Richard III

I am a Richard III apologist. I don't mean that in the Christian apologetics way; I mean that I apologise for and defend Richard III. I don't think he was a particularly great king, but I also think he didn't get the chance to be great (or not), and I don't think he killed his nephews.

The discovery of Richard III's body has brought a lot of the story back into the news, and it brings up two very different debates. First, what does this discovery teach us, and second, how do we think of Richard III?

I'll take the first one first before I get into my Richard III rant. What does the discovery of Richard III's body teach us? Oh so many things. The most important thing for me is its corroboration of (or invalidating of) contemporary sources. The skeleton showed signs of scoliosis (although not genetic scoliosis - he'd developed it but hadn't been born with it) so, yes, Richard had a crooked back. It showed no signs of a "withered arm". And it obviously hadn't been desecrated and thrown into the river, given that it was right where it had been buried in 1485.

What else does it tell us? It tells us the same things that other skeletons tell us: general standards of health and nutrition, battle customs, and burial customs. It tells us that a defeated king, who was very quickly considered a traitor and a murderer, was given a consecrated burial, but that even in death his hands were tied. It tells us that he'd been thrown over the pommel of a saddle after his death, even if it can't tell us by whom. It tells us all sorts of details of what it was like in Leicestershire during the days after Bosworth.

Is any of this important? Perhaps not these details in themselves. But put them together, and they can fill in the story. Put them together, and they can paint a clearer picture of a very murky time. Put them together, and they can point the way to future discoveries, and a better understanding of the past.

Going on to the second point: how do we think of Richard III? I don't think this discovery is going to greatly affect how people view Richard III. If you have an opinion, you have a strong opinion, and there's nothing with the skeleton that is going to affect someone's opinion of him.

My opinion is that he didn't kill his nephews, and my reasoning is very simple (although almost entirely lifted from The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey). He didn't really have a reason to, and more importantly, he didn't have a reason for them to disappear. If they had died, it would have been much better for him to show their bodies, as proof. Since they disappeared, all there could be was devastating rumour, which didn't do him any favours.

I'm not saying he didn't have means, and I'm not saying he didn't have opportunity. I'm saying that he didn't have motive. He'd already had them declared illegitimate, so there wasn't any imminent legal dispute over his right to the crown. There weren't any impending rebellions to put them back on the throne, except by the Woodvilles who didn't have a ton of support themselves. And while he was ruthless (having executed his own brother [Duke of Clarence]), he wasn't callous or reckless. By many accounts, he agonised over killing his brother George, and only did so after treason against Edward had been proven. 

And even if he did have motive to kill them, he had no motive to cover up their deaths. This is the one that really gets me - their disappearance, as opposed to their death, does not help Richard at all. If they had died, it would have been in his interests to announce their death. Spin a story if he must, but the princes' death only helps him if people know they are dead, and no longer claimants to the throne. If they merely disappear, then there's always the wondering, always the knowledge that Edward's sons might be out there. How does that help him?

I'm willing to believe that they died in Richard III's reign - the last recorded sighting of them was in 1484, before Henry Tudor started playing a part (according to Alison Weir, at least). But I simply don't believe that a man who was incredibly loyal to his brother, a man who had promised to protect his nephews, a man who had gone through the legal step of declaring them illegitimate instead of going on the attack, and a man who was incredibly careful with his actions would have rashly murdered two young teenagers in his care and then not reaped the benefits of their deaths. If they did die in 1484, I am more likely to believe that it was a Henry-II, "who will rid me of this troublesome priest" situation, and not any sort of conscious order of Richard's. (Although even then, if he knew about it, why didn't he tell anyone? He could have gotten major points by shaming the man who actually killed them - gotten them out of the way with no real blame attached to him.)

Or I think it would have been someone with Lancastrian sympathies. I know it had been 13+ years since the last real battle in the Wars of the Roses, but the Lancastrians were moving again. It had to have been someone who wanted to both eliminate and discredit the Yorkist line. I don't know whether they would have had Henry Tudor in mind as the next "rightful" king, but to me it's the logical explanation. The princes' disappearance gets the boys out of the way for whoever's next, and casts doubt on Richard's right to rule.

But, of course, none of this can be gleaned from the skeleton.

My life so far

I have spent far too much time at work lately. I am on a project with a team that "needs a lot of hand-holding." Everything is urgent for this team, but they're reticent about giving us information.  And our internal team can be a bit frustrating as well (myself included sometimes). Yesterday I was at work until 7, chasing a solution to a problem (that should have been a simple fix, adding an email address to a database) and waiting for confirmation that it had been done. Today I woke up and checked to make sure it had been done right - on a Saturday! - and it didn't look like it had been done. Good times.

And yesterday wasn't the first day that I've been at work late for this particular team, either; I have feel like I've barely seen my boyfriend for two weeks, much less any of my other friends.

But I did manage to get to the doctor last week to renew my no-crying prescription, which I've dropped down a step. Yay for that! 

And there's been interesting things happening in the news and whatnot, and lots of things that I've thought, "oh, I should blog about that," but at the moment all I can think of is Final Fantasy 6, the prospect of imminent snow, and the Jane Austen analysis (What Matters to Jane Austen?) that I'm two chapters away from finishing. And the Malory biography that I want to get back to, after listening to In Our Time about the Morte d'Arthur. And work.

6 January 2013

Happy Epiphany, I guess. It's the end of the liturgical Christmas season, and the end of my Christmas vacation. I still didn't do a lot of the things I usually do at Christmas - in part because my lovely boyfriend refuses to listen to Christmas  music except on Christmas day, so my hours and hours of choral and carol arrangements had to get squeezed into commutes, etc.

I didn't write here yesterday, and didn't realise it until about 2 am. When I was lying in bed, awake, playing backgammon on my phone in an attempt to stave off the for-no-apparent-reason tears. It didn't work. I'm hoping that going back to work and having that kind of schedule will help.

Because being around people......hasn't really helped. Friday night was necessary because it was a farewell to a friend, but I spent most of that night standing or sitting while people talked over and around me. The bar was really loud - it's a small place, we'd packed it, and then there were people who weren't part of our group as well - and got even louder (painfully so) when the live blues band started playing and no one thought to turn down their mikes. A touch of distortion, and ringing in my ears for an hour. So not only was no one talking to me, but I couldn't get to anyone that I might have wanted to talk to, and I couldn't hear anyone who wasn't immediately next to me. But, hey, good cocktails! Even though I had to put up with Mr. I-don't-like-to-try-new-things, and his friends, Let-me-tell-you-why-your-opinion-is-wrong and Oh-that's-nice-now-back-to-me.

So I think that was part of my problem yesterday, recovering from that. I spent most of yesterday upstairs reading and writing a few (as-yet-untyped) blog posts. I then went to bed, tired, about midnight, only to start crying for no apparent reason (and get pushed away by my normally lovely boyfriend, who hadn't really spoken to me all day). So it was 3am, at least, before I actually fell asleep.

Today I had every intention of waking up at a normal time (hence originally going to bed at a reasonable time last night) and maybe doing some baking. Instead, it was noon and I have played games, washed the sheets (but not put them back on the bed yet), sorted through music files, and cooked dinner. It's 8:30 the night before I go back to work, and I still need to wash dishes, wash my hair, remake the bed, and attempt to sleep at a reasonable time so that I'm not dead when I'm facing two weeks of a crisis inbox. Wish me luck with that....

January 4, 2013

Daily diary:

Today I still slept until nearly noon - despite waking up and being fairly wide awake at 9:30 when the postman knocked at the door. I lay in bed and read a few pages of Terry Jones's Medieval Lives and dozed and when I opened my eyes again it was almost noon. Oh, well. It's officially the last day of vacation, so I'm entitled, right?

The post included three boxes/packages for me - a headset for my computer, new forks because we keep running out, and the Christmas box from my mom (calendars, massive amounts of yummy spices, and a couple of other trinkets).

I have no idea what I've done for the rest of the afternoon. Went to the post office. Caught up on blogs and webcomics somewhat. Maintained my farm on WoW. Finished reading Medieval Lives - I plan on starting A Dance with Dragons shortly, since I finished A Feast for Crows last night, but didn't want to get sucked into it yet, as we're going out tonight to say farewell to a friend (who's moving to Costa Rica for six months).

I'm trying to psych myself up for going out tonight. On the one hand, this is a girl I adore, and it's a major change in her life, and I want to be there for her. On the other hand, .... going outside. And being with people. And spending money. I'm mostly just hoping I can get to midnight before I start freaking out.

3 January 2013

Do something for 30 days and it  becomes a habit. And hey, it's not like I have anything else to do for the month of January. Therefore, I'm going to turn this blog into a daily diary. Bibliophilia will still be for book and reading-related reviews, but Pennies for My Thoughts has languished. Time I got  some thoughts.

And, yes, I know that it's three days into January already and I haven't actually started with any of my vague, habit-forming resolutions (notably: work out so that I can slim down by the end of April). Baby steps!

So, daily diary like, here's what I've been doing for the last three days:

1. Sleeping until 11-ish. Which then makes me feel like I've wasted half the day, and threatens to turn me nocturnal just before I go back to work.

2. Keeping up on WoW farming. Not grinding, but farming and cooking - I'm so close.....but it's also become one of my more time-consuming habits.

3. Board games! Ticket to Ride for the last two days, mostly in person with the Jonface but also on Steam. Just because I have lofty goals doesn't mean it's not also vacation time.

4. Reading. I got 12 books for Christmas, and still have a shelf-and-a-bit full of impending reads. So I'm about halfway through A Feast for Crows now - not one of the Christmas haul, but an essential on the list anyway.

5. Cleaning. Or at least trying to keep the house as tidy as possible so that it doesn't pile up and overwhelm me. Overwhelm is starting to knock at the door.

6. Shopping. It was a bit of an organisational binge, as I cleared off the top of my dresser and discovered that I desperately needed some tiny Very Useful Boxes for bobby pins and ponytail holders. Also an over-the-bath drying rack for sweaters that need to lay flat to dry. Also various other odds and ends and forks.

7. Trying to remember to take  my pills. Because otherwise Overwhelm tends to ....well,  overwhelm me.

Seems like a lot when it's all written down. Doesn't seem like a lot when I'm waking up from an hour-plus nap, with a list of goals and plans that haven't even been started.....

Can I call myself a gamer?

The other day on Twitter, I saw an ad requesting contributing writers to a site called GirlGamer. My first instinct was, “Ooh, I should apply for that!” My second response was a bit more measured: I am starting a new day job on Monday, and I already have a freelance writing job that I just started, and I’m just over a month away from a musical theatre group performance, and my writing deadlines calendar is a bit full of contests and ideas I want to try, and now is probably not the best time to try to take on another commitment.

But there’s also the tiny little fact that I don’t really have any familiarity (yet) with GirlGamer and, even more than that, I don’t have the confidence to put myself in the gaming world.

I’ve never considered myself a gamer, really – not until the last couple of years, and even then I take the attitude of a “new” gamer. I don’t have much of a history of gaming, or exposure to gaming (until the last few years). My best friend growing up had a Nintendo of some generation, and I played Dr. Mario and, sometimes, Super Mario Brothers when we had sleepovers at her house, but my parents didn’t want me spending too much time staring at a screen and exercising only my thumbs. Or something like that. (Plus, we didn’t have a lot of money.)

We did have a computer, though, and my sister and I played some games on there, but never the ones that you think of as “gamer” games. We loved Oregon Trail, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (and eventually Where In Time is Carmen Sandiego) and SimCity 2000, which we’d learned at school. We played a lot of computer solitaire of various iterations. For a long time, when I thought about playing computer games, I thought about Solitaire and Minesweeper and, maybe, a Star Trek game that had come with a Windows pack.

In college, I didn’t play games. I was too busy studying and reading and being in choir and falling in love over AIM. If I did play games, it was, again, Solitaire and Minesweeper. Same again in my first career. I didn’t have a computer my first year, and then it was a laptop, and either way it was difficult for me to play games that weren’t pre-installed. My sister did get a Wii for Christmas, and I played some with her, but not any of the “hardcore” games that most people would think of when they think of gamers.

And I still don’t. I’ve been with my boyfriend – who is definitely a gamer, and did his dissertation on the role/history of music in video games – for two and a half years now, and he’s introduced me to so many things, from Rock Band to World of Warcraft (and, ultimately, Warcraft itself), from Final Fantasy to Half-Life. One of the first gifts he ever got me was a copy of Madden 10. (Which I now have a strong, strong desire to play, thank you football season....) But I know that I’m not yet up to speed on games. I have now at least heard of most of the major titles and companies, but I don’t play most games. I don’t have a burning desire to play most games. I think they sound really interesting, and sometimes fun, but most of them aren’t my kind of thing. (I do play WoW, though. A lot.) Some of it is the “life’s too short” thing – I know I can read a book or five in the time it’ll take me to get through most of the games, so why wouldn’t I do that instead? Some of it is the culture – the rampant, uninspected sexism, racism, and homophobia that permeates many (but not all) games and forums. But I also think that some of it may be fear.

See, my boyfriend’s been a gamer for years. Most of his friends – male and female – have been gamers for years. The blogs, comics, and magazines they read regularly are written by people who have been gamers for years. I feel like an interloper, an immigrant, who’s coming in all American and brash and loud and poking at the things that they have built their lives around, knocking things over because I’m not smart enough to know what’s good and what’s bad, what’s solid and what’s fragile.

Feeling like this is reinforced when I go into forums like reddit’s gaming thread, and realise that I don’t know 90% of the references. Or when I watch The Guild and see both Riley and Cyd’s faces fall when they realise that their definition of “gamer” is very, very different. I know that nobody does it on purpose, and I know that it’s a problem with any defined group of people. But when I see things like that, I don’t feel like I can call myself a gamer. I've played the "wrong" sorts of games, for one, and I don't have the right attitude, for another.

Sure, I play games. I really like board games (I’ve got a post coming soon about the board game resurgence in our society), I really like WoW and Civilization and Portal and L.A. Noire (once I learn to drive) and Typing of the Dead, I really like Eternal Sonata and Wii Sports/Sports Resort and Rock Band and Kinect Adventures and Madden. So I’m not not a gamer.

But when I have a free Saturday (like today), I don’t necessarily choose to game. When I have a free evening, I’ll probably spend it on WoW, but I am just as likely to spend it reading or cleaning or cooking. (Partially because of gender-based social conditioning, which is a fight we’ll have another time.) Games are not my automatic go-to.  And because of that, I don’t feel like I can really describe myself as a gamer, and why I didn’t even email about the opportunity at GirlGamer.

Back to the job boards

I am so tired of being underemployed.

I worked for fourteen months at an extraordinary busy chain coffee shop. It was hellish. The work was repetitive, nearly mindless. It was physically demanding, emotionally demanding, and mentally deadening. The shifts were erratically scheduled, with no set pattern. One day I’d be on from 6:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., the next maybe from 10-6, the next maybe back to 6:30. Or from 2:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Or from 8-4. There was no way of knowing. There was no way of planning. There was no consistency in anything except the complaining.

I was thrilled when friends of mine got in touch and said that they were planning on expanding their shop, opening up a branch in Nottingham, and would I like to work for them. I jumped at it. I promised that I’d give them at least a year, to help them get organised and settled. I gave my notice at the coffee shop. I’d start at the beginning of March.

The new shop fell through.  There was some problem with the lease. But no problem, I’d just work for them starting in April, full-time, in their original shop until things got sorted out.

The spring was horrible. It didn’t stop raining for two weeks in April – the wettest April for a century. The double-dip recession hit. The few people who were shopping for gifts or luxury items stopped coming in. They ran the numbers again – I’d have to go down to part-time, or at least part-time wages, until things improved. No problem, I said. As long as I have enough to live on.

Things didn’t improve in the next three weeks. They ran the numbers again. They’d have to drop me to two days a week, with wages to match. It’s not enough to live on, but it’s better than nothing.

But it’s not enough to live on. I desperately need to find something else – something supplemental or ideally, something to replace. Going back to the coffee shop would destroy me, would destroy the fragile emotional balance that I’ve developed and maintained with the help of my boyfriend, family, friends, and the medication.  But I’m not earning enough to pay rent at the minute.

So I go back to the job boards. Back to trying to spin my education, teaching experience, and retail experience into something that will make the finance-focused job market want to hire me. Back to staring blankly at screens, trying to write anything that I can submit to a paying contest, or a publishing house. Back to cutting back on everything from entertainment (wasn’t paying much for that anyway) to food, just so that I can survive for a few more months.  Back to setting myself completely arbitrary goals, just so that I can feel like I’m making progress on something. Back to forcing myself away from the abyss.

I am an intelligent, educated woman who has had the misfortune to be job-seeking in an economy not suited for job-seekers. I had the arrogance to study what I enjoyed rather than what might have been more economically viable, to see education as education instead of pure job training. I have experience in a field that now demands qualifications that I don’t have, and qualifications that don’t advance my experience. And I don’t have the money to retrain.

So it’s back to the job boards.