pile

i'm looking dolefully at the ever-growing pile of books stacked on my nightside table which is not really a table but a woven trunk masquerading as a nightstand.

it seems my 1.5 years of preschool boarding school, .5 years of kindergarten, 5 years of elementary school, 3 years of middle school, 4 years of high school and 2.5 years at Harvard have really instilled no knowledge in me that will be useful in my history + art history classes at the Sorbonne. How do I know that Philip II of Spain, son of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (and holy terror to poor King Francois Ier of France), married Mary Tudor (who ironically was promised to Charles Quint, who reneged on his promise and married some Portuguese princess instead)? It's really thanks to my assiduous obsession with European royalty, nourished outside of traditional educational institutions.

Sometimes I think I ought to have been a genealogist--I can spend hours, literally hours, perusing the intertwined, spider-webby family trees of the Habsburgs, the Capetians, the Tudors...wading through the intricacies of the house of Valois, Bourbon (Bourbon-Vendome, Bourbon-Montpensier, oh that poor Connetable Charles Bourbon, so cheated out of his potential claim to the throne of France), Conde...so on and so forth. C'est vachement interessant, as the French would say.

I'm a dork and I know it.