Psyched.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I just rocked my three-hour Arabic final.
And when I say I rocked it, I mean I blew it entirely out of the park. It's demolished. Burnt to the ground. Liquified. Vaporized. Flash frozen and sent through a meat grinder.
I could figure out EVERY SINGLE THING I SAW.
I'm not saying I'll get 100%. I'm absolutely sure that I won't. It's Arabic. There are infinitely many opportunities for mistakes--a forgotten short vowel, a missing letter, a misvoiced participle, a misjudged case ending--but let me just take this chance to say that on this exam those mistakes should be extremely few and far between. I saw all the tricks--deceptive xabar-kaana-s, ism-inna-s, definite and indefinite diptotes, attached and unattached sound plurals--and I played by all the rules.

It was my best and most enjoyable final ever, and I've had a lot of good finals in life. The greatest thing about Arabic exams is that they're really a just chance to show off how much you know--how hard and how long and how doggedly you have pushed yourself to the limit for your knowledge. And it's real knowledge--it's yours and it's tangible and it's useful and valuable and no one can take it away from you. This semester has opened my eyes to how much I honestly love this language. I go to class because I absolutely WANT to be there. Arabic (especially fusHa, my favorite kind) is a language that just keeps on giving. There's just so much in it--so much depth and beauty and structure and elegance that no one could ever learn it all. It's inexorably rigid and yet so artistic, creative, and shocking. And writing--يا سلام! The fact that I can WRITE and attempt to write WELL in this language is opening up a whole new world for me. Writing in Arabic is like writing in English--on LSD. It's so much more colorful and intense--every single little morpheme has to agree just perfectly and you can be so beautiful and indirect with style and vocabulary and the way you choose to formulate your sentences--
Obviously, I just can't get enough. :-)

After the exam some fabulous people asked me to join them at In-N-Out for a post-exam celebration, and I went and had fun with them even though I never eat cheeseburgers. Then I zoomed home and just allowed myself to feel my happiness.

I have learned so much this semester--nuanced tense and Arabic case markings (casing has become my FAVORITE Arabic activity of all time), hydrohalogenations and stereochemistry, progressive sound change and syntactical theory, Old Testament syntax and fifteen words for differing numbers of livestock--!

Welcome, Christmas break! I'm absolutely thrilled to see you!

(Next semester preview: Arabic 202; Biblical Hebrew; Intro to Tibetan; Middle Eastern History since 1800; and History of the Ancient Near East from 330 BC to 640 AD).

FREAK YES.