Sententiae Draconis

Today is December 6th. I don't always remember the day, but I always remember that this time of year is anniversary of the Montréal Massacre. For those of you who haven't heard of it (I have no idea if anyone in the States ever remembers it), twenty years ago today 14 female engineering students were murdered by some insane jealous guy who thought that they were stopping him from being able to go forward in Engineering. He walked into a classroom, told all the men to leave and then shot the women and himself. I don't know if this is standard, but in my tradition of commemorating this terrible event no one ever mentions his name (in fact when someone in my class asked, our teacher refused to say - good on her, I say), I don't know it, and I don't want to know it. Instead we remember the names of the women. I remember when I first heard about the Massacre (or at least when I was first able to understand about it) my grade seven teacher told us that she had been in University when the attack took place. And one of her teachables was science. Afterwards she took up Tai Kwon Do and by the time she was my teacher she'd reached either brown or black belt (something really high up anyway) and she gave us a demonstration several weeks later. (This is the same teacher who dressed as Trinty from the Matrix for Hallowe'en, she's really cool.)

I'm not in engineering, but I know lots of women who are. And it's the same principle in Classics, it's only fairly recently that there are female professors and most of them aren't high ranking yet. But there are more and more female grad students going into the field. Classics has been an old boys club for about 300 years and we're learning about old boys clubs in the ancient world. and it's often assumed that just because I'm female I'll want to learn about women in ancient society - I hate that. So it still really hits close to home for me. And somehow it's worse that it happened in Canada. I know that in some ways it's irrational, but I just don't associate gun violence with my country.

hobbitbabe, who is actually the first woman in North America to have her PhD in Welding Engineering (go her), wrote up some good stuff about her feelings here. And she names the fallen.

A lot of this commemoration has been sublimated into awareness of violence against women in general, but although I agree with that it also bugs me that no one ever mentions the men who were forced to leave. I don't even know how many of them there were, but I can't imagine how these students would feel. And I don't want to take anything away from the women who were killed, but it always bothers me that no one wants to talk about their plight. Violence against women effects men too, and not just the men who are perpetrating the act. I'm not sure if I can think of many things that are more psychologically scarring than being helpless in the face of violence aimed at your friends.

In Halifax there's a walk to raise awareness about violence against women and at the end of it either in addition to or instead of a moment of silence the crowd has a moment of screaming and yelling, because silence is kind of the problem. That often made me tempted to go, but I never did because while I agree with what is being said I hate how often these things go to extremes. And blanket ideas like "all men are evil" bother me and get in the way of my own observance even when they are only implied.

I have more things I could say that are controversial and explain my views about how gender issues are complicated. But I think that debate would somehow debase the point of this entry.

Twenty years ago today fourteen women were killed because they wanted to learn and be a part of a field of study which is still male-dominated today. It is my greatest hope that things have changed.

Roasts were on sale at the grocery store, so I got a nice little roast that should last me several meals, and some little potatoes and cooked them up for dinner tonight. I decided to just cook everything in the same pan in the oven. It turns out though that even little potatoes (cut into tiny pieces) take longer to cook than a roast beast. So I've got slightly underdone potatoes and slightly overdone beef. It's still good, but it's frustrating to know that it could be better.

Speaking of better, today I finally put up that poster in my Ancient Philosophy Class. This class is in the Chemistry (for reasons that escape me) and there's an enormous poster of the periodic table on the wall. Weeks and weeks ago I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be funny if we put up Aristotle's elements next to it?" And I finally just did it. So next to all that "science" we have a nice little diagram entitled "The Elements" with Earth, Air, Fire and Water, Hot, Cold, Wet and Dry. Which looks almost exactly like this linky linky.

I am so clever!

I did my Latin Sight Passage for the Honours Exams today. I am now 1/4 done the exam portion of my Honours degree. (That is of course, assuming that I passed.) I felt decently good about it. I couldn't tell where the piece I had to translate was from, but it was about Jason and the Argonauts, and the stuff about boats leads me to believe that Dr. O'B picked that passage for me on purpose. It's exactly his sense of humour.

I do want to know where that passage was from though, because it was one of those passages which helps to remind me that I actually do know what the hell I'm doing. I could see the grammatical constructions even though they were basically lying on top of each other, and I knew most of the vocabulary. Also it was prose instead of poetry.

But I'm done!

And now I've got to write a paper for tomorrow. C says I should wait until after hockey (I think he's mostly joking) and I totally could finish it afterwards (I've currently got an A+ in this class, and I haven't been putting a lot of effort into it), but I might write up an outline or something. And I should get a start on my Latin homework since my brother and some other folks'll be in town this weekend (yay!) and I probably won't have time to do anything then.

So I agonized a little bit and then decided not to do the paper that's due tomorrow. This isn't as crazy as it sounds - honest. You see for my Roman history class there are four essay topics for the semester and I have to write on three of them. My plan was to do the first one so that I would still have a free skip later on, but I'm feeling kinda stuffed up and brain-dead. And also I'm just not interested in writing about how Suetonius' place in history effected his opinion and protrayal of Julius Caesar. Partially because I think it's bloody obvious (and I always feel like an idiot when I write papers that I think are obvious, even if they're exactly what the prof wants), and partially because it'll be nick-picky and boring to flick through fifty pages of Suetonius' Life of Julius Caesar to find good examples to proove said obviousness. And I do think that all three other topics are interesting:

Topic B: How would it seem to people at the time that Augustus had restored the Republic?
Topic C: Why are Trajan and Livy's Letters important as historical documents?
Topic D: Why would contemporary Roman's like the character of Lucius in Apuleius' The Golden Ass?

See? They're all much cooler than flipping through Suetonius to find proof that he's way more comfortable with one-man-rule than Republican Romans (after all it`s not like he`s lived in the Empire under good, solid Emperors for his whole life).

In other news I just got hit with the cold that's been going around. It sucks balls. In fact it sucks bälle. But on the up-side, L is making chicken soup for the purpose of curing colds. She says it is magical Jew-Soup and will fix us all (her included). I am very much looking forward to eating some.

In the mean-time I think I`ll do some readings for class (and not that paper I`m not going to do!) and drink a bunch of mint tea and maybe watch some television. Oh TeeVee - how I love thee.

Today was the first day of classes. It was also the day that I picked up my new laptop.His name is Alexander, following in the tradition of naming my electronics after famous kings. Also he's a tablet and I am currently "typing" this using my pointing pen thing and handwriting recognition software. It's actually remarkably good. I haven't even really had to teach it much. I love him. He's so cool.

Also tonight is our annual Frosh Week Casino Night, so the guys and I are watching Ocean's 11 to get pumped. It should be a blast. I'm wearing my tails. :)

I'm very excited. Yay!

So it turns out that I actually have five weeks of Midterms rather than four. I was supposed to have my Greek midterm on Wednesday, but Prof M forgot to tell the rest of the class after I talked to him about it and he figured out a date (right in front of me I might add). I asked today if we were still having the midterm on Wednesday because he hadn't mentioned it in a long time, and S made an exclamation of shock and worry. Prof M ended up holding his book over his face in shame. It was cute. He's wonderfully absent-minded-professorish. I like it best when he wears bow-ties. (Last Monday he'd gotten a haircut, so I mentioned it and we ended up starting off the class with him muttering about how there aren't any good barbers in town!)

I'd actually been hoping to get these things over with sooner rather than later, since the middle of term is actually long gone. But this is how things go. Le sigh.

At least he didn't forget to tell the rest of my Greek History class about the Midterm we're having tomorrow, so that's still a go. And I should go back to studying that.

ETA: Best typo from my Greek History Notes - "Sappho is participating in the conversation about Zeus as a comic, rational force in the world." I really meant "cosmic" but I kinda like the it the other way around...

I've got my Latin Midterm tomorrow bright and early. C and I met up yesterday to try and study together, compare notes and fill in the gaps that we have in the translation and things like that. It didn't really work out so well, since pretty much we just got together and tried to figure out how to go about the studying bit and realized that neither of us have any idea how to study for a Latin exam at this level. Last year we had vocab lists that we could go over, and we didn't do nearly as much translating. But all we could figure out to do for studying is to go over absolutely everything that we translated and look at it and try to memorize the vocab and all that jazz. It's kinda frustrating because I don't really have the time or the concentration to be able to do that properly, and I'm missing a huge chunk of translation because of missing class or not being prepared or a mixture of the two. I think that after the exam I might ask him if he has any suggestions on studying methods, and talk to him in general about the workload (which is way more than I can handle, and the same goes for several others in the class with whom I have spoken) and things like that.

Well, once more unto the breach!

forsan et heac olim meminisse iuvabit.

So I'm going over my notes, and I'm finding that most of my misspellings are do to typos (yay!), and the majority of them are because I'm typing so fast that one letter comes before the one that should be there.

My Most common typo : "fo" instead of "of"

Funniest Typo so Far : "Hathor. Sometimes the daughter of Ra, sometimes the Mother of Ra. She is a Sky God and she bears the ank. The Sun dick on her head between the horns." Rather appropriate, considering she's the Goddess of Fertility as well, but still...

Why are conclusions so haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard?

I've completed my paper that's due tomorrow except for the conclusion (in great time too! Sure it was only 1500 words but still) and I can't figure out how to write the conclusion. I've been sitting here for the past half-hour procrastinating precisely because I can't figure out what to write.

Conclusions Suck.

I think I will try not to write

ETA: HUzzah! Done! And before eleven o'clock too!

I am so the tired. I can't even get up the energy to sit while I type this, so I'm going for the awkward stomach typing method. I'm sure those of you with laptops know what I mean.

Anyway, 0830 class + sinus cold + waiting around for over an hour to get my Mumps Vaccine = le tired.

Vaccine's always make me tired and adding that to the sinus cold that's been bugging me for the past week or so (my sinuses are always annoying, it is no fun) and I want to sleep a whole bunch. Also there's Mumps on campus, hence the vaccine booster, so everyone's going a little crazy about diseases. Usually I'm pretty relaxed about these things, but there have been several outbreaks of Mumps since February so I thought it would be a good idea to get the shot. Especially since it's free for students.

Tonight I have a recitation exercise for Latin to record, a bunch of pages for the Rise of Rome to read and a whole slew of Greek homework that I only vaguely know about because I took a sick day yesterday. Also I have to watch the new house and the first episode of the Tudors which is airing on the CBC (it's at the same time as NCIS, but I know where to find NCIS on the internets).

Plus I've still got a lot of the Aeneid to read by Friday.

I think I may just sleep for a while instead...