tl;dr
I’m taking an intensive 10-week Latin course that covers both beginning and intermediate levels. Aka, I’m saving myself a year of classes and going straight to upper division. And I’m graduating a semester sooner. I’m scared because it means one less summer to work and save money to live near SF to keep taking upper division language classes to get into grad school. I’ll live in Daly CIty, I don’t give a fuck. Plus I my GPA isn’t competitive enough.
I love the Classics department at SFSU, but I want to go somewhere with a PhD track. I’ll still apply there, of course. But the summer class at Berkeley can help me get an idea of the program, professors, etc. And I’m not meant to be an archeologist and it’s hurting my major GPA. FML.
So this summer I’ll practice Ancient Greek and German when time allows. I’ll read classics shit, look at Greek composition, comparative languages, etc.And I’ll talk to an old professor about writing papers you see in journals (not that I have plans to get published, but practice never hurts). If I teach at the university level, I have to crank those little shits out. I just need to find ways to compensate for short comings. I just want to teach. I offered to do an extra class long (with class discussions weaved within) for a second time the last day of school.
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I may be able to graduate a semester early! And save my parents money!
But I still need to be careful about getting my hopes up too high.
Someone told me awhile back about a radio talked about Ancient Greeks/Homer not having a concept of blue. I could only find an article from the eighties which had various ~scientific explanations, including color blindness (they saw through a different color sphere or something), etc. Then the crazy idea that it was one of the stock phrases epics used to keep meter and sound poetic.
Sometimes people in historical fields try to make everything in the past ~deep and ~important. I’m happy my first archaeology instructor threw out ideas, such as they carved or did something because they were bored, as an explanation. My Ancient Greece and Rome Gender and Sexuality professor is the same with pederasty. We’ve been reading work pre-Plato, and he’s been reminding us to put aside anything we know from Plato and look at the evidence from other times/sources. I’m really excited to start Plato’s Symposium in that class.
The previous paragraph is a crude summary, but I need to leave for class. I just didn’t want to forget since I won’t be home till 7pm!
Drove about 14 hours straight. Spent about a week at my boyfriend’s parent’s in Seattle. Drove about 14 hours straight back.
So amazing, but so good to be home.
Of course the paper I’m enjoying the most I’ve left last.
Save the best for the last, yo. Next semester I might go to my professor to discuss it and see if it isn’t complete shit. If I still like it at the end.
Only a minimum of six pages left until tomorrow at midnight!
Depersonalization without the extreme anxiety and depressive/manic episode without an external influence have more in common than I realized. In these cases, there’s the experience of raw, pure human emotion, not mixed up with any drug, tragedy, joy. A lack of distractions I guess. I don’t know exactly know how to word it.
I do know I wouldn’t give it up for anything, the fucked up parts and all.