for some reason i was feeling bad that i only have the ribbing and one cable repeat of the front of the sweater im making but like. not only has it been less than a week since i started it, & not only am i a full time student w a job, i also have been simultaneously knitting a pair of gift socks the whole time which i will likely be done with before the week is out?? so like it’s fine, and i can chill.

i read two whole nonfiction books this week. good for me

spqr, mary beard. fun; i did get the impresson that it was a sort of weird hybrid middle ground between (i think) classical classics studies (Here Are The Important Men Of Rome) and halfhearted ~~modern scholarship (Women Existed Also, And Immigrants, And The Poor). nonetheless, fun, accessible, i who knew no roman history now know some roman history. she did appear to think that the idea of a calendar with leap months, rather than leap days, to resolve the lunar-solar mismatch was an obviously “rudimentary” calendar form with which none of her readers would be familiar. i can’t believe that even now, in the year of hashem 5779,

wonderful life, stephen jay gould. my favorite book i’ve read this year, but only the first half where he goes through and exhaustively describes the anatomical variances of different fossilized Cambrian sea creatures, & the various experimental techniques used to describe them. the second half is about evolutionary theory & i am intentionally not an evolutionist. i just want to watch a bunch of subject matter experts wrestle back and forth about the implications of jointed leg attachments to the exoskeleton. and i did