Ok, so real quick, I didn’t do any writing today. That was very annoying. The really annoying thing, though, was that it took nearly six or seven hours to do less than two hours of homework. That’s what happens when I hang out around the Arabic house–too many distractions. Not that it wasn’t all unpleasant. Got into some really interesting discussions with my Arab friends, Basseem and Yanal. But when I find myself getting sucked into an hour long discussion between my Arab friends and my roommate David over who is the better prophet (Joseph Smith or Mohammed), and I’m trying to read a really dense article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I lose quite a bit of efficiency. Bah. I should have gone to the library!
But, things will be better because tomorrow we’re having a Quark writing party over at Jakeson’s and Gamila’s! Yay! I am very much looking forward to that! I really love having these get togethers; they can be very relaxing and enjoyable. The only problem is that I feel a bit guilty for not hosting one here. The problem, though, is that there are too many people coming in and out. Maybe if the weather weren’t so cold, we could just go outside or something. Maybe when it gets warmer.
Also, as a sort of unrelated side note, I went to an open house today on the Masters of Public Policy program here at BYU, and it really sounded interesting. Very interesting. As in there’s a greater than 50% chance that I’m going to do this. I need to sit down one of these days and ask myself “what are all the possible things I can do with a Poli Sci degree and fluency in Arabic?” and then write out a decision tree that I can use to formulate some idea of a plan for what I want to do. But as far as gut feelings go, this public policy program sounds really good. It sounds like just the thing to shoot me in the general direction where I want to go. And it also means that I would have a little bit more time to get married before jumping into a vocation. I know–I didn’t come to BYU to get married, not at all, but it is pretty important, and even though I probably worry about this more than I should, it is something I would like to figure out before I get too deep into a career.
Tomorrow will be crazy busy as usual, so here are some things I’d like to post about soon: review of Citizen of the Galaxy, review of The Forever War, some thoughts on L’Engle’s philosophies about writing, a pro/con post (or two) on doing writing as a career (from the limited perspective of a mere undergrad such as myself).
Oh, and one last thing. I noticed on this really awesome site that gives out free audiobooks that they have this artificial voice that generates a lot of the mp3 files. I’m assuming that they have a program that can convert word documents / pdf’s into mp3s, which is really cool, especially because the artificial voice isn’t all that bad. Does anyone know where I could get one of these dictation programs? It would be WAY convenient to just plug some of the readings from my classes into a computer program and have it generate an mp3 of the texts.
