Schreiber

There are some times in this research project (and I get the impression, in any such project) where you spend ages looking through stuff that might conceivably be useful, only to discover that, in fact, there´s nothing worthwhile there.

My whole trip to Karlsruhe was like that. ( Read more... )

(Written late one Thursday night, when I really should have been getting my beauty sleep.)

Friends, I have decided, are a lot like socks in some ways.

If you are anything like me, you have a lot of socks. Some old, some new, some that you had forgotten about until they show up again in the most surprising contexts. And naturally, you want to pair them up. Socks are happier in pairs, however odd the socks--and the combinations of socks--may be.
Attempting to do this, however, usually leads only to frustration. Most of your socks are probably already in pairs. And while you have more than enough other socks to make more pairs, this is generally doomed to failure. There are some socks for which you just can’t find a match, leading you to wish--usually in vain--that another sock will suddenly turn up in the wash or in the back of your drawer. There are other socks that would probably work together, but one’s already folded up with another sock with which it’s a better match. Other socks seem to want to be paired up with a bunch of different socks successively; still others don’t seem to want to be paired up at all.
Most of the time, when you have a lone sock, if a quick search through your drawer doesn’t find a pair, it’s best to just wait, and hope that in time, a mate will turn up. Trying to go through all your old boxes or ask friends for help is generally only irritating to all concerned. But it’s frustrating when a sock is left unattached for long periods of time: so much so that, while one obviously doesn’t want to have MORE unmatched socks, you’re tempted to go out to a tag sale or something and get some more socks, just in the hope of creating some more pairs. But that’s assuming too much for the desire of socks to have you interfering in their personal lives. As evidenced by the phenomenon of the Migrating or the Disappearing sock, socks have minds of their own. Really, one should just be thankful for the socks--and pairs of socks--that one has.

I was going to make some point about friends, but I forgot what it was.

(And yes, I’m sure someone has made this joke before, but I was contemplating relationships and laundry, and I felt I just had to get it down.)


Meantime, today I slacked off to go to a wedding. Well, sorta. Germans are REQUIRED to get married before a government official in an office, so weddings tend to be a bit more low-key. But the Konstanzer Rathaus is a pretty cool place to get married (being 16th century and all) if you have to do it in a government building. A bunch of us from the Uni-Chor came along to sing, and I came too, since a) Chris and Christina are cool (otherwise, we would have ditched this choir for some group with a less annoying conductor), b) free champagne! c) I felt that SOME American had to come along to help sing "Have a Nice Day" properly. (No, not what I would have chosen, but...)
But then it was back to the archive, to try to finish up the "Verzeichnis der dienende knechte". 600 entries on all the non-local apprentices and journeymen in Konstanz at the turn of the 16th century, so very useful, but also very long.
"...We'll make him read obscure sources (lala la)
The weirdest we can find (lala la)
He'll have to data-entry them all
Then we'll monitor his mind!"