Horrible Nightmare.

The other night I had a horrible nightmare - I was outside my house in Michigan, and it was raining torrentially, and I was walking down the hillside to the lake, to a marsh area on the leftside of our property, then I look over to the neighbor's dock and it's submerged under six inches of water, and I know that I have to run over to it joyfully and walk across it while it's submerged, though lightning is coming, so I go do that. Immediately after coming back in off the dock, I start to go back up the hillside and angle towards our door on the deck, and I can't, the rain is so heavy and the wind is so hard. I slump up against a tree on our property line and can barely breathe or move, and this 20-something (Asian) woman who I know is staying with us comes and fetches me before the lightning strikes, and slumps me against her body to drag me off and up to the house. In the house, the atmosphere is oppressive and I can barely breathe, and there's a crowd of people in the foyer near the room where my father is sleeping, and this other 20-something (Asian) woman who I know is also staying with us comes up with a member of my family and tells me not to go see my father, that it's actually nothing, and as I go through the people in the foyer, which is dimly lit as if by candlelight though no candles can be seen, I see my father staggering around with spasmodic, unearthly jerks, even falling into people and then backing up and blindly walking off and staggering into someone else, and all the while this horrible deep spittly rasping voice pouring out of his mouth, and I instantly know he's possessed. I try to call out, "I rebuke you in the name of Christ," but my paralysis has returned and I'm frozen, and I try to start saying, "I rebuke you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," and I start to say it and instantly I'm awake, and I'm shouting the middle of the phrase to my sunlit apartment. I had actually woken up out of fear. A friend was staying with me since she just moved back to Chicago and needed some place to stay till she got her apartment, and luckily she's a deep sleeper and I think I only called out 3-4 words, though I did shout them at the top of my voice, I think.

Carmina Burana (2 of 2): Poems for my students...

Because the poems were delightful and short and many of them were grammatically rather simple, I found a booklet of them at the library and made a photocopy of one for a student to present at my lesson, since he's 2/3 of the way through his Latin textbook he's self-studying from, and can handle the grammar, and has been enjoying the selected grammatically-simple (Classical) poems that the textbook presents.

He liked that, so I just went and scanned the rest of the lyrics and emailed it to him and told him to bring it to lessons and we could do that translation on an ad hoc basis if he sailed through a lesson.  He wrote back:

Thanks!  I’ll print a copy before our next lesson so we can peruse. I’ll also get to the library either today after work or tomorrow at lunch to pick up the dictionary and will get to work on the translation.  Great idea, by the way.  I’m very excited about this.  

 He is like mid-20s, graduated from a good state school, and works at a dept. on campus, and is learning Latin recreationally...  He's paying me $30/hour for me to show up and correct his homework and supplement the textbook as needed (though we usually just meet for 30-40min. a week, so I just make a quick $15-20), so I was hoping this would get him enthused even more, and that way when he finishes the textbook he'll hire me on for maybe $40/hour (justifiable because of the extra lesson prep) to do translation with me.

It seems to have worked!  And it's so much fun, too.

Carmina Burana (1 of 2): What great poetry.

The other weekend there was a free concert of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana downtown. Unfortunately they used the piano and percussion arrangement and not a full orchestra, which kind of sucked, but I still read the poems that were in Latin, and that made it well worth it...

They had the lyrics in the guide, and I was able to sightread a lot of them along with the music, even picking out some typos here and there.

One of my favorites was from a song about the tavern:

 In taverna quando sumus 
non curamus quid sit humus.

Or, in other words (roughly):

When we're at the bar 
we don't care about death!

- only, it has a punchy rhyme.

I texted a medievalist friend out of sheer joy, and we started talking about this and that (he has taught some of the poems), and he told me they were composed by wandering Latin scholars who drank a lot, which I immediately identified with.

I also composed my own little ditty and texted it to him:

Quanto bibo in tavernis
tanto dis me do infernis.

Or, in other words (roughly):

However much I drink at bars,
By that much I give myself to the infernal gods.

Only, it has a punchy rhyme!

My father's advice on writing evaluations.

So I talked with my father for a while about how to write up my one homeschooler's rec, since she isn't doing well in Latin and hasn't mastered basic skills, and my dad has experience with that from having been a high school teacher.

He made 2 good points, after I told him that this would be a general eval for placement later on in classes, and to show how much work was done:

1) Be realistic, but always stress the positive.

2) Frame things in such a way that even if someone isn't there yet, that with continued effort they will be.

I really liked that last point.  As he said, someone can come across a recommendation years down the line, and if you say things like that, they'll read it and realize how far they've come, or realize that they never overcame that, and have the maturity to see that you evaluated them fairly.

Year-end lesson was a bomb.

For my year-end lesson for my homeschooler, I surprised her with an activity where we translated "My Heart Will Go On" into Latin, but it ended up being a bomb despite fun conversations like:

1) When Celine says "every night in my dreams/ I see you/ I feel you", what kind of "feel" is she talking about - like 'sense', or like 'touch'?  After my homeschooler said 'sense' and then gave reasons why, I was like, "And if she meant 'touch', the movie *definitely* wouldn't have gotten a PG-13 rating."

2) We had to decide what "go on" means, in the phrase "my heart will go on".  We opted for the "continue/persevere" sense; it made sense in all the instances of usage in the song.

3) We had to take seriously the phrase "Love was when I loved you", which I'm still not sure what it means.

She was just overworked and tired, though, and she really doesn't like Latin, so she just didn't enjoy it.  We had had a late afternoon lesson, and I wonder if she would have enjoyed it more if we had had a morning start time when she's usually fresher.

As I told her when she just looked tired and annoyed, "You'll look back on this when you're older and realize how much fun it was."

Yet another dream!!!

Last night I had an odd dream - I was in this small wooden cabin on a top bunk, and I was a camp counsellor, and there were like all these rambunctious (Mexican) 8 year olds kicking the bunk, talking, etc., so I couldn't get to sleep, and I just stared at the ceiling while the light from a full moon streamed in the window.

(Was this from watching "Moonrise Kingdom" the other week, where one of the main characters was a boyscout leader at camp?)

In the morning, I'm in a convention center next door, and I have a feeling that my redheaded birth mother is there. Near the back wall of the convention, there she is at a small table selling hemp bracelets set out on a small wooden peg tree and handmade soaps and is dressed like a hippie, with her hair pulled back under a Renaissance (sp.?) Faire-style headband, and dressed in in soft flow-y robe over a peasant blouse, the blouse of like an off-white and the robe of earth tones and olive. She seems embarrassed to see me because she's dressed like a hippie, but her daughter is there with the soap in front of her, and tells me how they made up the soap at home as part of a project and are now selling it.

(Was this from passing by a street fair on my way to the beach yesterday, where people were selling homemade clothes toiletries etc.?)

 Then, I'm at this restaurant-bar next door, with a glass wall to the left and a large wooden bar in the middle, and it's very sunny and pleasant. Everyone is there in business suits and very professional clothes, including my birthmother, who is on the other side of the bar from me. Again, she looks embarrassed, and turns away from me slightly to talk to some business-suited men next to her, and she deliberately doesn't catch my eye.

Another dream.

Like over a month ago I dreamt I woke up and looked at my alarm clock, and on the side of the digital clock was the letters:


2 MIN LEFT

. . .