Housewife Grammar

For the past seven days, I have been living the housewife's existence. No wonder women have always been portrayed as shallow: when you're alone all day, with no one to talk to except maybe a cat, or your kids, you welcome any little thing to distract you. I've been reading The Tin Drum, and only have about 100pp left. It's a 550 page book, and Thom says that when he finished it, he felt like it could have gone on for another 550 pages. Not me. I enjoy the book, but it's probably not the best thing to be reading when you're home alone all day, really doing nothing but cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, unable to read anything else but a Latin grammar, which you think is better than most novels. Gunter Grass, I am convinced, has done a wonderful job in being able to cultivate such hate for his main character. Not that he's dispicable outright, but, in the guise of a child, he drove many people to their deaths and came off outwardly as innocent. Still, the book is really good. We have Dog Years here, too, which was written about the same time and same city as Oskar, but with different characters.

I've cooked some good things over the past few days: baked pesto tomatoes, tofu mushrooms and green beans, lemon cookies — it's good that I have this stretch of days off, to be able to get in practice with cooking. I rarely did any cooking at home. I baked sometimes, but never cooked. Now I'm learning half from my mom, half from Thom, half with recipes, half without, and it's all turned out pretty well.

As for the Latin grammar: it's truly an inspiration. I refuse to get behind in Latin this summer, or forget. I bought a little notebook, which will serve as my own personal grammar, in which I'm copying all the things I'm having trouble with. Most Latin grammars, like Latin texts, are very old. The language hasn't changed, so there's no need to write a new grammar, so just reprint the old one - why even reset the type? As far as I can tell, the last time the type was reset on my grammar (which was printed in 2004) was 1918. It's also a study in old typography, I guess. I bought this grammar at the beginning of the semester and haven't read through it much. It's not the most detailed one out there, intended for the use of schoolboys back when it was printed. Still, I'm finding out all these irregularities about the Latin language that I didn't know about before. Lists of messed up nouns and such. I guess they're just scared to spring all that stuff on you at first. It is said that Thomas Jefferson was always walking around with a book in his hand: a Greek grammar. No frickin' crap. Ancient Greek, let me tell you, is one bitch-ass language. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Chinese is like, 50 times harder than Ancient Greek, but out of all Western languages, Ancient Greek has to be one of the hardest. The only final exam that ever made me cry.

I think today I'm just going to go on a shopping binge. I'm so used to having no money that, to me, a shopping binge might cost $50. I'll start work in a week or two (that is, if I don't go insane first) and I'll easily be able to pay off my credit card bills. Let's see, what do I need?

• camera
• film
• address book
• thank-you cards
• tongs
• hanging kitchen basket thing
  

Looks like I'll end up going to the dreaded Wal-Mart. Actually, maybe I'll just go downtown and do some local business shopping.