Back at the Beginning: Part I

It's been one week since High School Graduation.  I've been telling myself that I'm going to start blogging again for days weeks months now, and I've finally gotten around to it.  I'm not going back to reread any of my previous posts before writing this.  Someone else wrote those, someone younger, less mature (I think), and a little less thoughtful.  It's now more than eleven years to an eternity.  And let me tell you, one year makes all the difference.

I've been hearing about it for years, but last summer I finally got around to watching Firefly, and it floored me.  I ended up watching half the show (a whopping seven whole episodes) in one night.  Firefly and Serenity are now my favorite television show and movie, respectively.  I'm not sure what it is about that universe, but I find it amazing.  In retrospect, it's clear that Joss Whedon maintains a certain style of writing characters, dialogue, and stories that I find very appealing, throughout all of his works.  But enough of that.  I'll (probably) dissect Joss Whedon and Firefly in their own post some other time.  After Firefly I re-watched Dollhouse (another cancelled Whedon masterpiece), Blackadder, and finished the first two seasons of Castle (with Firefly alum Nathan Fillion).

Interspersed between my teevee watching, I did some other things.  Like go to Alaska for ten days.  And stay at Thomas Aquinas College in Ohai, CA for two weeks.  Things like that.  I was in Alaska to visit St. John's Orthodox Cathedral and the surrounding community in Eagle River Alaska.  While there, I got to go on a cruise of Port Valdez and Prince William Sound.  I also went salmon fishing and lost (can you believe it!) several games of Settlers of Catan and croquet.  I'll try to find some pictures.  At Thomas Aquinas College, I attended what is basically a two week crash course of TAC's regular four-year Liberal Arts degree program.  We read several "Great Book," including Plato's Crito, Sophocles Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Shakespeare's Macbeth, selections from Genesis, along with works by Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Euclid, and thoroughly discussed them in Socratic seminars of about twenty students each.  I really enjoyed it; for those of you who know me, I like to argue, and it helped that our group included an ardent Catholic and militant atheist.  Between the three of us, there was some quite vigorous discussion, occasionally interspersed with comments from the fifteen or so other people and the two tutors (professors at the college).  While not reading or discussing, the other students and I participated in hiking, swimming, sports, and pranking, as well as visiting some of the sites in L.A. and Santa Barbara.  Once again, I'll try to find pics.

After all that, they made me go back to school.  Apparently there is a twelfth grade, and it is mandatory that you attend.  However, I will leave that for part two of this post, which I PROMISE will be up tomorrow.  For the one person who's reading (by accident, I'm sure), have a good night and God Bless.