Callistonian.net

Everyone, surely, has quirkly little things that they love. As for me, I love history. I find the subject to be this fabulous, wonderful, and unbelievably useful thing. I was always a fan but I used to think that history was easy and that I could teach myself all that there was to know by simply reading.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Regardless, my adoration of history is excessive. For example, I talk about Alexander Hamilton all of the time (i.e. way too bloody much). For reasons that need not be discussed here my friends even know his birthday. In my defense, even though, I say a lot of random historical things - they’re never really annoying and even in the case of Hamilton, I do not ramble. My statements are quick, flighty, and amusing (sometimes acerbic).

Nevertheless, everything historical does not interest me. And I was terribly frightened that I would be forced to devote far too many hours of my life to researching and writing a hell-ish essay of fifty pages euphemistically referred to as my senior essay.

A long time ago, I decided that writing about Korea would be nice. Korea is this cool country in eastern Asia. It produces wonderful movies and dramas; it gets really excited about the World Cup; its history is widely neglected in America (what do you know about Korea? =P); and half of it is kind of crazy.

Great! There’s lots there or so I thought.

But… then I realized that I can’t read classical chinese and so all pre-2oth century history is off-limits. And then, I went to the library and talked to a specialist. The one potentially useful thing that she showed me was an online archive of newspapers from long ago. Awesome~ but, with a catch: the newspapers were in Japanese. So then, I pictured myself (it was terribly, really) bent over a desk at zero o’clock in the morning, attempting to decode (yes, decode) practically ancient Japanese newspapers in hopes of getting something out of them so that I could write a fifty-page long essay on something
that I wasn’t even interested in… what fun.

However, as of to-day, this little historian thinks that she finally has a topic for her senior essay. The following sentence is probably going to be one of the most anti-climactic ever but you certainly can handle it. Anyway, I came to the realization that I could combine several things that I like to write about (feel free to cringe as I list each one (haha): politics, human rights (no cringing), Korea, women, history, historiography, and law) into one topic: comfort women (20th century slaves). Hurrah!