Gigi: An Introduction

A wild newbie appears!

Hello, all :) My name is Gigi. Nice to make your acquaintance.

I'm a semi-small-town girl from a semi-large-small city in Yolo County, California. Yearning to get out and away, I graduated from high school in 2011 and moved my life all the way out to the bay area to become a Linguistics student at Cal. Or, rather, to become an undecided and indecisive student at Cal. The Linguistics part came later.

As one might guess, I currently live in Berkeley, California. It's certainly an exciting place to live. There's always something going on; whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know. But the most beautiful part for me is this: if I take a walk East for fifteen minutes or so, I reach hills where I can hike to the top and see the whole bay. And if I take the bus West, I can sit at the marina and enjoy the silence and the ocean. It's easy to get away here.

If I'm being perfectly honest, one of the first things that drew me to studying Linguistics was that Cal only requires eight classes for the major. This means I have space, I have time, I have freedom to study a lot of different things. And I've so far been taking advantage of that time. This semester I'm taking one Linguistics course, one Italian course, one course about insects and one on written musical harmony. Variety is certainly the spice of life.

And if I'm being perfectly honest, that wasn't the only reason I chose my major. I took my first foreign language in high school: Japanese. Three years straight of one subject and I loved it. Language is beautiful. By learning (a little bit of) Japanese I opened myself up to communication with almost 130,000,000 new people on the globe, and that's just counting Japan's population. So now I'm learning Italian as well, and planning to pick up Japanese again next year. To be fair, though - Linguistics is not a study of foreign language. But a love of foreign language was what led me to it. And though I'm not very far into the major, I'm loving it so far. Two of my (legitimate!) sources for the homework assignment I just finished were Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Urban Dictionary. It was about the historical semantic change of the word 'wicked'.

Career-wise? I'm going to become a librarian. I decided this last year pretty much on a whim, and after volunteering at a library and talking to some people, it seems like a better and better idea all the time.

Things I think are wicked cool: Books (kind of a requirement for a would-be librarian). I just finished At Swim Two Birds, which I highly recommend, and I'm currently slowly getting through Ulysses, which was forced upon me by my boyfriend, but which I am so far enjoying. I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan. I haven't read anything by John Green yet, unfortunately, but it's coming! According to my parents, when I was little I would sit in my room reading for hours, and then come back out and ask why nobody was paying attention to me. So I suppose attention is another thing I like. 

I also very much enjoy cats, a "like" that I'm sure many others can relate to as well. I doodle at times, so those may show up here. And as with anyone, I love music, and some particular favorites are Pink Martini, Aqualung, Tom Milsom, Alex Day, Andrew Huang, CAKE, POTUS, Don MacLean, and Talking Heads. I also enjoy making music; I'm a decent singer, I can do some basic guitar and uke, and I recently bought a pennywhistle, which I've quickly learned has one setting: obnoxious.

Fun fact: one of my thumbs is a hitchhiker's thumb and one is not. So I am not perfectly symmetrical. Oh well.

I'm very much looking forward to this. New experiences, new people, new opportunities! New = good :)

DFTBA!
Gigi