AnnaKin's journal

1. As has been dominating my tweets lately, I have rainbow lunch bags. \o/

2. Today I discovered Kelloggs' Special K snacks. They are a bit of a mixed belssing as, yeah, they are like ninety calories each, but on the other hand they are very sugary, and they achieve the low calorie count by being TINY. The cereal bars are half the size of all other cereal bars. But on the other hand, they are delicious. \o/

3. Bacon is evil. Delicious, delicious evil.

4. I have a papercut on my thumb.

5. Today is the second day running on which I have been at the library from nine thirty till five o'clock. I went to the library cafe for... well, it was meant to be an hour, but it ended up being an hour and a half, both days. Today, the only time I actually left the library was to buy the aforementioned cereal bar in the student shop. I was still famished when I got home.

6. Herodotus is awesome. But heavy to carry home. He claims that there is a priestess somewhere who routinely grows a beard.

7. ( Cut for being TMI )

HE DID. He loved his hair. I bet he spent a fortune on hair-care products to make it smell good. : D And I bet Hephaiston liked to pet it. And he probably let him do it all the time. Then sometimes Hephaiston would try and do it in front of people and he'd be all NO NO SAVE IT FOR THE BEDROOM.

I want to pet his hair. D:

(Revison-induced insanity is rapidly setting in. I always knew studying classics would drive me mad...)

EDIT: A direct result of said madness is my inability to remember that not everyone will recognise Alexander the great when they see him. ;^_^ Yes, that is who it is. And he really was proud of his hair TO THE MAX. Honest.

So am I being a good girl and planning my classics essay. Said essay is on Greek Lyric Poetry. One of the fragments I was looking at mentioned something called 'Herotima', which I figured was either a place or a person. So, I Googled.

It asked me if I meant 'Herojima', but there was still one link that was about Anacreon (the poet).

And guess what.

Yes. Yes, that is a link to a TV Tropes page. No, I don't know either. But I feel like the world is telling me to go back to procrastinating... I'm just glad it's a quotes page not a trope page. ;_;

( Cut for a vaguely political rant )

So I am doing the 'reading of the week' for one of my courses, and I just discovered that Catullus wrote a poem called 'Stop Stealing the Napkins!'.
Unfortunately it was not as amusing as it sounds:

Asinius Marrucinus, you don’t employ

your left hand too well: in wine and jest

you take neglected table-linen.

Do you think that’s witty? Get lost, you fool:

it’s such a sordid and such an unattractive thing.

Don’t you believe me? Believe Pollionus

your brother, who wishes your thefts

could be fixed by money: he’s a boy

truly stuffed with wit and humour.

So expect three hundred hendecasyllables

or return my napkin, whose value

doesn’t disturb me, truly,

it’s a remembrance of my friends.

Fabullus and Veranius sent me the gift,

napkins from Spain: they must be cherished

as my Veranius and Fabullus must be.
 

He also refers to his girlfriend as 'Lesbia'. My lecturer says that is is a reference to Sappho, and thus is saying that she is very intelligent and talented, and also that Lesbian women (ie women from Lesbos) were famed for their beauty.
According to a book I read last week, they were also famed for 'sexual inventiveness'. Ha.

We also learned all about the utter bizarreness of Lesbia's family. One of the clues as to who she actually was is that she might have been accused of incest. She may also have been a woman who (possibly) poisoned her husband, then took a lover, then fell out with said lover, and accused him of poisoning her. Then... yeah.

There also appears to be a lot of poems about buttsex.
 

I had a classical sculpture lesson. One girl was flicking through the textbook, and stopped on a... rather odd statue (I think it's actually a statuette) of Heracles.

Her: OH MY GOD HE LOOKS LIKE HE'S PREGNANT!
Me: *not thinking* M-preg!
Her: Lolwut?
Another girl: OH I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN! I've never met anyone else who knew that!
*pause*
Another girl: We spend too much time online, don't we?
Me: *nodnod*

So yeah. That was fun. I also had a brief conversation with a boy on my bus who I tend to just call 'the really annoying kid'.

He's about twelve. He is almost always talking very, very loudly to his friends, about whatever happens to be on his mind. You'll often hear him repeating whatever this is to each friend as they get on (one time he repeated his whole spiel to a girl he'd always told it too). When he's not doing that, he plays ringtones and soundclips on his phone (some of which are very, VERY irritating, and, in his opinion, highly amusing). And if his friends won't pay attention to him, or he needs another opinion about something, he'll turn and talk to whoever's nearby.

Annnd I tend to talk back. Because I do quite like him. I find him more entertaining than most of the other people on my bus seem to. And I think he's a lot cleverer than he probably sounds like so far, espcially after today.

He asked what I was reading, and I told him it was Dracula. He said he'd read it, and started talking about Christopher Lee, and how he was 'the original Dracula', so I said that there were earlier films, including one which is actually a silent film (which sounds really damn awesome, btw). Then he asked me where I was up to, and, when I told him, he started telling me what happened next. At which point I started ignoring him, because... yeah.

I wasn't entirely sure if he was telling the truth when he said he'd read Dracula, but then he was right about what was about to happen, and... well, when I think about it, I read Frankenstein when I was only about a year older than him, so I should give him more credit.

Those were the two most noteworthy incidents for the day, really. Though I did always watch Little Miss Sunshine. And I'm finding Dracula surprisngly creepy (cause you'd think you'd be familiar enough with the whole set-up not to be... or I did, anyway).

So it turns out that my first re-sit exam is on Thursday. : O It's not the one I've been focusing my revision on. : O : O It's the one on The Odyssey.

Which I am now frantically re-reading.

'Telemachus roused Nestor's son from his sweet sleep with a kick and said: 'Wake up, Peisistratus. Harness the horses to the chariot and let's be on our way.''

That always makes me laugh. Partly because they are, if it's not obvious from that, sharing a bed. Later there's a bit where Telemachus is all 'oh, we've become so close, and I've learned to much from you, Peisistratus...'

The slash is all canon, y'know. Menelaus/Odysseus totally is. 'Loving each other above all others', indeed.

Firstly:





LOVE. SRSLY. I have been won over. I want him to wear a hat like that as the Doctor now...

( nd here is some squee'ing about a Greek tragedy. )

I'm getting increasingly annoyed by my classics group. I know that they must like classics, at least a little, but... one girl in particular is INSANELY critical. Particularly of the Aeneid, which I'm liking more and more the more I read of it.

Like... after we read Book Two, which is about the fall of Troy, she was talking about how Aeneas' wife was dying was his own fault for letting her walk behind him rather than in front of him. I was actually quite moved when I read that section, and the scenes before it, with Aeneas leading the Trojans in a last charge (they almost all die, obviously).

Then she (and most of the rest of the group) were talking about the scene in Book Three where Aeneas discovers the grave of Polydorus (a relative of his who was murdered) because the ground starts bleeding as if it was really bizarre, which... well, yeah, it's weird. Personally, though, I'd describe it as 'surreal and creepy'. I liked it. ;_;

My English Literature group is the same a lot of the time. They almost all seem to have this kind of 'meh' reaction to everything we study. It's always either 'yeah, it's alright' or 'I don't really like it'. It's not like that in all my subjects - most people in my philosophy and ethics group almost always seem to have opinions on what we study.

I really don't like my English group. I just don't get why they all chose the subject...

I have finished the dull sculpture essay, just about - I wrote half of it by hand, and left that half at school. I shall have to type it up tomorrow.

This meant i had to spend tonight writing about Othello instead. But I'm actually in quite a good mood, because it's just about done... albeit rather later than I'd like (quarter to ten) because my sister wouldn't let me use the computer when I wanted it. >_< Oh, and I was planning to do the rather simpler and less time consuming task of typing up and editing my classics essay. >__< But oh, well. Tis done.

This may mean I have time to plan my RS coursework tomorrow morning (I'm free till just before lunch). I have yet to do this. I really should.

And... damn, my printer is taking it's time!

The good news is that my new shoes have almost passed into a rather nice phase when they are lose enough not to be painful, but tight enough that they don't fall off. My old shoes came off quite often. Sometimes I would accidentally tred on the back. This was bad. It hurt. A lot.

The bad news is that I'm supposed to be writing an essay on Greek Sculpture. More precisely, Greek Architectural Sculpture. More precisely still, Archaic Greek Architectural Sculpture. In this context, 'archaic' means 'kind of crappy and dull'. This is an example of what I will have to write about.
On the plus side, though, it shouldn't be long till I will get to study something more like this. : D

Another piece of bad news is that I am very, very hungry. I may eat the mousemat that's in here (library computer room). I'm not even using it (they tend to slide around a lot).

'He spoke, and quietly signalled to Patroclus with a movement of his eyebrows to make up a bed for Phoenix...'

Either Achilles has incredibly expressive eyebrows, Patroclus is psychic, or they've spent so much time sitting there on strike that they've developed and intricate eyebrow code to pass the time, and confuse the hell out of people for the next three thousand years or so. I'm going for that last option. It'd be just like Achilles to do something like that.

There's also a simile, which I'd quote if I could find it - unfortunately, I can't remember which book it was in - that compares something to people knocking down sandcastles. I wish I knew what it literally translates as. I doubt there's actually a Greek word for sandcastle.

Thoon... Podes... Dolops...

Okay, admittedly neither Thoon nor Podes sounds silly when you pronounce it properly (at least, I assume Thoon doesn't - I'm not actually sure how to say that one), but 'Dolops' is just pronounced like 'dollops'. Presumably it's like Pelops.

The Iliad = win.
I'm nearly done with it. They're having funeral games for Patroclus. ^_^ Who has a surprisingly bada dying speech - 'Already you stand in the shadow of death and inexorable destiny, slaughtered at the hands of Achilles...'
It boils down to 'Hector, you are goin' down!'
XD I like Patroclus, and evidently Homer does to - he refers to characters that he really, really likes as 'you'. He does it with Eumaeus in The Odyssey as well.

I'm tired. I've been awake for too long. I should be eating breakfast because I need to leave early today (last day, going home tomorrow, whee!).

So, um - yesterday was fun. I spent the morning with the manuscripts-library-type-people and got to see some really old books (eleventh and twelvth century). There was a copy of Virgil's Aeneid (which I studied in Latin) bound in velvet, and some really old prayer books - the colours hadn't faded at all. They were still all shiny with gold bits.

Then in the afternoon one of the web design people made some suggestions about this, which is an online version of my Grandfathers article on Mao Tse Tung. Very helpful, but I did have to keep pointing out that a)It was only ever meant to be accessed by readers of the journal it was published in, and b) I didn't do the formatting - just copy-pasted it.

Anyway, breakfast has now begun, so I will begone.