Happiness

I got an A in Management class! For those who did not hear, this is the class that provided my favorite quote of last year:

"Managers who do not trust their employees grow a forest of bonzai trees."

My grade makes me laugh. No exam was required to complete the course: only a 4-5 paper on Josef Pieper's treatment of "Prudence." I wrote 4 Dickens-style pages in 2 1/2 hours and finished 45 minutes before the deadline, which coincided with my Economia exam. Don't worry, the irony was not lost on me.

Done!

With exam number one of this week! Yes, Ecclesiology is officially over after a 3 Day Marathon Translation Session with my Italian Ecclesiology book. It was such a special moment when I looked at the Catechism of the Catholic Church at 4 AM a few hours ago and realized that the entire book was summarized in English in the Catechism. Nevertheless, it is done and I think I did well! And after 3 days of Italian words dancing polkas through my head, I feel ready to tackle the next huge exam, Digital Communications, which must be written in Italian (and that is scary).

Thanks for all the prayers sent my way! Keep them coming. You're in mine!

And you asked me why I switched continents?

Hysterical.

"NoVA is Hotbed for the Sad and Lonely"

Yeah. My social life was in Prime Area Number 1 and I worked in Prime Area Number 9. Ok, it's not as if moving to the City of Roman Collars geographically helped much in that area. But still: vindication!

Il Papa's Word to the Wise: The Human Person

With his trademark clarity, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the mystery of man's human nature to a gathering of scientists today, directing their eyes to the richness and complexity of the human person, who cannot be defined by science alone. Some key lines from his remarks:

"'Man,' said the Pope is 'characterized by his otherness. He is a being created by God, a being in the image of God, a being who is loved and is made to love. As a human he is never closed within himself. He is always a bearer of otherness and, from his origins, is in interaction with other human beings.'"

Check out an article with other quotes from the address here:

Pope: Science cannot fully understand the mystery of man (CNA)

Study Break

Those odd Google email ads directed me to the following (and I have no idea how it generated it):

Italian Monastery For Sale

The pictures are a retreat in themselves. It reminds me quite a bit of St. Francis' Monastery on the outskirts of Assisi, except this one offers an even more stunning view of an Italian valley. Wait for the image to circle around, or go to through the first ten images in the gallery to take a peek.

Only 100 pages in Italian left to go. Thank God for 16 years of solid Catholic education that makes alot of this review.

Beebbadabada

How I feel some days:



"You can't speak Italian just because you wear more eyeliner!"

Thanks to Icarus for sending the link!

Changes 'n such

Yay! I have finally found a way to circumvent the fact that Blogger won't let me upload my nifty header. It's in wee form on the side now. If you don't have a microscope, the subtitle is: Prayer, Pondering, and a Healthy Shot of Partying.

You'll also find the fun new feature of a Newsfeed off to the side. It's supposed to give y'all Church-related links, compliments of Google. If anything funky shows up there, my apologies (and let me know); it's automatically generated!

And now, off to finish 140 pages of Italian text. Procrastination is over.

Prayers, per favore

I have finally mapped out my Finals Schedule and strategized an attack plan, and it is as follows:

Tuesday: Ecclesiology and Eccumenism (hard but enjoyable)
Wednesday: Cinema (easy if I get around to reading the dispensa)
Friday: Digital Communications (hard - radio, tv, and satellite technology in Italian - but I have a studymate)
WEEKEND!
Monday: Fundamentals of Institutional Communications (incredibly hard, needs lots of memorization, and it's oral - scary)
Thursday: Information and Technology (really easy because I've used Word before)
SOUTHERN SPAIN AND FATIMA!

In other words, for the next few days I'm doing this:



Contrary to any American sentiments, purple tights do help with the studying process.

So please do pray for me. You'll probably be seeing lots more posts like this as I find creative ways to procrastinate and happily distract myself. In the meantime, in thanks, here's an oldie but goodie picture of Rome from when I visited in June. The color of the water is slightly surreal when you open it up!

Translation. Post Office: Post-a. Definition: Slow-a.

Dear Laura,

Thank you so much for the card you sent . . . hmm, let's check:



November 15.

I'm sorry that it was "Missent to the Phillipines." I had nothing to do with that. I've been looking out for this thing for months, and had given up on it ever ariving. Well, there's a blessing! Maybe the package you sent will show up in another two months. It being twice as thick and all.

Thank you for the Thanksgiving wishes!! I think I told you about my Thanksgiving two months ago, so I won't get into that here.

With lots of love from the third-world-country known as Italy,
Adrienne

For my DC Crowd

Thought of y'all, with love:

"The More Successful You Are, the More You Drink"

And by the way, this is what Italians call an Irish Coffee:



Can we say spiked cappucino? Blech! Travesty!

Jackhammer Surprises and Lumen Gentium

I’m constantly finding myself surprised by those unexpected events that pop up in my life. You know, those times when you get out of screensaver mode, put yourself in the moment that’s happening or has just passed, and say in trite bewilderment, “I wasn’t expecting that.” Those.

Of course, some surprises come in the form of unpleasant revelations about yet-another-area for Future Improvement. You live, you learn, as Alanis Morissette nasally wailed in her good aungsty days. (Happiness deteriorated her career). But there are other joyful moments that leave you happily satiated with a sense of good delight and expectancy. So yes, you must learn, and painfully so. But you mostly, hopefully, you live.

I came to Rome to live. To live life fully, eat pasta and gelato, and coincidentally, study social institutional communications so that I can eventually . . . do something with it. It makes sense. I love writing. It’s a barometer for my well-being. I love editing and designing and just the sheer act of communication, period. It’s fulfilling to me. So, I never expected that my new favorite class, now that I’ve actually cracked open the book to prepare for a test one week away, is Ecclesiology and Ecumenism. That's been my surprise of the week.

Snore, you’d say. I said so too, while I was in class. The class is sort of a joke. There are about 70 priests and maybe 4 women in it, and they all cough, all the time. A choir couldn’t be more coordinated. One section stops, the other section starts up. The professor, in the meantime, has a microphone attached to his collar, but the batteries are always dead. And he’s Spanish, so he has what we refer to with a kind smile as the “Italian Spanish lisp.” His voice is strong throughout the sentence until the last key word, that one concept upon which everything hinges: and then his voice trails down, the hacking starts up, and I start having wild uncontrollable urges to pelt my entire class with cough-drops.

Even under circumstances such as these, there are singular occasions when the class, really, really shines. Like when the microphone wasn’t working and they were finishing up construction work on the piazza outside our university. Someone had the brilliant idea to open a window. Usually, that’s a relief. Let’s just face it, certain nationalities just don’t believe in deodorant. But it's not so good when someone’s using a jack-hammer outside. Fabulous. Now we can ALL lip-read and get headaches together too! The best part? No one seemed to notice that no one could now hear. Nope. They just kept on looking blankly at the teacher and scribbling stuff, while I, the glaring American woman, seethed. Maybe they’re all fantastic Italian lip-readers, but I'm the person who's still looking up "alora." But what can you do? So I continued on. And you know, they only shut the window when a screaming ambulance parked outside the building. My theory? Someone in the class below, having an experience similar to mine, had had enough and decided to end it right then and there.

But enough of such unholy thoughts. I love the class, when I can hear it. Why? Because it’s theology. It’s knowledge for itself, and it’s all about God. It’s an escape from the practical mechanics of learning how to shape public opinion and write HTML and what to do when your communications plan blows up in your face. My joy and gratitude every day is generated by trying to find the sacred in the mundane, to infuse the ordinary with the extraordinary. It’s such a relief when it’s handed to you on a platter.

You read familiar words you’ve heard all your life, like, “God’s salvific plan for man’s redemption,” you take a step back because you haven’t heard about that in awhile. And because you know a little more about the ugliness and horror and sin than you did in highschool, now you know exactly why those words mean so much. You get all excited when you think about God’s grand plan to love and save each soul in the universe, that He had figured out way back when (even when Adam and Eve got cocky), and you’re just left in wonderment and awe. Because that’s you, too. And that’s why Ecclesiology class is cool.

(Oh yeah, and the fact that our test is going to be open book(s) is pretty dang cool, too).

From the sacred to the profane

Yes, it's that time of year again.

Finals.

This is the time when the idyllic life of a student of a Rome starts to really, really stink.

The Europeans just don't do it the way American profs do. Study guides? Forget about it. Here's a book. Memorize it. Oh yeah, translate it first into your language. Heh heh heh. When my friend told me to "make a outline of what was covered in the class and memorize it as a point of reference - you know, when they ask you about it on the test," I knew that I was in for an interesting European experience.

But I knew all this when I signed up, so I'm not *really* complaining. Just commiserating with sympathetic souls like yourselves.

So, to express (somehow) how I feel about finals, I'm posting a link to a site that brings me entertainment, month by month. It's as anti-my-purpose-of-being-in-Rome as you can get. The author's succinct descriptions bring me joy.

Eyesore of the Month

You've GOT to check out the previous one, for December. Prepare yourself.

Gift

A little pre-Christmas, stuck-at-the-airport ramblin' for your post-Christmas enjoyment.



I’m seriously considering whether the end of my existence is God’s amusement.

I am ending my first four month stint in Rome exactly as I began it – sleepy, wheezing, and drugged. It probably has something to do with the sporadic heat and hot water in my apartment, combined with a wild-goose chase lugging a laptop to Rome’s four ends, combined with three days of last-minute targeted Christmas shopping that involved carrying heavy bags full o’ stuff and booze. Oh, you lucky other people. My shopping covered people I haven’t even met yet. As a result, all I want in my stocking these days is a bottle of Flex-All, a magic inhaler and a masseuse named Mollie.

Nevertheless, in the midst of suffering sore feet and sorer muscles, I encountered a unique person yesterday; a young boy who made me step back and think about the grand “meaning of it all” and all that good stuff.

The kid appeared on Tram eight on the way from Largo Argentina to Stazione Trastevere. With three bags of stuff, I was keeping my eyes busy scoping for thieves. A couple of stops down the line, to no surprise, a gypsy stepped onto the tram a couple of cars down and started pealing out chipper Christmas accordion music.

Sigh. I fluctuate in what I think about gypsies.

I feel compassion for them and their children. I do. But their cultural heritage of begging rubs my American sensibilities the wrong way. It’s something I struggle with every time I enter a church with the monotone moaning voice following me on the way in, “Prego, Signora, per favore, per Dio, per Dio . . .” Do you give them money? Do you hold out because you think they should get a real job, because you’re mad that they drug their babies to sleep so they’ll look more pathetic and they teach their children to lie and steal? What do you do? Where’s the line?

All of this was re-playing through my head when a gypsy kid stepped on at the next stop. The accordion music had paused for a minute, so I had a chance to think and size him up. Judging from the size of my oldest nephew, I put him at 11 years old. He was skinny and his motions gave you the impression that his limbs were moving by uncoordinated accident. He wasn’t disabled; just incredibly klutzy. Something about his expression was surprisingly alive, though; incredibly human. Many beggers have a dead heaviness to them, an assumed persona designed to guilt-trip you; this kid was lively and his presence was arresting: at least for the first thirty seconds. Then he changed. Down came the back, eyes, and smile; out came the hand, and he went from person to person asking for money. Moving very awkwardly. No luck for him today.

With a loud flourish, the accordion music started up again in the adjoining car. And then gypsy kid started and began to – well, whine. To himself. He came alive again. He sat down (perhaps fell akimbo into a seat is a better way to describe it) and began gesticulating (again, to himself) and started whining in rapid falsetto something in Italian, the gist of what I could gather was: You’re kidding me, somebody else is already begging in this train and it’s freaking Christmas and no one will give me anything now. And it’s Christmas.

Why, after all of my philosophizing about self-sufficiency, this moved my heart, is a mystery to me.

But I couldn’t help feeling bad for the kid. He’s young. He’s begging for money. It is Christmas, and I have three bags of stuff for people who don’t need anything. I fished out a eurocoin and motioned him over. (Ok, so I still kept a good eye on my stuff).

Wow, I made the kid’s day.

He got downright giddy. “Thank you thank you thank you – and for you, I will give you a kiss” – which he did, sort of in my ear. Something about my gift gave him new hope. He went from person to person in the car again, begging with a huge smile on his face. The kid was practically skipping. He started joking with the passengers. He fished something out of his own pocket and started talking to one of the older women about it at the end of the tram. A little while later, he came back and sat in the seat in front of me. He asked me my name and told me his. Told me he was 15 years old when I asked. Asked me where I was from. Then he handed me an American quarter. In Italian he said, “I give this to you, because you gave something to me. It’s free.”

It was a free act of kindness from a kid who has nothing, a kid who probably had to steal and beg to get everything he owns.

I'll always be grateful for the moment of clarity that boy gave to me that day. What that boy gave meant something, to him and to me. We give so much in this world without thinking; five bucks (if we remember) to the Church on Sunday, nickels into the tip jar at Starbucks, obligatory presents for people at Christmas and at bridal showers. How often do we have a chance to put a piece of ourselves into what we give, and receive something meaningful in return?

The kid had it where it's at.