What day is it?

I've gotten so bogged down and stressed out by exam reading that I no longer have any concept of what day of the week it is - I go by "do I need to set the alarm to get up and teach in the morning or not" and "do I have to go to ballet tonight" and leave it at that.

I'll post tomorrow on the stuff I read today about medieval nationalism, probably ignoring the argument Tony and I got into about whether or not there actually was a sense of "nationalism" in the Middle Ages, since the asshole who wrote the book on the topic (literally, and not the only book, just the book that everyone from the early modern period onwards likes because it makes early modern people sound smarter than their medieval counterparts)(the people living in those respective times, not the scholars of those periods) basically defined "nationalism" as being an absence of several defining factors in the medieval period and the presence of one or two things that are demonstrably present in the medieval period. Said book is, as according to at least one medieval scholar, 'the book medievalists love to hate.' Tony and I are probably the only two geeks in the world for whom such a topic could provoke a tears-inducing argument. The tears coming not because of anything he said, but because I'm really frustrated with all of my reading either chalking everything up to something Freud said or something Marx said, and I'm not convinced either one of them was right. And actually, it wasn't an argument either, it was just him pointing out the position taken by the aforementioned book-writing twerp and going along with that position, and me being frustrated because I was having a hard time driving, dealing with the sun in my eyes and reflecting on the dirt on my windshield from the salt on the road that I can't get rid of because my windshield-wiper fluid is completely frozen solid, and trying to formulate an argument for why sharing a religion with another country does not automatically mean that you're all a big, happy, same-nation-type family. Witness Iran and Syria, or England/France/Germany at any time now or in the past, etc.

I'm getting the first set of papers from this semester's bunch of freshmen. Should be entertaining. Most of them are writing in favor of mass genocide of some version or another, and have been getting more and more scared of their own brains all week while devising incredibly devious and persuasive plans to kill off all the redheads, or severely obese, or unattractive, or AIDS-infected, or moderately-depressed people in the world, with amazing amounts of economic and productivity benefits. Most of them seemed to point out as well that by killing off said group of people, we'd save energy and help slow global warming. Said one girl during a conference: "I feel like I'm trying to think like Hitler. And I'm starting to convince myself..." I'm amused. These kids are usually so overindulged in everything else in life (most of them are trust fund babies) that it's sorta entertaining to knock them off balance. Hopefully they learn how to argue.

Anna Nicole Smith died today. I suppose that given the intense media coverage of this historic event, it would be remiss of me not to mention it here as well.