Bathroom Cleaning: Now With Added Fun!

It's kind of a good idea to clean your bathroom on regular basis. If you don't, it's gross and nasty, and then when your RD tells you it's time for bathroom inspections, you have a lot of work to do.

...or you can clean your bathroom on a regular basis and still have a lot of work to do. Which is how I came to be standing on a chair in the shower, scraping soap scum off the ceiling. Seriously, how do you get soap scum on the ceiling? It must not be that difficult, because there was more up there than there was on the rest of the shower combined.

Well, I assume it was soap scum. Whatever it was, it's something that shows up under a blacklight. Apparently they use blacklights to inspect the bathrooms (fact: when they actually inspected the bathroom, they didn't), so we borrowed one from the front desk. Which is how I came to be standing on a chair in the shower, scraping soap scum off the ceiling in the dark.

I guess it makes it more interesting?

The inspection was during my class time, so my lovely roommate was in the room for it. When I got back from class, I found that our RD had come and gone and left a note in the bathroom. We passed! Huzzah! It even said our bathroom was pretty much spotless!

Except for this one note on the bottom of the paper:

I mean, I kind of saw that coming, but still...

Blast.

So Much Awesome

I apologize for the number of times I mention my Greek class on this blog. I know not everyone is particularly fascinated by the grammatical constructions of ancient Greek (and believe me, although I'm definitely at least kind of a nerd, I'm not always fascinated by them either). If you're sick of my going on about Greek, feel free to skip this. If you're not, great! Please read on.

In my Greek review class, we've been slowly making our way through the original Greek of John 8. Today, our prof showed us Codex Sinaiticus online. And it is pretty much the most awesome thing I have seen all week.

Codex Sinaiticus is the one of the oldest and most complete manuscripts of the Greek Bible that we have today, including much of both the Septuagint (Old Testament) and the New Testament. It was probably copied some time in the fourth century. These days, it's on display in a museum where people come to look at old manuscripts. Except they're usually more excited about the Beatles manuscripts on display next to it.

This is what John 1:1-38 looks like in the ancient Greek of Codex Sinaiticus. It isn't very easy to read (for a Greek beginner like me, anyway) because books back then were written as was convenient for the scribe, not for the reader, since they were so valuable and took such a long time to make. Hence, the letters are all capital, there's no punctuation, and there are no spaces between the words. But I can recognize the letters and some of the words, especially since the museum people have kindly transcribed it into lowercase words with spaces. And that's just so awesome. I'm looking at a manuscript from some 1600 years ago, and I can read it. I can pronounce "Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἧν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἧν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἧν ὁ λόγος. οὗτος ἧν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν." I know that it means "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning."

The Bible is so cool.

I don't really know if I'm a grammar nerd or a classics nerd or a Greek nerd or a Bible nerd or what. Whatever I may be nerdy about, I'm not ashamed of being a nerd. In fact, I quite enjoy it. Why? Because:

College Kids

Yesterday I finished a book I've been in the process of reading for a while. (That's how books tend to go with me at college: when I have time, I start a few chapters, then I don't have time for a while, then finally I do have time and read the rest of it even if I don't quite remember the first part.) The book is called Quiet, and it's about introverts, of which I am one. This has gotten me thinking a bit about being who I am as an introvert – and being an introvert at college.

In the book, the author explains how in Western culture, the extroverted personality is the ideal. If that's the case, then college in that culture is the land of the extrovert. Think about it: what's the image of college portrayed in the media? Staying up late, blaring loud music, constantly checking phones, doing crazy events around campus, dancing, partying, blah, blah, blah. You want to be the person who's always on the go, has places to be and friends to hang out with. You don't want to be the person who stays in the dorm, reading a book on a weekend and going to bed by midnight. If that's the best thing you can come up with to do on a Friday night, you must be sad, strange, nerdy, or – heaven forbid – antisocial.

We seem to have this idea in our heads that if we want to be quiet, especially on a college campus, there must be something wrong with us. But as it turns out, one third to one half of us are introverts. We naturally like environments that aren't exploding with stimuli. We might be perfectly happy to sit in our dorm rooms with our headphones on and play solitaire on the floor for an hour or so before we go back to running about like the campus squirrels – and there might not be anything "wrong" that makes us that way. It's just a matter of being different.

So yes, I go to college, but I'm not exactly your stereotypical "college kid." It's fine that other people are. In fact, it's great. Go ahead – stay up late, dance to your loud music, do crazy events around campus – and enjoy it. Do. Be your extroverted self, because this world needs both introverts and extroverts. I'll join you sometimes. We can learn together and learn from each other. Just know that when I retreat to the quiet of my room, it's not because I'm antisocial. It's because I'm a different variety of college kid.

Hiatus

As the dates by the side of this post will show, I haven't written on this blog in a while. I had a very busy November and December (NaNoWriMo + papers + research project + finals + etc.), and then it was Christmas break and I was home. In short, life happened.

So now I'm back at school, learning about C.S. Lewis for our three week interim (known in some circles as a J-term). Hopefully I'll be writing a little more often now. But (home)work before pleasure, as they say.

I suppose the point is I'm here. Sometimes I write stuff. Sometimes I have homework. Sometimes (when I have time) I do both. Lately I've been overusing parentheses (as seen in this post).

Please excuse my rambling. In conclusion, here's a brief limerick I heard this summer at Harbor Choral Festival. It made me laugh. If you know limericks, hopefully it will make you smile too.

There was an old man from Milan
Whose limericks never would scan
When told this was so,
He said, "Yes, I know,
But I always try to fit as many syllables into the the last line as ever I possibly can."