still the parfit gentil knight, professor sollors, whom i went to see today. you make things too hard for yourself, he says, your problems are psychological not intellectual. you set the bar too high. but what is the difference, i asked him, between a graduate and undergraduate paper? surely i must do more than i used to. the answer: not a lot at the start, giving me some courage to think that i don't have to write a dissertation or a publishable article for a term paper. although it's still too hard - something in me can't compromise with what i can't believe in.

trying, too, to think back on the papers i had written as an undergraduate which had comments along the lines of being already "at the graduate level" and trying to think what makes those different. and concluding: nothing - i am as i am, and i write as i write, and whether it falls flat or finds favour is in the hands of the professor. found out, too, only in the week of my graduation, through various gossiping sources, that a ta of mine liked one of my paper so much he made a photocopy of it for himself, but all the time i thought i was doing badly because of his silences. the weal and woe in me is placed?