WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Thanks to Elizabeth D, who hosted this diary on a weekly basis for more than a year, for keeping the tradition alive. We're now rotating the hosting duties, so no one person has to do all the work all the time; the current schedule is posted in one of the early comments here. If you're interested in hosting a session of WYFP?, leave a comment there or send me an e-mail, and I'll put you on in the first available slot. (Right now, that's early June.)
And right now, I wish it were early June! I'm sick to bloody death of this cold snap thing we've been having here in the Midwest for about the last month. I don't think we've made it up to the freezing point, much less anything above that, since sometime in early January. My poor car desperately needs washing, but I can't do that until we get a day warm enough so that the wash water doesn't freeze on the car.
Another FP of mine is time. Specifically, the lack of enough of it. Dammit, why are there still only 24 hours in a day? Don't people realize I have things to do?
Seriously, things have been a little frantic at work, and with two intensive graduate classes on top of that job, my free time has dwindled away to practically nothing. (As evidenced by, among other things, the scarcity of posting on my blog lately, as well as here and elsewhere around Left Blogistan.)
On the other hand, studying to be an historian is way cool. For example, I have an assignment due next week that requires me to find a document from the early modern period (roughly defined as 1350-1800), analyze it, contextualize it, and write a short paper on what it contains. So I dug up a reprint of a book originally published in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) in 1888, called Secrets d'Etat de Venise (Secrets of the Venetian State). The first cool thing about it is that the book was compiled by a Russian, written in French, and contains documents that are mostly in Italian and Latin, with a little French and German thrown in for good measure.
Now, as the instructor said when he mentioned it, most books with the word "Secrets" in their titles contain terribly mundane material. The title is a misdirection on the part of the publisher, trying to sell a few more copies of a book that would otherwise not fare too well on his/her booklist. Not so in this case. All of the documents in the two volumes concern various assassinations, either contemplated, contracted for, or carried out, and several other notable political deaths that affected Venetian foreign and internal politics from and after the middle of the 15th century.
I'm working on a couple of short Latin memoranda, about three years apart. In the first, dated to around 1448, a Venetian citizen who isn't named comes forward and offers to off Francesco Sforza, then on his way to becoming the first of the Sforza dukes of Milan. But the Council of Ten wasn't having any, though they did offer to pay the would-be assassin's lodging expenses (not more than six ducats) for the time he had to wait for the council to hear and deliberate on his offer. Three years later, though, the Ten were singing a different tune when one of Sforza's military captains let it be known through a Venetian nobleman that he was willing to kill Sforza: they offered him huge sums of money, a position in the Republic, a military command, a home rent-free, and promised to take care of his family after his death. Somehow, it doesn't sound so nefarious (or so mercenary) in bureaucratic Latin.
Really, though, I shouldn't complain. I have a good job, I get to study a subject that I love and that interests me, I get to go to Europe to do research on that subject every now and again, I have a roof over my head and central heating to keep the chill away. I have food in the fridge, family and friends who love me, and a pootie on loan from my sister to keep my lap warm on these cold winter evenings.
Nu, what's your fucking problem tonight? Talk amongst yourselves.