So onto my 4th paper. I have turned in 3 papers over the past 3 weeks and haven’t gotten a single one back! Baargh. How am I supposed to know if I’m referencing or doing something else completely wrong?!

Anyway, I’ve decided to do this paper rather in reverse: therefore, I am writing the bibliography first! I hate having the madly fix up the bibliography right before a paper is due.

I have taken out some really interesting books (yes, I’m back up to my book borrowing limit) for this research. Yesterday I read a whole bunch of Galen’s treatises — fascinating! He wrote a massive glossary of the bulk of the foods consumed in the Roman Empire, their properties, ease of digestion, use in medecine, etc.

I’ve also borrowed a book that is written entirely on garum, that is, Roman fish-sauce. An entire book just on fish sauce! Crazy.

Some of the stuff is rather dull but most is really interesting. I just wish I had more time.

Haven’t had a moment to write recently. I have been working like mad on papers, papers, papers…. and it won’t stop till May 16!

Just finished another paper on paterfamilias… the more I read it, the worse it sounds. It’s terribly discouraging. I hate the thought that even with all the hours and hard work I have put in, I will *still* not do well. I never minded getting mediocre grades when I didn’t put in the effort (putting in academic effort is not my forte) but when I do…

Joined the Brisbane Philharmonic a couple months ago and today is our first concert, on the Gold Coast (aka Vegas of Australia). I don’t thinkn I’ve played an orchestra concert since I was in Argentina the summer before I entered college — how bizarre is that? This orchestra, of course, is sad stuff next to YPO, but you have to take what you can get.

Anyway. Haven’t written also because I’ve been so terribly homesick lately. All this month! Perhaps friendsick is a more accurate description… The air here smells exactly like the air does when it’s spring at home… it fills my mind with past recollection.

Life is STILL exciting. There are plenty of things I enjoy, plenty of things to look forward to! Yet still, somehow, being grownup doesn’t have the glamour you expect when you’re younger… I can’t stop myself from getting lost in nostalgia sometimes.

It really is just the smell of the air.

I remember feeling like this in my early years at MIT — when all my friends had gone to colleges elsewhere, when I wasn’t going to NEC anymore. I wandered around Boston, feeling nostalgic and lost — haunted by these ghosts of high school and friends and experiences past.

And now I’m nostalgic for that time at MIT!

Well. Life goes on.

@#&*($@#.

Perseus WOULD be down just at the time I’m frantically trying to put together a bibligraphy for this rotten paper I have to turn in in a few hours.

Hate… Perseus… sometimes.

HATE BIBLIOGRAPHIES MORE.

Indeed, what is more true than that no one ought to be so foolishly proud as to think that, though reason and intellect exist in himself, they do not exist in the heavens and the universe, or that those things which can hardly be understood by the highest reasoning powers of the human intellect are guided by no reason at all? In truth, the man that is not driven to gratitude by the orderly courses of the stars, the regular alternation of day and night, the gentle progress of the seasons, and the produce of the earth brought forth for our sustenance — how can such a one be accounted a man at all?

Cicero, de legibus II.7

Well, it ain’t gonna get more done than this.