Ah yes, this is much more reasonable. Finally back to my 2,000 words/day-schedule, and compared to my 3k/day marathon last week (courtesy of a slacker weekend the week before), it’s almost nothing — almost fun.

The research is plugging along as well — a good thing, since this monster is much more research-intensive than I had anticipated. It’s become almost thesis-like in its workload, which of course I don’t mind, seeing as I love digging around and unearthing all this information. I wouldn’t have survived graduate school had I been less than enthusiastic about spending hours in the library. (Although, come to think of it, USC’s library was not an especially welcome place for students seeking to do mountains of research. It was designed to evoke the Kennedy Center in D.C., but because it required a lot of space to house all those books, the original architect apparently decided that in order to maintain the integrity of the facade, the rest of the building would have to be built underground. Five whole floors of it.

That meant that, no matter what time of year you went into the “dungeon,” you would always need a sweater. And maybe some kind of portable source of artificial sunlight, just in case you have an attack of Seasonal Affective Disorder. In June.

Rumor had it that someone had been raped in one of the stacks on the 1st or 2nd (the lowest two levels) floor, which surprised none of us, given the remoteness of the area and the paucity of students willing to spend any significant amount of time there. All graduate students were given their own study carrels, which we could lock up and store things in, but very rarely did any of us use ours. Too creepy and cold.)

Anyhoo, I digress…

As I was saying, the research is going well, and I’ve discovered more books and materials I’ll need to get through ILL. (That’s Interlibrary Loan to you library novices. 😉 I also ordered a video last night from a Canadian TV studio that produced a doc featuring a Scottish pharmacist who was in Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion. Should provide some good history on the medical establishment in place at the time of the Pacific War’s outbreak.

MRA