Yikes
Hey everyone,
sorry I haven't posted much lately. At least it's still the same month. I don't even have any great insights - I'm saving that for Kierkegaard (who I must admit I started to like in "Fear and Trembling" until he completely lost me in the final third of the book), and Nietzche (whom I've read about 10 pages of and dislike already). Also, if anyone has any thoughts on whether progressivism is more communitarianist or liberal in its idealogy, let me know!
I went to Fr. Jenkins' inauguration this weekend, which was interesting. I liked his address a lot. He seemed very courageous in stressing that Catholicism is an essential nature of ND, and in that's why ND is great. He pretty pointedly mentioned that a lot of top 20 schools have lost their religious nature, impressive given that most of them had representatives in the audience. He also went through JPII's ideals for Catholic universities. At the same time, he talked about diversity, especially religious, and said that if we were to be exclusively Catholic, we would be less Catholic, which I thought was a nice way to phrase things. And he had a great Benedict joke - he pointed out that our former President once removed, Fr. Hesburgh, had invited Ratzinger to be a theology professor here. "Just imagine what he could have made of himself had he come here!" Jenkins joked. :)
One more ND thing...the funniest flash animation I've seen for a long time can be found
here.
Free write!
I love vanilla ice cream cones, so simple and good bringing back visions of childhood summers and licking the drips off your chin. Afternoon sun poking in through my window peeking through the trees intruding on my own little digital world, keeping me connected to bigger and better things...i have a very strange relationship with homework, i can never decide if i have lots to do or nothing at all. maybe that's what happens when you like to work ahead, sometimes you realize you're ahead, but then you're stressed out when you realize how much more getting ahead you have to do. by getting ahead i mean finishing stuff more than say twelve hours before its due. now i'm just kind of typing because i could be thinking about the constitutionality of the court case muller v. oregon, or contemplating the parable of the ring in lessing's Nathan the Wise or reading wuthering heights or practicing violin in prep for orchestra...but instead i'm doing none of those, just typing. which isn't such a bad thing, i don't think. i mean, what's all this education for except for teaching me how to think and communicate? isn't that what i'm doing right now? Andrea said that the point of a liberal arts education is so that you can learn that you don't know anything, and can't ever know anything for sure. I think that's kind of true. but this is veering towards an actuall train of thought and not a free write. So, back to the randomness, clickity clack my keys are saying as i hit them, ironic that the only reason that they made that noise was that i was typing "clickity clack" ooh that girl out the window has a pretty skirt, i think i saw her earlier today in music history. oh yes it's my birthday soon, i'm excited to be 19. that to me is the last romantic age (no offense to anyone) but anyway its the last age to be tall and slender with stars in your eyes dancing with many boys and maybe just one in particular and full of ideals and virtue before the real world starts to rub the tarnish off, which is why i think of Rilla of Ingleside as perpetually 19. Although i don't know why i think of the real world hitting at twenty, in fact i'm pretty sure it doesn't. still, just being that much closer to having to be (horror of horrors) actually grown up kind of makes you grown up in and of itself. but see 18 also isn't tall and slender and idealistic, its officially grown up and processed and stodgy and scared. you can't have stars in your eyes the day that you're officially old enough to buy lottery tickets. 19 knows what happened at 18 so it's allowing itself a breath before plunging in to another decade. like a slip of paper that one puts in a book to mark the place. Speaking of which, i left a very important paper somewhere, i'm going to go make sure i can find it. toodles
