The Mirror in my Mind

My copy of Microsoft Word has conceived a vendetta against Georges Chastellain. More specifically, against particular passages in the Chroniques des ducs de Bourgogne. Every time I open a file containing any of these passages, Word gives me an error message and quits.

Actually, not just Chastellain. Apparently there is also a specific passage in the Croniques of Jehan de Wavrin that has also offended Word.

I am all bafflement.

So.

Philip Pullman justified the existence of my dissertation today.

( Alright, so not directly, but he justified it in principle )

I was already a fangirl to begin with, but this just clinches it. I'm just sad all of my copies of his books are three thousand miles away.

And, on an unrelated note, today's rehearsal of Oedipus yielded the best performances yet from the principals. Oedipus was genuinely scary! Which is precisely what I was looking for. The Chorus still needs lots of work -- maybe I should assign them a night to go out together for drinks so they can become a collective?

I really hope the Bod gets a copy of Michael Hicks' Anne Neville: Queen to Richard III because I am growing less and less inclined to purchase it, and I really need to read it.

Not that I'm looking forward to that. I had some spare time so I started flipping through it in Borders today and he succeeded in annoying me within about twenty pages by referring to Richard III as a paedophile because he married Anne Neville when she was fifteen.

If he's a paedophile, what does that make Edmund Tudor? He married Margaret Beaufort when she was twelve and she gave birth to Henry Tudor at thirteen. Not to mention the fact that Anne had already been married once before. Does that make Edward of Lancaster a paedophile too? Oy.

Seriously. This was normal. I'm not saying it was a good thing -- it probably wasn't -- but it was what people did.

I appreciate that *someone* is taking the time to write something about Anne Neville. It's about time someone did. That being said, maybe we could stop with the crazy conspiracy theories and weird statements that make no sense in context?

Picked up last term's essays. Suffice it to say the weather echoed my mild to moderate terror of this particular errand. It's been raining all day.

They were...lower than I wanted.

I passed both of them, thank God. If I hadn't, I'd probably be suffering a nervous breakdown right now. And, thanks to my very high mark from first term, my average has barely scraped past the minimum mark for the Ph.D. programme.

It's ironic that the essay I was more confident about was the one that came out with the lower mark. I was sure I'd written a nice, coherent piece, but apparently it contained rather large logistical gaps that I just hadn't seen. I managed to scrape the mark they gave me, on account of the vast amounts of research. Thank goodness it counted for something; I certainly spent enough time on it.

Of course, the silver lining on the cloud is that the essay that picked up the High Pass mark is the jumping-off point for my dissertation. And most of the problems pointed out by the examiner--i.e. lack of secondary sources, no real discussion of the parallels between Dumas' theatre and fiction, etc--are all things that will be dealt with in detail in the dissertation.

So I suppose it all evens out cosmically.

I think I'm going to drop my clothing into the washing machine and have a drink. Preferably something alcoholic. I don't care that it's the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes you just need alcohol.

I have just heard the sacred words to gladden the heart of any future academic.

"You know, I'd really love to read your thesis. Can you send me a copy?"

SCORE!!!!!

I am Research Goddess!