Answer Post

[ceitfianna]

So far I only have three questions, but I'll start with them, poll's still open for anyone who wants it and I may end up cutting this since I foresee long answers.

Describe your perfect day.

My perfect day I think would start with sleeping till I want to wake up and waking up in a room full of light then having lovely tea and toast for breakfast. I think next I'd want to spend the morning with my nieces, learning and talking and playing with them. Then have a fun and messy lunch with them and their father and my sister in law. In the afternoon, I'd want to walk in a lovely city with friends, stopping to peek into fun shops or sit down in cafes and just talk and do nothing. Dinner should be more fun cooking though this time with my parents and some good friends, cooking and eating late into the night over good wine and thoughts, losing track of time. With perhaps a stop to watch the sunset, but otherwise wind down at our own pace.

Why New Zealand?

This one needs a bit of context, I spent a semester studying in Athens, Greece and loved it and for me traveling is kind of how I figure out where I'm going. The year before I came to New Zealand, I'd had very little luck finding work I enjoyed and would let me support myself. erinmuse was planning to go teach in Korea for a year and that got me thinking, what would I like to do. I decided spend a year working somewhere else, English speaking though since while I loved Greece, I didn't want to have to learn a new language but also wanted more time. Great Britain and Ireland were too expensive and I've spent a lot of time in Europe. So Australia and New Zealand were my choices, New Zealand came to the front quite quickly since Americans could get a year long working visa, also Lord of the Rings and turned out I had a connection in Dunedin. So I ended up over here for a year working, went back to the States and discovered, I wanted to come back and do graduate school, which is what I'm doing currently.

So what actually ARE you doing over there?

I'm writing a master's thesis on Pindar, no classes and work has eluded me, so I spend my days poring over Greek poetry. Since everyone has heard me talk about Pindar but few people have actually read him, here's one of my favorite bits of one of his odes Nemean 6, this section is why I'm writing so much on him:

And now Alkimidas
gives clear proof
that the power
born in the blood is like
the fruit-bearing fields
that now in alternation, yield mankind
yearly sustenance from the ground
and now again, resting withhold their strength.
Nisetich translation, lines 8-10

The image of man as a field in rotation, full of possibility and wonder that doesn't always yield glory but at times does, I wanted to explore this more fully. So I chose this ode and two others that examine the same themes, Olympian 8 and Isthmian 6 and so far I've translated the first two and gotten a good chunk of my first chapter done and I'm deep into my second chapter. So that's what I'm actually doing here.

Comments

[house-monkey.livejournal.com]

That's cool.