Drunk-Driving in Milwaukee.

I am scared shitless by all the drunk drivers I've seen here in Milwaukee... Biking home at night, I've seen some seriously hammered people driving and swerving, and being pulled over. If I bike at night - which is something I do at home - I find myself looking the wrong way down one-way streets to make sure no-one is coming up them - something I never do at home.

Also, the other day me and my one Canadian roommate were watching tv, and this local funeral home had an ad on for a Harley-themed hearse, that was like this little black carriage with red flames that's drawn by a motorcycle, in the case of the ad being ridden by some big burly white guy with a large beard and sunglasses.

E-mail from a Spanish friend who's in Spain...

...in response to an initial email wishing him and his nation good luck in beating the Dutch:

Hey David, we've done it!!!!! World Champions!!!!! Biggest party ever started tonight!!!!! Que Viva España!!!!!!

I don't think I've ever remembered him using exclamation marks before at all, too!

Very odd coincidence...

One of my undergrad roomies is this redhead kid from Harvard who studies the Classics, seems slightly gay, and is a raging asshole...

The priest had a minimum age of 23 when he did the class in Rome, but I think he lifted it for Milwaukee since American kids won't go as hog wild here, and also because he's re-starting the class after his absence of a year, and because like 5 undergrads wrote him and did really well on the tests.

Overall, of the 5 undergrads, 2 are nice but don't study esp. hard (but then again, neither do a lot of the older people); 2 are very very intense in a young way, but they're really engaged in the material, which is great; and then there's this kid.

Twice like the second day of class, when I asked the priest a question on a complicated point of grammar I didn't understand, he shook his head no because he thought the question was misguided...

He did the same thing the other week, when the priest asked me for to state the translation I had done on my homework, and I declined, saying I had made a mistake where I thought this one word used the dative and had done so throughout my entire homework (it takes the accusative; I had looked it up, but had misread an example given in the dictionary entry).

This kid also reads incredibly incredibly fast whenever it's his turn to translate and then quickly translates into English, since it's like a challenge to him to do that, though no one else can follow along (most other people when sight-reading try to read the text in sense units, so everyone can try to understand it as it comes).

He also knows a shitload of words, like "distaff", and the names of types of woods and plants.

And, when he makes a mistake in translating and the priest gently corrects him, he says shit like, "I knew that," or, "I meant to say that."

Which, all in all, shows you that the basic assumption in his academic interactions is to show that he knows more and is better than everyone... Really, it's a very Classics-y ethos; the whole idea of the ancient Classics education system was to know the literature and be able to catch references and make them and know obscure words and talk in difficult grammatical constructions, and this kid buys into the values of cultural superiority and exaggerates it to an extreme degree...

He also never looks at anyone in the class except the priest, and when he does, it's with this incredibly sexual look, like someone leering at someone else in a bar, and it makes him look like a total starfucker, only it's kind of like a Tom Ripley thing, since he not only wants to fuck the priest, but he also wants to be him too.

He ended up moving into my apt., and I don't even say hello to him. Since, if he means to be an asshole (which I don't think he does), why would I want to interact with him, and if he doesn't mean to be an asshole, why would I want to be friendly or acquaintances with a person who's an asshole without even realizing it?... He's picked up on this, and if I have the fridge door open and I'm getting shit out and it's blocking his way, he doesn't even ask me to close it, but he just waits for me to finish before he passes.

Anyhow, he sits around the apartment a lot, and he always reads classics - either English ones in translation, or dialogues of Plato in Greek with English academic commentaries - which is kind of like how I used to read, I think, before I realized that memoirs were better literature than most things ever written.

I also wonder if I have ever behaved like him in class, with that self-focused behavior.

It's like looking into a twisted mirror image of me... He even wears Harvard shirts everywhere, something I've never ever done except in select on-campus circumstances, since I don't want to set myself apart from people (which seems to be the one thing he wants to do more than anything else).

Me and this other guy in class who has great Latin (he's a high school teacher, I go to him for help and he guides me through things in a very nice way) were talking about classmates the other day and he doesn't like the kid either.

"But he has mad skills, though," he was like, and he brought up how he sight-read the word for 'distaff'.

"That may be true," I was like, "But I can look shit up in a dictionary, and not being an asshole is a skill too," and I said that there's always people who are better than you at shit, and something you have to develop in academia is cordial relationships with people who can cover your blindspots, and if this redheaded little fuck continues to behave like this, I highly doubt anyone ever would want to check a translation of his or some bullshit.

Why the priest may not always like me.

There's times in class when we're reading early christian or medieval texts and someone has a question, "Well couldn't it mean this?", or "What's up with this weird phrase?", and after the priest has said something like "Don't worry about that," I usually call attention to the fact that it's likely repeating/echoing language from a biblical passage (the priest often notes the same point, but not always), and suggest that if they're interested, they check out such-and-such a passage, because that might help clarify things and narrow down the range of possible meanings.

Also, a few times people have drawn attention to weird terminology in exegetical texts, and I've pointed out that it's actually terminology from grammatical and rhetorical education employed in a christian context, and briefly state why (the priest isn't up on that line of research, which is too bad, it actually explains a ton of aspects of the texts we're looking at)...

I figure it's no problem, since we're discussing meaning and translation, and I'm only volunteering shit I know about to clarify those issues which are at stake in class, just like people do when they say stuff is like a Vergilian echo or some bullshit like that.

Only, there seems to be this other dynamic where people think they can understand technicalities of religious texts without knowing their context (perhaps because they assume all religious is simple, or accessible to anyone, or a matter of pontificating off of words you read?), or that the priest as a practitioner knows all about religion (one of the oldest mistakes, to think that people who are devotionally active are experts on the history theology etc. of their own tradition, though they do tend to know more than average), and so one person in particular who always asks the questions hears my explanation and then is like, "Well, I don't believe that" and then repeats the question specifically to the priest (who usually responds, "I don't know"), which makes me want to channel my mother and go off on the questioner and be like all telling him about how I spent 6 years of my life studying this bullshit and that he put the question out there for the class, so if he doesn't want to hear the answer, he shouldn't ask the question.

That same guy and another guy in class seem to be Catholics with issues, and they sometimes try to expound on the religous texts, and I gently correct them if they say something egregious, since if they're going to be experts for the class, they damn well better know what they're talking about.

What I've noticed, too, is that the priest is fine with me bringing up historical context or mentioned biblical passages, but not the grammar/rhetoric stuff - perhaps because he's never read those texts? I can tell from the way he changes the subject when I bring up those specific points.

Why the priest seems to like me...

He's mentioned the free weekly newspaper here, and then the other day when people were talking during a break from class, I brought up an event mentioned in the paper, and he brightened and was like, "You read [the free weekly newspaper]?", which gave me the sense that he likes Milwaukee and wants people to like it too.

I also wonder if it's the fact that I work really hard in class, but I also get out and do shit in the city, unlike other students... That's one of the reasons my (black) (female) dean likes me - as she's told me!

New cooking idea that turned out well.

I sliced kernels off of 3 cobs (so much tastier than canned, and it takes only a second), then chopped up a bit of onion and jalapeno pepper, then put it in a bowl and covered it with vinegar and a bit of salt and refrigerated it overnight.

Now, I use it as a pickled southwestern salad ingredient; I chop up some tomatoes and dump some of the corn mixture on it, add a little salt and olive oil, and I'm good to go with a salad to accompany dinner.

Stages in life.

3 of my 5 roommates are still undergrads, and 1 just graduated (the only one not like that is my Canadian roommate, who is like mid40s).

I find it interested to see what they eat and how they shop.

They still don't know prices yet, so they get produce from the convenience store downstairs where prices are twice what you'd find at a grocery store.

They also have a lot of shit frozen in the freezer (pizzas, hot pockets, etc.) that they eat up for food, and they also order out at least once a day (pizza, Chinese, etc.).

And, when I was cooking up pasta with an onion-tomato-olive oil sauce that was very basic, one of my roommates asked me how I made it, it smelled so good, and all I was doing was sauteeing onions and garlic in olive oil and then putting in sliced tomatoes with salt to get the juice out and boil it down.