New Adventure

I have moved to Los Angeles, specifically Pasadena. There are likely more job opportunities here in L.A. (even granting that it is the worst market in the nation) than there are in Sterling, and I only need a short-term, dead-end job to pay me $1000 per month till next July - hardly high expectations. Worst case scenario, I stay here till Thanksgiving and then tell M&D I've gotta come home, covered in shame. 


My goal in short term work is only to occupy myself till my longer-term plans shape up, and these are:

• Grad school. I am shaping my application to University of Dallas. I need to write a couple essays and destroy the GRE. I am unlikely to be accepted (they accept only five to seven of thirty to thirty five applicants), but I know I will not be accepted if I do nothing, so why not take the chance? Were I to be accepted, I would choose U of D over both alternatives.
• Great Hearts Academies. Kian Mapes contacted me and encouraged me to renew my late application for next year. I would likely hear little till February, so this is a pot on the back burner.
• Seminary. No, it hasn't gone away. More and more I begin to suspect I am being called to the priesthood. I met with a vocations director, and though I missed the August 2011 deadline, he said everything on his end had already been approved, and all that remained was a formal interview with him and the Archbishop Michael Sheehan. There is a good chance I could be in seminary next fall.

So these are my options, and I need to think about working through them (especially all the hoop-jumping required of the first) even as I write my letters, read my books, and search for gainful employ.

Sweat

Sweat is a remarkable substance, but it has only been made clear to me recently how remarkable. For the present I live in an exceptionally humid part of the world; my sister traveling in India says it is hotter here in the States on our parents' farm than it is in Mumbai. Annapolis is a comparable level of heat, and in both places one sweats at the slightest movement, even when one is reading.

Sooner or later this frustrated me and I felt restless. So in the hottest part of the day I went for a run. Predictably the sweat covered me entirely and when I came back I was wet indeed. For some reason I did not take a shower but sat happy as a clam in front of my bedroom fan. The sweat rolled off me, and when I dried something was different: the humidity did not affect me and I even shivered from the breeze.

Now this was something wholly unprecedented and I was unsure how to take it, aside from the sheer joy I felt. I knew a run in cold weather made tolerating the cold inside (I keep my house at fifty-five degrees in the winter) easier, but never dreamed that exercising in hot weather caused one's body to cool itself more efficiently, despite knowing, as we all do, that sweat is the method by which our body cools itself. I mean, duh. I even eventually showered and everything stayed the same. So I suppose this means I have adjusted from the desert to the humid plains, and shall have no more difficulties. Needless to say, this pleases me, and makes me turn an appreciative, benevolent eye to that once odious substance which now signals relief from the fire of the sun.

Power

I suspect that power is the fundamental human desire, not pleasure. Pain we willingly tolerate and even choose for ourselves, so long as it is at our terms, but a loss of power, even without corresponding pain, is more infuriating than anything else. 


Clumsily written. The highest pleasure lies in achieving one's way.

Fear

When Nature is angry and does something never-before-seen, one becomes a frightened pagan, realizing with horror how very small and truly insignificant one really is and always has been.

I pride myself on my fearlessness - in truth I fear little during daylight hours, and a modicum of danger I find exciting. Nature and harm to my other selves is what frightens me, and this morning with the howling, shrieking wind and sheets of driving rain caused me not a little unease.

Graduation and Other Matters

Saturday, 21 May, 10:30 AM, I walked the stage and received my diploma. Big day. Biggest day of my life. A large chapter finished that morning and a new, dark, and obscure one began. I have no idea if the author is drunk or sober, but I suspect I'm in for a wild ride.


The facts: five years ago I was in the Boundary Waters, on the way to reclaiming my faith. Several weeks later I would fall to my knees in Smith Hall and vow to spend my life in service to God no matter what I wound up doing. I shortly thereafter abandoned my military aspirations and applied to and was accepted by, St. John's College at Santa Fe, New Mexico. Over the next four years my intellect, mind, and spirit were shaped and transformed to an almost unrecognizable degree. The school year was spent in Santa Fe with a brief excursion in Annapolis; the summers at my second home, HoneyRock Camp. I met men and women there whom I hope to hold as friends for the rest of my life, and my devotion to God increased during those periods in the North. St. John's and HoneyRock; reason and revelation.


To give an overview of even only my intellectual change would be too tedious and exhausting to write, and worthless, since no one could possibly read such a thing, not even me. Suffice it to say I do not have many answers, only that I am beginning to know what the right questions are and how to ask them. I have a love for books that I did not have, and an ability to read and write that I could not have dreamed of possessing in 2007, though even there it is in dire need of improvement. I met good people there too; friends I wish to hold for the rest of my life.


But what now? I am an alumnus of St. John's College, and currently unemployed. I know what I would like to do, and I have written of it here before, but I do not quite know the next step, though I recently discovered something which intrigued me: teaching at a liberal arts charter school in Phoenix, Arizona: Great Hearts Academies. I came away from St. John's a zealot for liberal education. I know what it can do and I have seen what benefit it has provided me and my classmates. I think that teaching the liberal arts is something I would be good at doing, something I would enjoy doing, and best of all, something which would be good for me to do. Great Hearts thus would be a stepping stone; I should still like to attend grad school, and armed with a doctorate, teach at a liberal arts university like Thomas Aquinas College or something like that. Perhaps even my alma mater would be a possibility, but I doubt that.


I applied to Great Hearts (and a number of overseas English teaching positions too), but am still waiting to hear from someone...anyone. Naturally this makes me nervous, for though I have enough money saved to make about a year's worth of student loans, I should very much prefer to find work by September. The alternative career path is still open, but I am beginning to suspect that if indeed I should go there, now is not the right time.


But still - waiting, hoping, unsure.

Renunciation and Second Plans

I am not happy with the last post. So I renounce it in entirety. I shall start over.

I shall, Dei volonte, graduate in late May. Six months afterwards, I must either be employed or in school. Now for some time I have longed to enroll in graduate school and work towards a Ph.D in Philosophy or Classics. I should very much like to be able to read Greek and Latin fluently, and I love ancient philosophy more than I can say. Plato and Aristotle, not to mention the Greeks in their entirety, seem more honest, more wonderful, and more true than anything modern I have yet read. There is a sense of dramatic, almost childlike wonder about them and a passionate love for the truth I have found nowhere else save perhaps the medievals. So either I should like to attend a school where they take Greece seriously and I can write a dissertation on Plato's understanding of Being, or else find a reputable Classics department and study there in the spirit of Seth Benardete. That is my greatest short-term goal.

But whence from there? Ultimately I think I shall become a priest. Obviously that is an immense decision, but it is the direction I have been leaning for almost five years now. That means seminary, talking with priests, etc.

The first option was to try and do that immediately after graduation. That meant applying to graduate school in the fall. But I also knew I wanted to take a year off, which complicates things; it means finding a job to pay off a year's worth of student loans, which means job hunting before the loans kick in. I have a little money saved - maybe enough to fend off a year of payment, though I would be flat broke come next fall. The JET program seemed like a perfect solution, for it pays well, offers overseas living, and was something I very much wanted to do. I applied and did not make the interview. So here I am starting over. I realize I had counted on getting into JET more than I thought, and the rejection was not a little disappointing. So in the short term here is what I need to do:

• Find a job as soon as possible. I had hoped to find something fulfilling, but I need to stand on my own two feet, and if flipping burgers is necessary for that, I shall act precisely thus. 
• Study for and take the GRE. Destroy it. Judging from people I know who have taken it, this should be only a minor challenge. 
• Apply to grad school and seminary simultaneously, deferring the latter if accepted at the former. 
• Work out the developing logistical details. 

This is a considerable amount of work to be done. I know how to make abstract plans well, but I did that before graduating high school and look how that turned out. I cannot at present imagine anything better than a Braniff education/St. Paul Seminary tag team, but I would have said the same five years ago about the Army. Further, I wish to please my holy God in making these plans, and I want to work his will in my life. Coming rapidly to a point where I must quickly make major decisions which will have great impact on my life, I am not sure how to go about this. Do I halt all activity on my part and wait for God to grant me the answer by dispensation? Do I resolutely proceed with the best possible decision I can make at the moment? Do I fast, pray, and seek God and make inquiries about jobs and schools simultaneously? If this is the answer, how will I know what his will is for me, and that it is not just my own desires, again in the case of the Army? St. Matthew seems to provide a sort of answer, but again interpretation becomes a problem. There must be some sort of self-negation, coupled with the faith that God shall direct the result into something greater than what I by my own efforts could produce. Needless to say, that is the hardest thing I have yet faced.

So there I am: lost, frightened, and confused in the infinite sea of will, seeking desperately direction, purpose, and final cause, the antidotes to despair.

Sick For The First Time In A Long Time

I hate being sick. I was intending to make this an absence-free semester in class, but I came down with some nasty chest-cold variant of the flu. This knocked out my being present for three classes. One of those classes was a seminar on Capital, which I was most sad to miss. I have been coughing up bloody mucus for awhile now, and being sick is wearying to the soul. I am unable to focus on my reading, and moving is impossible without going into a spasm of coughing Raistlen would be proud of.

At least it is almost over. It roughed up Writing Period, and consequently my essay was a little inferior to how I envisioned it, but so much the worse. Everything begins again tomorrow, and I have bigger things to think about, like what on earth I will do when I graduate. I either need to be in school or employed in six months, which makes it almost December when they kick in. But as far as this direction goes, I cannot see my purpose. I want to go to grad school in some classics department and earn a Ph.D studying the Greeks and finish up with seminary and the priesthood, but I cannot see how to do any of that. I need a car desperately and instead am $22,000 in the hole, have neither taken nor prepared for the GRE, and have not remotely begun my applications anywhere. Throw me a bone, God!

I need a win. And I need direction. But till then, I will try and boost my GPA and revel in this period of study. Some anime and Final Fantasy VIII on the side when I get home will finish the short-term picture.

It's almost time to enter real life. Sure could use that $20k..

Drunk Nephew

This is what happens when Geoff gives Caedmon alcohol. I am going to save this picture for the next nineteen years and give it to him on his 21st when I buy him his first drink.

Emergency

My computer took sick. I am backing up all important files online in a last-ditch attempt to save him. Alighieri may rise again yet. But in the meantime...