The Purpose of Research

Today is nice. Maybe 70 degrees outside, it's the first day I've been able to hang my clothes outside to dry. There's hardly any pollution and nary a cloud in the sky. Beautiful day, but I'm stuck inside doing research on theoretical linguistics reading scanned in texts from books written when my parents were infants (or before) that combine language study with psychology and mathematics. A sample is as follows:

Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) operates with two basic operations, Merge and Move. Although there is current debate on exactly how Move is to be formulated, the differences between the current proposals are minute. The following discussion follows Chomsky's original proposal. Merge is a function that takes two objects (say α and β) and merges them into an unordered set with a label (either α or β, in this case α). The label identifies the properties of the phrase.

Merge (α, β) → {α, {α, β}}

For example, Merge can operate on the lexical items 'drink' and 'water' to give 'drink water'. Note that the phrase 'drink water' behaves more like the verb 'drink' than like the noun 'water'. That is, wherever we can put the verb 'drink' we can also put the phrase 'drink water'. This can be represented in the algorithm:

X NP AUX Y => X AUX NP Y

(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)

Yeah, as you can tell, it's riveting reading.
So as I was sitting here trying to stay awake and desperately avoid distractions (like this one) I was inevitably wondering why I'm doing this. I mean, I never recall seeing Chomsky's notes on mathematical linguistics on any recruiting poster for ESEC. Then, I had a thought. Since being over here, I've firmly established that I want to be in the field of education as my career. This revelation may have came thousands of dollars and five or six years after it should, but I'm just happy to have that figured out now. Eventually, sometime in the future (don't press me for details, because your guess is as good as mine) I will return to the US permanently. Maybe in 2012 or 2016 or anytime in between when government for, and, of and by the people is restored. When this happens I'd like to get my Masters in Education, and I've discovered a few really nice schools that can offer this without too many digits before the comma (another distraction) and I figure all this reading, everything from the Audio-lingual Method to our guy Chomsky here will be in the curriculum. It will be nice to vaguely recognize some of the names and theories.
Also, should I pull off the impossible here and actually get this work finished and everything else goes according to plan, I will have helped to have write a book that will be part of a series of mandatory textbooks in Chinese universities. That looks darn good on a resume when applying to schools to teach. So that right now is what has been getting me through all this research.