Good and Bad Things

+I spent yesterday afternoon watching Buffy and then Degrassi with currentlee
+Knitted with AD
-Got stuck on campus
There was going to be no bus until 7:15, and it was 6:55, so I decided to
take the red line to the green line. Unfortunately, the train I got on was
out of order, and we all got off at Central. We spent a lot of time waiting
in the train in the tunnel before we got to Central. I should have gotten off
at Harvard when it was taking too long to get going.
-No real dinner
+/-Buffy was good, but was very, very angsty
( spoilers from the end of season 2 )

We had technical difficulties during "Becoming (Part 1)" so I ended up
having to take the 12:45 bus home instead of the normal 12:15 I take. So I
got no sleep last night.
+I got my midterm from Nasrallah's class today. I got a B- on question 1 and
an A- on question 2, for a total of a B/B+. My reaction?
1.I'm not surprised with the first question, as I had no time left to
revise it or anything, and I'm bad at the scholarly reflection papers and
this was a question in the same style.
2.Question 2 had a comment about how my TF really liked the part where I
use the logic from Deuteronomy 22 (the whole scenario of what happens if a
betrothed woman gets raped), and said I should have talked about it more.
Except my paper already had gone over the page limit, so I couldn't have
added more. But still, shiny A-!
3.B/B+? Whenever I see slashy grades, I always think that there's a reason
why God invented numbers. Seriously. Just calculate it to a 87 or an 86.5
or whatnot. That would actually mean something to me.
-It took forever to get home today because someone got injured on the bus when she was exiting.
+I looked at the syllabus and even Dr. Machinist is cancelling his day before Thanksgiving class. Thus I can go home on Wednesday morning (since Tuesday night is still Buffy night).

I'm a bit apprehensive about getting my Idrimi paper back today, assuming I indeed get it back. I'm happy about the A- on the Nasrallah essay, and that gives me reassurance that I actually am smart and can handle grad school, I've just had a series of bad papers, and it's an unusually long streak for me, since normally I'll only have one or 2 bad papers a year, scattered out among different classes. Unfortunately, the Idrimi paper is one of those bad papers. It only counts for 10% of our grade, though.

We also got the assignment for the long paper. At first it said that we should be working with a primary source in the original, but then he sent out a correction that we could use a translated source since there is no language requirement for the class. Which is good because the original assignment scared the heck out of me, since I barely know Modern Hebrew at this point (I've forgotten a lot) and I know no Biblical Hebrew. And I like the other sources better than the Biblical stuff, since they're new and exotic to me, and also I don't have to worry about giving a non-academic interpretation since I'm used to reading the Biblical texts through a religious lens, and I don't have to deal with whether or not the Torah is true in my paper. So translations open up all the possible topics to me. Yay for not having a language requirement in this class. I may try to use a German secondary source if applicable, so I can impress Dr. Machinist and show that I'm working hard, even if I'm an uneducated first year grad student who handed in a very bad paper on Idrimi that was written under stress and with no time.

I should be getting back the paper from Shaye Cohen's class tomorrow (except that I handed it in a week and a half (extended) late, so he may not have gotten to it). I expect a good grade on it, since we just had to discuss a topic intelligently, and I did that, and I insulted Neusner's scholarship, and I had shiny figures (in color!). I should be getting my midterm back next week (I'm hoping for a low B on that, and I should have been able to get an A. And it's worth 25% of my grade. This is what I get for not studying enough.)

Hopefully I will end the semester with decent grades in all my classes, though right now I don't know if this is actually a possibility.