This postI’m really supposed to be preparing for my two midterms (which are tomorrow) and my grad school application (which is due ASAP, probably Wednesday), but I need some release, and writing is how I do that. (Accidentally napping in a library carrel for an hour did help, as long as you ignore the drool and crick in the neck. And I never knew I drooled while I sleep! We’ll assume this is a fluke, statistically insignificant. Maybe I only drool while sleeping in library carrels.)
Anyway, on my way down from the fifth floor, I stopped in at the PA section and picked up a book on New Testament Greek, and then in the PJs got a book on biblical Hebrew. Even if I technically don’t have time for it right now, just checking out books on something totally unrequired somehow helps me feel like I’ve got a handle on things, like my life isn’t spinning out of control as wildly as it feels, like I can actually do everything that has to get done. (And I’ll admit that the one thing I’ve got my eye on is graduation: if I can just hold on for another month, then all this madness will be over and I can relax and read books for hours on end.)
What I meant to blog about today was languages, actually, not the woes of school. Yesterday one of the fellows in my ward taught me a few words of Bulgarian (довиждане and здрасти, which both mean “hello,” and благодария, which means “thanks,” and I reserve the right to mess up the spellings :)), and holy smokes was it fun! I’ve never really studied any Slavic languages — other than briefly teaching myself the basics of the Cyrillic alphabet after reading Anna Karenina my freshman year — and I think it’s almost time to start. Maybe after I get a taste of Hebrew (which I also haven’t really studied). It’s also tempting to dive into Arabic, but that’ll have to wait.
I can’t remember if I mentioned my plan to read the weekly Sunday School reading (from the New Testament) in Latin each week, from the Vulgate; if not, well, that’s the plan. And hopefully I’ll be able to start reading it in Greek, too. And then the Old Testament in Hebrew. And the Book of Mormon in Welsh, or Russian, or Arabic, or whatever language holds my fancy at the moment. (Granted, I may not actually understand much of what I read, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and you may as well enjoy it as you go. :))
Well, looks like it’s time to head out, get groceries, prepare a lesson for FHE, give the lesson, and then memorize 300 lines of the Aeneid and pull together some semantic explications and cultural scripts. I’m not quite sure why I just gave y’all my to-do list for the rest of the evening, come to think of it. Um, consider it a historical artifact. You know, like the kind archaeologists dig up. Except not nearly as interesting or important. It’s rather like excavating an old site and finding a 7-Eleven receipt from the 80s. For a single slurpee. Man, I’m tired.
