I passed the Italian reading exam! Whoot! Let's ignore the fact that it was a ridiculously easy biographical essay on Raphael and instead focus on me not having to take it twice. Which leaves me staring down the specter of the German exam in December...and most likely again in February...and let's be honest, probably a third time next May. I don't foresee an easy victory, since most everyone who took it this time failed terribly. Suddenly I find myself wishing they would let me do French as my second language instead of German. Damn them for pioneering this field and making themselves and their stupid subordinate-clause-heavy language indispensable!
In other news...well, there isn't much. I have an entire day of studying in front of me, since my one class ended at 11 but I have a grad student meeting at 7:30. Sean suggested I just go home, but I know that I'd begrudge having to return again this evening, so here I stay.
That reminds me of a scene from the "Emily" series from LM Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables. In the first book, Emily's aunts are explaining how the family came to be living in whatever picturesque corner of Canada they're in: their paterfamilias was on a ship heading for New York, but after the crossing they stopped in Canada. His wife was terribly seasick the whole way, so they took pity on her and let her go ashore for a little while, but of course as soon as she got there she announced "Here I stay" and refused to go back on board. So the husband is forced to unload all their baggage and settle down in the hinterlands instead of cosmopolitan New York to his great dissatisfaction. The coda to this is that years later when she died, he had inscribed on her tombstone, a little bitterly, "Here I stay." Anyway, that was completely unnecessary and totally irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read those books (they're not as good as Anne, but I still enjoyed them) but as my own aunt would say (to Jen's great irritation): 'it is what it is.'
No comments:
Post a Comment