Leila tov w Laila saiida.

In the history of BYU, there has never existed a more complicated syllabus than the one I have for Arabic 201. It took two full class periods of questions just to begin to make sense of the massive document, and to satisfy its demands I've completed three to four hours of Arabic alone every night since Day 1. It's paying off, though. My reading and writing is totally back and my comprehension is sharp. I still have to go over many verbs and really practice my speaking, but for the most part I'm finding myself pretty well off. I even aced my quiz today. Both of them, actually--I had a very important one in Hebrew, too, and as of last night I can officially read my Hebrew copy of "Goodnight Moon." It never fails to surprise me how rewarding studying languages--and I mean intensely studying languages--feels.

I love science, but it's incredibly exhausting. The goal of everything and everyone around you--fellow students, professors, counselors, requirement lists, admissions criteria, even your courses themselves--is to make you fail. Everything is simultaneously unfair and impossible. It's designed to be that way, and after a while you just accept it. You figure it out. You memorize and internalize rules and diagrams and abstractions and methodologies and equations and spit it all back up and walk away tiredly clinging to your A, regardless of how much you've "learned." But being in so many humanities classes this semester has called my attention to other students' reactions when a professor mentions something that doesn't seem just. Science majors expect it. We scribble your unreasonable demands without a word knowing full well we'll try all semester to meet them, knowing that in the end we won't succeed. But watching colleagues protest such statements (and watching professors respond like actual people) reminds me that other people here are consistently being treated with respect, and it's a weird feeling not to know whether to pity or envy them.