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Mar. 11th, 2010 11:41 pmI'm supposed to be winding up. I have course propsals to do and a bunch of handouts to put together and even some articles to write. Instead, my brain is in 'calm before storm' mode and besides, I have a cold. I took today as a weekend day, since my weekends tend to be work days. I planned to do much, but nothing actually eventuated. I blame all the sneezing.
All I've done today is read a book (Sookie Stackhouse - it's for one of my articles, but really, it's because it's fun), do all my laundry, draft the outline of the article on happy vampires (inspired by the Sookie Stackhouse), watch much Veronica Mars (I keep on seeing Jewish women with odd makeup rituals and larger-than-life insecurities on US TV and lo, there was one today) and read a bunch of history course materials (mainly from MIT) and reviews. I felt ignorant, you see, and I thought if I read handouts and lecture notes and syllabi I would discover just how ignorant and maybe be able to do something about it.
I'm less ignorant than I thought. My favourite moments were discovering how early US empire-building began (high school taught me that the US was small and impoverished and private and concerned with its own affairs unless absolutely forced into battle, which was why it came late to the two world wars, but the reality is consistently more interesting, especially the early part of the Spanish-American War), that I know the tunes (with the wrong words) to far too many Civil War songs, that I am still uteterly obsessed with historiograhy. I had the pleasure of reading the Massachusetts Constitution to boot. It's a very fine document. It explains so very many things.
All I've done today is read a book (Sookie Stackhouse - it's for one of my articles, but really, it's because it's fun), do all my laundry, draft the outline of the article on happy vampires (inspired by the Sookie Stackhouse), watch much Veronica Mars (I keep on seeing Jewish women with odd makeup rituals and larger-than-life insecurities on US TV and lo, there was one today) and read a bunch of history course materials (mainly from MIT) and reviews. I felt ignorant, you see, and I thought if I read handouts and lecture notes and syllabi I would discover just how ignorant and maybe be able to do something about it.
I'm less ignorant than I thought. My favourite moments were discovering how early US empire-building began (high school taught me that the US was small and impoverished and private and concerned with its own affairs unless absolutely forced into battle, which was why it came late to the two world wars, but the reality is consistently more interesting, especially the early part of the Spanish-American War), that I know the tunes (with the wrong words) to far too many Civil War songs, that I am still uteterly obsessed with historiograhy. I had the pleasure of reading the Massachusetts Constitution to boot. It's a very fine document. It explains so very many things.