A bummer of a week

This has been a pretty awful week, all said and done. The first bad thing was that A. had to go back to New York on Saturday, so that left me in a pretty bad state for a few days. I had been having such a lovely time with him, and the first real vacation of my post-college life, that it was quite a shock to find myself alone again with an overwhelming amount of work to do. Fortunately I woke up Monday morning to an insane anxiety attack about the fact that I only have five or so more months to get all of my French research done, and a billion or so more archives to visit. I guess the good thing is that burying yourself in work at the national library or the Protestant library (which is dark, freezing and something akin to what I would expect to find at Hogwarts - although they would probably have a fire in the fireplace and one could conjure up a cup of tea) leaves little time to be sad.

Everyone knows how I like to make lists as a way of procrastinating from doing actual work, but right now I have so many balls in the air at the moment that the only way I can actually move forward is through lists. I counted all the little square orange pieces of paper on my desk and came up with a total of eighteen different lists. There are grocery lists, lists of things to do this week (2 identical lists, in fact, because I thought I lost the first one, although it was just on the other side of my archives-left-to-visit list), lists of songs I heard on the radio that I need to look up, lists of books for summer teaching, lists of names for my future puppies, etc. Unfortunately my list of archives left to visit is still at a whopping seven, with locations all over France (this does not include any archives outside of France, of which there are several more). The problem is that I hardly have time to read my documents as it is, and certainly am not brimming over with energy to deal with the bureaucracy in store. For example, to get a seat in the reading room at the military archives, one must telephone on a Monday morning between 8 and 8:15 to reserve a spot at least two weeks in advance of when you want to go, and you can only reserve three days at a time. If you want to go back, you have to call the next week. The problem, of course, is that everybody calls at 8:00 on Monday morning so it's a bit like trying to win a radio contest. And this is the only way to get in. I have to attempt this tricky business next Monday.

One of my bright ideas for how to be more productive this year is to get up at 6 am everyday, which will give me many hours of early morning darkness to get more work done (the sun does not seem to rise here until 8:30 or so). My success rate is only about 50%, so I may just have to give up pretty soon. However it does help me get to the archives early, so that I can work a full eight-hour day there (usually I can only manage about six at most). I have to practice this for the days when I have to go through hundreds of boxes in the space of a few weeks in my out of town archives, and must in fact arrive at 8 am and stay until they kick me out.

But of course the biggest bummer of the week is the news of Heath Ledger's death. I am really quite upset about it, and can't even identify why or find any rational reason for it, and everyone I know seems to feel almost exactly the same way. I guess it's the fact that he's the same age as us, and just seemed like such an interesting, fairly approachable personality, and something like the opposite of the antics of Britney Spears. But who knows if that is even the reality.

His death made me think quite a lot about the celebrity gossip mill and media circus surrounding events like this. While I was searching the web (using all of my historical research skills of course) for more information on his life, his exploits, etc, I became incredibly disgusted with myself for doing it. In the end I had to ask myself, if I was Michelle Williams, would I really want everyone in the world digging up every thing I ever said or did - um, no.

I openly admit to a fascination with celebrity gossip and to the fact that I spent way too much time during my exam year reading the gossip blogs. Here in France, I am currently very up to date on the exploits of the future Mrs. Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, and the utterly bizarre fact that Sarko may in fact marry a woman who looks identical to his ex-wife (who divorced him in October) and has dated (and dumped three weeks later) just about every man on earth. But I've always justified this bad habit to myself by saying that I am fascinated by the "cultural study" that it presents. But in fact, I realized that I love historical gossip just as much! The Mitfords, my favorite historical subject of all time, would have been all over the tabloids if they lived right now, but I guess it just doesn't seem as creepy to be obsessed with them since they are nearly all dead (except Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire!). But now that I have realized this, I feel kind of dirty, like a tabloid journalist digging up dirty secrets, even if the secrets I am currently digging up are, according to my grant proposals, globally important, in the end what I am trying to do is to understand why people behave the way they do, and what sorts of exterior factors drive their actions and ideas. It's like we're psychoanalysts with a much bigger bag of tricks than just the inner psyche, but somehow we still spend our time digging pretty deep into people's minds and behaviors.

So here's my question to the historians: are we just the historical paparazzi, or do we actually have important and valid reasons to dig up the secrets of history? And is the current global obsession with celebrity gossip anything new or different at all to what people have always done or been obsessed with?

If you need some cheering up like I do, and would enjoy seeing what our future Newfie Roxie Sparklebaum will behave like, then check out this video. I can imagine that whoever let the first dog into the water got into big trouble!



I hope that the next few weeks will not prove to be so glum for us all!