The Catholic Farmer

3rd Edition of the Roman Missal

2011-11-28T13:17:00.001-08:00

Dear Folks Who Are Griping About the New Translation:

It's not a very good argument (or a very good reflection on your logic and intelligence) to gripe for paragraphs about how much you hate the new translation and then at the end of it all to say, "Well, it's all just semantics. Words aren't important." If words aren't important to you, then you have no reason to argue. Either words are important to you, in which case you need to come up with a reason why the old translation is better than the new one (good luck with that), or else words aren't important to you, and you shouldn't care one way or the other.

I think the words ARE important. Very important. The reason being that words are signs of the undergoings of the soul, to put it in somewhat Aristotelian language. That is to say, we use words to communicate to other people what we are thinking and what we wish to convey. If the words we use are inaccurate, the thought conveyed will be inaccurate. In the case of highly complex but nonetheless extremely important doctrines of Christianity (the Trinity and the Incarnation are two good examples), the Church has striven for centuries to find the most accurate words possible in order to avoid giving rise to heresies. For instance, the Nicene Creed which we say at Mass has been revised so that rather than saying that Jesus is "one in Being with the Father" we say that He is "consubstantial with the Father". This is an extremely important distinction. In Aristotle's "Categories" he lays out 10 "modes" of being - substance (I am human), quantity (I am one in number), quality (my skin is white), relation (I am my father's daughter), place (I am in Wyoming), time (it is 2:30 p.m.), position (I am sitting), acting (I am baking cookies), being acted upon (I am being pulled on a sled), and being shod (the determination arising from the physical accoutrements of an object, e.g. I have socks on). The old translation does not specify in which mode of being Jesus is one with the Father. For all we know from that translation, Jesus and the Father could be one in being because they are both sitting down. And if that's all we know, how is that different from me and my dog being one in being because we are both sitting down?

The new translation is extremely superior in that it specifies in which mode of being Jesus and the Father are one - substance, or the what-it-is of something; its nature. "Consubstantial" basically means "of one substance with". This clears up the disastrous ambiguity of the previous translation. Now we know that Jesus and the Father have the same substance predicated of them - deity. They are both divine. In response to the question "What are you?" both the Father and Jesus would answer "God". The previous translation was not precise enough to convey this important truth, and therefore left the door open to the heresy of Arianism, i.e. that Jesus is not God.

This is just one example among many of the superiority of the new translation of the Mass, and of the fact that words, actually, do matter quite a lot.

Another example is a change which can be found in the words for the consecration of the wine. The old translation said that Jesus' blood would be shed "for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven." The new translation says His blood will be poured out "for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins." First of all, I'd like to include the original Latin text for this line. It goes as follows: "pro vobis et pro multis effundeter, in remissionem peccatorum." The most literal translation of this line would be, "it will be poured out for you and for many, unto the forgiveness of sins." And here is where another very important truth is conveyed. Although we believe that Jesus died for all men and that His sacrifice and the shedding of His blood made salvation available to all men, we do not believe that all men will take advantage of this. Not all men will repent, have their sins forgiven, and enter into heaven. Some will reject God and end up in hell. The original Latin makes this abundantly clear: Jesus' blood will be shed for the apostles unto the forgiveness of their sins, in other words His sacrifice will have the desired effect in them of the forgiveness of their sins; and also unto the forgiveness of the sins of many. However, since many other men will not accept God's grace and will therefore not have their sins forgiven, Jesus' blood will not be shed unto their forgiveness, in other words His sacrifice will not effect the forgiveness of their sins since they did not repent. The old translation does not convey this truth at all. At best it conveys the fact that Jesus' blood made salvation available to all men; at worst it conveys the false idea that all men will have their sins forgiven and go to heaven. The new translation, however, by going back to the word 'many' and by saying that Jesus' blood will be poured out for many FOR the forgiveness of sins, does a much better job of conveying the truth that many will receive the effects of Jesus' sacrifice, but that not all will receive those effects.

So there are two examples of how the wrong words can cover up truth or even promote heresy. Of course in this day and age when truth is unpopular and matters little compared with how you feel when you go to Mass (and you had better feel good about yourself and everyone else), it's not surprising that some folks are fighting claw, tooth and nail against some of those pesky, uncomfortable truths that the new translation is bringing clearly back into the light.

Petition to DEFUND Planned Parenthood

2011-10-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

If you don't want Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider (and also known through undercover investigation to cover up statutory rape and underage sex traffickers) to receive any more of your tax money, sign this petition! LifeSiteNews and affiliates are trying to collect at least 100,000 signatures on this petition, which will then be sent to every member of the U.S. Congress.

http://www.defundpp.net/

I don't get it...

2011-10-08T17:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes people's logic (or lack thereof) truly baffles me. I was on a pro-life website just recently and there was one commenter on the message board who declared herself to be unabashedly pro-abortion in all circumstances because she didn't "support forced pregnancy." The only kind of forced pregnancy I can think of is if a woman gets raped and happens to become pregnant from it. Otherwise, she CHOSE to have sex. Therefore she also chose all the possible consequences of sex, a very big one of which is getting pregnant. And yes, even if she was on birth control or the guy was using a condom, she could still get pregnant, because those things fail sometimes! Nope, sorry, you can't mess around with your reproductive systems and functions and try to use them solely for pleasure or for feeling closer to your significant other or whatever, because whether or not you want to believe it, sex was made so that people can make more people, and it's often very successful at doing that even if we try to stop it artificially. So if you're not ready to make more people, for heaven's sake don't do the very thing that was specifically designed to make more people! If you do it anyway, then please don't try to tell me that your pregnancy was forced, because YOU, and no one else, brought this consequence upon yourself; and YOU need to take the responsibility for your action instead of making yourself out to be a victim and murdering the innocent child who is the product of your decision to have sex.

The High Costs of "Free" Birth Control

2011-09-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty good article from the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. I would encourage you to read the pdf file linked in the article. It has the results of numerous studies which give evidence of the failure of birth control to reduce unintended pregnancies.

The High Costs of "Free" Birth Control

by Richard M. Doerflinger

JULY 28, 2011

On July 21, the health news site Natural Society. . . featured these breaking news headlines: "Newer Birth Control Pill Linked to Higher Risk of Blood Clots"; "Birth Control Increases Risk of Contracting, Transmitting HIV"; and finally, "Medical Panel Pushes for Free Birth Control for Women."

Hmm, one might ask, who was on this medical panel? Dr. Kevorkian? But no, it was the Institute of Medicine, advising the Department of Health and Human Services on "preventive services for women" to mandate in virtually all private health plans under the new health care reform act.

HHS says it delegated this task to the IOM so people would see the outcome as based on "science" rather than politics. But IOM's report seems based less on science than on the ideology of authors who share Planned Parenthood's view of sex and procreation, several of whom have served on the boards of PP affiliates and other pro-abortion organizations. The report says enhanced access to contraception will reduce abortions, though there is ample evidence against that claim. In fact, the panel recommends that health plans must cover all drugs approved by the FDA as prescription contraceptives – including the newly approved "emergency contraceptive" called Ella, which like RU-486 can cause an abortion weeks into pregnancy. When asked about a conscience exemption for those who have a moral or religious objection to this, an IOM spokesperson said it wasn't her panel's job to take account of other people's personal "feelings." Many fear HHS will take the same approach.

Secular news media – Time, U.S. News, USA Today, L.A. Times – obediently repeated the panel's public relations message that it is offering "free" birth control for women. That message is nonsense. Currently women who want birth control coverage pay for it through their premiums, and sometimes also have a co-pay or out-of-pocket expense. Under the new mandate they will still pay for it, but the cost will be buried in the overall premium – and everyone else, including churches and other religious employers as well as individual Catholics, will be forced to pay for it in their premiums too, so payments coerced from those who object will make birth control coverage a bit cheaper for those who want it.

And what about the "cost" in women's lives from those blood clots and cases of AIDS? Researchers have known about both problems for years. In 2005, for example, a study funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control noted: "The positive link between pill use and HIV infection was… supported by a meta-analysis of 28 studies, including seven prospective studies." Most American women haven't been told this. Ironically, other "preventive services" recommended by the IOM include screening for sexually transmitted diseases. But why would you mandate something that can cause what the other services on your list seek to prevent?

The other big "cost," of course, is the cost to freedom of religion and respect for conscience. Though not alone in its view, the Catholic Church has long been prophetic and counter-cultural in warning that artificial contraception and sterilization do not enhance women's well-being. No American, of course, is required by law to believe that teaching. But should the government, in the name of all Americans, now coerce even the Church's institutions into acting on the opposite view -- when the evidence supporting its message is stronger than ever?

Mr. Doerflinger is Associate Director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. For more information about the bishops' pro-life activities, visit www.usccb.org/prolife.

Artifical Conceptions and Incest

2011-09-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading an article about a possible negative side-effect of out-of-intercourse conceptions that I'd never thought of before: incest. The article was saying that, basically, when you have multiple children conceived from one sperm donor to completely different mothers/families, there is a real possibility that two of those half-siblings would meet up and have (unknowingly) incestual sex. Supposedly there is some kind of oversight on this issue to try to prevent this from happening (keeping track of all the children conceived via one sperm donor by having a donor number assigned to those children), but I can't imagine that it would be possible to prevent all such incest from occurring - one sperm donor was reported to have had 150 children, many of which neither the mothers nor other children really knew anything about. I don't think all or even many of those kids, if they happened to meet at high school or elsewhere and uh...got going...would stop to ask, "Hey, were you artificially conceived and if so, what's your donor number?" The risk of this happening doesn't just come from sperm and egg donors, of course. Extra-marital sex contributes as well, since the more one "sleeps around" the more likely it is that there will be half-siblings out there that don't know about each other.

Of course, incestual relations can lead to serious problems. According to one article: "Because relatives already share some genetic material, there is a greater risk that incest will result in a child who has a rare genetic disorder carried as a recessive trait. Recessive traits may cause no symptoms at all in those that carry the genes, but when combined can result in seriously affected offspring. The closer the relationship of people in an incestuous relationship, the greater the risk that they both carry the same recessive genes." Basically, if two of these half-silbings had sex and conceived a child, that child would be more likely to have serious genetic disorders.

Sometimes I wonder how long it will take people to figure out that when you go against Nature, you will suffer real, physical consequences. Nature designed our bodies to work in a certain way, and when we decide not to use them that way, our bodies will suffer. If we eat poison, we'll get sick or die. If we try to breathe something other than air, we'll suffocate or drown. The same concept applies to our sexuality - if we try to repress our fertility so that we can have sex for pleasure whenever we feel like it with whomever we want, or if we decide that reproduction doesn't have to happen in the context of married sex, we will experience real, physical consequences. Contraception has been linked to increased infertility and breast cancer; homosexuality has been linked to the increase in AIDS; now the practice of sperm and egg donation and extra-marital sex seems to be leading to the problem of possible incest and seriously diseased offspring. The natural law isn't just about not killing, stealing, and lying; it has important applications in the physical realm, and we would all do well to obey it in that realm, because Nature has a habit of coming back to bite you in the butt if you don't follow its laws.

A Little "Research Report" I Did

2011-08-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

After reading yet another article on how increased access to contraceptives has done nothing to decrease unplanned pregnancies, I decided to do a little bit of research into contraceptives and their failure rates as compared with the increase in premarital sexual activity over the last century. Please note that I'm not a professional researcher by any means, and that these results are the best I could come up with by doing some simple Internet searches for data on these points. Even though it's most likely not completely accurate, I think the general pattern is pretty evident.

Artificial Contraception Research

Methods of Contraception (as listed by Planned Parenthood’s website, excluding sterilization)

Implant

Patch

Pill

Shot

Sponge

Vaginal Ring

Cervical Cap

Condom, male

Condom, female

Diaphragm

IUD

Morning-After Pill

Outercourse

Spermicide

Withdrawal

Failure Rates, averaging different brands of same method (according to chart on Wikipedia and information on the Planned Parenthood website)

Method	Typical Use	Perfect Use
Implant	.05%	.05%
Patch	8%	.3%
Pill	8%	.3%
Shot	3%	.3%
Sponge	24%	14.5%
Vaginal Ring	8%	.3%
Cervical Cap	18.5%	12%
Male Condom	15%	2%
Female Condom	21%	5%
Diaphragm	16%	6%
IUD	.5%	.4%
Morning-After Pill	~20%	~11%
Outercourse	~1%	~1%
Spermicide	29%	18%
Withdrawal	27%	4%

Average Typical Use Failure Rate: 13.27%

Average Perfect Use Failure Rate: 5.01%

Data Breakdown

Over the last century, the number of teenaged women engaging in pre-marital sex has increased from roughly 6% in 1900 to roughly 80% nowadays. In other words, 6 out of every hundred teenaged women used to have premarital sex; now 80 out of one hundred do. Even if we assume every teenaged woman having intercourse in 1900 to get pregnant (not a likely assumption), this would only result (in pre-birth control days) in 6 “unplanned” pregnancies in 1900. If we assume all teenaged women today to use birth control, 13.27 percent with typical use will still get pregnant, and 5.01% with perfect use will still get pregnant. In other words, now there will result roughly 10-11 “unplanned” pregnancies with all teenaged women practicing a typical use of birth control; and roughly 4 “unplanned” pregnancies will result with all teenaged women practicing a perfect use of birth control.

Conclusion

In 1900, we stated that a possible 6 unplanned pregnancies for every hundred teenaged women could take place. This number was probably actually considerably less, when we take into account the fact that a woman can only get pregnant on a few days out of every month. In the current age, we stated that if all 80 out of 100 teenaged women having premarital sex used birth control, the number would be either roughly 10-11 or 4 unplanned pregnancies, depending on how they use birth control. Since the typical use is, by its very meaning, the one most-used, we can safely say that, under the given assumption, about 10 unplanned pregnancies will now happen for every 100 teenaged women. But since probably not all teenaged women engaging in premarital sex were using a contraceptive, the overall “failure rate” (rate of pregnancy) in all 80 would no doubt rise higher still.

The overall conclusion is that the promotion of birth control does not lessen unplanned pregnancies; rather, it probably (taking all the above-mentioned factors into account) at least doubles the number. The likely reason for this is that birth control induces a feeling of safety, such that many teenaged women who would not have had sex otherwise now have it; in fact so many more have sex that birth control’s effectiveness cannot “make up for” the increase in instances of premarital sex, thus more pregnancies result than before birth control. In addition, the birth control “mentality” has made premarital sex so common and “normal” that at least some people probably engage in it without using contraception at all. This only increases the likelihood of more unplanned pregnancies.

This conclusion is confirmed by data which shows that the out-of-wedlock birthrate has increased three-fold in the last 30-odd years (not to mention the many pregnancies which have ended in abortion).

Horses in the Wild

2011-05-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

For all you folks out there who think horse racing and/or other human use of horses (or any animals, really) is cruel, and that animals should all be allowed to go wild and free again... here's a video of what wild horses do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwOnFrfPRdE&feature=related

At least when race horses are injured, we put them down in a relatively painless manner.

Someone help me

2011-04-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

I recently volunteered to become one of the Sunday cantors at my new parish here in Wyoming. The reason? None of the other cantors did music that I would consider to be appropriate for the liturgy, as described in various encyclicals, council documents, and other Church documents. I wanted to have my chance once every 5 weeks or so to introduce the congregation to some better hymns. Anthony also signed up to join the cantor schedule, and he was assigned Palm Sunday for his first Sunday. So, we dutifully went through the lack-lustre OCP hymnal, picking out some of the few songs that were both appropriate for church and Palm Sunday themed. We then e-mailed our choices to the organist. Well, guess what? The next day we got a reply saying that at THIS parish we pick out our music from the OCP's suggestion list for that Sunday, and that in HER opinion we ought to choose "The King of Glory Comes, The Nation Rejoices."

Now, when I read this e-mail, I almost literally saw red. I was so angry I didn't even know what to think. First of all, the reply was just snippy-sounding. I felt like I was being talked down to. Second, I don't think I should have to take orders from our organist since she is Protestant. Why should a Protestant have any kind of say over what is done in the Catholic liturgy? Those decisions need to be left up to Catholics, who really understand what is going on and can choose appropriate music. Third, our organist isn't even very good at playing organ. If we're being limited in our song selection because of her inability, it's time for a new organist. And fourth, I don't think we should be limited to the suggestion sheet put out by the OCP. This publishing company obviously doesn't know or doesn't care about what the Church has to say on appropriate liturgical music, since the VAST majority of the stuff they put out is trite, sentimental, mushy, pop-music-sounding, and sometimes even heretical. Almost none of it actually reflects the sacredness and seriousness of the Mass, or is beautiful in any way. Their suggestion sheets usually reflect this trend, containing almost exclusively the afore-mentioned types of songs. Since I'm all about worshipping God properly, the way the Church wants us to worship Him, I don't think the parish should be tied down to this awful publishing company's hymnals and suggestions sheets, just because our Protestant organist wants it that way!!

I intend to discuss this issue with our pastor, as I'm not sure if he's aware of the current situation or if that's what he wants. I truly hope that he will permit the cantors to pick their music for themselves without regard to this organist, and that he will encourage the better type of music to be sung. If these things aren't the case...if I would be forced to submit to the OCP and the Protestant organist...well then, bye-bye cantoring.

Lecture on Marriage

2011-03-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a video of a great lecture on marriage given at Steubenville by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute. She paints a pretty scary picture of what the future could be like if same-sex "marriage" is recognized by the state. It's about an hour long, but totally worth the time.

Zenyatta to be re-bred

2011-03-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update: I read this morning that Zenyatta miscarried, so they are going to breed her to Bernardini again next week. Here's hoping everything goes well this time!

By the way, Anthony bought me her Breyer model for my birthday present! Yay! :)

Isn't this cool??

2011-03-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

Today, March 25th, is the Feast of the Annunciation. It is, appropriately, placed exactly 9 months before Christmas since it was at the Annunciation that Christ was conceived in the womb of Mary. The incarnation of Christ is such an important event in human history that this feast day is a solemnity in the Church calendar - the highest kind of feast day there is. This year, it happens to fall on a Friday during Lent. And guess what that means!

"Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday." -Code of Canon Law

Yep, you heard right - we don't have to abstain from meat today!! Hooray!! :)

From the CCC

2011-03-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a great quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator; yet there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty. For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation. The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.

The Church got it WAY right on this one. Just look around at how many people seem incapable or unwilling to understand a reasonable argument for why they shouldn't, say, have an abortion, or engage in homosexual relations. There are perfectly reasonable arguments against these things, but in my experience, those who do them just won't listen. And this quote explains exactly why.

I'm tired of know-it-alls

2011-03-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

So I'm getting really sick and tired of all these horse racing "experts" who feel like they have to degrade every horse that comes along and garners some attention for the sport. First it was Zenyatta: "She's just a synthetics specialist; they didn't race her against males; her competition was lousy, etc. etc." Now it's Uncle Mo, an undefeated 3 year old who has whooped every field to face him so far, and who has a lot of people excited about this year's Triple Crown prospects. The comments now are about his pedigree and pre-Derby prep schedule: "He's not bred for distance or stamina; he's just a sprinter so he'll never get the Triple Crown distances; he's never run a race longer than 1 1/16 miles; his prep schedule for the Derby is too easy, etc. etc."

Okay, whatever. Even if you despise Zenyatta, even if you think Uncle Mo has no chance at the Derby or Triple Crown, can't you just sit back and zip it for a while and let people be excited about these horses and about the sport of horse racing? If Uncle Mo isn't good enough for the TC distances, it will become apparent in time. But at least for the present, let us fans enjoy watching an excellent Derby contender and hoping that maybe the TC will finally be taken once again.

Sacred Music from TAC, #6

2011-03-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

O Vos Omnes by Tomas Luis de Victoria. This is a wonderful Lenten motet, and as Lent has just begun, what better time to post it than now? The text is from Lamentations 1:12.

Latin:
O vos omnes, qui transitis per viam,
attendite, et videte si est dolor similis sicut dolor meus.
Attendite, universi populi, et videte dolorem meum:
si est dolor similis sicut dolor meus.

English:
O all you, who pass by the way,
attend, and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow.
Attend, all you people, and see my sorrow:
if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow.

News on the Zenyatta Front

2011-03-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

Well, Zenyatta was bred to Bernardini a couple of weeks ago, and today's scan showed that she is indeed in foal! Yeah! So sometime next January, hopefully, the foal will be born.

Just for those who may be interested, Rachel Alexandra was also bred a couple of weeks ago, to Curlin, and she also was found to be in foal. Sure hope those foals turn out to be something. :)

The picture, BTW, is Zenyatta running in her paddock at her new home at Lane's End Farm in Versailles, KY.

Would You?

2011-02-02T14:15:00.001-08:00

Would you call me hateful if I didn't let my kids eat cake all day even though they wanted to?

If I made them do their schoolwork instead of slacking off?

If I encouraged someone to exercise instead of lounging around all day?

Would you say I was bigoted against addicts if I didn't let them have drugs or alcohol?

No? I didn't think so. And why wouldn't you? Because in all these cases, I clearly have the best interests of those people at heart. It would not be good for my kids to be uneducated and eat cake all day. It would not be good or kind at all to let addicts keep on ruining their bodies and souls by substance abuse. So, if one really cares about and loves these people, one should stop them from doing the things they want to do at the moment so that their lives will be better in the future.

Now, leaving aside for the time being any arguments about whether homosexual acts are *actually* good or bad for the people who do them, I will say for myself at least, and I'm quite sure for many other good, caring people (Christian and non-Christian), that we do not discourage homosexual acts because of hatred or bigotry against homosexuals. We think, for various reasons, that homosexual activity is harmful to those who engage in it, and that it will be less good for them in the long run to do these acts than to abstain from them now. So, it is precisely because we LOVE and CARE ABOUT these people rather than hate them that we discourage such activity.

So please, don't call me hateful or bigoted because I discourage these acts - as in the examples above, I only do so out of concern for the individuals involved, and if you are agreed that it is absurd to call me hateful in the above examples, it is therefore equally absurd to do so in this case.

And the lucky stallion is...

2011-01-27T08:08:00.000-08:00

...Bernardini! I read this morning that Zenyatta is going to be bred to Bernardini, who looks to be a worthy match. If you want to read about him, Wikipedia has a good article. His sire is A.P. Indy (yes, the horse that sired all those other A.P. horses you hear about), grandsire is Seattle Slew, and great-grandsire (sire's dam's sire) is Secretariat. He won numerous G1 stakes in 2006, including the Preakness and the Jockey Club Gold Cup. He also (like Zenyatta) took second place at Churchill Downs in the Breeders Cup Classic in 2006.

The Thoroughbred Times website has an article about the breeding decision, as well as a contest - name the hypothetical Bernardini-Zenyatta foal! The person who picks the best name (as decided by their editorial board) gets a prize package of Zenyatta memorabilia. (Sorry, I don't think they will name the actual foal by that method, though. ;) ) My entry was Bernardatto for a colt, and Bernardatta or Bernardatte for a filly. Sort of a take-off on the name Bernadette. :) Several people suggested Zendini...but that's not really taking off for me. Sounds too silly, I think.

Anyway, that's all the latest news on the Zenyatta front. I hope this foal of hers turns out to be something great!

Note: I just watched some of Bernardini's races on YouTube. He was amazing!! Check out the 2006 Withers, Travers, Jim Dandy, Preakness, and Jockey Club Gold Cup. Very different running style from Zenyatta - he was usually on or near the lead, and won going away, by anywhere from 3 to 10 lengths.

A Woman's "Right to Choose"

2011-01-25T07:36:00.000-08:00

This last weekend was the annual pro-life weekend, marked by hundreds of marches and gatherings around the United States (and hopefully some in the rest of the world, too). This particular weekend was selected because January 22 marks the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the U.S. In fact, the Catholic Church declared January 22 to be a day of penance and prayer.

"In all the dioceses of the United States of America, January 22 (or January 23, when January 22 falls on a Sunday) shall be observed as a particular day of penance for violations to the dignity of the human person committed through acts of abortion, and of prayer for the full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life. The Mass "For Peace and Justice" (no. 22 of the "Masses for Various Needs") should be celebrated with violet vestments as an appropriate liturgical observance for this day."

-General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 373

Here in Cody, Wyoming, a group of 80-100 people took part in a pro-life march beginning at the courthouse and ending at the memorial to the unborn in the Cody cemetery, where we prayed for an end to abortion.

The Walk for Life in San Francisco, which I attended during my years at TAC, had over

50,000 attendees according to police estimates, a number far surpassing what they've had in previous years.

The March for Life in Washington, D.C., based on attendance in previous years, probably had 2 or 3 hundred thousand participants.

Abortion advocates often use nice-sounding phrases like "A woman's right to choose". I'm sure everyone thinks having choices is a good thing, and that women should have them no less than anybody else. But we don't have the "right" to choose just anything. I have no right to choose to shoot my neighbor for no reason. I have no right to choose to shoplift from the grocery store. And why is this? Because other people's rights also come into the equation in these situations, and their fundamental rights to life and to their own property are more important than my "right" to choose. If my choices impinge on other people's fundamental rights, then I do not have the right to make them. This is why laws exist which will put me in prison if I do make those choices.

This is the situation with abortion. The choice that abortion advocates speak of is the choice to kill one's own child. If one is willing to grant that the unborn child is, in fact, a human being, then obviously one has no right to choose to kill it, since as a human it has the fundamental right to life. This is why abortionists and organizations like Planned Parenthood refuse to refer to the unborn child as a person. They call it a fetus (extremely depersonalizing), or worse still, "just a bunch of cells." This way they can hide the fact that the choice of abortion is really just a choice to commit murder. (The ironic thing is that the same people who say "fetus" and "bunch of cells" when the woman wants an abortion will turn around and say "baby" or "child" when the woman is excited about the pregnancy. It's all rhetoric.)

Pro-life Democratic presidential candidate Randall Terry (who is planning to run against Obama in the primaries), said at yesterday's March for Life in D.C. that "Until America sees child-killing, we're not going to make child-killing illegal." The abortion advocates mentioned above are currently very successful in their rhetorical war against the personhood of the unborn child. When one can't see the baby, or see what abortion does to the baby, it's easy to forget that it IS a baby. This is why it's important that Americans actually see the reality of abortion. This is the goal of such groups as Show the Truth, who travel around with images of aborted babies. The Priests for Life website has an excellent photo gallery of unborn babies in the womb and of aborted babies at corresponding stages of development.

Of course, even before the baby looks recognizably like a baby, abortion is still murder. The humanity of the child doesn't depend on its looks or its ability to feel pain, or its ability to survive outside the womb. When the child is conceived - that is when it becomes a human. What else could it be? It is alive, and, possessing a genetic blueprint distinct from either of its parents, it is not just a part of the mother's body. To quote an article from the National Catholic Bioethics Center website, "Concerning the empirical facts of the argument, it is an empirical fact that there is no organic life on earth that is 'non-specific,' that is, that does not belong to any particular species. In other words, all organisms living on earth belong to a particular species (even bacteria). We just don't see unspecific, amorphous 'life forms' lying around. Therefore, the individual human embryo...is human."

On this 38th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, let us all join together to pray and fight for an end to the murdering of unborn children.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

2011-01-25T07:17:00.000-08:00

Anthony and I recently bought the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" with some of the money we received as wedding presents. I decided that I am going to try to read through it - hopefully it will not take too long if I do some every day. No doubt this will probably inspire future blog posts, if some subject comes up that especially interests me. :) Today I read the little introduction by Pope John Paul II (who is going to be beatified in May, by the way). He says:

"This catechism is given to them [all the members of the Catholic Church] that it may be a sure and authentic reference text for teaching catholic doctrine and particularly for preparing local catechisms. It is also offered to all the faithful who wish to deepen their knowledge of the unfathomable riches of salvation (cf Eph 3:8). It is meant to support ecumenical efforts that are moved by the holy desire for the unity of all Christians, showing carefully the content and wondrous harmony of the catholic faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, lastly, is offered to every individual who asks us to give an account of the hope that is in us (cf 1 Pet 3:15) and who wants to know what the Catholic Church believes."

Horse of the Year!!!

2011-01-18T08:23:00.000-08:00

Well folks, despite having lost the Breeders Cup Classic, Zenyatta has finally been named Horse of the Year at the Eclipse Awards!!! We thought she deserved it in '08, we definitely thought she deserved it in '09, but finally, the voters got some sense in their heads and named her the 2010 Horse of the Year!!! She also won the Award for top older female (which she did win also in '08 and '09). Congrats to her, to owners Jerry and Ann Moss, to trainer John Shirreffs, and to all her other connections who did so much to make her such an amazing racehorse as well as to get her fans involved as much as possible with her career. We'll never forget Zenyatta; I will never forget standing in the Santa Anita grandstand cheering wildly when she won the BCC '09.

Next stop, breeding! I wonder to whom they will breed her, and what kind of foals she will turn out... :)

Cold

2011-01-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

Just for the record, I never knew what cold was before I came to Wyoming.

Cold is when you can't bear to step out of your front door without being wrapped in a sweater, two coats, two pairs of socks, gloves, a hat, and a scarf. And wearing gym shorts under the jeans isn't a bad idea, either.

Cold is when you can see your breath inside your car after leaving it outside for only a few minutes.

Cold is when you look outside at the most lovely snowfall of the winter and decide not to go sledding.

Cold is when you look at the weather report and find yourself thinking that 28 degrees F sounds warm, and 45 degrees F downright tropical.

Hey, at least now I understand why Anthony didn't seem to have an issue wearing short sleeves on "cold" nights in California! :)

The Advertisements on the Side Bar

2010-12-29T15:38:00.000-08:00

I noticed after I published my last post that an ad popped up in my sidebar for the United Church of Christ. I would like to say - I don't have much control over what ads appear on the site, so I will personally publish a post any time one comes up that I disagree with. The United Church of Christ is NOT the church that Jesus founded. The only church that can claim that merit is the Catholic Church. Our pope is descended (through the laying on of hands) directly from St. Peter himself, and our bishops from the apostles. This is why we call our church "apostolic". The doctrines we believe today are those which have been believed for hundreds of years by the faithful, even if they may not have been officially declared. These doctrines, though perhaps some are not named explicitly in Scripture, are all taught therein, and affirmed throughout the ages by Fathers, Doctors, and other great teachers of the Church. See this link if you wish to read some of the early Christian writings and discover how close to the time of Christ they were actually written.

"I believe in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church." --The Nicene Creed

"I believe in the holy Catholic Church." --The Apostles Creed

Puer Natus in Bethlehem

2010-12-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas to all! (Since it's only the 5th day of Christmas, I can still say that.) Well, my true love didn't give me 5 gold rings today, but he did give me one gold ring on November 20, and that's good enough for me. :)

Our Christmas was wonderful! We went to church at 9:00 a.m. Christmas morning, after waking up early to open presents. The sermon was great! One thing that was mentioned that really struck me, that I hadn't though of before, was the fittingness of Christ's lying in a manger. A manger is a feeding trough, so Christ's lying in one would seem to indicate that He is food of some sort. And indeed, as He later proclaims in John chapter 6, "I am the Bread of life." He is our food, and we indeed eat His flesh as commanded when we receive the most blessed Eucharist.

I had another thought while singing "What Child is This", provoked by the line "whom shepherds guard and angels sing." We all know that shepherds watch over sheep. So it's fitting that shepherds should be the first to come and behold the Lamb of God.

One final symbolism of the nativity story that comes to mind, especially with the Epiphany coming up, is that of the gifts of the Magi. They presented the Christ child with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold is appropriate because Christ is a King; frankincense (a type of incense) is appropriate because He is God (from ancient times incense was offered in many religions to the deity[ies] worshipped by them), and myrrh, a very bitter-smelling spice, is appropriate because it foreshadows the bitterness of His Passion. If you sing all the verses of "We Three Kings", you'll see how the middle three verses describe these gifts and their symbolism.

Anyway, to get back to our Christmas: a few people organized a choir for morning Mass, comprised mostly of my in-laws, with a couple other additions. Of course I sang in it, and we managed to pull together some nice music, including "Gaudete" and "Alma Redemptoris Mater". Good times. For Christmas dinner we were invited to Anthony's parents' house, an invitation which we gladly accepted. Dinner was delicious - a pork roast of some sort. Anthony's whole family, with the exception of his older brother, were all home, and his grandparents, an uncle and aunt, and the parish priest, were all there as well. It was a wonderful evening.

We had a brunch for Anthony's family at our house the next morning, after which we all swung over to Anthony's cousins' house to party, eat, and have fun for the rest of the afternoon. I spent most of the time there learning how to play a card game called Pinochle. It's a lot of fun, and bears some resemblance to games such as Spades and Hearts in that one tries to take tricks.

Monday afternoon we went to Anthony's family's house for lunch, as his other grandma was visiting from Ten Sleep, WY. And then to top off the day, that evening we and Anthony's family went to some friends' house for another dinner. Whew! It was a lot of partying that whole Christmas weekend. Fortunately we've had a couple of days off from social obligations now, though that will probably soon change as New Year's is this weekend. I expect there will be some kind of bash going on up the hill at Anthony's family's place.

The weather here is cold, as is to be expected, I suppose. The lows a couple of nights this week are -6 degrees F. B-r-r-r. I'm not used to this! Tonight thru tomorrow night there is snow expected, however, so it's not all bad. And also, prolonged periods of cold mean frozen-over ponds, and that means ICE SKATING! :) We indulged in that activity several times last week, and it was FUN! My first time on a frozen pond and not at a rink. Anthony's family claimed that the pond we were at was one of the smoother ones, but it was still quite bumpy and imperfect when compared with a rink. Oh well, I got used to the surface, and had a blast attempting to play hockey. :D

I hope you all had a good Christmas Day and are having a blessed Christmas season! Remember, it's 12 whole days long!! :)

Pax in Christo!

RIP

2010-12-17T07:25:00.000-08:00

Most people, when they think of a tombstone, usually also think of RIP written on it. This acronym is commonly taken to mean "Rest in Peace"; however, although this is a close approximation, it's not actually what the letters stand for. RIP stands for "Requiescat in Pace", a Latin phrase meaning, "May he (or she) rest in peace". This simple little phrase does not just express a hope or wish on the part of the person saying it that the dead person would be at peace. It is actually part of a prayer from Catholic funerals and Masses for the dead. The speaker is praying that the dead person will be at peace. Kind of like when you pray, "May so-and-so be cured from their sickness, we pray to you, Lord."

So why pray for a dead person? If they are in Heaven, surely they do not need our prayers anymore. If they are in Hell, no prayers will ever be any good since they will be there for eternity. But what if some souls, at the point of death, are not yet clean enough to enter into God's presence, but yet are not wicked enough to go to Hell? Surely we can relate to this. At this point in my life, I'm not perfect. I commit little sins all the time - be they of impatience, laziness, or whatever. However, I'm not out there hating God and trying to offend Him in whatever way I can. I love Him and try to serve Him the best I can, and when I fall, I repent and keep on trying. So if someone dies in this type of state - not wicked, malicious, and deserving of Hell, yet still imperfect enough to commit small sins and without that perfect love of God that would eliminate all attachment to sin - what will happen to him or her? There can be no imperfection in Heaven; as Christians we all believe this. But this person has imperfections still remaining in their soul. So something must happen to them to remove these imperfections. Since God is all just as well as all merciful, it seems unfitting that He would simply remove those imperfections instantaneously. Justice requires some kind of satisfaction for sin. The person himself would presumably also recognize this, and not wish to enter Heaven either unclean or without having paid his full dues to God. Therefore the soul should undergo a time of satisfaction to God and of cleansing, so that it may enter Heaven with a perfect love of God and having received its due recompense for sin. This is what Catholics call Purgatory, and this is why Catholics pray for the dead. We do not know that the dead person is in Heaven; they may very likely be in Purgatory. So we pray to God that they would soon be able to leave Purgatory and enter Heaven, where they will be at peace.

So the next time you see RIP on a tombstone, remember - it's a prayer that the person buried there will soon be cleansed from all imperfections and be able to leave Purgatory to enter into the perfect happiness of Heaven.

Sparkly Snow

2010-12-07T08:34:00.001-08:00

Of course I've seen snow before in my lifetime, but I have to say that I don't think I've ever seen it sparkle as much as it does here. It's so cold that the snow is really frozen and just glitters like diamonds on the ground. It's amazingly beautiful. We have a fairly good view from our house of the fields lying down to the southeast, usually with a few cattle in them, and the thin layer of whiteness that kind of just barely touches everything makes it even more pretty than normal. Sunday morning was so beautiful - there was an early morning fog that covered everything in dew, but when the fog lifted it was still so cold that the dew froze, making the leafless trees look literally completely white. I've never seen anything quite like that in Seattle.

Anyway, this post is kind of rambly, but the main point of it is me being delighted about the beautiful Wyoming winter. :)

Married

2010-12-03T16:13:00.001-08:00

Well, since the last time I wrote, I got married, went to Hawaii, moved to Wyoming, and am now nursing my sick husband. He has something akin to the flu - fever, sore throat and coughing, stomach ache...yeah. I keep trying to feed him medicine, applesauce, chicken broth and 7-up, but so far we've only made a little progress (fever is gone and he says he feels slightly better than he did yesterday). So please, prayers that he would get better quickly would be much appreciated.

Anyway, the wedding went off quite well as far as I could tell. At the very least, I'm married now and I wasn't beforehand! ;) I wasn't really paying attention to details on the day of, but everything seemed to work out as planned, for which I was extremely grateful. I was so happy to see so many of my friends there, old and new, and was so happy that they all seemed to have a good time and liked the ceremony and reception. I especially appreciate the many kind words, cards, and gifts which we received. Believe me, we are very grateful. :)

The trip to Hawaii was fun. We hiked, drove around, went to Pearl Harbor, and swam in the ocean among other things. Anthony had an encounter with a sea urchin which wasn't very pleasant at the time it happened, but he quickly recovered from the sting and already it's something we laugh about. :) It was so nice to be able to walk around everywhere and have it be so delightfully warm at the end of November! I got a cute little Hawaiian dress in order to better enjoy the atmosphere. :) We had Thanksgiving there and went out to a little restaurant close to our hotel that had a Thanksgiving dinner special. It had all the traditional food in it - turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob, candied yams, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie to top it off. Quite yummy.

Our next stop was a brief visit to TAC. It was SO nice to see everything again, and to visit with some friends. We got to sing in the choir on Sunday morning, and that was wonderful. I didn't realize how much I missed doing that. We also drove around Ventura and Santa Paula, visiting all our old haunts. *sigh* Sometimes I really miss the college days. Anyway, we managed to miss our flight to Seattle on Monday morning, and after much waiting, running around, and frustration, got booked on a 6:30 p.m. flight and so finally made it home around 9:30 in the evening.

The next day, we packed everything up and set out for Wyoming. About 30 minutes after leaving my parents' house, we hit snow, and from then on out there was snow all the way to Wyoming. It got less and less snowy as we went (which was good, since we made much better time). We stopped the first night in Spokane, and then made it the rest of the way on Wednesday.

So now we are here in our home in Wyoming, and I'm trying to set up house, open wedding presents, unpack and put everything away, do laundry, get groceries, cook, throw away/burn massive amounts of garbage and wrapping paper, all while watching over a truly miserable-looking Anthony. I'm beginning to get a little lonely doing all this by myself... :( Once again, prayers for a quick recovery are appreciated.

I hope all of you are well; have a blessed Advent season!

Facebook, Bad Words, and 1 Corinthians

2010-11-16T22:15:00.000-08:00

I don't like it when people feel free to use bad words in their Facebook statuses. A couple of people in particular that I know do this fairly often, and usually in big, bold, capital letters. No substitutes, no abbreviations, no little stars, just the four-letter word emblazoned brazenly within their status for everyone to see. Oftentimes I've logged into Facebook and when the home page popped up, there they were at the very top, and I had no chance of navigating away to miss it. I'd already seen the word, and it was too late. This bothers me because, not only do I never, ever want to say those kinds of words, I don't want to hear them or see them or have them in my mind either. The more often one sees and hears them (and thus the more easily they come to mind), the less shocking do they seem, and the more likely one is to start saying them oneself.

Now, even if the people using these words in their posts don't think it's wrong to use them, they surely must know that many other people do think such usage to be wrong (as in fact it is). I am fairly certain that, given the background I know these people have come from, they would know that using those words would be offensive and scandalous to a lot of their friends. This brings to mind chapter 8 of 1 Corinthians, in which St. Paul discusses how, even if we know certain actions to be morally okay, we shouldn't do them if it would scandalize a fellow Christian, and that if we do perform those actions that scandalize him, we commit a sin. How much more then, would we commit a sin if we do something which is itself sinful in addition to causing scandal to others!

In this case, I think that if the people using bad language don't quit soon, I will have to block them, because I'm tired of unwillingly being subjected to seeing these words whenever I log in to Facebook.

Not Meant to Be

2010-11-08T10:36:00.001-08:00

Well, Zenyatta did not win the Classic on Saturday. She came very, very close, only losing by half a head to Blame. My personal opinion is that she would have won, if she had gotten a better trip. She was very far behind the rest of the horses for most of the race, and got stuck in some traffic at the head of the stretch. But she gave it her best, and turned in a very good performance. All of her fans still love her to pieces. :)

Well, only one more weekend of single-dom! The Day is getting closer all the time. :)

The Breeders Cup

2010-11-01T23:09:00.000-07:00

The Breeders Cup World Championships are taking place this coming Friday and Saturday at Churchill Downs in Louisville, KY. All the races promise to be interesting and exciting, and I plan on watching as many of them as I can, but the highlight of the event, to my mind, will be the $5,000,000 Breeders Cup Classic, the last (and biggest) race of the event. The reason for this is primarily that Zenyatta, the unbeaten super-mare, will be attempting to repeat her victory in last year's Classic (which I was fortunate enough to actually be at) and retire a perfect 20-0. She will be facing some tough competition in this race, probably tougher than she's ever faced before. The contenders include Quality Road and Blame, two very good horses who have both won a number of graded stakes events, and Lookin at Lucky, the winner of this year's Preakness Stakes. Gio Ponti, runner-up in last year's Classic, may also be among the contenders, as well as Richard's Kid, winner of the $1,000,000 Pacific Classic at Del Mar this last August. Basically, Zenyatta won't get a walk in the park. But I am encouraged by the fact that, although Zenyatta has run primarily on the synthetic track surfaces of California throughout her career, her connections believe that she actually prefers dirt, which of course is what constitutes the main track of Churchill Downs. CD also features a rather long home-stretch, which favors Zenyatta's come-from-behind style. Lastly, trainer John Shirreffs and jockey Mike Smith both feel that she is coming into this year's Classic in even better condition than she did last year's Classic, added to Smith's avowal that he has never yet had to really ask Zenyatta to give everything that she has. If he does ask her this time, I wonder what kind of an amazing performace we might see. At any rate, I will be standing proudly with the rest of her fans this Saturday, rooting for the mighty Queen Z to thunder past the field to victory for the 20th straight time.

Law and Order

2010-10-28T21:56:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I decided to watch an episode of "Law and Order". I have been following "Without a Trace" (a crime drama about the NY missing persons unit of the FBI) for a while now, and find it entertaining for the most part. "Law and Order" also being a crime drama, I decided to give it a try. The first few episodes I saw were alright, but then they started trying to bring an agenda into it. I have seen, within the last week, an episode in favor of assisted suicide, two episodes in favor of homosexual acts and gay "marriage", an episode mocking high school students committed to chastity, and an episode mocking people who protest against our hypersexualized culture. The criminals in the latter two episodes, of course, ended up being the leaders of the chastity group and the anti-culture-of-sex group, respectively. Both of the pro-gay episodes portrayed Christians as being radical hate-mongers who beat up and killed gay people and led violent protests screaming that queers would burn in hell. In all these episodes, God and religion were treated dismissively, and people of faith were portrayed at best as misguided and foolish, and at worst as I described above.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the situation is really just the opposite of how it's portrayed. I don't know when the last time was that the producers of the show went to the Walk for Life in SF, or to any other similar event, but if they did, they'd quickly find out who really is normal, rational, and peaceful, and who is violent, radical, and hateful.

At any rate, my apologies to "Law and Order", but I'm going to be sticking with "Without a Trace" from now on. At least, that is, until I get married. My future husband and I are not going to have a TV in the house, and the more I see of TV shows these days, the happier about our decision I am.

Facebook

2010-10-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

You know, there are some times when I don't like Facebook. Right now is one of those times. I won't go into any specifics, but I've noticed that Facebook makes it a lot easier to say denigrating things about other people, especially when one doesn't think they'll find out. One example that sticks in my mind is the application where one can anonymously answer questions about friends. One of the questions I remember from this application is: "Do you think so-and-so is beautiful?" I could answer this question 'no' and my friend, while being informed by the application that someone thinks she isn't beautiful, won't know who said it. This kind of thing doesn't exactly build up trust between friends. I had this application for a couple of weeks, not really knowing what it was all about, but deleted it when I found out that my friends thought less than complimentary things about me. That's not what provoked the current post, but it is one reason for why I sometimes don't like Facebook.

It's also just easier when you're online and not actually with the person to say things that could be taken the wrong way, or that are maybe a little bit insulting. Emoticons are an attempt to convey what is lost with facial expressions and body language, but they often just don't cut it. I know that I have found myself many times wondering whether something I'm writing via e-mail or on Facebook will come across the right way to the person, and wishing that I could just say it to them so that they could hear my tone of voice and see my face. It's also easier in a way to rattle off something a little denigrating on your keyboard than to say it to someone's face. The worst part about all of this is that with Facebook, most of what gets written is open to your whole circle of friends. If someone writes something about you or to you that is less than complimentary, tons of people will be seeing it. I think of it as e-gossip. The person is letting everyone know what he or she really thinks of you by publicly saying something negative about you on Facebook. It doesn't have to be much; just one comment let slip can carry a huge weight of meaning behind it. So please folks, watch what you say on Facebook and in other online communities. These kinds of things are what can betray people's trust in each other. And I don't want to lose trust and respect for any more of my friends (or should I say "friends"?).

30 Days

2010-10-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

Less than one month 'til the big day! I'm getting excited. There are tons of things still to do, and I'm beginning to have pre-wedding insanity bouts. The priest who's saying our wedding has been on a six-week vacation. I think he's back now, but I have been feeling slightly abandoned, especially since I have to reconfirm some things with him before I can send everything to our wedding coordinators and print programs. Ack! I also have to tie bows and tags on 180 little wedding favor gift boxes, and then tie more bows on the wedding programs once they're printed. Not to mention that I already tied bows on 120 wedding invitations. Joy. I decided that if I have a daughter who gets married, it will be a bow-less wedding. My last dress fitting was yesterday, so at least that's under control, but we have to meet one last time with our florist and photographer, and maybe get a videographer too. Have to make sure everyone who's supposed to be doing anything in and/or for the wedding knows what, when, and where they're supposed to be doing it. Have to make sure the choir comes together and attend any rehearsals. Have to print out directions to reception on cardstock. Have to get cards with photo-ordering information on them for any interested guests. I'm sure there are other things that I'm not remembering at the moment. Well, somehow I'll get through it all. Everyone always does.

Anyway, I'm expecting my maid of honor to get to my house at any minute. We're having a wedding-favor-assembly party. :) Signing out.

Raking Corrugations

2010-10-13T22:29:00.001-07:00

One of the farm jobs that, for some reason, I find more appealing than others is raking corrugations. Corrugations are the rows in the field down which water flows to irrigate the soil. Now, sometimes the water doesn't make it from where the pipe is to the drainage ditch. Usually this happens because something is clogging the corrugation, and clogging generally occurs more frequently after the harvest because of all the loose straw that's left all over the field. Since I was visiting after harvest was mostly done with, many of the corrugations in the fields that we were irrigating got clogged. As a result, someone had to go down them with a rake, clearing out any gunk that was in them. As I said above, this job appealed to me for some reason, so I usually volunteered to do it. It always took a while to get all the way from one end of the corrugation to the other, but it was so rewarding to finally see the water flowing smoothly to the very end of the field! :)

Sacred Music from TAC, #5

2010-10-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Sicut Cervus and Sitivit Anima Mea by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. These two motets have for their text Psalm 42. Sicut Cervus is much better known than the other, but they are meant to go together and are both beautiful pieces of music.

Latin:
Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes,
ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.

Sitivit anima mea ad Deum fortem vivum:
quando veniam et apparebo ante faciem Dei?
Fuerunt mihi lacrymae meae panes die ac nocte,
dum dicitur mihi quotidie: ubi est Deus tuus?

English:
As the deer longs for the founts,
so does my soul long for thee, God.

My soul has thirsted after God, the living God:
when shall I come and appear before the face of God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
while it was said unto me: where is your God?

Rossi Leads Murray

2010-10-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Wow. According to this article at Life Site News, Dino Rossi scores higher than Patty Murray in current polls. How great would that be, to get a republican pro-life senator for Washington state?? :)

An Interesting Reflection on Embryos and Embryonic Stem Cell Research

2010-10-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I went to a Respect Life Conference in Cody while visiting Anthony in Wyoming. The primary topic of the conference was embryonic stem cell research, and the main speaker was Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk (short bio here). In one of his talks, Father Tad (as he is called for short) brought up an interesting reflection on one of the lines often used by Planned Parenthood on pregnant women considering an abortion, namely, that the fetus "is not a baby, it's just a bunch of cells." He said, "I'm just a bunch of cells. We're all just a bunch of cells. Our bodies are just bunches of cells." Therefore, to say that the fetus is just a bunch of cells is not in any way to say that it is not human or less human, because all humans are bunches of cells (joined to an immortal soul, of course). He went on to say that the unborn baby at whatever stage of development it's at is not less human than we are because it looks different from us; rather, it looks precisely how a human at that point in its life is supposed to look. A baby does not look like a teenager, and a teenager does not look like a senior citizen, but that doesn't mean that one is less human than the other. Similarly, just because the 5-day old embryo doesn't look like a newborn or even a further developed fetus, that doesn't mean it's not a human being. It just looks like a human being is supposed to look when it's 5 days old.

Father Tad illustrated this with an example. When bald eagles were put on the endangered species list, there were certain severe penalties one would incur if one were to kill a bald eagle flying around in the sky. But if someone were to go into an eagle's nest and destroy its eggs, those SAME penalties would apply. Clearly, people understand in the case of the eagles that the egg is no less of an eagle than the mature bird is. Why, then, do they try to say that a gestational human is not really a human? Especially considering that we "are of more value than many sparrows" (or eagles, for that matter)?

(Father Tad is on staff for the National Catholic Bioethics Center.)

Which is Worse?

2010-09-24T22:33:00.000-07:00

According to this article on Life Site News, the English bishops are more concerned about fighting poverty than they are about opposing gay unions. (They may, in fact, even accept gay unions, from the sound of it.) I wonder if these guys have ever read Matthew 10:28: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." Poverty seems to me like something which could conceivably kill the body, but does not have the power to kill the soul, while homosexual actions are sins of such a gravity that they will lead to the destruction of the soul and body in hell. So shouldn't Christians be more concerned about opposing the moral wrong of gay unions than about ending poverty? I'm not saying that it's bad to try to reduce poverty; however, the Church's primary goal needs to be the salvation of men's souls.

Abortion is Traumatizing

2010-09-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

I just read this article on Life Site News about how pro-life protesters in Britain were arrested for displaying a graphic image of an aborted baby outside of an abortion clinic. The reason? Patients were "traumatized and upset" by the image. Well, they should be. Abortion is traumatizing - to the baby who is brutally killed, to the mother who often lives with guilt for years afterward, and to those who see these pictures and still have an inkling of humanity left in them. What I want to know is this: if the image of abortion is traumatizing enough to arrest someone over, why isn't the real thing treated the same way? When people see pictures of starving children in third world countries, they generally don't just want to shove the pictures away because they are unpleasant, and then do nothing about it. They realize that something is very wrong and that they need to do what they can to fix it. So it should be with abortion images. If the picture of a torn, bloody body is unpleasant to you, why do you just shove it away? Why don't you fight to stop this gruesome procedure, now that you have seen what it really is?

How Far Must We Fall?

2010-09-16T23:45:00.000-07:00

Life Site News has an article about a new TV show that I've been seeing commercials for in the last week or so. The subject of this TV show is a polygamous LDS family - a "husband" with three "wives" and a fourth one soon to join. Although the ads absolutely sicken me, I have to say that sadly, I'm not surprised. Now that people are clamoring to redefine marriage so that two men or two women can get married, why should there be a problem with one man and multiple women? Once one departs from the natural, intended order of things, there is no reason not to accept every possible perversion of them.

As for the women who enter these "marriages" and seem to be just fine with them, I think they must be brainwashed, because NO normal red-blooded girl or woman that I know who is in a relationship wants to share their significant other. Certainly not me. My fiance is going to be mine and mine alone when we are married, "til death do us part."

Now of course I know all the arguments will come out about how the Old Testament Patriarchs had multiple wives, etc. etc. But in response I proffer the opinion of St. Augustine of Hippo, who said that it was permitted in the early days of mankind in order that the human race might increase more rapidly. But after the earth was filled with men and humanity had a safe, firm footing in the world, there was no longer any need for such rapid procreation, and Christ returned things to the way they were meant to be "from the beginning." (Matthew 19:8) He called divorce and remarriage adultery; a fortiori then, "marrying" someone else while still married to a first wife would also be adultery.

By the way, the channel offering this show (which is called "Sister Wives") is TLC, and I plan on sending them a letter about it, as well as boycotting their channel (even though it will be hard to give up "Say Yes to the Dress"). I encourage like-minded readers to do the same. We've got to stand up and speak out if we ever want to change the direction our culture is heading in.

Here is a link to the page where you can contact TLC to express concerns about this show.

A Shout Out to My Washington Senators

2010-09-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

I wrote e-mails to Senators Murray and Cantwell awhile back, asking them to vote against ObamaCare, as well as all other anti-life and anti-family legislation. They, of course, "politely" refused my request. So I'm letting them know that I'm going to vote against them the next chance I get. Now, don't get me wrong, I've never voted for them in the past, but any chance they might have had to change my mind has now been officially killed. So Murray had better watch out this November, because my vote, and hopefully many others' as well, will be going to Mr. Dino Rossi.

As long as I'm on the topic, and having just mentioned Rossi, I'll just say also: it's time we had a new governor. I know the next gubernatorial election won't be until 2012, but I just had to get that out there.

And This Week's Weather Forecast Is...

2010-09-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

I think since I've changed the title of my blog to reflect the fact that I'm marrying into a farming family, I should begin writing things that include that soon-to-be aspect of my life. And one thing that I've definitely realized about farming so far is how dependent it is on the weather. Of course, one always knows in the back of one's mind that farmers depend on the weather, but it becomes a lot more real when you actually live the life. While I was visiting Wyoming last month, I was surprised by how much people would say something along the lines of, "Pray for good weather," or, "Pray that it doesn't hail." Because when it hails, the crop gets ruined at least partially, and that decreases the amount of whatever-it-is that is available to the consumer, and therefore also the farmer's income. And when you are living with a family whose whole livelihood depends on that income, you suddenly realize in a whole new way what it means to be dependent on the weather.

A slightly more minor result of weather-dependency is that I don't know exactly when Anthony will next be coming to visit me. He can't come unless they've gotten a good amount of grass combined, but they can't combine unless the fields are dry. And obviously the fields won't be dry if it rains. So, too much rain in Wyoming equals no visit from Anthony here in Washington.

So, everybody pray for clear skies in northwestern Wyoming in the next few weeks. Gotta get the grass, beans and alfalfa combined! :)

Life Site News

2010-09-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

If I haven't recommended it yet, I will now. Life Site News is a great web-site with all the news on the pro-life and pro-family fronts that you won't hear from the regular media. One of the things I like is that they often provide contact information for the people involved in the incidents they're reporting on, so that you can write in with concerns, feedback, etc. Sometimes when I write in, I wonder if my one e-mail will actually do any good, but then I say to myself that certainly one e-mail has more potential than no e-mail at all, and you never know what God might work out with just one little letter...so I send it anyway.

Anyway, check it out.

Title Change...Again

2010-09-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

I know, I just changed the title of my blog fairly recently. But once again I feel like I need a title that better reflects the content of the blog. And my blog is, to my mind, a place for me both to share the wonderful things I've experienced as a Catholic, and also to write about my feelings, from a conservative Catholic perspective, on the goings-on in the world. And I am soon going to get married to a grass-seed farmer, hence the other part of my title and description. :-D I have to say I'm looking forward to it. Wyoming is a great place, and, God willing, we're going to have a great life and hopefully a big happy family.

Sacred Music from TAC, #4

2010-09-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

Justorum Animae by Orlando di Lasso. At last, I have found on YouTube a good recording of what I personally think is the epitome of all sacred polyphony. It is an exquisitely beautiful 5-part motet about the souls of just men being at rest. We usually sang it at TAC for requiem Masses, around All Saints Day, and whenever it was appropriate to the readings.

Latin:
Justorum animae in manu Dei sunt,
et non tanget illos tormentum mortis.
Visi sunt oculis insipientium mori,
illi autem sunt in pace.

English:
The souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and the torment of death does not touch them.
They seemed, in the eyes of the foolish, to die,
but they are in peace.

On the 107th day before Christmas...

2010-09-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

...the Costco store gave to me: Christmas stuff out already! Please, folks...PLEASE!!! It's not even officially autumn yet! It's the second week in September! There are OVER 3 MONTHS until Christmas!! I can stand Christmas things beginning to make an appearance in, say, November, but honestly...September? C'mon. This is a little early even for Halloween stuff to be out, let alone Christmas stuff. Sheesh. Get a little common sense and let us poor folks enjoy the time of year we are actually at, instead of making us live in constant anticipation of what's not yet here.

Oh, and by the way, when Christmas-time does roll around, let's all agree to call it what it is: CHRISTMAS. We all know that if it weren't for the Christian holiday of Christmas, we would not be throwing this big celebration. Not for Hannukah or Kwanzaa or anything else would all the stores have so much advertising and promotion so far ahead of the fact. So stop being two-faced and taking advantage of Christmas for your own commercial gain, while at the same time refusing to even call it what it is.

Hypocrites

2010-08-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

Whilst innocently perusing YouTube this morning, I happened across a back episode of "Say Yes to the Dress." The episode itself wasn't what prompted this post, but rather the discussion in the comment boxes below. There was a somewhat fierce argument brewing (what it was about doesn't really matter), and in the course of it one of the commenters lashed out at her opponents, calling them "sorry white trash" and "bitches." Okay, first of all, how in the world did she even know they were white? I suppose if they had posted pictures of themselves on their YouTube profiles, she might have been able to know that, but it's quite unlikely. None of the YouTube profiles I've ever looked at have had the person's picture on them. More importantly though, the comment was racist, pure and simple. "White people are trash" is effectively what it was saying. This becomes even clearer when you consider the first point: that there really was no way she could have known they were white. She didn't like what they were saying, so she called them "white trash." This means that in her mind, being white is being less good, less intelligent, or what-have-you, and that calling somewhat white is an insult. Even had she known they were white it would have been bad enough - the comment implies judgment based on skin-color and not on character. Since she didn't know, however, it just shows all the more clearly how she views whites - she saw some people acting (to her view) in a bad way, and immediately attached the term "white" to them.

Now, the reason I entitled this post "Hypocrites" is because such a thing would never, EVER be tolerated in the reverse direction. If I went on YouTube today and started throwing around the phrase "sorry black trash" or something comparable, the racist card would be flying so fast it would make your head spin. If I were a somewhat important person and said "sorry black trash" I would probably have to apologize publicly and end my career. If I did something so innocent as make a talking card that said the words "black hole" during the message, I'd have to recall it because a few African Americans thought they heard the words "black ho." (Yes, this incident did happen, and as my Mom said, the only thing it really shows is that the African American culture needs to clean up its language.) But the whites are open game. Minorities can call us whatever they like - crackers, white trash, gringoes - and they are NEVER taken to task for it.

I wrote a post last year on affirmative action and how it really fosters racism more than suppresses it. I say the same to those of you in minorities who cannot do anything but pull the racist card on anyone who disagrees with you or doesn't give you what you want, while at the same time practicing far worse racism in return: you are only hurting your own cause, because nothing is more likely to make people dislike you than your constant victimization of yourselves at the expense of everyone else.

I like this guy

2010-08-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Check out this article on Life Site News. I heartily agree. Enough vague and unfounded (or worse, only Bible-founded) arguments against abortion, homosexual acts, and other immoral sexual practices. We need arguments from philosophy and natural law, because these are the arguments that all people should be able to see simply in virtue of being rational, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof. Hey, maybe I'll actually post my thesis sometime soon. I flatter myself that it (somewhat) meets those requirements...

Coming Soon, and Some Thoughts on What it Means to "Judge Not"

2010-08-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

I am currently visiting Anthony in Wyoming, but after I return home I hope to post either my whole senior thesis, or a somewhat abbreviated version of it. It argues against homosexual actions primarily by means of the natural law, though revealed truth is also utilized towards the end of the thesis. Since the argument is made mainly from a consideration of the natural intent and purpose of sexual acts, it could be used equally well against any other sexual deviations (bestiality and artificial contraception, e.g.).

While I'm on this subject, I'd like to clarify an oft-misunderstood Scripture passage, that being Jesus' words about not judging. Those words are often thrown at us Christians when we try to argue against immoral actions like abortion and homosexual acts. "Don't judge," we are told, as if to point out to someone that what they are doing is wrong is simply not permissible. However, I do not believe that this is what Jesus' words are meant to convey at all. What we should not do is judge the state of a person's soul, to say whether they are in mortal sin or whether they had such and such malicious intentions when they did the action. Basically, we cannot look at a person and say, "I judge that you are evil and going to hell because you did 'x'." We can, however, judge such and such an action to be right or wrong, and in fact people do all the time; why do we have laws, after all, that condemn things like murder and theft? Because people rightly judge such actions to be wrong. This is what we as Christians do when we say that abortion and homosexual activity are immoral - we judge that the action itself (not the person) is against God's law (which encompasses both revealed truth and the natural law). This is why Christians do not believe that it is sinful to merely have a homosexual orientation, because the orientation is not the action itself, and the person with the orientation does not have to do the action.

Since we as Christians believe the homosexual act to be wrong and harmful to the one who does it (even though he may not see this), we argue against it and endeavor to promote a life of chastity rather than indulgence of the appetites. We do this because, contrary to what many people think, we love those who have a homosexual orientation and want what is truly best for them. But, human nature being fallen, and modern man being taught to believe that he must and is entitled to give in to his fleshly appetites (especially in the sexual sphere), many believe that they cannot resist the urges to such an act, and that to do it is right and good for them. These attitudes are encouraged by the dwindling of belief in God and in the immortal soul, for if man is nothing but a body, why should he not act as the animals do? There is nothing greater to be gained by self-denial and abstinence. As a result of all these circumstances, those Christians who would seemingly stand in the way of instant gratification by promoting the curbing of sinful appetites are labeled as "homophobes", "haters", and "bigots", when in fact all they desire to do is bring all men to their best and highest end - the happiness of Heaven.

The Dreaded D-words

2010-07-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

There are three D-words that I absolutely cannot stand. They are as follows.

1) Diversity
2) Discrimination
3) Dialogue

No, I do NOT think that diversity is necessarily a good and desirable thing in all circumstances. No, I am NOT discriminating against black people when I promote caucasion firefighters who did better on their exams. And no, I do NOT want to dialogue about what I have just said. Thank you.

Sweet Country Song

2010-06-22T22:24:00.000-07:00

Anthony came and visited me this last week, and while he was here he played me this really cute, sweet country song. It's by Tracy Byrd and is called "The Keeper of the Stars." It expresses quite well a lot of what I feel about our relationship. :) Thank you God, for letting me find Anthony at TAC.

Common Sense Prevails!

2010-06-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

I am glad to see that the federal Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability decided to keep in place a ban on blood donations from practicing homosexual men. This is like a "duh" issue to me; even a liberal editorial in the L.A. Times this semester was wary about lifting the ban.

Read the whole Life Site News article here.

Zenyatta

2010-06-13T21:52:00.000-07:00

Zenyatta, the mare who won the Breeders Cup Classic last November, raced again today in the Grade I Vanity Handicap at Hollywood Park. She won yet again, bringing her record to a perfect 17 wins and no losses, and breaking the record previously held by Cigar and Citation for most consecutive wins in unrestricted company (16 wins). She is a truly great horse; certainly the best, most exciting horse I've seen in the 13 years I've been following horse racing. I am glad that I got to be at the Breeders Cup Classic to see her in person for her historic win there.

Here is a video of Zenyatta charging late to nab today's Vanity Handicap. (BTW, she has won the Vanity three years in a row - also a difficult thing to do.)

"Stupid Little Bigot"

2010-06-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

Yes, you heard right, folks. Those were the words of a bus driver about a student who expressed opposition to gay "marriage" on the bus. Read the whole story here (and make sure to click the link in the article to watch the video too):

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jun/10060204.html

Now, I don't know about you all, but this makes me furious. Had it been a conservative or Christian bus driver behaving this way to a gay student, the media would have had a field day. The kid suing would win all the way, and the bus driver would end up getting fired. We all know that's what would have happened. But no, the school district denies the parents' claims (although they are clearly corroborated by the bus video cam) and says that the driver was "working within the scope of her employment." And, what's even more, the criminal defense attorney, who was a guest on Fox news, said, "I am so surprised that this lawsuit has not been dismissed yet on frivolous and pointless grounds...if anybody should be sued it should be, A, the father for filing the lawsuit, and B, the family for instilling these views in the child." (See the following link, http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jun/10060304.html, for this full article.)

Contact information for the school district is provided in the first article. I encourage all like-minded readers to e-mail the people listed and protest the bus driver's inexcusable treatment of this student.

Sacred Music from TAC, #3

2010-06-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

Tu solus qui facis mirabilia by Josquin Des Prez. This is somewhat of a borderline piece between Renaissance music and the polyphony of Palestrina, Victoria, etc.

Latin/French:
Tu solus qui facis mirabilia,
tu solus creator, qui creasti nos,
tu solus redemptor, qui redemisti nos
sanguine tuo pretiosissimo.
Ad te solum confugimus,
in te solum confidimus,
nec alium adoramus, Jesu Christe.
Ad te preces effundimus,
exaudi quod supplicamus,
et concede quod petimus, rex benigne.
D'ung aultre amer, nobis esset fallacia.
D'ung aultre amer, magna esset stultitia,
et peccatum.
Audi nostra suspiria,
reple nos tua gratia, O rex regum,
ut ad tua servitia,
sistamus cum laetitia,
in aeternum.

English:
You alone are He who makes marvels,
you alone are the creator, who has created us,
you alone are the redeemor, who has redeemed us
by your most precious blood.
To you alone we fly,
in you alone we confide,
and no other do we adore, Jesus Christ.
To you we pour out our prayers,
hear what we beg, and grant what we ask,
O gracious king.
To love another would be for us deceit,
To love another would be great foolishness and sin.
Hear our sighs,
fill us with your grace, O king of kings,
that we may remain in your service with joy,
unto eternity.

Friends in High Places

2010-06-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I hiked Rattlesnake Ledge with my Dad and brother. While we were at the top, I saw a chipmunk perched in a crevice of the rock, happily eating a tidbit of something or other with the valley spread out roughly 1,000 feet below. I caught a picture of him, and it's kind of cool.

Sacred Music from TAC, #2

2010-06-01T22:06:00.000-07:00

Sicut Lilium by Anton Brumel. This short and sweet piece utilizes a text from Song of Solomon, chapter 2, verse 2. I am (hopefully) going to have it sung at my wedding.

Latin:
Sicut lilium inter spinas,
Sic amica mea inter filias.

English:
As the lily among the thorns,
So is my love among the daughters.

Sacred Music from TAC, #1

2010-05-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

I have decided to find and post recordings of some of the many choral pieces that are sung by the TAC choir at Sunday Mass, and other Masses throughout the liturgical year. This will hopefully give a taste of what liturgy at the college is like, and will also hopefully illustrate what the words above the door of the chapel are supposed to convey: Haec est domus dei et porta coeli (This is the house of God and the gate of heaven).

Tradiderunt Me by Tomas Luis de Victoria. This is a Lenten motet, and one of my favorites. I think it really conveys the sort of anxiety and anguish that Christ would have experienced during the Passion.

Latin:
Tradiderunt me in manus impiorum
et inter iniquos proiecerunt me
et non pepercerunt animae meae:
congregati sunt adversum me fortes:
Et sicut gigantes
Steterunt contra me.
Alieni insurrexerunt adversum me
et fortes quaesierunt animam meam.

English:
They delivered me into the hands of the impious,
and cast me out amongst the wicked,
and spared not my soul:
the powerful gathered together against me:
And like giants they stood against me.
Strangers have risen up against me
and the mighty have sought after my soul.
And like giants they stood against me.

Girls in White Dresses...

2010-05-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, that is one of my favorite things as well. Especially when the girl is me, and the white dress is a wedding dress. I have spent the last few days going to several different bridal shops and looking at/trying on dresses. Finally, yesterday afternoon, I found The One. I tried on six or seven dresses at the shop, and when I put on the last one, I was like, "Oh yeah, this is it." It took me maybe a minute or two to decide between that one and another one that I had liked from that same store, but once I'd tried both of them on again, I definitely knew that the last one was my favorite. So we got it, along with a veil and a tiara which both match the dress really well. The things are likely to arrive at the store in mid-August, which will leave plenty of time for alterations. Some alterations will be needed, since some parts of my body are a size 8 and others are a size 10. We're going to go with a 10 and have it taken in a little bit in a few places.

Anyway, I'm very excited about having the dress. If you want to see what it looks like, search 'Jasmine couture T345' on Google. If Anthony should happen to read this post...you know you're not supposed to look yet! ;) I'm going to have them put spaghetti straps on it, since I generally feel more comfortable having a strap of some kind on my dresses.

So Anthony is now back in Wyoming, and I'm here in Washington. It's really a bummer having to be apart from each other for six months. He is going to come visit me in about 4 weeks, and I plan to visit him probably around the end of July. I'm really hoping to have another visit from him in September sometime (so that we can go to the Puyallup Fair together!), but we'll have to wait and see whether he can get away from work at that time or not. In the meantime, we e-mail each other quite frequently, plan to send hand-written letters as well when we're feeling especially romantic, and have talked on the phone a couple of times. It's quite amazing - Anthony, the anti-cellphone man, is thinking about getting a cellphone so that he can talk to me more often. That makes me feel special. :)

Well, I've got to go now. Happy Friday, and I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Graduation

2010-05-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

Graduation was yesterday. It was very exciting, walking up and getting hooded by the dean, having the diploma signed right then and there by the president, rolled up by the assistant dean, and handed to me by Archbishop Raymond L. Burke. And then getting to move the tassel from right to left. As Mr. Seeley said, "That's to signify that you're becoming liberal." Hahaha! I thought it was a funny joke. ;)

Anyway, many photos were taken, and gifts/cards/congratulations received. After the festivities, Anthony and I and both sets of our parents (who finally got to meet, yay!) and my grandma and Anthony's cousin all went to the beach where we got engaged, and then to dinner at Romano's Macaroni Grill, my favorite Italian restaurant. It was a lot of fun. :)

And now I'm going to Mass here this morning one last time, and then heading home. I am sad to leave TAC, but home will be exciting what with wedding planning and all. I'm also sad to have to be apart from Anthony for six months with only two or three visits, but, as we are fond of saying to each other, when November comes we're going to be seeing each other for a loooong time! :)

Anyway, I've gotta go now. I may post some pics of graduation soon. Happy Sunday to everyone!

The End is in Sight

2010-05-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will take the last final examination of senior year. On Saturday I will graduate and receive my B.A. On Sunday, I will leave TAC, not to be returning next year. How bittersweet.

(At least getting married in November makes everything better. :) And I am excited about graduation, really.)

Almost There...

2010-03-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

I am still alive. It's just that a senior thesis, classes, and wedding planning are eating my soul. Well, the senior thesis is actually done now, but I'm still scared about the defense. I hope I get to be more toward the beginning of defenses. The sooner I get it over with, the better. And then, graduation stuff will start happening. Like, for instance, we're getting measured for caps and gowns this week, and have to order commencement invitations and announcements. I'm getting really excited for graduation. It's hard to believe it's actually going to happen to me this time.

I mentioned wedding planning in the first paragraph. That's because Anthony and I got engaged last month, on Valentine's Day. It was really special. We went out to dinner, then ice cream, and then the beach. He kind of stood there awkwardly for a second, and then all of a sudden he went down on one knee, produced a very sparkly ring, and asked me to marry him. Of course I said yes. :) Everyone was really excited when we got back to campus and told them, and now I am looking at dresses, dresses, and more dresses. I've found a couple that I like so far, but it's really hard trying to find one that's not strapless AND has a high enough neckline for my taste. It's even harder trying to find bridesmaid dresses that fit that description. Arrgh. My bridesmaids and I are going shopping in a couple of weeks, and I really hope we can find something.

Right now I'm very much enjoying the fact that my section has no classes on Monday morning. We make up for it on Tuesday and Wednesday by having class all morning. Whoa, Anthony just came up behind me and poked me. Heh heh. Yes, so, I still do want the senior theses to be over with, because my friends have all secluded themselves into little thesis-writing holes, and won't be coming out until it's turned in on Sunday. I miss them... ;)

Well, it's time for me to sign off and let other people use the computers. I hope everyone is having a great day!

Breeders Cup 2009

2009-12-27T20:16:00.001-08:00

One of the most memorable events of this semester was my trip to the Breeders Cup at Santa Anita. It all started with the Tuesday morning edition of the L.A. Times, which featured a full-page ad for $10 general admission tickets to the Breeders Cup which was taking place that Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7. I already had plans for Friday, and the races I really wanted to see were on Saturday anyway, so I gave Anthony my puppy-dog eyes, and he agreed to take me.

Now, I've been a fan of horse racing ever since the day, around 10 years ago, that I stayed home from school sick and found TVG, the 24/7 horse racing channel, on TV. However, I'd never gotten the opportunity to go to a really big race before, though I faithfully watched the Triple Crown every year, watched LOTS of TVG, and went to my local track, Emerald Downs, two or three times every summer. So, long story short, I was REALLY excited to be going to the Breeders Cup. I was also really excited that I'd get to see Zenyatta run in the Classic. Zenyatta is a mare, and was undefeated going into the Classic, a perfect 13 for 13. I'd seen her run on TV during the summer, and she looked really good. Not to mention the fact that everyone loved her. She was what you might call a people's horse - she had lots of fans. So naturally I was very excited to see her.

Our day at the races was good. I bet a few, lost a few, but won on Goldikova in the Breeders Cup Mile. That was pretty exciting. Finally, Classic time rolled around, so Anthony and I went down to the crowded paddock to watch the horses in the walking ring. We were about...3 rows back from the railing, so I couldn't see that well. I was able to see the horses better when they came out onto the main track for the post parade, and got some good pics of them. Loading into the starting gate took forever due to an unruly horse that had to be scratched eventually, but they finally loaded up and were sent away in the Classic! Zenyatta was last for most of the race, and had me really worried about whether or not she was going to catch up, but coming around the turn and at the top of the stretch, she made this fantastic move through and around the pack, and bore down to win by about a length. It was *quite* phenomenal. It was like a sports movie, only better. You know, one of those feel-good flicks where the people's favorite wins and everyone is cheering and clapping and yelling themselves hoarse at the end. That was what it was like when Zenyatta crossed the line in first, and when she came back around to the winner's circle. Everyone (including me) was clapping and cheering for her. I managed to get a few (sort of) decent pictures of her with a blanket of yellow roses on her back. Anyway, it was a great day and a great race. People are ranking Zenyatta up with some of the greatest race horses of all time, and her Classic will be one of those races that people look back on and remember as a truly great race.

Anyway, here are a few of my pictures from the Breeders Cup.

Breeders Cup banners on the grandstand.

The statue of the great Seabiscuit in the paddock.

Zenyatta in the post parade, before the Classic.

Zenyatta returns to the winner's circle after winning the Classic.

Zenyatta with the blanket of yellow roses, and jockey Mike Smith aboard.

Home for Christmas

2009-12-23T21:40:00.001-08:00

Here I am, back in the beautiful state of Washington for Christmas break. It has been SO nice to be somewhere other than, as I put it, 'the land of perpetual sun and palm trees'. Sunshine is nice, don't get me wrong, but I kind of miss normal seasons, with colored trees in fall and snow in winter, etc. You know. And we have already had a little bit of snow since I arrived. Not much, and nothing stuck to the ground, but we had flakes coming down for about 20 minutes yesterday morning. I was very happy about it.

The last couple of weeks of first semester were really hectic, but I managed to get through everything. We had a choir concert, the Christmas dance, an opera, and a dorm party all on one weekend a couple of weeks ago, and barely had all of that gone by when finals loomed on the horizon. I spent more time and brain power than I care to think about studying for those finals, but I think I did alright on all of them. Thankfully, one thing I don't really have to think about is my senior thesis. I completed my first draft about a week before the November 30 due date, and my adviser thinks that it's almost perfect as is, so I'm really relieved. Not as much work to do next semester.

Since I've been home, I've baked cookies, written letters, read some of 'The Brothers Karamazov' and watched cheesy Hallmark channel Christmas movies. And gone Christmas shopping. Tomorrow we are going to the midnight Tridentine Mass up in Ballard, and I'm going to be singing with the choir, as the director is an old friend who used to direct the choir at my parish. I'm really looking forward to it; I've been attending the daily Tridentine Mass at TAC for almost two years now, and I've come to like it a LOT. It's so peaceful and quiet and meaningful.

To return to the subject of academics, I think one of my favorite classes this semester was theology. We studied St. Thomas Aquinas's treatise on the Trinity, and boy was it ever cool! I learned so much about the Trinity. Obviously I don't understand it and never will (on earth, at any rate), but I know a lot more about it now. One afternoon when a couple of friends and I were studying for the theology final, my friend Catherine, speaking of the Word, said, "He's like...God from God." After which my friend Nina and I added, "Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father." Nina paused, sighed, and then added, "Oh guys...it's so cool to be Christian!" To which, of course, I heartily agreed. :)

Well, not a whole lot else going on around here. I'm looking forward to Anthony's visit. He arrives on the 5th, and we return to TAC on the 9th. I've got all kinds of things planned to do while he's here.

Anyway, it's getting kind of late, so I'm going to sign off for now. I hope you all have a very blessed and merry Christmas in a couple days!

Alexis de Tocqueville

2009-11-12T10:05:00.000-08:00

So we just finished reading this really great book in seminar by Alexis de Tocqueville called "Democracy in America". Tocqueville was a Frenchman who traveled extensively in America in the early nineteenth century, and the book is a study of democracies generally, seen through the lens of American democracy. I want to quote some portions from it pertaining to various issues that I think are relevant today.

1. Religion

"One must recognize that equality, which introduces great goods into the world, nevertheless suggests to men very dangerous instincts, as will be shown hereafter; it tends to isolate them from one another and to bring them each of them to be occupied with himself alone.
It opens their souls excessively to the love of material enjoyments.
The greatest advantage of religions is to inspire wholly contrary instincts. There is no religion that does not place man's desires beyond and above earthly goods and that does not naturally raise his soul toward regions much superior to those of the senses. Nor is there any that does not impose on each some duties toward the human species or in common with it, and that does not thus draw him, from time to time, away from contemplation of himself. This one meets in even the most false and dangerous religions.
Religious peoples are therefore naturally strong in precisely the spot where democratic peoples are weak; this makes very visible how important it is that men keep to their religion when becoming equal." -Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part One, Chapter Five

"Legislators of democracies and all honest and enlightened men who live in them must therefore apply themselves relentlessly to raising up souls and keeping them turned toward Heaven. It is necessary for all those who are interested in the future of democratic societies to unite, and for all in concert to make continuous efforts to spread within these societies a taste for the infinite, a sentiment of greatness, and a love of immaterial pleasures.
If one encounters among the opinions of a democratic people some of those harmful theories that tend to make it believed that everything perishes with the body, consider the men who profess them as the natural enemies of this people.
There are many things that offend me in the materialists. Their doctrines appear to me pernicious and their haughtiness revolts me. If their system could be of some utility to man, it seems it would be in giving him a modest idea of himself. But they do not make anyone see that this should be so, and when they believe they have sufficiently established that they are only brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated they were gods.
Materialism is a dangerous malady of the human mind in all nations; but one must dread it particularly in a democratic people because it combines marvelously with the most familiar vice of the heart in these peoples.
Democracy favors the taste for material enjoyments. This taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes me to believe that all is nothing but matter; and materialism in its turn serves to carry them toward these enjoyments with an insane ardor. Such is the fatal circle into which democratic nations are propelled. It is good for them to see the peril and restrain themselves.
Most religions are only general, simple, and practical means of teaching men the immortality of the soul. That is the greatest advantage that a democratic people derives from beliefs, and it is what renders them more necessary to such a people than to all others.
Therefore when any religion whatsoever has cast deep roots within a democracy, guard against shaking it; but rather preserve it carefully as the most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries; do not seek to tear men from their old religious opinions to substitute new ones, for fear that, in the passage from one faith to another, the soul finding itself for a moment empty of belief, the love of material enjoyments will come to spread through it and fill it entirely." -Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part Two, Chapter Fifteen

"Up to now, no one has been encountered in the United States who dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society. An impious maxim - one that seems to have been invented in a century of freedom to legitimate all the tyrants to come.
So, therefore, at the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything.
Religion, which, among Americans, never mixes directly in the government of society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates their use of it...When [men] attack religious beliefs, they follow their passions and not their interests. Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic they extol than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics more than all others. How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond were not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if it has not submitted to God?" -Democracy in America, Volume One, Part Two, Chapter Nine

So there are several problems that religion will counteract in a democratic society. The first is inordinate love of material enjoyments. Tocqueville says that in democracies, where every man is free to make his own way in the world, and that where a lot of people will begin to experience material well-being for the first time, people will tend to get much too attached to these things and will become base and self-seeking. He also says that they will spend so much time looking after their own personal interests and trying to get as much wealth as possible that they'll want the government to take care of more and more other things for them, leading to a big centralization of power and eventually, despotism. Religion will help with this because it will turn people's minds away from material stuff and make them realize their duties towards other men as well. Also, religion will keep the majority from passing laws that will be hurtful to people. Funny, huh. These days, politicians will tell you that they keep their political life separate from their religious life. According to Tocqueville, religion is important precisely because it will help men to legislate correctly.

2. The role of women

"There are people in Europe who, confusing the diverse attributes of the sexes, intend to make man and woman into beings not only equal, but alike. They give both the same functions, impose the same duties on them, and accord them the same rights; they mix them in all things - labors, pleasures, affairs. One can easily conceive that in thus striving to equalize one sex with the other, one degrades them both; and that from this coarse mixture of nature's works, only weak men and disreputable women can ever emerge.
This is not the way Americans have understood the kind of democratic equality that can be established between woman and man. They have thought that since nature had established such great variation between the physical and moral constitution of man and that of woman, its clearly indicated goal was to give a diverse employment to their different faculties; and they have judged that progress did not consist in making two unlike beings do nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to acquit its task as well as possible. Americans have applied to the two sexes the great principle of political economy that dominates industry in our day. They have carefully divided the functions of man and woman in order that the great social work be better done.
America, among the world's countries, is the one where they have taken the most continual care to draw cleanly separated lines of action for the two sexes, and where they have wanted them both to march at an equal pace but on ever different paths. You do not see American women directing the external affairs of the family, conducting a business, or indeed entering the political sphere, but neither do you encounter any of them who are obliged to engage in the rough work of plowing or in any painful exertions that require the development of physical force. There are no families so poor as to make an exception to this rule.
Neither have Americans ever imagined that democratic principles should have the consequence of overturning marital power and introducing confusion of authorities in the family. They have thought that every association, to be efficacious, must have a head, and that the natural head of the conjugal association is the man. They therefore do not deny him the right to direct his mate; and they believe that in the little society of husband and wife, as well as in the great political society, the object of democracy is to regulate and legitimate necessary powers, not to destroy all power.
[This is also]the sentiment that the most virtuous women express: the others are silent, and one does not hear in the United States of an adulterous wife noisily claiming the rights of woman while riding roughshod over her most hallowed duties.
It is true that Americans rarely show women the ready attentions with which one is pleased to surround them in Europe; but they always show by their conduct that they suppose them virtuous and delicate; and they have such a great respect for their moral freedom that in their presence each watches his discourse carefully for fear that they be forced to hear language that offends them.
As for men, I shall not hesitate to say it: although in the United States the woman scarcely leaves the domestic circle and is in certain respects very dependent within it, nowhere does her position seem higher to me; and now that I approach the end of this book where I have shown so many considerable things done by Americans, if one asked me to what do I think one must principally attribute the singular prosperity and growing force of this people, I would answer that it is to the superiority of its women." -Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part Three, Chapter Twelve

This one pretty much speaks for itself. The only thing I have to say is, "Ah, for the good old days."

3. Big Government

"Equality produces, in fact, two tendencies: one leads men directly to independence and can drive them all at once into anarchy, the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but surer path toward servitude." -Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part Four, Chapter One

So what is this path toward servitude?

"Men who inhabit democratic countries, having neither superiors or inferiors nor habitual and necessary associates [such as were the members of one's class in an aristocracy], willingly fall back on themselves and consider themselves in isolation...it is therefore never effortless for these men to tear themselves away from their particular affairs to occupy themselves with common affairs; their natural inclination is to abandon the care of the latter to the sole visible and permanent representative of collective interests, which is the state.
Not only do they not naturally have the taste to occupy themselves with the public, but often they lack the time to do it. Private life is so active in democratic times, so agitated, so filled with desires and work, that hardly any energy or leisure remains to each man for political life.
I have also had occasion to show how the growing love of well-being and the mobile nature of property make democratic peoples dread material disorder. Love of public tranquility is often the sole political passion that these peoples preserve, and it becomes more active and more powerful in them as all the others are weakened and die; this naturally disposes citizens constantly to give the central power new rights, or to allow it to take them; it alone seems to them to have the interest and the means to defend them from anarchy by defending itself." -Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part Four, Chapter Three

And what will things be like eventually when people, not wanting to be bothered with anything but their own private interests, have let the government take over everything common or public?

"I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasure with which they fill their souls...above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.
Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposed itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd...in vain will you charge these same citizens, whom you have rendered so dependent on the central power, with choosing the representatives of this power from time to time; that use of their free will, so important but so brief and rare, will not prevent them from losing little by little the faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting by themselves, and thus from gradually falling below the level of humanity...it is in fact difficult to conceive how men who have entirely renounced the habit of directing themselves could succeed at choosing well those who will lead them; and one will not make anyone believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever issue from the suffrage of a people of servants...the vice of those who govern and the imbecility of the governed would not be slow to bring it to ruin; and the people, tired of their representatives and of themselves, would create freer institutions or soon return to lying at the feet of a single master." -Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part Four, Chapter Six

So there you have it, folks. Doesn't that make you want the government to keep taking care of everything for us?

Halloween

2009-11-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

The Halloween Dance was, appropriately, yesterday evening. I'm not going to say a whole lot about it. The dancing itself was pretty fun, and the costumes were a blast, as always, but the food was not-so-great AND there wasn't nearly enough of it; also, the decorations were really so-so. A few small-ish murals, and really no 3-D props. 3-D props are what really make the decorations, and they can make the difference between a dance being perceived as not all that great or as utterly amazing. Everyone loved our Mardi Gras Dance last year precisely because we had lots of 3-D props. Canopies, pyramids, an oasis, and a marketplace were among them. It was really cool.

So yeah, if you couldn't tell already, I wasn't overly impressed with how the sophomores pulled yesterday's dance together. But that's not really the point of this post. Anthony and I dressed up as Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett, and it was a lot of fun! We had a couple of last minute emergencies, namely, the collared vest that I'd found for Anthony got lost, and Peter's tailcoat was more than one size too small...but we found another vest that worked pretty well, and Anthony, with great effort, and quite uncomfortably, I'm afraid, did manage to fit somewhat into the tailcoat. But even though that looked noticeably too small for him, everyone definitely knew right away who we were supposed to be. I think his cravat (excellently tied by yours truly) and the knee-length breeches with long white stockings were what really clinched the style. Anyway, here is a picture of us in front of one of the murals.

So yeah, we had a good time despite the drawbacks. Anyway, I now have homework to do, so I'll sign off for today.

I hate the L.A. Times

2009-10-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, I most certainly do. Reading the front section infuriates me nearly every day, but even turning to the comic strips doesn't always provide relief. So many of them have blatant political overtones and openly mock conservatives and/or Christians. Anyway, I finally had my camel's back broken by the proverbial straw in the form of one of the editorials this morning, and so wrote a letter to the editor. I wonder what the likelihood is of its getting published...

My trip to the Sequoia forest last week was a blast! Anthony and I left campus around 6:30 a.m. and didn't get to the park till about noon. On the way there we had to drive on a road called Lovers Lane, and I could NOT pass up the opportunity to take a picture of Anthony and me in front of the street sign. ;) A little later on, we were driving down this two-lane road way out through the boonies, and got stuck behind a cattle drive. It was actually rather amusing, driving 5 mph behind a couple of guys on horses herding a bunch of cows down the middle of the road. Eventually they turned off and we got going again. So when we finally did get there, we had lunch and then looked at a couple of large sequoia groves. Those trees are amazingly huge; they completely dwarf all the normal-sized trees around them. On the way from Kings Canyon to Sequoia National Park, there was a lengthy stretch of road that was having some construction done on it, and they were only letting cars through every hour on the hour. Of course, Anthony and I got to the roadblock at 2:05. *sigh* So we had to wait for nearly an hour. Luckily there was a pretty good view from that point out over a valley of sequoias, so it wasn't all bad. We got done in the park at about 4 p.m. and then headed back to campus, arriving at around 9 p.m. It was a really fun day.

Thursday I spent almost all day reading seminar, and when I got to class that night there were only 10 people there. Yikes. We normally have 19 people in our seminar class, and most of the people who are the normal talkers were missing. So, I made the decision that even though I normally didn't talk, I had better do it that evening or there would be almost no discussion. So I did, quite a lot, and everyone was pleased with me. I think I should do it more often. :)

On Friday there was a formal dinner, and the seniors were seated with members of the college's board of governors. Anthony and I were together, and also at our table were our friends Hayley, Tim, Peter and Jeremy. There were three members of the board at our table, two of whom were a married couple, and they were a blast! They were so hilarious, always joking with each other and with us, and full of questions about TAC, classes, Don Rags, and the mysterious system of friendship and dating as it works on the TAC campus. Tim and Hayley, and Anthony and I, were quite equipped to inform them on that point. :) Anyway, it was quite a rip-roarin' time at dinner. I enjoyed the chardonnay they served. I think I'm beginning to develop more of a taste (and tolerance!) for alcohol. I can actually manage a whole glass now, as opposed to a couple of sips.

This morning I "thesisized", as they say, quite vigorously for three hours, and have now completed nine pages. I think I'm still happy with how it's going, though I have to keep on it, as it's due on November 30. This evening I'm going out to dinner with Anthony, and we're taking my friend Beth and her boyfriend, also named Anthony. It's actually quite amusing; two Elizabeths dating two Anthonys. Anyway, her Anthony is visiting her from Canada (his home) this weekend, and since she and I are good friends, we decided to go on a double date. So that ought to be fun. :)

Anyway, I need to go start reading my next seminar assignment, Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." I hope everyone has a good weekend!

Don Rags

2009-10-20T18:14:00.000-07:00

So FINALLY, I as a senior do not have any Don Rags this year. In other words, I don't have to be humiliated for 10 minutes by all of my tutors! But since everyone else still must undergo this process, I still get three days off this week. Nyeh, heh, heh. And I intend to make full use of them. In fact, I've already begun to do so. I worked on my thesis today, and managed to get into the eighth page. Yay! Tomorrow Anthony and I are going to Kings Canyon National Park (4 to 5 hours north of here) to see sequoia trees, and we're most likely going to be gone all day. Looking forward to that. On Thursday I'll probably (wait, no, definitely) work more on my thesis. Due date is November 30...

Anyway, I've gotta run now, but life is good. Have a good week!

Life with Hegel

2009-10-04T16:23:00.000-07:00

Our last two seminars have been on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Philosophy of History." The only book I've read that is more incomprehensible than this one is the other book by Hegel that we've been reading, namely, "The Phenomenology of Spirit." I am really hoping that our next few seminars will make me understand this stuff better, because right now my brain is short-circuiting around a sentence which contained the words 'bifurcation', 'self-otherness of the simple', 'abstract immediacy', and 'substantiality as the in-itself'. Whew. Someone take me back to Aristotle - he's hard, but at least he writes in English. ;)

We have finally arrived at the part of senior theology where we study the Trinity. It's extremely interesting stuff. So far we've said that there are two immanent processions in God, namely, that of intellection and that of will. The first is a generation and is the Son; the second is love and is the Holy Spirit. I really DO hope, along with many previous years' worth of seniors, that I don't accidentally write anything heretical on my final theology exam. :)

This weekend was rather interesting. On Friday evening there was a concert, the first one of the year. It was given by a group called L.A. Cantilena, and consisted of music by Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Telemann. That was quite enjoyable. After the concert was the annual game of Students vs. Tutors Trivial Pursuit, held in the coffee shop. The activities director asked for volunteers to be captain of the student team, and Anthony was the only volunteer, so the Official Student Microphone was handed over to him, he and I got to sit up front, and I rolled the die for the student team. Dr. McLean's pre-concert statement that the tutors would win turned out, unsurprisingly, to be true. I've attended the Trivial Pursuit all four years here, and the students have only won once. Oh well, it was fun anyway.

I had rather a bad morning on Saturday, but I won't go into that here. I worked on seminar and on my thesis all afternoon, and now have 6 pages of my rough draft finished. The draft is due on November 30, and only needs to be at least 20 pages long, so I'm feeling pretty good about it so far. I just got through a few pages which explain, both from common conception and from Aristotle, what it means to say that something is natural. After dinner, Anthony and I decided to go see the new Pixar movie "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." That was one of my favorite books when I was little, and the movie was alright, too. I don't think Anthony was as much of a fan, though (except for all the horribly corny puns). Oh well.

Not a whole lot has been going on today as of yet. The choir sang at Mass, we ate brunch, I finished seminar and read a bit of theology, and now I've been wandering around for the last couple of hours trying to find something to do until dinner.

For those who don't know yet, Anthony is going to be visiting me for a few days during Christmas break, and I am VERY excited. :) He arrives on Tuesday, January 5, and we are leaving together to return to TAC on Saturday the 9th. I've made all kinds of wonderful plans for what to do during his visit, including but not necessarily limited to seeing all the sights of downtown Seattle, going sledding in the mountains, and hopefully meeting various friends and relatives. So anyway, it should be a lot of fun.

Well, according to my watch, it's now (finally) nearly 5 o'clock, which translated means, dinner time. SO, I will end this post and wish everyone a happy Sunday!

Senior Year

2009-09-21T09:04:00.000-07:00

Well, I have returned to the sunny land of southern California for my fourth and final year at TAC. So far it's going great. Classes are all pretty interesting this year. In math we're doing calculus, and most recently learned how to find the volume of revolutionary solids via integration. Lab is way cool - we are studying light this year, and have been reading Newton's "Optics" as well as doing all kinds of experiments with prisms and lasers. In philosophy we have been studying Aristotle's "Physics" - the chapters concerning place and time. Next semester we get to do the "Metaphysics" which I am greatly looking forward to. In theology we are reading St. Thomas Aquinas's "Summa Theologiae" again. We've been focusing on some articles regarding how one would name God, as well as His knowledge and life, and we are very soon going to move on to study the Trinity. The Trinitarian articles will most likely be quite difficult - it is this next theology exam that each year's seniors always pray they will not write anything heretical in. :) My last class is seminar. I haven't really been enjoying it so far this year for various reasons, but at least the books are interesting so far. We've read War and Peace, The Wealth of Nations, some stuff by Kant, Emma, and now are working on Faust.

In place of a sixth class, the seniors write a senior thesis, which has to be 20 pages minimum, and which they defend orally before a board of three tutors during the second half of second semester. Everyone turns in a thesis proposal in the first month of the school year, which gives one's topic, thesis statement, and general plan of procedure for the thesis. I turned mine in a little over a week ago, and it was approved the next day by the dean and approval committee. Yay! I am finally doing what I said I would do a long time ago, if one were to read a post I wrote when I first started this blog; namely, I'm writing on why homosexual behavior is intrinsically disordered. I will be arguing primarily from natural philosophy, but I will also bring in the Scriptures and some papal encyclicals in the second half of the thesis. The topic has long interested me, but it was brought to mind again recently by the business concerning Prop 8 that was going on down here last November. Anyway, my proposal was approved, and I've written about four pages of my rough draft so far (it's due November 30), so I'm happy with the way things are going. :)

The senior-freshman beach day was this last Saturday. That was a lot of fun - the water was actually fairly mild, and the waves were great! I spent the longest time out in the surf just riding up and down on the waves. :) We also had a dance for the freshmen that evening, with lots of food and entertainment. It was fun, although I've decided that I'm not into dances quite as much as I used to be. They were fun and new freshman year, and even sophomore year, but they don't hold the same novelty for me now that they used to. Oh well, they're still pretty fun. :)

Anthony and I are still dating, and all is going well with that. He is coming to visit me for a few days during this Christmas break - January 5-9, and then we are flying back to TAC together. So there are lots of people who want to meet him, and lots of things to do while he's there. It should be a busy few days.

Anyway, I've got to get back to homework, so I will sign off for now. Hope everyone has a good week.

Alma Redemptoris Mater

2009-08-14T17:11:00.000-07:00

This is a motet by Palestrina. It's one of our staples at TAC. (*while running around in panic mode 10 minutes before Mass* "What are we going to sing for recessional?" "Um, I don't know." "What about Alma Redemptoris? We just sang it two weeks ago, but everyone knows it." "Okay! Sounds good.") But despite the frequent usage, I positively love it. What's not to love? It is Palestrina, after all. ;)

Latin:
Alma redemptoris mater,
quae pervia caeli porta manes,
et stella maris:
succurre cadenti,
surgere qui curat, populo,
tu quae genuisti natura mirante,
tuum sanctum Genitorem.
Virgo prius ac posterius,
Gabrielis ab ore
sumens illud Ave,
peccatorum miserere.

English:
Loving mother of the redeemer,
who remain a traversable gate to heaven,
and star of the sea:
Succor the fallen,
Lift up the people, [you] who cures,
you who bore, with nature marvelling,
your holy Creator.
Virgin before and after,
from the mouth of Gabriel
taking that Ave,
have mercy on us sinners.

Photographic Reflections

2009-08-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite pictures of Anthony and me. I don't like it just because it's cute (which it is), or because it turned out nicely (which it did), but because of something about it that happened purely accidentally. If you look just above my head and slightly to the right, you'll see a crucifix in the background. I didn't even realize that crucifix was there, much less that it was going to get into the picture (just a slightly different angle and it might not have been at all), but it IS in the picture, and pretty centrally located too, right by our faces. This caused me to stop and think about God's role in our relationship, and in relationships in general. We should be putting Him at the center of it, allowing Him to guide us as we proceed further and get to know one another even better. He is the one who gives the help and the grace necessary in a relationship, and finally, it is He to Whom we should be striving to bring each other closer, so that we may eventually be happy with Him in Heaven. That's why I like this picture so much: because for me it illustrates the necessary components, if you will, for a successful relationship - us, and God.

Summery Summary, '09 Edition

2009-08-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

With the notable exception of my trip to Wyoming, it's been rather an uneventful last 3 months. Along with many other friends from college, I was unable to find a real job this summer, so my employment consisted of playing organ at my parish church now and then. The pay is pretty good for organists, luckily, so I'm going to survive senior year without going bankrupt. Another, much more unreliable source of income has been a few visits to the local horse racing track, where betting on the races earned me some $65 or so. This money was used largely for expenses incurred during the summer, such as airport food while travelling to WY, as well as a TLC package sent to a very worthy resident of that state a few weeks later. :)

Occasional weekend outings with the family were quite fun. Among these were a bowling expedition (at which I did the unthinkable and bowled 160, enough to earn me a free prize treat from Dairy Queen), a trip to the put-put golf course (at which I did NOT do so well), a drive through Mt. Rainier National Park, with lots of stops and hiking at both Sunrise and Paradise, and an interesting expedition to the Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. We drove down on a cloudy day, and we finally got all the way up to the observation point only to arrive in the middle of a real pea soup, which showed no signs of lifting anytime soon. The result was that, while we were able to observe some blown-over trees and a LOT of ash, the mountain itself simply could not be seen. At all. It was a little eerie walking along the edge of this big ridge, knowing that right out there across the piles of ash and mud and dead trees was a huge active volcano (it last erupted in 2004), the crater aimed directly at you, with nothing at all standing between you and it, and yet being able to see nothing but the ghostly whiteness. The thick cloud cover made it darker out than normal, and between that, the lack of visibility, and the ash and dead trees everywhere, it seemed quite ominous. On a clear sunny day, this is the view one would have from where we were standing.

On the way back down we stopped at one of the visitor centers and looked around for a little while, at which place I put a penny into one of those crank machines and flattened it into a picture of Mt. St. Helens erupting. So that was my souvenir from the day.

I've also had time this summer to see a few friends of mine. I made a short visit at a college buddy's house to drop of some things of hers that I had, and it was good to talk to her for a bit. I also saw one of my good friends from high school a couple of times, and we got a chance to catch up on each other's lives, which was nice. A week ago my family went to a barbeque at my uncle's house, so I also got to see my cousin and some other relatives.

The last week in July was punishingly hot this year. I guess that was to make up for the never-ending winter we had last December and earlier this year. We were visitors at the lake nearly every day, as it was impossible to cool down at all without either going to the lake for at least an hour or standing in the cold shower all day. Temperatures by the middle of the week were around 105 degrees, and the days leading up to and immediately following were up in the mid 90's. The humidity was pretty bad as well on some of those days. I quite literally felt like I was perpetually sticky. It was NOT a nice experience. At least California heat is dry.

And speaking of California, I get to return to that great land in 1 week and 5 days, on August 22. I am, as they say, stoked. Putting aside the somewhat terrifying prospect of a senior thesis, I am super excited to be going back, seeing friends again, having the wonderful chapel, liturgy and choir, pursuing truth, goodness and beauty, being with Anthony, and FINALLY being on the top rung of the hierarchical ladder. *I* am now the senior; *I* am now the feared and respected one. Hahaha!! :) Okay, I'm not actually going to be an evil domineering overlord. I like the returning sophomores and juniors a lot, and I'm sure the freshmen will be wonderful also. Once they figure out who's boss, that is. JK! ;)

The preparatory reading for this year's first seminar is "War and Peace". That book is HUGE. I remember looking at it on my Dad's bookshelf as a child, being scared at the sheer enormity of it, and hoping that I would never, EVER have to read that book. My edition (pictured at left) is 1215 pages, and I'm currently on page 987. But, no fears! I will definitely finish by the end of the summer, and probably by the end of this week. It is an extremely interesting and well-written book, dealing with such issues as the meaning of life, the individual's role in the great tapestry of history, fatalism, death and the afterlife, suffering, religion, and, of course, love - romantic love, familial love, love of friends, and love of enemies. And love of God. These themes are treated of through a large cast of characters from very diverse backgrounds and walks of life, who are all thrown into the same struggle against Napoleon and his eventual invasion of Russia. I am very eager to finish the book so that I can get a handle on it as a whole and attempt to better understand what Tolstoy is trying to get across.

Anyway, that's a flavor of what summer life has been like for me over the last 3 months. So now, having done what I said I would do in the last post, and seeing that it's 11:15 at night, I think I shall retire. I hope everyone has a good week, and God Bless!

Good Evening

2009-08-08T22:23:00.000-07:00

This post is going to be a quickie. I just want to say that there will soon (within the next couple of days) be a longer post up, probably about the summer and what yours truly has been up to. (Don't worry, it's not much.) I'm going to end with a quote I found recently, which I think is very true.

"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." -Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Nothing has convinced me more of this than my experiences in various choirs over the years, where it was always the unskilled singers who were eager to volunteer for every solo part, while the trained musicians were more hesitant.

A Common Spelling Error...

2009-07-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

...that absolutely drives me up the wall is 'definate'. That's not how that word is spelled. It is as follows: d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e. Definite. Not 'definate' or 'defanate' or 'defanite', or anything else. 'Definite' is the only correct spelling. Thank you.

Title Change

2009-07-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

As you probably noticed, I made a title change to my blog. The URL will remain the same for convenience, but I felt that a title update was needed, as the old title did not really reflect the content of the blog all that well. I decided to use what you might call the motto of my school, Thomas Aquinas College. So, here you have it: Verum ~ Bonum ~ Pulchrum.

Thomas Tallis

2009-07-15T22:40:00.001-07:00

At the risk of this blog turning into a place for me to post recordings of all my favorite music, I'm going to continue in that vein by giving you a sampling of Thomas Tallis. This recording is by the Tallis Scholars (a choir which is truly expert at singing Renaissance music), and contains three pieces - "Miserere Nostri", "Loquebantur Variis Linguis", and "If Ye Love Me". I'd never heard the first one before, but have sung the other two with the TAC choir. The one I mostly wanted to concentrate this post on is "Loquebantur Variis Linguis." I have kind of a love-hate relationship with this piece, as it is really quite beautiful, but presented difficulties to our choir when we attempted to learn it, with the result that we did NOT make it sound beautiful for quite some time. It may not sound quite as "together" as some polyphonic pieces - the different lines all go off in varying directions and don't really resolve themselves into a unified sounding whole until towards the end, but there is a very good reason for this. The song is about Pentecost, and how the Apostles spoke in different tongues. Thus, Tallis was trying to musically convey the idea of a lot of languages going on all at once. I think he succeeded. For those who wish to skip directly to this piece, it begins at around 2:25 in the recording.

Latin:
Loquebantur variis linguis apostoli, alleluia,
magnalia Dei. Alleluia.
Repleti sunt omnes Spiritu Sancto,
et ceperunt loqui,
magnalia Dei. Alleluia.
Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Alleluia.

English:
The Apostles were speaking in various tongues, alleluia,
of the great works of God. Alleluia.
They were all filled with the Holy Spirit,
and began to speak,
of the great works of God. Alleluia.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Alleluia.

Affirmative Action

2009-07-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've been hearing a lot lately about Judge Sotomayor, Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court. And connected with that I've also been hearing about the white firefighters in Connecticut who were denied promotions because not enough minorities scored well on the exam. All of this brings the topic of affirmative action to my mind, so I decided to write a short post on it.

Affirmative action is described in the online Encyclopaedia Brittanica in the following way:

In the United States, an active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for members of minority groups and for women. Affirmative action began as a government remedy to the effects of long-standing discrimination against such groups and has consisted of policies, programs, and procedures that give preferences to minorities and women in job hiring, admission to institutions of higher education, the awarding of government contracts, and other social benefits. The typical criteria for affirmative action are race, disability, gender, ethnic origin, and age.

To give an example: many universities have percentage quotas or goals in the hiring and/or admissions processes, which is basically to say that they aim to have their faculties and/or student bodies have a certain percentage of caucasians, a certain percentage of blacks, a certain percentage of women, etc. Given these quotas or goals, when faced with a decision between several candidates or applicants, the university will give the position or admission to the candidate who is the member of whatever ethnic group or gender is needed to meet these quotas. What this means is that if I applied to the university and had an SAT score of 2200, and another person of some minority group also applied, but with an SAT score of only 1900, the university would accept the other person instead of me if they had to meet their minority quotas. Basically, the other person got accepted, as the encyclopaedia article stated, on the criteria of race or ethnic origin, and NOT on the basis of academic prowess or ability.

Now, although affirmative action was originally touted as action AGAINST discrimination and racism, I say that, today at least, it FOSTERS these things more than anything else. In the example above, applicants to the university are not being judged on the basis of character or what they have accomplished as an individual. They are being judged on the basis of something that they cannot help or change - their race. And therefore when one applicant is selected over another, it sends an implicit message that the race of applicant (A) is better or more desireable than the race of applicant (B), which sounds a lot like the very definition of racism: "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race." (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

One problem with this is that it leads to resentment among those people who have been turned down because they were not of the race or ethnic origin needed to meet the quotas. If anything, affirmative action (AA for short) will actually help to establish racism by causing this resentment and dislike of the members of the race which is being given preferential treatment. In this way AA defeats its own end, since racism and discrimination is more likely because of it than without it.

In addition, I would hazard a guess that many members of minority groups might actually feel insulted by AA, for the very reasons given above. If I were aware that my race was the only reason I was getting preferential treatment, I would certainly feel insulted. I didn't have to work or sacrifice to get my race. I didn't put any effort into it. It's not because of any merits of my own or any character traits that I have that I was selected for such-and-such a position. If it weren't for my race I'd be out the door, and quick. To me, this would be extremely insulting, and I can't imagine that there are no minorities out there who share these feelings.

In light of all this, isn't AA doing exactly the opposite of what Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of in his famous "I have a dream" speech? He said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Well, as long as AA still holds sway, I say that that nation has not yet come to be, because as far as I can tell, people are still being judged by the color of their skin.

A Small Tidbit of Aristotle

2009-07-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

From the Nichomachean Ethics, Book II, chapter 9:

"Enough has been said, then, to show that virtue of character is a mean, and in what sense it is so; that it is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency; and that it is such because it is the sort of thing able to hit the mean in feelings and actions. This is why it is hard to be good, because in each case it is hard to find the middle point; for instance, not everyone can find the centre of a circle, but only the person with knowledge. So too anyone can get angry, or give and spend money - these are easy; but doing them in relation to the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, with the right aim in view, and in the right way - that is not something anyone can do, nor is it easy. This is why excellence in these things is rare, praiseworthy and noble."

I won't go into any details concerning my personal problems and issues, but I will say that I have been becoming more and more aware of the truth of the above paragraph for some time now. It's hard to be good.

O Jesu Christe

2009-07-12T10:11:00.002-07:00

More music - this time it's "O Jesu Christe", a motet by Jacquet de Berchem. Our choir at TAC does this one often during Lent, as it's a sort of penitential song. It's one of my favorites. This isn't the best recording I've ever heard, but it's the best I could find on YouTube.

Latin:
O Jesu Christe, miserere mei.
cum dolore langueo,
Domine tu es spes mea.
Clamavi ad te,
miserere mei.

English:
O Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
With sorrow I sigh,
Lord you are my hope.
I have cried unto you,
Have mercy on me.

My trip to "God's Country" - aka Wyoming

2009-07-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

As some of you reading this may already know, I took a trip to Wyoming last weekend to visit my boyfriend Anthony and to meet his family. I left from SeaTac on Thursday morning, went first to Denver, waited around there for quite some time, and then flew to the Yellowstone Regional Airport in Cody, Wyoming. It's one of those really small, dinko airports that can only take planes smaller than a Boeing 737. In fact, on my plane, as we were getting ready to taxi out to the runway in Denver, the stewardess had to ask a few of the big guys sitting in the front of the plane to move to the back - otherwise we might not be able to get off the ground. That's how small it was. Anyway, it was a very bumpy trip, and we got in about a half hour later than expected. I got off the plane and was immediately wowed by how beautiful the scenery was. One of the most prominent landmarks to catch the eye is Heart Mountain. There is some debate as to why it's called this - some say it looks like a heart, others that it was named after some guy whose name was Heart. At any rate, it's quite impressive.

So then I got into the airport, and there was Anthony waiting for me, and of course I was very happy to see him. It was about a 25 minute drive to his house from Cody, through a lot of flat, wide open area covered with fields mostly of grass. A lot of the farmers in that area, including his family, grow and sell grass seed. We finally got to his house at about 8:30, where I was bombarded by a stampede of little girls all anxious to meet me (he has 5 younger sisters). So in the midst of the flurry I met four of the sisters, his younger brother Peter, and both of his parents, and we sat around in the house and talked for about an hour before bedtime.

The next day was quite busy. Mr. and Mrs. Spiering and Anthony get up at 6 a.m. every morning to go irrigate, and then breakfast is usually around 7:30. I got up for breakfast, and then Anthony took me on a big tour of the farm. I saw all of their different garages and shops and tractor storage sheds and granaries, and then we drove around the farm (I believe they have close to 700 acres now) in what they call a mule - it's kind of like a high-powered off-roader golf cart.

I saw a lot of different kinds of grass growing on that tour. I managed to learn some of them, but there are a lot I still don't know. I can recognize several kinds, like alfalfa, smooth brome, Indian rice grass, and Ephraim crested wheat grass, but there a lot more kinds than that. I also saw the two different irrigation techniques they use. One is siphon tubes - by covering one end of the siphon tube with your hand, thus cutting off the air pressure at that end, you can get water to flow from the big irrigation ditch at the edge of the field up through the siphon tube and down into the corrugations (rows). There's definitely a special touch you have to acquire to be able to get them going, and I still don't have it, though I managed to do a few while I was there.

The other way of irrigating (and this way is much easier) is gated pipe. Instead of the water going down the edge of the field in a big ditch, it runs through a pipe which has little doors, or "gates" every two feet or so in the side of it that you can open and close, thus allowing the water to run out of the pipe and down into the corrugations. You can also control the flow of water better this way, as you can adjust how much you open the gates.

After my farm tour, Anthony and I went to visit the Harders, friends of ours who used to live in the Seattle area and now live about a quarter of a mile down the road from the Spierings. They were very happy to see us, and showed us around their farm and house. They've got chickens and goats and sheep, and I think maybe a cow, though I'm not sure. Anyway, it was a fun visit.

After lunch, Anthony took me on a big scenic drive through the Beartooth Mountains, which are to the northwest of them. In the end we arrived in Red Lodge, Montana, where we had dinner, but at least half the fun was just the drive itself. We went there by way of a very roundabout scenic highway, and what with all the stops we made at different viewpoints, it took us about four hours to get from his house to Red Lodge. It was a very enjoyable drive, with tons of beautiful scenery.

When we finally did get to Red Lodge, we had dinner at a pizza place called Bogart's. The pizza was really good, even though we were restricted to cheese due to the fact that it was Friday. After that we made a visit to the Montana Candy Emporium just down the street, whereat we purchased jelly beans, variety barrel candy, and a nice chunk of mint chocolate fudge. We then proceeded home by the direct route, which only took about an hour.

After we got back to his house, we and some of his family watched a DVD recording of the musical that our choir at TAC had done this spring, "Princess Ida." I thought it turned out fairly well for the most part, though I now know what our director is talking about when he's constantly telling me to sing more loudly... It was quite late by the time that got over, so everyone went right to bed.

On Saturday I got up early to go irrigating with Anthony, and after that the whole family bundled into the van and drove into Powell to go to Mass. When we got home we had brunch, and then got ready to go to a barbeque at a relative's house in Cody, and after that to go swimming and canoeing at a nearby lake. So we all got swim suits and life jackets and all the canoes and paddles, loaded up the big trailer, and hooked it onto the back of the van.

So after everyone was ready, we drove into Cody to the barbeque, where I met a lot more cousins and relatives and both sets of grandparents. Amazingly enough, I remember all 9 of Anthony's siblings' names, and all 12 of his cousins' names! I don't know how I managed that. Anyway, I was very pleased to discover on surveying the food table that someone other than my Mom makes raspberry coolwhip salad, also known simply as "pink salad." We stayed at the barbeque "long enough to be polite," as Anthony put it, and then the Spiering kids and all the cousins (and me, of course) went to the lake and swam and canoed and generally had a marvelous time the whole rest of the afternoon.

After arriving back at the house from all of that, Anthony and I went irrigating again, which took a little while due to the fact that someone had turned off the water supply to the field that we were supposed to irrigate, so we had to turn it back on and then wait for about a half hour for enough water to get all the way from the head of the supply down to that particular field. Once it got there we were setting out siphon tubes, and I had just set one successfully on the very first try when hey presto, I tripped over the edge of the big irrigation ditch and fell *splash* right into the middle of it and got completely soaking wet and cut my hands a little bit. I must have looked quite a sight standing forlornly in the middle of the ditch with water up to my thighs, soaking wet and trying not to laugh TOO hard at myself. Oh well, apparently it happens to everyone at least once. So after we finally finished doing everything, we came back and joined the party that had already begun, with loads of fireworks and food and drink and all kinds of merriment. Their whole family and all of the cousins were there, and there were kids with fireworks *everywhere*. We stayed up quite late that night engaging in attempts to light off eight artillery shells at once, as well as shooting each other to pieces in Saturn missile battery wars. What a night!

The next morning Anthony and I got up early to irrigate, except this time instead of going in the pickup truck we went on one of his Dad's motorcycles. THAT was fun, whipping down the dirt roads in the early morning sunrise with the breeze in your hair, admiring all the beautiful scenery and changing the water from one set of corrugations to the next. I kept thinking to myself that this was the life - getting up early and working and enjoying the wonderful views and the wonderful company... :) I was very happy. After we returned from that the whole family went to Mass, and then came home and had brunch, and then, sadly, it was time for me to go. So I said goodbye to them all and got in Anthony's car, and he took me to the Cody airport, where I said goodbye to him, and then flew to Salt Lake City and then back to SeaTac.

All in all, it was a fantastic long weekend, and one which I'll remember for a long time. His family was so sweet, and I loved them all. One of his little sisters in particular, the seven year old, attached herself to me very quickly and followed me everywhere, calling me pretty and asking if I was in love with Anthony. It was extremely cute. The little five year old girl was adorable also. She was really shy at first, but pretty soon she warmed up to me and talked and talked and played peek-a-boo, and followed me around. Just all in all they are a wonderful family.

Anyway, there are many things to do today, including laying out bark on all of our flower beds. Dad ordered a very large pile which was dumped on our driveway at 8 a.m. this morning, half of which is still there. I was already out there for a while earlier this morning, spreading bark all over one of the larger beds, but apparently there's still a lot of work to be done. So, I will sign off for the present. God Bless, and have a good weekend!

O Magnum Mysterium

2009-06-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

This is a recording of "O Magnum Mysterium" by Morten Lauridsen, written in 1994. I heard it for the first time this last Christmas at a concert at TAC, and really liked it. It has a mysterious, and what you might call a hauntingly beautiful quality to it. (I suppose it should be mysterious considering that the title when translated is "O Great Mystery".) This version was performed by the Nordic Chamber Choir.

Latin:
O magnum mysterium
et admirabile sacramentum
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum
jacentem in praesepio.
O beata Virgo
cujus viscera meruerunt portare
Dominum Jesum Christum.
Alleluia.

English:
O great mystery
and wonderful sacrament
that animals should see the new-born Lord
lying in a manger.
O blessed Virgin
whose womb merited to bear
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia.

Random TAC Memory, #2

2009-06-22T14:46:00.001-07:00

I wrote the first of my "Random TAC Memory" segments two years ago, and decided (finally) to do another one. This one concerns April Fools Day of this year and what my section did to our lab tutor. He can be just a little bit OCD about certain things, e.g. he simply can't stand it when people don't write Q.E.D. at the end of their props. It's not a bad thing; in fact most of the time it makes life in lab class a lot funnier and more interesting. But on April Fools Day my section decided to play a couple of pranks on him. The first one involved moving the bookshelf in the classroom so that it was in front of the lightswitches (which we had switched off). Our tutor always flips on all the lightswitches on entering the room, if they're not on already, so we figured that preventing him from doing this by moving the bookshelf would be funny. The second thing we did was to take all the pictures on the walls and hang them up sideways or crookedly. This having been done, we waited for our tutor to arrive.

He came in about five minutes later, and automatically reached to the left to flip on the lightswitches. Finding a bookshelf in the way, he reached to the right. But, no lightswitches there either. For a moment he just stood there looking a little confused, until he glanced behind the bookshelf and saw the switches. He sighed, put down his briefcase, and tried to push the bookshelf to the side, but it ended up taking three people to get it pushed back to where it should have been. So then he started taking roll. He was doing okay until he got to me, and that was when he noticed that all the pictures on the wall behind me had been hung up crookedly. Looking somewhat alarmed, he said, "Ahh! Will it never end??" and ran over to the wall and painstakingly put all the pictures back in their proper positions. We were all laughing hysterically and of course told him that it was an April Fools joke, so overall it was really funny.

He got us back a bit later in the class, though, by calling someone for a prop that hadn't been assigned. Of course he didn't actually make the person do the prop, but he got a good scare out of us nonetheless. :) It was a good class.

More random memory segments will hopefully be forthcoming in the near future.

A Proof for the Existence of God

2009-06-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

If one reads Question 2, Article 3 of St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, he will find five ways to prove from natural reason alone that God exists. The juniors (my class) read these texts in our theology class this last year, and one of our paper topic options for that class was to go through and explain in detail one of the five ways and the arguments on which it is based. This was the topic I chose, and I wrote on the fifth way - an argument from the governance of nature. Here is my paper.

In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas claims that the existence of God can be proven in five ways. The fifth of these ways is based in large part on Aristotle’s Physics, and concerns the governance of things. Aristotle says that natural bodies lacking knowledge are seen to act always or for the most part in one particular way, and concludes from thence that they are acting toward their end, or what is best for them. Taking up his definition of chance, one sees that this sort of action cannot be attributed to chance. St. Thomas then proceeds further with this argument, saying that the action must therefore be due to intention, which, however, these natural bodies lack, since they are without knowledge. At this point, one can only conclude that such bodies are guided by an external intelligence, by “someone who knows and understands,” and this someone we call God.
In order to convince himself of this argument, one must first examine natural bodies lacking knowledge so that he might see that they always or for the most part act in the same way. A good example of such a body is an insect. In looking at bees, one sees that they inevitably build six-sided honeycombs. All bees, everywhere in the world, do this. Another example of a non-rational natural body is a tree. Trees also have this kind of action in them; every year they produce fruit of some kind which eventually ripens and falls to the ground. This production of fruit is also always and everywhere the case. Many other examples could also be given to illustrate this point.
A further consideration will show that this action in such bodies attains some kind of end which is good for them. In the example of the bees, six-sided figures are the strongest by nature. Thus, the bees’ honeycombs will be sure to be sturdy and last a long time, providing them with shelter. Clearly in this case a good end is attained by the action of the bees. In the case of trees, the fruit produced contains seeds which, when the fruit falls to the ground and rots, can germinate and grow into new trees. Thus in this case, the production of fruit attains to the preservation of the species, which is also a good end.
An additional reason for believing that the action of nature is for an end comes from a consideration of human art. Art tries to imitate and in some cases improve upon nature, always with an end in mind. In agriculture, for example, human art tries to improve upon natural conditions and facilitate the natural process of plants growing and producing their fruit. This illustrates that there is an end which such natural action should obtain, and which man is trying to help it obtain through the art of agriculture. If there were no good end to be achieved through these natural processes, it would not make sense for agriculture to exist and try to facilitate and improve them. Clearly, then, such action in nature produces a good end, since men try to imitate it.
The next question to be considered is from what cause such action in these natural bodies is produced. One possibility is that it is caused by chance. The definition of chance as given by Aristotle in the Physics is as follows: “In things which come to be for the sake of something simply, when things whose cause is outside come to be not for the sake of what happens, then we say [they come to be] by chance.”[1] In other words, when several events which have their own proper causes and ends (“things which come to be for the sake of something simply”) happen to come together, producing some other end separate from those proper ends and not aimed at by any of the individual events (“things whose cause is outside come to be not for the sake of what happens”), the result of this coming together is said to be by chance. For example, if a mother bird leaves her nest to find food for her young, and while she is gone an eagle comes and eats the baby birds in the nest, we would say that the mother was saved by chance. Her leaving the nest with the end of getting food for her young happened to come together with the eagle’s raiding of the nest with the end of finding dinner for himself, with the result that she was saved from being eaten. This result was the proper end neither of the eagle’s action nor of the mother bird’s, yet nevertheless it came about because of the coincidence of those two events. Such a result, Aristotle says, is caused by chance.
Another property of chance is that it is the cause of things which do not happen always or for the most part. In speaking of luck, Aristotle says, “First, then, since we see that some things always come to be in the same way, but some do so for the most part, it is apparent that luck is called the cause of neither of these; nor are these by luck, either what is by necessity and always, or what is for the most part.”[2] Aristotle later goes on to say that luck and chance differ only in that luck comes about in things which have choice, while chance comes about in things without choice. “And because of this fact neither the unsouled nor a beast nor a child does anything by luck, because they do not have choice…but chance is in the other animals and in many unsouled things.”[3] Therefore, since this is the only respect in which chance and luck differ, neither would chance be said to be the cause of things which happen always or for the most part.
Indeed, this fits very well with the abovementioned definition of chance, as it would be very odd if the same totally disconnected events were to come together always or for the most part. If they did, it would seem as though they were meant to be together that way, and that they were for the sake of the result thus produced by their coincidence. To use the example given, if the mother bird left the nest to find food every time the eagle came and raided the nest, it would seem as though the mother bird was really leaving for the sake of avoiding the eagle and being saved. But this is not what people think, and indeed these two events very rarely coincide. Therefore chance cannot bring about things which happen always or for the most part.
From this explanation of chance it is manifestly clear that it cannot be the cause of those good ends produced by nature’s action. Firstly, as was said, those ends happen always or for the most part, and chance cannot cause such things. Also, it seems evident that the natural action is in fact meant to bring about those ends, from the very facts that the action is so effective in causing them and that the action and the good effect always go together. The tree’s production of fruit always brings about the production of a new tree, and when we see that the seed is contained in the fruit and that the fruit falls to the ground, allowing the seed to germinate, it is clear that the action of producing fruit is meant to bring about the end of producing a new tree. Thus there is no chance coming together of actions having other proper ends, but one action with this very end in mind, and therefore chance by definition cannot be the cause of such action.
Since chance is not causing these actions in nature, there is only one other possibility, and that is that there is intention at work. There is an end, a ‘that for the sake of which’ that all such action is meant to bring about. Aristotle says in the Physics that “there is ‘that for the sake of which’ in things which are and which come to be by nature.”[4] Therefore there must be an intention to bring about this end which ordains that such action take place in order to obtain the end. That there is intention in nature can be seen, once again, by a comparison with art. Art has an end in mind with intention to bring about that end through the actions it does, and since art is an imitation of nature, one must conclude that nature also has an intention to bring about the end. Aristotle addresses this point as well. “And, generally, art carries to an end some things which nature cannot work out, and imitates others. If, then, things which are according to art are for the sake of something, it is clear that things according to nature are too. For the posterior is to the prior in a similar way in what is according to art and in what is according to nature.”[5]
One now runs up against the question of where this intention is to be found. Aristotle alludes to this problem in the Physics. “Whence, some people are at a loss as to whether spiders and ants and such things work by mind or by something else.”[6] It seems pretty clear that since the natural bodies in question are those which lack reason and knowledge, they cannot possibly have the intention within themselves. Bees do not build six-sided honeycombs as a result of having deliberated about which was the strongest structure, nor do trees think about what would be the best way to reproduce. This is merely because these bodies do not have knowledge and reason within themselves. Aristotle affirms this fact. “But this is most apparent in the other animals, which act neither by art, nor by inquiring, nor by deliberating.”[7] One must, however, grant that there is intention at work in the action of these bodies. Therefore, since the intention cannot be within them, it must belong to an external intelligence which orders and directs all things toward their ends. As St. Thomas says, “But things which lack knowledge do not tend toward an end unless they are directed by someone who knows and understands…therefore there is something intelligent, by which all natural things are ordered to an end, and this we call God.”[8] Thus it can be seen that God must exist.
In summary, one can clearly see that nature does many actions always or for the most part, and that these actions always bring about some good end. Chance by definition does not cause action for an end, and thus cannot cause things which happen always or for the most part. As a result, one must say that intention is the cause of this action. Since natural bodies lack reason, they cannot deliberate about an end and the means thereto, and thus they cannot have the intention within themselves. Therefore, there must exist an external intelligence which is guiding nature and its actions so that it obtains good ends, and this intelligent being is what we call God.

[1] Aristotle, Physics, Glen Coughlin translation; book 2, chapter 6, lines 197b18-21
[2] Physics, book 2, chapter 5, lines 196b10-13
[3] Ibid, chapter 6, lines 197b7-8, 14
[4] Physics, book 2, chapter 8, lines 199a7-8
[5] Physics, book 2, chapter 8, lines 199a16-20
[6] Ibid, lines 199a21-23
[7] Ibid, lines 199a20-21
[8] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, question 2, article 3

The End of Junior Year

2009-05-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

So as I said in my last post, I'm now going to say how junior year wrapped up. The Easter celebrations were wonderful - we had our new chapel of course, and the choir sounded so good in it. We sang for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil, all of which were very beautiful services. After the Easter Vigil we had our traditional 3 a.m. "brunch" at which was served a vast quantity of many different delicious foods. The Hallelujiah chorus was played over the sound system during the meal, and everyone sang along, which was glorious. Then we danced the rest of the night, and it was so much fun! Anthony left at 5 a.m. that morning to go to D.C. for a short visit with his brother's family, so I spent the next two days doing homework and such things.

On April 15 we got the terrible news that the college's president, Dr. Thomas Dillon, had died in a car accident in Ireland while there for an academic conference. We had a Mass for him and his family that day, and the next week was his funeral and burial. It was all very sad, and we definitely miss him around the college - he was always around talking to people and being cheerful; he even played basketball and other sports with the students when he had the time to. So now the Board of Governors have picked out an interim president and are in the process of selecting a new permanent president. Luckily, the college's guidelines state that the president must be chosen from among the Roman Catholic teaching faculty of the school, so he will be someone that we already all know and that will uphold what TAC is all about.

As a result of Dr. Dillon's death, our Easter break was extended 4 more days so that the faculty had time to sort out a bunch of stuff and get itself back on its feet again. Anthony arrived back at school when Easter break should have ended, so we decided that in the extra time off we would go to Magic Mountain, as he had a 2 for the price of 1 coupon. So we went, and it was a lot of fun! The rollercoasters were so amazing, especially Goliath. I sat in the very front seat, and wow. It was crazy. :) We were gone pretty much all day, but it was a very enjoyable time.

The next big event was the Spring Dance, put on by the freshmen. They had a cruise ship theme, so the commons was decorated as if you were on the deck of a steam ship, with murals of the sun setting over the ocean and the city skyline on the walls, and red and white flags and Christmas lights hanging from the rafters. It was really quite clever. I think they did a good job. While on the theme of dances, the Chez Martin was the weekend after the Spring Dance. This is a sort of farewell dance that the senior class puts on every year shortly before graduation. I didn't really stay for any of the actual dancing, but the entertainment and the food were great! (Though nothing can quite compare to the Chez Martin that last year's seniors put on.) The very next day was the junior-senior dinner and dance. This is an event that the junior class hosts for the seniors, as our goodbye to them. We had the dinner down on the lawn by the hacienda (the president's house), and there were steaks, asparagus, mashed potatoes, and chocolate tiramisu. It was really good. The dance was held up on the plaza between the faculty building and the chapel. The big fountain that's there and all the bushes were decorated with Christmas lights, and we also had floodlights so that there was more light. It was a really good dance, and people dedicated songs to each other, and danced and talked and signed senior year books. It was a really fun evening.

Another event that happened that same weekend, on Friday evening, was our choir's musical. This year we put on Gilbert and Sullivan's "Princess Ida". The basic plotline is this: a prince and princess are betrothed to each other at the ages of 2 and 1, respectively, with plans to meet again and get married 20 years later. But when the princess is supposed to show up to meet the prince at that later time, it is revealed that she has scorned the world and all men and has opened a women's university, where no men are allowed, and where all the girls promise "to repudiate the tyrant known as man." So then the prince has to figure out a way to get the princess back. What he ends up doing is taking two of his buddies, and they disguise themselves as women and sneak into the college, where mayhem ensues once it is discovered that they are really men. Finally, the prince's father comes in with an army, and the princess is forced to yield (except by this time she is actually rather willing to yield as the prince is "fair and strong and tall.") It was a lot of fun. I played one of the two girls at the university who fall for the prince's two buddies. After the performance, we all went over to our director's house, had a bonfire and roasted kielbasa and had sandwiches.

Finals week was crazy busy, as is to be expected. I started studying with a group of girls from my section about a week in advance, and even so we were scrambling to get everything done by the time the finals rolled around. But I think I did well on all of them, and hopefully when my report card arrives in the mail, it will confirm my thoughts. :) And then of course on Saturday was commencement. It was so exciting, and yet so sad, to see all of the seniors processing down in their caps and gowns, and getting their diplomas. *sniff* They're all leaving us. I'm going to miss them next year. It's so weird that I'm actually going to be a senior next year. There will be no other classes above us anymore. I remember being a freshman and thinking the seniors must be the smartest people in the world, which of course seems really ludicrous now since I know that I don't really know all that much.

Anthony and I went out for dinner on Friday night, and to the beach on Saturday after commencement, so as to hang out and relax on our last couple of days together before break. It was really nice. We both left pretty early Sunday morning, so we didn't see each other after Saturday night. I miss him, but we write to each other, and I'm visiting him over 4th of July weekend out in Wyoming, so that ought to be fun.

As of right now, I'm home, and looking for a job, which is NOT fun. I've turned in a lot of applications and contacted the guy I worked for a couple of summers ago, but so far no luck. Hopefully I find something soon, because tuition isn't exactly cheap. Anyway, I should go continue all of that lovely job-hunting. So, I hope everyone has a good rest of the week, and a good summer!

Summer Is Here

2009-05-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

Yes it is, and I'm home for a break. School wrapped up pretty nicely, and I had an uneventful trip home last Sunday. I've been resting up and beginning job hunting over the last couple of days. I have a little money coming to me this summer from a couple of Sundays on which I'm playing the organ at church, but I'm going to need more than that. Thankfully I won't have to earn as much as I have the last 2 summers because I was left some money this last year by a friend of my grandma's who died, and that will be a BIG help with my student payment - it covers half of it just by itself.

Anyway, that's the story of my life just about now. I'm planning on writing a long post in the very near future about what happened for the rest of my junior year after the last post I wrote, and also about my summer plans, but it's almost 10:30 p.m. now so I don't want to get into it at this moment. :) I may also include some more pics in the upcoming post.

I hope everyone's having a good week. :)

For the Record

2009-03-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

For the record, here is a VERY recent (i.e., taken yesterday) picture of me and Anthony. Just in case anyone wanted to see. :)

My 21st Birthday

2009-03-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

So I turned 21 on Friday. Let me tell you what happened. I went to all of my classes, as usual, but after morning classes I had two wonderful packages waiting for me - one from my Mom, and one from my Grandma. My Grandma sent me a LOT of chocolate, as well as a wine glass that was specially painted with birthday messages (see pictures below). There were also a few other things in her package, but it would take a while to go through them all. My Mom sent me a new outfit from Coldwater Creek. It's a really cute skirt and sweater top. She also sent me these adorable black shoes. I really love them. :) After I opened all of that stuff up, one of my friends (who was unable to attend the party I was having on Saturday) took me out for lunch, and what we ate at the restaurant was a lot better than what lunch was on campus. :) My afternoon was normal, but after dinner Anthony, armed with chocolate, a guitar, and a large blanket, took me up into the hills behind the college to this meadow with a great view of the campus down below, as well as of the road going down the valley into town, and we sat out under the stars and talked and played guitar for a couple of hours. It was really nice.

On Saturday morning Anthony took me out to breakfast at this cute little place in Fillmore, after which we drove out to the beach in Ventura, where we walked around for a while, picked up shells, watched the sailboats and surfers, and generally just had a good time. Later that afternoon I met up with 12 of my girlfriends, and we went out to the BJ's Restaurant in Oxnard for a party for me. It was a LOT of fun. BJ's has amazing food; their pizza is especially good. I generally dislike the taste of alcohol, but...it was my 21st birthday. I had about 10 different recommendations on what I should get, but I ended up going with a Cosmopolitan, which is a mix of cranberry juice, lime juice, citrus something-or-other, and vodka. Whew. I decided that I don't like vodka. It was okay at first, but after I drank roughly half, I couldn't take the taste of it any more. Oh well, I had the honorary first drink, and now I think I'll stick with lemonade when I go out to dinner in future. :) See the pictures below of me with the "stuff." The waiter brought me a free birthday pizookie (a mini-pizza sized cookie with ice cream on top), which was very warm and yummy. After that, my friend Annette insisted on a long-awaited photograph of me holding a bottle of Jack Daniel's Whiskey. The point of this picture is that I am about the last person who would EVER drink the stuff, so it would be hilarious to have a picture of me with a bottle of it on my 21st birthday. Anyway, I submitted to a LARGE number of photographs of me with it (as well as with a collectible 21 shotglass which was given to me as a birthday present). See the picture below of me with the above 2 items. All in all, it was a really fun dinner, and we arrived back on campus just in time for the college's production of Shakespeare's "Henry IV," which was very well done. And then today I had to do all the studying I didn't do over the rest of the weekend. Heh heh. :D

Here are the photos mentioned above.

The special birthday glass - with my drink in it.
Me - somewhat apprehensive.
I take my first sip.

I am pleased with myself. :)

The infamous photograph - me with Jack Daniel's and a shot glass.

All in all, it was a fabulous birthday weekend. :) Anyway, I have to go finish studying. God Bless!

Recent Events

2009-03-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

There is a saying which reads, "March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb." I wouldn't know about the going out part yet, but it certainly came in with a bang. To begin with, the new chapel on campus here at TAC, which had been under construction for around 3 years and in the planning process for many more years prior, was at long last dedicated on March 7. Cardinal Mahoney came up from L.A. to preside at the Dedication Mass, and several hundred benefactors and alumni were in attendance. Due to the large numbers of said benefactors and alumni, the students were not able to attend the Dedication Mass, with the exception of those singing in the choir, of which, fortunately, I was one. The Mass was very long, as was to be expected, but really beautiful. The altar and tabernacle were incensed and sprinkled with holy water, and the altar was anointed with oil. A first-class relic of St. Thomas Aquinas, our college's patron and namesake, was also interred in the altar. The choir (I thought) sounded gorgeous, and we were accompanied by organ and three trumpets on several of the hymns. The whole thing went off very well, and all the students are enormously happy to finally have such a beautiful chapel, as well as thankful to all the people who donated so much money toward its construction.

The weekend after the dedication, my parents came to visit me! I'd been wanting them to come for a while so that I could show them the campus and have them meet some of my friends, and they finally decided that March 13-15 was a good weekend. So they arrived on Friday afternoon, and I gave them the grand tour of campus, which included the commons building, the classroom buildings, the faculty building, the chapel, the library, and (for my Mom, anyway) my dormitory (men aren't allowed into the women's dorms). They had dinner on campus Friday evening, at which I introduced them to a number of my friends, and after dinner came to a lecture on history that was being given. Hopefully they enjoyed it... :) On Saturday we went out to Ventura and I showed them all of my haunts and places where I go with friends to have fun, which included Trader Joe's, the bookstore, and the Ventura Pier. We also saw Mission San Buenaventura. Dinner was had at Ojai Pizza of wide and infamous renown, after which we picked up a couple of my friends and went out for ice cream. On Sunday they came up to the campus for Mass, came to brunch with me, and then had to leave a little after noon. But it was a lot of fun, and accomplished a very useful purpose which I will now relate.

Ever since the second semester of my freshman year, I'd been becoming closer and closer to a certain young man in my class, by the name of Anthony. We weren't dating, just close friends, although everyone knew that it was probably headed in the dating direction eventually. Well, things had been going on like that for about a year, and I was beginning to wonder when or if they actually would go farther, as I was definitely attached to him. And then one day during the second semester of my sophomore year, he related some very shocking news to me: prior to coming to TAC, he had wanted to be a priest after graduation and in fact had chosen to come to TAC based partially on that reason (a large percentage of TAC grads, relative to other Catholic colleges, go on to the seminary). But then he had met me, and suddenly wondered if he had been right about his vocation. So he'd been praying and trying to figure out what God wanted him to do, and was, at that point in time, really torn between the two options - neither had the upperhand at the moment. Naturally, this wasn't the most pleasant thing I could have heard; although the priesthood is an amazing vocation, it would mean I couldn't have him. So...now that we were in that quandary, I settled down to wait for him to discern, praying that God would show him what to do, and that everything would work out for the best. It took about a year for him to decide (and believe me, it was probably the most stressful, frustrating, anxiety-filled year of my life so far), but as of the beginning of second semester junior year, he was feeling drawn to me much more strongly. We went out a few times on what my friends jokingly referred to as "platonic non-dates," and everything went pretty well. It was about this time that my parents came down to visit me. They got to meet him, and really liked him, which information I communicated to him. The evening of the very Sunday that they left, Anthony informed me that my parents' approval was really what he'd been waiting for since shortly after semester began, as he was almost sure he had decided in my favor. So he said that if I wanted, we could, as they say, "go official" now. And of course I wanted, so he took off my claddagh ring (which symbolizes 'single' or 'taken' depending on which way it's facing on your finger), turned it round, and put it back on again. *sigh* It was really very cute. So as of three days ago, Anthony and I are dating, and I am very happy to have finally made it to this stage. Now we will have to keep being friends and doing things together and see if this relationship is one that God wants us to take further.

Anyway, it's getting late, and I have to get up early tomorrow, so I will end this post. God Bless!

2nd Semester Junior Year

2009-02-12T13:19:00.000-08:00

Yep, it's finally here. Back when we were all freshmen, it seemed like an eternity away (at least for me it did). But, as they say, time flies when you're having fun. So I've already done a load of things since I've been back here (other than studying and going to class, which take up most of my time). The biggest event so far has been the Walk for Life in San Francisco. There was a mass exit from campus on Friday the 23rd, as the walk was taking place on the following Saturday. As usual, the TAC contingent stayed the night in the gymnasium of Sts. Peter and Paul Church in SF. The car I was in arrived at the church somewhere in the vicinity of 11:30 p.m. (it's about a 7 hour drive from TAC). The next morning we went to the pro-life Mass at the hideous chunk of concrete otherwise known as the cathedral, and then spent an interesting half-hour locating a place to have some quick breakfast. Eventually we found a quaint little cafe down by the waterfront, fed our life-savings worth of pocket change into the meter to earn a precious half-hour, and had Danish pastries. We then spent another interesting half-hour finding a place to park the car while we went on the Walk. Eventually we found a parking garage which, at the end of the day, cost us $24 to park in. Yikes. Said parking garage was in the vicinity of Fisherman's Wharf, which meant that we still had to walk for quite a bit before we got the Embarcadero, where the Walk was starting. But we finally made it, heard some great speeches, and then set out down the street! There were some counter protesters there, few in numbers but nevertheless very loud in profanity and disapprobation. Oh, and then of course there were also a bunch of gay men throwing condoms at us from the sidewalk. Fun... But we soon passed them all and continued in peace through the city to the Marina Green. It took about 45 minutes for the entire column to actually arrive at the Green after the front had reached it. It was really quite amazing. I heard later that there were an estimated 35,000 people on the Walk. Quite impressive. So then after we all arrived there, and the people in my vehicle located each other, we walked back to the parking garage, got the car, and proceeded to do very touristy things for the rest of the day. First we took a rather unforgettable trip down Lombard Street, and then drove to the top of Telegraph Hill to see the Coit Tower and take pictures of the Bay and the city. After that we drove clear across town to see Golden Gate Park, and then came back to the church, parked the car, and walked down to Fisherman's Wharf and the waterfront, where we walked, talked, window shopped, actually shopped, got pennies flattened into scenes of SF in those little crank machines, took pictures, ate a ridiculously overpriced dinner at the Rainforest Cafe, and just generally had a grand old time. Oh. We also got gelato. It was dee-licious. So then we went back the church and crashed. Went to Mass early the next morning, and took the long drive home again. It was a wonderful weekend. :)

Last Friday some friends and I went to a production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" down in Pasadena, which was directed by a TAC graduate. It was a lot of fun, despite the fact that it was raining waterfalls the entire way there (with the unfortunate result of colossal amounts of traffic and accidents), and that we managed to get lost in Pasadena. Oh well. We made it with a whopping 10 minutes to spare before it started. It was really quite entertaining. I especially liked the costumes. So ornate and medieval! :)

The juniors are putting on the Mardi Gras dance, which is a week from Saturday. Our theme is going to be Arabian Nights, and we are very hopeful that it will turn out well. Let's see, what else is new? Valentine's Day is on Saturday. I'm not doing anything that I know of. Again. *sigh* Maybe one of these years... We also get Monday off from school because of Presidents Day. I am elated because it means I get a whole week to read seminar! Um...the choir is putting on Princess Ida this year, which is another Gilbert and Sullivan musical. I am thinking of perhaps auditioning for a part this time around.

Well, there's not much else in the way of news. The studies are getting quite interesting. We're currently reading David Hume in seminar, who says, among other things, that humans don't and can't know the law of cause and effect in nature, and that miracles and the Real Presence are a bunch of boloney. Oh boy, am I looking forward to seminar tonight. In lab we're doing Newton's Principia, in which we just discovered that, ultimately, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas, and ellipses are the same curve. Dun, dun, dun... Of course, a proper explanation of this fact would necessitate one's knowing what Newton means by "ultimately," which would take pages in and of itself. *sigh* Complication. I am especially liking theology this year. We are reading some of the Summa, and it is absolutely amazing. All I have to say is, the Popes were right when they said that Thomas is the most outstanding theologian and intellect in the Church's history. He argues to so many truths about God just from natural reason, and answers the most formidable objections against his positions. Not to mention, from the extensive quotations he makes use of, it would appear that he had read all the other philosophers and theologians of any importance as well as writing his own works. It's really neat.

Anyway, I have to go finish seminar. Yay for three day weekends on the near horizon! :)

I'm Not Dead!!

2008-12-26T10:08:00.001-08:00

Really, I'm not. It's just that junior year is...well, quite hard, and quite time-consuming. The main reason for that is the fact that instead of having just one seminar class per week, we now have two, and the readings are on average 80 to 100 pages a week. Someone calculated that we've read about 3500 pages this semester of seminar alone, not counting what we've done in the other subjects. Whew! I am very glad to say, however, that seminar has been one of my favorite classes this year, so I didn't mind too terribly. We've done 8 Shakespeare plays this semester, as well as some Thomas, Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, and Spinoza. And Don Quixote right at the beginning. Most of the abovementioned guys were screwy in some way or other; I especially disliked Hobbes and Spinoza. A couple of main themes of seminar this semester had to do with the nature of man, and his capability for knowledge and power, with a marked disregard of what God has to do with either of the above. (Which, of course, led to the screwiness.) Anyway, it's really quite interesting stuff.

And then of course there are 5 other subjects as well, with both math and lab having props to some degree. (Supposedly there's going to be a tidal wave of lab props next semester - yikes!) Anyway, all this is mostly to explain why I have disappeared from my poor blog for the last 4 months, and to say that no, I'm not dead, just incredibly busy. :) And now I'm on Christmas break, having just enjoyed a lovely, WHITE Christmas!! Yay for snow!!

Well, there are things to be done, and places to go, so I had better sign off for the present. I hope everyone has a very merry and blessed rest of the Christmas season!

Back to School

2008-08-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

Today is officially my last day of summer break. Tomorrow I fly back to Thomas Aquinas College to start my junior year. Goodness, how the time flies. Sometimes it feels like I was just a freshman. Anyway, one of the things I am very much looking forward to is seeing how the construction is coming along on our new chapel, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel. The opening date had been set for sometime this fall, October or November, but I heard from a summer worker recently that it had been moved to March of next year. I'm not sure if that's right or not, but I hope they don't put it back any further than that. I am itching to see the inside of it, as the outside is *quite* lovely. Here is a picture of the outside.

I hear they still haven't quite raised enough money to cover the cost, so if anyone wants to donate, they (and we students) would be most grateful! :) Anyway, I'm going to go continue my packing. God Bless!

Summery Summary

2008-08-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

Alright, so that somewhat cheesy title was NOT my idea; it was my Dad's. Anyway. My summer has plodded along in a rather ordinary manner since last I wrote. I worked at the Safeway deli for about 2 and a half months, and just quit the other day in order to enjoy a couple of weeks of relaxation and socializing before our family vacation to Seaside, OR. I'm looking forward to that trip; we haven't been to Seaside in four years, and it was always fun before, so hopefully it will still be fun now. And after we get back from that, I am going back to TAC on August 23rd! Summer seems to have just flown by.

My job was, for the most part, a drag. I was a closer, which meant that I regularly worked from sometime in the afternoon until 11 p.m., sometimes later depending on how much work had to get done. I packaged a lot of salads for the cool cases, cooked a lot of rotisserie chickens for our hot case, washed a lot of dishes, and served a LOT of customers. Just for the record, customer service is NOT something I would be interested in doing in the future. People can just be rude sometimes! You'd be surprised at the number of people who simply have no concept of waiting in line to be served. Once a lady got mad at us because she thought our oven took too long to grill her panini sandwich (it only takes about 1 minute). Whatever. We really can't make the oven go any faster, and if you can't wait one minute for your sandwich, then that's your problem. Then there are also the people who complain to us bottom-of-the-ladder employees about the high prices, as if WE could possibly be to blame for that. The most annoying of all, however, are the customers who think they know more about doing our job than we do. There was this man once who ordered something from us and wanted to pay for it at our cash register right there in the deli. We said we couldn't do that because management had already taken our tills for the evening. So he rolled his eyes and started talking to us as if we were 5 year olds: "What's that?" (pointing at the cash register) We answered that it was a cash register. So, snottily, right back at us, "Well, doesn't it have tills??" We answered NO, management removed them from the register for the evening. He humphs, and stomps off angrily toward the regular registers. Sheesh... But anyway, I'm done with that job now, and good riddance.

I also got to go to the horse races with my Dad a month ago or so. That was really fun, and we're planning on going again in a couple of weeks. The family has been to the river a couple of times, and Dad has taken me and one of my brothers to the mountains for short hikes once or twice also. Just this morning we went on the Cedar River Watershed Educational Tour. Normally they don't let people into this big area up in the mountains because that's where the drinking water comes from, but they do tours once in a while where they take people in and show them around, so we did that this morning. And now we are getting ready to have a party, because it is one of my brothers' birthday today; he's turning the big 18. The next couple of weeks should continue to be fun. Tomorrow I'm hanging out with a friend from college, and next weekend my cousin and I are going swing dancing, so that ought to be a good time.

Anyway, the relatives will probably get here soon for the party, so I'll sign out for the present. I hope everyone has a good weekend!

The end of sophomore year, and my summer so far

2008-06-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

Sophomore year at TAC wrapped up pretty well, for me at any rate. The choir practiced long and hard and finally put on a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Trial by Jury." We incurred rather a major bump on the road to our performance in the way of a cracked ceiling beam in the commons area which required the entire room to be closed off for a few weeks until it could be fixed. We had been planning on having the performance in there, so as a result we had to move the entire set outside and down by the library, where there is a flat cement area for a stage and a large spot of grass to set up chairs on. We managed the entire move on the afternoon before our performance, and it turned out pretty well for being a last-minute get-up, or at least I thought so. The musical itself came off almost without a hitch, and I think everyone enjoyed it, not least of all we actors and singers! As per tradition, an impromptu outing to Angel's Donuts in Santa Paula followed the performance, and a good time was had by all. The next week we had a more "official" cast party at the beach in Ventura, with food and a small fire on the barbecue grill.

Scarcely had that blown over when it was about time to begin studying madly for finals. Math became my worst enemy the weekend before finals week, but all the pain paid off on Tuesday morning, because I knew as soon as I finished the final that I had totally rocked it. I was proven right a couple of weeks ago when my report card came in the mail. :) I had a completely awesome seminar study session later that day, followed almost immediately by the oral final, which went decently. Studying for lab was probably the most rewarding part of finals week for me personally. A TON of things just suddenly came together that hadn't before, and it was really nice. The final went pretty well for that subject as well. And then I proceeded to stay up until 12:30 or 1:00 that night with the same trusty group of friends I'd been studying with for all the other finals, racking my brains over the philosophy review sheet (which was FORTY questions long, people!). The final was possibly the most "interesting" final I've ever taken, especially considering that essay question #2 was quite vague, and I, along with most other people I talked to afterward, had NO IDEA whatsoever what the answer was. I congratulate myself that I came up with a couple of pages of stuff that at least somewhat made sense, and as I now know, I passed the class with a bit of breathing room, so it can't have been too terrible.

The last couple of days before I left to go home for summer break were a flurry of packing, packing, and more packing. And singing for the graduation Mass. And then more packing. And trying to hang out with friends for the last time in a while. And more packing. But I got it all done with a bit of time to spare, thankfully, so was able to spend plenty of time with good friends before having to bid farewell to them for the summer. That part of breaks always makes me sad... :(

Now that I'm home for the summer, I am working in the deli department at our local grocery store, doing such things as cooking food for the hot-case, slicing meats and cheeses, making salads, and generally keeping things looking neat, clean and sanitary. I work the closing shift most of the time, and so have to stay up until 11 p.m. a lot, which makes me rather tired, but I'll survive. In addition to that job, I am also playing organ at my church every Sunday at the Mass my family attends, and once in a while at our other Mass as well. And organ brings in pretty good money, so I'm happy to be able to do that.

Aside from working I am just hanging out with my family, and going on the occasional outing to the movies, local parks, and even to the horse racing track! I have to say that was a very fun day. I even won a bit of money on one of the races. :) And then lost it again on the next one. Oh well. When you keep the bets small, it's not a huge deal whether you win or lose.

Anyway, I am surviving, though I already miss TAC like the dickens, and to tell the truth, really want nothing more than to get back there and pick up where I left off in my perfect little world. :) Hope everyone is enjoying the first week of summer!

I'm Still Alive!

2008-06-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

I'm planning on writing a long post sometime in the very near future (when it is NOT 11:30 p.m.), but until then this is just a quickie to say that I am still alive, that I have successfully finished (and passed) sophomore year at TAC, that I am now home for the summer (have been for over a month, actually) and am currently working two jobs, one at the grocery store deli, the other as organist for my church. Hopefully between the two of those I can make some money towards my tuition.

Anyway, as I said before, it's 11:30 p.m., and yours truly wants nothing more than to go to bed. So, until the next post, valete, amici!

Last Week

2008-04-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so last week was really busy. In a good way. On Wednesday afternoon we had our Most Grueling Choir Practice Yet (it went from 3:30 to almost 6:00), and I enjoyed most of it, though towards the end I was getting a bit tired and frustrated with people in general. But then that evening we had a Schubertiade and that made it all better.

...And there is a white mouse loose and running around in here and people are trying to figure out what to do about it.

Sorry, random tangent.

Yeah, so anyway, the Schubertiade was really good, especially the last orchestral number which featured a trumpet player, which is a novelty around here.

On Friday we had a lecture, given by Dr. Anthony Esolen, who translated the version of Lucretius that we read here in sophomore seminar. It was the Best Lecture Ever, basically. He was a very animated speaker, unlike most lecturers we have, and his lecture was just...fun, I guess is the best word to describe it. I was actually enjoying it instead of just sitting and listening politely.

And then on Saturday we had the Spring Dance. Our theme was "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," and the freshmen did a really good job! Their decorations were by far the most creative and fantastic of any of the dances this year, and the two guys who were MC'ing were absolutely hysterical. When they first came out on the stage they were dressed as two Arabs, and they said that the theme of tonight's dance was, *first guy spits out long Arabic phrase,* which in English roughly translated to "Seventy Brides for Seven Brothers." The whole commons was dying of laughter. Their food was sooooo good (think fried chicken and fresh-made fruit cobblers), and the dance itself was really fun. I, as per the usual, danced more times than I remember, staying up till...almost 2 a.m. It was a good evening.

Then the next day my grandma and aunt came to visit me for a few hours, because they were traveling through my part of the state. So I showed them around campus and generally kept them entertained for a bit until they had to leave. That was pretty fun. And then that evening I went to Mr. Grimm's house for dinner along with the rest of the choir. The Grimms own a horse which they keep at a barn across the road, so we went and visited horses before dinner, including a new-born foal! It was *so* cute. Then, after excellent barbecued chicken, we played a very rowdy game of Pictionary, in which my team absolutely *owned* (as my brothers would say) the other team. Good times, good times.

And now it is Tuesday after seminar (for which we had a pizza party) and almost time for nightly Rosary, so I will sign off now. God Bless!

Easter and My Birthday

2008-04-01T16:57:00.000-07:00

Wow. A lot of things have happened in the last 2 weeks or so. Easter break started on March 19 after classes, an event about which everyone was *very* happy. The triduum here was absolutely lovely. The choir sang for Holy Thursday Mass, Good Friday Service, and the Easter Vigil, and we did some gorgeous music. Durufle's Ubi Caritas, Allegri's Miserere Mei, and a *ton* of Palestrina and Victoria were some of the things we sang. I was practically in heaven. On Wednesday night I went to something called Tenebrae, and it was really cool. Basically, we sang psalm chants back and forth while all the candles were gradually extinguished, and then when it was completely dark, we started banging the pews really loudly, until suddenly they relit just one candle, and then all the noise stopped. Apparently the thing ended just like that, because that was when people started gradually drifting out. I'm not sure what the symbolism of everything was...but it was definitely really neat.

So the Easter Vigil was really nice, what with all seven readings and the psalms in between. Most of the psalms were done in Gregorian chant by the guys, but we also did a threesome of Palestrina motets in between the last three readings. We didn't have any baptisms or confirmations this year, so we just blessed the baptismal font. Father Paul gave the homily, and it was a really good one, all about how even if there are other bad things that we are suffering right now, nothing should make us forget about the joy of Easter, because that is more important than anything else. So the Mass didn't get over until around 1:30 in the morning, after which we had the traditional and insanely joyful Easter "brunch," in which large amounts of very good food were consumed by all present. We had ham, scalloped potatoes, cinnamon rolls, strawberries and cream, pancakes, fruit salad, home-made truffles and other candies, and I could go on, but you get the idea. So everyone ate and ate and ate, and at one point they put on the Hallelujiah chorus really loud over the sound system, and everyone stood up and sang along. Ahhhhh....it was wonderful. And then at around 3:00 a.m. they started the dancing! I danced till about 5, when I finally went to bed in order to get a little bit of sleep because a friend and I were leaving that morning to go to another friend's house for Easter dinner.

The Easter dinner was wonderful, with basically a lot of the same food we had eaten at breakfast that morning. We also made Ukrainian Easter eggs, which are marvellously intricate, and just hung out with their family and had a great time till about midnight, when they finally took us back to the college. *sigh* It was pretty darn awesome.

The rest of break went alright, but the day that we went back to classes (March 27) was my 20th birthday! My grandma had already sent me a new dress for a present, which I really adore, and my parents sent me an iPod nano, which is *really* cool. I also got presents from other friends, and to top off the day a couple of my guy friends planned a surprise party for me down at our swimming ponds. They ordered a whole ton of pizza and had cake and candy. It was a blast. :) So I would definitely say that I had a good day.

Well, dinner time draws near, so I will sign off for now. Hope you all had a good Easter, and will have a blessed rest of the Easter season!

A Quickie

2008-03-16T19:26:00.000-07:00

So...what *has* happened since February 7? I don't really remember. That tends to happen, I suppose, when one has just been bombarded with a week of Apollonius props, long complicated laboratory readings, Aristotle, the Canterbury Tales, AND an 1800-word-long language paper on the question of whether adjectives or participles are, more properly speaking, parts of speech. I cheated and said they BOTH were. Mr. Berquist can kill me if he likes - I don't care. I mean, I really think they both are, and I gave arguments for it, so...yeah.

We had a good Palm Sunday procession this morning. We sang "All Glory, Laud and Honor," which is one of my favorite hymns EVER, so that made me happy. And then at breakfast some of us were doing palm branch art. The most I can manage is small, somewhat sloppy crosses. The more talented folk were doing braiding, boxed braiding, and...other cool things that I tried and made a mess of. And now I'm looking forward immensely to Holy Week. First of all, break starts on Wednesday after classes, and that, believe me, is a MUCH looked-forward-to event in my life right now. And Holy Week here is just so beautiful anyway. The choir is going to be singing on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and at the Easter Vigil, and I just can't wait. We're doing so much *beautiful* music.

In other news, the senior class is walking on air right now because their theses are finally done. The fear and trepidation is not quite over yet, though, because defenses are currently going on. I shudder to think of the day when that will be me...being *fried* by 3 extremely smart tutors. Speaking of being fried, Don Rags happened somewhat recently, but I actually was NOT fried. They were quite good, as a matter of fact. I didn't think I deserved all those nice things they said...but I'm certainly not complaining.

ANYway, the title of this post indicated that it was going to be short, and so it is (somewhat) because sophomore language papers are due this evening and people are coming in and out of the computer room needing to print papers, so I should probably make way for them. I hope you all have a wonderful and blessed Holy Week and Easter!

Lent!

2008-02-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

So unlike many other people that I know, I'm not giving up blog posting for Lent - just the sweets this year, which is plenty enough for me, who loves sweets exceedingly, especially considering the fact that there are very good desserts after every meal here at college. I looked with longing on the chocolate-frosted cookie bars today...but no. Must resist!

The last little while has been somewhat wild and crazy, but I managed to survive it. For the last couple of weeks we've been getting some of the longest theology readings we're supposed to ever get (think 40 pages of really *dense* St. Augustine), plus we're into Kepler in math now, and as I have heard from some people, Kepler is probably close to the most difficult math we'll run into throughout the course of the curriculum. Lab is still plenty interesting. We titrated base into acid this morning in order to discover, with the use of a liquid indicator similar to litmus paper, the point of neutralization. Pretty cool stuff. In seminar we're reading Dante's Divine Comedy, which is turning out to be really amazing. That man put all kinds of subtleties into that poem, I'll tell you. In Latin we're still translating St. Thomas selections, and in Philosophy we're plugging through Aristotle's De Anima. We finally got finished sorting out what his predecessors thought, and are now getting to what HE actually thinks. I am glad about this. And while I'm on the subject of school, the only reason I'm writing this post right now is that Mr. Kelly (our theology tutor) canceled today's class. That made me *extremely* happy. But I still have math at 2:30. Oh well.

The junior class put on the Mardi Gras dance last Saturday. The theme was 'Fairytale Masquerade,' and boy was it cool! There were opportunities to make masks in the coffee shop several times before the dance, though I already had a mask and didn't need to make one. Some of the ones that people made were really amazing, though. They had all kinds of glitter, different colors and textures of paper, beads, sequins, feathers, and other things. Really neat. The main mural featured a large castle with a moat, and there was a smaller mural of a dragon and a knight on one of the other walls. Plants and other greenery were spread around nicely, and on the walls were photographs of various students dressed up as everything from Little Red Riding Hood to Rumpelstiltskin. Oh! Rapunzel's tower also found it's place in one corner, complete with "hair" (I think it was actually yellow yarn) hanging from the window. The entertainment was, for the most part, hilarious. One of my favorite acts was a rendition of "All I Ask of You" from the Phantom of the Opera, done by Mary Teichert (a senior) and Jordan Matteoli (a freshman, who has a voice absolutely to DIE for). It was *really* good, and luckily I took a video of it on my camera. Dancing itself was (as I always say) awesome. I got a fair number of dances, with most all my guy friends and also some that I didn't know as well, including a couple of visitors. I think I stayed till around 1 a.m. before I realized that I was really tired and had to get up early for choir rehearsal the next morning.

Speaking of choir, we are working quite busily on our musical for this spring, which is Gilbert and Sullivan's "Trial by Jury," a lesser known one that is about 45 minutes long, but hilariously silly and fun nonetheless. Basic storyline: a girl's fiance runs away on their wedding day and she sues him. In court the jury is obviously leaning towards the girl's side before the trial even starts, though they keep telling each other that the trial must be free from bias. The judge turns out to be a scamp who ran off on his wife (oh, the irony), and he ends up falling in love with the girl and marrying her. It's great fun. There are no alto solos, otherwise I would try out for a part, but maybe I can be the head bridesmaid, who is a listed part of the cast even though she has no singing lines independent of the chorus. One of my favorite lines is from the usher:

Oh, listen to the plaintiff's case,
Observe the features of her face.
The broken-hearted bride!
Condole with her distress of mind...
From bias free of every kind,
This trial must be tried!

And when amidst the plaintiff's shrieks,
The ruffianly defendant speaks,
Upon the other side,
What he may say you needn't mind...
From bias free of every kind,
This trial must be tried!

Heehee! Great stuff. We-ell, I should go look at my math a bit more before class, so I will sign out for now. Hope you all are well!

It's Raining, It's Pouring

2008-01-24T22:03:00.001-08:00

I don't know if there is any old man snoring, but the first line of that song definitely holds true for the state of the weather here at TAC. It rained quite a bit right after Christmas break, cleared up for about a week, but now for the last 5 days or so it has been raining almost constantly, and pretty hard. There was quite literally a mini waterfall cascading down the steps that lead from Monica's dorm up to Therese dorm earlier today. All the seniors are having freshman year memory moments (that was the last time it flooded here), though we are not that bad yet, and hopefully won't be. The mountains are awfully pretty though, when you can see them, because all the rain that we are getting down here is snow up there, so we are surrounded by white-topped hills. The snow was lower down this morning on the sides of the mountains than I had ever seen it before.

So second semester is going along pretty well so far. Copernicus and Kepler are quite interesting, though Kepler is already turning out to be a beast as far as props go. Lab is also fun; I made several different kinds of flammable gas this morning during an experiment. :) The theology readings are HUGE...around 30 pages per assignment of small-print, and I can't exactly say it's too interesting right now, either. We're on Augustine's City of God, and he's tracing the history of that city in the Old Testament. In philosophy we're reading De Anima, for Latin we're doing St. Thomas translations, and in seminar we're on Dante's Divine Comedy. That's...just about it for school.

The choir went to Mammoth a couple of weekends ago for a ski trip. I didn't actually ski, and so another member of our group who also did not want to ski came with me to the drug store where we bought a sled. We then found a large snowy hill and spent our morning coasting down it. And taking pictures of each other and the wonderful scenery. The local chapel found out (I think Mr. Grimm actually informed them) that we were a choir, and not having any music organized themselves, asked us if we would like to sing. Of course we said yes. :)

Last weekend was the Walk for Life in San Francisco. On the way up I rode in the big bus that the school had acquired for the transportation of students to the Walk. It was pretty neat, fully equipped with a bathroom in back, plus a DVD player and TV screens, so we watched the Count of Monte Cristo after a dinner stop in Santa Maria. Upon arrival in SF at about 11:45 p.m. we set up camp and slept on the gym floor underneath Sts. Peter and Paul church. The floor was kinda hard, but they had a rack with athletic mats on it in the corner so we grabbed a bunch of those and slept on them instead. The walk itself was really great. The TAC-ers got special privileges, i.e., we got to stand up behind the speaker's podium and hold the big banner, plus walk at the front of the column during the March. According to what I've read there were around 30,000 people there, and hardly any protesters at all, much fewer even than last year, which is, of course, excellent. We're winning! :) After the Walk was over I hung out down by the waterfront with a group of friends, and rode back the next day after morning Mass in a 15 passenger van with some of my close pals. Fun times...

Last night I went to a concert in Santa Barbara. Somebody donated 26 tickets to the college for a performance of Beethoven's 5th symphony, along with a couple of other pieces, by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The seats were pretty good, and the concert itself was fabulous. And of course it meant I got to dress up, which is a good enough reason to go to anything. :) So...yeah. I'd say my life here has been pretty lively lately. Just pray that we don't get flooded again, and it'll all be good... ;)

Well, the time grows late, so I'd better sign out for now. God Bless!

Concerning November

2007-12-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

So I didn't write anything on here for the entire month of November, which means that there will be a gap in my archives from October to December. *sniff* Oh well, I'll live. All that, of course, is not to say that nothing of interest happened all last month. To start off with, we had Thanksgiving break from Wednesday through Sunday. Campus was Dead. Yes, with a capital 'D.' I think there were all of like, what...4 people still here that I knew well enough to carry on a conversation with. See, all the people that live close enough to drive home do so for the entirety of break, and often take large amounts of people with them. I was invited to go somewhere, but decided to stay on campus instead and get work done. It was rather nice, actually, to have the campus almost completely to myself. On Thursday I went to my friend Max Becher's house for dinner. Now, Max is currently at the ITI in Austria, but his family still invited over a bunch of the people that Max had met and hung out with a lot even though he is not here anymore. And that included me. It turned out that only 2 of us college students went there (everyone else had gone to various other places), but it was a rollicking good time. Mr. Paietta (one of the tutors) and Mr. Andres and family (another tutor - he's new this year) were there in addition to the 9 Bechers and us two. It was *awesome.* We stayed up way too late playing Apples to Apples (a highly amusing card game of sorts). The rest of break was relaxing, and yes, I did get some work done. :)

Just this last Friday the choir had the Advent Concert, for which we performed excerpts from Handel's Messiah. A lot of preparation went into this concert, and we were all looking forward to it exceedingly (I with a slight twinge of nervousness as well, since I had a solo part). It came off fabulously in the end. We performed the whole first part (since that is all about Christmas) and some of the more famous songs from the other two parts. My solo was a recitative towards the end, as well as a duet with a tenor - "O Death, Where is Thy Sting?" I think it turned out well, and so did all the other people that I talked to afterward. Hopefully the recording will be available soon.

Last night we had the Christmas Dance. The seniors hosted this dance, and their theme was the movie "It's a Wonderful Life." The decor was, as always, fabulous, featuring a large mural of the main street of Bedford Falls, as well as the drug store, Christmas trees, lights, and just general Christmas prettiness everywhere. The entertainment was vastly amusing, especially the skit about what TAC would be like had certain seniors never been there. :) Mary Teichert and John Brungardt were very funny, and I nearly *died* of laughter when Louis Bolin, Big Rich, and James Layne did their segment. After the entertainment, we had a gift exchange and time for food and socializing, and then...dun, dun dun...the drawing for the Win-A-Date contest. See, every year the senior class raises money to buy a gift for the college, something like a monstrance or a new entrance sign - something the college could use. One of the things the seniors did this year was the Win-A-Date contest. Any of the lovely ladies on campus could buy tickets for a drawing to be held at the dance, for their chance to win an evening out with Dan "the dancer" Selmeczy, Michael "Hotti" Bertotti, Matt Maxwell, um...some other guy whose name is slipping my mind, Jake "the unattainable" Whalen, or the Mystery Man (who turned out to be Arthur Grumbine). It was quite the spectacle to see those five gentlemen standing up on stage being auctioned off, as it were. I hope the lucky ladies whose names were drawn are happy with their lot. :) The actual dance was fun as well. I danced about the amount that I usually do at such events (have forgotten how many times I've been asked by the end of the evening), which is quite enough for me, staying up until around 1 a.m. before going to bed.

And now I am bursting with joy because I just finished my seminar paper!!! This is a good thing, considering that it's due tonight at curfew. Now I hope Mr. Wassell will think it's good... Anyhow, there is a line for the computers, so I'll scoot now. Happy Sunday to everybody!