Wit & Whim

Today we--yes, the royal we--are playing hot lava. Anywhere that the sun is not shining is the hot lava, and must be avoided at all costs. The only exceptions are class periods, and getting my coffee cup refilled. I find the sunshine most conducive to thought, including thoughts which should have occurred to me some time ago. Today, in particularly, it was just something regarding my research, which I really grasped for the first time. I had previously realized that Austrian national identity was poorly defined prior to the end of WWII and the Austrian Victim narrative. I had failed to reconcile, however, the real import of this. Austria is almost completely a post-WWII concept. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburg dynasty was a broad collection of regions, united under a central bureaucratic mechanism. Within that Empire, regions  ethno-cultural likeness were organized into provinces; there was no Austria, as such, but Tirol, South Tirol, Salzburg, and Vienna, amongst num...

To controvert a meme: Summer is Coming. That is quite fortunate, because I am simply a tad bit tired. There is only so much heavy academic literature one can read before it is time to cut it with a healthy dose of talking animals. Although, I have come to believe that it is not the literature itself which is so stuffy, but rather, that it is the knowledge of coming graded work which renders the otherwise pleasurable suffocating. A prime example of this would be the work I am doing for my senior seminar. I find the topic fascinating, and I still get the familiar chills down my spine each time I discover something particularly weighty, but as the semester drags on, I come to view it more as plain drudgery, not because the topic has lost merit over the course of my studies, nor because my expanded knowledge on the topic makes each new discovery any less triumphant, but merely because I realize that the time will be coming when this is no longer just for me, and when I will have to yield...