Life is good....

Got sick Sunday night, had a slight headache and stuffy head Monday morning, and completely crashed Monday afternoon with a fever and headache and all kinds of good stuff...but I got 9 hours of sleep last night and am feeling much better; not 100% yet, but MUCH better. My fellow students are wonderful in their compassion and caring (and my roomie is stupendous, both as a person generally and because he got me a cup full of fruit this morning so I could sleep in but still eat).

Professor Donnelly took our 3-person PHC ROTC group down the National Defense University yesterday morning; he was giving a lecture on homeschooling to people (mostly colonel or their equivalents) attending the NDU College of Industry-Education track. After the lecture, which was largely an informative one with demographic and academic statistics, we cadets were introduced, and a Q&A session ensued. We were asked such questions as how we might deal with people more "experienced" in the world than ourselves when we eventually became second lieutenants, and whether we ever wish we could have gone to public school, and whether or not it's hard for us to relate to our peers. Overall, it was a fun experience, and I look forward to doing it next year.

Classes are going well; finished my first Physics exam today, on which I scored well, and have been doing well in my other classes, too: have done a recitation and 1/5 Commonplaces for Brit Lit, 3/4 outlines for Lit Crit and am working on my first paper for it, 1/2 Short papers for Shakespeare, and am constantly working on Physics homework.

So far I'm most enjoying Literary Theory and Criticism--it has the most difficult reading of all my classes, but is the most provocative of deep thought and theorization on the nature of art, and especially of Christian art. It is interesting to see what both Christians and non-Christians have had to say about it over the millenia--we've gone from Plato to Heidegger over the last month and a half, and each reading opens up a new idea. I'm writing my paper on Nietzsche's argument that Christians cannot be artists and vice versa. I believe it can be answered only with a profoundly Christian and especially theocentric view of art. It will be fun, and I'll post it to the Lit Crit blog when I finish it.

Speaking of which, for those interested, I finally posted the last section of the Drama paper to my Lit Crit blog, discussing history as a tragicomedy and how this is biblically, philosophically, and aesthetically satisfying.