Thirsty

In being accepting of your friends' choices, despite your own thoughts on the worth of those choices, are you stringing your friends along? Are you holding them back from what they could become? Where do you draw the line on what to say?

Assuming or clueless?

God does not condemn us to Hell; God wishes all humans to be saved. He will love us to all eternity, but there will exist the possibility that we do not accept that love and do not respond to it. And the refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, that precisely is the meaning of Hell. Hell is not a place where God puts us, it's a place where we put ourselves. The doors of Hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside. - Kallistos Ware

We bridled at that last bit, drew ourselves up to our full heights, insisted defensively on our competence, on the respect we were due because of all our hard work. We looked for others whose lives were similarly overstuffed; we found them. "This is just the way it is," we said to one another on the train, in the restaurant. "This is modern life. Maybe some people have time to measure things out by teaspoonfuls." Our voices dripped contempt for those people who had such time. We felt oddly defensive, though no one had accused us of anything. But not me. Not anyone who has a life. I have a life. I work hard. I play hard.

Well, starting last week, I am now the "Network Czar" at my employer. Or something to that effect, it'll probably go down as "Lead Network Administrator" or "Senior Network Administrator" on my resume. I was about 90% surprised at the offer, I had heard rumours, but never took them seriously or counted on them. This was after 17 months as Systems Administrator for a particular subset of my employers operations. The Good: - great resume material. very great. - a means to further accelerate my debt elimination, thereby achieving freedom from financial chains - more professional and career challenges than ever before. more systems, more interaction with more people. more responsibility. more technologies. more logistics. The Bad: - now directly responsible for Micro$oft servers. i must now play more nicely than ever before. - yanked out of the cozy BCK community, and into the sea of chaos. - i replaced a long-time employee. e...

This week's bulletin at my parish included a good mnemonic exercise for praying (well, more of the petition aspect of praying, but you can insert "gratitude" into each item as well, to complete it). It's called the Five Finger Prayer : Your thumb is nearest to you. So begin your prayer by praying for those closest to you. Pray for your family and your friends. The next finger is the pointing finger. Pray for those who teach, instruct, and heal. This includes priests, deacons, religious Sisters, teachers, doctors, nurses, judges, attorneys and all counselors. They need support and wisdom in pointing others in the right direction. Keep them in your prayers. The next finger is the tallest finger. It reminds us of our leaders. Pray for our religious leaders—our Pope, our Bishops and Pastors. Also pray for our President, all government leaders and all leaders in business and industry. These people shape our church and our nation and they guide public opinion...

A new free webmail service called ippimail is currenly in it's beta stage. I found it via Open Source Disaster Relief - by Email ( Smart Mobs ), which linked to it via WorldChanging . Each time you use Ippimail, 10% of profits go to the Open Source Community. Of the remainder, 50% goes to the charity of your choice and 50% is given back to you by way of improving Ippimail. Join us and help us reach our target of raising $1m/day for charities all over the world. I've always looked with disgust on how marketing has literally overrun the internet and most other public forums. But until now, I've never really thought about harnessing that as a "resource" for my own nefarious desires for "good". I can see myself being a little more patient with those flashy ads if I was assured that the pennies paid to gnaw at my screen real estate were kinda like me putting my pocket change in the collection basket. Maybe this site will be a success (how coul...

Dear Abby, I am a crack dealer in Beaumont, Texas who has recently been diagnosed as a carrier of HIV virus. My parents live in Fort Worth & one of my sisters, who lives in Pflugerville, is married to a transvestite. My father & mother have recently been arrested for growing & selling marijuana. They are financially dependent on my other 2 sisters, who are prostitutes in Dallas. I have 2 brothers, one is currently serving a non-parole life sentence at Huntsville for the murder of a teenage boy in 1994. My other brother is currently in jail awaiting charges of sexual misconduct with his 3 children. I have recently become engaged to marry a former prostitute who lives in Longview. She is a part time "working girl". All things considered, my problem is this: I love my fiancé & look forward to bringing her into the family, & I certainly want to be totally open & honest with her. So, my question is this: Should I tell her about my cousin who supports ...

I guess I have no place in thinking about this, because I'm not a woman and so will never be placed in this situation. But this is probably the most controversial degree to which one can hold an anti-abortion/pro-life stance. What do y'all think? It speaks directly to the "abortion only for the safety of the mother" issue. ROME, January 26, 2005 - The official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, wrote on Tuesday that a woman who refused cancer treatment to save the life of her unborn child is a "hero." "She was aware that if she gave birth she wouldn't have had any hope of surviving," the Vatican paper wrote. "Despite that she went through with her choice, the choice of welcoming new life even at the cost of her own death." Rita Fedrizzi 41, who refused the abortion and cancer treatment, joins the ranks of a number of other women praised by the Holy See for their lifegiving sacrifice. Last year, Pope John Paul II ...

LifeSiteNews.com NewsBytes How lying marketers sold Roe v. Wade to America http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI... US Supreme Court Refuses to Reinstate 'Terri's Law' http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewFlash.asp?Page=%5CThisH... Poll: Roy Moore choice of GOP voters http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/b... Dutch baby euthanasia warrants no prosecution http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI... Abortionist 'flushed babies down toilet' http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI... New measure requires religious groups to hire homosexuals http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI... Catholics gather signatures against late-term abortions in Germany http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=2879 Quebec has controversial proposals for Tory convention http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2005/01/23/90... Austrian Catholic Church declines http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satell...

Weekday evenings fly by. I really need to be more productive during them. But it feels so good to lay back and watch TV for a coupla hours. hmm... maybe unplug my TV? Right now I'm blasting Damien Rice, which I snagged from Theresa when she came over this weekend. I also watched two movies; Sneakers is a classic which I always enjoy, but I saw The Village as well, for the first (and second!) time. I actually really really enjoyed it, I think it has become a favorite of mine. There's no snippet or quote that captures what I like about it, it really only exists as a whole. Friday night I managed to get Oracle 9i installed on one of our new servers at work. The biggest problem was that the installer relied on an obsolete version of glibc, so I had to compile a bit of code to be preloaded by glibc prior to calling the installer. Oracle has always been a black box to me so it was pretty exhilirating when I finally got in to the SQL prompt. I'm slowly becoming more...

Guess what I did last night? :) My tailbone hurts, my wrists hurt, my neck hurts, and my arms and shoulders are still weak. You get one guess. I left work a half hour early, and drove about an hour and a half north, with Young, a co-worker of mine here at SMS. He took me to a place he's been to quite a bit, and he had an extra board. So I just had to rent boots for $10 and buy a lift ticket for $20, for 3 hours of painful learning. Every time down the hill I picked up a tiny bit more, and by the end of the evening my legs and arms were shaking, my head was spinning, and I could make it down a run even doing slow 360's and just barely going in every direction that a snowboarder naturally goes! (It took awhile to be able to turn around and kinda go backwards on my toes instead of heels.) There were a couple times that I was sure I bruised my tailbone, or pinched a nerve in my neck, or fractured a wrist. But lo and behold, I'm fine. Can't wait to go again...

In honor of today's verse of the day , a site feed discovered with David 's help, Philippians 2:14-16 : Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life–in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor for nothing. ... I'd like to endorse an excellent piece of reading for your blogroll: HeroicStories: Restoring Faith in Humanity... One Story at a Time . Every few days a new entry is posted containing one short story, and some followup on previous stories. You can see the most recent issue here , receive each one by email , or subscribe to the feed with your favorite blogroll utility . In your quest for peace and unity, don't forget to add a little positive peer pressure into the mix. Avoiding bad doesn't help if you're not looking for goo...

Continuing my informal series on transcultural Catholicism, this morning I attended my first Polish Mass, with a buddy from back home who was in town, Matt. We pried our eyelids open in time to make it to the 9:30AM at St. Mary of the Angels , in the Bucktown neighborhood, real close to where Dean lives. As usual, it was a nourishing experience. As always, it was a blunt demand for me to shift my focus away from myself. I finally rationalized part of why I enjoy doing this sort of thing: participating in the Mass in another language or within another culture forces me to pay closer attention to what's going on, and what's really happening. I may never have heard these words in Polish before, but if I've habitualized the ritual, I can join in worship with such diverse human beings. I can learn to sort our common ground from our unique paths. I spent basically all weekend with Dean, Matt, and five of Matt's classmates from a Ph.D. program at Washington Universit...

The numbers keep going up. Now, reports indicate that Saddam Hussein received at least $21.3 billion in oil kickbacks from the $64 billion program. Also, the value of other fraud related to the scandal associated with the United Nations’ Oil for Food program are supposed to be twice as high as previously reported. The amount of money and the complex network of corruption defy belief. Nevertheless, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hints that its “staggering” disclosures have just begun. The fact that so-called “humanitarians” profited enormously from a program that was supposed to benefit the poorest of the poor is appalling. - The United Nations’ Oily Outrage Is this editorial accurate? If so, can we blame Bush's continual reluctance in submitting to the UN? Most recently in the Tsunamai relief efforts. If it's not, I need to start studying the UN even more. It's a fascinating structure. Kinda wish I would have talked to some of the "Model UN...

Testing - sending this from my cellphone! :)

In my parish, Holy Name, the largest organized ethnic group are the Filipinos. Last night I attended the 2nd annual Holy Name celebration of Simbang Gabi, a festive mass with many connections to Filipino culture. It centers around the star of Bethlehem, celebrating the choice Mary made for us, and encouraging us to ourselves become a star of Bethlehem, welcoming that young family into our hearts each year anew. I was actually surprised that not that many other non-Filipinos attended, since it had been publicized for weeks leading up to it. Maybe because it's only the 2nd one. Anyway, many of the songs were in Tagalog, and had the music/lyrics in a program they had distributed. It was great to get the chance to immerse in the ritual worship set to the tone of a completely different culture. One of the best parts was recognizing the Gloria being sung, in Tagalog. Ritual can be such a powerful thing! Because I've sang this week in and week out all my life, it was suc...

Here I sit, with the customary clutter surrounding me, the hours sliding by ceaselessly. It's atypical that I'm even writing this at a decent hour; over the last week or so I've been letting the night overtake me. Somehow I always slip back into my nonproductivity. At least I can say this time it hasn't been as long as previous times. It's been less than a week since my declination. Just last Wednesday I spent a couple of hours at Catholic Charities , my second week in a row helping with a Wednesday night meal for about 130 homeless folks. The first week I came with a few other young adults through my parish, and then I asked if they could use any help on a more frequent basis since my parish only helps maybe once per month. So they let me come again last week, though there ended up being a little less work for me. A couple of saturday's ago I went with about 15 other young adults from my parish to spend the morning with a bunch of other volunteer groups ...

by Moby, has a nice pace to it. It's instrumental, and it stuck. Sometimes songs just do that. It's amazing what music can do to the spirit. It's like praying. For turkey day I flew down to Charlotte to spend the 4 days at my sister's new home with her new husband, and my parents and brother. I had a great time and all in all felt like it turned out as a good time of bonding with both Anna & Brian. Loneliness is one of the most universal sources of human suffering today. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists speak about it as the most frequently expressed complaint and the root not only of an increasing number of suicides but also of alcoholism, drug use, different psychosomatic symptoms -- such as headaches, stomachaches, and low-back pains -- and of a large number of traffic accidents. Children, adolescents, adults, and old people are in growing degree exposed to the contagious disease of loneliness in a world in which a competitive individualism...

To begin, I must say that until yesterday, Friday, July 2, 2004, I was strongly pro-choice. I am a pre-medical student, and being very scientific, I understood that the mass of cells that forms the fetal body is not often capable of survival before 24 weeks in the womb. I am also somewhat liberal, and I believed that every woman should have the right to choose what she did with her body and one that could potentially be growing inside of her. This summer, I was accepted into a pre-medicalprogram in NYC in which we are allowed to shadow doctors and see all sorts of medical procedures. When given the opportunity to see an abortion, I did not hesitate to accept the offer. It was something new, edgy, and exciting that I had never seen. When I entered the operating room, it felt like any other I had ever been in. On the table in front of me, I saw a woman, legs up as if delivering a child although she was asleep. Next to her was a tray of instruments for the abortion and a vacuum machine fo...