A local institute of higher learning has an embarrassment of riches offered in the way of language courses this summer. This is convenient, because I have an urgent desire to apply myself to the acquisition of more language skills. It is double convenient that the school in question does not have the deliberately gatekeeping schedule that so many schools pretend happens by accident.*
So, though the intensive Latin course starts early enough to get the students fresh from a short family break after final papers, they are late enough at night to make it possible for people to come home from work, throw a sandwich at their children, and spend the remainder of the night at Latin class. Hooray!
I really need the structure of a class for a language, I find. I have all the resources for Latin, but I keep having to start over because it's very easy to put the "my hobby" thing down when the teacher stuff needs doing. And the teacher stuff always needs doing. I hope that with an instructor holding my feet to the fire, I'll prioritize the Latin a little higher up on the scale.
One thing. Teacherling at work heard "summer of the word nerd" and wanted in. He's a smart kid. So smart I almost forget he's barely in big boy pants sometimes. He's also extremely competitive in the "I will twist this issue every possible way until you tell me I win" way that young men often are. I don't tend to tell people they win if they are arguing disingenuously, because I am like that. When I was his age, I would have probably told him he was right to shut him up, but I am currently old and mean. Hilarity is almost guaranteed to ensue.
Local church has a Latin Mass which it has had forever, which makes the rector a heretic. Latin practice for me, a chance to live a memory for Mama. Good stuff all around. Except, I have read the rector's website and, um, he's the suckiest heretic that ever was heretical. I mean, generally I enjoy all things transgressive, but this dude totally ruins it. His heresy is of the "We demand that the authority beats us more often and more vigorously" kind that might make for an interesting weekend if you're into that sort of thing**, but is just awful in a person setting himself up as a sort of authority. So, I'm not sure I want to understand his Masses, because ew.
I am also annoyed with myself and a few of my peers. I'm exhausted by all the effort involved in examining my privileges only to turn around and find some more. I'm really tired of people who think it's OK to say patently un-OK things to me because I'll take the time to explain why they aren't OK instead of ripping their heads off. Am I doing anyone a favor by not ripping heads off? Do I even have the right to ask that question considering all the boneheaded things I do on a regular basis? I'm tired of the nagging assertion that everything I say today will horrify me six months from now, and that the best I can hope for is that I am not being terribly naive
all the time. Why is being just a reasonably self-aware and occasionally kind person such a project?
"What? You have to work a day job? Well, I'm sorry, but we just can't offer a graduate class in anything interesting to someone who is unable or unwilling to devote their whole selves to our course. I mean, if your life demands that you support yourself and others rather than depending on others to support you so that you can take a ridiculously underpaid, and extended "internship" at our institution, thereby allowing us to refrain from hiring people just like you hope one day to be, or at least allowing us to refuse to offer them work at a living wage, causing you to know fully goddamn well that you will be accruing massive debt and suffering opportunity cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a life of almost guaranteed penury, making this not only the most selfish thing you could choose in that matricide-by-failure way, but also the most foolish thing you could possibly choose in the bag-lady by severely limited earning potential plus no kids kind of way, then how can you possibly study hard enough to learn well enough that you can one day write a paper about the damaging effects of classism?" ***
**I am so not into that sort of thing.
***Yeah, I know. There's always plenty of irony to go around.
