Thursday, July 27, 2006

State of the Blogger

My faithful/pretty steady/downright two-timing readers,

As the pictures below indicate, I am back from the realm of little-to-no-internet-access. It is good to post pictures to Blogger. It is bad to deal with the large number of e-mails waiting in my inbox.

I spent six weeks in Los Gatos, CA at a retreat center. I went on retreat for a week at the beginning of June, stayed on as a volunteer employee for three weeks, worked as a camp councilor the last two weeks. The retreat went fairly well. Playing mute is easy, defeating mental distractions hard. The priests were good. They implanted important principles and realizations, which will serve as reminders every time I completely forget to act according to all of my noble resolutions.

Currently feeling neither literary nor poetic about my prose. Not sure why. Uncertainty about style pesters composition of each sentence. A picture is worth a thousand words. Eight hundred and forty-eight more words until this post is photo ready.

The volunteer work was eclectic, laid back. Fr. Emily decided to redecorate. We painted different color swatches on the walls. The reception room wall could have passed for inept modern art. During Fr. Emily’s trip to France—vacation with the family, a priests’ retreat, and participating in the Society’s general chapter—we tore out the waiting room ceiling. Then we removed the roof. A new roof was built while I was counseling the boys’ camp (the camp was very upset; after one session of counseling the camp, I had to send the camp to a real shrink).

That joke looks quite lame.

The boys’ camp was good and bad, terrific and terrible, sweet and sour, straight up and straight trippin’. The vast majority of the campers were good kids. I made some good friends. Shout out to my main man in Boise, Nicolas Giblon, a.k.a. The Giblonic Cronic. This guy is straight up gangsta, insofar as a traditional catholic into organic foods and Gregorian Chant can be gangsta.

Also became good friends with Brother Henry who was moved to Los Gatos in January. He is awesome, funny, a good listener, and, most importantly, sane.

Hoping all y’all have a good three remaining weeks of summer. I have less than ten pages left in War and Peace and have had less than ten pages for at least three weeks now. I have no thesis work done.

--Kakashi

P.S. Tommy: I installed Lightroom, but it runs somewhat slowly. I think if I clear up some hard drive space it might run faster (i.e. bigger cache size and my HD is fragmented something awful).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

john, his offhand sspx comments are going to get you in trouble. vatican secret service is already tapping your phones...

Anonymous said...

Seriously, John. Watch yourself.

Kakashi said...

Good lord. Is the Vatican Secret Police reading my blog? I hope they leave comments.