Sunday, December 11, 2005
I vacillitate between riding to and from the K-hole with Rebekah, to stay with April and her familia, or remaining the entire break in Lubbock. I would be gone about twelve days, and I am reluctant to leave the Chinese girl (her name is Miaomiao) with whom I am staying by herself that long. Her English comes forth a bit stilted, and she looks forward to conversing with me and thereby improving her English (she don't know me wery well, do she?).
The third roommate, Margarita, left this morning for her native Colombia. She told me learning English from interactions with college students does not work. I responded to this with, "Like, what're ya talkin' about?" But she speaks and understands English well and is pleasantly vocal and outgoing, so I am genuinely sorrowful that she has left and will not return until the day I return to the dorm room.
I believe I did better on this morning's final in ancient gender and sexuality than I did on the previous two exams. We focused less on reading select texts and more on "summing up the semester" via a longer essay as the third component for the final. I chose to write about the topic concerning how the Greeks and Romans applied concepts of sexuality to other aspects of society (art, literature, law, et cetera), with an explication of Hesiod's Theogony as thematically representing male castration anxiety. I also mentioned somewhere a passage in which the author disparaged a prostitute for engaging her lust; he used a form of the verb "bubinare" (to defile with menstrual blood), which I recalled from a footnote and made certain to include parenthetically for a possible "wow-she-remembered-the-original-Latin" point.
Afterward I ate brunch and returned to the dorm for a nap. I then visited the Residence Hall Coordinator to ensure I might move back in two days before the official return date, for the girl I am replacing at the apartment flies in from China the day before the dorms reopen. I ate dinner at Sam's Place and began reading a much-abridged version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with which I am about to vanish again to the apartment.
But first, I shall quickly check online for how I ought to spend mein Großvatis gift.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 12:41 PM]