…know and do not know/ What it is to act and to suffer…

Got home from school today; found out that I'm not a National Merit Scholar. It figures. And then I went to Changing Hands, but they didn't even have Conrad's Fate (the new Diana Wynne Jones novel) in. My luck only gets better and better.

Luck. How often do you hear that pennies are lucky? I pick up at least five or six every day. And my luck only gets worse. Maybe I'm weighing myself down in a metaphysical sense. But probably not. I just try too hard. I ought to just accept my own mediocrity and be done with it. It isn't as though I work hard. I only hope too hard.

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Maybe I do worry too much about prestige and postion. But it's hard not to feel inferior, when Jennifer Y. is going to Harvard on one hand, and Zack to CIM on the other. I'm surrounded by brilliance, it seems. And the only things I do are academic and musical. If I can't be really good in either, well, then I'm nothing in anything.

Today is the the 503rd anniversary of James Tyrrel's execution. He "confessed," under torture and 18 years after the fact, to having murdered the Princes in the Tower under Richard's orders. He didn't fight at Bosworth; he reconciled to Henry Tudor; but then he fought for John de la Pole. So he was a committed Yorkist in the end. I think they just tacked on the question about the Princes while they were forcing out the rest of his confession over that rebellion (it was what he was hauled in for). Josephine Tey and others have made him out to be Henry Tudor's cat's paw, the murderer on his orders, but I'm not so sure.

Recquisiat im pacem, Sir James.