Telling myself to shore up against the inevitable disappointments of college life helps a little, if not entirely.

I knew it was going to happen, everything told me it was going to happen, but knowing and anticipating only go so far in placating my slightly bruised sense of self. We got back our first two World Civ quizzes, along with a print-out of our current grades, and mine read an ignominous current C.

So we're only 20 points into something like 800-900 for the semester, and the quizzes were both short and unexpected, not to mention proctored with little instruction besides the topic. And it's happened to me before, this beginning poorly, though I can't exactly recall when (I'm sure I naturally block these sorts of things out as soon as they're rectified, though ninth-grade algebra does come to mind). I know I'll eventually achieve good standing. It's just that seeing that C, and having to own up to it, as I'm fairly certain I pretty much deserved it, got me down.

In other events, I got a few more hours at the library, bringing my total somewhere around 15 a week. It's a great thing, this being surrounded by endless shelves of intellectual process. But to walk the rows of books is to be confronted with the vast amount of information that cannot possibly ever be synthesized entirely. As I troll the aisles for unstacked books, titles flicker out from every direction: "Christianity & Literature"- they print such a magazine? The Works of Andre Gide- I know his name ("Geed," right?), but what did he write? Narrative Poems of C.S. Lewis- when will I ever have time to read that?

And so it goes.