Quid Dicis, Homo?

This has been the most emotionally exhaustive semester of my life. It’s not necessarily more demanding, but I’ve never felt so incompetent and, subsequently, depressed. I feel like I hardly know anything about Greek. I’m slipping in Latin because I give priority to all the other subjects I’m stressing out about. My Deductive Logic homework drives me nuts. I’ll literally spend an hour or so on one problem, slapping my head and absolutely baffled, only to have a sudden epiphany that enables me to solve it in two seconds. While it may be obvious that “either it is not the case that both ‘b’ is a cube and ‘b = c’, or it is the case that ‘c’ is a cube,” it can be quite grueling trying to prove it with the language and rules given (first-order language, etc.). Is it any wonder I have no mental energy left to do my other homework once I’ve done hours of Greek and Deductive Logic? Talk about a language barrier….

If you’ve read the very first post I ever did on this blog, you know I have spent much of the last few years debating what direction I’d take in graduate school. The one positive thing I can say about all this language stress is that I now know I would go insane to do a graduate degree in classics. God bless those who do, but it would probably bring me to suicide. So I think it’s a health issue, really. The one thing I will still consider doing is the master’s program in Early Christian Studies at Notre Dame. While this technically falls under the classics department, the fact that I’d be dealing with religious texts could make it worthwhile. After all, I really do want to maintain (and, dare I say, improve?) my classical language skills, but I don’t want those to be my primary focus. I figure there will be plenty of opportunity to utilize both Greek and Latin in my religious philosophical studies regardless, so what I am worried about? I don’t know why my deductive logic abilities didn’t figure this out months ago, but thank goodness I know it now.

Like a dog returning to his vomit, let me now announce that I am strongly considering adding German to my repertoire this fall. The exciting thing is, I may have enough credit to take just those three classes—Greek, Latin, and German—without hurting my plans to graduate with a classics degree in Spring ’06. Either this fall or next spring, I’ll have to take a “capstone course” in classics, but aside from that, I think I’ve done everything. So that’s pretty cool. I took two years of German in high school, back when I didn’t care and wasn’t really trying that hard. I hardly learned anything back then, but it will probably still give me the tiniest edge now, and that’s nice to know. I’ve been eager to learn a language that’s actually spoken today, and most graduate programs require some competency in a modern foreign language. In other words, I’m not just trying to torture myself. I hope to have things settled within the next couple of weeks, so I’ll let you know. Until then…