Learning is a long and lengthy lecture.

I feel like I've learned a lot this past week. Nothing really different or unusual happened; I just feel like I've learned things. Well, I did have my first Reynolds session. (This is a Torrey session with Dr. Reynolds - the director of the whole Torrey Honors Institute - as the tutor.) On Tuesday and it was on Plato's Timaeus. I finally have an appreciation for Plato now that we're done reading his books. That guy was so brilliant! It's hard to say what exactly I learned because it's so confusing and I still don't understand all of it. I can explain one concept that stuck out to me though. In Plato's Republic (yeah, I know, it was in the Timaeus session but we talked about some of Plato's other books that we'd read, too), Socrates talks about the people who care more about appearing to be just than actually being just. And we applied this to being wise too. My whole life people have always called me smart - if I got anything less than perfection it was always a shock to people. I'm not perfect, nor have I ever been perfect. But I quickly realized that I could get the good grades without really doing much at all. I became lazy. As long as everyone said I was smart, I believed that I was smart. But, looking back now, I think I was more worried about appearing to be smart than actually being smart and learning. Especially during my senior year. The excitement that I felt in elementary school, when I would finish my homework and get to do the homework that my older sister was doing, had left me. I no longer had a love of learning. I think I'm finally starting to get that back, and I have Plato to thank for it. Which is weird to say. But he's tough to read and tough to discuss, but what he says and the way he says it can just be so darn cool. And then our session on Thursday (also on Timaeus) was really good too and beneficial to our group as a whole. Which was what we needed. We're growing as a group together, as we all try to finish our first semester in Torrey successfully.

Dr. Reynolds pointed out to us that a lot of things in the Narnia books are from Plato. C.S. Lewis was that smart. So Thursday night, we watched the first Narnia, and there's this one quote from Plato that Aslan says - "where's the fourth?" - and it has so much more meaning now, and we were nerds and got really quiet right before he said it (the rest of the movie we were talking the whole time, and we assigned people roles in the Narnia books. I got Lucy :) ). Anyways that's my learning experience for now.

Midnight Madness was last night! So much fun! It's basically a pep rally to kick off the basketball season. But it was a lot better than my high school pep rallies (nothing against Northwest) which never worked for the Northwest-Dalton football games. Anyways they had the cheerleaders do a dance, and they called out all the sports teams at Biola, and then introduced the basketball players by name. We learned a cheer to do at the games. They had a 3-pointer competition between the girl and guy basketball players. The girls represented upper campus (yay!) and the boys represented lower campus. Of course the girls won! ;) Then the dance team Xopoc (I think that's how you spell it...) came out and they were AMAZING!! really, really good. It was fun to watch. Then we got to run on to the court, like we apparently will at the end of the basketball games, and they had a bunch of confetti and it was red-and-white madness! It's really weird being a red team now since the red team in high school was our biggest opponent. Oh well.

I have a canker sore on my bottom lip that hurts like the dickens. Especially when I eat, which is super annoying. Hopefully it'll go away soon.

I have my first Bible session tomorrow! On Genesis. I'm really excited to see how it goes. It was weird, going from reading Plato to reading the Bible because I was reading the Bible how I read Plato, and I've never done that before. Normally, when I read the Bible, I read a chapter a day. I read Genesis in three days this weekend. It was so cool! Anyways, I'm excited for session tomorrow.

5 more weeks til Christmas break!

Well, that's basically all I wanted to say. And I wanna go to bed now. So goodnight, and thanks for reading, whoever you are that happened to read this. :)

"There's a road like a long grey ribbon as far as I can see, and it's pullin' independence outta me."
- Independence, The Band Perry