SchneiderWeb

On July 19, 1997, my life, which had been going pretty darn well, took a turn for the even better. Along with my roommate and bandmate Jeff, I cohosted a Regressives "fan appreciation party" on the roof of my apartment in Hell's Kitchen. In fact, I still have a copy of the invitation, which promised an "early morning dogpile on John Schneider" (unless I'm confusing that with one of our New Year's parties). I'll spare you the details since this is a family blog, but suffice it to say that at approximately 7:15 PM, a petite Asian woman wearing expensive sunglasses, a dayglo lavender miniskirt, and 5-inch platform shoes knocked on my apartment door. Already feeling in good spirits, I opened the door with a sweeping, dramatic gesture and proclaimed, "It's the woman from the deli!" She must have been wondering whether she had the right apartment because I was the only one there; everyone else was up on the roof. In retrospect, I'm amaz...

Alas, while the calendar shows July, my summer--for all intents and purposes--is over. I began summer Greek last week. Summer Greek condenses an academic year's worth of Greek into 8 weeks. Each week is basically the equivalent of a month of Greek taken over two semesters. We have a quiz every day and an exam every Friday, except for last week. So the first exam is this Friday. On the PTS Web site the school discourages students from working while taking a summer language, and I completely understand and agree with the suggestion. I thought I studied a lot last year, but each day requires a good five or six hours of studying (I opted to take the class for a grade rather than the recommended pass/fail). Greek is unlike any foreign language I've studied (the others being Spanish and Korean) in that virtually every particle of speech--articles, subjects, objects, adjectives--must agree in gender, case (i.e., nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), and number (...