introducing comparative adjectives next week and realizing that I have the perfect opportunity to make students read the terrible poetry that Polyphemus composes for Galatea in Ovid

—the rest is silence.

they're everywhere (in every ablative absolute with consulibus) for those with eyes to see

telling my intro Latin class about the forbidden present participle of esse

what a day to find out that mayonnaise is named after 3rd-century Carthaginian general Mago Barca. never letting anyone tell me classics isn't relevant.

I have a joke about that guy sitting across from you who seems to me like a god but I have no voice left in my mouth with which to tell it.

received text reading "Rebecca, Tuesday is Election Day in IL! Based on recent elections, your voter turnout grade is 100%. Who you vote for is private, but whether you vote is public info. Vote if you haven't already! -NextVote Stop to end"

this is an incredibly effective motivator to get me to the polls because I absolutely DO want to get a good grade in voting

"dissertation methodology" I will be consulting the ancient tomes

Speak hands for me!

[They stab Caesar.]

CAESAR
The ides of March are come.

SOOTHSAYER
Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

Is not tomorrow, boy, the ides of March?

writing a fellowship application to be reviewed by a committee of non-classicists like. hm. do I need to specify what I mean by "the fifth century BCE"???

the curse of writing about Aristophanes is the number of times you have to explicitly say "x is funny"

typing "birds" into wikipedia and confidently hitting enter as if that's going to take me directly to the page for the Aristophanes play

it feels very unfair that I've got my big landmark Thucydides out for the work I'm doing on this chapter about tragedy. that is emphatically not what I signed up for when I chose a dissertation topic.

the Ancient Drama in Performance conference at Randolph College does exactly this! it turns out that the mere threat of a Fury is usually enough to get everyone to stick to time, but she absolutely will drag you off to drink your blood if you go over. which should be the case at all conferences.

and I should be able to apologize personally to everyone I have inconvenienced with the books that I myself have had checked out for over a year

I have my suspicions about who it is, but I should be able to message whoever's had the book that I want checked out for over a year and ask them if they can scan a chapter for me

favorite page of the dissertation so far is the one where I have four separate footnotes going "*except for Oedipus at Colonus"

enough about haunting the narrative, what about haunting the dissertation???

at least this time the person who wrote his obituary for a journal had the decency to mention the scholar's 1944-1945 German military service in the opening paragraph about his early life????

I have GOT to stop submitting library requests for articles and books in Italian if I'm just going to avoid reading them for months once I have them

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college:
The Wizard of Oz in Context
Visions of the End
Michelangelo to Mussolini: The Classical Tradition in Rome
Queering the Bible
Homer's Illiad (sic)

comment on a word document by Rebecca Posner-Hess reading "check if this is actually true"

oh I feel that

apparently my role in this department is going through people's works-in-progress and correcting their use of vocabulary that suggests textile manufacturing processes that are anachronistic for that period of antiquity

I'm thankfully usually reading more recent scholarship these days but it's always jarring when books from the 70s and 80s consistently refer to other male scholars by last name only and then suddenly start talking about what "Miss Dale" has to say on the matter

not bad (me after skimming a monograph that’s taken a decade to research, write)

the word "maenads" with an autocorrect pop-up suggesting "men"

seems a bit off but okay

currently going through my own draft and trying to straighten out where I talk about 'Athene' vs where I talk about 'Athena'. choices were made.

nothing like googling "how much meat in a cow" to make me feel like I'm doing real classical philology