bedlamsbard | Mar. 7th, 2013

Well, the good news is that I have 454 words of paper #1 written, the bad news is I haven't started paper #2. (For reference: because my professor apparently hates all his grad students, they're due on the same day -- two different classes, same professor.) At least I am, at the moment, reasonably confident about the quality of my prose, if not necessarily the quality of my research. As

aella_irene said, if I can write 20,000 words on murderous architecture, I can write 3K on the startling lack of modern research on the Roman navy of the Middle Republic and 3K on archaeological evidence of the Roman slave trade. (The latter is the one I have no research on yet.)

Probably the really pathetic thing is that this is not even the least prepared I've ever been about a paper or set of papers. Thank you, undergrad; I do research more than a week in advance of a deadline now! And thank you, undergrad, for letting me know that I am in fact fully capable of writing a ten page paper in about twelve hours and typing sixty pages or so over the course of three or four days. (This was my last finals week senior year. Good times. My hands cramped up and I was incapable of typing. Good times. I'm pretty sure I started drinking after that -- no, wait, I figured out I liked tequila right before that. Uh, this sounds worse than it was.)

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My right wrist keeps popping and it's extremely annoying. I swear I almost dislocated it or sprained it or something when the timer went off for my 20 minutes of paper writing (more tomorrow, I just needed to get something started) because it kept twinging for about fifteen minutes afterwards. Stupid thing.

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I've started watching Elementary. I'm about five minutes in and it's fabulous, and -- okay, I honestly didn't know I needed this, but it's so refreshing to see that an Asian-American woman as a main character on a mainstream American TV show. I've gone almost my entire life without seeing characters who look like me, act like me, have a similar cultural background to me, in media, and I didn't think it would mean that much. I said the same thing a few months ago, when I read Sarah Rees Brennan's Unspoken -- the main character is Japanese and British -- and it's...shocking. I never thought that it would be something I even wanted in my life; it's very unexpected. But it's kind of an amazing feeling. I've always thought of my background as a combo between something very weird and very ordinary, though not necessarily or mostly because of being half-Japanese; that's so much a part of me that it only really comes up when I'm having a race-related crisis. (This happens every few months or so, sometimes more often; I think I had one last week, but it was a small one.)

Anyway. I love Joan.

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Hobbit rec posts: Drinking! shall be the theme for the day.

cheers! by