27.02.02 – Wednesday
Hmm. Tired. Woke this morning to the smell of perfectly toasted bread and scrambled eggs – from someone else’s apartment.
Overheard:
- ‘I only like art that I agr-ee with…’ – the words ‘art’ and ‘agree’ being intoned through the nose.
- ‘And yeah, like, Harvard is really cool and everything, but I just don’t know… and, you see, I’m a male feminist and that really makes me stand out, you know… I mean, it’s weird, I’m from Minnesota, you know, but I don’t, like, have much of an accent now, but like, when I go home, I don’t have, like, a Boston accent, but some almost surfer-dude type thing, you know?’ These last, I kid you not, were the words (verbatim!) of an Amherst boy on the bus towards Hampshire; he’d just found out that he’d been accepted to law school, even though, ‘I mean, I haven’t really done any cool internships, or even extracurriculars… (a Smithie interposed: ‘But you have good grades’ to which Amherst boy’s radiant silence marked assent) …but, you know, I just really took a different track with my personal statement…’
So in German today we learned a past tense; in Chinese history we learned about the Han dynasty and the emotional needs of the professor’s dog; and in Latin, Aeneas scrambled about on the roof of Priam’s palace and Pyrrhus was likened to a glistening snake having just shed its skin – the verb finally appeared ten years later, which I don’t much mind in Cicero, but strikes me as more than a little annoying in ‘poetry,’ which the Aeneid purports to be.