a++ would smuggle into space again

Has anyone ever gotten a thesis printed?

I don’t want to risk the school printing office — every other history major will be in there and there are at least twenty of us, plus American Studies. On the other hand, FedEx/Kinko’s is being remarkably cagey about how much time it takes to get something bound, and whether or not I can get it tape bound at all. One would think that asking for three copies of an eighty-page book would just be like, great, it’ll take us ten minutes to print each, and then five minutes to bind them (BECAUSE YOU ARE LITERALLY SLAPPING DOWN SOME GLUE AND A BIT OF TAPE), come back in an hour! Instead it’s all TWO HOURS. Is that just because of the printing or does the binding take that long?? And is it safer to email ahead or to bring in the printed copies? And what if the computer lab runs out of toner?

This is the most ridiculous response, but I just really wish I was John in Pru’s Bell Curve right now, because I am all grown up and getting my first Bachelor’s, and I don’t have anyone to keep me from getting paper cuts on all my fingers. I have been nursing this fantasy for some months and tonight I'm tired enough to admit it. (I am not actually tired. I am terrified.)

This may be revealing my secrets a bit, flist, but I really think there should be some kind of reward for the best essay written with the least available sources (bonus points for the sources totally being available, just not to you at that time, because you are a doof who can't schedule things.) I just did my second-best work under those circumstances: I wrote an essay about the failure of the civil rights movement in Chicago, some teacher has checked out all of the books on it until April, of the books remaining there was a book subtitled "the Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago" but I put it down on a sofa on the fourth floor of the library and it didn't reappear in time for me to cite it for my paper. In fact it is still missing. I hope the sofa didn't devour it.

My best work done under those circumstances was definitely the paper due over a weekend break for which I had none of the sources, because they were all at college. I Google Books'd that motherfucker like a champion and then did a lot of supplemental original research so it didn't look so thin. The essay was entirely composed and edited between ten at night and one in the morning. My teacher called it "thoughtful."

What are your tales of horrorsuccess?

HEY YOU KNOW WHAT IS COOL, when you're reading the Jami al-Tawarikh (which is from the 1300s) and you're checking the terms Rashid al-Din uses for the various Chinese district sizes and you realize that they're still in use. I mean, this romanization is pretty terrible (the English translation is from 1914 and I don't think it's even Wade-Giles, but what do you expect out of a book called "Cathay and the Way Thither") but I'm pretty sure cun is sún is tsun. Also that whole detour into the "jing" character which is basically the "kyo" in Tokyo and "Kinh" in Tonkin and so on and so forth.

You know what is even cooler, when you're looking through the manuscript in the back of the book and you flip one section too far past the Chinese emperors (all drawn in Persian versions of Chinese style) and you're suddenly looking at the history of some European state, probably Hungary judging by what you can sound out in Arabic characters, and the illustrations totally look like medieval European paintings. Without ever not looking like Persian illustrations.

You know what is even cooler than that, when you get sucked into the Hungary section of Wikipedia and you realize that Vlad the Impaler and his brother were kidnapped by Mehmet the Conqueror's daddy when they were eleven or so, and his brother then became a highranking janissary and dear friends with Mehmet, and meanwhile Vlad swore vengeance on these bastards because, remember I'm not making this up, he was such a little mouthy bitch that they kept beating the shit out of him, not that I wouldn't do the same thing in his position, and then he and his brother fought each other across the steppes and WHY ISN'T THIS A MOVIE? They could call it "Dracula vs. Dracula's Brother: The Historinating"! The people called them the Blood Brothers. THE BLOOD BROTHERS.

Tzum kal, everyone. I am fasting, but I am not observing otherwise, largely because I have two papers to write and my keyboard broke last night. I had to go buy another one from Wal-Mart. I guess calling my computer Tony pretty much ensured that it would live perfectly for a year and then spectacularly crash and burn, but really now.

It turns out that after years of being a medievally obsessed fangirl who made marzipan even though she hated almonds, and then even more years of being like "Europe is boring," I am back to secretly, in my heart, loving medievalism a lot. I'm still planning to major in modern empire, but ... I have two papers to write tonight, and the one that's giving me shit is not the one about how Peter Brown Is Right About Everything, it's the one about how the Spanish-American War and WWI represent a "unified imperial moment." (My answer right now: propaganda.)

One of the joys of taking a medievalism survey course is that I know so many of these names from reading toft's entries over the years. So it'll be like, let me read Abelard's incredibly horrible whiny biography! And I will remember that Heloise is really into BDSM. Or I'll read Plutarch's life of Cicero and then read Petrarch's "but my boyfriend Cicero had his problems." Sorry, Toft, I know this is kind of creepy. But it's one of the things I love best about fandom -- quite apart from the free education in media and/or inequality studies I've gotten over the years, including citations and some of the classic works in full-text form, I have also gotten these wonderful long glimpses into disciplines I'd otherwise never get to explore. Shakespeare scholars. Victorian studies. Linguistics. Medicine. In delight's case, I have a working knowledge of the daily life of the EMT.

It's more than a little wonderful. That said, it also makes me feel phenomenally inadequate, because the problem with having a little knowledge in everything is that it makes me completely unaware of whether it's a truism or an absurdity to suggest that the Crusades grew out of a crisis of freedom, and am I even using the phrase crisis of freedom right? and should I be doing anything this structuralist anyway? and how much emphasis should I be putting on Teddy Roosevelt in the other paper, what if he comes for me, what if he finds me on his moose?!

I would like to stop coming up with super-brilliant comparisons that turn out to be chronologically impossible, please. Surely Victor Frankenstein is named after the Victorian Age, and Mowbray is trying to sound like Brian de Bois in Harrington? Despite the fact that Ivanhoe was published partially in response to Harrington and the Victorian Age didn't get going until after Shelley died? Clearly the solution is lots and lots of time-travel.

(Picture it -- Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley get hold of a time machine and then fight vampires with Mary Lennox, discovering all the great injustices of a hundred years in either direction, and therefore Edgeworth returns home to fight for the Irish cause and Shelley to be a staunch feminist, and both of them slip up and quote the future in their books a couple of times. Makes perfect sense to me.)

In related news, I've lost the sheet that indicates how long this paper is supposed to be, but I feel fairly confident in stating that what I have is currently not long enough.

It is traditional among my people (the common college slacker) to provide a tiny bit of the entertainment I have been providing myself with for the past, um, I've lost count in trying to write this paper, to which I can only address this traditional Serbian blessing: Da bog da trazio detzoo Gaygerovim broyachem.*

Unfortunately, this paper is not entertaining. Well, it is, but only if you are a rabbinical scholar. Basically it is my attempt to salvage from the wreckage my emotions on reading religious-based texts as a Jew -- here contrasted to how my teacher and my classmates read them as Christians. (The one Muslimah I know of in the class didn't comment.) Viz: the Bible is actually an astoundingly ambiguous, bizarre, complex text, and we are encouraged in the text itself to contradict and reinterpret it. We are also encouraged not to contradict and reinterpret it, because, hello, contradictory, but I feel like that is a paradox that works itself out pretty nicely. Anyway, we read the Last Temptation of Christ in class.

TEACHER: Isn't it weird that all these miracles don't mean anything and Jesus is deeply politicized?
EMMA: No?

And the Dictionary of the Khazars:

TEACHER: Isn't it strange that religious texts are called so frequently into question and sacred knowledge is considered inaccessible and dangerous in its pure form?
EMMA: No?

What is entertaining is that the way that my computer, even after being helpfully renamed Tony, decided to break tonight. Thank you, Tony! You pick the best times for everything.

Also, I wrote Sarah Jane Smith/Romana II, but I think that was a terrible error.

ETA: HA HA! This paper is due at five. That means I have four more hours in which I cannot sleep, but must stare like a zombie at the screen in the hopes that it will magically produce a good paper on its own.

*"Blessing".

Procrastinating: it may mean that I haven't gone to sleep tonight/this morning, but it also means that I've found this website while googling King James Bible quotes for my paper. It is clearly insane, but on the other hand, it approves of Henry II and disapproves of the Lionheart, so how crazy can it be?

I just picked up a Pepsi to get me through the last three hours till noon. I've been drinking a lot of Nantucket Nectars and Snapples lately, so I flipped over the cap instinctively to find the trivia. "PLEASE TRY AGAIN." If my mind was working right now, that would be a metaphor.

eta: and this Iliad/Genesis/one line of Plato paper is done. Sort of. Any edits I can get between now and noon Central Time would be amazing, and that is the only reason I am putting this crap up. ( here )