it's 81 degrees outside today and i feel as if i were in singapore. as i zao-ed latin i reflected that i never did this last semester in david kovac's ovid class, and how much i missed the ovid folks. kovacs was a jolly old gentleman who was kindly and made jokes about his own age and gently steers the class. oh, i like zachary biles too. he's funny in a different way, and a very nice person. he's not even strict or fearsome, you know, but he absolutely is the sort of teacher that one of my classmates ruefully described as "hardcore". and there was a paper for the ovid class, which biles isn't having for this one. i feel the strain of a class which is entirely dependant on translation and exams. it gets tiring, this day in day out translation without a change in view. with kovacs we not only had a paper but did fun things, like put time aside to talk about ovid as literature, and non-classwork translation, like his night before christmas poem (although i didn't like the versification exercise!) also in ovid i had a strong feeling of camaradie - our class sat around before class going over lines together, and we talked and laughed alot and had parties and left funny messages on the blackboard all the time. here the classics majors cluster together and the rest of us feel isolated and nervous. anycase, i'd done about 2/3 of what i thought was the day's assignment, and pretty darned sure he was going to call on me near the start of class, but when i got to class i found that he'd skipped forward by about 80 lines, and i wasn't about to hang around to sight read, whenever her should call on me. staying in class when you haven't prepared lines is silly; you could use the time better if you just went off to the library and worked through the assignment instead. so that's what i did - for a little while. i started nodding off. it's been a tiring day, a flustered day, and even when i was in the library earlier today getting through my lines i felt as if i was going to drop off any moment. what i still have to do today: finish reading leaves of grass; write 2 page response. write 2 page response on in memoriam. read 250 pages of tacitus, do 85 lines of virgil, and try to find sometime there to write my thesis. hah. let's see how much of that happens. and in the meantime i'm going to take a nap.