What was my major anyway?

In high school, I was a total science nerd.  I figured why stop a good thing so I went to university to study science.  Like many science students, I mocked my friends that were doing their BAs.  I made the obligatory jokes about their glim employment prospects and derided their life-choices.  In hindsight, I was a bit of a jerk.  But by the middle of my third year, it was abundantly clear that physics would not play a large role in my future (which is not to say that I haven't taken anything away from physics -- for proof see my previous post).  The unthinkable had happened; I registered for some Arts electives... and I liked them.

Now undergraduate students are not, by and large, known for their unwavering dedication to lectures and coursework.  I was no exception especially when it came to physics.  Sometimes my mind would wonder during the lectures.  Sometimes I didn't even bother showing up to class.  On more than one occasion I even fell asleep (this is even worse than it sounds because the average enrolment of a physics class at UNB was 5-7 total students).  

On those days when I had a full night's sleep, but didn't feel in a physics-y mood, there was only one distraction I turned to -- not Facebook, not twitter, not even the proverbial comic book hidden in the textbook.  For me, Greek and Latin translation exercises were my guilty pleasure.  Only ancient language could scratch my itch and float my boat.

To this day, when I have some time on my hands, I crack open some Greek text and go to town.

How I became interested in the ancient world

Like many children growing up in a North American Protestant Church, often my Sunday School classes featured cartoons meant to inspire us with a dramatic presentation of biblical narratives.  The one I most remember, "The Greatest Adventure," told the story of two archaeologists and a young boy that get magically transported back to Bible times and become first hand witnesses to the great stories of scripture.  If you don't recall the series or have never seen it, here is a link to one episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gPN9nyQ0-4.

While I loved (and still love) cartoons, even at a young age I was bothered by the fact that everyone in the past spoke English!  I knew instinctively that this wasn't the case, and it caused my mind to ponder the possibility of accidental time travel.  Would I be able to live in the distant past?  Could I adapt to the culture?  Could I even learn how to communicate and speak the language?

And so, at the age of 12-ish, I resolved to learn an ancient language out of fear of accidental, involuntary time travel.

In high school, I had my first opportunity to follow this resolve with the aid of my internet browser of choice -- Webcrawler.  I looked up a number of words and phrases in Latin, wrote them on large pieces of bristol board, and taped them to my bedroom walls.  Soon, however, I grew tired of learning disjointed words and phrases.  I wanted to learn the language not just a handle of "useful" phrases.

By grade 11, I petitioned the high school administration to grant me permission to teach myself Latin for credit... and it worked!  As it happened, there was a student teacher that majored in classics due to arrive and he was all too happy to guide a student through Wheelock's introductory Latin textbook.

As I discovered, however, the more you learn, the more you learn that you don't know.  Learning the beginning elements of Latin just made me realize that Latin as a world language would only get me so far in the case of accidental, involuntary time travel.

That is how it happened.  Almost twelve years later, and my hobby is still reading and researching the ancient world.