The beautiful, beautiful, gorgeous, amazing summer sun has once again decided to grace Vancouver; I had forgotten that blue sky could be so lovely. This has been, as I am informed by several sources, the coldest (and one of the wettest) Junes in Vancouver since they started keeping records. Dubbed “Junuary” by some of the locals, it has been a chance to get a bit of sympathy for the characters in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Long Rain.” The good news is that writing papers and studying for tests is somehow less onerous when there is no enticing alternative beckoning from a sunlit window. Nonetheless, I will certainly not complain about the distractions; it’s amazing how much better life gets just from being able to see the sky, even if it is through a classroom window.

I’m sorry that I’ve been an ever worse-than-usual correspondent over this past month and a half; honestly, there’s not been a whole lot to report. After my prayer class, I continued teaching music at the elementary school. Our last day was June 18, and looking back, I am quite thankful to have had this opportunity. Although it was certainly a challenge to come in at the end of the year, I know I learned a lot, and I hope that the kids learned something too. At the year-end awards ceremony, I felt that we were able to give a presentation that we could both be reasonably proud of. Plus, I got to learn ukulele, so what’s not to like?

The Monday after classes at West Side ended, I began an intensive language course affectionately dubbed by its pupils as “Suicide Hebrew.” Over the course of seven weeks, this course covers an entire years’ worth of biblical Hebrew. One of the other Regent professors (not the Hebrew one, obviously) said that, if you’re Catholic, Hebrew 501 will probably be good for a few years off of purgatory. Even though language is my hobby, I must admit a bit of ambivalence going in to the course.

However, two weeks in, although it has certainly lived up to its reputation as an intensive experience, it has also been one of my most rewarding experiences since coming to Regent. Our first day, we met our professor: Curtis Peters, a very-young looking doctoral candidate in biblical linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. He opened the class by saying that, although he had to use the particular text that he’d been assigned, he did not think that the best approach to language was memorizing paradigms; rather, language was a beautiful thing, to be savored and soaked in rather than dissected and preserved in formaldehyde. It was at that moment that I decided that, if he were not male and already married, I would have found my soul mate.

The first two weeks have certainly been intense. Every day, Monday through Thursday, from 8:30AM to 1:00 PM is our lecture time. Following this, we have between one to three chapters of homework, which usually takes me a few hours. By the time I finish with a week, I usually feel like my brain has been turned to scrambled egg. Nonetheless, it is very exciting to see what is coming from such a short time. On our second day, we started going through Genesis 1; after a week and a half, we have learned enough of the forms and basic vocabulary to read and comprehend the first half of the chapter. Our first midterm was today, so we celebrated by going to a pub afterwards, and I can look forward to a three-day weekend of forecasted sun with no homework. Under such circumstances, even such a cynical pessimist as I would be hard-pressed to deny that life, at its heart, is good.