I must proclaim: This journaling once a day is hard work, especially after spending a long day AT work. Again, I'm attempting to instill some sense of discpline in these fingers, to train them to be ready and willing for writing on a daily basis. If another stint in grad school is, in fact, on the horizon I'll need to be able to work through disinterest, pain, sickness, depression, etc., etc.

Kinda sounds like I'm about to be shipped off on a tour of duty in Iraq.

Speaking of demanding activities, I began reading James Joyce's Dubliners last night and managed to stumble through the first story entitled "The Three Sisters." Or at least that's what I believe to be the title. Because the fact is, I'm reading the book predominantly in an attempt to improve my vocabulary: Sure I'm reading Joyce's prose, but I only seemed to be picking up on bits and pieces of the plot. (Some priest died and now his body lies "solemn and copious" in a coffin, his visage "maleficent and sinful.") What's really happening, though, is that I'm too busy writing down and looking up (thank God for Dictionary.com) words like gnomon, simony, simoniac, aspersion, breviary, etc., to actually concentrate on and enjoy the narrative.

I wonder if I'd been raised Catholic if my vocabulary would be more robust?

While I'm happy in the realization that I recall most, if not all, of the meanings behind those previously unknown or somewhat unclear lexical items from "The Three Sisters", I'm still curious as to when or, rather, how long it takes before passive vocabulary tranistions into the readily active.