"Everybody look inside their hands, and everybody tell me what they feel."

Sometimes I think that I live in a very different, much simpler world than everyone else. At least the weather's nicer here...

I feel very accomplished today. I got up this morning at 9AM, took a shower, went to the Financial Aid desk, paid off my housing deposit, went to the housing fair /and/ mailed out my taxes! What a way to start the day, and all that before lunch! I have some thoughts I could write about, but I might leave that to later today. For now, I've gotten questions as to why I haven't updated all week, so here's a week's worth of Material Update, focusing on my awesome weekend:

So I spent all last week in three stages: sick, recovering from sickness and healthy but tired from being sick. This is why there were no updates all week. I spent all of Monday night throwing up, then most of Tuesday sleeping, aching and fevering. Wednesday and Thursday I dragged myself to class and got to bed early. Then this weekend, which I knew ahead of time would be busy, arrived.

So this weekend two close friends visited at the same time. Two close friends from two completely different social circles. One was a graduated household brother: Andrew Gill, and the other was my longtime comrade: Aaron Harburg. The weekend actually ended up being a good time with both of them, and I didn't really feel like either one was ignored. I saw Andrew Friday night at Household Mass and talked a bit beforehand. Then the "Ann Arbor Eight" (it's been quite a while since there were eight of us on the same campus) + friends watched Devdas, which all of the guys at least agreed was a very good, deep movie. The girls haven't really expressed an opinion aside from it being one of the most depressing movies ever.

On Saturday I lead my first Lord's Day as Coordinator. It was weird because I've been saying the response part for about two years now and can practically do it from memory. I also practically know the Coordinator's part by heart, but it was really weird to be /saying/ it, so I messed up once or twice. It went pretty smoothly though, and no one got hurt. After that, CTL had a formal dinner with our sister household, SOL. They spent all day cooking it (some of us helped where we could) and it was delicious. It was angel-hair pasta with heavenly meatballs and wonderful garlic bread. I may not be at all Italian, but they have some good food! After that, I just felt like goofing off (rather than starting on my Honors paper), so I challenged Don Thomasino to a game of Halo (he could play, since he starts his Sabbaths on Saturday evening). Odin came along, and we ended up playing Star Wars Battlefront co-op for three hours! That was fun, just sitting around, shooting the breeze as well as Rebel Scum. The Empire pwned that night, and afterward we sat around talking a bit more. JP Nunez came over from Francois and Thomasino and he and I did a few rounds of Halo. I actually held my own in one of the games, which was nice! After JP went home, Thomas and Michael Miller and I stayed around (well, it was Mueller's room) for at least an hour more just talking. Subjects covered over the course of the five hours I spent in that room ranged from music to relationships to girls themselves, and there were many lines that we swore never to quote in any context. All in all, it was a blast and I got to bed about 2 hours later than I had intended, without having started my paper!

Sunday morning I woke up kind of early because Mass was at 10AM instead of 11. Afterwards, Aaron and I went off-campus to Amy Brockman's house. She made us scrambled eggs with cheese and spinach in it, which tasted sehr gut. We spent the brunch and about an hour or two afterwards talking about relationships. Not like, /romantic/ relationships (for once) because all three of us are single, but more along the lines of friendship. The major focus of conversation was how the relationship of Superior, Support Group and Person That You're Ministering To changes the friendship. I mainly took a silent role, and was content to listen to them talk. We also covered some practical catechetical issues and while we didn't solve /all/ of the world's problems, well... we didn't have any pipes or cigars either. When I got back to the dorm, I stopped by Thomasino's room and got roped into a round of Halo while he took a break. I ended up playing Will Marks and some girl I don't know. They were both decent beginners, but I still pwned them. It's nice for me to do that sometimes because I generally only play really good Halo players, so I sometimes forget that not everyone can kick my butt. I guess I'm just on the Accelerated Learning track. :)

I finally started my paper Sunday Night before Men's Group. I spent about an hour distractedly researching while listening to excellent music. I currently have 3 pages of quotations, and that's only with not even 2 of the 6 books I need to use for this paper. Once again: I am stuck with way more information than I need. But that's better than the alternative and, it looks like it'll get done! At 9:30PM, JoeG stopped by my room on his way to Men's Group, which is good because I had totally forgotten about it. Men's Group actually got done pretty quickly (done by midnight like usual, but we started at 10 rather than 9) and I was in bed by 1:30AM. And that's all she wrote!