Week 3, Saturday

I'm listening to ABC's "When Smokey Sings." It's strange that I like ABC so much (or at least a few of their songs), but that's a different post for a different time...

Anyway, what do I have to talk about today? Fatigue? Yeah, I'm a little fatigued. Yesterday we officially completed a semester's worth of Latin. Three more weeks and it will be a year's worth.

I love how focused I can be here in tackling one intellectual task without distraction, but it's probably like eating only ice cream for three weeks (10 hours a day). So I am a little tired this week.

But I'm not overwhelmed. I know at this point that Latin will not be like Greek was. I'll be rather fatigued by the end (just in time for yet another semester!), but I won't be overwhelmed and turned inside out. I'll be glad as hell to be back with my sweet little woman though. That's for certain.


What else can I tell you about? I had a strange moment this week. As you know, I hang out with Doug, Katrina and my handsome young godson Sampson every Sunday. I also meet up with Doug for lunch Tuesdays and Thursdays. It's just like being back at UVSC again, except we are at Cal.

We both feel lonely as grad students. We have colleagues we like and we even have friends, but we don't have anything like the friendship we had with each other and a changing cast of characters - many of whom are also dear friends and a most dear brother - back at UVSC.

Part of it is probably being more mature and responsible and crap like that so that we aren't sitting in the hall all day on a couch. But I also think we have a unique friendship that is hard to find again. We get each other in a great and rare way.

Tuesday I didn't go to afternoon class as it was a superfluous exam review. Doug skipped out on work and we had a great afternoon of discussing parenting and religion (like I know anything about either) as we walked around Berkeley. At one point we cut through Doe Memorial Library, a beautiful edifice of which I'll post some photos later.

As we walked out the other side, I realized that two very awesome and strange things were happening. First, I was talking to Doug who moved to a different state at least half a decade ago. We were hanging out and talking as if it were 1999 (literally). Second, we were walking from Doe Library up in the direction of the Sather Tower at the University of California.

We were at Cal, and we weren't tourists. Doug is actually a student here earning a PhD and a law degree. And I am studying Latin here for my PhD program back at Chapel Hill. It was a time warp in which we were both younger friends hanging out together and then suddenly older, more mature men engaged in what we consider serious business.

Once I became conscious of this, the tension was irreconcilable, unnerving and exciting for me and I had to tell Doug what I was thinking. He thought it was cool too. Then we went back to discussing religion like the serious men and giddy boys we are.


Much of my life I've felt like Roger Waters as he reveals himself in the song "Time" (off of Dark Side of the Moon):

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day,
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town,
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today,
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.


I've always waited for someone or something to show me the way. I've waited for invitations to be an adult. I still have a hard time believing I am one. I believe all of my peers and old friends are real people and justified in acting as such, but I have spent much of life waiting for the starting gun to let me know that life is now mine to be lived.

Those who read a lot here know that I've been working on this and making good progress. Anyway, in that moment with Doug, ten years had indeed gotten behind me, and yet I felt that I had also started to run already.

I think this moment also completed a moment I had here four years ago. During the 3 hour morning drill session we were taking our 10 minute break. I was standing outside in the perfect weather with some friends while they got their nicotine. As we talked, I realized that I was a grad student at Chapel Hill shooting the breeze with a grad student from Oxford, one from Harvard and an undergrad here at Cal.

When I became conscious of it, I freaked out a little. I had just completed my last semester (as an instructor) at UVSC little over a month earlier. I hadn't yet been to Chapel Hill though I was registered to begin that fall. It was strange to think of the world I was suddenly so casually living in. I knew I was stepping onto a new stage of life, but this moment made it real, and it felt a bit crazy.

But it also wasn't crazy. These were all totally normal people. All three of them were certainly bright in their ways, but they were just people and we weren't discussing anything ground-shaking. I was feeling their normal humanity in that moment as much as I was being awed by their institutional affiliations.

I was inching forward in that moment in my realization that people who go to elite schools, or do anything people consider special, are just people. They may be lucky and hard working people, but just people. Four years later, I'm again shooting the breeze with students from various top schools as we take a break from conjugating verbs, but now we are all fully just people. I respect them and am happy for their successes, but no more than for anyone else seriously pursuing anything else.

In that moment walking with Doug, I again realized that all people out there doing whatever, whether they consider themselves adults invited to the party or not, are just people out there doing whatever. I also became conscious that Doug and I had been growing up and were indeed attending our corner of the party, doing our whatever. And I also felt that we were 100% just Doug and Will chatting excitedly as we always have.

I don't know if this is expressing anything meaningful to anyone. I suppose I'm just trying to think through a moment where time wrinkled up for me and I felt older and younger, more mature and less mature. It was a moment when I saw serious change in myself while feeling a unity of identity with myself from years ago.

It's like looking at my hand and still seeing the same sleek beautiful design made for playing guitar with its lines and wrinkles a little more pronounced and the skin just a little less pink than it used to be. Time really trips me out.


In other news, next weekend my miracle woman of love will be here.

click post TITLE for full text and comments

Summary only...

Week 2, Saturday

I've been out walking. I don't do too much talking these days. These days...

I'll let Nico tell her version in the sidebar first. I may tell my version later. And, in fact, I've done some good talking today. I had a nice conversation with Mom sitting among some eucalyptus trees on the side of the hill overlooking the bay.

It's not quite the same as wandering the hills above Provo, but there is something restorative for me about walking on a dirt trail that angles up the side of a hill far from any sidewalk, phone line or garage. Undeveloped territory is always only 10 or 15 minutes away up the hill. Something about hills to the east and water to the west that tells me all is right with the world. Climbing up those hills to look at that water is always healing.

I was explaining to Mom (she's always so good to listen to me just go on and on - sort of like I do on this blog) how I'm really realizing how critical regularity and repetition is to my functioning. Just a few posts ago I was talking about how entirely uprooted I felt in our empty apartment in Chapel Hill before Jamie and I parted on our individual adventures.

Well, I've realized that I am an Egyptian.

Hugh Nibley says that the Egyptians were incredibly conservative to keep the universe from unraveling. That is, they repeated everything in their lives like clock work to give order to their universe. Their art, religious practices and almost everything else stayed remarkably unchanged for millenia (at least compared to the change our world has seen in, say, the last century).

The philosophy and religious conviction behind this was that by maintaining regularity in what they had control of, the gods, universe and everything else would maintain regularity in all of the things they couldn't control - like the flooding of the Nile that made their incredible agriculture possible in the middle of a deadly desert.

So I'm an Egyptian. I've known it to some degree for years. It really came home to me as I latched my shower door, turned on the hot water and hung my plastic bags full of shower stuff). You see, I have a shower. There are four to choose from, and I always use the same one. I haven't even been in the other three.

I have a ritual of turning on the water as soon as I enter, so that it will be slightly lukewarm by the time all of my accouterments are arranged in place. Then I hang my two plastic bags on the two hooks, take my shower gel and deodorant out of the smaller one and my rolled up, fresh clothing out of the other, which I place on the small shelf. Then I undress, put the dirty clothes in the large bag, and enter the barely tepid water.

Boring I know, but I realized upon my fourth day of repeating this ritual how much it meant to me to have a specific shower, a ritual associated with it, and a specific time of day for the entire rite. It was one of the things that was making me be OK about being clear the heck in Berkeley parted from Jamie.

As I showered, I thought of all of the other rituals and repetitions I had already established here. I realized how deeply such things function as tent stakes for me. I thought of how incredibly regimented and predictable my schedule was, and how I had automatically chosen 6:30 as my wake-up time and 10:30 for my bedtime.

One of the most effective and satisfying projects of my life was my mission. In addition to the incredible focus and at least 20 prayers a day, part of what made me function so well had to be the well regimented schedule.

This may freak some of you out. Maybe I am mildly obsessive compulsive (isn't that all about rituals and repetitions? I think so). We all know I am mildly fascist. I am attracted to few evil men of history as much as Haussmann. I realize freedom and spontaneity have their place, and that imposing a plan on life can do incredible violence to good and beautiful things.

But I've also come to terms with what kind of creature I am.

I love having the exact same schedule Monday through Friday and then having a planned two days of freedom on the weekend. I love it.

As I discussed with Mom, I think it is related to my quest to let my yea mean yea and my nay mean nay. I learned from one of my therapists that my yes can only ever be as strong as my no.

Here's what that means to me. Think of when people ask you for help and favors. If you are a passive aggressive pleaser (and it is possible that I could be addressing people that aren't even Wasatch Front Mormons here), then you always say yes. Or you make up an excuse. Or you really have an excuse and gladly put it to use. But the last thing a passive aggressive pleaser will do is just say "No, I'm not going to. Thanks for the opportunity."

That would just sound crazy and be some kind of sin. But what this means is that I don't give myself permission to possess and use a powerful NO. What if the friend asking for help takes my excuses seriously and circumvents them by taking care of my problem for me and then showing up in their car when I am supposed to be occupied by solving my problem? It looks like I end up helping the friend.

But I don't want to (which is what the wicked no would have indicated), and I help my friend grudgingly and incompletely. Have you ever been on the other end when someone acted like they wanted to help you or acted like they wanted be involved in something? Then they are crap for help, you eventually realize they didn't want to, and you think to yourself, "Why didn't you just say no?"

Well, I've been practicing saying no when it's what I mean. What does this do? Well, it probably does put people off. I'm sure many think we aren't supposed to have permission to do that kind of thing. But it also makes my yes into a real yes. If you've asked me before, and I said no, and you know I am comfortable saying no, then when I say yes, you know I really mean it.

And I know I mean it. If I say yes, I am making a real commitment. I have the energy for a real commitment, because I say no when I need to. If I always say half-yes, then I never take care of myself in order to have the strength for a full yes. I am also never fully present and helpful for the things I am saying half-yes to (which is everything in life).

I hope this makes sense. I'm moving on.

So how does this yes/no business apply to my quest to become the master of my school work? Let me tell you what saying yes as a grad student or professor would mean. I do love philosophy. I do love literature. I decided to spend the better part of a decade in grad school only to make a fraction of what others who go to grad school for much shorter periods make because I love this stuff.

So I do want to read. I do want to research. I do want to write. But lo and behold, once it becomes school work, I am beset by avoidance and procrastination patterns and suffer from continual writer's block. Saying yes to my work would mean that I pick a topic, dive in, write up my findings and move on with life - all without the painful, time-wasting procrastination and continual stress.

What my therapist (mentioned above) helped me realize was that I also never said no to my work. Once I'm assigned that paper or become aware of whatever task it is, I hang it on my back like a monkey. I'm always working on it, I always have to do it. It's my excuse for getting out of helping my friends with anything (see above explanation of yes/no).

I can't talk to Jamie tonight, I have to write this paper still. But if you took the two hours Jamie wanted to talk to me and see how much of that time my brain was focused and producing quality work, it would probably be 20 minutes or less.

I'm continually half-doing my work. I never fully say yes to it and then just knock it out of the park. I also never fully say no to it, put it on the shelf and do something else. I just carry the monkey on my back, trying constantly to ignore it while using it as an excuse to get out of anything else. This is how an MA thesis takes longer (much longer) than a semester to write.

I've gotten a lot better at saying no to my work. I've become much more comfortable with admitting to myself that I am in no mood to work and consciously deciding that I am no longer going to pick at it for the rest of an evening. The powerful ability to say yes to my work still hasn't kicked in yet, but we all know how renovations work: you have to tear out before you put in.

That state of everything being torn up is quite unnerving but a natural part of the process.

Again, I hope that second explanation of my thoughts on yes and no made sense, because I'm moving on. So what does this have to do with my schedule-naziism? I realize that I have to say yes to it. It's me. I'm Egyptian. My name's Will and I'm a raging routinist.

What has this routine done for me here at Cal? I'll tell you once I discuss something else quickly. This is related to the test/quiz post I recently did. Part of what I've learned in the past few years of soul searching and therapy is that I have to let go of my perfectionism. I have to let things slide. I have to be satisfied with an A- (or even, heaven forbid, a C).

So keeping in mind that I am much better at just letting things go, it should make sense that keeping my schedule gives me freedom. I get up at 6:30 and study for two hours straight. I eat, chill, review my latest stack of flash cards and then go to class for 3 hours. I go to lunch, chill, nap, and then go back to class for three hours. Then I eat, do 30 minutes of deeply relaxing meditation, and take a shower.

Now I'm ready for my evening that will include a call from or to Jamie at any time. In general, I have at least two hours to study before 10 when all studying becomes verboten and I wind down into my sleep time at 10:30. You may have noticed that I only have two blocks of about 2 hours to study during a day. With the amount of material we are covering, that is woefully inadequate - we do cover a week's worth of Latin every single day.

But I just tell myself that I am keeping my schedule so that I can put those two hours and two hours of study time in (and I am always quite well rested and refreshed for each of those two sessions), and then I put my new "letting go" skills to work and say that the rest is none of my business. I put in four hours and let the dead bury the dead from there.

This keeps me from stressing out about my knowledge of Latin all day (which is what I did with Greek). I have four hours to put in my effort, I go to class and mostly pay attention, and that has to be enough. Crazy thing is, it is enough. I'm still doing great in class. My mind is much sharper and my recall is much better than it was with Greek. I'm having trouble not finishing test/quizzes long before everyone else, but we've already discussed that.

This all gives me great amounts of freedom during the day. My meal times are sacred. They are guarded by a NO with flaming sword that keeps all concern for study away. My showers, meditations, walks and other moments away from Latin are equally sacred and protected by a powerful NO. My sleep is more than sacred. God wants me to have those 8 hours. All of this helps me say yes to my two hour study sessions and my time in class.

My no let's my yes really mean yes. This let's me work to my best ability when I am saying yes to work. This lets me perform well when I need to, and that lets me rest and not carry the burden of doing poorly. Four hours of real study is way better than 8 hours of crap-study.

And what does this do to my weekends? Oh baby, I've never had both days of my weekend free for as long as I've been in school. Who would have thought it possible in an intensive Latin workshop? Beyond an hour each of the two days simply reviewing flash cards, my weekends are protected by a hella powerful NO. Little kids are on to something when they master their no long before other utterances.


I also talked to Jamie after I came down from the hills. In our conversation on my need for Egyptian regularity (which Jamie was less than shocked to hear about) we somehow arrived at the conclusion that we won't have internet access in our next apartment. YIKESARONI!!! It will be great for me. Just like TV, the web obliterates the power of my yes and my no. It freaks me out just like unhooking the cable did and just like giving the leased car back still does. At this rate, we'll be Luddites in no time.


In other news, life is beautiful. I'm loving my time here and am continuing to explore campus and study up on the history of its development. Goethe remains a fantastic travel companion. We will soon be in Rome. Latin is going quite well, and I'm starting to make friends (I will work on my shyness one day - not now - when I'm done overhauling my study/work habits).

Doug meets me for lunch every Tuesday and Thursday and it is absolutely great. Man I miss him in my daily life. Such a great friend and interlocutor. On Thursday he drove us all around in the hills, showing me some great neighborhoods and views of the bay while I preached the gospel of straw bales, passive solar design and intelligent community planning. I look forward to my time with him and Katrina tomorrow. Even if we just sit and talk it will be a great adventure.

click post TITLE for full text and comments

Summary only...

Week 2, Wednesday

Today was my first exam. I indulged in some of my bad habits, but some of my new habits were evidenced as well...

I have two tendencies with test taking that add to my stress and keep me from performing as freely and effectively as I'd like to as a student in general. The first habit is to always score a 100% in order to impress the teacher. The second habit is to try and finish first in order to impress the other students.

Why have I felt for so long that I need to impress these other people? Read my post on the ego keeping in mind that I think we never trust our image of our own ego as much as we trust the feedback we get from others on their concepts of our egos. We crave others' feedback and affirmation to tell us that we have fooled them into thinking we are who we think we need to be. This gives us permission to, maybe, think we are hot stuff (until the insecurity sets back in).

Anyway, my ego has needed to have teachers and fellow student think I'm a genius and it has forced me into some bad test taking habits over the years. The problem with aiming for 100% and being the first one done is it puts incredible pressure on me to perform. This pressure stresses me out, reduces the proportion of my natural talents I can access, and, well, wastes energy impressing people who seriously don't care (they are most likely only worried about their own test scores, and egos). I'd rather spend that energy taking in a nice view while enjoying a good bagel.

In the Greek workshop, I prided myself on my streak of 100% quiz scores and always being the first to turn my quiz in (this held out for the first couple of exams too until my mind started to break down). This was the behavior that got my professor friend to want me to transfer to his department, so it clearly does have real world benefits. But it was also tied into the perfectionism and need to constantly compare and impress that shut me down a few weeks into the workshop, making me much less able to learn.

Well, I'm proud to announce that I have only scored one 100% in the past week and a half. I did notice that I was turning my quizzes in long before anyone else, so I've started looking at my quiz and using elements on it like flash cards to review info. Once a few others have turned in their quizzes, I turn mine in. At least this is what I've been doing this week.

One other factor that plays into my test/quiz taking patterns is how I test. My mind either knows something or not. It can either access the info or it can't. When I look at a question, I always just write down what immediately comes to mind. This technique always works more than well enough if I've studied.

I don't know how to agonize over questions, and I'm not sure what processes others are using when they do so. This makes me a pretty fast test taker. Even if I haven't studied and don't know the material, I still write the first thing that comes to mind, as its as likely to be as right as anything else that might come later.

I've also decided to not review my work, as that's part of my pattern of getting 100%. When I do review my quiz/test, I only ever catch a mistake or two if any, which, in general, only affects my score by, at most, a few percentage points. I'm learning to enjoy letting those points go their merry way.

Today I finished the 3 hour test in half an hour. I wanted to kill time, so I did review it slowly and only found one error. It made a fantastic pun, and I was really tempted to leave it. It was also sexist (as Latin and Roman culture are), however, so I did correct it. This reviewing took 5 minutes.

I started to tell myself that I was done, and there was nothing more to do - which was true. I also told myself that I had a 3 and a half hour break until the afternoon class, and that I should enjoy it starting now. So I got up, turned in my test, and walked out triumphantly.

In the hall I realized how triumphant I felt and became conscious of the fact that I was so satisfied with being done before anyone else. I saw the habitual patterns of thinking how brilliant everyone must think I am starting to kick in. I honestly hadn't thought about impressing others when I got up to turn the test in.

What this tells me is that I have been able to let go of what my teachers think of me to some degree (not needing to get perfect scores). It also tells me that I am still engaged in patterns of comparison that are unhealthy and unnecessary. Oh the momentum of habits! For my next test, I plan to take small breaks between questions so that I finish after others and am not tempted to run for the tape. Sort of like chewing each mouthful 32 times.

Despite problems, the really good news in all of this is that I have been able to let go of some of my perfectionism and that I really am so much more relaxed at this workshop than I was with Greek. If I can keep letting go, or even let yet more go, I should be able to pace myself to stay strong (but not 100% I hope) for the whole workshop. I can also hopefully avoid crashing like I did last time and break a little more of my habits of comparison and needing to impress.

I figure that if I can pull that off, I will have made a lot of progress in my quest to make my study habits more healthy, relaxed and kept within a wider perspective of what really matters. One day I will be able to freely create whenever I want to without stress and habits of procrastination and guilt. My impending dissertation might even be a very enjoyable experience.

Sorry if that was incredibly boring, but I've been working hard for a few years now on these things that shut me down, and I'm glad to see slivers of progress. Change is possible.


On Sunday, Doug and Katrina showed me a great time. Doug picked me up in the early afternoon and we drove to Muir Woods. On the way we discussed our future plans. Doug's sound great. They're his business and not mine, so you'd have to ask him to hear about it, but I think he's got goals that will make the most of his talents and skills and will allow him to bless a lot of people. He's a perfect match for his plans, that's a great position to be in, and it makes me really happy for him.

Walking among the tall redwoods of Muir Woods, we discussed politics and conspiracy theories. I love conspiracy theories, though I can rarely buy into them beyond their initial suggestions, and often can't buy into them at all. Still, I think they are a blast to think about and always start fantasizing about books and movies I'd make based on various theories.

What sent us off on the topic was the fact that "Bohemian Grove" was on the little map for the Woods. I knew the Bohemian Grove was in Northern California and had been started by artsy types in San Francisco, but I didn't think it was connected to Muir Woods. Turns out that the original, tiny little Bohemian Grove was in Muir Woods, but the organization has since bought a much larger tract further north (where the most powerful men in the world plan how to impurify our precious bodily fluids). Search YouTube for more fun stuff on the Grove.

After this lovely walk and lively conversation, Doug drove me to the north end of the Golden Gate bridge where we took in a fantastic view on a hella windy point. After that we took a drive across the bridge and through the city, ordered some incredible Chinese food, picked it up in Berkeley, and met up with Katrina and little Sampson back at the Spencer place for dinner and further engaging conversation.

Many of you know Doug (Helmut for my UVSC friends), and a couple of you know Katrina. Well, you all should know that I love these guys. They are exciting people and the conversation is always as stimulating as they are.

They are continually in the middle of something awesome. Doug has been my tour guide in Manhatten, DC (a great tour complete with astronomical and masonic elements of the city's layout), and now of San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. I look forward to future, equally lively centers of culture and civilization where I'll get to visit Doug and Katrina and have them show me how the people in the middle of it all live.

So far Doug has plans to take me to a horse race and a baseball game. This will tell you how much I love Doug and how much fun he makes things: I actually look forward to both activities.

Weather is still perfect, and the Latin is moving right along.

click post TITLE for full text and comments

Summary only...

Week 1, Saturday

Judas Priest! It took me an hour and a half just to check all of my human links! I guess they all had new posts to read, since I haven't checked them for a bit. Some of you write really long posts. What's up with that (yes, I'm being ironic)?

Maybe I'm also just finding out how much time I spend with blogs. Yikes...

It's the weekend, and guess what: I'm treating it like a weekend. With Greek, four years ago, I spent the entire weekend, every weekend, cramming, reviewing, conjugating, declining and stressing about the test on Monday. Our Latin workshop director is brilliant and thinks that is counter productive. He puts the exams in the middle of the week.

That's right - no weekend to waste cramming and reviewing. So last night (Friday) I kept the same schedule I keep all week. I.e., I came home and did my nightly homework and went to bed by 10:30. Today (Saturday) I got up at 6:30 like the other days of the week and reviewed my new flash cards and the set for the day before as well (as I've done every morning).

The only thing I didn't do was write out my exercises due Monday. I'll get up at 6:30 and do that Monday morning, so that the material is fresh for the quiz and the drilling.

Do you realize what this means?! It means I have Saturday and Sunday as a bona fide weekend! I admit I will review my flash cards for the whole week over the course of the next 48 hours, and I'll probably conjugate a verb or two through all cases, moods, persons and numbers (no passive yet), but that will be a total of an hour or two of study - FOR THE WHOLE WEEKEND.

So how am I spending this free time I never would have dreamt possible while studying Greek? Checking all y'all's blogs for one. Writing my own post, perhaps (oh, I guess I am). Enjoying a leisurely lunch. Walking Berkeley and visiting some of its fantastic bookstores (there are a couple of ones selling used books that I love like old friends).

I'll probably spend the evening sitting on the hillside overlooking the Bay reading Goethe's Italian Journey. I've already been turning to it when I have breaks (and I've actually had a few this week). In the late 18th century, any cool (or at least well cultured) German of some means would take a trip over the Alps and spend time seeing Italy - kind of like the senior trip to Europe our college kids take.

Goethe kept a journal of his trip. If you've ever read Goethe (don't be afraid, he's awesome), you know how lovely he is to spend time with. You know the friend you have that makes everything an adventure because they have so much positive energy and enthusiasm? Goethe is like that. Living is his thing. But he also opens your eyes to even more of the world's beauty than you've seen before. Everything is beautiful, exciting and life-affirming when you're with Goethe.

So who wouldn't want to take a trip to Italy with him? I can't speak Italian anyway, and he can. So far it's been lovely. I also feel that my trip over the Mountains to the Mediterranean climate of the Bay to immerse myself in Latin language and literature was the closest I'd get to Goethe's journey to Italy in the next little while, so maybe I'd understand his trip a little better. Or maybe I just wanted to incorporate his trip to enhance the beauty of my own.

At any rate, we are over the Alps now, on our way to Verona, and I plan to make some good progress with him this evening. Last night I watched him talk some small town folks into realizing that their dilapidated medieval castle had all of the charm and historical value of Roman ruins. It was quite a treat for the town's folk, for me, and for Goethe. Oh, and I met some of the characters from one of his novels while still in Bavaria (Minion and the harper). I didn't know they were real people.


On a different note, Latin is still going swimmingly. It really is easier than Greek - especially after studying Greek. (Who ever let me register for an intensive Greek course without Latin? there should be a law.) Still, as I explained in my last diary entry, I was feeling pretty cocky in my first week of Greek, so I know that I still have a lot to learn and that my stacks of flash cards will only continue to spawn like rabbits. I still give myself full permission to get overwhelmed and exhausted later. All the same, I'm feeling great now and am enjoying an entire weekend off.


Berkeley is beautiful. I live right next to my favorite chapel - in the whole country, I think (I'll have to ponder that a bit more). It's the Christian Scientist church across from the People's Park, and it was done by Bernard Maybeck (Google "Christian Scientist Bernard Maybeck Berkeley" for pictures). I see it every evening when I go outside to talk to my sweet Jamie on the phone as the sun sets over the Bay.

I've also been wandering campus much more than I did last time, and am finding some lovely buildings and - my favorite parts of any campus - lovely outdoor spaces created by the buildings that frame them. In part I am sad that the original vision for the Beaux Arts campus was never fully completed here, but I also always love seeing history take shape spatially as campuses grow organically and fossilize specific moments in their various buildings.

For breakfast, I fill a take out container (fully compostable), and add an extra apple, banana and bagel for lunch. Then I find an inspiring spot on campus to enjoy my breakfast as the sun glides up over the hills warming the cooled campus. For lunch, I find another outdoor spot with a relaxing view and nibble on my bagel and apple. Then I nap and/or read some Goethe. Finally, I enjoy the banana as I walk back to class for the afternoon session. The blue sky reminds me of Carolina, but the scent of eucalyptus tells me I'm drinking in life at Cal.


My roommate, Chris, is a nice guy from Orange County (CA, not NC where Jamie and I usually live). He'll be a sophomore at Swarthmore in the fall and is studying Greek. Don't worry, he's done Latin. We don't spend great amounts of time together, as I did with my friend Bryan last time, with whom I lived and studied Greek. We do, however, catch occasional meals together and have had a few nice chats.

Showering is fine. The latching door is all I need in my coed facilities. Everything else about my accommodations is great, especially since my spoiled self got over not having a luxury suite like I was so lucky to have last time.

As for the smell of pot, I haven't smelled any this entire week. Berkeley students are mostly quite serious and headed towards lives of world shaping and domination. Not too many radicals at all. The school itself is as conservative as any top tier research school in the nation. The revolution is over here, but lives on in strange ways across the country. Maybe if I hang out in People's Park I'll catch a whiff - but that wouldn't be wise for me.

The stench in the dorms is simply human if not all too human.

Time for lunch and a bookstore crawl. Tomorrow Doug and Katrina will be my guides and companions on some sort of Bay area adventure.

click post TITLE for full text and comments

Summary only...

Week 1, Wednesday

I had a lovely image I was going to use as the header for each of these (I know that pure text scares folks off), but I can't load it. I'm not sure if it's Cal's networks or what. [Edit: obviously I got the image to work.]

Oh well...

First, some quick info. I will most likely NOT be adding anything to the ephemera sections. Videos will likely be updated quite rarely. I'll only be checking my human links (not the info ones), though I will rarely comment on any of your blogs. I'll be reading them (or speed-reading them), but you won't hear from me any time soon. I'm also only checking email occasionally. Anyway, that's how it seems right now. We'll see how it develops.

We'll also see what happens with my hope to post summaries of my exam reading list texts. As for the titles for these diary entries, they'll just be what the title of this one is, so you'll have to keep track of the dates if you are interested in keeping up.


I'm here and have been thru my second day of the intensive Latin workshop. That means I've had the equivalent of two weeks of a regular semester's worth. Just three more days and my first week is done (i.e., five weeks worth). Just 9 more weeks after that and I can read Latin with the equivalent of three semesters under my belt. It's just flying by.

Or not so much. But it is nice so far. I was rather pissy when I got here because I am stressed out about this summer in general, miss Jamie like crazy, and, to push it over the top, checking into my apartment was way harder than last time. Four years ago (for the intensive Greek workshop) I had explicit instructions that were easy to follow. This year required a lot more guessing on my part.

My good friends Doug and Katrina live here, while he's in grad school, and they helped me figure it out. I got into my room and it is tiny. I mean, it is probably the same size as countless dorm rooms across the country. I was just spoiled four years ago with a place with a large living room with big windows, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two large bedrooms that had two and three people in them (I was in the 3-person room).

Well, no living room, no kitchen, the bathroom is for the whole floor (and is co-ed - yep, including the showers - which are booths with latching doors), and this 3-person room is tiny. Oh well. It smells like a wide assortment of humanity crammed into a small space. It reminds me of the MTC dorms (referring to the odor), only more concentrated.

The dining hall still has a great selection and, well, Berkeley is one of the coolest places on earth. It's so Californian, so lively, such a cool campus, and I love the smell of eucalyptus as much as the smell of Carolina pine. It's fun to be back after four years. I feel at home again already and am back in a great mood after a nice stay in Utah.


The Latin is going great so far. I get everything I'm being presented with, I can usually think a couple steps ahead of what the teacher is going to say, and I've easily memorized everything I've been presented with. I'm so cocky and on top of it that I have to save my questions for after class so that I don't stress other students out with questions that bring things and terms up they don't know about. Students who are still trying to get the distinction between direct and indirect objects aren't helped by questions about indirect discourse. (Others do ask such questions just for the thrill of being advanced.)

But this is more or less how it was with Greek. I already understood the difference between the cases. I knew what a copulative verb is (not as exciting as it sounds). I understood terms like paradigm, conjugation and consonant assimilation. Thanks to the painful march thru the Greek workshop, I now know way more about Indo-European (the family Greek, Latin, German, English and French all belong to) grammar in general than I did back then.

Still, I have to remember how, after the first week or two last time, my background store of knowledge became less and less helpful, the storage space in my mind for memorization got more crowded and confused, and I started to lose my edge and cockiness. By the third week, the experience, and my ability to cope, changed drastically.

The first couple of weeks I sat next to a prof here who was so impressed with my perfect scores on my quizzes and quick answers to every question that he took me out to dinner to discuss the benefits and strengths of his department (Judith Butler aint' bad at all), let me and Jamie stay for the whole weekend at his place when she came to visit (while he and his wife were out of town) and gave me a serious invitation to apply to transfer to the Rhetoric Department here (I still think about it and wonder what if). Luckily he didn't sit next to me after that initial phase as much, or he would have seen me drop precipitously from stellar to barely above average.

It's really good he didn't stay for the last four weeks (when we are done with grammar and focus on reading real texts), or he would have seen me cross-eyed, cussing, and complaining that I never want to see another Greek word ever again.

I do think the Greek background will give me serious help with Latin that my German and French backgrounds couldn't offer to the study of Greek. I'm also way less intense of a student and have learned a lot about stress reduction, taking pressure off of myself, and being thrilled with floating through many of the slots below the 99th percentile. And, well, Latin just isn't nearly as nasty, irregular or complex as Greek.


Nevertheless, I can't imagine that the comfort and ease I'm enjoying at this point will last the rest of the summer. I'm psychologically and emotionally prepared to feel overwhelmed, burned out and apathetic if/when it hits me. I'm ready to not be the top student in the class. I'm ready to, gulp, just let things slip and go back and get them later.

I was so intense with Greek at first that when I burned out, a lot of things slipped against my will - I was mentally exhausted. I spent a lot of time in Greek lit classes at Carolina going back and regathering what I had lost here. And you know what, that was OK. In fact, it was totally, absolutely, just fine.

It's California living and California learning this time. How can I be intense with weather and scenery like this? I'm going to learn Latin, but I'm also going to have a good time and allow time to do plenty of non-Latin stuff.

I've changed a bit in the last four years. Still, I'm going to review my stacks of flash cards one last time before bed. Good night.

click post TITLE for full text and comments

Summary only...

In Transition

I am in Utah right now and feel much, much more grounded. Amazing what being home and spending time with my family does for my sense of stability. It's also impressive how much I miss Jamie. Soon Dad & Ann will drive me to Berkeley to begin the Latin adventure from hell. It may not actually be that bad, I'm just still a little frazzled from doing Greek this way 4 years ago.

I really feel bad about the decision to drive to CA with oil prices going nuts, though I am loving my brief vacation at home.

click post TITLE for full text and comments

Summary only...