my head feels like a gelatinous cube!

But our project was different. It was a new implementation of everything right and true and decent in the Redwoods Treebank. It was a gross, dynamic programming salute to the fantastic possibilities of parse selection in this corpus -- but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

My advisor understood this concept, despite his academic position, but our prospective student was not an easy person to hack. S/he said s/he understood, but I could see in hiser eyes that s/he didn't. S/he was lying to me.

The code suddenly veered off the schedule and we came to a screeching halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the review board. My advisor was slumped over the desk. "What's wrong?" I yelled. "We can't stop here. This is the normal form of the perceptron!"

"My tenure," he groaned. "Where's the rhetorical argument?"

"Oh," I said. "The argument, yes, it's right here." I reached into the book-bag for the Ellison. The kid seemed petrified. "Don't worry," I said. "This man has a good idea -- Ensemble Models. But we have no results for the dual-form perceptron. Yes, here they are." I picked four stories out of the Alone Against Tomorrow and handed them to my advisor. He immediately cracked it open and started reading, and I did likewise.

He read "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and fell back into the seat, staring straight up at the sun. "Turn up the fucking Portishead!" he screamed. "My head feels like a Gelatinous Cube!"

"Volume! Clarity! Bass! We must have bass!" He flailed his naked arms at the sky. "What's wrong with us? Are we goddamn code monkeys?"

I turned both the radio and iTunes up full bore. "You scurvy shyster bastard," I said. "Watch your language! You're talking to a doctor of kernelism!"

He was laughing out of control. "What the fuck are we doing out here in this lab?" he shouted. "Somebody call the police. We need help!"

"Pay no attention to this guy," I said to the prospective. "He can't handle the Ellison. Actually, we're both doctors of kernelism, and we're on our way to ACL to cover exponentially-sized feature sets for parse selection." And then I began laughing . . .

My advisor hunched around to face the prospective. "The truth is," he said, "we're going to ACL to subvert a ling baron named Chomsky. I've known him for years, but he ripped us off -- and you know what that means, right?"

I wanted to shut him off, but we were both helpless with laughter. What the fuck were we doing here in the lab, when we both had sleep deprivation?

"Chomsky has cashed out!" my advisor snarled at the kid in the back seat. "We're going to rip his theories out!"

"And eat them!" I blurted. "That bastard won't get away with this! What's going on in this field when an entrenched MIT professor like that can get away with sandbagging a doctor of kernelism?"

Nobody answered. My advisor was cracking another Ellison and the kid was climbing out of the back seat, scrambling down the trunk of the tree. "Thanks for the derivation," s/he yelled. "Thanks a lot. I like you guys. Don't worry about me." Hiser feet hit the asphalt and s/he started running back toward computer science. Out in the middle of the lab, no parse tree in sight.

"Wait a minute," I yelled. "Come back and get an account." But apparently s/he couldn't hear me. The music was very loud, and s/he was moving away from us at a good speed.

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.