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New Beginnings, Or: A Life Updated, Or: I Need A Hobby, Or: Didn't I Used To Be Good at Making Words?

2010-07-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

I have been instructed by minds (or at least one mind) larger, better, and more sister-in-lawish than my own that I need to get back into the habit of writing. Being a typically disgusting child of this age, I find any action nearly impossible without the watchful eye of All You Jerks Who Have Internet Access and thus, I will include you in my goal to return to the written word.

So, there it is: I aim to start using this blog once more, if not often, then at least oftener than I have for the past (--SWEET UNCLE ELANOR'S BEARD THUNDER, has it really been?) two years.

I don't know how much I will be on here, or if my notes here will be as personal and anecdotal as they have been in previous years, since I have been scared straight on the topic of letting The Internet know your secrets or your life. Remember: As interesting as your personal life may be, people that suck have computers too. But it is my goal to write something every day. Roughly 20 minutes, or 500 words. Not all of that will be blogging, or Facebookery, or public, because I think I'll get back to some larger projects which have been left to the cold, digital wayside.

But these fingers were made for writing. And I'm intend to do it good and stuff alot, y'know?

I Have Conquered Canada

2008-08-14T22:19:00.000-07:00

The revolution will not be televised. But this part of it will be blogged.

For it was on this triumphant note, that my second adventure around the world with the Militia of the Immaculata came to a graceful end. I prefer to think of it ending here gracefully in this Canadian garden over where it arguably came to a more definite end: When I came stumbling out of the airport in Seattle smelling like a man who had worn the same clothes for several days, living off a 2hrs/day sleep quotient, and then was locked in a small space for endless times with only a short break to run crazily across the stickily humid Atlanta airport.

Sliding a discreet and wholly translucent veil over all those more ungentlemanly details, I am home now, and happy to be so. There is much work to be done in Seattle.

He Said She Said Father Said

2008-07-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

I keep hearing rumblings from the sidelines about a FSSP parish coming into being in Seattle, besides the community at the Josephinum? Does anybody know what's going on?

From The Ed

2008-07-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

...who is a seminarian in Rome with the Apostles of the Interior Life, a fantastic and freshly born religious community.

...Yesterday evening I was out for a run making my way to the forest preserve when an elderly woman signals for me to stop as I am passing her on the sidewalk. In a weak voice she asks if I could help walk her to her destination and that she would pay me for the service. I smile and tell her that I would help her and that she didn't have to pay me. She leans on me for support and then replies (in the typical blunt manner of some elderly people), "You're SWEATY." I smile and apologize (I was just running) and then discover that she's making her way to... Mass! Before leaving her, I tell her that I am a religious seminarian and that I am counting on her prayers in becoming holy. I must admit that with the never-ending list of tasks to attend to, I often run the risk of being negligent to the finer details in life: the human person and being attentive to them in their needs. How easily I could have missed this opportunity! Thus, I saw this brief and seemingly "insignificant" encounter as a gift and a reminder to keep my mind fixed on what's important most important in life.

In Jesus and Mary,
Edward

Schedule of Late

2008-06-27T13:11:00.001-07:00

All Last Week: Volunteer to help run the Militia Immaculata camp in Seattle, worked with two other leaders to keep stack of energetic children triangulated at all times, have fantastic retreat.

Wednesday: Finish camp, hang out with leaders for hours and hour into the night.

Thursday: Go to a graduation, dance and party until 4am.

Today: Wake up at noon, immediately decide to fly to Chicago for the MI camp there, leave at about 3.

Tomorrow: Explode with awesomeness.

Pray a whole lot for me and my crazy compatriots.

Quote of the Day

2008-06-06T01:49:00.001-07:00

[Encouraging my elder brother in the face of a lot of homework]

Mom: Go do the champion whatever!

Poem of the Day

2008-06-06T01:17:00.000-07:00

The Quickening of St. John the Baptist
Written in 1949 on the Contemplative Vocation
~ Thomas Merton

Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats, the farms,
The winesmelling yards and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the women by the well?
Why do you fly those markets,
Those suburban gardens,
The trumpets of the jealous lilies,
Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?

You have trusted no town
With the news behind your eyes.
You have drowned Gabriel's word in thoughts like seas
And turned toward the stone mountain
To the treeless places.
Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?

The day Our Lady, full of Christ,
Entered the dooryard of her relative
Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves
like gold?
Did not her eyes as grey as doves
Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon
miraculous Elizabeth?

Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother's body,
Bounds with the echoes of discovery.

Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth
That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!

What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloistered Christ?

You need no eloquence, wild bairn,
Exulting in your hermitage.
Your ecstasy is your apostolate,
For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.
Your joy is the vocation of Mother Church's hidden children -
Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage;
The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,
The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of
contemplation, Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.

Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied
sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world's gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world's frontier.

But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos
Flying the prosperous world
Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,
Then, like the wise, wild baby,
The unborn John who could not see a thing
We wake and know the Virgin Presence
Receive her Christ into our night
With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.

Cooled in the flame of God's dark fire
Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame
We burn like eagles in His invincible awareness
And bound and bounce with happiness,
Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven
Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.

I know, as a very sociable man, that there is special grace in being able to undergo a life of contemplative solitude. Even more so, then, for the contemplative who makes that life sound so entirely gangster.

Living, working, hidden from sight and saving the world, silent but stronger than hatred? Sign me up.

The Call of Dude

2008-06-06T01:10:00.000-07:00

My little brother Charleston has discovered the multifaceted and rubbery word "Dude". He uses it to refer to any human person, as an expression of anger or awe, and frequently repeats it to himself to keep his hand in, and now one of us must die. Soon.

Happy Birthday, GK Chesterton!

2008-05-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

"To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance."

In honor of his birthday, here is an essay by the one and only Dale Ahlquist, head of the American Chesterton Society. It's titled "Who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him?"

[...]

"Who is this guy. . .?"

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) cannot be summed up in one sentence. Nor in one paragraph. In fact, in spite of the fine biographies that have been written of him, he has never been captured between the covers of one book. But rather than waiting to separate the goats from the sheep, let’s just come right out and say it: G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else. But he was no mere wordsmith. He was very good at expressing himself, but more importantly, he had something very good to express. The reason he was the greatest writer of the 20th century was because he was also the greatest thinker of the 20th century.

Born in London, Chesterton was educated at St. Paul’s, but never went to college. He went to art school. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly. (To put it into perspective, four thousand essays is the equivalent of writing an essay a day, every day, for 11 years. If you’re not impressed, try it some time. But they have to be good essays - all of them – as funny as they are serious, and as readable and rewarding a century after you’ve written them.)

Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. His style is unmistakable, always marked by humility, consistency, paradox, wit, and wonder. His writing remains as timely and as timeless today as when it first appeared, even though much of it was published in throw away papers.

This man who composed such profound and perfect lines as "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried," stood 6’4" and weighed about 300 pounds, usually had a cigar in his mouth, and walked around wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in hand, laughter blowing through his moustache. And usually had no idea where or when his next appointment was. He did much of his writing in train stations, since he usually missed the train he was supposed to catch. In one famous anecdote, he wired his wife, saying, "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" His faithful wife, Frances, attended to all the details of his life, since he continually proved he had no way of doing it himself. She was later assisted by a secretary, Dorothy Collins, who became the couple’s surrogate daughter, and went on to become the writer’s literary executrix, continuing to make his work available after his death.

This absent-minded, overgrown elf of a man, who laughed at his own jokes and amused children at birthday parties by catching buns in his mouth, this was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. This was the man who wrote a novel called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish Independence. This was the man who wrote an essay in the Illustrated London News that inspired Mohandas Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India. This was a man who, when commissioned to write a book on St. Thomas Aquinas, had his secretary check out a stack of books on St. Thomas from the library, opened the top book on the stack, thumbed through it, closed it, and proceeded to dictate a book on St. Thomas. Not just any book. The renowned Thomistic scholar, Ettienne Gilson, had this to say about it:
"I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a 'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas. . . cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which we had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him."

Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten Chesterton, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and skepticism. Ironically, all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection. And George Bernard Shaw said: "The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton."

His writing has been praised by Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Karel Capek, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E.F. Schumacher, Neil Gaiman, and Orson Welles. To name a few.

T.S. Eliot said that Chesterton "deserves a permanent claim on our loyalty."

". . . and why haven’t I heard of him?

Why haven’t you heard of him?

There are three answers to this question:
1. I don’t know.
2. You’ve been cheated.
3. Chesterton is the most unjustly neglected writer of our time. Perhaps it is proof that education is too important to be left to educators and that publishing is too important to be left to publishers, but there is no excuse why Chesterton is no longer taught in our schools and why his writing is not more widely reprinted and especially included in college anthologies. Well, there is an excuse. It seems that Chesterton is tough to pigeonhole, and if a writer cannot be quickly consigned to a category, or to one-word description, he risks falling through the cracks. Even if he weighs three hundred pounds.

But there is another problem. Modern thinkers and commentators and critics have found it much more convenient to ignore Chesterton rather than to engage him in an argument, because to argue with Chesterton is to lose.

Chesterton argued eloquently against all the trends that eventually took over the 20th century: materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism, and spineless agnosticism. He also argued against both socialism and capitalism and showed why they have both been the enemies of freedom and justice in modern society.

And what did he argue for? What was it he defended? He defended "the common man" and common sense. He defended the poor. He defended the family. He defended beauty. And he defended Christianity and the Catholic Faith. These don’t play well in the classroom, in the media, or in the public arena. And that is probably why he is neglected. The modern world prefers writers who are snobs, who have exotic and bizarre ideas, who glorify decadence, who scoff at Christianity, who deny the dignity of the poor, and who think freedom means no responsibility.
But even though Chesterton is no longer taught in schools, you cannot consider yourself educated until you have thoroughly read Chesterton. And furthermore, thoroughly reading Chesterton is almost a complete education in itself. Chesterton is indeed a teacher, and the best kind. He doesn’t merely astonish you. He doesn’t just perform the wonder of making you think. He goes beyond that. He makes you laugh.

The Urban Legend

2008-05-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

Much like Sasquatch, I am considerably larger than you. Much like Sasquatch, I have much more hair on my person than most civilized persons. Much like Sasquatch, I speak no known human language and subsist on a diet of berries, vines, and tiny rodents and baby fish.

This is all stuff you already knew about me.

The comparison goes a bit farther this day, for much like Sasquatch, I have also been recently spotted by fanatics running blurrily through the forests and neighborhoods of the Pacific Northwest, my home of several hundred years, furtively completing tasks meaningful only to myself, the final bastion of my species, as I await my inevitable and unenviable end at the hands of a shadowy governmental cover-up.

However, I come here not as Sasquatch does, to kidnap the elderly and howl at intoxicated college students or to produce footprint-related artwork. I come here to say "I am back in Seattle. Love me as you have never loved me before. Because I am kind of like Bigfoot. And that is awesome."

Surprise! It's Easter!

2008-03-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

So, turns out I gave up blogging for Lent. I was going to tell you, but instead I gave up blogging for Lent...but I'm back now, sucker! Happy Easter!

I'll give you guys a fuller update on where I've been and what I've been doing for the past month and a half, but right now I'm going to go eat some steak and hang out, these being two of the most important things one can do on Easter.

For a brief overview: I am doing quite well, I'm very happy, and although I am in Arkansas, I am surrounded by people I love and so I have no complaint! God bless you!

Details

2008-02-09T00:18:00.000-08:00

In other news, writing has been left to the side lately, due to some unexpected life developments.

The second most noticeable one of these is the surprise of my deciding to stop working at Starbucks, and even more shocking than this is that tomorrow I fly out for the midwest, to spend another several months in service of the Militia Immaculata.

I was asked to do go on the road again for the purpose of missionary and evangelizing work again. I decided not to go for several reasons; I had commitments at home, friends to be with, a good job, an education to look forward to.

And ultimately, a consecration to live out.

St. Max once wrote "We are Knights of the Immaculata, ready for any expedition; any place, anytime."

It's because of that single quote, which needled and haunted my brain, that I know am leaving again, quite humbled and way happy. I'll miss being home, and all the beauty of my family and friends. But for now, I know I'm supposed to be doing this, I know that I am called to help with Max08, doing my best to serve the Church in this little way. This trip is going to bring a lot of hope to people, myself among them.

I'm sorry I didn't write sooner, or give any sort of warning, because I know that there are many of you that didn't get your last chance to see me, but in the words of an important modern orator and public servant in California: I'll be back.

Basic deal of the trip is this: I leave Seattle in about 5 hours, and probably won't return until the summer. During the interim, I will overtax my health and sanity running youth retreats, driving the heck out of various highways on in the midwest and East Coast of the America, and generally living the charming life of a sweaty and impoverished pilgrimissionary as previously documented on this blog.

Speaking of this blog, as before I will post when able or moved or commanded to, but I will be largely out of contact. I promise I don't hate you.

Now it's off to pack my stuff and then stay away looking forward to soaring out of the rain. I'll write again pronto, and until then: Stay classy.

I mean, be good. Whatever.

But for real, be good.

How I Got To Chicago, Unfinished

2008-01-23T22:33:00.000-08:00

I wrote quite a long reflection on my retreat at Marytown over New Years. Then I went back and edited it, added more, reconsidered some of the things I was thinking about. Then I wrote some more, and reflected more. And basically kept the document alive and growing until I had gotten out what I was thinking about.

The end effect of all this is that in the end it was something I needed to write, not something I needed to tell other people. So you guys get nothing from all that.

What you do get is what I wrote when I realized I needed to have a more personable bit of prose for the public...but by then, I was pretty much prosed out, and so instead this is merely the explanation of how I got to Chicago. It's not very long, all things (particularly the length of time since my last post) considered, but I thought I should at least get this up for you all.

In keeping with an old and stupid Cow tradition of not sleeping before I fly, I just stayed up all Boxing Day night doing laundry and reading comics and burning CDs of music to show off to all the chumps with whom I would be trading blows of raillery.

So, all the things a gentleman does before spending a week in prayerful retreat...instead of sleeping.

I don't get anxious about flying or trying to get through security (Thought the soul-suction cyborg skeleton fused onto my bones can be a hassle, I'm not gonna lie), I just tend not to sleep before I go, mostly on the basis of "Sleeping in boring airports and on tarmacs is a great way to pass the time" and also it helps to be exhausted to adjust time zones. Excluding all facts outside my own rationalizations and sleep-starved enterprising imagination.

In retrospect, I really should've slept while I had the chance. Even admitting that my flights were gentle and my surroundings painted with the eager brush strokes of ethereal gold by the waking Apollo, (And to a lesser degree of agreeability, my person soused with the intestinal caress of ginger ale and globs of breaded Meat Nectar from Burger King,) all creature comforts, along with every happy memory of my childhood and, I'm ashamed to say, even the tender hope of my salvation, were savagely and untimely ripped from the tatters of my mind the same dark moment I walked out into the flesh-eating winter air of Milwaukee.

Some of you may remember Kyle the Hyperborean Freezing Death God of Relentless Wind I've previously talked about in reference to a series of chilly, soggy, and Seattley adventures I had.

Now, keep in mind that I haven't talked to any Professional Weather Philosophers, but I'm pretty sure that the thing I have known as Kyle was actually just a passing whimsical thought of whatever unholy and unnameable force moves in the American midwest during winter, and the tangential and faded power of Kyle was such that even this was enough to keep our whole emerald city of pale and doughy computer programmers, alt-indie scenesters, would-be space-glass blowers and space-sandwich-makers, Boeing engineers, and public fish-heavers stuck indoors with a trusty bucket of Trader Joe's eco-friendly "Winter Coat Hibernation Lard".

I did come prepared, fortunately. But I soon realized that my attempting to come prepared was in itself a preparation of another sort. Pretty much a preparation for the inevitable death I was fated to have under the sunless and tenebrous sky of Milwaukee. Indeed, my paltry two sweaters and one light jacket (Or in the Wisconsin colloquialism: An outsider's funeral clothes) seemed to call out for my death and I know that the battle for my battle would soon be fought and over.

With all this in mind, and after a few minutes of waiting in vain to spot somebody I knew driving by I decided to turn around sharply and dash pell-mell back into the baggage-claimey warmth from whence I came.

Realizing now a flaw in my "Get to Chicago" plan, I called Mark, who is the Chicagoan hub for all "Dude, so I just flew into Milwaukee, but I'm not sure if anybody was going to pick me up here..." inquiries.

He called around, and found out that the person who was planning on picking me up was coming off the runway...to head back into the airport several states away. Which is...inconvenient, at best.

Fortunately, he was only mildly busy running himself ragged wildly waving his e-semaphore flags to help get everybody into Marytown, and so before too long he and another good friend Dave were starting the hour-long drive up to pick me up.

The drive was thankfully uneventful, aside from much fraternal yukking it up, as we had all three had our share of adventures together over the summer, and we eventually pulled into home sweet home, Marytown, the National Shrine to St. Maximilian Kolbe.

From there, the week progress on to include Big Holy Things, even more familial yukking it up, scads of great talks, and karaoke. Eventually, I came home. Again, sorry, I'm not including any important things.

But in actuality, it should be expected. The ol' first rule of Cow writing: If I have time to write, it's because interesting things aren't happening. The corollary to this being that anything I write is not very interesting, by default.

And for that matter, if I'm writing during something interesting, then I am either not paying proper attention to my writing or the interesting event, so even that's going to be a flat tire in Dullsville.

Under the Influenza

2008-01-10T14:13:00.000-08:00

A New Years Retreat post is still in the works, but I came down with some bug and I've been feverish and bad-natured and asleep since Tuesday.

For the record, if you want to have really hideous dreams, I recommend not only the flu, but also being introduced to really suspenseful TV shows right before you get sick, and also reading grotesque Southern gothic novels during your lucid moments.

I'll get something decently interesting up here soon. But not right now. I'm not going to lie, right now I'm just going to go sit down and listen to Balkan folk music and read Spe Salvi. Sue me.

Schmee....

2008-01-06T02:15:00.000-08:00

There and back again, as of Thursday night in truth. Stories to tell when it's not 2am and the author isn't near asleep at the helm.

A good retreat, though.

Going, Going...

2007-12-26T21:53:00.000-08:00

...Nope, not gone yet.

But this shall soon change. Largely due to 4am tomorrow morning being when I leave to go to Marytown.

I shall not post for a week whilst I am in the smothering embrace of solitude. Complete and utter solitude. Just me and like five dozen other completely uninteresting young papists, sanctimonious dullards every last one of us. Replete in our hermetic pious-ocity, we shall creep together solemnly and solitarily in a cold empty room with blank walls, to ring in the New Year the way it was meant to be rung in: Quietly, alone, and with great trepidation.

Ha! Forgot I was Catholic, didn't you?!
"I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." ~ John 16:22
"I am happy and you should be happy too. Do not weep. Let us pray together with joy." ~ Among the last words of the beloved Pope John Paul II
May you all rock onwards. I'm personally intending to rejoice so hard that I may lose my sense of smell, and stay so focused on praying that I may not even notice. Be back next Thursday.

Christmas Day

2007-12-25T21:03:00.000-08:00

I love Christmas. Let's do it again next year.

Lovely Christmases for All, on the house!

2007-12-24T21:47:00.001-08:00

I'm getting ready to take a brief nap, and then head out to midnight Mass at Blessed Sacrament, and although I'm very tired, I'm also pleased to just be with my family (My folks' 25th Christmas together, and Luke and Tasha's first! Awwww...) and revel in that Most Unfair Grace who was born so very long ago.

And with this Christmas wish is missed
The point I could convey
If only I could find the words to say to let You know how much You've touched my life
Because here is where You're finding me, in the exact same place as New Year's eve
And from a lack of my persistency
We're less than half as close as I want to be

And the first time
That You opened Your eyes did You realize that You would be my Savior
And the first breath that left Your lips
Did You know that it would change this world forever

And so this Christmas I'll compare the things I felt in prior years
To what this midnight made so clear
That You have come to meet me here

To look back and think that
This baby would one day save me
In the hope that what You did
That you were born so I might live
To look back and think that
This baby would one day save me

And I, I celebrate the day
That You were born to die
So I could one day pray for You to save my life

I think I've had these same words quoted several years in a row in honor of the Birth of Christ. Therefore, it is no longer monotonous. It's a Tradition, because it remains something worth reading or hearing at least once a year.

Celebrate this day, dear reader, but let today's celebration reflect the only thing worth partying for: That there is hope, a fresh hope, working in every new day. There is power in sacrifice. Love is the point and the beginning and end of all lives.

And since God is particularly good about providing physical ways for celebrating and spreading love, we'll also get to eat a lot of candy in the process. In the words of St. Theresa of Avila, "God and chocolate is better than just God."

Just one more reason to know your faith, kids. Catholics know how to bring the partay. Merry Christmas to you all!

Endless Toil

2007-12-23T23:27:00.000-08:00

From the amount of posts which aren't being posted of late, O Wopsum and Velplicious Reader, I trust that the obvious trail of thought has been followed to it's gory end. I, have died. No, wait. I have been busy.

Whatever.

For the most part, my toil has been fully enjoyed, for I have been spending my days in three pursuits.

The first pursuit is the fulfillingly great American dream of chasing of the buck, or bucks, and namely ones of the Star variety. Since last mention, skills applicable to my position as roughly one fourth of the manristo population at St. Arbucks have grown to include Journeyman Level Register Manning, Person in the Drive Through Talking At, and Coworker Making Fun Of-er.

Of these, I am probably most comfortable with my talents in the last-mentioned arena, and most confused and terrified when involving myself with anything involving drive through.

Despite my breathtaking good looks and clean fingernails, I am a simple, humble, and idiotic man at heart, and when I find myself facing a situation which will involve me trying to thrice-split my attention to the customer physically at the window, the customer taking into my brain (by way of headset), and the baristas making jokes into my brain (by way of headset and dramatic and and intriguing hand signals), my initial reaction is to want to tell them all to shut up, and go hide in the closest available bathroom or walk-in refrigerator.

My second, more reasoned reaction is to ask only two of them to shut up, and deal with the third in a flustered and oft-fumbly manner, and in my line of work even this is looked-down on as bad form, inferior manristo-ship, and "You're pretty much spilling blisteringly hot liquids into the lap of every other customer after you give them the wrong change".

Now, I don't know what inane bureaucratic process caused that to be the mark of Cain among baristas, but I certainly am going to look into having the stigma removed from what is a perfectly normal incident in the life of somebody as clumsy as myself. I just want to be accepted as I am: a huge and mobile menace to humanity.

Other than that, work is awesome, though. I think one of my favorite things to do is close up, because for the last hour there are no customers, and so it means that you're either just scrubbing stuff down as you chat with coworkers or you're scrubbing stuff down as you just think and listening to chillaxed Starbucks music.

Having a day shift usually means you just sort of dive into the fray and then get spit out on the other end of your shift several hours later, which is also a lot of fun and lovely if you are looking forward to doing something cool afterward. But my highly distilled soul also likes to have a wind-down period, and time to consciously work at something and enjoy the moment fully.

Outside of work, my second order of business has been, and shall ever be, having a pan-American buffet of adventures, shenanigans, and parties. All three have been merrily complimented in the past weeks by the gradual return of College Friends, and College Friends' Friends. And my random seminarian friend who got stuck in Seattle like two weeks ago.

On this topic of my friends, I would ask for prayers for many of them. Several are sick (None greviously so), two have just joined the armed forces, some are partaking in the traditional "Now that I'm almost done with college, what am I doing with my life" crisis, some are having that crisis minus the college, and many more can use the prayers even in an unfocused blast.

Other than that request, I fear that much of the time I've spent with them is simply to delightful to hammer into the constraints of language, given my time restraints and the exceptionally vomitous nature of my memory.

The third and currently most pressing event was the fact that I was asked to try and attend the Militia Immaculata's New Years Retreat, which is at Marytown in Chicago. Having an approximate sum of jack money. I treated this an endearing but impossible idea, and but then found myself to be frantically plugging holes in the dam with the help of a well-trained squad of Dutch boys to keep from being washed away by the ocean of ridiculous coincidences and generosity.

As it is, a deranged millionaire has anonymously paid for my trip, and so I will heading out into the stormy east this Thursday for a week of MI retreat-reunion splendidness. Kindly add my deranged millionaire to your hypothetical list of people to pray and thank God for, and all my fellow retreatants as well.

And finally, I would like to commandeer some of your prayers my way as well.

The truth of the matter is this: One of my chief reasons for going on New Years is to further discern (and it is a discernment) whether or not I might be going on Max again this year, once again giving up my debonair Seattle persona* and live on the road as a wacky and unhygienic pilgrimissionary** for several more months.

I honestly have no idea what these next few weeks will bring, and I hope that asking for prayers about this is prudent, and non-gossipy. I really do just want the prayers. For serious.

But I figured that since last time I was faced with this decision, I was already on the road before half of you knew where I had been the past couple of days, the least I could do this time around was at least tell you that I was considering the possibility and working to fully realize what I am intended to do with my life.

What this does not mean, for the record, is that I am definitely leaving now for sure, so get your farewells and giggles in while the Cowster is in town or has regular internet access.

It means that I'm going on a retreat to discern, and y'all need to pray for me way lots so that I may do the best thing. Thank you all extremely lots!

*Not actually debonair
**By historic pilgrim standards, still extremely hygienic

Anthem of the Homeschool Nation

2007-12-22T23:18:00.000-08:00

This song *almost* describes half the people I grew up with. 'Tis a thing of gloriously hilarious misconceptions.

Rocking the Papacy

2007-12-19T18:53:00.000-08:00

Anticipation & Driveby Judgements

2007-12-15T22:49:00.000-08:00

LWW (aka Das Narnia Un) was a pretty fun effort, and won big points for not disemboweling the allegory or joyful childish quality of the fantasy. So I trust them with Prince Caspian. But Price Caspian needs to be EXTREMELY awesome for me to be looking forward to an unbotched Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is tied for my favorite Narnia story, and probably one of the harder ones to translate into film.

Batman Begins was probably the best superhero reboot yet, perhaps not matching Spiderman II or Xmen II for pure comic-bookey action and glee, but definitely passing up all the rest for all-around quality. My only fear with this one is that the evil Joker is going to over-hype the Dark Knight himself...which is kind of jacked up. I mean, having a truly evil bad guy is crucial for any superhero story (The bigger they come), but it always weirds me out when people are almost rooting for the villain to be more despicable.

I know plenty of people give a pass to M. Night after the Village, and even more after Lady in the Water, but truth is, I even like those ones. If you judge all of his movies by "How Much They're Like 6th Sense", then they aren't going to seem very good. If you go into a romance like The Village for the twist and the thrills, and then you're disappointed, guess what? You suck at watching movies. Therefore, I still am looking forward to this, even though I know next to nothing about it. I intend to see it by itself and not run through the checklist of ways in which 6th Sense makes a better thriller.

I don't care that Indy is now approximately Way Old. Where is it written that Old People Cannot Be Cool? I mean, I guess now it's written right there...but I didn't mean it. His middle-ageness was always part of the charm of the movies, how he got put through the ringer and came out the other side alive...but very sore and bruised and with his back out. Plus, of all the annoying teenage heart-throb sidekicks he could be stuck with, Shia "The Beef" LeBouf is actually pretty cool, and has good enough comic timing for the part. Haha!

Also, this doesn't exactly file under anticipation, but Steven Speilberg Peter Jackson is totally making a(n animated?) Tintin movie, and rumor is that Andy Serkis (Gollum, Smeagol, Lumpy the Cook, King Kong) is going to be playing Capt. Haddock. Schmee...only time will tell how that one turns out.

Poem of the Day

2007-12-14T21:40:00.000-08:00

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator

Reading the Signs

2007-12-08T18:40:00.000-08:00

After all the uproar and panicking and shouting matches, it looks like the Golden Compass, the new atheism-for-kiddies flick, a fantasy story meant to dropkick Narnia in the face and cause a new uprising of anger toward Catholicism ... sucks.

According to Rotten Tomatoes, less than half the reviewers have given it more than two stars. Denied.

Could it be that haranguing against something good, beautiful, and honest will leave you bitterly defending that which is uninteresting, and deceptive?

There is a certain level of pleasure in tearing apart beauty and truth, otherwise we would never sin. But once you have finished, what is left? The triumphantly suicidal shout that we are pointless, there there is nothing to look forward to, and that finally we are free from the shackles of a truthful and beautiful Love.

By the Way

2007-12-07T14:05:00.001-08:00

My old compy did get fixed, and so I have easy web access again, plus all my delicious music.

And, in the case of the song I'm listening to right now, also my not-as-delicious music.

Poor 80's music. So underappreciated...because you suck so much.

Quote of the Day

2007-12-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

Online earlier with my brother...

Luke: This is an elephant beetle.
Me: Oh, okay....
Luke:

Cow: HOLY CRAP.
Luke: *shudder shudder and a shudder*
Cow: HOLY. CRAP.
Luke: Eeaugh.
Cow: That's like a loaf of bread.
Luke: A loaf of horrible, horned, exoskeletoned nightmare bread.
Cow: With butter made from the boiling sap of a thousand demonic cows.
Luke: Toasted over the sulfuric flames of burning bones of the damned. Served with soured eggs from most villainous platypus the world has ever known.
Cow: And prepared by Martha Stewart.
Luke: With a cup of really pulpy orange juice.

My Part of the Seattle Storm

2007-12-04T11:43:00.000-08:00

Pic from Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Since two of my "out of town" friends have now contacted me asking if I need any help recovering from the storm, I would like to first of all say that I, and pretty much everybody I know, is perfectly alright and largely unaffected by the storm and the flooding, with the exception of some decent "here's what I was doing when it happened" stories. The only reason I haven't posted is because I caught a cold and was working, and between the two I was sleepy and not fully capable of post-worthy writing.

Others haven't been so fortunate, for example this woman on the bus yesterday had her basement flooded, but appearantly she's going to be just fine. Also, you may still pray for the two people who died, and all the people (including Flooded Bus Lady) who had their stuff ruined or lost in the storm.

As for me, my family and I had spent a large part of Sunday helping a friend move and so we were more than aware of just how wet things were getting and how freeking cold the wetness was, but the flooding on Monday was a bit of a surprise.

I was to learn how to work the register down at St. Arbucks, and so I made my way down there, shortcutting it through the mall which shares our parking lot. As I wandered down the escalator, I looked down the hall to see that there were "Wet Floor" signs aplenty, and puddles forming and rolling down toward me.

My cursory glance led to the cursorily uncharitable response of "Sucks to be you guys" and I headed on out toward Das Bux, through the Acursed Parking Lot. It's not actually acursed as far as my spider-sense can tell, but there are approximately 46 million crows which all swarm around the area and generally seem forboding and upset about something, particularly when you've seen The Birds or if you are secretly expecting the return of John Uskglass. You never know. He may not approve of Colonial Independence.

In anycase, the murder* continued with no thought of my mere humanity, and my Buxward trek through the parking lot went on with undiminished vigor, at least until I found myself sloshing in what appeared to be a brand new Calming Water Feature, covering up where we had previously displayed a rather unimaginative section of grey concrete of considerable acreage designed so that people could indescriminately scatter their vehicles around and keep them largely exposed to the raw elements, where they belong.

I pretty much just walked into the water without realizing it, and then praced around frantically for a moment, trying to stop jumping in the same stupid puddle when I noticed two things: that my shoes were pleasantly water-proof, and that the unexitable puddle was more like an impressive pond who had a profoundly ambitious personality, and two fountains where there had previously been storm drains.

I skittered around the periph. until I could stepping-stone it across a speedbump and get over to Starbucks, and once I was on the relatively dry land of that happy place, I took a moment to check the place out, and decided that something was definitely afoot.

I went inside and met up with my coworker contingent who were, for the most part, hanging out and watching the road behind our shop grow more and more raging riverly by the minute, thanks to our store being at the bottom of a long slope, and being right next to about 5 overflowing storm drains, and a former creek which had been promoted to Regional Assistant Tributatary over the weekend. Fortunately, the store itself is built a little above the newly fashionable sea level, and we had nice high curbs and shubbery gardens as well.

As mentioned above, mastery of the register was my personal task at hand, and so I went into the back for about 2 hours to do the computer training deal and some assorted other paperwork, and then popped out again to join with the rest of the staff, who were still mostly just hanging out, and casually wiping up after the 2 guys who came in earlier, valient customers who had braved our fearsome moat to pick up their prescriptio--...coffee. Other than those hearty souls, it had been a quiet morning on the floor, and they had shut down the flooded drive through, and so basically we were all just taking pleasure in the disasterness of it all.

Meaning no disrespect to those who did get messed up by the storm, or by any other tragedy, but there remains something uniquely congenial and satisfying about going through something hard or crazy alongside other people, something unitive about suffering together. I feel a lot more comfortable with everybody at work now that we all went through the storm together, and now I had something to talk about with everybody I happen to meet on the sidewalk, because we all have some kind of storm story, or maybe a fortunately dull time.

In any case, the Powers that Be ultimately decided that since we hadn't exactly been attracting a crowd in our current state, I was to get ferried up the road to another Starbucks by a gal I hadn't met yet, but who I shall work with when I get transfered to the presently non-existent store nearer Chez Shea.

So up the road I went, and got there to find...men working there! I was astonished! I was starting to worry that I would be eternally fighting a battle of overwhelming odds (My usual place at Starbucks being The Only Dude cast adrift amidst a sea of cheery women), but at the Up the Road Starbucks, the masculine army had a fighting chance (5 guys vs. 2 girls), and so I merrily spent the day amidst much grunting, general sound effects, bad puns, and learning-through-sarcasm.

Although several of the men were long-time partners of St. Arbucks, they too were not exactly sure if there was a more gruff and imposing version of the word "barista" which we could use to explain our line of work without some of our chest hair falling out. Everybody first thinks of "baristo", but I unanimously agree with myself that this title sounds dumb, so my only option was to make a name less dumb...or make it SO dumb that it's both manly and poignant yet timely satire on cultural views of manliness...the "manristo".

In the midst of this, and a host of other Important Discussions, my twin sister-in-law showed up, having picked up the trail from the remaining folks at Floody Regular Starbucks, and she gave me a ride home and all us Sheafolk shared our storm stories (My brothers went down to the lake, and it had risen about 6 feet and devoured the picnic area) and mashed potatoes.

All things considered, I wouldn't complain a smidge if future disasters could manage to keep this standard of convenience. I hope all my fellow Seattlites are doing as well as we are, and for that matter, I hope the rest of you guys are pressing on just fine as well.

*Proper term for "a bunch of crows"...plus I like footnotes, and murder

Quote of the Day

2007-12-01T10:48:00.001-08:00

From around the ever-whimsical and highly-masculine Shea dinner table.

Sean: I wonder what a ninja zombie would be like...
Dad: Silent but dead.

Encyclical'd!!!

2007-11-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

The Pope just wrote a new encyclical concerning the role of hope in our salvation! Read it here. I'm off to work, so I'll probably start reading it over the weekend/next week, and then probably start beginning to grasp the concept of how to prepare to understand some of it in about 2 years (this being generally my track record with Deus Caritas Est), so I'll let you know when that happens.

Cross Your Toes

2007-11-30T00:34:00.001-08:00

If you can actually cross your toes...I find that most alarming. You can stop now, and additionally please never tell me.

Now that we've gotten through that red tape, you can now cross your fingers (because that's what NORMAL people do, you weirdo) that when Some Computer Guy comes tomorrow to try and fix our long busted 2nd computer, it will work.

According to my research, this would rock primarily because (although I never was terribly heartbroken, and if I was, I've certainly recovered) what amounts to about 7/10th of my entire musical collection of about 9 years of hoarding CDs is on that computer, and so I've been getting by largely on junk CDs that I still have in my possession because nobody was ever interested in borrowing them. And whatever music I've bought since then.

The most alarming thing is that my music was at one time something that I cared about a whole lot and having it inaccessible/gone forever probably could've caused a burst blood vessel some time ago...and now it looks as though my months of living in communal poverty has left permanent damage. I'm a working man now! I need to brush up on my unending materialism, not shrug off the loss of an entire teenhood of collection!

Ach. I'm sure I'll get into the worldly spirit before too long. Don't worry.

In any case, having that compy up and running again would be pretty sweet. I would get my music back (hypothetically), and as a bonus for you guys, I would have internet access that didn't depend on the food chain of Chez Shea Computer Use, which goes something like this:

1. Dad, who needs to work and provide for our entire family.
2. Mom, who keeps the universe in line.
3. Peter and Sean, who have school to do.
4. (Optional) Random other people in our house who need to check email/show off funny videos
5. Cow, who writes goofy blogs about himself in the third person.

Having the double comps to break that process down a little would mean that all you guys would have a theoretically larger amount of Cow-provided whimsicality in your lives. Which I feel would be a positive experience for all of you. Seriously.

WARNING: Savage Cuteness Contained Herein

2007-11-30T00:20:00.001-08:00

TWO nuns at an East London convent have recently celebrated turning 100-years-old, but both said with a shrug that they don't feel any different to when they were 99!

Yesterday, a tea-and-cake party was held at Emmaus Convent to mark Sister Bertrand's century seven weeks after her friend Sister Serena also reached the milestone.

"It really doesn't quite register in my mind that I am really 100-years-old", said Bertrand, who has been a nun for 79 years. "I am still not aware maybe it's because of old age."

Serena offered similar sentiments.

"I don't even think about being 100-years-old", she said. "I can still do many things by myself. I don't think about being old."

The two, both originally from Germany, are now living at the convent in Cambridge, which is specially for elderly nuns. Bertrand entered the convent when she was only 18 after growing up in a Catholic home.

"We were 15 children in my family and when we were growing up my older sister entered the convent and I followed in her footsteps", said the birthday girl. "I enjoyed being in the convent; it became my life. After three years as a nun, I was sent to South Africa in 1928. I worked in different places like Johannesburg, King William's Town, Queenstown and other places".

Bertrand said the difficult times she remembered were during the Second World War and the apartheid era.

"When the war started I was always filled with anxiety. I feared for my people", Bertrand said. "The worst thing was that we could not communicate with them. We could not write letters to our families during that time. It was difficult".

In 1960, she returned home to visit her family.

"Oh, it was very good to see my family again after so many years. I still recognized all of them."

She said she has also enjoyed good times helping people.

"I am grateful for my calling, she continued. There is not a day that I regret being a nun. These days I can't do things for myself I need help all the time even if I want to do something. The one thing that I am grateful for is that I can still pray."

Serena, who still walks as fast as a young woman, said she still wakes up at 5am to start her normal day.

"I still do my meditations early in the morning. I go to church for the Holy Mass and I also do my spiritual readings. I turned 100 in October and I still do rosaries for the sisters, said Serena. I can also read and write but I can't hear at all."

Party Hat tip: The Curt Jester.

In Defense of Great Beauty

2007-11-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

Hahaha! I read this post last night and marked it for blogging, and then find today that Gregaria has already quoted a post script made by the author later on!

The original post is from Matthew of the Shrine of the Holy Whapping, and was well worth quoting as well.

[My father and I] bond over bicycling, over long walks in the cold, and we bond over liturgy, too.

"They dumb everything down these days; they're so afraid of leaving someone out if they put in a little beauty. What's wrong with sitting and listening to a beautiful motet and thinking about God?"

I nodded my agreement, enjoying the severe and familiar beauty of the landscape.

"What'll they want to go for next?" he continued. "By the same logic, they'd say art's too elitist too, since the whole congregation can't participate in it either. Too exclusive. Maybe we should take down the cross and hand around sheets of paper and crayons before mass."

I laughed. "Don't give them ideas!" The sad thing was, while he was kidding, the liturgy gurus might do just that. Modern times defy parody.

Anything beautiful, anything that inspires us, is always a threat to someone--because there's always the potential for danger in anything good.

Must Resist

2007-11-26T22:59:00.000-08:00

Fighting the urge to just post a lot of Chesterton-related material, I am realizing that I need to get a life or something. Haha!

When I get the chance to hop on the computer, I just feel like talking about Big Important Things all the time, but I simultaneously have not the required level of brainpower or blog-friendly brevity to make a good argument for or against anything.

So instead I've been talking a lot of beards and Starbucks, which are not wholly undesirable topics, but personally, I get a little weirded out after more than four posts on the same subject, or the same two subjects. The internet is a wide and anonymous place, but nonetheless, the chances of somebody with great interest in those two items is quite slim.

"Hey, some guy repeatedly blogging about Starbucks and beards?! This is JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR!!!"

To prove I'm not a whackjob who thinks only of his beard and his job, here are some other things which I've been thinking about but not posting about lately:

~~My beard~~
Where my other sock is (I looked down today to find I had on only the one)
The WGA strike and how much I hate big business
~~Musing on how much I'm potentially going to hate myself for working for Starbucks~~
Last weekend's "College people are back in town" escapades
The forgotten dignity of homeless people (Something I've been quietly simmering about for weeks)
~~My beard~~
This guy on the bus the other day who whistled when he said anything with an S in it, and how awesome it was when he said "I seldom see sets of silverware and such sold in sets these days." No joke. Totally just happened to say that in the midst of his conversation with somebody else.
~~All the overwhelming lucre I will be given by noble and groovetastic hand of St. Arbucks.~~

I think five legitimate examples is enough to prove my non-whackjobular nature.

Also, I totally found this great cartoon in the Giant Book of New Yorker Cartoons I received last Christmas. I tried to find it online, but it slid from my grasp like an invisible buttered weasel, and so I shall have to fall back to the fearsome annoyance of just repeating the gist of the joke, but without the funny picture or the exact funny phrasing.

[A business man walks back into his office.]
Businessman: Anybody try to reach me during lunch?
Secretary: A man named Stevie Wonder, sir. He just called to say he loves you.

Ah. Good times. Okay...I think that's more or less all the random leftover bits the the prodding fingers of my own subconscious were leading me to write down. Consider this session of mental diarrhea over, my friends.

Chesterton of the Week

2007-11-25T20:43:00.000-08:00

I've been haphazardly making my way through the Ball and the Cross over the past month or two (It's not a long book, I just continue leaving it in delightful places like under the sofa and behind the fish tank), and I find it highly agreeable.

For the sake of understanding the quotes properly, the story is kind of Pilgrim's Progressesque allegory, regarding an Atheist (named Turnbull) and a Catholic (MacIan). Both are kind of naive but passionate, MacIan's passionate nature leading him to smash the window of Turnbull's shop when his magazine publishes something blaspheming Mary. He challenges Turnbull to a duel to the death, and Turnbull accepts, delighted that he's finally being taken seriously as an Atheist and being given a chance to stand for his position.

They quickly wind up on the lam together as the police chase them across England to stop them from dueling, and spend their time sparring verbally until they find the occasional chance to cross swords without interruption.

Other than this, I will leave to the (occasionally Cow-emphasized) actual words of Chesterton, particularly the last quote, which is disastrously long, albeit worth the exertion. The exertion of purchasing a hard copy of The Ball and the Cross is also recommended.

The first two are mostly just prime Chestertonian wit doing it's thing.

"I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God."

The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MacIan wore an expression of sad bewilderment not uncommon with him.
"I am to understand, then," he said, "that you don't believe in nature."

"You may say so in a very special and emphatic sense," said Turnbull.
"I do not believe in nature, just as I do not believe in Odin.
She is a myth. It is not merely that I do not believe that nature
can guide us. It is that I do not believe that nature exists."

"Exists?" said MacIan in his monotonous way, settling his pewter
pot on the table.

"Yes, in a real sense nature does not exist. I mean that nobody
can discover what the original nature of things would have been
if things had not interfered with it. The first blade of grass began
to tear up the earth and eat it; it was interfering with nature,
if there is any nature. The first wild ox began to tear up the grass
and eat it; he was interfering with nature, if there is any nature.
In the same way," continued Turnbull, "the human when it asserts
its dominance over nature is just as natural as the thing
which it destroys."

"And in the same way," said MacIan almost dreamily, "the superhuman,
the supernatural is just as natural as the nature which it destroys."

Turnbull took his head out of his pewter pot in some anger.

"The supernatural, of course," he said, "is quite another thing;
the case of the supernatural is simple. The supernatural
does not exist."

"Quite so," said MacIan in a rather dull voice; "you said the same
about the natural. If the natural does not exist the supernatural
obviously can't." And he yawned a little over his ale.

Turnbull turned for some reason a little red and remarked quickly,
"That may be jolly clever, for all I know. But everyone does know
that there is a division between the things that as a matter of fact
do commonly happen and the things that don't. Things that break
the evident laws of nature----"

"Which does not exist," put in MacIan sleepily. Turnbull struck
the table with a sudden hand.

"Good Lord in heaven!" he cried----

"Who does not exist," murmured MacIan.

"Good Lord in heaven!" thundered Turnbull, without regarding
the interruption. "Do you really mean to sit there and say that you,
like anybody else, would not recognize the difference between a natural
occurrence and a supernatural one--if there could be such a thing?
If I flew up to the ceiling----"

"You would bump your head badly," cried MacIan, suddenly starting up.
"One can't talk of this kind of thing under a ceiling at all.
Come outside! Come outside and ascend into heaven!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I begin to understand one or two of your dogmas, Mr. Turnbull,"
[MacIan] had said emphatically as they ploughed heavily up a wooded hill.
"And every one that I understand I deny. Take any one of them you like.
You hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward
and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer
from real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete
cosmos of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces.
Who knows now exactly what Nestorius taught? Who cares?
There are only two things that we know for certain about it.
The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught something quite
opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic who came before him,
and something quite useless to James Turnbull, the heretic
who comes after. I defy you to go back to the Free-thinkers
of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all.
I defy you to read Godwin or Shelley or the deists of the eighteenth
century of the nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance,
without discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you
differ from the Pope. You are a nineteenth-century sceptic,
and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature.
If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have
told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature.
You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century.
Read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their whole
universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a materialist,
and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and you
will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker, with his
genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy Christianity.
What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before.
Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as
much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and variety.
But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any possibility--
Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be progressive
because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again
from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction.
All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads,
so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who can discuss
whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was pessimist?
It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is steep.
No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both
accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill
and down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse;
but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters;
they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction;
they are the only two things, it seems, that ever _can_ progress.
The first is strictly physical science. The second is
the Catholic Church."

"Physical science and the Catholic Church!" said Turnbull sarcastically;
"and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second."

"If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable,"
answered MacIan calmly. "I often fancy that your historical
generalizations rest frequently on random instances;
I should not be surprised if your vague notions of the Church
as the persecutor of science was a generalization from Galileo.
I should not be at all surprised if, when you counted the
scientific investigations and discoveries since the fall of Rome,
you found that a great mass of them had been made by monks.
But the matter is irrelevant to my meaning. I say that if you
want an example of anything which has progressed in the moral
world by the same method as science in the material world,
by continually adding to without unsettling what was there before,
then I say that there _is_ only one example of it. And that is Us."

"With this enormous difference," said Turnbull, "that however elaborate
be the calculations of physical science, their net result can be tested.
Granted that it took millions of books I never read and millions
of men I never heard of to discover the electric light.
Still I can see the electric light. But I cannot see the supreme
virtue which is the result of all your theologies and sacraments."

"Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal,"
answered MacIan. "Christianity is always out of fashion
because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities.
When Italy is mad on art the Church seems too Puritanical;
when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems too artistic.
When you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism;
but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would
not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The Church always
seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times;
it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer.
It keeps the key of a permanent virtue."

Starbucks So Far

2007-11-25T16:39:00.000-08:00

I just though I would report on what I've seen at Starbucks so far. All one day of it.

I went to St. Arbucks as an employee (Or "partner" in Starbuckspeak) for the first time last Monday afternoon. I felt mildly goofy in my slacks, shiny shoes, and perpetually tucked-in shirt, but other than that was surprisingly bereft of first-day jibblies. I showed up a little early which provided me the chance to embarrass myself with various Starbucks-related doodles, and then try and awkwardly put them away really quickly when my manager came out get started.

We then progressed over to another table, and then filled out a Crime and Punishment's worth of paperwork for about 3 or 4 hours (I wrote my name and address at least a dozen times, in combination with heaps of various other scraps of my personal information and ideas), and went over the basics of what Starbucks does, and some essential stuff I'll need to know about the business outside of how to make coffee.

It was actually pretty amiable and fun for the most part. My manager apparently does have a soul, which was a charming surprise, and she was also happily realistic about how to look at the job and our relation to the customers, in that we're not going to be necessarily changing lives and giving out advice becoming of the most loyal sitcom bartender. We're making coffee. But we are making it largely for people we'll see day in and day out, and that we are allowed to have a good time and be a cheery, if small, staple of the lives of the groggy and fickle citizenry.

So. Not a high-impact Do Gooder job. But one that, for the time being, I'm definitely more than content with, and that will pay the bills, keep me insured, finance the parties, provide cheap caffeine, and help me get back to school so I can learn how to fish myself out one of those High-Impact Do Gooder jobs.

Assuming I can actually learn how to make coffee. I've thus learn approximately jack in that department, but I'm hopeful about the prospect of training in this mysterious art in the future. After I finished my Managerial Paperwork Bonanza, another gal came by and officially gave me a tour of the whole facility, and then asked me if I thought I could clean the lobby properly if she asked me to. My manly pride is rarely hindered by truth or reality and so I set about wiping surfaces down pell-mell around the store, trying to figure out where to find replenishment for the shelves and displays, and trying to sweep around the people in the store without jabbing faces with my broom and dustpan.

This experience was not aided by the fact that there was this one table that was acting extremely uproariously and seemed particularly jubilant and amused when I was trying to clean around them without disturbing the obviously fantastic time they were having.

Focusing hard on my tenuous grip on my broom, washcloth, and mental jumble of stuff I was trying to remember to resupply/ask how to resupply, it probably took me about 10 minutes after noticing the laughing table to actually look at them closely and realize that yes, it was my best friend of several years sitting there with his brother and some friends, and they had been pretty much laughing at me the entire time I had been bumbling around and pointedly not looking anybody in the eye lest they ask me a question.

Lesson learned. Pay attention to the customer, particularly when it's a customer who is watching you intently with a group of his friends. No hard feelings on this account though, for I got off soon after that and the night went on to be filled with more laughter, some of which was directed away from me, and many happy games of Spoons with good friends.

It was a fine first day. For some reason my next day isn't until this Tuesday, but I daresay I'm even looking forward to that day.

Assorted Beard Knowledge

2007-11-25T16:34:00.000-08:00

Pogonology is the official term for the study of beards. I don't think I would consider myself a true pogonologist, but more of a happy dilettante.

This charming graph was brought to my attention by the inimitable Michael Lounsbery.

"How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them! For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest--a sign of strength and rule." - St. Clement of Alexandria

Roadie

2007-11-24T22:50:00.000-08:00

Dad and I were playing with Google Earth as he gave a bird's eye view tour of his recent trip to Ireland. When he finished, I started laying out a rough map of where I've been, and then we started tracking how far that was.

Over the course of my last year, I've traveled more than 42 thousand miles over the surface of our planet.

May the jury take note that this is a freekin' lot of miles.

Chesterton Society Meeting Next Thursday!

2007-11-23T17:07:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends of the G. K. Chesterton Society of Seattle,

The Society's board of directors cordially invites you to the second lecture of the season, to be held this coming Thursday, November 29, 2007, at 7:30 p.m., on the campus of Seattle Pacific University:

"Pope John Paul II's Historic Pilgrimage to Poland, June 1979"
Dr. James R. Felak
Department of History, University of Washington

Pope John Paul II's nine-day pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979 was one of the most significant and remarkable events of the twentieth century, instrumental in leading to the collapse of Communism in Poland and elsewhere in Europe. Based on a reading of the Polish-language texts of John Paul’s speeches and homilies during those fateful days, Professor James Felak will analyze for us the Pope’s messages to the people, the Church, and the government in Poland, with special emphasis upon the Pope’s use of Scripture, Polish and Church history, and Polish culture to convey his thoughts, concerns, and hopes.

James Ramon Felak, associate professor of history at the University of Washington, is a specialist in the history of East Central Europe and the history of Christianity. His publications include works on nationalism, Communism, and the Catholic Church in twentieth century Eastern Europe. He is currently researching the eight visits made by John Paul to his native land during his papacy.

The lecture will take place in the Falcon Lounge, Royal Brougham Pavilion, at the corner of W. Nickerson and 3rd Avenue W. For links to a campus map and directions, please see the Events Calendar at www.seattlechesterton.org. As always, pizza and
refreshments will be served at the end of the lecture.

Please join us for a delightful evening!

Yours faithfully,
The G. K. Chesterton Society of Seattle

If you're in the Seattle area and don't already enjoy the Chesterton Society meetings, this would be a great time to start since Felak is a delightful lecturer to hear.

Thanksgiving!

2007-11-22T19:50:00.000-08:00

Personally, I'm quite thankful for my new job (I had my first day this week, and now am waiting till next Tuesday for my next day).

I'm also glad that my beard is growing back.

And I'm really thankful that I've spent this entire week leaping from one party into the next, most of them involving The Alex, who is a man of honor and egg nog.

That's the short version of my thanks and my week of adventures. Now I'm going to get back to my parties.

One Small Step for Mankind

2007-11-18T23:59:00.000-08:00

...One giant leap for my bank account.

Yes, tomorrow is the day of great celebration, when I go into Starbucks for the first time not as a hairy man unsure of how to order a drink that will taste good and not burn the inside of his head, but as an awkwardly cleanshaven man with goofy clothes and a lust for money and power. As a partner of St. Arbucks.

To celebrate, here's some "family history" of the Great Brotherhood of St. Arbucks.

Starbucks is named after two things:

Primarily the first mate from Moby Dick, who is a Quaker and one of the only characters to think that Captain Ahab maybe needs to get a life and stop vengefully hunting down the whale. He is noted for being fond of drinking coffee, but all things considered, it's kind of a weird thing to name a coffee shop anyhow. There might be something more to the Moby Dick connection, however, since the name of their ship, the Pequod, was also considered for a name.

Getting a "cup of Pequod" is gross though. So personally, I'm glad they went with Starbucks.

The other connection is more local, but even more enigmatic, as it refers to a mining camp which existed around the turn of the century on Seattle's towering overseer and impending disaster, Mount Rainer. I see that this place is quoted as a namesake, but the place was actually named Starbo, and even so, I'm not entirely sure what mining camps on volcanoes has to do with the cheap lattes and free wi-fi we've come to know and love.

Disregarding etymology for the present, I'm terrified of giant hyphenated drinks. To comfort myself, I discovered that the shady minds of the Cult of St. Arbucks have a shady and unknowable relationship with the governments of all these countries:
I don't know what's up with Mongolia. All the other large Asian countries are doing it, man. What are you, chicken?

On average, St. Arbucks opens up 7 stores every workday. I'm not sure about you guys, but I don't even open my eyes that many times in a day. Except Thursdays and bank holidays.

In closing, I accidentally stabbed myself in the elbow with a pen the other night. Terrible.

And also, please pray for the new job sitch, and so forth.

My Face's Brief Respite

2007-11-14T16:46:00.000-08:00

Today, my friends, is the first day of the beardy-beard contest. Which means that, just to be ornery, as soon as I get home from our pro-life meeting and safely out of range from the prying eyes of all those who would like to see what my face looks like unbearded, I'm shaving.

To be honest, I'm really starting to get curious about what I'll look like, having had more and more of my face covered by beard during those happy teenage years when my face was (presumably) changing a lot. I have no idea what I look like underneath the hair. I'll bet that I look pretty hilariously young, as it is the presence of beard that usually brings onlookers to imagine that I'm a disaffected Amish post-graduate student.

I might post a picture, just for the sake of properly documenting the momentous moment of my briefly normal face, but then I'll get right back into longing for my beard and growing for all I'm worth.

All the gents who join me in this quest for greater facial hair, I wish you good luck. May the best beard win.

License to Kill...

2007-11-14T15:27:00.000-08:00

...bacteria...in food...which I am now legally permitted to handle, thanks to the Food Handler's Permit I've just freed from the clutches of the Seattle area government after enduring many Great Trials and Giving of 10 Bucks to Some Lady.

The "class" wasn't as bad as I was prepared for. Sure, it did mostly involve a Dull Governmental Woman monotoning it through soulless-bureaucrat-approved explanations of why and how you should wash your hands as well as her heavily scripted jokes about cross contamination.

Then we paged through the booklet I read last night online, and watched a scratchy version of a short infomercialish film I also watched last night online, and then took the soulless-bureaucrat-approved test, designed to pump out as many food workers with the bare minimum of actually food-safety knowledge.

Even that was okay, because I was just recently fawning over the sweet childhood memories I have about doing the WASL and SAT, and wishing I could just fill in some bubbles with my trusty pencil, of course the #2 variety. (Fun fact: This is barely sarcastic...I do strangely enjoy filling out bubble tests.)

Then we cycled through the line as the Bubble Test Score Machine, operated by Dull Governmental Woman, decided our respective fates, and sent us on our way. What I did find odd was that for the most part, Dull Governmental Lady said, "100%, good job!" For the most part. Sometimes she didn't, but people still passed and got the card. I went on to find out that up to 6 wrong answers are acceptable for a passing grade.

This means that somebody with a food handler's card could have failed all the questions on how to sanitize his workplace after a raw meat tsunami and whether or not he should come to work when he has some strain of Uncontrollable Oozing and Spewing Disease. Here's some news for you consumers out there: Gross.

In any case, I got my card with only 5 wrong answers (I kid, I kid), and I was out of there like a...terrifically funny analogy goes out of my brain right when I need it. So watch out, food. I'm bona fide.

Two Rights Might Make Wrong

2007-11-13T22:56:00.000-08:00

What's cool is helping out your aunt and uncle with yardwork and crawling around in the mysterious caves below their house, and getting paid for it.

What's also cool is having your mother give you delicious treats when you get home from that.

What bitterly horrendous is licking some of the delicious treat off of your finger, and it tastes like dirt and For-the-sake-of-mental-stability-please-don't-even-guess because, although you did wash your hands, you didn't properly clean your fingernails before eating.

Hygiene: More than just a good idea. It's a really good idea.

My Brothers Win At Life

2007-11-11T19:14:00.000-08:00

This is the best thing ever. I actually had to dive out of my chair to avoid a nostril-powered milk explosion ruining my keyboard when first I read through this. Written by my esteemed elder brother Luke about an interview he did with my two younger brothers Peter and Sean.

For my history class this quarter, I have a project for which I must
interview a family member and do a snazzy biography thing about them.
Feeling silly and slackerly, I decided to interview Pete and Sean
instead of someone who might actually provide me with some historical
perspective (Pronounced "Actual Work") worth investigating. So,
a-interviewing I went.

I had the lads over to my place during this last week, and busted out
the camcorder and a sheet of sample questions. We had a grand time,
and the video will be a priceless gem of family comedy for years to
come, regardless of how well this paper turns out. During the
interview I learned all sorts of interesting things about my youngest
family members and their adventures, most fascinating of which was
their knowledge of and involvement in the imminent return of the
woolly mammoth from their refuge in space where they have been hiding
since the ice age. Also, it turns out that mammoths "aren't funny."
Why not, you may ask? "All their jokes are about ice," says mammoth
expert Peter Shea. "And squeaking," adds his research assistant Sean.

You heard it here first, folks. Mammoths will not make you laugh,
unless you find ice and squeaking things to make light of.

I have included here some highlights of that evening's conversation,
on a variety of topics. For simplicity's sake, I've just laid them
down screenplay-style, with initials to clarify speakers. For those
of you unfamiliar with the first letters of words, that means

L= Luke
P= Pete
S= Sean

Enjoy!

~~~~~~~~~~

TRAVEL:

L: What's the furthest you've ever traveled from home. Probably
Colorado, for both of you, right?
P: What? No! Sean, what about when-- Oh yeah, the Martians brain-wiped you.
S: No they didn't, but (whispering) not in front of other humans!
P: Oh! Yeah! I mean, when I say Martians, it's 'cause we visited a
town in Colorado called Mars, and--
S: Marmazonia!
P: Yeah, Marmazonia, and the people from there are called Martians.
L: So, other than Marmazonia, Colorado, where would you guys like to
visit in the future?
P: Um...Icecreamazonia?
S: Heaven!
P: What's the difference?!

POLITICS:

L: What would you say is the most important social issue today?
S: GLOBAL WARMING!! (waves hands madly)
P: (thoughtfully) Well the ice cream man doesn't come down our street
hardly EVER anymore.
S: SUE THE PRESIDENT! HE'S IN CHARGE OF THE GOVERNMENT! HE'S IN CHARGE
OF THE ICE CREAM MAN! SUE THE PRESIDENT!
L: You know, Cow and Spencer and I once wrote a letter complaining to
the President about the ice cream man not coming down our street very
often.
P: Well, you obviously didn't do a good enough job!
S: SUE THE PRESIDENT!! Besides, global warming is going to melt all
the ice cream anyway.

Note: Luke, myself, and Spencer (neighbor and longtime honorary 5th Shea boy) really did once, in the throes of childhood, write to the recently elected President Clinton concerning the Ice Cream Man predicament. Employing methods not dissimilar to that of a 6-legged ninja with a mission from God, we managed to get a message sent without letting any adults in on our schemes, trusting our plea to the only man we knew could help us. The President himself.

Spencer's mom soon found herself with a reply from the Office of the President of the United States of America, assuring the three of us that our input was valuable and that we were the future of America, with a real live copy of Bill Clinton's signature.

We may never know why President Clinton entrusted us with the future of America when all we had really wanted was a simple law forcing the ice cream man to suffer as our street had suffered from his cruel neglect. All we know is that all our lives changed permanently when we were handed that lofty destiny all those years ago.

THE ECONOMY:

L: What was the best job you've ever had?
S: My allowance.

THE ECONOMY AGAIN:

L: What was the worst job you've ever had?
P: Testing torture devices to make sure they work.
S: Yeah. Especially the ones that chop your head off. That REALLY
HURTS, you know?
P: And now I've got to live with all these steel plates in my neck...
S: It makes it hard to breathe, but...It's worth it!

ROLE MODELS:

L: Who do you respect and admire?
P: Not Sean. Not in the slightest.
S: (Punches Pete in the head)
P: (Completely undisturbed) I respect Mom, and Dad, and some of my
Teachers, and Sasquatch--
L: Sasquatch?!
S: I RESPECT NO ONE!
P: Yeah! He's completely one-of-a-kind, living alone in the woods for
hundreds of years, wearing a big, furry coat, and all the while almost
NEVER BEING SEEN BY HUMAN EYES! You've got to respect that!
S: (Convinced) I respect sasquatch.
L: I guess you're right. I think I respect sasquatch, too. Sean is
there anyone else you admire and respect?
S: I respect Spider-Man, but not Batman!

HISTORY:

L: What is the most important historical event you can remember?
S: ...The building of the Pyramids?
P: No, no, Sean, only things that you can remember happening in your lifetime.
S: Oh! Columbus.

AND MORE HISTORY (DON'T ASK HOW WE GOT TO THIS POINT IN THE CONVERSATION):

L: But...Mammoths don't have a future!
S: How do you know? Are you from the future?
L: I'm from the Mammoths' future. And they're all dead and frozen solid!
P: All the ones *we've found* are frozen solid. But those are just
the ones who didn't make it to the ship!

I HAVE NO IDEA:

P: So the box came slicing through his head, and--
S: (GASP!) Pete! He's filming!
P: Aah! I'd better put my leg back on!
S: I think I dropped my lung over here somewhere...

AND FINALLY, THE FUTURE

S: I wonder what would happen if we watched this video in the future,
when we're really old men, and we have dignified friends who didn't
know us as kids.
P: I think we'd laugh ourselves into heart attacks.
S: No, the dignified friends would be like (Makes face indicating
extreme horror or disgust)
P: Yeah, maybe we can shock 'em into comas, and go take all their stuff!

~~~~~~~~

I think I'm going to try and edit the 40-plus minutes on two different
tapes down to all the good bits and put it on DVD, eventually. It's
brilliant stuff.

Well, I hope you dug. Talk to you all soon!

Jovially,

Luke the Journalist

I dare your family to be funnier than mine.

Poem of the Day

2007-11-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

Forgotten Language
~ Shel Silverstein

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . .
How did it go?
How did it go?

I relish this poem. There is something bitter and beautiful in that nostalgia man feels for splendor he hasn't known yet.

A Martyr's Love-Letter

2007-11-10T17:22:00.001-08:00

This speaks for itself.

Blessed Bartolomé Márquez was a martyr of the Spanish civil war, executed at age 21 for his involvement in Catholic Action. This is the letter he wrote to his girlfriend Maruja while he was in prison, awaiting his death the following day.

Provincial prison of Jaen, Oct. 1, 1936

My dearest Maruja:

Your memory will remain with me to the grave and, as long as the slightest throb stirs my heart, it will beat for love of you. God has deemed fit to sublimate these worldly affections, ennobling them when we love each other in him. Though in my final days, God is my light and what I long for, this does not mean that the recollection of the one dearest to me will not accompany me until the hour of my death.

I am assisted by many priests who -- what a sweet comfort -- pour out the treasures of grace into my soul, strengthening it. I look death in the eye and, believe my words, it does not daunt me or make me afraid.

My sentence before the court of mankind will be my soundest defense before God's court; in their effort to revile me, they have ennobled me; in trying to sentence me, they have absolved me, and by attempting to lose me, they have saved me. Do you see what I mean? Why, of course! Because in killing me, they grant me true life and in condemning me for always upholding the highest ideals of religion, country and family, they swing open before me the doors of heaven.

My body will be buried in a grave in this cemetery of Jaen; while I am left with only a few hours before that definitive repose, allow me to ask but one thing of you: that in memory of the love we shared, which at this moment is enhanced, that you would take on as your primary objective the salvation of your soul. In that way, we will procure our reuniting in heaven for all eternity, where nothing will separate us.

Goodbye, until that moment, then, dearest Maruja! Do not forget that I am looking at you from heaven, and try to be a model Christian woman, since, in the end, worldly goods and delights are of no avail if we do not manage to save our souls.

My thoughts of gratitude to all your family and, for you, all my love, sublimated in the hours of death. Do not forget me, my Maruja, and let my memory always remind you there is a better life, and that attaining it should constitute our highest aspiration.

Be strong and make a new life; you are young and kind, and you will have God's help, which I will implore upon you from his kingdom. Goodbye, until eternity, then, when we shall continue to love each other for life everlasting.

[Translation by ZENIT]

This was on my birthday, October 1st. The next day he was killed while shouting out "Long live Christ the King!"

"...[l]et my memory always remind you there is a better life, and that attaining it should constitute our highest aspiration."

Blessed Bartolomé Márquez, pray for us.

(Hat tip: The Shrine of the Holy Whapping/Zenit)

Enter Stage Right

2007-11-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gents, I am proud to bring your attention to a new blog, run by my own former co-host of Paul.Hollowcube and Almost1Brain, my partner in crime through many adventures, mistakes, and flavors of chaos, the one and only Alex.

Welcome back to the Interwebs, chum.

Prayer Requests

2007-11-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

For a good friend who is happily living the sketchy and worrisome life.

For another good friend who is trying to endure a load of suffering.

For me. I'm finding myself staring down the barrel of Important Decisions, and I need help discerning what I should be doing, and then to have the strength to do that.

Thanks!

Quote of the Day

2007-11-05T20:50:00.000-08:00

Out of context...

Luke: Check out third place in freestyle sideburns!

In context, this is hardly less weird, because we were totally looking at exciting and whimsical beards online. To see the freestyle sideburns which were so worthy of comment, you can go here. It makes me very happy to see that at least somebody realizes that beards, like anything else in God's creation, can be an opportunity for laughter and sub-creation. And a little fraternal competition is a welcome event as well.

And thus, I now choose also to announce/remind the male readership that No Shave November is upon us, and the annual Beardy-Beard contest along with it. Many set aside this, our former 9th month for the noble art and bodily function of beard-growing, and my friends are no different.

Our unofficially Youth for Life sponsored face-fuzz frenzy will start the day of the next meeting on November 14th, and end with the meeting after that on December 12th. Any participants must shave on the beginning date, and refrain from any subsequent shaveatory actions until the voting and judging takes place at the Dec. 12th meeting. Prizes are traditionally worthless, sketchy, and amusing.

If you are not in the area, or if you are not a member of YFL, you are more than free to grow a beard. God alone will judge you. But if you post pictures on your blogs, then I will help out with the process.

And to shock and awe all of you, I will be participating in this contest fully, which means that I will be entirely clean shaven for the first time since I was about 13 and I decided on a whim to grow sideburns, mostly to gross out some of my friends. But then I shall grow a new beard of substantial magnitude.

Pre-Employment

2007-11-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

Although I really do have this job, and continue to see things I like about the people I'll be working with, my life largely continues unmoved. I won't actually begin my training for another two weeks, and it's been about that long since my initial interview/hiring.

For now I'm just going to keep on with the odd jobs and the way too much partying, but now with the possible addition of the randomly researching coffee history to take a break from Seattle history, which I have been wrapping myself up in since August for no noticeable reason other than a habit of obsessive curiosity.

It's unflaggingly interesting, to my great remorse.

I avoided most kinds of Washington history under the impression that since I didn't live someplace very long involved with Western culture, the history wouldn't be interesting, but I was gravely mistaken, and now I regret not taking the opportunity to learn the stuff I'm finding out from people who would've been happy to teach me. True, the American Indian history isn't very well explored or easy to research, but just the exploring parties and founding fathers of the Emerald City are a pretty wild bunch and a lot of fun to learn about.

Victory

2007-11-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

My weekend has been greatly eventful.

Instead of telling you about it, I'm going to eat soup and hang out with the broface and the correlating wife.

Quote of the Day

2007-11-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

The four sons of Shea were all hanging out the other day after Mass talking about time travel, and Peter was trying to explain a story in which a man from the future comes back and gives the time machine to our hero, and it's from this time machine that the technology is invented to make time machines in the future so that the man can come back and give our hero the technology. Luke and I, in correlation of the Annoying Older Brothers Pact of '62, were trying to convince him that it wouldn't work.

Me: You can't do that, though.
Peter: Sure, he brings it back from the future!
Luke: But you can't have a free lunch. It's like if somebody took a recording of Bach and went back to play it for Bach himself, and Bach transcirbed the recording onto sheet music so that someday people could play it and make the recording that goes back in time...the music doesn't actually come from anywhere!
Peter: Yeah, it does, Bach wrote it.
Me: Because they brought it back for him. He didn't invent it, though.
Luke: Yeah, and it's the same thing in your story. The time machine is brought back, but it never started existing ever.
Me: You have to think of a way for the time machine to get invented. Otherwise, where does the time machine even come from?
Peter: *cheerily* Beats me! *goes on to tell us about the rest of the story*

Enough about Me, What do YOU Think About Me?

2007-10-31T15:57:00.000-07:00

What song is in your head?
"Signed, Sealed, Delivered" by Stevie Wonder. That's a song my brain can comfortably live with within my head.

What is the newest album in your collection?
Sufjan Stevens' "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" and it's still quite remarkable.

What is the top album on your wish list?
Any of the other Sufjan albums, particularly Seven Swans or the Michigan album; I never got a hold of the new Switchfoot album; or a fair amount of Mark, Jun, and Roy's music (Read: Indie, pop rock or hip-hop, and swing) that I listened to on Max.

What is the most recent live music event you have attended?
Um...do Luke and Tasha being way too musically talented all the time count? Can't turn 'em off, you can't! Hahaha! In truth, I haven't gone someplace just to listen to music or to attend a show for a long time now, although there has been live music at places where I have gone.

What is the top live music event on your wish list?
I heard Switchfoot and Relient K are coming through town, and RK has put on a jolly show for a few years. I would also fight an entire bus full of middle schoolers to get a hold of some Sufjan tixx if and when he comes through Sea-town.

What are the top three albums currently in rotation at your house [room]?
1. Broken recordly, Sufjan Stevens' "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" by far. Chill enough to put on as you go to sleep, interesting enough to wake up and work by. A deadly combo.
2. They Might Be Giants' "The Else" and it's subsequent bonus disk.
3. A mix of Max tunes, which is a lot of indie, some peppy rock, and some swing and tracks from various movies we watched on the road.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?
I was still getting comfortable in Mrs. Meyer's fourth grade classroom. My days were spent reading a whole lot (Particular favorites of this era were the Narnia books and the Animorphs) and wandering around my neighborhood pretending I was a spy from the future and that my house was a super high-tech base. Hiding from cars was a must. I was, in short, a weird kid.

2. What was I doing 1 year ago?
I had probably just finished up my lunch break at Archie McPhee, and was now going back to help Galen pack and wrap the last couple orders before taking off, and maybe going up to meet Alex in Everett and spend the weekend up north enjoying being alive.

3. What was I doing yesterday?
Cleaning (Totally alphabetized my bookshelves again!...it was getting pretty disorderly...please stop laughing), walking up to the library and back, writing down a couple thoughts (mostly story ideas which I hope to get to someday), calling like a brazillion people (7), and trying to schedule out all the stuff what needs done in the next couple days, and goofing off with Brutus and Charleston when the 'rents went to Fr. Spitzer's talk at Chesterton.

4. Five snacks I enjoy:
1. Tim's Cascade Chips (Sour Cream and Onion and Sweet Maui Onion [Batman!] are the best.)
2. Peanut-themed products, and particularly those which belong to Reese.
3. Baby carrots (Other vegitables only if monsterous amounts of ranch dressing are handy)
4. Gnome-steak pie.
5. Bagels

5. Five things I would do if I suddenly had $100 million:
1. Whoop and holler.
2. Go get a cheap haircut.
3. Buy some exciting socks.
4. Go see the Assassination of Jesse James.
5. Repair my typewriter (The '7' key doesn't work)
(What's exhilarating about this particular question is that I'll be able to do all those things after I get my first paycheck. In fact, I can start whooping and hollering right now!)

6. Five locations I would like to run away to:
1. Assisi
2. Poland
3. Marytown, IL (Or Marytown in Japan, for that matter)
4. California (But only because of all the people I know there. Still hate the state at large and everything.)
5. Toronto or Louisiana

7. Five bad (weird) habits I have:
1. Beard-growing
2. A liberal view of what counts as cleaniness in the bedroom floor arena.
3. Nail-biting (I'm an unabashed biter of the nails. Teeth seem more convenient that finding a clipper.)
4. Rereading books and listening to the same song over and over.
5. Not putting on my shoes until I get out of the car at the end of the trip.

8. Five things I like doing:
1. Streching.
2. Travelling.
3. Sitting at the beach.
4. Talking walks in the middle of the night.
5. Running away with my imagination.

9. Five T.V. shows I like:
I don't watch TV. For real. I think I haven't seen a single show that's on right now. Sorry I'm lame. I have it on good authority that I'll like Lost and Heroes when I get around to catching them on DVD, if that helps.

10. Five things I hate doing
1. Bleeding.
2. Falling off of things accidentally.
3. Laundry.
4. Being chased, surprised, or bitten by dogs.
5. Forgetting important stuff. (Did anybody else know it was Halloween today?!)

11. Five biggest joys of the moment
1. Listening to cheery music and writing
2. Being employed
3. Wearing fuzzy slippers
4. Mark Twain
5. Um....YOUR FACE

Anybody who has the time and inclination, feel free to spread the meme disease.

Double-Tall Triple Shot Vanilla-foam JOB'D!!

2007-10-31T15:55:00.000-07:00

Totally got the pozish over at the Shrine of St. Arbucks. They apparently did think I was awesome, but then somehow forgot to ever get back to me. Which was okay because it allowed me to show off my ability to be gracious in the face of error. Bonus.

I'll start training down the street next week, and eventually transfer someplace else to train in a store with a drive-through, and then I'll transfer to the store where I'll be permanently. That store doesn't exist yet, actually, but fortunately they have enough power to compel matter to come into being.

Thanks for all the prayers about this. I'm glad to be on the power-wielding side of what someday might be a world government. And aside from that, I'm quite grateful to have a honest job with good benefits.

Web Drama 2.5

2007-10-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

This in from a reader who shall remain nameless until he gets on with it and makes a blog for me to link.

After reading your latest report from the field, I find myself compelled for some unknown reason to add this tidbit: If a couple marries, but one of them has been involved in the death of either of the previous spouses, then the marriage is not valid in the eyes of the Church. Or as it is put formally in the Code of Canon Law:

Can. 1090 §1. Anyone who with a view to entering marriage with a certain person has brought about the death of that person's spouse or of one's own spouse invalidly attempts this marriage.

§2. Those who have brought about the death of a spouse by mutual physical or moral cooperation also invalidly attempt a marriage together.

So there you have it. Assuming Cynthia indeed offed Robert, she is not free to marry Hieronymus.

Web Drama II

2007-10-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

The plot has thickened with the spiders who share my room with me. First of all, I decided to give them proper names to help track and understand their movements more easily and with greater levels of anthropomorphism than can be achieved anonymously.

To recount the known facts, several days ago I witnessed two spiders who had set themselves up comfortably in a web above my bed, and before I could even introduce myself, much less reason with her, the female (henceforth Cynthia) had murdered her husband (now christened Robert) on the first afternoon in their new house on the frontier.

Appalled, I tracked her trek as she fled from the scene of the crime to the opposite corner of the room where she remained for several days, in shock of her own actions it seemed to me. Would she then go and turn herself in? What was her motive in all this?

Wednesday found me once again on the telephone, this time with my brother Luke who was also not unduly interested in the intrigue to be found on my ceiling. I decided to report on the actions of our apparent culprit, Cynthia, but she was no longer in the corner I had come to expect her in.
A quick survey, and a brief consideration of the criminal mind, led me right back to her...huddled once again over the corpse of her husband!!!

(More hygienic or cowardly detectives may consider it bad sportsmanship to leave cadavers sitting in the open for days on end, but I have not buried him for fear of disturbing crucial evidence from the scene of the crime.)

I was both disturbed and alarmed, and watched from a distance, as to not raise suspicion. Cynthia only stayed for a few minutes and then left. I pondered this, and I have to say that a lot of my fears seemed confirmed. Cynthia definitely was behaving like she'd murdered Robert, and was now covering her tracks, getting rid of evidence at the crime scene.

My stomach sank and I tried to think of a way to disentangle myself from this mess and get Cynthia behind bars where she belong. But this was only the beginning, for after taking a walk to clear my head of this sordid labyrinth of trickery, I returned to find Cynthia nestled in a new web not three feet from the corpse of poor Robert.

The twist comes when I realized that she was not alone. There was a new fellow in there with her!!!

After rapidly discerning a name for him (Hieronymous ... a name that popped into my head unexpected. I had to go look it up and make sure it was a real name. It is. It's the Greek name for Jerome, and means "sacred name".)

I have yet to figure out what exactly Cynthia is up to. I still don't know if killing Robert was a crime of passion so she could be free to marry Hieronymous (her potential life-long love), whether it was the unfortunate result of defending herself, or whether she had killed her husband in cold blood to cash in on the insurance and inherit his web.

And if that was the case, Hieronymous needs to know he could be the next victim of her female schemes!

Quote of the Day

2007-10-26T23:49:00.001-07:00

From GK Chesterton's essay "The Advantages of having One Leg".

To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing itself symbolises something other than isolation. If we wish to see what a house is it must be a house in some uninhabited landscape. If we wish to depict what a man really is we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand. So long as he is a single figure he means all that humanity means; so long as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship. Add another figure and the picture is less human--not more so. One is company, two is none. If you wish to symbolize human building draw one dark tower on the horizon; if you wish to symbolize light let there be no star in the sky. Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we call our day there is but one star in the sky-- a large, fierce star which we call the sun. One sun is splendid; six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower of Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg. To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness. As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which stands most alone.

[...]

All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrender of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, all desolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that it may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to realize how very much otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than we ever know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realize how fearfully and wonderfully God's image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realize the splendid vision of all visible things-- wink the other eye.

Two Artistic Positives

2007-10-26T23:16:00.000-07:00

Local coolness first, I found a great website by way of Nellie's Corner, this being the quite delightful Seattle Daily Photo, a blog made just to enjoy the beautiful and artistic bits of The Emerald City. There are a lot of bits to enjoy.

National coolness found due to the masterful linkage of Raised by Wolves. This one is enticing, but impractical for me right now: The National Novel Writing Month, or to get the stabbingly impractical acronym out of my system, NaNoWriMo. *shudder*

Despite that downside, the idea is cool. It's this group of folks who all take part in this contest of sorts, where all involved open a blank document on the first of November, and by the 30th, have to turn in a novel at least 50,000 words long. To quote Mark quoting the website:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a
novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a
novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing
down.

And elsewhere on the site:

NaNoWriMo is all about the magical power of deadlines. Give someone a goal and a goal-minded community and miracles are bound to happen. Pies will be eaten at amazing rates. Alfalfa will be harvested like never before. And novels will be written in a month.

Part of the reason we organize NaNoWriMo is just to get a book written. We love the fringe benefits accrued to novelists. For one month out of the year, we can stew and storm, and make a huge mess of our apartments and drink lots of coffee at odd hours. And we can do all of these things loudly, in front of people. As satisfying as it is to reach deep within yourself and pull out an unexpectedly passable work of art, it is equally (if not more) satisfying to be able to dramatize the process at social gatherings.

But that artsy drama window is woefully short. The other reason we do NaNoWriMo is because the glow from making big, messy art, and watching others make big, messy art, lasts for a long, long time. The act of sustained creation does bizarre, wonderful things to you. It changes the way you read. And changes, a little bit, your sense of self. We like that.

Me too! By Grabthar's Hammer, my day shall come!

Bella

2007-10-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

The American Papist has a review up.

I'm very interested in this film, but shall wait to see it (Someday...it doesn't look like it will open in Seattle) before commenting.

Rodeo O's!

2007-10-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a feller gets a hankerin'. Sometimes that hankerin' is for food. And real men hanker for food developed for real men.

One of those foods is the brand new breakfast cereal from Red Hot Brand, the hottest brand on the shelves: Rodeo O's, the first breakfast food crammed full of all the rough and tumble force of a cowpoke bein' trampled alive by a herd of stampeding longhorn.

Made from the purest all-American ingredients* which allowed the west to be won, the overwhelming flavor of one serving of Rodeo O's will give you the tenacity to get up in the morning and make it through a long day out on the range.

Said one satisfied customer, "I ain't ever even smelled nothin' like Rodeo O's before, but now that I et it every mornin' fer a fortnight I think I done personified masculinity!"

Yessir, it's much more than a common breakfast cereal, it is. Fitted to those what can't always make it in from the plains to hear a preacher come Sunday, eatin' Rodeo O's is danged nearer to a religious experience. Why, we reckon the sense of justice alone from a mouthful of this zesty chow is just what you might need to take your vengeance on a murderin' cattle rustler near you.

Look for the barbed wire box at any grocery store what carries the Red Hot Brand brand.

Rodeo O's: Are you man enough for breakfast?

* Main ingredients are horse meat, bacon grease, leather, barbecue sauce, gunpowder, and Cheerios.

An Unfinished Account of a Walk in the Night and the Successive Nostalgia

2007-10-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

I find something very interesting and relieving to take walks in the middle of the night. Even like the one I returned from a few nights ago, where the weather has put a word in against you and things are kind of spooky and you hear mysterious trilling noises behind you periodically. There is something both calming and exciting about just traipsing around completely alone in places you know are filled with people at all the other times.

What would it be like if I was always on these streets alone? Does anybody else come out to enjoy this dark ceasefire or am I the only company of the town and the inquiring ghosts of rainstorms past that tug on my mind when I get ready for bed? What are the people who never see the empty night dreaming about right now instead of driving their cars and jogging along, shut in by their headphones?

My shoes go along in a clumping salute of my own heartbeat and the God-given bounce of creation, sometimes joined by the cold and unexpectedly offbeat sound of a puddle exploding underfoot, but I'm pretty careful to keep away from the branches which have assumed their surrender positions on the pavement after many deadly hours of siege from the roaring wind.
(It's unchivalrous to step on a somebody when he's already been blown out of his tree. Believe you me, because I've been there.)

The trees are sick of the fight and are writhing and thrashing, doing their best to free themselves of the hold of the earth and take to the air once more, but gravity's grip on their roots is unrelenting. I consider the example and imagine taking off into the sky as well, but after realizing that power lines are hard to spot while gliding through a stormy night I decide to keep on walking for the moment.

The biggest road found itself before me and I looked across it at the condos that had replaced the one decent haunted house of my childhood.

It was big house for our neighborhood, and had been sitting in the center of a large and overgrown plot of land for as long as I could remember, boarded up and empty with charred marks around the outside. It had been set on fire under indefinite yet thrilling circumstances long before any of us neighborhood boys could remember.

Considering the evidence with our 8-year-old male minds, the only logical reason for a house to look this way was because somebody flipped their lid and, after dismembering the other living contents of the house, filled the entire house with kerosene and then sent the whole place up with a toss of his lit cigarette (the favored weapon of homicidal lunatic arsonists). The explosion left the house intact, but was left in that condition as a gruesome reminder for all the public to see, of what might happen if you smoked cigarettes, or something.

After gleaning this much of a story from various rumors we all had invented over the years, we then consciously moved on to making up campfire stories for our Boy Scout troop concerning the creepy hulk of a building. The stories grew more gory and fantastic and convincing until one day they bulldozed the place, built condos, and then the younger Scouts no longer knew what house we were talking about. (The physical location was a crucial part of persuading earlier generations that our tales of murderous neighborly horror were true, for everybody knows that if there's a dilapidated house right where the storyteller has indicated, then by gum, it probably is filled with the enchanted blood of a demon possessed drug-addicted murderer as well.)
I looked up at the clean-cut condominiums as I walked by, and I missed our old haunted house. There are no good condo stories. At least, none that would impress any self-respecting Boy Scout.

I suppose there are certain stories involving the place. I think somebody got beat up in the parking lot a few months ago, for instance. But there are no solid truths discernable from this, whereas campfire tales of horror always point to the honest wisdom of not murdering your family, getting drunk, or worshiping Satan, or frequenting places where such activities are known to take place. The only lesson of the condo parking lot story is "Somebody might come punch you while you're in a parking lot. That sucks."

Not quite the Shyamalan zing your audience is probably waiting for.

Regaining Focus

2007-10-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

Fr. Martin Fox over the Bonfire of the Vanities has a solidly impressive post up right now, which is more or less a transcript of a talk he recently gave about what is going on in the Church as a whole.

It's very encouraging, and raises a lot of good points about how we often get zoomed in on our parish or city, when really the life of the Church consists of...the whole Church, and not just what is affecting our diocese.

When it comes to our experience as Catholics, we live and operate most of the time in a “zoom in” situation. To show what I mean, let me do a little survey.

I’m going to ask some questions about Mass attendance—just to be clear, I’m not fishing around for whether you get to Mass every Sunday. I’m assuming you do; I’m not trying to embarrass anyone. Rather, I’m curious about where you usually attend Mass.

If you were at Mass outside your own, home parish anywhere in the last month, raise your hand. Keep your hand up if you did that twice in the last month. Keep your hand up if three times.

[...]

What if I were to ask you to get up and describe three different parishes, where you have routinely attended Mass in the last year — how many of you could stand up right now and have something to say?

How many of you attend Mass all or mostly in Latin? Spanish? Another language other than English? Okay, that serves my point.

[...]

Our experience of the Church tends to be our own parish, or a handful of parishes right around us, and the people we know from there. Beyond that, it’s the diocese [...] But that’s pretty much it.

Even then, there are things that happen in our archdiocese I bet most of us aren’t part of. We have several parishes where there’s a significant African American membership. Same with Spanish-speaking Catholics. A few Asian communities. We have a number of parishes where Mass, either the old form or the new—is regularly offered in Latin. There are several Catholic churches in our own archdiocese that aren’t Roman Catholic, but they are fully Catholic. How many of us can name those churches?

And this Archdiocese is [...] one of hundreds in the U.S. — and the 60-plus million Catholics here are less than 5% of the whole world’s Catholics!

Totally true. I've been all over the country, had far more experiences with the American Church at large than your average bear, and I realize that through all that was mostly around a tiny tiny portion of the English speaking parts of what ammounts to a smattering of churches.

When I did get glimpses into other Catholic cultures, particularly hanging out with Indian and African churches in Canada, it was a breath of fresh air to know something outside of Seattle flavored American Catholicism and instead see that we were all one large body and that we didn't all have the same problems, and indeed that we often had remedies for other afflicted parts of the body.

Do you remember when the fast before Mass was 3 hours? How about when it was from midnight? Can you remember when Pope Pius X lowered the age of receiving first communion? That happened in 1910, almost 100 years ago.

That seems such a long time ago, for our usual way of living—but in the life of the Church? Not so long! We’re still being influenced by events well before that—for example, many of the “new” trends in Biblical scholarship were “new” before that; the “new” Social teaching of the Church was “new” in the 1890s(!); and “new” trends in liturgy go back to about that time as well!

Not only do we live in a “zoom in” situation as far as location and culture, we also live in a “zoom in” situation as far as time—we’ve experienced only a small slice of the life of the Church. That skews our perspective. On the one hand, we view some things as “permanent” because they’ve been around for a few decades—but that’s not permanent in the life of the Church. Yet on the other hand, we think the changes we’ve experienced are about recent history, when in fact they really go back centuries.

[cut]

We hear about a priest shortage. We’re experiencing it right now, in our archdiocese. If we zoom out, and see the bigger picture of the world, we discover that there are worse shortages in many other places, and there are far better vocations, in others.

In Central and South America, many Catholics see the priest, for Mass on Sunday, every several weeks. In between, they have no Sunday Mass, only having the Scriptures read and maybe a communion service.

Meanwhile, there are very few parishes in this country where you can’t have Sunday Mass, either in your own parish, or a parish nearby. For example, I am pastor of two parishes, but they are a half-mile apart, and each has three Masses for Sunday.

Our vocations to the priesthood have been down in this country for some time, that’s why we’re in this situation. Only they are trending up in recent years, for our Archdiocese. And in a number of dioceses in the U.S., they are way up, and have been up. In others, the situation is turning around.

Even though the situation in the U.S. is getting better, it’s not good enough yet. More older priests are passing from the scene than new ones coming on. The good news is, the worst is behind us, and things are slowly getting better. Depending on what we do, the situation could be getting a lot better.

The situation in Europe is terrible—but there are bright spots even there.

Meanwhile, in Africa vocations are exploding: up over 80% from 1978 to 2004! They are also way up in Asia. Of course, they’ve got to keep up with an even-faster growing Catholic population in those places.

You and I tend to think of the U.S. as the center of things; but while we’re less than 5% of the whole Church worldwide, for every American Catholic, there are almost 3 African Catholics. [...] As it stands, only one in five Africans is Catholic, but the Church is growing there, same in Asia. The face of the Catholic Church, to us, may be European and white — but in reality, it’s more African and Asian.

Again, based on what little time I've had around African and Asian Catholics, this gives me unexpressable joy at the hope that we might be learn from their guidance.

From there, Fr. Fox goes on in Chestertonian and orthodox fashion to defend the Mass and the actions of the Pope and Vatican II from both the progressives and the conservatives, but I will leave you to read that on your own because I'm already essentially copying his entire talk and it's much easier to read it where it's written.

Housekeeping

2007-10-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

I switched things up a little, here at the Puny Yet Jocular Institute. I've gotten rid of my unkempt lists of cool people, both real and fictional...mostly because I hadn't altered them since the day I made them, and I have since found many heroes in my adventures and my books and movies that a proper update is nigh impossible to keep.

I also added a few more interesting blogs and sites, so check those out. And I went ahead and yoinked some of the dead blogs. I think I'm going to fix a bit of the clutter in the labelling department as well.

Just make this operation a little smoother...so that when you read my posts on your RSS feeds, we'll have a clearer transmission of thought.

By the Way

2007-10-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

My life is awesome. Sure I'm jobless and often confused about the future, but seriously, what kid my age gets to have the adventures I've had? I realized that out of the past year, September was the only month were I wasn't on some fantastic trip, and instead I spent it hanging out hardcore with friends and then going to Luke and Tasha's wedding.

Hello? Awesome?

Yes, this is Awesome speaking. In your face. All year long and across the face of the globe.

I thank you, God, for this most amazing life. Give me the strength to use it to be an even amazinger person, and to pay it forward whenever possible.

Web Drama

2007-10-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

Whilst conversing with my dear friend Alexander this morning by means of telephone, I found myself staring at the ceiling while relaxing on my bed. There were two small spiders up in the corner of my room, and they seemed to be setting up camp.

I informed Alex of my new roommates, and we agreed that it must be very exciting for such spiders to be heading out together to start a new life together in the corner of my ceiling. Considering the fact that the couple might not want prying eyes as they got used to life together, I though of relocating them to the garage, but was swayed to allow them to stay due to slowly declining temperatures, just for the winter, as long as they didn't mind me staying and keeping tabs on them.

This isn't the first time I had enjoyed such companions. In the midst of my Travels, when we were staying with Sr. Bertilla, we were enjoying the luxury of her sitting room, and found ourselves in the company of a spider of striking (Some would say 'off-putting' size) which strode around the edge of the high ceiling with an effectual gait. We considered demolishing the room in an attempt to get close to the wall and take him out, but instead offer him the protection of St. Francis and finished out meeting.

Eventually, we grew to appreciate his spindly presence and rigorous surveillance of the perimeter, and named him Fred, after Fred Astaire who had once danced on the walls with as much grace as this, his tiny Canadian counterpart.

After a few days somebody killed him anyway and he got flushed away, wrapped in Kleenex. A noble end for a noble spider.

I decided to salve my aggrieved conscious by letting this young spider couple to move in, and Alex helped me think of potential names, and he suggested that their names would probably reveal more about their futures and personalities. For example, if I suspected that I would ever need to kill them without much regret, a Romeo and Juliet might be in order. I decided against it, and stood up to see them more clearly, whereupon I discovered the horrible truth:

One of the spiders was DEAD, and just hanging in his web curled up into what might be a fetal spider position, and the other was now fleeing the scene of the crime!

We agreed that it was probably the male who was the victim, as this is the only part of bug psychology we had ever heard of thanks to several bad sci-fi movies about the praying mantis, and wondered how to proceed.

Was there a Spider Justice hotline to call? Why had she killed him? Had he fallen in love with another spiderette, and she was overcome with jealousy and slew him in passionate revenge? Had she just broken up with him, causing a despairing suicide?

I left his body where I had found it, and pursued the chief suspect as she headed for the air duct, but then changed her mind and dashed for a plausible alibi in the opposite corner of the room.

That's where they remain even now, as I sit here and type, the sole witness to a brutal and sudden death. Was it a homicide (arachnicide)? Suicide? What were the motives here? What should I do as the available arbiter of the law?

I shall report as events develop, and the names for these tiny individuals are revealed.

INTERVIEW'D!!

2007-10-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

Before all else, let me say as man of few, but largely lazy, time-tested habits, that waking up in the morning is kind of a weird experience. I had heard from local legends that our sun still rose is the east during this point of the "day", but my own memories of the phenomenon had long since recessed into the fog of ages. I now understand what people have been talking about, and would even go so far as to hope I might someday be able to repeat the encounter.

For good luck, I put on one of my favorite ties, the Striped Orange Italy Tie. (This tie is, as they say, tied for the position of Favored Tie along with several other memorable ones including Burnt Orange Trevi Fountain Tie, Blue-Green Plaid Grampa Tie, Pink Polka Dot Bernhoft Tie, Swirly Yellow Louisiana Tie, and several Untimely Worn Christmas Ties. Along with these honored titles, there are also beloved contenders for the ugliest tie, which is largely a battle of Brown-White-Orange Pixilated Plaid-and-Polka-Dot Tie pitted against Knitted Mustard Gold with Red Paisley Designs Tie.)

I got to the Shrine of St. Arbucks a few minutes early, and got a free frappacino for my efforts, and to stave off the encroaching "waiting for a job interview" butterflies. Weirdly enough, I hate doing actual applications more than I mind interviews, even though normally I would jump at the chance to impersonally write about how I grow marginally more stupendous with every passing breathe, step, and gulp of Mountain Dew...but for some reason an application of even moderate sway strips me of my egotistical and linguistically agile powers.

After checking my handsome and professionally clad self in the warped reflection of a Mysterious Coffee-Related appliance (Don't worry all you potential future customers, I secretly know that it was an espresso machine, and what's more I know how to operate it thanks to some adventures in the midst of my Travels...but that would ruin the joke) I sat down and, in a fit of materialism which I hoped would have both a camouflaging and soothing effect, made a list of all the people I could start paying back with my Starbucks-made wealth, and then continued on to all the sweet stuff I would be able to buy. I got as far as a butler, robot house, and candy before I suddenly found myself being interviewed.

I think it went pretty well. I was all upons the good posture, eye contact, jaunty smile, and answering questions in a way that seemed to go over pretty well. I even apparently got the hidden bonus points just by knowing (from big family experience) that a large part of working in a high traffic area was cleaning up after all the traffic whether they be toddler siblings or business executives. My only awkward worry is just the fact that I didn't have very many questions for them, and they looked as if they were expecting more.

Meh.

I'll hear back sometime this week, so keep it all in your prayers. Even if I don't get this job, it was a generally genial experience, and I was glad to have the chance to get interviewed by a good place, even if it winds up being practice for the next interview.

Plus, I got a free drink. I'm happy.

Blogversary!

2007-10-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

Four years ago today, I was added as the third member of what become the most infamous trio in the Catholic homeschooler circles. I knew Paul from MI and hanging out in study hall, and I barely knew Alex but had met him when Paul and Mary invited me to Youth for Life. My first-ever post is an odd read nowadays.

Cow is Tryin' Out the Blogger Thing

Uh, hey everybody! My good friend Paul sent me a plea to save his blog from undergoing mass boredom, and with my witty quips, perhaps people would get interested again.

Okay, he actually said something more along the lines of, "Well, since once in a while you say something sorta mildly funny among the endless dribble spouting forth from you, I guess it'd be okay if you contributed to my blog. You know. If you REALLY wanted to..."

Either way, here I am, a complete newbie to blogging, and pretending I'm not. I guess this is hello.

I can't find the email from Paullo, but I'm nearly sure that it was a lot more inviting than my faux-humilty.

What an alarming 4 years, anyhow.

I bet there are people who still read this blog who can remember all the way back to the Paul.hollowcube days when I was the new guy who posted way too much, and claimed myself Dictator for Life when I successfully had pushed all post from Paul or Alex off into the archives by my well-crafted yammering, or the transfer to Almost1Brain.com, where Paul and Alex nearly got lost in translation and posting become even more of a rarity.

Now both of those sites have been cannabalized by the internet, and dismantled...AND NOW MY DREAM AND COME TRUE!!! I have outlasted all the others, and shall rule with an IRON INTERNET FIST. M'WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!

Pray for SoCal

2007-10-22T20:06:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard from the news or Perkins, Southern California is burning, and people's lives and livelihoods are in danger. Pray for everybody who is being evacuated, for all the people who are still in danger, and for the soul of the man who died in the fires.

Saints Florian, Lawrence, and Joan of Arc, protect them.

PS: I don't want to pre-empt your California bound prayers, but also please pray for me. I've got an interview with a successful locally owned shop tomorrow (Starbucks), and I would pretty grateful for the work.

Daily Life at 40 Days for Life

2007-10-20T23:38:00.000-07:00

The adventure continues down at 40 Days for Life (at 9th and 45th in the U-District! Go now, if you feel the urge! You can finish reading this later!) I thought I would tell some of my good stories.

The first story took place last Friday morning, starting at the stroke of midnight. Or...the stroke of like 11:34pm Thursday, because that's when my friend Brian came and got me, and we wound our way down to the site of the vigil to be greeted by what I have since lovingly named "Kyle the Hyperborean Freezing Death God of Relentless Wind". (Kyle hangs out a lot at the vigil site. He's loyal.)

As well as Kyle, we found ourselves in the company of the man who covered the previous hour, another bystander (henceforth the Curious Guy), and a cop car which had just pulled over some lady right across the street from where we stood.

We said hello to the previous pray-er and he took off, and Curious Guy picked up where he had left off, commenting on the behavior of the cop and the lady across the street and filling us in on what had gone down already. Apparently the policeman had pulled her over for some minor refraction (a light out, I think), but the lady took it to heart and had burst into tears, and so the policeman had kind of receded into his car.

When the cop came back to talk to her, she jump out of her car and ran into a restaurant, leaving him kind of standing there surprised in the street. Unsure of what protocol dictated in this situation, he proceeded to call in EVERY COP IN NORTH SEATTLE FOR BACKUP. They all received the summons loud and clear, and soon the street, sidewalk, nearby parking lot, apartment buildings, and sturdier trees were filled with squad cars, all with lights flashing to the mild annoyance of Curious Guy. The policemen themselves all congregated on the sidewalk.

Curious Guy kept up a running commentary on how badly the policemen reacted, and checked in with the staff of the theatre to see if they had any inside scoop, and then came back to fill us in. He had gleaned the fact that the lady was still in the restaurant, possibly talking to her sister, lawyer, or boyfriend. He went to chat with the cops, but didn't get a very good story out of them, and so he just went into the restaurant, where he found out that the lady's sister had been contacted, and was talking with the police.

It seems the lady had a history of Something-or-other that apparently got her off the hook, because almost as soon as Curious Guy had told us about the latest developments, all fourteen hundred cops got back in their cars, and they all left.

The girl soon came out of the restaurant, and her boyfriend and sister soon appeared. The three of them stood talking, while Curious Guy talked with the restaurant staff and customers who had come outside, and then both groups converged and all chatted for a while allowing for Curious Guy to get all the final details and then they all left. Curious Guy never came back to tell us the end of the story.

Fortunately, the interesting part of my tale is the fact that while the whole block had been turned to a discothèque of squad cars and cops shining flashlights at each other, a lot of the denizens of the nearby apartments decided to come see what the fuss was about (Curious Guy was happy to bring them up to speed), and while they were out, to see what the deal was with the guys who were always standing on the sidewalk (We were happy to bring them up to speed), and that result was remarkably affable, even if not always supportive.

But one guy specifically thought it was really cool not only that we were out there taking abuse, but that our point wasn't to accuse or hate or ashame or annoy, but to just pray and actually help out any parents who needed choices.

So, as inconvenient as the whole police pow-wow, and subsequent everybody-just-giving-up-and-vanishing, must have been for all parties involved, it was a funny way to evangelize our fellow bystanders.

I'm still mad Curious Guy didn't bother to tell us the final events of the hullabaloo.

Soon after that all went down, we got some reinforcements, and a visit from a woman who was out walking her small, unleashed dog at 3am. She came up and said that it was good we had a sign up now, because she hadn't known why were there before. Continuing, she lauded and praised us for our efforts in the baby-saving area, and went on in such a way for about 5 or 10 minutes, whereupon she concluded with asking us if we thought dogs went to Heaven.

All of us reflected on this internally and waited for somebody to answer, or some relevancy to appear. Eventually somebody said "Well, I don't really know. I don't really think so."

At this point the woman, in short, freaked. She took back all the previous remarks and went on to blame us for not only abortion, but also the Iraq War, racism, Michael Vick, and then stormed off into the night. It was astonishing.

Dad suggests that the best non-committal answer to this is "I hope so." Just in case any of you find yourself faced with this, or a like-minded woman.

My second story takes place last night, when several of us guys took up the weekly walk around Greenlake in our highly attractive retina-burning-yellow 40 Days for Life t-shirts to raise awareness.

For those of you not in the non-profit social work biz, 'raising awareness' usually means doing something that causes a lot of people to say "Hey, what the heck are you guys doing?"

In this case, it meant walking around the lake after dark during a rainstorm. When the campaign started, a walk at 6pm was pretty smart, people were just getting off work and going for an evening run.

Unfortunately, several weeks later, when you start at 6pm, most people have gotten off work and are now in their houses and avoiding all activities that will bring them out into the wild. Because it's very dark. And very cold. Kyle lapped us like five times around the lake.

Nonetheless, we pressed on. It was rather fun, actually. We were all sort of in high gear for no reason and so there was much hollering and whoops and capering around like ninnies.

I mean...like men.

Soggy, capering men.

After a period of time roughly akin to a life sentence in a labor camp in Siberia, we got around the lake and back into the truck, and decided that a cheap, hot, convenient heart attack was in order, and gradually made our confused way (Every time we accidentally found ourselves heading toward the Space Needle, we discussed whether or not we had ever been to the top. At last count, I had still not been to the top of the Space Needle at least 8 times.) to the closest "Dick's Drive-in: Burgers, Shakes, and Fries", and purchased several orders of all three.

Incidentally, we probably did more "raising awareness" in the 20 minutes of hanging out at Dick's Drive-In than we had in the previous hour or two of capering around around the lake, slowly frolicking closer to a case of pneumonia. We decided that the truth was plain: God wanted us to go out for burgers more often.

We few, we happy few, then crammed into the truck again, far warmer, successful, and fatter men than we had been getting out. On our way back to where all the cars were parked, we had a bet to see if one of us could guess the next singer to come on the radio of the local country station. We all picked our performers...and we all lost three consecutive songs, and gave up and walked down to the vigil site.

Two Orthodox Catholics were covering the hour, and I chatted with them for a bit as were joined by two more people, and then a group from Seattle University. A woman came up and thanked us for being out there, and told us a bit about pro-life movement she had been involved with in her native England before she had gotten married. As she walked away, I realized that it was Suzanne Wolfe, who wrote a beautiful book called The Unveiling, which I've recently read.

I considered running after her, but was quickly presented with the Famous Person Conversation Mental Block, where I can't think of anything to say besides "Hey, I recognize you, and you do cool stuff."

In retrospect, that would probably be a welcome remark, even if it's oft-repeated.

So, after that pleasant experience, and actually right as the SU folks showed up for the first time to see what happens at the vigil, a van parked next to us, and the couple inside glared at us. After hesitating, the man got out and went to go get movie tickets, and gruffly called us idiots as he walked by. No big deal. Personally, a fairly accurate remark most mornings.

The girl kept staring at us, and I'll admit I stared back, but only because I though it was a friend of mind. I briefly considered if her seeing me there would affect our relationship, but then realized that she had long known I was pretty strongly pro-life due to my sweatshirt, which remains a ragged reminder of that fact, thanks to a colony of Rock for Life patches. And then I realized that the girl wasn't who I thought it was, as she stepped out of the car into better light, and then opened a bottle of Coke and threw it violently at us.

I was mildly surprised at that action, but admittedly more so when she walked up and, following a impressive preparation of saliva, spat on Brian. This whimsical action was met with what is best noted as a mixed reception, but after some stern looks at her retreating back, we just continued our rosary.

If nothing else, that certainly takes a bit of bravery...of sorts. I don't mean to say that spitting on people you disagree with is courageous, but at the same time, she obviously felt that we were doing something wrong, and even though it was her lonesome self standing before a pretty large group of us, she laid siege in spite of the odds. The pacifistic odds.

When we finished our rosary, and started back, for the most part we were all pretty jealous of Brian. I mean, a few of us got pop in the face, but to actually get spit on for your beliefs...that's pretty impressive on your spiritual resume.

It's very humbling to have that kind of visceral knee-jerk hatred right in your face, very personal, and at the same time know that this person is the person you need to love more than ever, to try and help, that you both might make it to Heaven. When somebody hates you personally, you might be the best chance they have of learning forgiveness.

Why does Brian get all the graces?

Next time somebody gets the hankering to launch a loogey our way, I'll be prepared to request a spread shot.

Consideration of the reaction happened eventually as well, and the verdict was that being Catholic is a pretty weird gig to sign up for. Yeah, you want Catholics? We're the guys who stand in the rain all night praying, and fight over the spittle of the people who hate us.

Epilogue: We got back to the truck, and Nick won the "Guess Which Country Star Will Be On the Radio" bet, and so we have to buy him his burger next time.

Eeeeearwoooorm....

2007-10-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

I've had a song stuck in my head all day.

The twist is that the song is the "nah nah nah" part from some rock song I can't even remember. Like, the "Nah nah nah" is the only thing from the entire song I know, and I've been impulsively nahing all day long and I'm pretty sure brain cells are dying because of it.

I Have a Sharp, Driving, Depressing Pain in My Chest Regarding This

2007-10-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

George Lucas is going to make a Star Wars TV show.

Filmmaker George Lucas said Tuesday that he has "just begun work" on a live-action television series rooted in the "Star Wars" universe, which is huge news not just for fans of the science-fiction epic but also for networks looking for a piece of the Lucas magic that has grossed $4.3 billion in theaters worldwide.

There is a caveat, though: The proposed series doesn't have anyone named Luke or Anakin in it, a story path that Lucas concedes is "taking chances" as far as connecting with an audience expecting the familiar mythology.

*several more childhood memories escape in the form of a protracted sigh and are soon disected and rearranged and sold for profit* Please, George, just stick movies. Good movies. Like...a few you did in the 80's. Actually, thanks for those movies, but please find something else to do now.

I really don't see how this can be anything but terrible. A TV show relies on good plot and good writing, and then maybe a little bit of "Wow" factor (special effects and nifty props and cool "universe" ideas) for sci-fi shows. George is still pretty darn good at the "Wow" factor...and pretty much fails abismally in every other way recently.

Star Wars fans are already coping with the death of any good backstory for the original tale. Don't kill the future too. Just let the story be there.

If you really feel the urge to get into sci-fi TV, then use your ill-gotten funds to finance Joss Whedon to make another few seasons of Firefly. *wink*

A tip of a very depressing hat to MikeG.

Blogging 'Somewhat' To 'Reasonably' More Likely

2007-10-18T00:41:00.000-07:00

I've just gotten a flash drive, which means that I can finally get things off of my my own chunky desktop, which has no web access, and get them onto Das Internets. For example, blog posts. This also means that I can keep a better handle on replying to email, writing columns for the New York Times (under a cleverly witty pseudo-name), and fighting terrorists. Technology is the answer to all life's little problems.

On the other hand, that's all in a best-case scenario, and I shall probably continue apace. A very slow, lazy, and informal pace. Where I mostly do other things in spite of my new flash-drivey advantage.

Quotes of the Day

2007-10-18T00:16:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the second-hand advice of my brother Luke, who was really just passing on the brilliance after he got it from our friend Chantelle, I've been reading a book called Seventeen, by one Booth Tarkington who is like an American Wodehouse...with far less books. The book chronicles the love life of William Sylvanus Baxter, who is seventeen years old. Behold the humor:

...the approaching vision was piquant and graceful enough to have reminded a much older boy of a spotless white kitten, for, in spite of a charmingly managed demureness, there was precisely that kind of playfulness somewhere expressed about her. Just now it was most definite in the look she bent upon the light and fluffy burden which she carried nestled in the inner curve of her right arm: a tiny dog with
hair like cotton and a pink ribbon round his neck--an animal sated with indulgence and idiotically unaware of his privilege. He was half asleep!

William did not see the dog, for it is the plain, anatomical truth that when he saw how pretty the girl was, his heart --his physical heart-- began to do things the like of which, experienced by an elderly person, would have brought the doctor in haste.

And again!

During the glamors of early love, if there be a creature more deadly than the little brother of a budding woman, that creature is the little sister of a budding man. The little brother at least tells in the open all he knows, often at full power of his lungs, and even that may be avoided, since he is wax in the hands of bribery; but the little sister is more apt to save her knowledge for use upon a terrible occasion; and, no matter what bribes she may accept, she is certain to tell her mother everything.

All in all, a young lover should arrange, if possible, to be the only child of elderly parents; otherwise his mother and sister are sure to know a great deal more about him than he knows that they know.

Sufjan, Soothe my Soul

2007-10-15T21:19:00.000-07:00

In the midst of my Travels, I would often "steal" (Is it really stealing when after the theft, the object and the thief are going to remain within eyesight, and probably the same van, of the victim for like 5 more months?) Mark's iPod and paw through his notable collection of sweet music, most of which is distinctly indie, which means music not terribly popular due to the artist's interest in playing complex music and not trading in their souls for studio manufactured popularity, leather pants, and amps so stupendous that simpler cultures could use them to house a sizable flock of goats and their single plowhorse with a game leg who might not make it through the winter.

One of my favorites was incidentally the one which I had already heard some of, yet couldn't put on while driving for fear of all sentient life within earshot falling in a state of blissful calm, and subsequently plunging into a swamp, off a cliff, or...into a cornfield.

Dispite this grave and oft-upheld restriction, I did grow to relish the music of Mr. Sufjan Stevens. Just the other day I finally went out and bought one of his albums, "Come on and feel the Illinoise". It is to the ear what I am to you: Delightful.

Trust me.

His style is kind of uberchill folky rock, plus a some jazz...and maybe like...a small jam session on somebody's back porch. The lyrics are very beautifully written, poetry in very comfortable motion, and reference a lot of Illinois history and culture as that's the "theme" of this album.

That's the other fun thing about Sufjan is his quiet whimsicality. He has appearantly decided to do an album featuring every state in the Union. He did two (Illinois and Michigan) and then it seems gave up on the idea. The song titles are pretty hilarious as well, my all-important personal favorite being "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!", closely followed by "A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, but for Very Good Reasons" and the record-breakingly ridiculous "The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'"

Speaking that song title aloud equals about a quarter of the time it takes to listen to it. And if that's not quality music, I don't know what is.

Solid Article on Sr. Miriam!

2007-10-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

This article, titled 'One Cool Sister', from the Everett Herald was read at YFL, where Sr. Miriam is already known and admired, and I though I'd pass it on because it's a surprisingly excellent secular piece about terrific gal.
Whole thing can can be found here.

"...Of course she shops at a normal grocery store," said sophomore Savannah Fletcher. "She's a normal person."

Well, not exactly. Most people don't dedicate their life's work to Christ. Or take vows of poverty. Or spend much time praying. Or wear clothes that clearly define who they are. And just who is Sister Miriam James Heidland? Well, when she stood before the student body at Archbishop Murphy High School on the first day of the fall term, she told them who she was. A party girl in college. A person who once aspired to be a "fabulously wealthy" business woman and live a "glamorous life."

[...]

On the day she spoke to the Archbishop Murphy students as Sister Miriam James Heidland, a soon-to-be 31-year-old nun who would be an assistant volleyball coach to head coach Jim Hardy, dead silence prevailed in the gymnasium. "You could have heard a pin drop," she recalled. Shock and awe? Perhaps. From party girl to nun? That's enough to addle any teen's mind."

"I was really worried she was going to be really strict and make us wear long Spandex and be a really uptight kind of person," said Megan Carlson, one of the players on Sister Miriam's junior varsity team. "She's not like that at all."

She's really fun to be around. She does everything that everybody else does. The only difference is she wears an outfit and she works for God.

Keeping Up Appearances

2007-10-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

Much like glaciers and evolution, the way I present myself to the world rarely chances. However, much like global warming and mad scientists who want humanity to progress faster, sometimes my imagination takes over and I find myself looking even studlier that ever before, and a mighty change occurs.

For example, last week I wore a sweatervest for the first time in easily-recalled memory, and the first time of my own choosing. I actually wore an overcoat over it, but I was still kind of secretly pleased by my own furtive nerdiness. I think it's important that someone bears the torch of this ill-recieved fashion nugget.

I think we owe it to vests, for all the work they've done for us over the years anyhow. As the poet Demetri Martin has said, "I think vests are all about protection. You know what I mean? Like a lifevest protects you from from drowning... and bulletproof vests protect you from getting shot...and the sweatervest protects you from pretty girls. 'Leave me alone. Can't you see I'm cold just right here?'"

In addition to keeping the honorable sweatervest current, I also removed several portions of my beard, namely the parts that don't pertain to the sideburns and gotee that I still have on my face. For all you visual learners, my chin now kind of like this:

\ - /
`#

Be it noted that although I have shaved in the pattern indicated, my face is noteably less arrow shaped, and more along the lines of a large but comely hank of ham.

St. Edna

2007-10-03T23:42:00.000-07:00

In the midst of my Travels, I went to St. Edna's parish in Illinois. Quite a lot, actually. I decided to find out more about the saint, and was somewhat discouraged by the fact that a Google of "St. Edna" several links which led to...the parish I was at. Not exactly the best indication of a well-documented life. Fortunately, further inquiries revealed her story. Kind of.

But not really.

From the ever-helpful Patron Saint Index:

Princess who renounced her wealth and position to become a nun. Renowned for her sanctity and miracles.

For those keeping track, sanctity and miracles are some of the best things for a saint to be reknowned for.

That is, however, pretty much all I could find on her. Oh, and she was Irish. And lived at least for some part of the 9th century.

Preparing to write some kind of snark about the dearth of absent information, I realized that if I could get away with two sentences similar to hers floating around around on the internet 11 hundred years after I die, I will die with a better reputation than I deserve.

She lived the life that I long to: she lived a life of humble holiness and simplicity, showing the face of God to those around her.

That's all I need to know about somebody.

St. Edna, pray for us.

Ouch.

2007-10-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

Well, that was dumb and humiliating.

If any of you happened to read the post from earlier this evening, that was a lie. It was a prank lie. But that's no excuse, nor does it make it less harmful.

I am truly sorry for lying to all of you.

Das 40 Days For Life

2007-10-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Are you in favor of helping women, particularly pregnant women? Not doing anything at ungodly hours of the night, or at any point during daylight hours? Hypothetically able to find 9th and 45th in the U-District?

The 40 Days for Life maybe for you?

I mean, it is. Sorry. I was getting on a question mark kick.

The 40 Days for Life is a peaceful prayer vigil that is taking place RIGHT NOW out in front of the Planned Parenthood near the U-Dub. People have been outside of it praying, every hour of every day for about a week, and they are going to continue the vigil for another 33 days.

You may ask why. Therefore, the premptive response is this:

The mission of the campaign is to bring together the body of Christ in a spirit of unity during a focused 40 day campaign of prayer, fasting, and peaceful activism, with the purpose of repentance, to seek God’s favor to turn hearts and minds from a culture of death to a culture of life, thus bringing an end to abortion in America.

This, and a lot of other excellent explinations and facts can be found at the Seattle 40 Days for Life website. As well as this, they have an ongoing blog about what's been going on at the site of the vigil. That remarkable gal Gregaria also has been keeping track of her thoughts about her time spent there, and those thoughts are worth reading.

Please, if you are anywhere in Seattle, check it out. See if you can come out for an hour, and if you can feel free to contact them and tell them when you can cover things. If you are kind of in the Seattle area, do it. Also, check out the vigils being held in Everett and our mighty capital, Olympia. Or, go to the National site, and see if there's one close to you, should you belong the the 99% of the world population that isn't in Seattle.

All the Haps

2007-10-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

Lack of Posts: Due the untimely and power-surgeity death of the computer (I still cling to hope of a comeback, thanks to the ability of computers to be dead for weeks before a horrible zombie uprising can be purchased and installed) where I usually live and check my email and write blogs obsessively broke, and so subsequently my cyber-soul has slowly been fading away as I have fewer and fewer opportunities to blog, email, chat, or play old Nintendo mods online.

I've pretty much been forced to start looking people in the eye when I talk to them, and use my own voice and face to communicate (instead of the standard typing fingers, italics, bold, and occasional smiley), and go somewhere besides Wikipedia or IMDb when I don't know something.

Okay, that's a lie.

I just make a note of it, and then wait until I can find some web access. But it's still far less convenient that my standard instant gratification. Anyhow, that's what's up, and why I've only written about 3 dozen words this month entire. In an effort to recouperate from that dismal creek of watered down Cow's Life, here be the bottom line on what I've been up to.

My Life: Kind of dull, yet enjoyable. This summation of my current state of being also doubles as what I consider to be a passable epitaph. Keep that in mind when the time comes. Another good one is Hillaire Belloc's, which says "When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." And "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, by Spartan law, we lie," is pretty hard to beat, King Leonidas.

Anyhow, generally speaking, not a whole lot is happening. That's not to say I haven't been having my doctor reccomended daily percentage of snorts'n'chuckles. But there's still something about having a life that mine is missing.

My Employment: I have very little to replace/fill in the time I would've spent talking to people online, thanks to my new employers, who are not exactly ideal for the professional workplace, to say the least. I mean, heck! For starters they, and anybody else, have not even bothered to talk to me or hired me yet.

Poking around bookstores and nearby shops looking for work have been casual hobbies of mine, but so far nobody is biting. Who wouldn't want to hire somebody as hairy and untrained as I am? I'm responsible! I worked hard (kind of, on and off) for almost six whole months in various warehouse establishments before I ran away and lived in a van for the remaining 6 months of the year!

If that's not quality life experience, I don't know what is.

Besides actually have a job.

Luke and Tasha: Totally got married the other day. Admittedly, that freaks all kinds of fluids and objects out of me, but at the same time it's so wonderful. I mean, it's always weird when people you know make big changes like that, but when it's your freeking brother who is about a year and a half older than you marrying somebody you've been friends with for a while...it takes a little adjusting. They're the new Mr. and Mrs. Shea. Hahahahaha! Yeah. Wow.

Anyhow, the wedding was great. It was at Blessed Sacrament, and Fr. Bernard presided, or did whatever the verb is for "being the priest who said all the stuff that the bride and groom repeat, and then also blessing things and leading prayers". I was, and continue to be, the best man (I don't even know who was my counterpart on the estrogen-based side of things. I'm thinking of running for Best Person Ever next time, but we'll see). Luke and Tasha were groom and bride, respectively.

The people who were there were an ecclectic bunch. It was weird to see so many of my friends there together. Family, high school friends, people from EdCC, old neighborhood friends, Youth for Lifers...it was amazing to see them all gathered together to congratulate and witness The Lukester and Das Tash all matrimonied.

My Age: Has just ticked over the meter to a new record. At least a new personal record. I'm pretty sure people have been this old before. But despite this, I'm enjoying the new territory thus far. Although this year has pretty much been the best of my life so far, so Newbie Age shall be struggling to equal it. But I look forward to the attempts.

And kind of on the absolute opposite end of that still-hearty desire for another adventuresome year, this has probably been the most uneventful birthday of my life, and I'm really enjoying it. This birthday does sojourn boldly into new lands with the fact of its being the first birthday on which I've recieved Happy Birthday salutations from The Future, thanks to the state of Arkansas and it's temporal incongruities with reality.

On a slightly more alarming note, this also is the first birthday where in the stead of cake, I blew out a candle which adorned a stack of recently microwaved mozarella sticks. *shudders, but still would happily eat more if they came his way*

In Conclusion: I'm still probably cooler that you.

September 22nd

2007-09-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Luke and Tasha are getting married today.

Times, they are a-changing.

And the new times are very good.

Communistastic!

2007-09-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

*ker-snort*

HT: MikeG's Propaganda Machine.

Happy Babyday!

2007-09-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

The Wilson baby is on the loose! Her name is Mary Catharine, and she's doing just fine, as is her mother. But you should still pray for the both of 'em.

At 18, I've Still Got My Hopes Up

2007-08-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

A Californian flew into Sea-Tac and planned to spend some time out on the town, but it was raining to much for him to do anything. He instead sat in a coffeeshop staring out into the drizzle, and asked a passing kid if the rain was ever going to let up.

"I'm not sure yet," replied the kid, "I've only lived here for 3 years."

~ Stolen (and partially forgotten) from the formidible John Kennedy

St. Dennis

2007-08-23T03:13:00.000-07:00

In the midst of my Travels, I found myself driving off to go to Mass in one of the suburbs of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (Perhaps you know it as The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula [The name of the chapel St. Francis rebuilt after his conversion, the name meaning "The Little Portion"]? No? Wait, what do you mean lazy, unreligious Americans shortened it to L.A.?!) and found out we were headed to a church dedicated to St. Dennis, who I was perfectly unaware of previously.

We got to the rather nice church (pretty nice, by the way! Big marbley place with a Spanish-looking courtyard. Cha-ching) and I looked around for a plaque or something to explain something about the saint, but there was no dice. I was going to ask the pastor, but there was a missionary priest there that day, and then I was going to ask a random old friend that I ran into while I was there, but I forgot. On the bright side, on the way out I did see this exceedingly crazy stained glass window of a headless body holding his own decapitated and amply bearded head (adorned with a bishops mitre), the face portion of which seemed not entirely satisfied with the new arrangement and was looking rather sternly at something outside my view.

It would be a lie to say that I thought nothing of it since that kind of weird is going to be setting up shop in your head even if you don't have a vacancy, but I can honestly say that I successfully drove the picture out of my imagination after jumping into the car and racing through canyon roads pumping the local mariachi and Norteño station.

Such happy music. It's like a polka and big band jazz plus a little spice. Excellent.

Anyhow, I eventually got to a computer for a short time, and decided to see precisely what the heck this guy was all about. I Googled up a heart-healthy stack of links (hyper, not sausage), and open the first one to...another picture of a headless bishop! Eeeeek!

So here's the deal:

From the online Catholic Encyclopedia:

...while still very young he was distinguished for his virtuous life, knowledge of sacred things, and firm faith, is proved by the fact that Pope Fabian (236-250) sent him with some other missionary bishops to Gaul on a difficult mission.

The Church of Gaul had suffered terribly under the persecution of the Emperor Decius and the new messengers of Faith were to endeavour to restore it to its former flourishing condition. Denis with his inseparable companions, the priest Rusticus and the deacon Eleutherius, arrived in the neighbourhood of the present city of Paris and settled on the island in the Seine.

[...]

On the island in the Seine Denis built a church and provided for a regular solemnization of the Divine service. His fearless and indefatigable preaching of the Gospel led to countless conversions.

This aroused the envy, anger and hatred of the heathen priests. They incited the populace against the strangers and importuned the governor Fescenninus Sisinnius to put a stop by force to the new teaching. Denis with his two companions were seized and [...] scourged, imprisoned, racked, thrown to wild beasts, burnt at the stake, and finally beheaded.

The bodies of the three holy martyrs received an honourable burial through the efforts of a pious matron named Catulla and a small shrine was erected over their graves. This was later on replaced by a beautiful basilica...

Pictured right, for your veiwing convenience and pleasure.

My thirst for of knowlege was yet unquenched and so I Googled on until I found the story that caused Denis to be immortalized as the alarming saint who holds his own decapitated head.

According to one of the stories, after he get axed, his body ran over and picked up his head, and held it aloft so it could preach as he walked across the city. Where his body finally collapsed is the place where they built the shrine.

If that wouldn't convert you from a life of heathen debautchery, I don't know what would.

The Child Ninja Story

2007-08-23T02:59:00.000-07:00

In the midst of my Travels, I was walking around in Kailua, HI when Mark and I spotted a youth of roughly 8 years and 4.5 feet of height coming out of a martial arts place in his ninja suit.

To say he walked is an offence against the boy's confidence. The movement was more that of a flouncy skip, and the additude was one of firm arrogance and deadly skill.

And it was about then that we realized that teaching a 8 year old boy kung fu is just about the worst idea ever, since he's just getting big enough to be able to do some damage with his fists of fury, and yet still young enough to decide to flip out and ninja somebody to death for really dumb reasons. Young boys already are irrational and violent.

There's no need to hone that skill just yet.

I'm Home...Again...For Real

2007-08-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Last night, I got home!

...From a vacation to Lake Chelan I went on after getting home last week from Max07, not telling anybody I was home. But no matter when the correct time of arrival was, it's good being home. Or even in Lake Chelan with "home" friends.

I look forward to seeing everybody around. I look forward to just being around! I look forward to catching up with all the changes in peoples lives, and I even look forward to looking forward to seeing people when they get home from college.

So...now I should probably find a way to keep myself busy for the rest of my life...

*looks in drawer*

*goes for a walk*

We're Off!

2007-08-05T01:20:00.000-07:00

Also, we're leaving.

Or at least starting up the Party again full blown action destructo-ville ramp-it-up style. For those keeping tally, that was within the top 98th percentile of the Dumb Things I have Written.

Despite that drawback, tomorrow Mark and I will be picking up our brothers-in-arms JunJun and Dave Matthews (You think I kid?) from the airport and preparing for the summer program in Toronto, our final excursion. An excursion which I fully expect to blow the minds of all involved, since it's going to be run almost solely by people who were on Max, plus a extremely hilarious and close seminarian friend, and the newly ordained Fr. Pio.

I haven't seen him since he became a priest, but since he was the coolest (wise-cracking, beat-boxing, skate boarding, brainy and articulate) friar since ever at New Years, I imagine that he's only gotten more amazing since recieving Holy Orders. Being Catholic is the best.

Needless to say, you shall not hear from me until that is finished.

Please pray for us in our travels, for the young adults in Canada who are doing all the grunt work preparing the retreat, and most particularly for all the youthful ladies and dudes who will be attending the retreat. And never forget to pray for Shevawn.

Saints I've Learned About

2007-08-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

In the midst of my Travels (I want to start prefacing all my sentences with that phrase now that I can ostensibly do so and maintain my honesty. Capitalizing the word "Travels" is a must...it make it seem more more Mysterious and Important) we would occasionally come across a parish which was named after a saint that I'd never heard of, or a religous person with a name I'd never heard of, or just somebody would tell us a story, devotion to, or homily about somebody I'd never heard of.

I thought I should take up the cause of researching them and repeating their stories and the unique ways in which they went about spreadin' the love.

St. Dennis
St. Edna
St. Eugene
St. Ephram
St. Kashmir
The Fourteen Holy Helpers
St. Irene
St. Vitus
St. Giles
...and several other saints.

I'll get something up about each one as soon as I am able, which won't be for a few weeks, most likely.

Poem of the Day

2007-08-04T22:40:00.001-07:00

TO MY ANGEL GUARDIAN
~ St. Therese of the Child Jesus
February, 1897

O glorious guardian of my frame!
In heaven's high courts thou shinest bright,
As some most pure and holy flame,
Before the Lord of endless light.

Yet for my sake thou com'st to earth,
To be my brother, Angel dear:
My friend and keeper from my birth,
By day and night to me most near.

Knowing how weak a child am I,
By thy strong hand thou guidest me;
The stones that in my pathway lie,
I see thee move them carefully.

Ever thy heavenly tones invite
My soul to look to God alone;
And ever grows thy face more bright,
When I more meek and kind have grown.

O thou who speedest through all space
More swiftly than the lightnings fly!
Go very often, in my place,
To those I love most tenderly.

With thy soft touch, oh! dry their tears;
Tell them the cross is sweet to bear;
Speak my name softly in their ears,
And Jesu's name, supremely fair.

Through all my life, though brief it be,
I fain would succor souls from sin.
Dear Angel, sent from heaven to me,
Kindle thy zeal my heart within!

Naught but my holy poverty,
And daily cross to give have I;
0 join them to thine ecstasy,
And offer them to God on high.

Thine are heaven's glory and delight,
The riches of the King of kings;
The Host in our ciboriums bright
Is mine, and all the wealth pain brings.

So with the Cross, and with the Host,
And with thine aid, dear Angel Friend,
I wait in peace, on time's dark coast,
Heaven's happiness that knows no end.

And just because I'm putting up girly saint poetry up here doesn't mean that I'm not going to fight you if you make fun of me for it. I might admire the saints, live like a zealot radical, and definitely urge others toward sanctity, but that doesn't mean I'm actually holy. You'll have to keep on looking to the saints for that stuff. 'Cause I'll punt a ball right at your head.

The Militia of the Immaculata had a camp in Seattle

2007-07-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

You can check out the proof online! Because if something is on the internet, it HAS to be true!!

Enjoy the pics! Frolic away and show them to all your little friends, O Fickle Public! See if you can spot the one with my gigantic head filling the entire screen!

Exploration 48% Done

2007-07-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

I just tallied them up, and I've been to 24 of the states in the Union.

Kind of aggravating that I'm so close to half, and that I won't see any more new ones in the near future. When I get home, we should take a road trip to Montana or Nevada...those are the closest unvisited states for me.

Maybe I'll convince Mark to take me to Wisconsin...it's only like 45 minutes away...and there's nothing cool there, as I understand.

Wait, I've been to the Canadian side of Niagra Falls, but that's only like 500 meters away from being in Buffalo, NY...does that count for anything? We even made calls with the American cell network from there!

Do You Miss Me?

2007-07-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

I skipped town again, but I didn't really tell anyone, bringing into question that old maxim: If something happens, but your friends don't blog about it, did it really happen?

(Yes. Get a life.)

So, yeah. Anyhow. I hopped on a bus a week and a half ago...and then I stayed on that bus without really eating or sleeping for about 3 days straight. Pretty much was the most horrific time of my life.

I actually started having some kind of hallucinations while we were driving through Utah. I couldn't figure out where I was, and I thought I was falling forward, and my imagination just exploded, and I sort of started to flip out and so I just fell asleep on the dude next to me for about an hour, and when I woke up I was fine. Regrettably, that was the longest I slept the whole time.

I got to Chicago alive, though.

The retreat was glorious. I love Marytown, and staying at Marytown is even better. The riotous hilarity of daytime activities and the personalities of all the kids and the friars somehow match perfectly and mesh with the simple peace of sitting in makeshift chapel in the basement for night prayers, and going to bed with the knowledge that chapel is always less than a minute away if you need it.

This retreat is different from any of the other ones I've been to because it's not super far away from civilization, and this enables us to shuttle the kids over to an old folks' home run by a perfectly remarkable little order call the Little Sisters of the Poor. We all just hung out with all the residents and chatted with them and let them tell us stories. They were the coolest people...of course. In the words of on of the sisters' as she told her vocation story and reason for entering the Little Sisters of the Poor: "Mmm...I love old people."

It was also extremely humbling to just be there to serve in what the Little Sisters call the Ministry of Presence, and yet this was also totally what I've been learning while on the road. We don't have everything it takes to be these role models and leaders and we certainly can't do everything perfectly. But far more important that the doing is the being...just showing up and being a person who wants to help. In the case of many of the residents there, they don't need anybody else to do stuff for them. All they need is somebody to be with them, to be present to them, and to be focus on them as a being.

Whenever the world is just too much for one little person to fix or to love, there are those imprisoned in nursing homes, penitentiaries, hospitals, and poverty who just need people to be with them. I need to remember this.

Several of the talks were given by the priests, which was awesome because firstly that meant that they knew

The retreat regrettably came to an end, and so while I wait for the final camp in Toronto to start, I'm staying with Mark. We had a few last parties with the last leaders who were straggling, and we all got to blurt out thoughts about our futures and the MI and the retreat, and that is time well spent.

This time will be good for me as a kind of personal retreat to just think and just soak stuff in from the past 6 months, and prepare for the final camp, and the ensuing madness of going back to secular life. I'll get some entertainment up here for you guys when I'm feeling gracious and entertaining, or (God forbid) educational.

Until then, eat hearty and don't take no wooden nickels from nobody.

I could get into this...

2007-07-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure Kodi did years ago. Starbucks is just following in his caffeine-laced footsteps.

New Latin Mass Already

2007-07-11T11:59:00.001-07:00

It appears that Fr. Fox at St. Pius in Mountlake Terrace is going to start up a Latin mass. Old Skool.

Something is in the air...

2007-07-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

...because we're putting on another Youth for Life retreat! I say "we" in the sense of "all my friends besides me, since I'll be Chicago", since I'll be in Chicago, but it's all my friends.

If you're a youthful Catholic pro-life Seattlite you should be there, or else you hate America.

Here are some less rude details:

You are cordially invited to attend
THE YOUTH FOR LIFE RETREAT
being held on Saturday, July 21, 2007
from 10:00 am until 6:00 pm
at St. Mark's Parish
for Catholic Youth ages 14 and up!

Invite all of your friends! It's going to be fun!

Details:
Lunch will be served.
Bring a camera and a rosary (optional).
We will end with 5:00 Mass.

RSVP: Call if you know the number (its on the fliers we sent out)
or e-mail us at youthforlifewa at yahoo.com.

Prayer Request

2007-07-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

Please pray for Brother Francis Mary. He's the Franciscan who is largely responsible for starting the MI youth movement here in the States back in 1975, and without him, there would not be any of the summer camps. Even though most of us have never met him, he's basically like our spiritual grandfather, and right now he needs our prayers, has he's been taken to the hospital with congestive heart failure and it's very probable that he's not going to live much longer.

Please pray and offer up all you can for this man.

You Learn Something New Every Day

2007-07-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

Personally, I learned what it means when I say "getting off scot free" today, thanks to the nerdy help of Mark Ahn.

From World Wide Words
[Q] From Pete Barnes: “Exactly whence came the term scot free? Does it, as it sounds, refer to citizens of Scotland? Or am I reading something into that?”

[A] Scot free has no connection with Scotsmen, frugal or otherwise. It’s an accidental connection, just as it is in hopscotch.
Scot is from an Old Norse word that meant a payment or contribution and which is linked to the modern French écot, a share of communal expenses, as in payer son écot, to pay one’s share. It is a close relative of shot, which at one time could have the same meaning of a contribution or a share of expenses.

The expression scot free derives from a medieval municipal tax levied in proportional shares on inhabitants, often for poor relief. This tax was called a scot, as an abbreviation of the full term scot and lot, where scot was the sum to be paid and lot was one’s allotted share. (This tax lasted a long time, in some places such as Westminster down to the electoral reforms of 1832, with only those paying scot and lot being allowed to vote.) So somebody who avoided paying his share of the town’s expenses for some reason got off scot free.

Scot was also used for a payment or reckoning, especially one’s share of the cost of an entertainment; when one settled up, one “paid for one’s scot”. Again, someone who evaded paying their share of the tab got off scot free.

It’s been suggested that this usage may have come from the old habit of noting purchases of drinks and the like by making marks on a slate, or scotching it, but the evidence suggests this is just a popular etymology.

Poem/Lyric of the Day

2007-07-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

Something Like Laughter
~ Leanor Ortega

People say they know a girl who's lost her way,
she's always angry.
No one bothers to ask her what she hears
or what she hopes for.
The air is cold,
she lives alone and tires of being her only provider,
she can't fathom grace tonight,
no not tonight, it's not an option.

Searching for more than mere tastes of living water,
tired eyes tend to wander, seek the light.
Create in her a sense of awe that sees Your beauty,
let Your splendor flash with blinding light.

Cities slowly suffocate,
what once was bright is now moth-eaten.
As young girls filter thoughts
that once were fresh now worn and beaten.
Clutching pity like a prize to her
side her fingers grow weary.
"He cares so much for sparrows,
won't He toss something out my way?"
Searching for more than mere lies disguised as dogma,
tired eyes tend to wander, seek the light.

Create in her a sense of awe that sees Your beauty,
let Your splendor flash with blinding light.
Standing tall all the aspen trees drink water
as the rain falls down like laughter from the sky.

Nicolosi A-Strikes Again!

2007-07-09T19:56:00.000-07:00

I was just going to post bits of this, but Barb Nicolosi is several times to remarkable to edit down. This is her post, entitled The Last Judgement of the New Evangelization.

And on the last day, the Son of Man will be seated in judgment of the various generations of men. And the People of God from the age of technology will also appear before Him.

And He will turn to those on His Right, who were Lampstands in the culture, with their laptops and microphones and scripts and notebooks radiant and transfigured. Suddenly, just beyond them will appear millions of souls, the saved from the age of technology. And they will plead for the Lampstands whose stories and songs are engraved in the individual books of the saved.

And the Judge will turn his eyes to the writers who told stories, and He will say to them, “Enter into joy. For I was cynical and unmotivated, but you gave me a hero to enthrall me.”

And He will turn to musicians and singers and say, “Enter into joy. For my heart was hard and dead, but you sang me stirring melodies.”

And He will find actors and say to them, “Enter into joy. For when I was obtuse and couldn’t see myself, you became a saving mirror for me.”

And He will turn to journalists and say to them, “Enter into joy. For when I was uncertain and ignorant, you sought out the Truth for me.”

And He will turn to the makers of images and say, “Enter into joy. For when I was blind, your paradoxes compelled me to see.”

And He will wave in those who wrote mediocre CBA novels and sentimental Christian movies and ‘the Painter of Light’ saying, “And even you all come in. Because at least you tried. (But not the ladies who danced in leotards and red sashes at Catholic Churches. You can't come in.)"

And he will turn to those who just made entertainment. And He will say, “Come, Blessed of my Father and enter into your joy. For when I thought I was alone, you were my friend. When I was depressed you made me laugh. When I was pitiless, you gave me tears. When I was bored, you gave me the joy of life again. When I was empty, you inspired me.”

And the Lampstands will say to Him, “Lord, when did we tell you stories or sing to you? When did we teach you or inspire you or make you laugh and be your friend?”

And the Judge will say to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, any time you spent hours practicing scales for an audience, or delving into a character for a producer, or auditioning for a cold director, or submitting an article to an editor. You did it for me. Now, inherit the Kingdom that has been prepared for you.”

And then, the Judge will turn to one of the angels of the apocalypse and say, “And where are those who are supposed to be on my left?

And the angel will reply with more than a hint of frustration, they are waiting for You in their caves. They have spent their age in personality wars and fighting over which of them is really a Christian.

And the Judge will have His angels flush the Cave Dwellers out and He will say to them, “Depart from me, you who have sent no souls ahead of you.”

And the Cave Dwellers will say, “Oh, but Lord. We did send some souls. See! Here are a few members of our families and also several of the folks in our church small group...

And the Judge will stare at them in utter disbelief for what will seem like a few centuries and then say, “Depart from me, you slothful, fearful, worthless disciples. You not only did not read the Signs of your Times, but you took pride in ignoring them.

“For I was a poet who was supposed to give words to the fears and longing of my times, but you told me to get a real job.”

“For I was a composer who had an anthem that would have rallied the world to communion, but you cut my budget.

“For I was a novelist, with a story that would have brought insight to millions, but you grew impatient with my first efforts.

“For I was an actor who was bent under rejection, and you told me to just quit.

“For I was a radio host who gave you company and comfort many days when you would alone in your car, but you never found a way to support me.

“For I was a director with a prophetic vision, but you just shrugged and said, ‘Movies are all garbage.’

“For I was the global audience, that was desperately in need of meaning and encouragement and communion. That needed to be persuaded to choose life and not death. And to know that they are not alone.

And the Cave-Dwellers will turn to Him and say, “Lord, when did we see you needing meaning, out of work, or rejected or alone?”

And the Judge will say, “Whenever you failed to embrace the arts and media, you failed to embrace millions of souls. And you failed to embrace me. Away with you to wail and gnash your teeth and watch lame reality show reruns for all eternity.”

And the Cave-Dwellers will be led away to languish forever in sloth and fear, but the Lampstands into the joy of unbridled and perfect creativity.