No lie...

$2.5 million is being spent to consider alternate designs for the new campus center to avoid removing the Council Oak Tree. To be fair, the tree is featured in the UWEC crest, and has some sort of Indian significance, but it should also be remembered that the actual tree died... this is an impostor oak. This was decided in the same week that the city council approved the original plans.

The same chancellor who elected to save the tree (might I suggest that $2.5 million could have been used as an effective landscaping budget to place plenty of greenery around the new building) is also leading the Tour de Chancellor, to support clean commuting. Of course it's non-competitive.

The local Newman Center, when there are few people in the congregation, celebrates mass by inviting the congregation to surround the alter for the entirety of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, neglecting to kneel at all. A rather flagrant liturgical abuse huh? Unfortunately the kids here don't think so. Where did we go wrong? I've been Catholic for 6 months and I know that the congregation stays away from the alter until after the priest's communion. This rule is commonly violated when the army of alter server's assembles so that the distribution takes 7 seconds, during which the priest can hastily clean the vessels, and get right to the fun stuff: announcements! Even the most liberal Catholics kneel! What's up? They don't even have a crucifix on the wall. Not even a Lutheran no-Jesus crucifix. Not'in!

Serving as the representative for the all-male sanctuary which is Emmet Horan Hall to the Ideas and Improvements board of the Resident's Hall Association I realized that all improvements in modern society are going to come down to how green they are. The hand dryers currently installed in the resident hall bathrooms are worthless. Because they dry your hands so unsuccessfully, most people simply choose to use their pants, or walk away with wet hands. The proposal for a more effective method of drying your hands was proposed. Understanding that paper towels are perceived as ungreen, a more effective hand dryer was suggested. But unfortunately these hand dryers use more energy than the current ones. But the humorous kicker: if we improved the hand dryers, people would actually use them, which would even further increase energy use. Why don't car manufacturs start making cars that only go 3mph, so it ends up being more effective to just walk?

I'd like to add that the University is being sued by the Sierra club for burning coal in their power plant. What an awkward position for the ultra liberals to be in. Imagine it... your all puffed up because in a week your going to go biking to promote freezing your butt off in the middle of winter biking to school (global warming?), when you get slapped with a law suit for burning too much coal. I can just envision it:

Ultra-Liberals who run UWEC: We propose that we offset our carbon emissions with carbon credits, as long as you drop the law suit.
Sierra Club: But think of the irreparable damage you've done so far.
Ultra-Liberals who run UWEC: Fine, we'll pay for the last 116 years of coal use.
(aside) we'll just raise tuition.

Christian Perception

So many things in the Christian life are about perception. I will give a few examples, and please remember suffering is redemptive!:

Due to computer malfunctions, only 1/4 of my math lab was printed, and so me and my group only got 1/4 of the points. It would have all been a rather simple fix except that the computer was unable to save the file, so we had to do it again. Now, to the grade-grubbing girl in my group this was horrible. "Maybe we won't get full credit! Maybe we won't be able to figure it out again!" Oh! Ye of little perseverance! What a great opportunity to humble ourselves, one ought to think. We did all of the work, knew all of the stuff, and we didn't get the grade for it. We were cheated! What a wonderful opportunity to endure! And of course, as it always does, things turn out wonderfully if only you let God make it so. We re-did 2 hours of work in 30 minutes and got to go up to our math teacher's office, where he was sitting with his lights out on his computer. He got up, after I alerted him that his stapler was out of staples, and he says "it's dark in here! Oh wait, I didn't turn the lights on".

Lately I've been pondering the plights of parish priests. They must be very lonely people: they live, without a wife, with few friends who don't view him primarily as their priest... they live alone. But what a gift that really is! Mary was given an immense gift in remaining a virgin because she didn't have to complicate her life with sex. I'm surprised college students haven't realized this... Priests are given the gift of not having sex! So too, they are given the gift of being alone. Thomas a Kempis is unrelenting in his prohibitions against frivolous conversation: only those who love silence can break it; only those who hate company can have it. If we love any of these things we close ourselves off to the love of God. Now, I'm not saying that these men are never a little annoyed with their gifts; the likely feel as if they were the wife who received a washing machine for her birthday. But such wives are overly attached to material goods, and so too such priests are overly attached.

I have to walk 2 miles to mass on Sunday and 3 miles to confession on Saturday, and because of my club feet I often find myself limping around hoping to not step on my foot the wrong way and send pain shooting up to my knee, and then I screw something up from limping all the time, and it all goes down hill very quickly. But what an opportunity the Lord has given me! I can trust in him to make my walks bearable. And again, such trust is always rewarded in this world, but even our consolations you have to be prepared to receive. There is a joy which comes with giving yourself to God! Hearing a leaf scuttle across the pavement, or being able to crush little cherries falling from the tree by your foot, or having somebody say "hi" to you; what gifts from God! God knows just how to please us... he made us!

You'll never be able to bear any suffering if you insist upon the misery of it to yourself. If you insist on the necessity of what you don't have, if you dwell on the urge (wrong, or often times completely legitimate, right and healthy) that isn't satisfied in you. You have to mediate on the goodness of the Lord! You have to mediate on how good He is to you! Is it any wonder that the Psalms, despite the rather undesirable life the Jews lived, are constantly filled with commands to meditate on the goodness of the Lord, to Love him, etc. I stopped observing feast days while praying the LoH for a while because the actual psalms often come from the First Sunday's psalms, and they are just obnoxiously gushing with praise of God. What a foolish man I am!

Mere Semantics

"Please discard your cigarette's in the proper recepticle".

Teacher>> What is wrong with the above sentence? Billy, do you know?
Billy>> Well yes... I think that cigarettes should not have an appostrophy. It isn't possesing anything.
Teacher>> Yes Billy! Absolutly correct.

That is a scene which ought to be played out in 2nd grade classrooms across America, and yet, sadly, on college campuses today employees much older than Billy prove to have much less control over the English language. Another example, though perhaps more picky:

"Please do not walk in the flower beds, it is killing the flowers".

Here we have a comma seperating two complete sentences. I should point out that what seperates me from any real grammarian is that I have no clue what that missused comma is called. No, I am just an ordinary guy who knows the English language. At any rate, you cannot seperate two complete sentances with a comma. A period is most commonly used for this, though (my personal preferance) a semi-colon can be used. Observe:

WRONG: Dick went to the store, Bill went to school.
CORRECT: Dick went to the store. Bill went to school.
CORRECT: Dick went to the store; Bill went to school.
OR EVEN: Dick went to the store while Bill went to school.

We have a wonderful language, and it pains me to see it trampled on like this. Or perhaps I should say:

Please do not trample on the English language; it is making us sound like idiots.

Allocate Your Profanities... Please!

So I'm in the laundry room, throwing my clothes into the dryer, and as I vacate the washing machine another member of the Most Honorable All-Male Emmet Horan Hall is tossing his clothes into the washer. He finishes throwing them in, and realizes he forgot his detergent. But this wasn't an passive forgetting... no. His response to this event was "holy fuck!".

And it occurred to me that, 1) not only is it a problem that college students are SO PROFANE, but 2) they don't bother to think of what they are actually saying. Something like forgetting your detergent deserves a "darn!" or possibly even "shit!", if your having a particularly bad day. But at the point when "holy fuck!" becomes your expletive for forgetting your detergent, what are you going to use for anything else? Nothing holds any meaning any more. You've reached the top with forgetting your detergent! If your leg gets run over by a car, your verbal reaction can be no more emphatic than forgetfulness. If you hammer your thumb into the wall, you got nothing. There is a 104 step stairwell to my dorm here at Eau Claire; you fall down that and, if you can still speak, you got nothing. See the problem?

College students just don't think about what they are saying any more. Requesting God to damn something is a grave act that, well, really isn't our job, right or option. Why can't girls say "I don't intend to be mean/rude/obnoxious" instead of "I don't intend to be a bitch"? It's even more descriptive! You can't carry a conversation with most, even the most gentile of girls without them using God's name in vain. Nothing is ever difficult or confusing any more: it's fucked up.

My roommate is from China, and he tells me that Chinese has far more expletives than English. Perhaps that is our problem: there simply aren't enough words to go around? No! There are plenty of words to go around. I know them because a) I learned them in school and b) I think! The epidemic of poor choice of words infects all words. Look at the word 'decent'. Most people truncate the second syllable these days, saying simply "dec" to describe something which is adequate, sufficient or mediocre, acceptable, unexceptional, or, if words with 3 or more syllables scare you, fair or good.

Please, allocate your profanities properly! I don't care if you say, as drummer Phil Hay did, "I might use words that you guys aren't used to", but at least he did so intelligently!

Liturgia Horarum

Lately I've been clutching to my Liturgia Horarum. I don't normally pray Matins, principally because I can't understand the readings, and it is called "The Office of Readings" in the new hours. As an aside, I love that the hours have their own atitudes. Lauds is such a "isn't God great!" type of hour (which is why I thought the insertion of Psalm 42 (43) was a bit odd today...),while Compline is a "I'm horrible! The world is horrible! Save me God!" type of hour, and Vespers strikes me as the happy medium; the perfect hour to pray before dinner, when that 4 o'clock slouch hits you. At any rate, lately the readings (of Matins) have been coming from Jeremiah and The Imitation of Christ, two books that I happen to have. So, in fulfillment of my promise to sport some more Latin (which will always be in italics) on this blog I present to you the readings from Matins today, Tuesday in the Twenty Second week of Ordinary Time:

De libro Ieremiae prophetae (20,7-18)
(English Translation)

seduxisti me Domine et seductus sum
fortior me fuisti et invaluisti
factus sum in derisum tota die
omnes subsannant me

quia iam olim loquor vociferans
iniquitatem et vastitatem clamito
et factus est mihi sermo Domini
in obprobrium et in derisum tota die

et dixi non recordabor eius
neque loquar ultra in nomine illius
et factus est in corde meo quasi ignis exaestuans
claususque in ossibus meis et defeci ferre non sustinens

audivi enim contumelias multorum
et terrorem in circuitu
persequimini et persequamur eum
ab omnibus viris qui erant pacifici mei et custodientes latus meum
si quo modo decipiatur et praevaleamus adversus eum
et consequamur ultionem ex eo

Dominus autem mecum est quasi bellator fortis
idcirco qui persequuntur me
cadent et infirmi erunt
confundentur vehementer quia non intellexerunt
obprobrium sempiternum quod numquam delebitur

et tu Domine exercituum
probator iusti qui vides renes et cor
videam quaeso ultionem tuam ex eis
tibi enim revelavi causam meam

cantate Domino laudate Dominum
quia liberavit animam pauperis
de manu malorum

maledicta dies in qua natus sum
dies in qua peperit me mater mea
non sit benedicta

maledictus vir qui adnuntiavit patri meo
dicens natus est tibi puer masculus
et quasi gaudio laetificavit eum

sit homo ille ut sunt civitates
quas subvertit Dominus
et non paenituit eum
audiat clamorem mane et ululatum in tempore meridiano

qui non me interfecit a vulva
ut fieret mihi mater mea sepulchrum
et vulva eius conceptus aeternus

quare de vulva egressus
sum ut viderem laborem et dolorem
et consumerentur in confusione dies mei


E Libro De imitatione Christi (Lib. 3, 14)
(English Translation)
1. Intonas super me judicia tua, Domine, et timore ac tremore concutis omnia ossa mea et expavescit anima mea valde. Sto attonitus et considero, quia cæli non sunt mundi in conspectu tuo. Si in Angelis reperisti pravitatem, nec tamen epercisti, quid fiet de me. Ceciderunt stellæ de cælo, et ego pulvis quid præsumo? Quorum opra videbantur laudabilia, ceciderunt ad infima, et qui comedebant panem Angelorum, vidi siliquis delectari porcorum.
2. Nulla est ergo sanctitas, si manum tuam retrahas, Domine. Nulla sapientia prodest, si gubernare desistas. Nulla juvat fortitudo, si conservare desinas. Nulla secura castitas, si eam non protegas. Nulla propria prodest custodia, si non adsit tua sancta vigilantia. Nam relicti mergimur et perimus; visitati autem: vivimus et erigimur. Instabiles quippe sumus, sed propter te confirmamur; tepescimus, sed a te accendimur.
3. O, quam humiliter et abjecte mihi de me ipso sentiendum est, quam nihili pendendum est si quid boni videor habere. O, quam profunde me submittere debeo sub abyssalibus tuis judiciis, Domine; ubi nihil aliud me esse invenio, quam nihil et nihil. O, pondus immensum, o pelagus instransnatabile, ubi nihil de me reperio, quam in totum nihil. Ubi est ergo latebra gloriæ? Ubi confidentia de gloria concepta? Absorpta est omnis gloria vana in profunditate judiciorum tuorum super me.
4. Quid est omni caro in conspectu tuo? Numquid gloriabitur lutum contra formantem se? Quomodo potest erigi vaniloquio, cujus cor in veritate subjectum est Deo? Non eum totus mundus erigeret, quem sibi subjecit veritas. Nec omnium laudantium ore movebitur, qui totam spem suam in Deo firmavit. Nam et ipsi qui loquuntur, ecce omnes nihil, et deficient cum sonitu verborum. Veritas autem Domini manet in æternum.