(no subject)

Easter is the only holiday that still has an emotional hold on me. Christmas is a nice time for giving gifts and hanging out with family, and I like some of the associated traditions, and some people write very nice things about it, but it's not doing anything that I can't get elsewhere. I didn't grow up with Halloween, so I admire it from a polite distance, like Passover or the Fourth of July. My family never did Lent, I'm still not very clearly on what Labor Day is for beyond something about white shoes... I just don't feel much attachment to holidays. It's not like people around me celebrate them the way I did when I was a kid, anyway. So it's no big.

But Easter. Man. Death and resurrection, sacrifice and silence and rejoicing. Standing on the roof of the school at sunrise, shivering in the mountain air, while we said to each other, "Christ is risen!" "He is risen indeed." That pulls on deep emotional strings, for me. It's like pouring out a drop of distilled Hope in the middle of the darkness.

And, well. I don't get that anymore. The days leading up to Easter, I get a lot of coupons suggesting that this is a holiday about buying toys for children. I wake up late on Easter morning, and check my Twitter feed to find 70% of the posts being some sort of "Aren't Christians stupid? Let me express how much I scorn their stupid holiday!" comment. The day after Easter, I can pick up discount chocolate bunnies. Sometimes I'll see chocolate crucifixes in the dollar store, and blanch. (Really? Really? The fuck.)

Most of the people around me don't feel the way I do; that's okay. Some of the people around me want to make a deliberate point of telling everyone they don't feel the way I do; that's okay. Some of them want to make sure to express that I am a wrong and stupid person for feeling the way I do, and...I admit, that hurts a bit. But I realize some of that is coming from them having been made to feel similarly by other people they associate with the religion before, so, y'know. Collateral damage. It happens.

I'm too agnostic to try to embrace Christianity again, these days. (And frankly, I don't have the self-confidence for it. Large portions of my social group would take it poorly, and I am not going to choose that hill to die on, as expenditures of emotional energy go.) I'm not about to show up at a strange church on Easter morning, because I'm not part of that thing anymore, and it'd be...fake, really, to try to embrace the community sensation that comes at that point.

If it's not worth doing properly, it's not worth doing at all.

But I think back to my surly little preteen self standing in the cold air on sunrise, and the way that wave of emotion poured down on me from every side. Light out of darkness, hope out of despair, and the determination to do something great with a new opportunity. I miss the taste of it, the way I miss the smell of jungle rain on sun-warmed cement, and I can't get back to either sensation.

Ah well. Christ is risen. (Perhaps.) He is risen indeed. (Let us hope so.)

(no subject)

In the grim past of archaic Latin, there is only...well, inscriptions and grammar. Which means that this week’s translation has a lot of exciting renditions of “Here is an example of the anapest” and “This monument commemorates this dude sacking this city.” Thrill to ancient explanations of poetic meter! Admire a long sequence of nearly identical references to military victories!

*throws a handful of confetti, blows a tiny horn*

Wheeee.

( I was not kidding about the poetic meter, people. )

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The source I’m working from for the military inscriptions has the English for each inscription listed to its side. I’ll still be working through those myself, to make sure I know how they work--and because I don’t feel like memorizing English directly, which would just be silly--but I won’t be putting those up unless I happen to come up with a notably different translation from the one offered, because it’s just not different enough to be worthwhile (and to not feel like plagiarism). You can rest assured that when I’m translating long works, like Plutarch’s Themistocles, my translation is often significantly different from any English version that I have available for reference. Sometimes appallingly so!

...I should put some of those up side-by-side now and again so that you can see what I mean.