Satisfaction Guaranteed

I was skimming a Chicago Tribune article about a total-face transplant, when I hit a paragraph that stopped me dead in my tracks:

Arthur Caplan, a leading bioethicist who has expressed concerns in the past about such surgery, withheld judgment on the Cleveland case but said the woman's doctors should give her the option of assisted suicide if they make her life worse.
(article)

Seriously? I'm certainly not denying the trauma that would drive someone to this measure, but presenting someone with the option of suicide because a failed reconstructive surgery? Then again, I suppose we can already kill other people based on their appearance...

All that’s standing between me and break:

 

• Paint and assemble giant cardboard tube of lipstick (due at 10:30 tomorrow)
  
• Repaint plaster self-portrait (also due at 10:30)
  
• Dispose of giant tube of lipstick and (30 lb.) plaster self-portrait. The possibilities of what to do with the latter are endless…
  
• Write Christmas/thank-you cards to five or six priests
  
• Turn in creative writing final project; brush the dust of that class of my shoes on the way out the door. (4:15 tomorrow)
  
• Finish printing photos for portfolio, decide that the chemical prints are better anyway
  
• Philo test (Friday morning). Hume, Descartes, and Kant won't know what hit them. That would be me. With a copy of the Summa.
  
• Throw away roughly 1700 pages of class handouts I'll never need again.
  
• Clean room so I won't want to cry when I see my room again in January.
  

Gaudete!

Altar servers: 4
Priests in choro: 1
Schola members: 6
Attendance: ~80
Hours spent ironing surplices/albs: 2 1/2
Height of candlesticks: really flipping tall

Getting to start finals week with a mindblowingly awesome Mass: Priceless

It’d be a good day to watch The Untouchables…

"If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States, it's certainly one hell of a competitor," said Robert Grant, special agent in charge of Chicago's FBI office. "Even the most cynical agents in our office were shocked." (source)

It takes so little to kill the mood...

I've been having a pretty good week so far, despite the fact that I've got a ton to do in the next 10 days.  Having finished my philo paper at midnight last night, I got 8 hours of sleep, and woke up in time to take a shower, blow-dry my hair, and still have time for a Starbucks run before class.  Even the pouring rain made me feel  more like Gene Kelly than a drowned cat.  Then, I stepped into Starbucks, which has become the most Christmas-y locale on campus, after the Alumni Chapel (which looks like a Macy's).  Among the early-morning chatter of baristas and students, what do I hear, but the one sound that could really kill my happiness.  

Yoko Ono on the Christmas Muzak.

Quote for Finals Season

Some men are graduated from college cum laude, some are graduated summa cum laude, and some are graduated mirabile dictu.

 

~William Taft