1st recap

Sam, (my roommate in Spain), and I shuffled into our fourth floor room in the Parisian hostel. The girl whose thong had been hanging on the chair earlier was now asleep. Weird to see underwear before you see a person. She woke up and startled us with an Australian accent. (I say startled because it was 4am and because it will always be funny when Asians speak a foreign language that isn’t Eastern. I’ve commented on that before, and though it’s never wise to alienate a billion people, I imagine I will again.) Joe told Sam and me that she can always tell where the Americans are because they’re the loudest and drunkest in the room. Great right? But we moved from nationalities to personalities, discussing her return home, the people waiting for her there, and her thong.

The Louvre turned out to be a little bit bigger than the glass pyramid part that I’d seen in movies. One thing that struck me was that everything--the ground, ceiling, building, walls, and exhibits were all art. The Louvre was an experience which was thankfully more than a drive-by of the Mona. The other thing I realized is that I’m really ignorant. The works of the ages may as well have been wall-paper. It’s embarrassing to admit, and you know I love to play The Cultured Guy, but I can’t name 5 pieces on display in the Louvre. Can you?

Notre Dame pushed me over. The food, the travel, the school, the relationships—all about me. Notre Dame—not about me. At first I tried. I tried to disqualify the magnificence by bemoaning the gold cast Mary, the TV’s, the camera flashes, or the number of hungry bellies that could have been fed instead of fake bellies carved—but I sat down. I sat in one of the many wooden folding chairs and I breathed for the first time in 16 days. Everything has been new and selfish and scary and fast: Who am I when I’m not in America? Not at my church or school, not with my family or friends? Why does the whole continent smell like poop? How do you say peanut-butter? But I sat in the wooden chair, listened to priest-dudes sing that song that’s only “OhhhhohOhhhOHHHohhh”, and my insides were pushed over. My heart that kept me from sleep, beating like a bird’s even when I lay, was finally in rhythm. I considered the possibility that some of the workers who built The Dame, and some of the contributors to its construction—I measured the chance that maybe The Dame is an acknowledgement of Greater. Maybe it wasn’t just a couple dudes trying not to die, but a lot of dudes who knew that the absolute greatest that they humans could offer should be to God and not themselves.

Notre Dame is Greater in construction and aesthetics than the athletic fields of the same era.

But regardless of right or wrong, acknowledging our tendency to over and under spiritualize, and admitting that it may have been a reflection of what I needed--the moment and the place struck me as Holy.   

The Fondue place had two long wooden tables, matching benches along the sides, and walls painted with penned graffiti. The small room was loud, hot from the boiling pots, and wonderfully cramped. The long meal of jockeying prongs, drinking wine from baby-bottles, and story swapping was in my opinion the wealthiest moment of the trip.

I’m tired of writing and self-conscious of the quality. Our culture is narcissistic to begin with, especially that of the youth, and writing a blog that chronologically accounts the mundane of my life is frustrating. I want to keep those who are interested aware of my goings-on, but I also want to create. I guess I’ll do this when I have the fortitude. The trip has been new. At one time high school was new, then college, and now this. 60 of us live in a building together—10 to an apartment. I live with girls. No one knows me, though they think they do, and I know no one, though I think that I may, and we have no choice but to continue to act as if the friends and relationships of two weeks can replace those of years and lifetimes. But we’ll get there. This is new, but if it weren’t new it would be old, and old is why I left.