Friday, March 25, 2005
Fur mich ist heute kein Feiertag, obwohl Karfreitag ist. I awoke at six-fifteen as usual to attend terminology at eight. In ancient technology we viewed a documentary about the reconstruction at the Athenian port (Pithenae, I believe) of a trireme; the inexperienced volunteer oarsmen, amusingly, kept smacking each other's oars, and consequently mobilized the ship very little until after they had practiced a few days. Everyone wore short shorts, placing the film as having been produced in the early nineties, which made me grateful once again to have lived through that period as a small child rather than a teenager or an adult.
The undergraduate advisor sat in during our German class, presumably to observe Eike and Brian; she also at the conclusion of class announced she and Eike would be teaching the next levels of German during the summer. Das ist sehr gut; ich liebe Eike. I ought to schedule an appointment with the advisor via e-mail sometime next week in order to discuss my plans for either a minor or major (depending on what the history advisor tells me about those major or minor requirements). I would be concentrating in the advanced courses translating literature, particularly since I must do so later as part of my master's exams.
Latin and English were relatively nondescript; in Latin the instructor reviewed the homework few people completed, and in English the professor lectured on As I Lay Dying, a novel about which I feel ambivalent at the moment. I both like and am irritated with the stream-of-conscious writing style, disliking partly because it sometimes obstructs my comprehension of the action. Most of the imagery is either biblical or alludes to T. S. Eliot's The Wastelands, which, of course, I have not read. If the library remains open this weekend, I shall look it up there or try to find an accurate text online. I must also seek out the prologue to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as part of an extra-credit derivatives assignment for the terminology class.
Otherwise, this weekend I shall probably do nothing exciting, or many things unexciting.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 1:45 PM]