10/17: browsing

I don't go clothes-shopping much; most of my clothes I order online. But today I needed to run some errands in the part of town where T. J. Maxx is located, and I decided to go in. I'm only fond of T. J. Maxx in a second-order kind of way: my dear, dear mother-in-law always loved going to the T. J. Maxx near her, and so the store makes me think of her. Today she would have been proud of me. I browsed and browsed, seeing nothing that was really me, and then I found something lovely: a grey boiled-wool sweater jacket with a shawl collar decorated with wool rosettes. I know that if Mrs. C. had been with me, she would have been excited at my find. Not only is it really my style, but it was about 1/3 the price it would have been if I had ordered it from a catalog.

In my upper-level Latin course the students will be working independently on unprepared translations in class tomorrow. Which means that I got to browse through Martial to find 4 poems that I think are manageable on a limited-time, limited-reference-book basis (the students will be able to use only their dictionaries). It was fun to poke around in Martial (he's so capacious!) and pick the poems, and I'm interested to see how the students will fare with them.

(How many times has paging through Martial been compared with sorting through the racks in T. J. Maxx? I don't think Martial would mind the analogy at all.)

3 comments:

Barbara said...

OK, I admit to confusion. First of all (she said, blushing) "capacious" wasn't in my vocabulary so I looked it up. Now I can't apply it to a poet....

RR said...

Hello, Barbara--I call Martial "capacious" because he wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems on all sorts of different topics. A real grab bag of ancient Rome: all the weird characters of the city seem to populate his poems, and though each poem is short, the sum of them contains so much. Now I feel all teachery, so apologies for that....

Barbara said...

It would never occur to me to put you and treachery in the same sentence! Thanks for the explanation. Latin III was a VERY long time ago....