Prioritizing Intellectual Projects

I only have a few weeks of summer left. I have to start prioritizing my intellectual projects. It seems I have had a number of weeks the seemed to evaporate with little progress at all. However there are a number of things that I simply must do before I finish the summer.

1. Review my Greek Grammar and vocabulary in Hansen & Quinn.
2. Review my Latin Grammar and vocabulary in Moreland & Fleischer.
3. Finish the Crito.
4. Read more Homer.
5. Finish the Medea.
6. Write a draft of my personal statement.
7. Work on thesis revisions (for graduate school writing sample).

This means that a lot of other endeavors will fall by the wayside including Xenephon, Infinite Jest, most of the works on my reading list, re-vitalizing my French, etc (although some short lived things I may do just for fun now and then).

I have only seven weeks to prepare for my Greek and Latin exams (to get into the classes I desire). Wish me luck!

So I Am a Little Behind...

A great friend came to stay for a few days and I have made three loaves of bread and done a whole bunch of other things. Unfortunately, I now have 125 lines of Medea for the next two days that I have put off reading. So, for now, enjoy this XKCD comic about e-readers that I found in an article about e-readers and tablets on Kindle World Blog.

From here on XKCD.

More on Tartine Bread and bread soon!

Time Worms

Last night I spent most of the night helping my friend out with her Sartre paper. I have never read any Sartre. She simply needed a sounding board for ideas and someone to help crystalize her thoughts into a more coherent form. Although it may not seem like it sometimes on this blog, I do have some talent for extracting the essence of and repackaging thoughts. We spent a long time on the phone and then on skype-chat trying to figure it out.

Although I do not miss the stress and horror of finals week, I miss the intense discussions it created between students. Most of my friends who are still in school have this crazed vibrancy about them. Staying up late last night to talk over this existentialist work reminded me of some of the reasons that I like academia. That rush of excitement over suddenly comprehending something, phrasing a sentence artfully, or writing something both for a class and because it is fulfilling is fabulous. I am not a fan of existentialism, so far as I know, but I enjoyed the process nonetheless.

In my senior year of college, I started a group reading the first half of Being and Time. Although I had little time to spend on it and I probably should not have started it in the first place, the group of people who came (including the wonderful Ovid II) were wonderful and the discussions were fun and productive. I did not read Heidegger nearly as closely as I should have, and I would like to try reading it again sometime in the next two years. Hopefully soon (even my Greek history reading and my Horace has fallen by the way-side a bit). One of the things that someone mentioned was that Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which I was given a few years ago, was considered "a brilliant misunderstanding of Heidegger's Being and Time" and I am very excited to read it at some point.

I have more Μήδεια to read tonight, which is one of the fun things that I've been doing with old friends from my Alma Mater. However, it's much less fun to read Greek when I'm sick because my brain does not process it very well (and I hate that I'm still sick).