the apple tree

had an anthropology test today I forgot about. I panicked at first but the test was so easy it was almost funny. All but a handful of answers were "all of the above". My dad cut himself really badly today. If the cut were any deeper I would've gotten hysterical that he didn't go get stitches. It's pretty gross. When we went to the financial aid office for yet another trivial matter, he kept leaning on the counter and getting little bloodprints on it. Yech. Thursday is the classics' club movie night. I don't know if I'm looking forward to it or not.

I posted on a classical history board last night for the first time under my new sig. Gawd I wish I'd just keep my mouth shut like I used to be able to do. I got caught up in the spirit of my post and said some things that made me look I had no clue what I was talking about and was totally off-topic, and of course the smart people there challenged me and made me feel even stupider. From now on I'm just going to read stuff there, never post. Gawd now I feel like such a wanna-be, trying to be part of their world. Maybe I am. Doesn't ease the pain though.

Today has been such an odd day! Rivals Lilah's wedding day. On a whim this morning I went online just a minute before all the student stuff was up for the day, just to see if I'd be able to reset my password after a bajillion other tries. To my surprise, it worked! So I reset it to deafult, then changed it (my default wouldn't work to access anything). I was kinda disappointed though when I checked my email for the first time and it was empty. Oh well. At school, I went where I was supposed to go for my government class - the sixth floor of the library that held special collections. Nobody was there, though. This floor was dead silent - not like regular library silent where everybody constantly shuffle papers and whisper. No, this library had cold tile floors and was really just a sparse room with a few couches and doors to offices by the wall and a few wel placed student tables and chairs. Since there was only one other person in the room - a guy stting on the couches on the far side of the room - so I decided to take the advantage of the soft couches and the dead silence to read some more Caesar's Women, of which I have been absorbed in already. About the time my govenrment class would've convened had I been in it I went to my english class. But the elevator I was in picked up a guy on the fifth floor who promptly introduced himself as Kevin and shook my hand. I gave him my name because I felt awkward enough already without being impolite to him. We picked up some more people on the way down; one of whom was a guy who Kevin promptly introduced himself to. They got to talking and I gleaned that Kevin was an education major (!). Then I went to english class. We were in the computer lab; the teacher spent about 5 or 10 minutes actually explaining the coming assignment and the rest of the time was spent listening to sound files of boring examples. Consequently I spent the time fiddling with the computer now that I can actually log on and surfing the internet before messing around with my screen settings. Next class I had was Intro to Lib Arts, which I never liked anyways. Today was even worse because we had a counselor come in and talk about the test scores of a test I kept forgetting to take. It was all the usual study skills, attitude adjustment, and all the other getting serious for school crap. I want to get serious about school, really! It's just I don't take a liking to people who tell me, among other things, that I can't daydream in the middle of studying. Almost halfway through her speech my mind started wandering first to writing a poem, then to writing commentary about the choice of pictures on the handouts; then, in my head, I started to write a little memoir about how I was indeed serious about school but I was proud to be extremely disorganized! I found this so much fun it put me in good spirits all day.

I went across campus because (I thought) I had forgotten my lunch money at home so I went to a bench close to my next class and started reading my book again. Before I sat down though, I noticed this was the same bench I saw earlier in the year with the beautiful quote written on it. I don't want to slaughter it with my bad memory so I'll tell it to you tomorrow what I get a good look at it again. When I sat down though I noticed other things: a communist symbol drawn on the arm, on the other arm were scratched some more quotes and the familiar lover's initials. I resolved before this year is over I will write my own quote on it. The only problem was making up a quote beautiful enough to write on it forever.
My next class was pretty boring because we went over the basic myths - all of which I already knew. I kept thinking about my professor: he was married. He had at least one daughter. He graduated with a P.h.D. from Yale almost 30 years ago. He was an actual person.

Didn't do much the rest of the day except read. Hey, this book is pretty good alright? Tomorrow I think I shall think go back to the sixth floor again.

I'm still having trouble with my university email password. I went to the library like it told me to both yesterday and today, but that place makes me uncomfortable. Everybody there knows exactly what they're doing and it doesn't have the friendly silence like in other libraries; instead the silence there makes it seem so...sterile. And as far as I can tell, it's all research. No "pleasure books". Guess I shouldn't be surprised about that one though. The first time I went I followed this girl in the elevator to the fourth floor, then kind of half-followed her down in the aisle. Turns out the one I turned down had a bunch of old books about the french revolution, and behind me were some about some russian war, although I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Bolshevik one. Turned the corner and there was a whole row of shelves on topography and geography. This floor had just about everything except the one thing I was interested in: Greco-Roman period. I did however pick up a large book about costumes/clothing about its history, all the way back to prehistoric times. And I picked up a thin book on post-abortion syndrome (it was the book they had on the subject; go figure). I know I wasn't supposed to re-shelve them but it irks me to just leave a book out, especially if I know exactly where I found it.

The Classics Club had its first meeting today. We're planning to have a showing of Gladiator at the end of the month. As far as I can tell a good lot of them were from the greek class. In fact I think I was the only freshman there. I'm more excited than I sound...honest. The president was pretty hot, but I don't know what he thinks of me since A) I'm a freshman and B) I was having a bad hair day. Everyone there was pretty funny, most of all the head dude person (who incidentally is my mythology professor). It was exciting because the only thing keeping the club alive the past half-decade was the department and the alumni and this year we've had alot of people come so far. Mr. Chaisson was utterly shocked!

I looked up my mythology professor on the website and learned he got a Ph.D. from Yale. A Ph.D.! I didn't even know there was even enough information on the subject to make up a Ph.D.! I looked up the classics program on both the Harvard and Yale websites, and they were both enough to drool over. Unfortunately I'm not going to shell out $40,000+ a year. Now I know what those poor inner-city kids feel when they can only dream of going to a school like that. Guess I'll be stuck working on cadavers in forensic labs the rest of my life. That's exciting, right?

To do tomorrow: go to library and check out Colleen McCullough's Fortune's Favorites and Caesar's Women. See also if they're at the local used bookstore. They sound really good.

As you can tell I'm frustrated. After 3 blackouts this past week I finally figured out what was wrong with my internet connection: my cat had chewed clean through the phone cord. The first thing I tried to do once I got this all fixed was to set up my university email account since everybody keeps stressing how important it is. After numerous pages telling me my password had been retired (they do it every 70 days for "safety reasons"...curiously enough I only made a new student password about a month ago) and me trying to do something about it, they finally direct me to a page telling me I'll have to change my password at one of the library computers. Grr. While I'm ranting I might as well rag on my english class. I hate it. I got switched over to a teacher who's so soft spoken you can barely hear her and I swear she has no opinion on anything. Our first assignment was to read an excerpt from Plato's Republic and discuss it next class period. I got all excited thinking we were going to have a deep discussion like me and Puck used to have that I really miss now. We had nothing of the sort. Everyone had the same opinion. I was the only one who thank out of the box. I'm still bitter. Our newest assignment is to read one of Malcolm X's essays and write a respsonse to it. I'm going to have lots of fun with this.