my first day of class went alright, though there's nothing like greek at 9 in the morning to kill all pleasurable thoughts. and thoughts of pleasure, for that matter. our professor is new and youngish and enthusiastic and disciplinarian and diligent, (he made a rather expensive set of vocabulary cards required) which is the worst sort of teacher to have for a depressing morning class. actually the people scare me too. i looked around and realised that no one from greek 102 with me last year is in this class. classics majors only need 2 semesters of greek if they have a latin concentration so that was about half my old class. the other half were religious studies majors who've gone on to new testament greek. all the people in this class are bright-eyed first years who have had umpteen years of greek in high school and have more confidence than i will have in a million years and actually want to be here. i don't look forward to that class at all although i do want to learn to read greek which is the only thing that keeps me going.

this rather seems like a semester for people to sign up for unlikely languages though. more than 20 people were in class for ovid, and at least 17 for old english, which surprised professors kovacs and baker. both wondered if they (or we) were in the right class, or that isis could possibly have let so many people in. a lot of grad students auditing actually. i recognised daniel heins from spenser. peter baker is extremely nice. david kovacs even more so and very soft-spoken. he gave out photocopies of the beginning of the third book of the metamorphoses and made us scan it as a class, himself leading, until about 14 lines into it he said, hm, someone prompt me, what's the next line, and we realised that he had no text and was scanning from memory all along. which made jaws drop all over the room and our esteem for him go through the roof. from peter baker i learnt the word unraed. the epithet for some king, i forget who, which means unready. or rather, ill-advised. foolish. "dopey, rather." which is a funny word to hear a professor use. i think that lining up three classes of this sort thrice a week is very bad for mental well-being but it's too late to do anything about it i'd have to look for another class to replace one of these. why do we do five classes? i don't think anyone can do five classes well and be happy. four is about as anyone can reasonably expect. i'm exhausted. perhaps i could go back to sleep for another hour. it's been a cold wet day yesterday and today looks even worse. i miss people.