Ironies of research

[guanin]

The essay I'm working on now? Very straightforward. What were the Bourbon Reforms and how successful were they? Simple. Easy. That's the problem. Writing the Huitzilopochtli essay was insane. Mental. I kept wanting to bang my head against the wall sometimes. Trying to decipher the religious strategies of a civilization that's been gone for 500 years from sources that are fragmentary at best and sometimes contradict each other is an exercise in madness. But it was so much fun! The thing is, that's what I love, what I want to specialize in, what's gets me all enthused and giddy and eager to do research. From a masochistic point of view, I also get that the intricate, complicated, "we'll never know what was really going on" of it is one of the reasons why I love it so much. What I'm working on now is just too, well, straightforward. Although once you get past the generalities and dig into the details, you will get academics shouting at each other over minutiae, but I only have time to skim at the surface anyway, it doesn't help me. I keep thinking I'd enjoy it so much more if they threw a tall ship in there. Everybody's talking about how much revenue trade made for the Crown and I just want to know what kind of vessel the traders were using. How much the sailors got paid. If they were treated as horribly as they were in the British merchant navy. Maybe next time I can beg for some maritime subject, if there's one to be had.

PS. My spellcheck knows Huitzilopochtli! How cool is that?

ETA: Proof that I'm a Doctor Who geek: As I was turning a plate in the microwave, the sound it made as it scrapped against the glass turntable was eerily reminiscent of the TARDIS.

Comments

[guanin.livejournal.com]

Sorry. *looks sheepish* But you really should be studying. *says the girl who's on LJ instead of reading her books*

Really? Mine just does that boring Windows thing.

[visiblemarket.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah. Any minute now. No, really.

Mine does it because it's got a CD stuck in it ;)

[guanin.livejournal.com]

I can't believe it's been the entire weekend and I've only gone through two books. And only a chapter in each, too. At least since I'm doing the outline on the compu this time, I have a word count going. 1,000 so far.

You can't get it out? Why are optical drives always crazy? One of my old computer's wouldn't play CDs and the DVDs played all wonky.

[visiblemarket.livejournal.com]

Well that's...that's pretty good, yeah? (It's always hilarious to me when I do word counts for my papers, and then compare them to the word counts of fanfic I've written since I should've started writing those papers...and when I say hilarious, I mean sad.)

Nope; dropped the thing, and since then, no.

[guanin.livejournal.com]

I know! And writing fanfic is always so much faster. I'm amazed that I can write 1, 500 (or more) in two hours but in one whole afternoon I wrote only 600 for one of the essays. It did require a lot of back and forth among the sources, but still.

Wow. That sucks. I was going to say something about my computer, but then I got superstitious and knocked on the table.