The Egypt class looks to be entertaining, if aimed more at frosh looking to fulfill their cultural requirements than history students as such. Which does work pretty well for me, because three classes are about the limit of my brainpower right now. (I have, with great reluctance, decided to merely buy the textbooks for a fourth class, and pet them lovingly, rather than trying to audit a full third-year Latin class while also doing two other language classes and a history class and trying to teach myself French. Because I occasionally remember my limits before I exceed them.) One of the books is big and shiny and coffee-table-esque, and a bit dubious, but as we're just reading selections from it, and the different chapters are all written by different experts, I'll assume our prof will choose the best ones accordingly. The other two texts are a great history text and a good basic atlas with corresponding essays.

I expect this class to be entertaining, light on the workload--nothing but reading and some studying!--and overall a nice refreshing change of pace from my other two classes.

The most difficult of which will probably be the second class of MWFs, the Greek class. It's a standard fourth semester class on Homer, except apparently the professor was originally under the impression that he was teaching third-year Greek students, not second-year ones, and is hastily redoing the syllabus now that he's learned better. He was planning on having us do 40-60 lines a day of Homer. Which...I would be hard pressed to do in Latin as a third year student, much less in Greek at this level and working with a new dialect. Eeee.

Still, it looks to be a very fun class. Lots of secondary readings, one short essay, weekly quizzes, lots of discussion of translation in class--I'm really hoping we'll get a chance to talk some about different translation approaches/goals/techniques/choices and that sort of thing--and with a professor who's clearly enthusiastic about the topic. The accent is a touch hard to understand at times, but he noted that up front and told us to ask for a slow-down and repeat if he ever gets hard to follow.

He's also apparently deeply passionate about Lucan. I respect that in a professor.

Then of course there's Latin Comp, which should be difficult in the "mastery of the material" sense, but not hard at all in terms of basic homework requirements. Which pleases me; I can shuffle study times around a bit as schedule and brainpower demand, but homework needs to be done on a pretty strict deadline, and so is much less amenable to flex.

Now to assemble my books for homework (why can't the co-op carry enough copies of that Homeric lexicon?), finish some basic chores, and try to get many, many things done in the next few days. Perhaps I shouldn't have scheduled quite so many things concurrent with the first week of class, but, hey. Live and learn. Eventually.

The convenient store--somewhat less than a block away, though it involves crossing two small streets--has free brewed coffee and donuts. In theory these are only free before noon, but in practice they're both freely available for as long as they last, though they stop refilling the coffee in the mid-afternoon or so. It's a cramped little store, about 50% booze and 50% everything they could jam in there that a college student might need. (Cat litter, painkillers, milk, bread, cookies, ice cream, bottle openers, notebooks, detergent. The usual.) It's open 24 hours, and stayed open all through the break, aside from Christmas day.

And...well. It's run by neat people. There's the guy who I think is in charge, though I'm not sure if he's owner or manager or what, who will stock what customers request--there's one flavor of energy drink he keeps on hand specifically for the spouse--and find a place to jam it in somewhere. He started stocking tiny ice cream cups after I asked about them, special ordered Woodchuck seasonals for me more than once...

When I came in today, looking for hamburger buns ("We usually have them," he said, looking at the six varieties of bread, two types of bagels, English muffins, and three tortilla variants on the display, "so I guess we need to restock"), after he showed me a new apricot wheat beer that I might like, we got to talking about the Woodchuck Special Reserve Pumpkin. They only did a two-week run of that stuff, and for a while it was nigh impossible to find. He special ordered it for me--and then grabbed as much as he could again, when that sold out--with one customer swinging in to buy 18 of the 20 six-packs that he'd managed to get his hands on.

(I came in later that day, and he told me about the remaining two packs. I grabbed them at the time.)

It was established that he had never actually had a chance to try the pumpkin himself, though he'd heard a lot about it. So I ran back home, grabbed one of my bottles (four left!), and delivered it to him. He promised to order it again next fall, encouraged me to grab another donut, and I went home with my tortillas (they're like hamburger buns!), free donut, and free coffee.

One of these days, we're going to move to another neighborhood. Maybe another city, even. A quieter neighborhood, where we can get a larger house and a real yard, and maybe not have so many neighbors who like drunken shouting at 3am or to smoke (or vomit) at our doorsteps.

But damn it all, I'm going to miss that convenience store when we do.

This is an entry I am putting up mostly as a mental tag to myself. Because memory is unreliable, and sometimes I want to make sure I have nailed down in writing a thing which I might not remember properly later.

In Pittsburgh, I spent a whole lot of time doing a whole lot of nothing. I was there for about two years, and I don't really remember what I did for most of that time. Walking back from the grocery store, sitting in the tea shop with my laptop... I'm not sure how I occupied two years with "stared at my computer" and "sometimes walked to the library". In retrospect: depression. Yeah.

Back in Austin, it took a while for me to figure out that maybe I shouldn't be spending quite so many days effectively staring at the wall all day. Went into therapy. I was (and remain) pretty damn lucky: a supportive spouse and the finances to pay for therapy are not available to everyone. Also pretty lucky that it seems to be mostly a mental configuration thing, rather than a chemical thing.

Because, see, therapy worked. It wasn't always perfect, and I had a polite parting after about a year with my therapist because we didn't agree on some things, but...it worked. There was a while in there where my big goal for every day was to get out of bed before noon and leave the house at least once a day. Because these were the minimum happiness-inducing things that I could reliably manage if I really, really tried. I had all three of my meals listed on my to-do lists for months, because it was one of the only ways to remember to eat regularly. And things like "interact with a friend" and "leave the house."

And...I'm better now.

Perfect? Ha. No. Especially if I'm not careful about my sleeping and eating. I have days of pointless woe, and days where I get nothing done, and days where I get things done and still feel like I'm a horrible miserable failure because it wasn't enough. (One thing I learned from the therapist: it's never enough, because the Horrible Miserable Failure voice doesn't care about facts.)

But. I'm better now. There are very seldom days where I spend the entire day feeling encased in gelatin, where I can barely convince myself to stand up and do something I enjoy instead of staring blankly ahead hitting refresh on a website I don't even care about. I get up before noon regularly. I eat (mostly) regularly. I get writing done. I get to classes on time, and my homework done. I stress about being a good student, or about how I should do more writing, instead of about how my not being Successful and Published and a Good Housekeeper means I'm a bad person who will never amount to anything.

Things were bad in my head. They got a lot better. I'm writing this down so that on the bad days, I can go back and remember that things do get better, and they have gotten better, and they can continue to get better. It is not hopeless.

And now I'm going to go get coffee. It's one of those things that improves life.

One of these days, I really ought to go talk to a Qualified Medical Professional about the whole ADD thing.

It is, I think, a fairly familiar story. Difficulty paying attention but bright enough to get good grades anyway, not so hyperactive as to annoy teachers, and thus ADD coped with haphazardly until old enough to look up symptoms when no longer under parental insurance plan. Yadda yadda. But as I have some reasonable form of health insurance right now, I should probably actually go address this. Caffeine and multi-tasking can only go so far to help me cope when crunches hit, and I've learned enough about proper study skills as a "returning student" to realize just how poor mine used to be. And just how much attention is required to study properly these days.

Of course, I'm writing about this now as an expression of frustration on not being able to focus on studying for my Greek final tomorrow. Which would be less of a problem if I'd been doing this sort of not-quite-studying for a week, like I planned, but a nasty cold has seriously reduced my ability to focus from its already pathetic levels.

(You want "has difficulty focusing"? I can't play video games I deeply enjoy, with lots of exciting action that requires concentration at regular intervals, unless I can window them on my computer, or pause them on the console, for regular breaks to read a few pages of a book or chat to someone or check forums or get a snack or...well. Let's just say the dragons of Skyrim are usually two-pause battles for me.)

In sadly related news, I've gotten a fair amount of writing done lately, but mostly out of avoiding the studying I should be doing.

My brain is very tired. I'm looking forward to the end of the semester. Which comes at 10pm tomorrow, when my last final is done. Now, if only I could get through this Antiphon review one more time, and move on to Lysias...

Having finished today's Greek test, I find myself in that hazy limbo of many tests to study for, no homework to do, and only the vaguest sense of how to prioritize. Study for each upcoming test in turn, moving on to the next as each one is taken? (That's not going to give me much time to cover everything for the Greek final, after the last Latin test.) Prioritize the most difficult material? (But the simple, tedious sentences test comes first.) Round-robin the three sets of information as the whim or inspiration strikes me? (But then I end up avoiding the hardest stuff...)

Probably I should make some sort of a schedule. One that gives me plenty of time off over the break, so that I'm not twitching in a ball by Thanksgiving, but makes sure I really do get to everything sooner than the day before each exam. Because those 140-something sentences aren't going to memorize themselves, and I really need to review my Ovid, and I haven't looked at the Antiphon speech since the test over it...

Meanwhile? I'm going to go play more Skyrim. I'm truly appallingly terrible at that style of game, which is frustrating at times; I have the difficulty setting turned down as far as it can go, and I'm still regularly being pulverized by "Go clear out these bandits" random quests. But I enjoy collecting all the cabbages in the world, getting excited over new mushroom discoveries, and staring out at gorgeous mountainous vistas.

There's also some sort of plot about dragons and stuff, but who has time for dragons when there are barrels of carrots to loot and tundra covered in lavender and thistles to harvest, huh?

I'm working on Latin model sentences this evening, since there's a quiz tomorrow. (And test on all 134 of these a week from Monday.) They're not very interesting, but they're sort of soothing in their own way; there is exactly one Right Answer, the question is always in the same format, as it were. English sentence: provided. Latin sentence: expected. There's no real translation variance desired, because the point is to learn certain phrasing types, special cases, and so forth, not to just translate well in general.

(That's what next semester's Latin Composition class is for. I am so excited about that stuff, I tell you. So excited!)

Most of the sentences are rather dull and straightforward in their inherit Romanness. People order each other to do things a lot, the subjects are almost entirely male (and often military), and there are whole series of sentence variants involving Caesar and a bunch of envoys, plus some marching about. Sometimes people live in Italy, sometimes they deny living in Italy...

...and then there are a few where I wonder if the professor was making his own jokes. "They accuse him of treachery," says one sentence. "They condemn him to death," says the next. And then, nearly at the end of the giant list of sentences...

Me pudet intertiae. I am ashamed of my laziness.

I am, a little. I should've been studying all these sentences back on Tuesday, or least starting yesterday, not starting tonight. But anyway. Onward! To sentence-translating glory!

(This is to your interest as well as that of all the citizens. Hoc tua et omnium civium interest (refert).)

Once upon a time in elementary school, there was a little section in our textbook on how to write instructions. For a spot of fun--and because she had to juggle three grades in one room at a time, poor woman--our teacher decided to have all of us fourth graders write out instructions on how to make a PB&J sandwich. She said we should be as detailed as possible, and that she would follow the instructions exactly, with all the classes watching. Then the resulting sandwiches would get cut up for all the kids into the room. Informative, entertaining, and involving a snack: everyone wins!

One kid's sandwich ended up without any jelly. (He didn't specify where to spread it.) One had a single slice of bread coated on each side. My instructions sort of unnerved the teacher; apparently she hadn't expected me to spend a paragraph on how to open the jars properly. But still, it was a learning experience: there are reasons for instructions, and the most common task that "everyone knows" may, in fact, need instructions aimed at someone who doesn't. Just in case.

I was thinking about that today when I found myself glowering at a package of sausages because it didn't tell me how to prepare them. I'm in the habit of getting food that tells me exactly how to convert it from its packaged form to something edible, if this process involves any step beyond "remove from package before consumption". (Many include that instruction anyway, to be on the safe side.) And I begin to wonder, at what point will bread packages start coming with helpful sandwich-making instructions written on the side?

...which I suppose I could bemoan as a sign of the Fall Of Civilization, or talk about Kids These Days (And How Dumb They Are), but really, I don't. Once upon a time, a single man (because, c'mon, it was always men who had the chance) could know everything there was to know about everything... But that was because there was only so much known. And frankly, they didn't know everything, anyway; they just knew everything they thought was important.

So as we go on with this whole civilization thing, in fits and starts (and with some things dropping out through the holes) we learn more things. More than any one person can practically know, especially if the person in question needs to actually engage in a social life, pay the rent, and possibly engage in some child care or dishwashing, because, again, it was pretty much just the rich men who could afford to sit around pursuing Nothing But Knowledge as a full-time job anyway. So we get specialists, and more specialized specialists, and you know what?

I'm pretty okay with that. I don't know how to butcher a hog, and Heinlein can bite my ass, because I don't care. It's pretty unlikely to come up. I don't know how to change the oil in my car, and again, not too worried, because I'm happy to pay someone else to do that, and use that portion of my brainmeats to learn how to get through Portal 2 (more fun!) or change the upstairs catbox efficiently (more immediately useful!).

And in a way, instructions printed on things are a sort of level of information beyond what they're instructions for: they're a way of marking out what's aimed at the amateur, as opposed to the pro (or dedicated hobbyist). If I buy a cheap pack of acrylic yarn from a giant hobby store, it'll explain how to make a basic scarf on the inside of a label; if I buy expensive silk, it expects I already have plans in mind and don't want a lot of excessive nattering about what I could be doing with that. The frozen food will tell me what to do; that pint of cream, well, it figures if I'm buying a pint of cream, I have cream-based plans, and it doesn't need to explain them to me.

So this is perhaps something of an anti-rant. There's a tendency for products these days to come with simple instructions, and clear warnings, and a lot of helpful detail that pros aren't going to need. But that's okay. Not all of us want (or have time to be) pros at everything we want-or-need to interact with briefly in passing, and I'm actually pretty happy about the sorts of expansion of knowledge that all these "Look, you haven't had time to learn about this thing, and it's okay" explanations imply.

Kinda wish I'd checked this package of sausages for helpful cooking instructions before I bought it, though. Still. Plenty of places online to find helpful step-by-step instructions aimed at amateurs like me.

Setting aside all the bother with Lysias, who, despite his (deserved) reputation as a man who can tell a compelling and straightforward narrative, starts out his first oration with three paragraphs of optatives expressing vague but effusive hypothetical compliments to the jurors of the case...

It's deeply satisfying to feel like I'm actually improving, in my climbing.

I mean, yes. I'm still on the V0 routes. I can't even start the ones with a steep incline, or the ones that go over corners. (The one on an incline that starts on two sides of a convex corner, then goes up over a ledge, is maddeningly difficult. If I try it five times, I might get to the second hold twice, and never to the third.) And routes that I've done before I'll still fall off of, or get stuck on halfway through...

But I'm getting better. I can try moves that used to terrify me with merely a small thought of, oh, yes, this might not work. Sometimes those moves do work. I can get my feet nearer to my hands that I used to, when I need a big step up somewhere. I'm getting better at hanging onto the wall with three fingers in one hold--if briefly--while I do a lunge for a new hold. Things that were once impossible or wildly improbably are now merely difficult and a bit chancy.

I'm getting better. Slowly. But definitely better. It feels...a lot like the moment when I went back over a fanfic series I was working on, and could tell that my later entries in the series had better pacing and better plots than the earlier ones. A long way to go: but with the knowledge that progress is being made.

(I'd like to feel the same way about Greek translation. But I'll take what I can get.)

Today I got some fantastic climbing in: a few of the usual routes climbed, a few of the usual routes fallen off of, but two challenging V0s that I hadn't been able to manage on several previous attempts finally cleared. And on my first try of the day with each, too!

Today I finished all my Greek homework in record time, if perhaps not to record standards. We've reached the end of the Antiphon speech, so it's one more day of covering it in class, a day of review (and lecture on homicide law in Athens), and then the test--and then, finally, we're moving onto Lysias. Not a dreadfully interesting Lysias speech, in the sense that it's not new in content to me, so I won't be discovering any exciting new premise while reading it, but still! Moving away from Antiphon for a bit!

Today Steam released Psychonauts--what's one of the best platformers of all time, according to a lot of reviewers--for the Mac, with what looks to be pretty decent ported controls, and a reportedly less-insanely-difficult final level. I ran through the intro, and it's pretty cool; I'm looking forward to playing a lot more of it.

Today I had a great time talking with people about writing (and bad movies, and slush piles, and I think I used a truly terrible spaghetti metaphor in there somewhere) and got all sorts of fired up to finally do that big choppy next revision on the Czenik story so that it'll be ready for one final content revision, and then the proper line edit.

Sadly, tomorrow I have a Latin quiz that I am deeply unprepared for, and I should spend all of this evening and tomorrow morning studying for it. So. No writing, no Psychonauts, no random cooking shows on Hulu with Gordon Ramsay shouting at hapless chefs... Livy. Lots and lots of Livy. All night long.

Bah.

There's glass in the honey now.
We could pick out shards together, piece by piece,
and never be sure it's gone. All the work of the bees
and the glass factory's seamless jar
have been swept together to the benefit of neither.

It's not your fault, or mine, or the fault of the bees;
we can blame gravity, our parents, the nature of kitchen floors.
You've got fingers in the honey and I've ruined one rag;
there's nowhere to go from here but pain in the sweetness,
cut lips and trying to fix this.

Here's the secret, love: there's no fixing what's smashed.
This is no teacup to glue together,
and responsibility's not on the table.
We have one question left: blood and honey, or neither?