MY DAY OFF

In the last week, I’ve been fighting somewhat of a chest cold that’s proven to be just as stubborn a thing to kick for me as it is to break the habit of yelling at the tv during a Zag game.  I’m not proud to admit it, but if me watching a Gonzaga game was a movie, it could very well get a rating of R and that's without having any nude scenes.  Take the refs out of the games and I think we could lower the rating to a PG-13 movie, but even still, I think once the credits were rolling you’d end up saying “I can’t believe that movie wasn’t Rated R ” instead of “why was that movie PG-13?"

I woke up Sunday morning and tried to find some clean clothes for the day, but in doing so I realized my clothes have more permanent grease stains on them than the number of three’s Gonzaga gives up to their opponents in any given basketball game—too many to count.  Once I found some decent attire, I used the early portion of my day off to try and get the first few days of my Thailand trip figured out as I’ll be leaving this Friday to meet up with my friend from back home.  Not sure if I’m more excited to jump in the Andaman Sea once I get down there or to jump into John Doan’s arms once I see him—in a very manly manner of course.  If you could package John Doan up into a product, he’d make the iPad obsolete and no doubt everyone would want to get their hands on him. 

After getting a few things figured out for the upcoming trip, it was off to the Mother House so I could tag along on an activity I was told would be somewhat of a Mother Teresa pilgrimage around town.  The pilgrimage started at Mother’s tomb at the Mother House and afterwords we ended up walking to what ended up being 3 other historical places that proved to be a big part of the beginning of Mother’s Missionaries of Charity order.  The first place we visited was where Mother first lived after leaving the Loreto convent and where she started her first dispensary.  The second place was Mother’s first school that she started, which happened to be in a slum that was right outside her window when she was still with the Loreto convent.  The fourth place was the Loreto convent itself, which I had already seen earlier in my stay, but one thing I didn’t get to see on my 1^st trip that we got to see this time around was the church that Mother supposedly had intimate conversations with God in, the conversations of which resulted in her writing a book title, "Shine a Light."  In this church, all of us and the Sisters had an hour of silence and prayer.  Actually the time of silence was closer to 59 minutes and 57 seconds as my phone made an attempt to turn a time of meditation into a dance party with the beats of Jiya Se Jiya.  Yes...I was “that guy.”  For what it’s worth, I'd like to think I turned my phone to silence just as fast a group of my friends to finish a Howard's pizza from back home, but I still would have preferred avoiding this situation altogether.