One November evening

The PBL-course started yesterday and it went surprisingly well. The students didn’t really know all that much about legal history, but they managed to analyse the text much better than I had expected. But I got to tell you that they looked soooo young. That kind of made me realise that I’m not twenty anymore, but I rather liked the feeling.

Today I stayed home again to work. I managed to read a book and at long last write something too. All this teaching and going through the archive records has had the unfortunate consequence, that I haven’t had the time/energy to read and write that much. But now I intend to correct the matter.

I’m staying home tomorrow as well, but then I have to figure out where I’m at with my dissertation. I’m having a meeting with P on Thursday and I need to tell her what I’ve been doing and what I am planning to do. And I’m still uncertain of chapter three. I’ve always been uncertain of chapter three: the part about appeal. What is it exactly that I want of appeal? Do I need it as a separate chapter in the first place or would the whole book make more sense, if I tied the questions concerning the appeal to the other chapters? That’s what I will try to figure out tomorrow.

I haven’t been sitting on the couch the entire day, but did go to town too. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila was talking about his research in the post-graduate seminar of legal history today – mostly about pagans in the 7th to 10th century Iraq. He’s a very fine speaker. Did you for instance know that Hammurab’s law wasn’t meant primarily as a code to be applied in practise, but was instead a letter of the king to the gods? Just one piece of interesting information learned today.

I also received a letter from S today. It’s strange how she can know me so well, even though we’ve never met. She pointed out something about me that I realise is very true; I just don’t know for sure what it means. I am hoping that this will again be a case of “recognising and admitting one’s weirdnesses is the first step to overcoming them”. Not that one needs to overcome all of one’s weirdnesses; some of them are pleasurable, but this one is not. But S, if you should be reading this, thank you for being my personal therapist. You’ve made me realise that it is not necessary to be perfect to be liked and accepted, that it is okay to make mistakes and to be “strange” and that it is very important to learn to trust people. I would never be writing this journal without you.

And I guess I ought to thank L and H, too. And ultimately of course Rammstein and Till. And a weird horoscope I read at my sister’s birthday party in February, which told me that if I would have the courage to make a big decision in the next couple of weeks I would be thankful for it later. I’m too much of a rationalist to really have faith in horoscopes, but this one did cause me to make the other one of those big February decisions. The less important one, but still. I really am feeling quite happy about life right now.

And I sound like an idiot. No, I don’t sound like an idiot. My brains do tell me that I sound ever so slightly mushy and irrational though. But that’s okay. I’m embracing my weirdness today. I think I better go and post this before I’ll end up deleting every word.