04-30-03 - 8:52 p.m.

On Monday Dr. Walton changed the due date on the exegesis paper from today to Friday. And I have to be out of town during the exam, so I'm taking that on Monday. This whole week I'm working at the museum, where I sit at the reception desk the whole time doing nothing, so I have lots and lots of time to do my paper. I have about half of it written, which is much better than usual. It's still tiring, though, even without the typical last-minute terror accompanying it. And for the exam I'm studying by reading through Genesis 10 chapters a day in an interlinear Hebrew Old Testament I checked out from the library. Interlinears are evil according to my professors, but this is a special case. The exam is straight translation. He gives us a starting point and we just translate as much as we can in two hours. Reading will help me much more than trying to memorize vocabulary and paradigm charts. But I don't think the test will be too bad. We can use a lexicon. So all that is to say that my last semester here seems to be fading out rather than ending with a crash, and that can only be good.

Now this. I've been reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (listening to it on tape, that is), and he hates that phrase, "Now this." :) It's used in the news to break off the viewer's concentration on the story that they were just hearing about and to introduce something that's utterly unrelated. It's like the opposite of a conjunction. Neil Postman is great. That book is brilliant. Go read it.

I'm still reading The Unseen Hand, and I just got in the mail two other ones I ordered, The United Nations' Global Straightjacket by Joan Veon and The New World Religion by Gary Kah to fill out the main areas Ralph Epperson doesn't cover.

And in other news, go visit April and Alpana! April works in our office at the library, and Alpana is one of my friends from high school whom I convinced to start an online diary.

Umm, the end!