Jawohl! / AAAAHHHH

1. Jawohl: Three cheers for what passes for democracy in the States! Finally a democratic house and hopefully senate, as well as good ol CO--I no longer "live" in a republican state!

2. AAAAHHHH: Scandanavian Fairytales

An 8:30 AM class. The professor shows up 15 minutes late. He then spends the next 15 minutes repeating what he said the class before (rather thoroughly, and quite sufficiently, making the previous class completely superfluous). The text we were supposed to have read? He didn't get around to copying it to leave it in a particular office until 15 minutes before that office closed *yesterday*, meaning there was no possible way anyone could have read it. But no worries, it wouldn't have made a difference, because the @#$#%ing text is in DANISH. Written in Gothic script. So even if I spoke Danish I probably couldn't have read it, and I'd have a @#$# of a hard time even if it was in German. Or English, even.

So.....I'm sitting there, feeling like this is a complete waste of my time. He's reading passages in Danish, translating them into German, and trying to put it together into a coherant whole, which is hard because it's an 1819 theoretical justification of fairytales based on the philosophies of Kant and Lessing. But I more or less understood what he was trying to say, not having ever actually read Kant or Lessing though familiar with Critique of Pure Reason and such--and the whole point was that it was a sort of Nietzschean geneological declination from one concept to the next relative concept to the next, eventually arriving where you wanted to go. So the bell rings. I've been counting the minutes, not even bothering to try and follow along in the text whatever he's citing. He keeps talking. Someone opens the door (there *is* another class after ours in this room) and he sends them off. 5 past. 10 past. If I had another class after his I'd be aufgeschmissen (remember your German lesson??). *Finally* he lets us go. I meekly gather my papers and approach his desk.

"Erm...I don't speak Danish. At all. Is there any way to get this stuff in German or am I completely in the wrong place?"
"What languages *do* you speak?" he asks, addressing me informally. I ashamedly mutter something about only speaking English and German. I doubt he would have bothered to find me a French translation if I had mentioned French, so I thought I'd let it lie. Apparently the actual fairytales will mostly be available in translation, so I guess I should keep showing up. Which is good, because otherwise I'd be a course short and it's too late to jump into anything else....