all I can do is all I can do

1. This weekend went too fast, and I just didn't get enough done. Some of it is the sheer amount, and some of it is the difficulty of preparing a response to a presentation of which I only have the barest idea, and some of it is the crippling fear of public speaking. People will say it gets easier; every time I do a big presentation I hear "well, next time it will be easier!". Though I know they feel they have to say something, it's just not true. It's just as bad as it ever was. Oddly I still want to be a professor, and I still think I could lecture to undergrads without much difficulty - it's just lecturing in front of peers, most of them - in this case - overachievers who are themselves stressing over this class.
But reading Gaijin as a study break is oddly calming. Clavell has a philosophy he puts in the mouth of all his heroes - when bad things happen, karma is karma and that's all there is to it.

2. On a stage that makes my whining about schoolwork completely insignificant, a friend from high school, Jason Lamont, was presented the Medal of Military Valour
(that's him on the left) for medic service in Afghanistan, where according to CBC he ran through enemy fire to care for a wounded colleague when their unit was ambushed last summer. There's an interview with him on CBC.ca, and also he's quoted as saying "The shorter you are, the more bullets go over your head", which is pretty typically him.

3. Sean's friend Matt is visiting, and so our little home is full of gaming strategies and character design. It's rather nice to have company; it's good with just the two of us, but sometimes I do miss having people around like we had at Brunswick Street last year.

4. Today I had a massive Latin test, which went reasonably well; I feel much better about the rest of the week in consequence. Though I wasn't as sure as I would have liked to be about some of the translation, I feel good about all of it, and even the grammar/syntax questions, which usually utterly destroy me (as I keep telling my classmates, I know how to translate the passive periphrastic and the ablative absolute, so I don't feel the need to be on a first-name basis with it).

5. This afternoon my Maritime Archaeology seminar went to the Archaeological Services Unit downtown to be introduced to the staff and the resources there. It's not a museum so much as a bunch of offices, labs, and collections rooms; they run all of the administrative and archival business to do with archaeology in the province. It was interesting, but the real focus of the afternoon was the introduction of the meat of the course: our hypothetical proposal from our imaginary archaeological consulting firms. I really can't deal with the work at this point, mentally - it just has to wait until Thursday afternoon, after my other big dumb seminar is taken care of (and it will be; after Thursday, all I have to do for it is pull together a paper on my presentation topic, and write the takehome exam in April).

6. To work! Karma is karma, and all I can do is all I can do, and tonight's all the time I have to do it in, now, so I'd better make the best of it.

7. Super Special Bonus Content!! or bits of my reading that amuse me.

Counting people, one may note, is not the same as inventorying goods; the former keep moving around, and are fully capable of being refractory for various reasons and unreasons.