Seminary is rough, and a funny story

Boy, this new semester sure is kicking my tail. For those who are curious, I'm taking Intermediate Hebrew, Biblical Aramaic, Inductive Bible Study on the Minor Prophets, and Vocation of Ministry. Three of the four are tough classes, with Aramaic, by far, being the most challenging.

Also for those curious, Aramaic is basically a later dialect of Hebrew. So, it's similar, but at the same time it is also very different. And it's kicking my tail.

There also has been a lot of stuff going on. I'm still working on getting acclamaited to the environment, namely that I don't know a whole lot of people yet. But, that'll change, I suppose.

Ok, now here's the funny story part...

On the first day of classes, I walked into the Hebrew class (who is taught by a Harvard Ph.D), and she asked all of us to write all the Hebrew background we've had on an index card. Of course, I put down that I had 4 years in college and two years of high school.

She had said that she doesn't give out many As in this class, and that if you get an A in her class, you are Ph.D material. If you don't, you're probably not Ph.D material. So I took that as a personal challenge.

After reading my index card, she sent me an e-mail. "Are you sure you want to be in this class, given your background?" I responded yes, simply because she has a reputation of being somewhat of a driller, and that's what I wanted. She responds:

"It's totally your call, but given your background, as far as getting an "A" in my class, well, you had better."

Yeah, Harvard Ph.D telling me this. No pressure. :\

Jon

A hellish day

I hate it when my family gets new computers.

First, they always expect me to set it up. No problem--I love setting up new technology. The killer is getting my dad's Quicken files all backed up. What's worse--we were going from Quicken 2005 XP to Quicken 2008 for Vista. Holy hell. It turned out to be simpler than I was making it, but my dad was saving all his quicken files to the backup folder, and to top it off, the computer was reading them from some other location. So, even though I backed up the "Backup" folder, none of those files were current. So we had to go and sort through three different versions of Quicken before we could find the most current files... it sucked.

On the bright side, the new computer my family got is a workhorse. 3.2 GHz quad-core with 3GB of RAM and a 512 NVidia Geforce 8600 GT. Nice.

Now I'm off to a friend's concert. Later...

Jon

Wicked! was a wiked show

Got to see Wicked! last night w/ Phillip. Not only was it good to see my friend again (if he's reading this, he probably doesn't appreciate that somewhat "mushy" comment), but orchestra-level seating topped it off. Although I couldn't see the pit orchestra (I was too short to see over everyone's heads) the show was great. I could've stood to be sitting a little bit closer to the stage, but that's nit-picking...it was a fantastic show. I'm still not sure if I like it better than Les Miserables, but it's at least a close #2, if not tied with my favorite.

School starts in exactly one week. I'm looking forward to seeing people again, and meeting new people, too. I really began to question my relationship options and current situation (I hope she's not reading this, or else it could be bad news for me...). In any case, I want to make sure that I meet the right person if I'm going to spend the rest of my life yet, and I'm not certain that God (as yet) has provided said person.

I'm also looking forward to getting plugged into Hebrew next semester. I've already either taken or tested out of the general classes, and will now be starting on more challenging (albeit familliar) material. I've already looked at the syllabus, and it seems that I have already translated everything on it, but I'll be looking forward to going more in-depth. This course is supposed to be one of the more challenging at Asbury. I'm looking forward to being challenged. In addition to the classes, I'll also be continuing EBR (Eta Beta Rho), the Hebrew honor society, which is a national chapter. Hopefully it will look good on a graduate school application for Ph.D work.

In the mean time, I'm still enjoying games and doing some relaxing reading.

That's all for now,
Jon

Some things that bother me

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the color scheme on this blog is hideous. I'll have to do something about that. I just hope that this thing will give me customization options, cause right now, it really sucks...

Enough of that. I have a little over a week left of vacation now, for anyone that cares, and I'm enjoying it. Aside from going on new medication that threw me into a loop, I'm doing well. I'm certainly glad that I didn't take a J-Term, though, cause then I wouldn't have had the time to sort this whole mess out.

In the spare time, there's been a lot of television and video games. The MMO of Jon's month is Lord of the Rings Online. Some people call it a WoW clone. Granted, it has some things that are similar to WoW, but what interests me is the environment in which it's set. I love Tolkien's books--putting Middle Earth in an MMO is something that I, personally, have been waiting for ever since I was introduced to online gaming. So, I'm a happy camper.

Not so happy about next semester, mainly because I'm kind of nervous. I'm taking almost entirely upper-level classes, four of them, which is probably the equivalent of an 18-hour workload at Asbury. The bright spot is that I am taking Hebrew (which I've had plenty of), Aramaic (which I have gotten my feet wet in), Minor Prophets (which I have studied before), and Vocation of Ministry (which should be easy. So, I'm crossing my fingers that I'll be able to get everything done.

I miss people... looking forward to being back in Wilmore soon!

Peace for now,
-Jon