Golden Christmas

Yesterday we had a Christmas party with my mother's family at our house. If was great to see everyone. I played a round of DDR against my grandmother! My aunts and mom also got in on the action. (It had kept the cousins entertained for hours, so the grown-ups decided to give it a try.)

Also, I learned how to tie a tie. (My brother will need to wear one when he becomes a Legionary candidate in a few months, so my dad was giving him lessons.)

Early this morning, he (my brother) and I went to the Carmel for mass, and afterwards Father wanted him to meet the prioress, so we visited with some of the nuns through the grille. He's leaving later today.

Merry fourth day of Christmas.

Hola!

I'm running on fewer cylinders than I have since the VIP weekends this summer- I've slept about one night of the last four. Unfortunately, it's not working overtime that is keeping me from sleep, just insomnia. But I've already left my sleep-deprived comments all over the blogosphere, so I won't subject you to much more here.

My brother Andrew is home for a couple of days, and right now he's testing for his driver's license. After Saturday, I probably won't see him again for at least a few years, so I'm trying to enjoy his company while he's here. It would be so fun to bring him out to school for a visit- he's like me, Greg, and Joe, all rolled up into one with a huge overdose of my family's sense of humor. It's always fun.

Pax Christi

Merry Christmas!

God bless you.

Ero cras

For all you Latin-literates...

O...

Emmanuel....
Rex Gentium...
Oriens...

Clavis David...
Radix Iesse...
Adonai...
Sapientia...

...and so he shall. Tomorrow night. Isn't the liturgy neat?

O Emmanuel

The Christmas tree has been moved into the house; all the boxes of decorations have been brought downstairs. Half of the kids are at work at McDonald's, but when they come home there's going to be some decking of the halls...

O Emmanuel,

king and lawgiver,

desire of the nations,

Savior of all people,

come and set us free, Lord our God.

O Rex Gentium

The first Victorian current cakes (our family Christmas cookie) are out of the oven... and a few have been safely put to rest.

O King of all the nations,

the only joy of every human heart;

O Keystone of the mighty arch of man,

come and save the creature you fashioned from the dust.

O Oriens

mmm... I already am having misgivings about the new Blogger, since it just made this post disappear.

But we'll re-type most of it.

I just talked/walked in a 10-mile Q with my house at the tip of the tail. Making your phone calls on foot sure beats sittign around. Walking is the sort of thing you can forget that you're doing- like sitting, except that it hurts your back less and your feet more, after a while. My back cries in agony when I sit for too long, and so I like to walk. It's kind of like Newton's state of motion... (not seriously)

O Radiant Dawn

splendor of eternal light,

sun of justice:

come, shine on those who dwell in darkness

and the shadow of death.

O Clavis David

Hopefully I'll get here every day from now until Christmas, even if just for a minute...

Between 9 last night and now, I've done 8 1/2 hours of paperwork! (But at $10 per hour, that certainly isn't a complaint!!) I'm working now and then as a research assistant (i.e. data compiler) for a clinical study on NaPro Technology.

O Key of David,

O Royal Power of Israel

controlling at your will the gate of heaven:

come, break down the prison walls of death

for those who dwell in darkness

and the shadow of death;

and lead your captive people into freedom.

O Radix Jesse

Well, the finals are finished.

Today my Mom's office had their Christmas lunch and, since I am technically a very part-time member of the staff, I got to come along. We went to a nice restaurant run in a Revolutionary War-era tavern in our "town". (According to the historical photographs on the walls, our town-let once had a Texaco (gas) station!)

On the way back, my Mom suddenly realized that she never had a chance to weigh the Christmas cards that she had me drop off at the post office this morning. There was a pretty fair chance that they were two-stampers, and she didn't like the idea of having all the cards return to us. So we described the envelopes and return address stickers to the postmaster, and they went back into the bins and dug around for a while. Eventually they found our cards and, indeed, they each needed 24 cents more. God bless the cooperative postal workers!

Tomorrow my aunt is coming! She and her husband moved out to the west coast last year, but he has been away in the Navy and, as the song goes, "there's no place like home for the holidays," so she'll be here for Christmas and New Year's. (Almost all of the family has stayed in the northeast.) She's technically staying with my grandparents, but they live approximately 75 yards to the south of our house, on the same property.

And here we are, in the last days of a very short Advent. May Our Lady help you all prepare fruitfully and joyfully for Christmas.

O Flower of Jesse's stem,

you have been raised up as a sign for all peoples;

Kings stand silent in your presence;

the nations bow down in worship before you.

Come, let nothing keep you from coming to our aid.

Pax

My life as a general biology student is now over. (the din of general rejoicing) Don't get me wrong, biology is wonderful- but not if you divorce it from its Cause and all sound philosophy. Next semester I have two bio courses, but they should both be more fact and less fluffy theory.

The last curve of this track seems much more peaceful than the first three so far. The remaining finals will be done by next Monday, and next semester promises to be more engaging, even if more hectic. Things are looking up. Alleluia. I actually ate lunch with some girls I'd never met before, which is all but impossible around here. Then someone I didn't recognize greeted me by name... maybe if I made more of an effort I could actually meet some people.

The Coming and the Endings

Advent and Finals

Well, my brothers on the front line are in the thick of the most exciting week of the semester while the battle on the home front continues in a subtler way. My last class was a few hours ago, and finals start the day after tomorrow. "Finals". This year it just doesn't strike the same note of danger, terror, and, well, whole-hearted finality. Maybe it should, since it determines a clear cut and preordained percentage of the course grade- but the emotions can only stay on edge for so long, and with exams every few weeks, I've become numbed to the normal dose of pretest adrenaline. Also, in short, it is just another little dance to give them and not a valuable synthesis of understanding.

Our last Saturday physics class was cancelled, so this weekend I went up north at the spur of the moment to watch the Nutcracker. My little cousin danced as one of Mother Ginger's children.

Today I caught up on a lot of lost sleep and spent the morning cleaning up here and there, and playing music. (I intended to do some chemistry homework, but it's probably just as well that I didn't. Preparing for lectures tends to make them insufferably boring.) I dug out the nativity scene's manger and cut up a jar-full of yarn "hay" to put by our little shrine-corner and invite people to make Advent sacrifices to pad the Lord's crib.

Last year I was teaching catechism (with a dear friend) to a generally delightful class of second graders. I was full of new ideas for old lessons, she was full of vigor and also knowledge, and they were full of enthusiasm, so it worked out well most of the time. One not-so-original idea was straw for advent sacrifices- the kids put a little strip of yellow paper in the manger on my desk for every sacrifice they had offered up that week. Some of them wrote down their offerings on the straw to make it a little more tangible.

It sounds silly, but I am still very motivated by childish exterior tracking of progress. The biggest motivation for me to do my studies or other tasks has always been a neatly-written-up to-do list with little checkboxes aside each item. The items themselves have to be broken up into attainable chunks. Just ask anyone who saw my complex to-do list for finals' week last year- a grid with blocks for reviewing the material for each subject, for study-guide finishing, for reviewing with others, for actually taking the tests; blocks for each hour of work-study left for the semester; blocks for meetings and concerts and conversations that needed to take place.

So I guess I can see the motivational usefulness of these kinds of projects.

I tried twice to write the rest of the paragraph that the above sentance starts, about pedegogical scaffolding and weaning off of it to not count sacrifices or think about them for long, but I think my brain is officially shut off now (midnight). I'm sorry that I always post when I'm running on half-steam, so the composition is deplorable and the topics usually rambling.
Adios.

The Nativity Story

My family went out to see this on Saturday night, in the first few (liturgical) hours of Advent. I'm certainly no movie critic, but I was very pleased with the movie. It's not your standard Christmas pagent, but I think that is the best part- it draws the sparse narrative we have from the gospels and the details we have from tradition and secular history into a cohesive picture of the event, and goes beyond the facts to really develop the characters. That is tricky business, for sure. It seems hard to put together exactly how a sinless woman would look and act and think, in the daily grind of life. It is easy to imagine her as stained glass, but not very inspiring or helpful. It's also hard to imagine what her marriage would look like in daily life, since they certainly did more than stand together holding Christ and posing for our lovely Holy Family statues. For the last 8 years or so I've been wishing that someone would make a good movie that mostly focused on the interactions of Our Lady and St. Joseph. This might be it.
Of course, the writer and the director are no more privy to the real personalities of our mother and her chaste husband than we, but they did a believable job of it. Some caveats may be in order: St. Joseph is not protrayed as the elderly man he is sometimes pictured; several details about Mary known to Catholics are only slightly implied -understandable since it was made by non-catholics- but these are not denied either. At the beginning of the movie, she seems to be caught up in a bit of a "bad attitude" but this soon gives way to a more clear expression of sorrow. I think that is one thing the movie does quite well, portraying her as the Mother of Sorrows. I have seen that some secular reviews disliked it for that reason, calling the movie "glum" and saying that it's Mary had a severe case of post-partum depression. But cross seems folly to the world, anyhow.
I can't wait to get it on DVD. I don't think I've ever said that before of any movie besides SupaSeo.

Pax Christi,
A.D.A.

non-notandum

Happy Tuesday! (and happy New Year!)

This morning welcomed my newest second cousin into the world, Sarah Elizabeth. (That recently-immigrated side of the familiy is small enough that second cousins and their first-cousin-once-removed parents are all notable parts of the extended family. I say this mostly for the benefit of those of you who can't even count how many first cousins they have, never mind seconds.)

Well, last night I had a crazy dream. Since some patrons of this site might find it vaugely amusing, I'll tell you the general story. I was going on a cross-country road trip with my sister, my brother, and my cousin, in my cousin's car (he's only 14 now, so I guess this was in the future...). The only music we had to listen to were three horrid CD's the boys had, so this was going to be one long trip. Along the way, (I think somewhere in Kansas or something) we saw off to the left a horse and trailer, and in the trailer was a ragged looking young man sitting in the straw, holding a sign that read "I wish I were at TAC". Now, I thought this was interesting since my school is called TAC, and I was thinking the very same thing, and so I wanted to find out if it was anyone I knew. My siblings, on the other hand, were quite tired of hearing about the wonders of the school and more or less had forbidden me to mention it.
By and by the wagon's trajectory closed in on our own. Who should the man be but our own Tasik! Incredulously I called out his name (the "easy" version) and, to be brief, he told me about how he dropped out of school one semester before graduation and had been working on a farm doing heavy labor since then.
Soon after this, we all found ourselves in a forest and some band of theatrically dramatic night riders were slaying everyone in sight (By this time, our party had somehow grown to include all the new freshmen whom I haven't yet met, and some other random people known only in the dream.) Some strong and enterprising character named Napolean collected all the people he could, saving them from the bloodthirsty riders and bringing them to a "refuge" on a barn where, in fact, he intended to enslave them. In the process he somehow also captured an angel, whom he had stationed in the hay loft to direct a magnificent choir of all the captives who could sing. The angel was only too happy to oblige Napolean with a sort of condescending sweetness, even after the man started making silly and unfulfillable demands about the music and the decorations for the concert that was already in progress.

And then my alarm clock went off. My imagination sure keeps me entertained at night.

Three exams. Three classes. Two weeks and one day left of the semester. Thirty-eight days until I set foot on the same ground Bl. Serra trod.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Have a blessed Advent.