Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Last Post For The Year

I mean it this time. But I wanted to say, "Merry Christmas!" to y'all before I get home (I leave day after tomorrow! Woot woot!) to share my lasagna woes.

I'll be the last bloody Davis to arrive home...I hope there's hot lasagna waiting! (please God, make it lasagna) The lasagna here is....less than desireable. It has no meat, and is chock full of vegetables. Vegetables! Instead of meat, we have zucchini. Excuse me? Zucchini? And kale? And okra?! Eww! Frikkin vegans, lasagna is ITALIAN. You need ITALIAN SAUSAGE LIKE WHAT MOM PUTS IN HER LASAGNA.

We had lasagna last night and I almost wept for disappointment. I was a sad, sad, freshman. (two more days...

Last of all, I will share with you a MERRY CHRISTMAS picture! Appreciate the Christmas Cheer! I know the little kid does, hahahahah.


Isn't it adorable? It always makes me smile -I'm such an ogre- :)
If it doesn't suit you, try this one. :)
Yeah! Go Santa!

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Aussies are fun people

This is what they say!

"I don't give an oodnadatta if you can't gundagai my uluru. Feel pitjanjatjara to wolloomoolloo my wingecarribee

1371

Friday, December 14, 2007

Seven Days And I'm Outta Here!

Can we get a "w00t w00t!"? Next Friday around 0900 I leave for Lamy, a town of approximately 135 people. That'll be fun.

This semester was fun. I got to read a load of books, and I'll be reading Thucydides when I get home. I think I'll get the Thomas Hobbes translation, despite a universal recommendation for the Landmark Edition (Crawley translation plus a bunch of maps and summaries). The Hobbes translation (yes, the Thomas Hobbes who wrote Leviathan) is so beautiful. It has the advantage of being of poetical beauty comparable to that of the King James Bible, while retaining cutting edge accuracy that, in David Grene's opinion (and probably mine after I read it) has not been equalled since.

Thucydides will be fun. I loved Herodotus, and think that he was a first-rate historian (you gotta get used to his recounting of myth and legend), but further that he was more objective than modern historians. We have so much to learn from these Greeks. History has a way of repeating itself. We all "know" that, but it never hit home for me until after the Iliad and The Histories. If we as a nation read more books like this, more struggles and wars could, in my opinion, be avoided.

This was a fun semester. I am of the mind that I am in the right place and that St. John's is the finest liberal arts school in the world. Period. There is no other school like this no matter where you look. Period.

This is a very disjointed post, with the effect being similar to that of driving a stickshift with bad use of the clutch. I apologize. But after writing so many papers, it is a relief to have the privilege of writing informally.

Oh, and it's snowing. We have about eight inches and more is on the way! Is it snowing back home in good old Illinois? And is it icy??

Aha! Dinnertime! See y'all next week!!
~Toodles!

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Winter in San Francisco




... yes, the flowers are real. December in San Francisco is lovely. What a welcome relief, not to have to worry about falling on the ice or bundling into a winter coat for one weekend. Linda and I had a great time, shopping and yakking, riding cable cars and buses all over the city. Going to the opera was a special treat! We decided that we must do this on an annual basis.

Final Semester Hurrahs.

Yah my semester is winding itself up with papers, papers, and more papers. Ugh. Sometimes I almost wish that St. John's was a normal college and we had tests. Instead we have papers every two weeks. This means me as a writer has fantastically improved, but it also means we're frantic little freshmen running around like chickens in heat. (I really like that metaphor - Homer would be proud)

I've only got one more paper due before the semester is up though; Heraclitus. Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic philospher (all philosopher is divided into two sections; pre-Socratic and post-Socratic. It's like history. We date history pre-Jesus and post-Jesus) who wrote aphoristically and whose writing survives only in fragments quoted by other writers like Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, and even medieval philosophers like Geoffrey of Monmouth. He's pretty cool, but really hard to understand. He makes Plato look easy. We need to write a four or five page paper on two sentences of Heraclitus; translate them (embed the Greek text within our paper), and spend a goodly amount of time on analysis and discussion. It's sort of like a miniature seminar paper or at least a good model thereof. Here's one of the sentences I will be translating. Abby, see what you can do with it. Hahahahahahah! Maybe Mom can help you out with them:

Πολεμος παντων μεν πατηρ εστι, παντων δε βασιλευς, και τους μεν θεους εδειξε τους δε ανθροωπους, τους μεν δουλους εποιησε τους δε ελευθερους.

Here's the other one:

Ειδεναι δε χρη τον πολεμον εοντα ξυνον, και δικην εριν, και γινομενα παντα κατ΄εριν και χρεων.

Don't these look like fun? I sure think they do. In fact, these are exactly the sentences that the Greek class was translating when I was a prospie! Isn't that delicious? Not only did it make it easier to translate (I asked a freshman to translate these in my journal and remembered them for a whole year), but it made it so much more fun. Heraclitus is the man. War being common and Justice being strife... you'll grow to love him!

I'll go finish my paper now. Toodles!