Uneventful day.
Roman Lit is all about sex poems right now. It's only interesting because there was no such thing as homosexuality in the ancient world. Our teacher was talking about the word homosexual itself and how it was invented (in 1890-something) to be a mix of Greek (homo) and Latin (sexual) in order to sound legitimate when in reality it is totally illegitimate. There was nothing wrong with being gay--as long as it was with a younger boy. The poems themselves are all pretty crude though and it's entertaining to hear our posh Englishman teacher read and explain them so seriously.
Trad is getting a bit hard to follow. We have an essay, a listening exam, and the final exam. The essay titles are very hard. I have no idea which one I'm going to do yet or where to start on any of them. It's hard because this is the specific subject our teacher did his PHD on--the rise/emergence of Traditional Irish music. I think he's expecting a lot. His lectures are getting a little unfocused too and it's hard to tell what's important to know for the final exam because I think he just genuinely enjoys talking about the subject and he tangents freely.
Sociology was entertaining. We had to this excerpt from a larger work by a journalist who went undercover as a low wage worker a few weeks ago. And today in lecture we watched 10 minutes of a "musical documentary" (the first and last made apparently) which featured the journalist. It was really weird. The lecture itself apart from the video was a lot of graphs and statistics about poverty and Ireland and how around the world having a job doesn't necessarily mean you are above the poverty threshold.
Okay one thing about the Irish accent that drives me crazy is that they don't always pronounce "th" the same way. "That" and "they" and "them" and "there" are all the same. Three is tree. Threshold is tresh-old. It's jarring whenever I hear new ones. I've gotten used to "tree," and "tanks," and "footpat" for footpath which is a sidewalk. But threshold was a surprise today.
The thing about the lecture was that it seemed out of sequence or something. All the lectures until today were about theories--Role-Learning, Functionalism, Goffman, Marx, Weber, whoever--and then today she spent about twenty seconds saying how you could apply different theories to the issue of unskilled labor and poverty. It's just kind of hard to know what's important to remember.
I actually enjoyed Athens lecture tonight. It was about pre-Socratic philosophy, and the teacher had a lot to get through so he didn't have as much time to stop and preach at us. The philosophers were getting into it after they stopped believing in the Olympian Gods. So once they dismissed the gods they had to figure out what rules the universe--some said water, a bunch said air, one guy said fire. Nobody mentioned today said Earth--I found that curious. The cool ones though were the guys all into paradoxes. Parmenides said there is nothing buy being and non being. If something exists it doesn't not exist and anything that doesn't exist cannot come into being. And nothing changes. He's the guy that said if something occupies it's own space it's not moving. So an arrow shot from a bow is occupying it's own space in time, so it's not moving. False. He's also the guy that said if two people are racing and one guy gets a head-start, the guy that goes first will always win no matter how fast the second guy is. That's because the first guy gets to a certain point right? But by the time the second guy gets to that same point, the first one has already moved on, and so on and so on forever and ever. False. It's interesting because all Parmenides' other philosopher buddies knew he was full of shit, but they couldn't disprove. Nobody disproved him until Aristotle 300 years later. I think that is so cool.
The other cool guys are the ones that thought up the atom. Everything being made up of something too small to see--the smallest thing imaginable, so small it can't be split. Too bad the bloody scientists know how to split atoms now.
I took a successful 45 minute nap in the middle of the day. I've been really tired the last few days.
Ran into Darya in the post room. Said hi. She signed up for the Killarney weekend trip too. Grand. Expect lots of corny pictures.
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