Don't you cry no more
For today. Today was a surprisingly good day. I was prepared for philosophy class and understood the material...which I thought I wouldn't be prepared but had given up on the homework last night, but we did not even touch Kant this morning and we're not done with Plato yet. Hurray? I don't know. All I'm proud of is I spoke up in class, even if my essays continue to suck. (Yeah, if that continues much longer I might go see the teacher and ask for some insight.)
English was wonderful as usual. So much comprehension, but so much fun! Even if it is poetry. Oddly enough, I didn't mention this yesterday but I talked with Al during lunch that day and somehow we started talking about English class and our preferences between poetry and prose. I said that I never really liked poetry, save Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot's cat poems. She said she never really had the patience for analyzing prose; our conclusion was that analyzing poetry was a learned skill, and something she picked up in her high school classes and something I never really got a chance to fully develop. Plus as poetry was not a favored form of expression in my family, I had a natural disposition against it (which looking back on it is odd because in a sense I DID grow up with poetry, I just never saw it as such). Al mentioned she liked poetry because there's a message, or some sort of conviction, in only a few lines. I said I preferred epics, as they are more proselike and (generally) have a recognizable storyline to me, and that most poetry to me accessed an emotional level I just for some reason can't grasp. I like prose because there's a story, and I grew up with story and feel far more comfortable analyzing something that feels far more concrete to me (don't ask why poetry isn't when it's so descriptive. I don't know why it feels vague to me). I like long stories, and I like sitting through stories and absorbing them, whereas my friend doesn't believe she has the patience to sit through all of that and deal with story. Oddly enough, I prefer prose that sounds beautiful, lyrical and poetic, and we both enjoy vivid imagery in what we read. I need the right imagery, otherwise I can't get into the book. And then we talked about our first experiences with the Harry Potter books and how we didn't like Sorcerer's Stone the first time we read it because we didn't understand, but after the movie we went back and realized what we hadn't figured out before. I need a visual palette from which I can create images.
That was too long, but I hope at least somewhat insightful? Well it was for me, and that's what counts. I'm definitely getting a shake tonight, work be damned.
Edit/: Before I forget, my professor was right: Arabic language and grammar is a thing of beauty. Though numbers are a little tough (in Arabic, you read right to left like in Hebrew but numbers themselves are written/read left to write), and I still get confused every once in a while. But I love this language even if it does drive me insane. <3