one of my super powers is worrying

Differing opinions on what I should do this summer continue to differ. *sighs* I started polling professors on whether I should go the archaeology summer school or do languages; so far I've asked my Age of Reformation prof (specialty: medieval Spain) and my Etruscans & Early Rome prof (specialty: archaeology of imperial Rome, I think in the first century AD?) and gotten two different answers. OF COURSE.

I really really want to go to the Cambridge program. I think it would be awesome and a great experience; I haven't had the chance to go abroad during my undergraduate career and I probably won't get to otherwise before I graduate. It's not just fieldwork which I expect I'll be doing during grad school anyway (if I get in, oh my god); it's a lot of sites over a pretty broad period of time, which is, heh, what my undergraduate program has been about: a vast diversity of geographical and temporal difference. I've taken classes in everything from prehistoric Italy to the Byzantine Empire to medieval England to Reformation Germany and a heck of a lot in between, and I've liked nearly all of it. (Well, except when we got to sixteenth- and seventeenth- century missionaries in Asia and the New World, which bored me nearly to tears. And the Russian Revolution. But that's way out of my period.)

I think it would be fun. And it's something that I wouldn't get to do in the U.S.; sure, I guess I could hold off and apply next summer, but right now I know I can afford it. I don't know if I'll be able to next summer. And nobody's said yet that it's actually going to hurt a graduate school application, especially for a history program. (In comparison -- the summer language program that I'm looking at costs roughly the same, sans airfare but plus housing in Seattle. The program my Etruscans prof recommended is in the same range, but I'd also have to deal with finding housing in NYC, which, no, my worst nightmare is living in New York City.)

I really want to do the program. But I don't want to do it if I think it's actively going to hurt an application for grad school; I'm worried that not doing a summer language program is going to do that. I mean, maybe I'm paranoid. Maybe I'm way overestimating how hard it actually is to get into graduate school. Am I actually going to be judged for something I didn't do when I had the opportunity to do so? How serious are grad school admissions pages when they say you don't need to come in with advanced study in multiple languages? If I can't get into graduate school, what the hell am I going to do with my life? (I gotta be honest here, the place I'm going with this is, "Apply for library school.")

*worries* (By the way, I have to pay the deposit within the next week, so...yeah. I have to make a decision pretty soon.)

ETA: Wait, did my Etruscans prof actually imply that if I did not do summer language classes, I would not be able to get tenure at a hypothetical future date? I...think she did.

the day to day minutia

I am seriously milking the library system this year. (Actually, I haven't gone up to Rare Books or Nadine Vorhoff (the women's library) yet, nor have I ILL-ed anything, so maybe not.) Ack. Right now: a pretty good indication of my just picking up books when I'm stressed, although I restrained myself from getting Antony and Cleopatra, which I really, really want to read because I love Adrian Goldsworthy (and am super-depressed he stopped teaching in order to write, because his field of research = my field of interest), but I knew it would take too long to get through if I'm reading it alongside other stuff. I got two books for class, one for Etruscans (I'm never going to get around to reading the scans of Livy, but I love Livy, so if I actually have the book in my room...) and one another prospective subject for my tutorial prospectus, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (highlyeccentric mentioned it today, I think).

Then I went to go get Gaudy Night, since it had been recced all over the place, and almost every single book by Dorothy L. Sayers was out. It was really rather impressive. There were a few left, which I'm guessing were either ones the borrower owned or which were duplicate copies. I'm betting either someone's a comfort-reader like me, or (more likely) someone's doing a paper, since I think a handful of the academic books were also gone. There were three shelves with vast swathes of empty space. I contemplated it in despair, then wandered over to the children's book collection and picked up Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters; I've never read Mahy, but I heard she's good. If I go through it quickly, I might pick up DWJ's Hexwood, which I haven't read. Then I almost left, but remembered that I really wanted to read Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden, since I'd heard there was incest in there. (...yeah, I got nothing. Carry on!)

Then I went over to MacMart to get ice cream, since I'd been craving it all evening. (I had a bad translation experience, where I realized on the last freaking sentence that I'd misunderstood a fundamental part of that chapter's grammar. Yeah. Hopefully I don't get called on tomorrow for one of those sentences.) I wanted mint chocolate chip or Krazy Kookie Dough (which is the most freaking bizarre-looking ice cream; it is bright yellow cake batter ice cream with bright blue, pink, and green sugar cookie dough bits in. 's good, though), but both those were out, so I snagged the last pint of orange swirl, which I haven't had in years. It's actually pretty good! I still prefer Tillamook ice cream to Blue Bell, but unsurprisingly they do not carry Oregon ice cream in Louisiana, just Texas ice cream.

Also, I think I'm allergic to something, as I've been sniffling and sneezing off and on for the past few days. Thanks a lot, New Orleans. Later I shall study for my Latin quiz tomorrow.