Reflections from May—Part 1: Mountain Dew Induced Jittery Groans

I had a blast writing about August, or more accurately I had a constant smile remembering great stories with great people.

Now, I wish to balance those whimsical reflections with more serious reflections from May.

In May I had been studying Biblical Hebrew for ten months.  That whole endeavor had gone wrong from the very beginning.  I couldn’t get into the class I wanted, it took me several weeks to track down the textbook, and that was all before I had seen a single letter.

Upon opening my book about a month before class started (yes I’m a giant nerd) I saw twenty-two characters that looked more like Chinese than English along with a bunch of points (vowels are marked by lines and dots below consonants).  Just to memorize the alphabet, learn to write the letters, and learn how to pronounce their accompanying sounds took the rest of summer.

Fifteen hundred flash cards later I had still never caught up.  I had been several steps behind throughout the whole experience.

In May, I had to translate Lamentations 4 from Hebrew to English and write a paper defending and explaining my translation to pass my final Hebrew class.

At the same time I was having a lot of trouble sleeping during the day (I was working the 10pm-6am shift at 24hourftiness).  As I got into my car to drive to work a sense of panic would hit me as my eyes started to feel heavy.  It was so bad that I was drinking two two-liter bottles of either Diet Mountain Dew or Pepsi One every night (I’m still trying to break that addiction but now in the context of trying to be awake during the day). 

Around 2AM would come and there would be almost nobody at the gym (in three years I would only see it completely empty in the middle of the night on July fourth).  I would start to feel utterly oppressed by life.  I couldn’t go to sleep, was painstakingly looking up every word in an analytic lexicon and dictionary (tools for those who have to translate Hebrew but aren’t good at it), couldn’t see why learning Hebrew mattered beyond graduating, and with great loneliness wondered why I was willing to work nights while normal people slept.

I was powerless to make changes, which was probably the worst part.  So, what I would end up doing was write out Exodus 2:23-25:

After a long time the king of Egypt died.  The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out.  Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God.  God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and God took notice of them.

I begged God to hear my jittery caffeine induced groans.