Ugh to technology

My brilliant plan to download my photos onto a school computer was foiled. They apparently don't let you do that round here no more.

Which is a problem, because I currently can't download any pictures to my own computer becuase my harddrive is completely full because of the 4,638 previously downloaded photos. (I call it a hobby, some would call it OCD). And when I try to burn these photos onto a DVD disk to free up some space, the burn fails half way through, or - even better, this happened yesterday - my computer completes the burn, but then refuses to read the disk it just made. It rejects its own child, so to speak.

So, suffice it to say for now that San Giorgio's is really pretty, even at 7:00 AM. To give the people who know Rome some geographical bearings, it's a couple of blocks down from the Mouth of Truth. It was beautiful being at a Mass where everybody stood up, sat, and knelt at the same time, and started singing and ended singing at the same time, and got up to go to communion in orderly rows, one by one. Dang, I've missed America.

I'm not going to bother describing the church because I am, somehow, going to put up pictures tomorrow. Don't ask me how. I think it will involve putting old pictures on my thumbdrive and burning them onto a disk on a school computer so I can do the whole process all over again. The things we have to do to make technology work to make our lives so much easier.

There's icing on the cake of waking up at 6 AM. The NACers and priests apparently have an established list of all the best cafes next to all the station churches. This is an early morning tradition I can live with. Rome in the early morning before it has people in it is glorious, especially on a sunny day. I have some lovely shots of Campo di Fiori and Piazza Farnese which y'all will get to enjoy . . . eventually.

I finally saw again one of my Deacon friends from the diocese of Bismark. The deaconate ordination at St. Peter's, especially from the perspective of third row from the front, was one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had in my life. Here's a photo from that day . . . the days of freedom when I could actually download photos . . .



We had good seats.

San Giorgio

San Giorgio just doesn't sound as masculine as St. George.  It just sounds like the Italians finally went haywire and decided to canonize Armani.

So apparently the church tomorrow has St. George's skull in it.  And it was John Henry Cardinal Newman's titular church (meaning he had possession of it in name - all the Cardinals get one in Rome, it's the door prize of being elected a cardinal).  

Again, is it apparent that I'm avoiding schoolwork?  I have to do a Media Training debate tomorrow about the Church and homosexuality.  Lord spare me.  I know very little about the topic.  

Happy Lent 'n such

A year ago (liturgically speaking), I was here.  

I find it vastly ironic that I made it to the first Station Mass in Rome last year when I was living in the beach boondocks.  To get there, I took 1 hour and 20 minute train ride, plus 10 minutes squashed on the Metro, plus a hard 15 minute walk uphill.   Now I live an easy half-hour walk away from the Santa Sabina, and I stayed in bed.  There was a paper that got in the way of waking up at 6 AM.  It was arguably one of the worst things I've written all year, but it still managed to keep me up until 2.  I figured that shirking responsibility and skipping school again was worse than breaking your Lenten resolution 6 hours after Lent officially starts - right?  (I know a priest who is going to give me a very hard time over this no matter what I say).

So, as I mentioned last year, Rome has a tradition of attending Mass at the city's oldest Churches for the 40 days of Lent.  Romans do it at night, the NACers (North American College priests) do it for English speakers in the morning.  Check out their website for some great Roman history - they give the best descriptions of Roman churches available, hands down.

Altogether, it's a great way to experience the many churches in Rome.  I experienced today's Santa Sabina - and the gross 70 year old sacristan who tried to kiss me there, eww - a couple of weeks ago, so I'm ok with missing it.  I'm going to my favorite San Agostino, where St. Monica is buried, instead tonight.  

Tomorrow is San Giorgio in Velabro.  Never heard of it.  I'll bring my camera.

Books (no beads nor bech)

Has it become apparent yet that I have two papers to write? Ripped from Facebook.  I'm not bothering with the love or star symbols . . .

The BBC says most people will apparently have read only 6 of the 100 books listed...

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Put in a note with your total in the subject


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9. The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman 
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - x 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x (half of it, anyways)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis x
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis  x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne 
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery  x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen  x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens  x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley  x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas  x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding   x (got me through my first break-up.  Graham Greene's The End of the Affair got my through my 3rd - why is he not on this survey?).
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett  x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  x (hated this book).
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray  x (parts of it)
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt x (half of it . . . it was boring)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (loved the movie!)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White  x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x (parts of it)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x (I agree - the horror).
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exupery 
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas  x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare  x (more times than I ever wanted to)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've read 39 (ok, some of those were only partial readings).  That's pretty respectable.

No man is an island. Papal proclamations and the like.

I tend to fall hook, line, and sinker for anything that John Paul II wrote about human relationships.  He has a way of taking philosophy, theology, and reality and meshing them together so poetically that my  heart literally starts nodding while I read him.  Unlike some who complain about his style, I find reading him fairly effortless.  Must be the English lit major in me rising up again . . .we can be more intuitional than logical at times, and I admit, John Paul II doesn't always explain all of his bases.  But for me, that has never been a problem.   You can convince yourself to accept a lot of things, but your soul doesn't need to be sold when it simply knows that something is true.

Nevertheless, Benedict's clarity has been a welcome infusion into my sporadic reading of papal proclamations.  For as much as I love John Paul's style of elucidation through relational imagery (despite the protests of you phenomenological nay-sayers), Benedict has a way of summarizing concepts that is direct and clear . . . and, well, German.  I like that.  What struck me about this speech, recently delivered to the Rome's Major Seminary - on the eve of the feast of Our Lady of Confidence, no less - was how he captured all of the mystery and poetry of John Paul II's insights about love and man's purpose, but synthesized it so much more concisely.   

"Man is not an absolute, being able to isolate himself and behave according to his own will.  This goes against the truth of our being.  Our truth is, above all, that we are creatures, creatures of God, and we live in relationship with the Creator.  We are rational beings, and only by accepting this relationship do we enter into truth, otherwise we fall into falsehood and, in the end, are destroyed by it."

Read the rest here.  It's good stuff.

He talks about everything that has been on my mind these last few months.  Love, and what it really means in practice.  The impossibility of existing or thriving as an isolated island.  How we, as human beings, need each other to experience the love of God, even when that love demands sacrifice, vulnerability, and pain.  The absolute necessity of bringing every aspect of our lives into the light and being whole.  How the truth and its light set us free and ultimately allow each one us to heal, even if it reveals all our ugliness and scars along the way.  How love means putting the good of the other person first, even when you've been hurt and it means you will continue to hurt.  That concept of dying to self for the good of another.  And what that all means when you're facing reality and crying out for both mercy and justice.  What using the word "love" demands from you - when that love is a reality but nothing like you expected.  When love cannot die, but must be somehow reshaped.

Amazing how the Pope realized that he needed to say something about all that.

"You probably all know St. Augustine's beautiful words: 'Dilige et fac quod vis -- Love and do what you will.'  What Augustine says is the truth, if we have truly understood the word 'love.'  'Love, and do what you will,' but we must really be penetrated by communion with Christ, having identified ourselves with his death and resurrection, being united to him in the communion of his body.  By participation in the sacraments, by listening to the word of God, the Divine Will, the divine law really enters our will, our will identifies with his, they become only one will and thus we are really free, we can really do what we will, because we love with Christ, we love in truth and with truth."

I love this man

Steele: GOP needs "hip-hop" makeover

I'm serious.  I really do.

Rip-off entertainment

The best advertisement I've seen in awhile caught my eye as I was taking a mini-bus down the Corso on my way home from work.  The Corso is an endless boulevard of shopping and commercialism chaos that extends from the monstrously huge Vittorio Emmanuele monument (otherwise known as the Wedding Cake for its huge white blobby layers of embellished, deck-out, golden-laced stone) to the equally huge Piazza del Popolo at the other end.  Normal buses can't go down the Corso, but mini-buses can.  Mini buses have 8 seats in them - 4 in the back facing forward, 4 next to the driver facing backwards, and about 5, maybe 6 feet in between the two.  

Needless to say, Italians try to squeeze about 47 people into this teeny death trap.  

But I digress.  

So, an underwear store had an poster in its window advertising a "buy 2 for this price" sort of sale.  This poster attempted to cater to the masses, and by that I mean Italians and tourists alike, and those who can understand English, and those who can't read, period.  To aid those who cannot read, they had line drawings depicting the different types of underwear they sold followed by "= 4 euro" etc.  

To appeal to Americans and the entire world, which were all recently blown away by the positive power of our new American president's amazing rhetoric, their sign proclaimed in big bold letters "YES WE CAN!!!!!"

The lovely underwear diagrams were directly underneath.

I've never seen Obama's horrid slogan, which conjures up images of the Little Engine That Could for me every single time, put to a better use.

Haircut and other such news

There is nothing more satisfying than being fed up with your circumstances and cutting your hair. It completely changes your outlook on life.  It makes you a new person.  A new person who has it together and looks GOOD.

Yep, I fulfilled that old stereotype and I merrily chopped off my own hair at 11:38 PM one night, after telling my laughing roommate that I would.  AND I LOVE IT.  It's nothing too drastic - NOT a return to the college boy-mop look (shudder).  It's just a bit above my shoulders with a couple of layers to emphasize the fact that I have curly crazy big hair.  I would show you the self-photo I just took on my Mac, but blogger won't let me upload anything.  :P  So until I make it to my school computer lab, you'll have to take my word for it that it looks good and that I don't have massive holes in my hairline.

In other news, I went to Siena with one of my friends to protest Valentine's Day.  I don't have much use for the Hallmark-fest this year (see note about fulfilling a stereotype above).  And everybody knows that you can't just sit around your house and be single on V-Day.  That makes you a loser.  So instead I ate wild boar and tried really hard to be reverent in front of St. Catherine's dried disconnected finger.  Bet I'm the only American who gets to say THAT about my Valentine's Day.  Pictures from that trip coming soon, too. 

School started again this week, and it looks like it's going to be a fun semester.  I have one class on Public Speaking and another on Media Training, so there are going to be a lot of cameras and classmates in front of my face for the next four months.  Bring it on.

I love Media Training so far.  I'm as shy as can be in some situations, but get me into a job interview or an interview of any sort - get me someplace where I *have* to perform to save my skin - and something inside of me just turns on.  I eat it up.  Something in me just decides I'm going to nail it.  So, since I go to a Catholicy school where they assume I am going to be a Catholic diocesan spokesperson, our "interview" questions mostly to have to do with controversial Catholic issues.  This week was abortion.  I think I was the only person in the class who didn't make reference to a single Catholic encyclical during the interview exercise - but I think it went really well.  I revealed my inner Italian and used my hands way too much.  Apparently, survival situations bring out my inner Italian voice too, because I somehow managed to rattle the whole thing out in Italian (with a healthy scattering of English words).  I completely baffled my classmates, who believe that I am literally retarded when it comes to speaking that language.  No, I'm dead serious - they make fun of my speaking abilities all the time, which is main reason I speak so terribly around them.  Doing the interview was infinitely satisfying in that regard.  The only problem is that now my professors think I can actually speak Italian, and they told me that they're never going to speak to me in English again.  Dang it.  I blew my cover.

Life is good.

St. Joseph novena

The thirty day novena to Saint Joseph begins either today or tomorrow. (I'm too tired to do the math, but I'm pretty sure it's today).  There's a traditional novena prayer that accompanies it, which I heard my mother pray so many times during my childhood that I still cannot read the words without hearing her Maltese accent in the background. 

Courage

You may or may not have heard about Eluana Englaro, an 39 year old Italian woman who was in a persistent vegetative state for 17 years following a car accident.  She passed away last week, 4 days after her food and water were suspended.  Consider her Italy's Terri Schiavo.  

Eluana's father Beppino Englaro went all the way to the highest Italian Court to receive the right to discontinue her nutrition and hydration, arguing that she would not have wanted to continue living in her current state.   The court granted his request after a series of appeals.  Since the nuns who had cared for Eluana for 14 years refused to comply with his wishes, Beppino had her moved to a hospital in Udine, Northern Italy, that was willing to carry out the court order.

A constitutional crisis emerged when emergency legislation designed to save Eluana's life was vetoed by President Giorgio Neopolitano.  Prime Minister Berlusconi then stepped in with his own legislation, vowing that he would go so far as to change the Italian Constitution if it would save her life (for the first time over here, I found myself saying Go Berlusconi).  The bill was expected to pass within 3 days.  Eluana passed away the evening of February 9, just as this measure was being debated on the Parliament floor.  The suddenness of her death was immediately questioned, as her conditions were reported as being stable the morning she died.  An autopsy is being performed.

My roommate and I happened to be watching TV online when she died.  It was remarkable to see how openly the news reporters expressed their  sadness over the turn of events.  A beautiful story just appeared on Zenit about an Italian missionary who returned a national award in protest of the President's refusal to save Eluana's life:

Cases like Eluana's can have happy endings

Father Trento lists four specific cases of comatose and "useless" people that he welcomed into his home and, quite simply, loved.  For those who are immune to the euthanasia debate, his imagery presents a powerful and compelling argument.  His no-nonsense statement challenges all of us to see the beauty and meaning inherent within life, regardless of a person's consciousness.

What are we going to do tonight, Brain?

Call me weird, but I don't like the idea of an external system telling my dishwasher what time to run itself.

Google taking a step into power metering

What's it going to do next, turn off my lights when it determines I don't need them?  

I will heartily admit to the immense debt of gratitude that I personally owe to Google and . . .those other search engines, whoever they are.  Without them, I could not find information.  (Hold that thought).  Or perhaps, I could find the information, but it would take 3 weeks.  But I'm starting to get creeped out by some of the functions that Google is creating.  

First, they want to put all my medical information online.  Ok . . . .why is this necessary?  Convenient, perhaps - but necessary?  What assurances are they going to give me that these files are being controlled, and that this sort of sensitive information will not get leaked or misused?  Don't call me paranoid.  They cannot even keep my credit card number a secret at Marshalls.  Top government agencies have information stolen.  Why should I trust Google? 

Then there's news about Google building massive data centers around the world (all details kept secret).  Interesting.  Ok, they want to be fast and have a competitive edge.  That makes sense.  But according to a story last month, they also want to eliminate your hard-drive, and store all of the information you currently have on your computer online.  Again, what about security breaches?

Then, I go onto Google Maps one day and discover that anyone can see a panoramic picture of my street, down to the stuff the dog left on the pavement.  

I just don't like that.  

I don't like that someone from Antarctica - or someone who's a psycho - can type in my address and see the street that I walk down every day and count the number of windows on my house. You can dismiss that as a personal complaint.  I would call it a privacy complaint.  But more importantly, what about the terrorists who use this wealth of information to plan attacks on city infrastructures?  Think about WWII movies back in the day.  It used to be a big deal for people to get in a plane and get aerial pictures of a particular location.  Now it's a click away.  Is the technology bad in itself?  No.  But is our security system threatened by this new elevated and easily-accessible level of information?  Arguably, yes.  And have our security officers stepped up to the challenge of this new technology?  That is left to be discovered.

It seems that every day there's a another piece of news about Google soaking up another section of information - books, geography, now energy consumption.  All of these are useful and would help to streamline systems.  But a red flag went up for me when I wrote the sentence in the first paragraph, that without Google, I could not find information (quickly).  If you've ever studied Public Opinion and the ways that we know what we know, you know that information is power, and that information can be manipulated, and that the public is not best served by information monopolies.

It does not appear to be a good idea to allow a privately owned global corporation, without any oversight from what I can tell, to have access and broadcasting rights to so many areas of our lives and infrastructures - many of which rightfully fall into the "personal"or "private" category.  Google is assuming the role of a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up information and blowing it to the four winds for anyone to use or manipulate as they choose.  I'm not calling for censorship: I'm calling for a consideration of what constitutes privacy, what gives Google the right to demand control over all of this information, and how exactly are they safeguarding the information we've handed over.  In other words, who's moving the vacuum cleaner back and forth, why, and what do we really think about it?  It's worth looking into.

One of them days

The good news is, I am pretty much done with finals today.  Just have to turn in the final copy of my desktop publishing project on Friday, and first semester is over.  Yay!

The bad news is, I deleted 45 minutes worth of podcast today while copying tracks from one place to another.  Apparently "copying" things in  Garageband doesn't mean that the new copied material is independent from its source.  Apparently if you delete the original recording thinking its safe and secure in its new location, the copied track disappears too.

Huh.  Fascinating little detail, that.  

File it under the "live and learn - and then make 50 backups" category.

The good news is, I went grocery shopping today and found . . . edible things . . .  that are sort of like potato chips.  I think a more accurate name would be a potato-based snack.  They take processing to a whole other level.  Unlike America, they actually admit on the front of the bag that they contain a maximum of 10% oils/fat.  "Crazy Chips" became my friends today.  My favorite part is the very very very small print at the bottom of the bag.  It reads, "L'immagine e puramente dimonstrativa."  I bet even  you can figure out what that means.  "The image (of plasticy looking potato-based edible things) is purely demonstrative."  

Their English translation of that phrase:  "Presentation advice."

Maybe they mean "Presentation advisory"?  You know, warning the faint-hearted that the food-like thing they just purchased might not look like the nice photo?

The bad news is, there's a ton of bad news today.  Friends being hit from the economic crisis, a devastating scandal breaking for the Legionaries of Christ, the Chicago cathedral's roof burning off . . .the world isn't doing so well.  A lot of things to keep in our prayers.

The final word is, I'm really happy that finals are coming to an end, and that my electronic To Do list has diminished from about 28 lines to 12.  That, my friends, is pure happiness in itself.  Buona notte.

Rainy Tuesday

This is true.

Sometimes I hate that it is. But it is.

"There are no safe investments . . . To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. . . the only place outside of heaven where you can be safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell." (C.S. Lewis)

Happy studying Sunday

It's been quite a week.  I had one exam last Monday, followed by a blessed week of time off.  Exams begin again tomorrow, and continue to come one-a-day until Thursday, when I shall finally be free.  Until then, it's a mad scramble to get everything done and properly crammed into my head.  

Exciting news of the week: I picked up an internship doing translation and editing work for a Rome-based Catholic news agency.  Life from now on is going to be busy, but lots of fun - I've always wanted to do something like this.  I figured out this weekend that I have, in fact, five jobs:

1. Schoolwork (sitting and class and doing assignments - with a laptop, these two can thankfully be combined)
2. Thesis (reading and writing)
3. Teaching my 2 year old Italian kid English ($$$)
4. Internship (couple afternoons a week and some weeknights)
5. Life (groceries, cooking, laundry, cleaning, saying hi to people every once and awhile, and sleep)

Let the day-planning and multi-tasking begin.  :)  Thank you, D.C. life training.

In the meantime, this weekend has been super-productive.  My friend and I spent all of yesterday putting together a podcast for one of our classes.  We have to produce 4 fifteen minute segments on any topic we like.  Technically, we had four months to do it, but we only just got around to doing it now.  Yes, so typical.  We're doing ours as a audio Student's Guide to Rome, with lots of touring information, food facts and and practical tips.  Researching it has been a blast!  I learned some of the most fascinating facts about areas of Rome.  

Macs make producing a podcast so easy, too.  All you do is open Garageband and record one track with audio and piece together another track with back-ground music.  I love stuff like that, so I happily took over the task of production.  When our program forces us to learn practical skills, I really appreciate the value of our program.

Guess I'd better get back to studying so I can actually graduate from it . . . .