Happiness Is...

Five Good Reasons To Be (Almost) Catholic

1. Yesterday was “Chili and Margarita” day at Divine Redeemer, which meant that I went directly from mass to eating homemade chili and enjoying mixed drinks in Fellowship Hall, and they were tall and unusually strong. Those old ladies know how to whip up a margarita. Only in the Catholic Church would you have hospitality volunteers signing up to bring “12 large bottles of tequila.”

2. Flannery O’Connor is Catholic. I bought a copy of A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Short Stories at a used bookstore on Saturday for $3.50. I was three stories in before reading the back cover and discovering that not only was O’Connor Catholic, but her expressed purpose in writing these stories was “to reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday life.”

3. I also started reading Dracula in preparation for Halloween. it’s interesting to note that Dracula is sort of built around the liturgical year, beginning on St. George’s day and culminating on Halloween, or All Hallows Eve. My plan is to set the mood in the month of October by reading Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Frankenstein. Who’s with me?

4. Today in our bulletin I found the following announcement under the heading Annual Blessing of Pets: "On Monday, October 6th, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, we will be blessing family pets. You may bring your pet to Divine Redeemer for a special blessing of good health and, hopefully, good obedience. All pets are welcome.”

5. And finally:

Indoor Living

Ever eat in the shower? It seems like it ought to be against the rules, but take my word for it: shower-eating is exactly the reason why they made Flavor-Ice popsicles. You know the ones contained within the plastic sleeve? Not only is the cold artificial flavoring extra tasty when you are being bombarded with hot water, but they are a good way to conserve water as well. If it takes you longer to shower than it does to eat a popsicle: you are wrong.

Plus, there's nothing like standing in your manwear (dress socks and boxers), listening to your favorite pump-up song (Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time") and knowing that you are still eating the same popsicle you were when you jumped out of bed 12 minutes and 43 seconds ago.

Ramen is for Lovers

Despite having a long weekend I spent most of the last four days indoors. I toured the local coffee house scene, spent time in the library, and went into school for a couple hours yesterday. While I'm jealous of friends who were hiking and camping over the weekend, I've been content to stay at home nursing a cold and reading good books.

I finished Chesterton's book on St. Francis, and I'll give a full fledged review of that in the near future, but I also wanted to mention that I started reading both Julia Childs' book "My Life in France" and Frank Herbert's "Dune". Although I can only really stomach Julia Child while I'm actually eating (as a substitute for Colbert or The Simpsons, since the lovely people with the unsecured wireless network have finally shipped out), it isn't bad. In fact, it's nice to be reading a book again that is primarily about vocabulary words and pictures.

Today is the start of my second week of teaching and I'm feeling pretty good about it at this point. Of course, I'm writing this blog post from the past (6:12pm Mountain Time on Sept. 1st) so I'm less than 12 hours from actually being back in the building, which is a little frightening, now that I think about it.

Today is also "Back to School Night" which means I'll be at school for every second of my day. From my arrival at 6:00AM, at which time I will set off the door alarms for the third time in a week, to when the last parents finally leave at 9:30PM, I'll be going non-stop. If there's one way to add pressure to your first month of teaching, it's adding parents into the equation before you've even given the first test. Bad times.

I keep envisioning it as a School of Rock experience, where the parents realize that I'm not at all qualified enough or concerned enough about hygiene to be teaching their kids.

Dear Everyone:
Please come live with me. That is an invitation to every one of you to come out here and spend some time in one of the prettiest states in the union without having to pay for lodging. Give me a couple weeks with The Joy of Cooking and I might even be able to guarantee you food.

Seriously though, the only reason to have a house is to fill it with people. If I didn't think that some of you would be joining me out here (as Brad and Leroy already did this summer) I would probably just live out of my car. So, let me know when you'll be here (notice there isn't a "I won't be attending" box to check). Honestly, if you are reading this you have to be at least in my top 100 favorite people, so make a little plan Stan, just hop on a bus Gus and get yourself out here.

Also, I appreciate how concerned you all are for my culinary health. Last night I made a salad for dinner and if you don't mind my saying so, I don't think it looks half-bad (not pictured: the tator-tots I had for dessert).

Less is More

Thanks again Jose for sending me the book on St. Francis. The first 30 pages were so good that I couldn't stand to keep writing down quotes and thoughts on stitcky-notes and decided to head to Borders to buy a copy for myself. Really, I can't stand to read a good book without writing in the margins, underlining, etc. and G.K. Chesterton's life of Saint Francis of Assisi is one of the best books that I've come across in a long time - well worth the purchase.

In other literature-related news, I went down to the library today and checked out the book club pick for this month: "My Life in France" by Julia Child.

Chapstick, Chapped Lips, and Things Like Chemistry

G.K Chesterton says of St. Francis "His life was one riot of rash vows," and that "Never was any man so little afraid of his own promises."

That courage of resolve comes from a dedication to honesty, that few are manly enough to seize with surety. We have already wronged so many. We are all so in debt already, how could we ever just decide to become men of our word? I know I'm in debt to nearly everyone I know, for so many things that even if I tried to remember them all I couldn't. So what hope is there?

The only hope is to be so completely transparent and so ready with your charity that others see in you a consciousness of universal debt. We owe each other more than we can say, so whether you get your philosophy of charity from St. Francis, or from the movie Pay It Forward, or from Barrack Obama's words at the DNC this week:

"This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.
This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he's worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.
We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes."

It all amounts to the same thing: as individuals we are better than our baggage. Now you may not agree with the way that someone else says it, but the choice we have is simple. Whenever we decide to we can clean up our act and start acting like Christ. And what's beautiful about that is that Christ was the most human person ever to live. He did humanity right and in him is every true aspect and characteristic of every individual that will ever live.

To sum it up: the Truth of humanity is so incomprehensibly big and so incomprehensibly a part of who God is that I am confident that in heaven we'll experience everything that we find true and good and beautiful on Earth.

This all struck me last night as I walked down a side-street after dark listening to the song "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band. I realized that there is something about this song that reveals an aspect of humanity that was previously unstated or at least never stated so beautifully. And because of that unalterably true aspect of that song, I'm sure that a part of the adoration of Truth in heaven, whatever that ends up looking like, will include what is good and beautiful about the song "Ants Marching".

I love literature because it always attempts to say more clearly and more beautifully what we already know. Music is the same. There's something that always gets me about the song "In The Belly of the Whale," which is a children's song from the Veggie Tales movie about Jonah and the whale. The story of Jonah is one of those stories that captures a certain aspect of humanity better than it has ever been captured before.

Now, Jonah is by no means a long story, but when the Veggie Tales song sums it all up in the lines "got outta dodge, sailed on a bon-less bon voyage, you said North, I headed South, tossed overboar,d good Lord that's a really large mouth," I can't help but think that as silly as it is, it's incredibly pleasing to God.


And if all that bored you:

Brought to you by an unusual propensity toward rodentia on the part of Productivity 501, here are some tips on how to live your life from rats:
1. When you want to learn a skill, sleep a lot.
2. Too busy or tired to exercise? It's probably because you aren't exercising.
3. And finally: don't be influenced by preconceptions, otherwise your preconceptions will influence others.