This octave of neglect now ends. This being Saturday evening, I gladly await the start of classes on Monday the 30th. Whereas peers of mine frequently wonder at the speed with which our lives have progressed, for me God has moved time at just the right pace. Glories there are to a senior year. As Atobe pointed out when he returned today, I shall be an upperclassmen, or senpai, in the Japanese, in the truest sense of the term, receiving the admiration we once gave our illustrious forebears, and living the power and authority I merit as a four year member of the Student Senate. As in the corresponding senior year of high school, I am ready for these blessings, which have arrived neither a moment too soon nor too late. In the spirit of "One More Time", a fine and relatively innocent dance tune by some Daft Punk, the beat of life, this

Music's got me feeling so free
We're gonna celebrate
One more time

Yes, even we Naulties and non-substancers.

Granted, our seniority has not availed universally. Despite a streak of drizzly and unfathomably chilly days, my eminent SGA colleagues and I (our core of pro-Catholic mission senators has been jokingly termed the SGA Brain Trust by a friend) were unable to prevent our participation in the universally-detested and indoctrination-rife Student Leadership Camp. Included this year were multicultural awareness activities reminiscent of my elementary school brainwashing. By their structure the activities assumed, a priori, that all common notions about different races, believers of different religions (ex. Muslims, Jews, and Catholics), and even such groups as teenagers and the elderly are "stereotypes": that is, not grounded in reality. I don't know about you, but it'll be a long day when I believe teens are not, in fact, bad drivers. Besides the relativism inherent in multiculturalism, this ideological cancer prevents the "critical thinking" educators are supposedly so eager to encourage. To make things worse, the rain ensured that even the traditional delights of midnight pranking were off.

At least there is good news: the Brain Trust has a potential new prospect, in a gentleman who goes by J. Paul. As I told him, had I that moniker, I would always be adopting the persona of the late Supreme Pontiff of the same name in my varied discourses. Speaking of whom, I just finished his Memory and Identity, his conversational look, a few years into the third Christian millennium, at global politics, the future of nation and state, and the evil ideologies of the last century. Given the liberal reputation traditionalists rightly give Pope John Paul II for his treatment of the Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX, it was surprisingly good. While John Paul praises the Enlightenment belief in the rights of man and "liberty, equality, and fraternity" (the last of which is quite popular at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute across town, now that I think of it), an overly positive view of Vatican II, and claims the post-Reformation wars of religion were not in the spirit of the Gospels (I, of course, would have been the first to serve under the Iron Duke on his heretic-crushing campaign; and it were better for the tolerati, that millstone were hanged about their necks, and they cast into the sea, than that they should let the schismatics scandalize one of these faithful), he defends the nation (as distinct from the State) as natural and irreplaceable, forever setting aside the claims of post-nationalist Catholic liberals. Besides the few defects I mentioned just now, Memory and Identity would make a wonderful companion book to the Catholic political thinker Pierre Manent's A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, which also discusses the essentiality of the nation in the context of the horrors of nazism and communism, and of the drawbacks of modern liberalism--of course, for someone as widely read as me, everything seems like a good companion book to any work written on such great and general themes! Additionally, John Paul uses the example of his native Poland in explaining the nation to his readers, and I for one was intrigued by his accounts of that Catholic nation about which I know so very little. Overall, a very profitable read, which may be read in two or three determined days if you are reading on a schedule.

Now, for my first anime break in eight long days!