Bring out your soapbox . . . again

I've heard that FOCA might be shelved (and then divided, repackaged and reshipped) due to the loud and public protest against it.  In the meantime, I just saw this headline pop up on one of my favorite blogs, American Papist:

Worse Than FOCA: Prevention First Act

As Thomas points on in the first line, this one is more dangerous because it is in Congress already.  Click on the link and read up.  Seems like orthodox Catholic hospitals could be put at risk over the emergency contraception item.  The LifesiteNews link calls this the "bailout of the abortion industry." 

If you live in Virginia, your Senators are (click to be directed to their e-mail contact form): 

Mark R. Warner

and

Jim Webb

Talking points (ripped out of the LifesiteNews article):

• The bill's name is Prevention First Act, S. 21
  
• Hospitals would be forced to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims -  this pill can work as an abortifacient
• The likely beneficiary of the bill would be Planned Parenthood
• While it encourages the use of Plan B for rape victims, it has no reporting requirement for young girls who may have been victims
• Bill does nothing to promote parental involvement in these choices

Happy protesting.

Life.

Sometimes your whipped cream gets swiped.

Victory!!

Good news:  I finally tracked down my advisor and my thesis proposal was approved today! 

Bad news:  I have to write a 70 page paper.  

Eww.

Well, on the positive-thinking side, I *did* write 80 pages for my undergrad one (what was I thinking?)

I'm actually really excited for this one.  I'm doing it on communication, the conservative movement, and Ronald Reagan.  Yep.  I worked for those folks (conservatives, not Reagan) for two years.  Figured I might as well learn something about them now that I'm almost two years out of DC.  

It's going to be a fascinating topic to research.  To aid the task, I have about 20 books and 1500 photocopied sheets of material to sift through.  Finally, an excuse to read something in English!  So, prepare yourself for an inundation of conservative facts in the next few months.   

Such as, did you know that the conservative movement invented direct mail?

Who would have thought?  We were once cutting-edge.

"Now That's One for the History Books"

I promise to lay off on these sort of things.   But I just couldn't stop laughing.

Gotta love the media.

Compliments of Mollie.  How she finds these things, I will never know.

Catching up

I'm having some formatting problems today, but no matter. I have photos! From last June. That would be half a year ago. But they are photos!!

So, the one you see above is the inside of the Dome in the Duomo in Florence (called Firenze by the locals).

This slightly blurry one was taken at the top of Assisi at night.

This fresco randomly caught my eye. It's taken from an outside chapel at San Damiano convent, at the bottom of Assisi.


Another from that night in Assisi.


Eating Sorrentino gnocchi in Sorrento on a 100 degree day. To my great disappointment, the frozen Sorrentino gnocchi that Trader Joe's makes are ten hundred times better. Who would have thunk.



For my Christendom Rome ´04 peeps: the view from the rooftop of our convent, up on the hill. (The hill with all those STAIRS! Do you remember them?)



Outdoor artwork in Florence.



Figure on one of Ghibertti's doors, Duomo Baptistry, Firenze.
Time to run to dinner. More to come during another period of procrastination. Say a prayer for the 8 things I have to do for school tonight. Heh heh.

Milestones

For starters, Blogger apparently accepts my photos if they're uploaded from my university computer lab. Oh, it's good to have a picture on this page again! I took this one in Capri at the end of last June. Now that I've discovered the trick, more photos coming soon . . ..

My friend and I made a pact to focus on the positive this year. Here's my upbeat contribution for this week.

I went to confession in Italian for the first time last night, and as far as I know, I didn't tell God I murdered or pillaged anything. A year and a half ago I couldn't order coffee without mispronouncing something. It's a big deal for me.

I've wanted to learn desktop publishing since I was 17. That crazy year, one of my friends gave me a mixed music CD. Playing around with the free-and-awful program that came with my printer, I put together a real CD booklet just for the heck of it. It took me hours to do, and I loved every minute. Must be my mother's artistic flair coming out in me whatever way it can, because I sure as heck can't draw or paint like she can. The cool news: my graduate program offers a desktop publishing class, and just this afternoon I finished putting together a graphic magazine that looks like the real deal. Love, love the creative component!

Thanks to a fun challenge from a friend a couple days ago, I figured out that I can take a news story in Italian, translate it into English, and make it sound like a real piece of journalism. I never would have thought I could do that.

Reading over this, this post sounds an awful lot like bragging. But it's not meant to be. I've asked God for a lot of things lately. My status lately has sort of been ''begging mode.'' It hit me last night that some great things have been given to me that I never expected nor even asked for. Allora. Time to give thanks. And time to go write another paper . . . after I upload some more photos.

New Catholic media coolness

Now I'm just procrastinating. But this is too cool not to share. I'm ripping it off of the blog I have to write for school, so if the formatting is weird or if Blogger shuts me down for plagiarism, that's why.

CatholicVote.com has just released a brilliant video dismantling the popular pro-abortion argument that a life full of hardship just isn't worth living.

CatholicVote.com - Imagine Spot 01

Simple yet beautifully executed, the short commercial features sweeping instrumental music, the image of a baby in utero coming ever-closer to the screen, and the tale of a man who came from a broken home and yet lived to become the 1st African American President of the United States.

Sporting the tag-line "Life. Imagine the Potential," the video conveys its message without artifice, politics, or preaching. Even more impressive is CatholicVote's skillful piggy-backing off of two pop-culture icons: John Lennon, composer of the popular progressive feel-good song "Imagine," and America's soon to be inaugurated president Barack Obama.

When St. Paul went to preach to the Greeks, he pointed to the image they had already constructed and proclaimed to them, "See your image of the Unknown God? I come to speak to you of what you have sensed, but do not yet fully understand." Using symbols that the populace feels friendly and comfortable with is communicative genius. Well done, CatholicVote.com.

Scenes from an Italian life*

Technology:

Student delegate: IT person, the internet is not working in our computer lab.

Italian IT person: Yes. The internet is not working.

Blank stares.

Silence.

Blank stares.

Comprehension:

Student 1: What is the professor drawing on the board?  Is that a graph?

Student 2:  It's lines and squiggles.

Student 1:  Oh.

*I have a fun life, all things considered.

I have returned to Italy for the fifth time.  This year finds me away from the sea, and instead on top of a hill which has 217 steps leading you up or down from the tram line into the city - preferably down, but wondrous things start to happen to your legs once you've gone up enough times.  I come home for lunch these days and make crazy huge salads with corn and ceci (chick peas), provolone chunks and pepperoni (red pepper) and shredded spanish coldcuts, and then I head off to work and class again.  

My job is teaching a sweet two year old boy how to speak and think in English.  I think he knows a lot more than he lets onto.  He surprises me every once and awhile by randomly starting to count in English or repeating oddball words like "kitchen" or "sticky."  I take what I can get, and then repeat them into infinity . . . in fun ways, of course.  We play with noisy cars and colored play-doh together - but they call it "pongo" here.  Or rather "PAAAWHN-go," as the Italians have a love affair with dragging out vowel sounds.

I'm supposed to be taking something like eight classes, working three times a week for one (possibly two) jobs, and writing a thesis in the next few months.  The amount of posts you find upon here will be a measure of how much thesis writing I'm actually getting gone.  But hey, blogs are communication, aren't they?  It's part of my studies . . ..

For some reason I cannot upload photos from my computer, so until that is fixed it will be a much more visually boring blog.  

It's good to be back in Rome.  B3 is back again.