3.32a.m. i am improving. at half hour increments give it another week and i will be waking up at a sensible time. my second day of school was not too bad, much better than the first, and more interesting than the third. the first was a series of scrambling and sleepiness and discontent, and the third was slow and uneventful. a 9.30 class in the winter term is a terrible idea, of course, but i perked up once i made it to class, because the professor, whose class i had taken 3 years ago, and whom i remembered as being sneery smart, was only very smart, and the sneeriness appears now to be nasally rather than anything else. the reading is not light but not unreasonable, and although i had not been keen on the idea of a roman history class, the syllabus clearly explained this was *not* a history class, but a study of roman civilisation through literary texts, which cheered me up considerably. i spent the afternoon today reading about 100 pages of livy on early roman history, and it was surprisingly absorbing - i quite wish i had taken livy last semester and read it in the latin! i've forgotten what it's like to go to a lecture class and have prepatory readings. all my classes, for the last 2 years, have either been small language classes or english seminars. result: inability to pay attention. i imagine hist of lit will be even worse, with 320 people, although, in a class with that many people, it's most amusing that the first thing that the chap who sat down next to me should say was: hey, i really miss dr nohrnberg's class.

went off to see nohrnberg preparing myself for a talking to which i hoped would be short and merciful. to this end i timed my appearance at his office exactly an hour before i had to go to my next class, so that any discipline and whips wouldn't last any longer. a grad student was in there already thus i was luckier than i thought. sat outside for a good 50 mins before the guy was bowed out and i leapt in to say hello (his response: look who's turned up!), deliver professor milbank's message about my "disciplining and punishment", hand him a postcard of the raffles hotel and a box of japanese mantou and then dashed off again quickly. i found on his door a new picture of a large snowy owl that looks suspiciously like hedwig. i asked him what it was supposed to be he said "an owl, like me, i'm wise and old." i reminded him of what thurber says about owls (you can fool too many of the people too much of the time) as a parting shot and arrived late for virgil. thirty-one people were in virgil, so that when i walked in the room i almost backed out again thinking i was in the wrong room. "i blame it on virgil!" says zachary biles, our professor, about the class's popularity. i must say i don't understand it at all. me i would take ovid and catullus anyday. what is even more amazing is that there was a majority of non-classics majors in the class, as a show of hands revealed. actually, i suspect one reason virgil is more popular than petronius or livy is that most people have read quite a bit of virgil for ap latin. only three people (i was one of them) in the class have never read any virgil before. my old sense of inferiority in this area surfaces once more. most people have had umpteen years of latin in high school and have apparently been reading dactylic hexameter since they were so high, and i've only just worked my way up through the grammar to where i am.

evening: meet kai-ting at alderman cafe and then my newest hostee, a transfer student from korea. it all went well, although i suspect she preferred kai-ting to me, and i feel v uncomfortable when people ask whether i wrote. i think the answer is no, i don't. but that gives a rather different impression of what i feel about words. and, anyway, that doesn't seem to me to be a proper question to ask. at any rate, if the answer had been yes, what would the follow-up be? to see some of the writing? you'd have to be close enough to ask something like that, i think.