Notes from finals week

—Is there any nutritional value in dilly beans? I hope so, because they're the only green things in my diet right now. Unless you count green Skittles, which I suspect aren't getting the RDA of anything but Yellow No. 3.

—I turned in 16 books to the library this evening. That was all the ones I had out for my Shakespeare paper. I checked out 5 more, leaving me with a grand total of 45, down from the semester high of 69. It is so awesome to be a grad student. The new books I checked out tonight? Not due until Jan. 24, 2007. Seriously.

—I've pretty much decided that the coffeeshops in IC need to be segregated. Like, the undergraduates can have all the Java Houses, the humanities and social science grad students can have the two House of Aromas, and business students and med students get Starbucks, the Terrapin, and Caribou. Science and engineering students have to stay in their labs, so they may come get take-out coffee from anywhere. I don't care who gets what, as long as the giggly, noisy frat girls and their screechy voices get the hell away from me. Annoy someone who doesn't have to write 20 pages that may determine their future in their graduate program of choice, and thus their achievement or failure of life-long goals, how about that, hm?

—The aforementioned 20-page paper is on divine wrath in the medieval illumination of Psalm 109, which is about the most kickass topic ever, except for the part where the theoretical background keeps expanding like bread dough with too much yeast in it. I have to set up the medieval interpretation of the psalm, medieval illumination techniques and practices, theories on the perception of divine wrath, and the typical iconography of medieval psalters from A.D. 700-1400.* Awesome. The worst part is, I totally did this to myself. However, it is kind of fun to look at all these illustrations to see where they're hiding God's anger. Kind of like The DaVinci Code except with less Tom-Hanks mullet.

^{*Important grammatical note: If you're indicating a year in the A.D. era, A.D. goes before, always. So A.D. 1066, as opposed to 1066 A.D. This rule gets broken fairly frequently and, of course, that annoys me. Of course, the new trend in politically correct scholarship is to use C.E. and B.C.E. (Common Era and Before Common Era), which are awkward and, if you think about it, not much more politically correct than before, since they still use the Christian division of time at (approximately) Christ's birth. However, they do both come after the year, so 1066 C.E. or 54 B.C.E.}