When you start hoping for a couple more days on this essay so you could just get further into the topic, you have to start wondering if maybe you're lost. You're gone. You're an... academic.

Gasp.

It's fascinating, it's enthralling, it's finger-itching-to-turn-pages rivetting. It's the position of women in damn Han China, for DOUG's sake. How am I this interested in something so silly? To be specific, it's the trail from servant girl to Emperor-in-all-but-name that pulls me in. It was so simple. A dancing girl catches the Emperor's eye, becomes a consort, wins his favour by her beauty and intellectual virtue, bears his son, becomes his wife and, after his death, is the Regent for his son. The Empress Dowager, who held all the power of the Emperor himself.

You see girls doing that sort of thing these days? Didn't think so. And Chinese women are so bloody subjugated, are they? Pah. Pah, I say!

Yeah, um... I'll go back to writing the essay then, shall I?