The Golden Compass

...the movie's coming.



Comment on my daemon or find your own (mouse over image and click the button). You could morph mine into some other critter if you disagree with my answers, apparently. Link totally and unapologetically ninja'd from Kelly.

Birthday was fun, I got Greek and Roman coins (holy moly!). Shame I don't have a camera, I'd put a picture of 'em up on here. Kevin wants to torch my GPA apparently, because he sent me a PS2 disc with over 30 Sega Genesis classics on it. The Sega Genesis is and has always been my favorite system. So now I have piles of work on one hand, and Sonic, Flicky, Kid Chameleon, et al., on the other. Uh oh.

PS - if you haven't read the His Dark Materials books yet, WTF are you still doing here? Go read them, noob!

Song of the night is the eerie "Hutterite Mile" by 16 Horsepower. I MUST get this on CD.

Small favors

I'm feeling miserable and it's only Monday. But the early morning meeting tomorrow has been canceled, and just now I found out that so has prose composition. Meaning I'll have only an hour and a half of school tomorrow. Meaning I can put off Vergil tonight and do more tomorrow. Sometimes life has some good surprises.

Song of the night is Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek". Very mellow, kind of sad. Interesting use of vocoder or something similar.

I feel so normal

I wonder about myself sometimes, as I'm sure most normal people do. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Is this really going to make me happy in the long run? More specifically I have two major subject-related concerns. Some days I feel like I'm actually not very good at Latin and I wonder if I'll expose myself for a hack one of these days, and sometimes I wonder if I'm actually doing my job (teaching my little Latinists) well. These can be disconcerting thoughts.

Some days I look at a few of my peers and realize I'm just fine.

Some of my fellow grad students just don't do the work. I don't mean they skip something now and then, I mean they never complete the readings. Some make Latin 101-level mistakes that they'd call out their own students for. And then there's one poor guy who just has no self-confidence. I'm talking absolute zero. It makes me feel fortunate that I am not so full of self-doubt.

I hate to say it because it sounds so mean, but sometimes comparing myself to a select few of my colleagues (most are both skilled and hard-working, even if they'd tell you otherwise) makes me feel so much better about myself.

Song of the night is Buckcherry's "Next to You". The more I listen to them the more I find out they're a great carefree rock band that's just a lot of fun.

Daniel's ok, so are Kelly's brother Jimmy and my high school friend Matt. Doesn't make the situation at Tech any less terrible, but I can't deny I'm relieved.

A funny thing happened on the way to the classroom

Something cool and fun happened in my Latin class on Friday. One of my students said she went out for dinner the previous night and almost ordered a Caesar salad (pronounced 'ky-sar,' not 'see-zer').

Yay Latin!

Song of the day is Rob Thomas's lovely piano/voice piece "Now Comes the Night". See an incomplete but excellent performance here. It's beautiful.