First Day of School!

Thinking it was 6:30 a.m., I awoke with a start and got dressed quickly to go to the gym and work off those first-day-of-school jitters that I always get at the start of every semester. Upon arriving at the gym, which is supposed to open at 6:00 a.m., I found it closed and finally realized after some confusion that I forgot to set my phone to central time after arriving on The Mountain yesterday. Normally, I would be frustrated about this sort of careless error that deprived me of thirty minutes of sound sleep. Instead, I determined it was a good sign of what will hopefully be diligent productivity over the next semester. Well, we'll see how that goes when sleep-deprivation kicks in a couple days. 

I always hate the first day of class because of the awkward introductions everyone must go through. There's always an irksome interlude with a professor who can't understand my name until the third or fourth try, and there was even one who called me "Rat" for the first three days of class. Miraculously, this time, Dr. Gail Streete, a religious studies professor from Rhodes College, called me by my correct name the first time! This was certainly a promising start...

When the lecture started, I discovered that my note-taking skills are very rusty after two months of slow summer vacation. Trying to draw correlations between Virgil's poetry, the Pax Romana, and Christian hierarchy was just a little too much for my dusty, World Cup-absorbed brain and out-of-shape hand to take. 

Colloquium, or discussion, was a bit easier. Our class of about 30 students was divided into halves, one led by Dr. Streete and the other by Dr. Ariel Lopez, a Classics professors at Rhodes College. Dr. Streete's colloquium was very stimulating as we discussed asceticism and the validity of spiritual perfection and the means of its attainment. She also described some intriguing gospels that are not included in the Holy Bible like the Gospel of Judas and of Mary.

Currently, I am mentally preparing myself to withstand three weeks of this intensive academic ascesis. That's Greek for "training." I learned that today in colloquium. Whoa.

To avoid sounding like an intolerable nerd, this will probably be the only post about schoolwork. 

My homework...