as von would put it: gloome and doome.

i seem to hate school already.

no of course i don't mean that. i like going to school. always have. i just wish i had another week to settle in. i think latin and greek are esp inconvenient to start the semester with because there's no time to warm up to the class we dive into translation from day one. i've been looking at my ovid for the last half an hour and things aren't coming together in the way that zachary biles (my greek prof) calls a "triumphant flash" and this is especially upsetting because i know i am actually decent at latin plus i have the advantage of knowing the metamorphoses in english. so i don't know why it won't come together and i think i'm just out of practice but it's still very upsetting i hope to goodness it comes together by tonight. i also wish we were reading a more exciting book than book one. all this cosmogony is interesting to read but irritating to work on. too many unfriendly and unpretty words like matter and substance and structure, and no plot! it'd be so much more fun to read book three and four, lots of avenging gods and adoring lovers and monster slaying and turning people into stone. and as for greek, sigh, i don't even want to talk about xenophon. line 1: something about the some kind of athenians in the first attributive perceiving something in the middle or optative to do with sailing in the infinitive and and something happening in the space of a night (genitive of time w/in which?) and alcibiades raising something in the perfect active and somebody trying to do something else with a supplementary participle. how i will get through 30 lines tonight i have no idea.

back for just over a week now, and mixed feelings about what i've come back to. the weather is bad, first so strangely dry and hot that coming up the stairs on sunday i stopped in astonishment at the sight of red leaves on a tree outside the building. it is only august! and then three days later, we woke up to cold rain and november skies. it's stayed this way all today, and if the weather report is right it'll be like this till next monday. i'm inordinately tired all the time. we're (the students) also, however indirectly, finally feeling the effects of "budget cuts", the fearsome new words that are on everyone's lips now, especially the TAs, with library hours reduced, printing services cut, class sizes increasing (26 people were in french this morning! we're supposed to have 18!) housekeeping removed. having spent 3 rather happy and carefree years here where all these things were taken more or less for granted it all suddenly makes me feel quite strickened. and really i'm not ready for work yet. or at least it doesn't seem managable (it is, but it doesn't seem so), so i never feel like starting because i think, ah what's the point? shouldn't have put together such a badly-distributed schedule throwing the bulk of the work on the same days. and i miss some people very badly and am disappointed how little i've seen of them. and now i have to go for a meeting which i really would rather not go to.

i go.