just go on flat monologues about my fixations. I constantly had to remind myself that nobody around me was actually interested or wanted to hear about this kind of thing. But during both my MA and PhD, it was just different. Since all my local friends were in the program, I didn't have to worry nearly as much that people wouldn't know what I was talking about or would find it intrinsically dull, and we'd just sit around a table chattering about this stuff.

That said, this being a constant, inescapable aspect of your life with a lot of pressure and obligations and expectations and so forth—and just the sheer amount of reading you have to do—can start to suck the joy out of it, and this can be a major problem if it's one of your major sources of joy in the first place. I mean, there isn't much reason to do it if it isn't. But I have hardly read any fiction outside of my academic interests for years because the idea of reading any more just feels exhausting.

I don't read fanfic at this point, not because I think there is any intrinsic qualitative distinction between original and fanfic, but because my mind is so wrung out that I usually don't read stories of any kind unless it's part of research. Some of my friends who got degrees in literature experienced the same thing and gradually found joy in literature again once they were free of grad school bullshit, so this isn't a permanent rupture necessarily, just something to consider.

Then there's teaching, too, and the messy composition-literature dynamic, and frankly, as a whole, it's been really bad for my mental health, especially my mood swings. But a lot of that has to do with the culture around grad school and academia in general, not literature specifically (I think it would be worse if it were any other field, actually, except maybe creative writing). So it's worth bearing that possibility in mind, but not a certainty, either.

I know this is a lot! Basically, it depends on a whole ton of factors, and I can't give you an exact answer. But these are the kinds of things I would consider.

#anon replies #respuestas #ivory tower blogging #rare breed of attack unicorn #long post

[jennadoran22]

Script Writing, Part 2

Act One, Scene One

JOEI enters her living room after taking a nap, looking worn out and exhausted. MADDIE sits on the couch, eating some ramen noodles and casually flicking through television channels aimlessly. 

Maddie: Long day?

(JOEI sighs, and nods)

Joei: It feels like everyday is just longer than the last. Like today, for example, I thought I would treat myself to getting lunch on campus. I wanted to go to Blaze since it’s my favorite pizza spot. But, when I got there, it was unbelievably packed so I couldn’t even go! I was looking forward to it all day and that was such a bummer.

Maddie: Sorry bestie. I know how much it can stink to look forward to something all day, and then not be able to do it…how was the rest of your day?

(JOEI shrugs, and starts to poke around the kitchen)

Joei: It was alright, had a long day at work but other than that, things are going okay. I’m just waiting to go down to Florida at this point.

Maddie: Oh yeah! I forgot about that! Are you excited? I’m sure it’ll be fun to go down there and to see their grad programs, and it’s a bonus you get to visit family too.

Joei: Yeah! I think it will be interesting to see what it’s like. After all, Florida is super different from Philadelphia, from politics, to weather and to lifestyle. At this point, I need spring break. That way, I can just make up my mind and know where I’ll be next year. 

Maddie: Of course! I totally get being stressed about it. That’s how I felt before I knew I wanted to go into Speech Pathology and work in that field. It’s totally natural to feel unsure, but things will definitely work out.

Joei: Thank you! I needed to hear that and I appreciate it. 

Maddie: Make sure you take time for yourself too. It’s something we never think to do, but with this being a crazy time of the semester, it’ll help you more in the long run if you have some stress free things to do everyday.

Joei: Aww, yeah! Thank you, I totally will. How was your day?

(MADDIE sighs, and puts down her food).

Maddie: Work was HORRIBLE! We had so many crazy customers, and one woman kept yelling at me because she couldn’t get her prescription filled right away. She came in at 12:30 though, and it clearly said that the pharmacists took lunch then. At first, I thought she couldn’t hear me and was confused, but then, as I kept repeating it to her, I realized that she knew what I was saying, and just wanted it instantly. Honestly, I can’t anymore with these CVS customers. They always think they know what’s right and how the store should run! At this point, I just want to say to them, ‘why don’t you run the store then?!’ because I’m so sick of this crap!

(JOEI opens up some Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, and starts snacking)

Joei: I totally get it. The customers can be such a pain in the ass, and they really don’t understand how anything works, and want us to make exceptions for them because they can’t comprehend the basic rules of a retail store.

(JOEI rolls eyes and continues to eat ice cream)

Joei: I’m so proud of you for not snapping at them though! I would’ve done that in an instant, so you’re stronger than me.

(MADDIE sighs, and nods)

Maddie: You’re totally right. They definitely just want us to cater to them and don’t get the rules. It’s just so frustrating when it’s the same stuff over and over again.

(MADDIE thinks for a moment, and then smiles)

Maddie: I do have some good news for you though! I decided to try somewhere new on campus!

(JOEI looks up and is ecstatic)

Joe: Ooohh, I’m so proud of you! I know how much you like to stick to eating the same food, so it’s exciting you’re going to a new place! Where’d you end up at?

Maddie: I got a hoagie from the Footlong Truck and I’m excited to try it! It looks good, I put it in the fridge for now so I could eat it for dinner. It’s perfect because that way I don’t need to cook anything new!

Joei: Ooo, great plan! I love that idea! 

(JOEI finishes ice cream, and throws out container)

Joei: Ugh, I hate to say this but I really need to get some homework done. If I don’t do it now, I definitely won’t do it later. Want to watch one of our shows together later?

Maddie: Yes, absolutely! I’ll browse through Hulu and see what new episodes are out while we wait!

(JOEI smiles, and starts to walk upstairs)

Joei: Sounds great, see you in a bit!

Maddie: See you soon! 

End of Scene

[nomadiclinguist]

i’m back in tumblr

Hi! I’ve abandoned this blog for a while now. I’ll try to keep it more or less active. I’m working on making a more professional blog soon to document and share things I read and learn, experiences teaching ESL and translating, or applying to grad schools. 

Since I made the post of possible linguistics jobs, I did some shadowing and took up some communication disorder courses at my school before graduating this May. Helped me decide that in the long-run I want to become an SLP and after getting experience, maybe pursue doing psycholinguistics and speech pathology research. 

However, for now, I’m glad I got to graduate and acquire my B.S. in Linguistics, with minors in French and Cognitive Sciences. With the COVID-19 situation, and the current economy, chose to move to Spain instead of staying in the US. I had a hard time to find an OTP job and I didn’t graduate with a great GPA, so I want to take a gap year for the sake of my mental health ( take care ^^ ), earn and save some cash, and to gain some experience that could help me get into a grad school program. 

I’ll be trying freelance translation and offering tutoring for Spanish and English. Wish me luck, I’ll be keeping you updated with resources and things I learn along the way. I wish you luck too, getting into programs and getting jobs right now can be more difficult than normal. I send you all a great virtual hug in these harsh times. 

#career #linguistics #2020 #esl #translation #freelance #autonomo

[sadafs]

hi! i’ve seen you mention a few times that you're a linguist? i’m thinking about pursuing a career as a speech therapist or sociolinguist or such, and i was wondering if you'd be willing to share any quick advice or what-I-wish-I'd-known or anything along those lines? (of course, if it’s not too much of a bother!)

hey yeah! im currently studying for a ling BA. i’m likely going a computational route so stuff like natural language processing, machine learning, AI etc but there are a lot of other paths. 

for sociolinguists, the traditional path is undergrad > phd > postdoc position > try to get tenure-track. its really difficult, and phd programs vary in acceptance rates based on who is researching what at that particular moment in a research program. often, you can apply to many programs one year and get in nowhere, and apply to the same programs a year later and get into at least a few. i’m unsure how much you know about the grad student struggle, but for general advice, don’t do programs that aren’t fully funded (you are meant to be paid to be part of the program). research the faculty in the grad dept and base where you apply off of how overlapping your interests are with the existing people there. labs and program heads want people who are passionate not only about their own research but their research as well. 

there’s also something to be said for how hard it is to get an academic position these days, and how productive you need to be from a research publishing perspective to be taken seriously and be considered a desirable hire. 

but once you acquire a postdoc position, you get a lot of freedom wrt what you research in your free time which is always the largest draw of something like an academic position. with sociolinguistics, however, my main interest is how to apply research towards the public good; this is in part why i’m doing computation stuff now, and *intend* to do my socioling phd later once i have savings and a better idea of where sociolinguistics is going. it’s frustrating that i can read the same articles and books talking about linguistic discrimination but never hear about who else is reading that research besides linguists. 

in terms of setting yourself up well (and again, i dont know at which part of the process you’re at) i’d recommend trying to do sociolinguistic research with a professor at your own university during undergrad, and then applying to share your research at conferences and mini symposiums and all that. also, look at the kind of research that big socioling conferences like NWAV are including, as it can reveal trends in what people want to study right now, which is likely gonna help with applications. 

speech pathology is quite a different beast, although it has shared points of study with socioling like phonetics/phonology. most sociophonetic research is acoustically centered, whereas most speech pathology research/work concerns articulatory gestures. i know a lot less about speech pathology, other than that there is a really good program for that at emerson college. its a little more straighforward of a path (afaik) just because speech pathology programs aim for a technical training and there’s a traditional type of clientele- like, it’s a trade, whereas sociolinguistics is usually an open-ended research/professorial gig in an academic economy that has very few spots. i’d recommend talking to people you know who are speech pathologists about this. 

which overall is good advice- reach out to professors (not only at your university) with questions through email if you can, reach out to alumni from your school with your degree through linkedin to ask how they got to the position they’re at now, be it socioling or speech pathology. i’m still only graduating this semester and these are both fields i’m not pursuing at present so i know like, 2 things. hope this was helpful! and feel free to ask more qs if you want if you wanna message me directly 

#Anonymous

[everythingbutmyheart]

I got into grad school this week for Speech Language Pathology which is a HIGHLY competitive program to get accepted into. I told myself for months that if I’d get in, I’d get these lyrics as a tattoo because of all the hardships it took for me to get to where I am today.

AND GUESS WHAT, THIS WEEK I GOT INTO MY TOP CHOICE GRAD SCHOOL AND IM GOING TO BE AN SLP.

I LITERALLY GOT ACCEPTED TO THE GRAD PROGRAM THIS PAST WEEKEND, GOT THIS TATTOO YESTERDAY, AND NOW TAYLOR DECIDES TO DROP HER COUNTDOWN.

AS IF THIS WEEK COULDNT GET ANY BETTER THAN IT ALREADY WAS 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 IM ON CLOUD 9 RIGHT NOW 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 @taylorswift

[beingulti]

Sam Pickel

My name is Sam Pickel. I’m 30 years old and grew up in Seattle where I still live. Until beginning grad school in Speech Language Pathology this Autumn, I worked as an Instructional Assistant in various Special Education classrooms around the Seattle Public School district.

In 2019 I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail with my girlfriend. After returning to Seattle I began taking prerequisites for a post-bac program at the University of Washington in Speech and Hearing Sciences, which I began the following Summer amidst the pandemic, and finished this last Spring.

I did not play ultimate in High School, nor have I really ever had a head for sports at any time in my life. However, I was exposed to ultimate by a friend my first year at Western Washington University. I was very bad, but also wanted friends. I stuck with it through college and have played on and off since graduating in 2013. The fact that I am now a defending WUCC and USAU champion is absolutely absurd to me.

I have only ever played mixed club in Seattle- for Birdfruit from 2014-2017, BFG in 2018, and again for BFG in 2021. Did a few pro stints in there as well.

I have been to club nationals twice. Once in 2015 with Birdfruit where we got last place and again this past year with BFG where we got first place.

Outside of ultimate my main activity is music. I play drums in a death metal band and have been in and around the Seattle underground metal scene since 2007-2008. I’ve toured the states, parts of Mexico and Canada, have shared stages with personal heroes, and have released numerous albums with my current band and others.

I like drawing the comparison between ultimate as a sport and metal as a music subgenre- both are supportive spaces where it’s easy to feel understood and like you have a captured community. Both are very white (and male- especially in metal) and have a lot of the same problems as a result.

The hot-button ultimate topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the concept of “legitimacy” in the sport. As an outsider when it comes to an appreciation of professional sports, I found the culture of ultimate incredibly unique and subversive of mainstream sports culture. There’s something really valuable there that I hope the community is able to hold onto in the face of whatever changes are before us. However, the push for ultimate to be more visible on a larger national scale and as a more “legitimate” (starting to hate that word- the more I use it the less I feel like I know what it means) sport means that there will be increased opportunities for people of color and those from disadvantaged communities to engage with and come to the forefront of our sport. I hope there is a path forward in which both of these aspects can be realized.

Topics I’m hoping to cover this coming week include- music, Seattle in general (ultimate, gentrification, etc), masculinity in sport, my experience on the PCT/hiking in general, the BFG/Mixtape rivalry (as I perceive it), and BFG’s 2021 season. Expect some obnoxious trophy pictures. Also I do not know how to use Twitter so please bear with me and offer advice as I struggle through this week.

Feel free to give me a follow on Instagram @deathtofalsedadrock if you like drumming videos and cat pictures

https://mobile.twitter.com/Le_Piq/likes

(November 15th - November 21st)

[weekegg2-blog]

A ‘freaking fag revolutionary’ remembers the early years of gay liberation in Chicago

When the annual Pride Parade steps off from the intersection of Broadway and Montrose at noon on Sunday, June 30—with Lori Lightfoot, Chicago's first openly gay mayor, serving as honorary grand marshal—it will represent a very different mind-set from the event that launched the pride parade tradition. This year's parade is expected to draw more than a million participants and onlookers to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28 and 29, 1969. Thus the theme Stonewall 50: Millions of Moments of Pride.

I was a teenaged member of Chicago Gay Liberation, the loose-knit, short-lived group that organized the first pride parade on Saturday, June 27, 1970. Most of our group thought of ourselves, proudly if irreverently, as members of the "freaking fag revolution"—to borrow the phrase used by Thomas Aquinas Foran, the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted the so-called "Chicago Seven" anti-war activists charged with conspiracy and incitement to riot as a result of their protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The first parade wasn't even a parade. It was a march, which meant we were allowed to walk on the sidewalks but not in the streets. There were no floats, no cars, no politicians, no crowds, no corporate sponsors pitching their brands to onlookers. The last thing on our minds was the possibility of any mayor, let alone an openly gay one, leading the way; we were happy the city's then-mayor, "Boss" Richard J. Daley, didn't set his cops on us.

The day began at noon with a rally in Washington Square Park across the street from the Newberry Library—known as "Bughouse Square" because of its storied history as a free-speech forum. From there we walked to the historic Water Tower at the intersection of Michigan and Chicago Avenues. Then, instead of dispersing as we had originally planned, we impulsively headed south on Michigan into the Loop, chanting "Out of the closets and into the streets!" as we wended our way through throngs of Mag Mile shoppers. The march ended with another rally in Civic Center Plaza (now Daley Plaza), where the event culminated in a joyous circle dance around the Picasso statue.

Between 150 and 300 people (depending on which account you read) showed up to celebrate what our flyer promoting the event declared (in all capital letters) was: "THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF GAY PEOPLE TELLING THE WARPED, SICK, MALADJUSTED, PURITAN AMERIKAN SOCIETY THAT THEY HAVE HAD ENOUGH SHIT."

That flyer is on display as part of "Out of the Closets & Into the Streets: Power, Pride & Resistance in Chicago's Gay Liberation Movement," a new exhibit at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, the midwest's largest LGBTQ library and research center. Conceived by the library's director, Wil Brant, and curated by a team of young volunteers including professional librarians Chase Ollis and James Conley and designer Kurt Conley, the display is drawn from Gerber/Hart's extensive archival collection.

The march marked the first anniversary of a riot in New York City on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay nightclub in Greenwich Village owned by the Genovese crime family, reacted violently to what had begun as a routine police raid. That event, and the events leading up to and following it, are well covered in a new book, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History by Marc Stein (NYU Press).

But that first Stonewall anniversary march wasn't the first activity of Chicago Gay Liberation, which started up in fall 1970 after University of Chicago grad student Henry Wiemhoff placed an ad in the Chicago Maroon student newspaper seeking a gay roommate. Not only did he get a roommate—a female taxicab driver named Michal Brody—he got a discussion group. We met in Wiemhoff and Brody's Hyde Park apartment and then, as our numbers grew, began to gather at the Blue Gargoyle, a community center and coffeehouse in the multicultural, nondenominational University Church on the University of Chicago campus.

Talking soon led to action. The first public Gay Lib event I participated in was a protest four months before the Stonewall march, on the snowy afternoon of Wednesday, February 25, 1970, outside the Loop headquarters of the Women's Bar Association of Illinois. The group was hosting a program on "Youthful Offenders" with a Chicago police officer, Sergeant John Manley, as guest speaker. But for us, the offender was Manley himself. The blond, muscular cop was notorious for entrapping gay men in Lincoln Park restrooms; wearing street clothes, he would pretend to solicit guys for sex and then arrest them if they responded to his invitation. Mattachine Midwest, an established "homophile" organization in town, published Manley's picture in its mimeographed monthly newsletter and mockingly suggested Manley himself was a closet case: "If I were gay and I didn't want anybody to know, and I felt very, very guilty, I think I might get a job where I could cruise in the public interest," wrote David Stienecker, the newsletter's editor. On February 7, 1970, Manley made an early morning appearance at Stienecker's third-floor apartment to arrest him for criminal defamation.

"After I unsuccessfully attempted to make a phone call, Manley called for a police van and I was escorted from my apartment in handcuffs," Stienecker now recalls. "Upon arriving at the precinct house, Manley suggested that if I just pleaded guilty the judge would only give me a slap on the wrist." But Stienecker, represented by the diligent and fierce lesbian attorney Renee Hanover, fought the charges. After several court appearances, most of which Manley missed, the case was thrown out of court, but Stienecker lost his job as an editor at World Book Encyclopedia due to the ensuing publicity—there then being no legal protection against employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Manley later rose to the rank of captain in the police force, but his career crashed and burned in the mid-1990s when he was fired for sexually harassing female officers under his supervision. Some 20 years later, his name popped up in the news again when he was ticketed for, of all things, impersonating a government official after he posed as a U.S. Maritime Service "special agent" to avoid a parking ticket. Stienecker, who went on to a successful career writing educational books for children, is credited as a program supporter of Gerber/Hart's "Out of the Closets" exhibit.

In March 1970, we responded to the release of The Boys in the Band, the film version of the 1968 off-Broadway stage hit. Our aim was not to boycott the movie—which used waspish humor to illustrate the pathological, self-hating behavior of a group of gay New York men—but to use it as a teaching opportunity. We handed out flyers on the street outside the Carnegie Theatre on Rush Street (where Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse is now), which read in part: "The pain and cruelty typified by The Boys in the Band should be understood as the expression of human lives damaged by an environment of condemnation, suspicion, job discrimination, and legal harrassment [sic]."

Gay Liberation also organized dances, which drew large crowds from around the city. Though same-sex dancing wasn't illegal, it was forbidden in the mob-owned gay bars in Boss Daley's Chicago, where periodic police raids were a given. The first two Gay Lib dances were held in the protected environs of the University of Chicago campus. (It inspired other LGBTQ student groups to hold their own dances at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle—now UIC—and Northwestern University. At the latter, music was provided by the Siegel-Schwall Band, then one of Chicago's hottest blues-rock bands. )

When the U. of C. demanded that CGL move its dances off campus because the crowds were getting too big, we booked the Coliseum, located on South Wabash between 14th and 16th Streets, a huge venue that had hosted several Republican presidential conventions, sports events, rock concerts, and, a few weeks previously, a congress of Black Muslims. As historian Timothy Stewart-Winter, author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press), recounts in a Slate article titled "Beyond Stonewall: How Gay History Looks Different From Chicago":

"[T]here was a problem: The venue required an insurance policy, and every insurance agent the organizers approached said the risk was too great that the police would raid the dance, cart the attendees off to jail, and levy fines. Only on the day before the dance did the activists find a broker who'd sell them a policy—a black man whose company had insured the Nation of Islam's annual convention at the same venue."

About 2,000 people showed up at the Coliseum to dance for liberation on April 18, 1970. So did the police. But when the cops entered the hall and came face to face with a phalanx of attorneys—including the formidable Renee Hanover—primed to document any civil liberties violations, they shrugged and went away.

The Gerber/Hart exhibit includes copies of the mimeographed newsletters that Gay Lib used to spread its message in those long-ago pre-Internet days. Also on display is a copy of the Chicago Seed, the city's hippie/radical underground paper, which published an eight-page Gay Liberation supplement in one issue. There's also a well-deserved tribute to the late Frank Robinson, who gave Chicago's LGBTQ community the first professional- quality publications we could call our own. Robinson was a closeted middle-aged editor for Playboy magazine; unable to come out for our demonstrations, he devoted himself to behind-the-scenes messaging. After publishing a one time "Gay Pride" paper to promote the 1971 Pride Parade (which by then had been relocated to the Lincoln Park/Lakeview area on the north side), Robinson put out two editions of The Paper, a 1972 tabloid that covered local LGBTQ arts and politics. The Paper ran interviews with local counterculture celebrities such as painter Ed Paschke, lesbian singer-songwriter Linda Shear, female impersonators Roby Landers and Wanda Lust, and stage director Gary Tucker, aka "Eleven," whose gender-bending Godzilla Rainbow Troupe was then running its hit production of Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr's outrageous Turds in Hell. A copy of The Paper on display at Gerber/Hart shows a photo from another landmark of Chicago's fledgling off-Loop theater movement, the Organic Theater's sci-fi epic Warp!, featuring André De Shields (who just won a Tony for his performance in the Broadway hit Hadestown) as Xander the Unconquerable. In 1973, Robinson had relocated to San Francisco, where he became the speechwriter for a camera store owner and activist with aspirations to a political career—Harvey Milk. But by then the city had its first (more or less) regularly published newspaper, the Chicago Gay Crusader, edited by activist Michael Bergeron with copy editing supervision by his lover Bill Kelley.

The success of the June 1970 Stonewall anniversary march (no one got arrested!) encouraged members of Gay Liberation to start developing a larger agenda. Inevitably, there were conflicts. Some wanted to merge Gay Lib into a broader leftist coalition; others preferred to keep the focus on LGBTQ issues. GL's women's and Black caucuses went off in their own directions; the Black caucus turned into Third World Gay Revolutionaries, led by Ortez Alderson, who went to prison for destroying draft records in downstate Pontiac. And in September 1970, as reported in a CGL newsletter displayed in the Gerber/Hart exhibit, "Tensions that had been brewing for some weeks finally came to a head . . . with the result that the group suffered a schism and a large number of members announced they were forming a new group—not a new caucus—to be called 'The Chicago Gay Alliance.' . . . Though there . . . were moments of acrimony, the parting was amicable. . . . All present expressed a desire to avoid the infighting of competitive groups in other cities"—a reference to the internecine turf wars that tore at the fabric of New York's gay community around the same time.

The debut issue of the CGA newsletter in November 1970 explained: "The Chicago Gay Alliance is actively interested in alleviating the ghetto (whether spiritual or physical) conditions of homosexuals, in dispelling the psychological and sociological mythology that has grown up about the subject of homosexuality, in providing referral services to homosexuals, in helping homosexuals 'coming out' develop a sense of pride in who they are and courage in facing the generally hostile outside world, to provide additional social outlets so that homosexuals can meet each other as human beings, to change repressive laws and end police and political harassment, and to improve communications between the homosexual and the heterosexual communities."

In 1971 CGA gave Chicago its first LGBTQ community center, a ramshackle red-brick two-story rented house on an Old Town side street at 171 W. Elm. By 1973 the center had closed for lack of financial support, and CGA ceased operations. But the activism continued. A July 1973 issue of the Chicago Gay Crusader reported that 20th Ward alderman Cliff Kelley, working with a group called Illinois Gays for Legislative Action, had introduced legislation in the Chicago City Council to prohibit discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations based on sexual orientation. It took 15 years for the City Council to finally vote an LGBTQ-inclusive Chicago Human Rights Ordinance into law on December 21, 1988.

The Old Town community center paved the way for today's gleaming Center on Halsted. The Gay Crusader was succeeded by the weekly newspaper GayLife, founded in 1975 by the late Grant Ford, and then by Windy City Times, cofounded in 1985 by Tracy Baim, now publisher of the Reader, and still publishing in print and online 34 years later. (I served as editor of both GayLife and WCT in the '80s.)

The Gerber/Hart exhibit's narrative arc climaxes with a major event from 1977, chronicled in an issue of GayLife on display. On June 14 of that year, singer, orange-juice industry spokeswoman, and former Miss America Anita Bryant arrived in Chicago for a concert at the historic Medinah Temple at Wabash and Ohio (it's now a Bloomingdale's home furniture store). The concert had been booked before Bryant achieved national notoriety as leader of an anti-LGBTQ initiative in Dade County, Florida. LGBTQ activists, including me, picketed the Bryant concert in Chicago, despite being cautioned by gay establishment leaders that our action would be an embarrassing failure. By then, it was thought, the activist energy of the early 1970s had waned, and the only time queers turned out en masse was for the Pride Parade. But a spontaneous, unexpected turnout of 3,000 to 5,000 (depending on whom you ask) proved the naysayers wrong.

Chicago Gay Liberation, the Chicago Gay Alliance, and the other groups that sprang up in the wake of Stonewall ran out of steam by the end of the decade, but the sense of empowerment they gave the community—and the lessons we learned from their successes and setbacks—guided us into the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic and the struggle for civil rights at the city, county, and state level drove a new activist spirit. "The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long," notes Gerber/Hart's James Conley. "As transformative as those groups were, they were temporary. But the impact they had in their short span of existence was monumental and lasting."   v

Special thanks to Amber Lewis at Columbia College Chicago

Correction: This article has been revised to reflect that the Siegel-Schwall Band played at a dance held on the campus of Northwestern University, not that of the University of Chicago.

Source: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/gerber-hart-gay-pride-history/Content?oid=70924510

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

[alyssumaimatia]

a list of things about my friend who i am simultaneously very proud of, very jealous of, and very concerned about bc i want to rant but everyone i know has heard some version of this rant before: (read more bc i have a lot to say)

- she’s super stressed but very determined and hard-working and absolutely bent on getting into medical school - she’s going on a month-long trip in july to montreal to learn french - she’s going to write the mcat in august - she’s taking a final exam for her speech class in a few weeks which will qualify her to teach - starting with the next school year, she wiLL be teaching some students for that speech class - she also currently works at a speech pathology practice as a volunteer coordinator where they hired her after she volunteered there for several years and after one other girl is leaving to go to grad school, she will be the second-most experienced person there and will be running one of their programs on top of her existing duties - she is on the board of directors for a local volunteer board (and the organization that she’s on the board for is restructuring so she said that if restructuring means that there’s a position that would fit me, she’d put in a good word) - she’s looking for a volunteer position in a research lab for the school year - she works saturdays mornings as a receptionist at a doctors office - she’s also fasting for ramadan right now so i have no ideA HOW she’s managing to pull these ridiculously long and active days - she finished this school year year with a 3.85 gpa - she’s double majoring in biology and psych - she’s also super social???? so many friends. and so nice. i have been on the bus and i’ve heard people just talking about how nice she is and how they heard she was getting to receive a bunch of awards and how she deserved them all - she’s good at art??? there’s a painting she did framed at our old high school. also she went to a competition once for digital design - i have told her like 5000000000 times that she’s going to burn out (and she has) but she keeps? going?????/ which is frustrating. but also pls teach me ur ways - she also has a bunch of younger siblings so when her parents are away for whatever reason she’s usually the one driving them to games or to lessons or whatever - she also took piano lessons for a while but i think she quit bc she was too busy - oh also she volunteers at a local art gallery anD just took on a new volunteer position at an arts center - she literally got into a car accident and could have eASILY taken off work for at least a daY (only minor injuries) but nah she went to work for eight hours anyway - we’re both organizing a fundraising campaign in support of an international organization (as in we’re the only two at the moment) and we’ve put in equal amounts of work and i jusT DON’T UNDERSTAND - uh she drinks ridiculous amounts of coffee and takes naps but like. not a lot of naps. bc she usually doesn’t have time to go home between things. so i guess that helps but its unsuSTAINABLE - i wish i could be so accomplished but also not bc she’s often very tired but also she makes plans and sticks to them and is a good friend even if she’s basically always working

#life #may 14 2019 #aka i just finished talking to her bc she had just gotten home from work and was going to take a nap before going to speech #i dont understand #how she is noT DYING #ALL THE TIME #i mean a month in montreal is a pretty good vacation but also noT BC SHE'LL BE STUDYING FOR THE MCAT #how to be this accomplished

[h0llyw0lly]

People I'd Like to Get to Know Better

Tagged by @azim-steppes ^3^

Last Song Listened To:

“Wouldn’t You Like” from Epic the Musical. It’s a musical currently in the process of being written, based on the tale of the Odyssey. This song is SUCH a fun one, and I can’t wait to listen to how he portrays the next part of the story (*coughUnderworld Saga is released April 26th cough*)

Currently Watching:

Finishing my rewatch of the Owl House (and crying all over again because I just love Hunter, my sad awkward boy who just wants to be a kid for once, and he finds friends who accept him—plus he and Willow AAAAA; not to mention the bi-rep with Luz and her relationship with Amity, and then the Collector and King—OH AND FLAPJACK AAAAUGH). Also watching A Condition Called Love cuz the first episode aired last Thursday and I am SOOOO happy with it, and am TRYING to watch Dungeon Meshi but my Netflix is being stupid (;̦̦̦̦̦̦̦̦ↂ⃝⃓⃙⃚⃘дↂ⃝⃓⃙⃚⃘;̦̦̦̦̦̦̦̦)

Sweet/Savoury/Spicy?:

I think probably sweet, though I do love savory foods. And, yknow, I’m from Texas, so I enjoy spicy food—but it has to be spice with a PURPOSE. It has to ENHANCE the flavor, not just try to melt your brains. Sweet, though—hohoHOOO. Yeah. I’ve definitely got a sweet tooth. Again, though, it can’t just be sweet for the sake of sweetness. There should be a little something extra in there to counteract the sweet (￣ε￣〃)ｂ

(I think I just like food LOL;;;;)

Relationship Status:

Single Pringle (　´,_ゝ｀)

Current Obsession:

Genshin impact, ffxiv (thanks a LOT lol, I love my little gremlin girl Nelle), and getting “A”s in my grad courses so I can raise my gpa and get into a masters program for speech language pathology. So, you may notice there are potential obstacles to that last one, evidenced by the previously stated obsessions (๑⃙⃘·́ω·̀๑⃙⃘)੨

Tagging:

@chikinan @ozwuv @carigros

And anyone else who wants to, go right ahead! Just don’t forget to tag me! I’m very nosey lol ( ͒•·̫|

#ask memes #this was funnn #I haven’t done one of these in ages #about me

[nicolekidmanwigfactory]

Questions: What got you into studying linguistics? What would you like to do after grad school? What topic in linguistics is your favourite? Which is your least favourite?

How to answer that question...in undergrad I studied Spanish and Speech Pathology/Audiology. I went for my AuD in Audiology at first but after an emergency medical leave, I returned and hated it. What I loved in undergrad became the bane of my existence. I liked performing otoscopies, testing for acoustic reflexes, and clinic in general, but couldn’t give a shit about the neural pathways of the auditory system and etc.

As I pondered my next move, I took a job as Spanish teacher in a Catholic grade school and enjoyed explaining the linguistic side of things to my students. I’d had linguistic courses as part of my BA that I enjoyed but didn’t think of pursuing that further until later. I had a friend who is in a PhD program and asked him some questions and like what I heard.

So I applied and now I’m in my second semester of the program. My main research interests concern first language acquisition and development but I’ve been surprised by how interesting phonology (the sound system or “grammar” of a particular language) is. Morphology (study of word formation) is something that’s really fascinated me and I’m excited to take the morphology class next semester. Word etymology has fascinated me  I was excited for my Second Language Acquisition class but so far it’s been a snooze and not what I expected. I absolutely despise syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (meaning of language) is just philosophy and algebra folded into grammar.

I’m not sure what I’ll do after I graduate. I’m getting my TESOL (teaching English as a second language) certificate but that’s more a back up. I may go on for my PhD, but I don’t know if I want to school for another 3-5 years. I just want a stable salary. That said, I’d love to find an analyst or research position somewhere, particularly a publishing house or a think tank.

[patiencecharacterhope-blog]

11/14/2019

Well hello there...I can’t believe I was on here a little over a year ago. Maybe it’s the sadness of another year ending with no progress that provokes in me the urge to “desahogarme”. Desahogarme which according to google search means “let off steam”, umm no, it actually means to pour out my feelings. Let me pour out my little heart into this keyboard and give you an update on my life.

First thing is first, I finished by B.S. in Speech Language Pathology with a GPA of 3.89. I applied to two schools last fall and really did not bank on making it due to my low GRE scores. However, with God’s blessing, I MADE IT! I was accepted to both schools, Emerson College (TOP 25 School’s for SLP) and the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences ( Not even accredited yet, but it is a private grad school offering MS, and Doctorate Programs in OT and PT which is very promising). So which one did I decide to attend...drum roll*

University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences

I am so excited, this school seemed to offer so much of what I want in a program and I am confident that I will do my best here. They also align with my mom/school/wife duties which is very important to me. 

Other than that, I graduated in May with my Bachelor’s degree. Since then I have been staying at home with my toddler which has been a very difficult time for me. I think ... 95% sure I have postpartum. My baby is not the easiest and gets up once a night to drink milk. On the positive side, he turned two, so the crying in the middle of the night that used to make by incus rattle has a much deeper tone which makes it more bearable. Mixing that with my brain which I am pretty sure that it is recovering from a possible stroke I had due to the pre-eclampsia and high blood pressure...I am surviving but this has been the most difficult moments in my life. 

On the bright side, both my babies are thriving. I am taking it one day at a time to be patient and not raise my voice too much. Mikhail just started Karate a little over a month ago and is doing so good academically. We had a parent-teacher conference this past month and he is just so intelligent, everyone sees it. He also won the lunch with the principal award, which I was finally able to attend and see him on stage. Marcel is beginning to say more words and connect words which makes me happy, he says shoes, tu tuu for thank you and loves cocomelon and singing happy birthday. He just got a referral for speech therapy which I hope helps him and helps me help him too. He is so smart and sometimes I feel like I fall so short of being a good mom to him. Oh God please change my heart.

My marriage is still falling through the holes. I feel like it has hardened my heart and I do not want to turn away anymore. It is a constant problem that is making me emotionally and physically ill. Everyday we argue and bicker, everyday it is my fault. Ten years of emotional abuse and when I scream back...how fucking dare I...How dare I be an evil/ bitch...how dare I tell him to shut up when he is cussing for two hours straig* ht at his video games and I tell him to be quiet because it is 12am. How dare I piss him off and now he has no urge to go to work tomorrow? How dare I not finish the laundry and put it away while also taking care of everyone else?

I have realized that for the past 9 years of my life I have turned my eyes from my problems. I look away because if I forgive him internally I can keep going. But I just can't anymore. Therefore I am angry, so angry, I am over him and his daily bullshit. He is not a good father, barely everyn spends time with the kids, he divulges in non stop video games and anime. He comes home and everyday is tired of us before he even makes it through the door.

And a husband?...forget it... sex is one way, for his own pleasure. And that is the only type of loving I will get. He tells me he doesn’t want to hear it when I have something to share with him, or just say something mean to be spiteful. For example the other day, after I found out that a little guy I used to know from middle school was diagnosed with testicular cancer, his response was “ that’s great”....the same fucked up response he gave me when I told him my cousin had cancer. It just made me livid and internally sick, I just wanted to punch him. 

 Looking toward the future, I have two years left to finish my Masters and work as a SLP. I may have to bust my ass but it will be worth it.

I cannot wait to live on my own with my babies...all 4 of them. My two kids and my dogs. A quiet home full of love and mistakes where no one gets punished for being themselves. A place of acceptance and a few stains here in there. Just thinking about a promising future makes me feel better. I see the light at the end of the next two years and its shinning bright.

[musicandhearts]

Yesterday a close friend and I were having a discussion on how we both don’t want children, and how we would probably make the worst parents ever.  

Sometimes it is something to laugh about; it can be funny to make jokes and everything.  I was telling her how I may be infertile but haven’t found out yet if I really am or not, and that is how the conversation started anyway.  But, sometimes, another part of me wishes that I was good with kids too.  

I had to switch out of speech-pathology because I was that bad with kids.  And, yes, I know that raising your own kids is extremely different from working with kids who need extra support to learn communication skills in any way shape or form.  But, still.  

I hate that I always feel so overwhelmed with my own life and thoughts that I can’t turn them off to greet a kid with a smile, or that I don’t know how to think on my feet to get a kid to listen and follow rules because I (usually) followed rules pretty well as a kid.  Or, I don’t know how to dumb down how to explain something to a 5 year old who needs help with language because when I was five I understood language extremely well (for my age).  And therefore I could understand language in a way that didn’t have to be dumbed down to the same extent.  I grew up with a mom that didn’t know how to dumb things down for kids at all until she had me, and being her first and only child, she just didn’t have to dumb things down as much to me.  Which is actually terrible because it screwed me over when I tried to do clinics last year.  

And, I would love to had been about to start my last rotation and have a degree and be done with school forever.  If I was good with kids, even if I didn’t love them, I definitely would have stuck with this field because done school=job=making money.  You see?  And, it would have paid “well enough” that I would have been fine in this field.  

Idk, part of me is like, as a biostatistician, I will hopefully be able to work on studies that will save people who don’t get to live right now, and that is what I want because I am not dead because people too the time to do studies to help people through what I suffered through in college.  So, my job will mean so much more to mean than SLP ever will. 

Another part of me is scared that I will screw up all my math classes because theoretical math is not a strength of mine, and I am only average in my computer programming classes, so I may not make it to a job in this field, and every job is like “we want a masters degree”.  lolz.  

And, another part of me thinks that I wouldn’t have screwed up speech pathology if I had better circumstances when I was at grad school for that.  I had the worst living situation ever, I only made one good friend, all of my other close friends were 4 hours away, I had so much driving anxiety driving to where my clinics were in a neighboorhood that wouldn’t be safe to drive in alone once the sun went down, and I was not always in a place to interact with people.  

And, when your field is basically based on interacting with people, and you are struggling to put aside all the shit in your life to think on your feet and how to bond with them to sneak in their goals, well, you are fucked.  

I was actually starting to do okay enough with clinics in the beginning with adults who had aphasia after a sort of rocky start.  But then I started visiting home a few weekends in a row, and I got upset over a boy who was never worth my energy from day one, and everything starting feeling like it was falling apart.  

When my life felt terrible all through my undergrad, I usually could put that aside to study and at least do fine in my classes.  But, when it came to working with people, I couldn’t put it aside properly.  

And, therefore I though, this new field will tie to something that means so much to something shitty I went through, and I won’t have to struggle to put aside my own feelings since this field doesn’t involve being cheery.  It simply involves good writing skills, which I think I am fairly good at explaining things and concepts through writing.  I am just very concerned about my theoretical math skills since I struggled with it deeply last semester.  I am going to take a step back and take extra course work to help those skills, and I truly hope that is enough...