Nothing quite so vexing as when people who know nothing, or very little, about publishing try to give you tips about the process to try to be "helpful." The following is a conversation I had a dinner:

Random Dude A Who Sat Down At Our Table: "I think if you have a few chapters, you can submit them to the publisher and they'll tell you if they want you to finish the manuscript."
Me: "...No you can't. At least not in fiction. And certainly not for an unpublished writer. You need the full manuscript, yo. And who submits directly to publishers these days anyway? Agents, dude." (Okay, I didn't actually talk that way. That's my revisionist head voice version.)
Random Dude A: "Uh, yeah, I think that sounds right."
No, really?
Random Dude B: "How do you know this? Have you gotten in contact with publishing people already?"
It's called the Internet. Seriously.)

And particularly vexing, I say, because I don't have the patience for such useless chit chat when I haven't yet started writing the 10-15 page paper on Confucius and Mencius due the next day.

Sometimes writing is like pulling teeth, but boy oh boy, trying to read Japanese for research purposes, now that's pulling teeth. I can barely get through a whole page of any one book before I start flipping through other books.

My paper topic for my research seminar is supposed to be women and politics with a focus on Tenshouin Atsuhime (wife of the 13th shogun, Tokugawa Iesada)...But I have this distinct feeling that I'm just getting sucked into the world of the Great Interior Quarters, the Oooku. It's super interesting in ways not entirely beneficial to my research paper. I spent about five minutes studying diagrams on how to partition and tie up one's hair in the way of the women back then. And many of the books that talk about the Oooku have a ton of information on clothing and hair and accessories. It's perfect material for my stories, but as for my research paper...well.

Oh, and today I finally looked at two of the library books I'd borrowed a couple weeks back. They're so awesome that I squeed with nerdy glee. See, I do have a researcher in me, somewhere, deep, deep inside, who gets excited by old books. One book, published I think in the 1930s, came with huge fold-out maps of the Oooku, while the other one, published in 1902 (!!!It's great how Yale lets you take such old books out of the library as long as they're not falling apart--on a related note, they wouldn't let me take a copy of the Analects out because it was falling apart) has a few awesome fold-out color prints and all the kanji text is glossed with hiragana. Win! Although I still have doubts about how much of these books I can actually get through or make use of, but it's exciting to flip through them.