An oversaturated picture of a deer I took at the Grand Canyon.
I should probably start this with the obligatory gesturing toward the whole "there's more to life than lingustics" thing. Well, I'm going to now say a bunch of things about linguistics. It's a pretty strange field and it's full of pretty strange people, of which I am no exception. We often say that basically no student comes to college wanting to study linguistics—here I am an exception. I've been interested in languages and linguistics since I was a child. When I learned that there was a group of people who studied grammar and words, but didn't actually have to learn to speak those languages, I was hooked (for better or for worse). In my senior year of high school my main qualifications for college were the presence of majors in my two intended areas: lingusitics and philosophy (naturally the former being harder to find than the latter). As Emory University was the only school I got into with a linguistics department, that's where I went—there I was privileged to be taught and mentored by some amazing educators like Marjorie Pak, Susan Tamasi, Phillip Wolff, Mark Risjord, Devin Stewart, and Yu Li.
I grew up in a suburb south of Atlanta, Georgia, and I spent the first two and a half decades of my life there. This is why I have a faintly detectable southern accent which shows up in some words (e.g. sentence [sɪn̪ɪn̪ts], and the bunched-r makes the word rural nearly impossible to pronounce [ɹ̈ɝɫ̩]).
Other than linguistics, I have a lot of interests as well as a lot of hobbies. Some things I like doing are watching basketball (Atlanta Hawks), reading and editing Wikipedia, and collecting coins (mainly pennies). I used to like to play basketball, but I stopped during the pandemic—I keep telling myself I'll get back into it. Here's a photo of me touching the rim from a few year ago:
When the weather is nice, I like going fishing. There's that old aphorism that it's impossible to be stressed when you're fishing. My favorite type of fish to catch are sunfish, because they're pretty and easy to unhook. I normally do catch-and-release, but I will make an exception if I ever catch an American Eel, because they're tasty (and easy to clean). The fish that I'm the best at catching are mossfish and stickfish.
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Every so often I get into whittling, but I've never stuck with it long enough to make something more than a blob man:
Carving an eagle is easy. You just have to remove the parts that dont' look like an eagle.
-My dad (maybe from somewhere else?)
I really like cats, despite being allergic to them. You can meet some of my favorite cats here.
As you can probably tell from this website, I'm a big fan of web1.0/minimal CSS websites.