Selected Greek Doodles

Some more of my limited artistic talent for your enjoyment.

First, here's a dinosaur. It was a decent drawing day, so I got a decent dinosaur.

Here's Batty and Black looking at a bulletin board for Chao Kindergarten. It says Chao Kindergarten at the top, but it's kind of hard to read.

On the left, Black and Sunsun are riding in a hot air balloon advertising a movie that doesn't actually exist: Chao In Space 2. On the right, Batty is dangling from a helium balloon advertising Chao In Space. Poor Batty. He always got the raw end of the deal.

Here's a hippo, because none of my doodles would be complete without a hippo. You can kind of see the next one through the page.

Here's a cow. You may notice that it looks remarkably similar to my hippo. Like I said, limited artistic talent.

More chao. Here we're having some kind of pool party. Up top we have Sunsun on a swing. Ghostly is standing nearby while Gray swings on a tire swing. Below, Black and Joy are unpacking a picnic while Pickles goes snorkeling in the pool. There's also a beach ball, but it kind of got cut off in the picture. Batty is about to swing into the pool on a rope swing, but he seems to have forgotten to look before he leaps... silly Batty. Trix are for rabbits.

Llama.

This is a rocket ship. My friend Alysha and I always used to draw rocket ships in stats. I guess I was feeling nostalgic. For stats. Sure.

Here's some actual work. I only include this because of what was written at the bottom of the page, which I erased so no one would look over my shoulder during class and think, "You are a sad, strange person." Except now I'm posting it on my blog, so... don't judge, okay? I was very frustrated with this sentence when I wrote it, because I worked on the thing for an hour and I still don't know what it says. Anyway, it said something like this: "I am not [name of classmate who is very smart and also very good at all things Classics]. I am Erin. That is perfectly acceptable. Even if sentence number twenty is worse than weasel bites. Seriously."

This picture is brighter because I turned the light on. That helped. It's still rather hard to read. This is because I was writing left-handed, which I am not. Here's what it says:

[why are you smiling?]
because I know something you don't know
[what is that?]
I am not left-handed

That's a quote from The Princess Bride if you haven't seen that movie or didn't recognize the quote. I'd rather be watching it than trying to translate Greek right now. Oh well. Back to work. Sigh.

On Choosing a College Major

I'm like Link.

Link is a hero. Well, he's supposed to be.

The problem with being a hero is that he has to become one first. And becoming a hero doesn't come easily. He has to go on a journey, and not just any journey. A quest – leave the island, infiltrate the fortress, find the treasure, slay the monsters, rescue the princess, get the sword, restore the power, defeat the evil, save the world – and that's only the half of it.

The thing about quests, though, is that they aren't always that easy either.

Sometimes, while Link's out searching for the treasure so he can continue with his quest to save the world, he gets stuck. He finds himself standing in a room that's just a circle, and all that's in that circular room are doors.

Lots and lots of doors.

Link goes up to the first door, but it's locked. Link tries a different door, but it's locked too. He moves to another door, and this one opens.

But when Link gets inside, all he finds are some monsters who want to end his quest so evil can rule the world. Link fights the monsters, and in the end he defeats them. He goes to open the treasure chest, and what does he find inside?

Not the treasure he's looking for. Instead, he finds a key. A key to the next room.

Link goes back into the first room and opens another door with his key and goes on in. And there are more monsters. He fights them, and when he wins, he opens the treasure chest, and there inside it is another key.

So Link takes the key and goes in the next door, and the next one, and the next one, and it's always the same. Fight the monsters, get the treasure (such as it is), and go out. Lather, rinse, repeat. Some fights are easier; some fights are harder. Sometimes he tries his key in the wrong door; sometimes it lets him right in.

Sometimes Link gets sick of it. Can't one door have something other than just another monster waiting to attack him? Can't one treasure be something other than a way into the next room? Can't one lock just be open in the first place so he doesn't have to go back and find another key? Link gets tired of trying doors. He wants the next door to be the right one. He doesn't want the next door to be locked or to just show him where the next door to try is or hide another monster. He wants to find the real treasure and get out of here.

But he can't. That original door, the one that let him into the room in the first place, has bars over it. No key is going to let him go back. So he's stuck here, trying doors.

Eventually, Link gets to the last room. This has to be it, he thinks. Now he'll get the real treasure. He beats the monster, and what does he get?

Nothing.

He goes back out into the main room, the one with all the doors, and what does he find there but more monsters. And not just any monsters. These are the toughest monsters yet.

The battle is long and hard, but finally, finally, he does it. He wins. He defeats the monster, and it disappears in a puff of black smoke. And there appears in that room with all the doors a treasure chest.

Link is battered and bruised and beaten and broken, but he pulls himself together, picks up his sword and shield, and pries the lid off of that chest. And inside, there it is. The treasure. The real one.

The bars slide off the door that let him into the room however long ago that was. He stumbles out through it, but when he gets out he stands up with his head held high. His work isn't done – he just got the treasure so he could keep going with his bigger quest. There are more doors ahead of him, he knows. The path this door has put him on is probably going to change.

Sometimes it's going to feel easy. Most of the time it isn't. But he knows – he knows – that he has help along the way. He doesn't have to do this alone. Even when it feels like he's alone, he isn't.

I'm like Link.

Link isn't quite a hero. But that's okay.

He's just in the process of becoming one.

Double Duty

I like connections. I think it's interesting when something I've learned or stumbled across one place shows up somewhere else when I'm not expecting it. And then there are things that are similar enough to begin with that I almost expect to cross over at some point. Such were my classes today – two of them, anyway.

The funny thing about these two classes is that they take place in the same room on the same days, and sometimes the prof of one class will mention the other in passing, which I suppose comes from sharing the room. Between those two classes (and until my half semester classed finished, it was three), I spend a lot of time in that room.

I guess some points of concurrence are to be expected, since the first class is Church and Society and the second class is Christian Theology. Lately in Church and Society (or CMS for short, since it's from the Congregational and Ministry Studies department), we've been talking about the theological side of the church. Earlier in the semester it was more the sociological side. In Christian Theology (or religion for short, since it's from the Religion department), we've been talking about... theology. Surprise.

So today in religion we talked about ecclesiology, which is a big word that's short for the study of the church. I imagine you can see where this is going. Ecclesiology is pretty much what we talk about every day in CMS. I went to CMS today and we talked about sacraments, the culture of the church, the purpose of the church, a little about the visible and invisible church (spent a lot of time on that earlier in the semester) and other things. I went to religion today and we talked about sacraments, the purpose of the church, and the visible and invisible church, and other things.

I kind of feel like I went to the same class twice. The subject material is pretty interesting, so it was okay. Religion just felt a little repetitive, since we went over all these things in more depth in CMS. Part of me thinks I could've worked on my CMS research project instead. But that's not really a reason to skip class.

Connections are still cooler than less detailed repetition, though.

Keyboard Conundrums

Ah, vocabulary. If I didn't have to spend so much time memorizing it, I would probably like it much more than I do now. Although I actually do kind of like vocab. Especially since I study ancient languages – I enjoy learning new words in English by learning Greek and Latin. Or learning how to pretend I know what some English words mean by uncovering their classical language roots. And I can play with the words and use them in writing. Or name blogs after them.

There's this awesome online flashcard website that I was introduced to in eighth grade. Since then, it's gotten me through four years of high school Latin and now nearly a semester of college Greek. Typing in my Latin flashcards was pretty easy – I just had to figure out how to do a macron (this thing: ¯), and I knew everything else already. Helps that English uses the Roman alphabet.

Greek, however, does not use the Roman alphabet. The Greeks came before the Romans, and they, surprisingly enough, used the Greek alphabet (fun fact: the word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta). So learning Greek meant learning the Greek alphabet – and for my flashcards, it meant learning how to type the Greek alphabet.

There's a handy little setting my computer has that lets me flip back and forth between different keyboards. That is, it makes the keys I press put out different characters. I have three keyboards I regularly use. There's your standard US keyboard, which I'm typing with now, the US extended keyboard, which I use to get the macron, and the Greek Polytonic keyboard, which I use to type Greek.

The problem is that I'll be typing along with my Greek keyboard, and then I have to go look something up. So I open up the Internet and type "google" or some such thing into the address bar. But instead of "google," I get this:

γοογλε.

Gah.

Thankfully, Google knows how to search for itself in Greek. But there are a lot of things it doesn't know how to search for when you accidentally search in the wrong alphabet. Plus it messes me up sometimes when I switch back to typing English, because I try to type where the Greek letters are instead of where the English letters are.

No, this doesn't really have a point. I just find myself accidentally typing in Greek sometimes. Ανδ τηατ δοεσν᾽τ μακε α λοτ οφ σενσε. Οη ςελλ. Τηατ᾽σ λιφε, Ι γθεσσ.