Highlights from the weekend

This past Sunday I volunteered at the Mexican Independence Day Fiesta at Penn's Landing. It was a great day: the weather and the girls were beautiful. I helped out Juntos, a South Philly cultural organization, to get a ton of people to sign postcards that will be sent to our congresspeople, asking them to take the initiative to reform the immigration laws. The process by which I did this was simply walking around through the crowd with a clipboard and a bunch of postcards, and asking people to sign. It was a great opportunity to use my Spanish for an entire afternoon. And the feeling I got by approaching people was the same feeling (though perhaps not quite as nerveracking) as I get by approaching girls at a bar: the pressure of capturing someone's attention within just a couple of seconds and trying to hold their attention long enough for them to give you something (here, a signature, at the bar, a phone number). Overall I had a really good day. When I first met with Valeska, the executive director of Juntos, about a month ago, this was the sort of experience I was looking for: something where I felt useful and something that was for a good cause. Hopefully the more I help out, the better chance there may be for greater opportunities to arise, maybe even an opportunity to direct my career in a more fulfilling direction. I leave that in God's hands; but in the meantime I'll do what I can to get more involved.

So I finally have television again. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I went and visited my dad this past Saturday. Our mission for that afternoon was to hook me up with a television antenna, a digital converter box, and a television stand. Check, check, and check. After a long and harrowing afternoon trying to assemble the tv stand and negotiate all the wires, I was finally able to put on the tv by the evening. After Pito had left, I was able to watch, of all things, the women's U.S. Open semifinal between Serena Williams and Kim Clijsters; as fate would have it, it was the match where Serena blew her lid and thus blew the match by threatening to shove a tennis ball down a line-judge's throat. Great drama. Proof that sports has always been and always will be the best form of reality tv.

Finally tonight, I'd like to mention that I finished the book "My Antonia", by Willa Cather, this past Sunday night. It is one of the most beautiful novels that I have ever read. It's about the love between a boy and a girl, who eventually become man and woman, but whose love is never fulfilled, much less consummated, with anything more than a kiss. It showed that true love, as it is really felt and expressed, has very little if anything to do with sex. It showed that true love is truly beautiful. And so, although the main characters' love was never fulfilled with each other in any traditional, logical, or preordained sense, thus giving the novel a tragic feel and the reader a certain feeling of discouragement, it was ultimately a romance of the highest order. Even more than the dynamic between Antonia and Jim Burden, the book really romanticizes, in a non-proselytizing manner, the plains of the American midwest. The imagery and lyrical descriptiveness with which Cather describes the land of Nebraska was incredibly moving and simply beautiful. I'll finish this post with two beautiful quotes from "My Antonia", one of scenic imagery and the other of pure love:

"If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made."

"The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me."