Day 67/99: The Megapost

Sorry for going over a week without updating! I've been really busy and literally haven't been able to spare the time, but after biting the bullet and skipping my two-hour fencing practice tonight, I have just enough time to blog. I can't believe two-thirds of my time here has gone! It's scary.


Academically, everything's going pretty well - I'm still getting along fine in Latin, I have my plan written for my Junior Paper and my advisor thinks I'm on course for an A, and we've been set our paper titles for Athenian Democracy so I can start writing that soon. Roman Portraiture is feeling like a bit more of a burden, but it's a graduate seminar that doesn't count towards my degree, so that was always going to happen, and I basically know which portraits I'm writing about for my final paper for that (which will probably be a bit of a rush job, but I'll still get the CV kudos of saying I took a graduate seminar). I'm probably looking at a mid-2.1 at least for Princeton, and hopefully I'll actually end up with a First - even if I don't, though, I'll still benefit from the experience of writing long independent essays when I'm doing my thesis, and I'll have more revision time per paper when it comes to Finals.

My other extracurriculars are also good - I'm submitting my third Daily Princetonian column tomorrow (and I've put it on my CV!), we're having a Gallery board meeting tomorrow evening, and I'm still meeting up with my BreakOut trip group to plan how we're going to try and convince Princeton to offer ASL classes for credit (I'm planning to devote my next column to the topic). Fencing's going quite well too - I don't really win bouts, but I sometimes score a hit on my opponent, so that counts for something.

Earlier today I went to an interest meeting for the Oxford-Princeton History Exchange, to help out - I regaled all the sophomores with stories about dining with Larry Flynt, getting drunk with tutors and having world-famous tutors sign the books they wrote, and I think I convinced a few of them to apply, so yay. I've met two current Princetonians who are going to be in Oxford for our next two terms - one's the secretary of the fencing club - and they're both going to be living fairly near me, so I'm sure I'll say hi to them. Speaking of Oxford, there's a lecture here on Thursday by Bryan Ward-Perkins, from Oxford's Classics Faculty; I've seen him in the library there before, so I might go to that.

I took a photo at the end of the exchange talk, just to use it in my blog:

In other news, I got my swine flu jab on Monday (yay for barely tested medication! I haven't mutated yet, so it was probably safe). I've also been to a couple of dinners since my last blog post - an informal Indian dinner with the Master of Butler College, where I met one of the girls who's going to Oxford on the exchange next semester, and tonight there was a Humanities Careers dinner where three graduates from English, Near Eastern Studies and Classics talked about their careers to date. The classicist graduated two and a half years ago and is now running a conservative thinktank, so that was cool, and the Near Eastern Studies major gave me her business card and invited me to lunch at the Institute for Advanced Studies where she works - of course, that's also where Albert Einsten was based, so I'm definitely taking her up on that.

Also, I'm going to New York on Saturday, to look at sculptures in the Metropolitan Museum with my Roman Portraiture class. I noticed these for sale in the Met's online store:

I think it's a definite yes.


Finally, here's some photos from around campus: the everpresent squirrels, and a random bowl of pasta left out on a sidewalk for a few days.