Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

A minor news item first: the faculty retreat is back to being in two batches instead of one, and the first batch, to which I belong, is slotted for this weekend, from Friday to Sunday. That means I won't be able to go to my top sophomore engineering student's eighteenth birthday party on the eleventh.

What's funny is that the facilitator for the teachers' retreat is is the same one as the one for the graduating college students' retreat, Brother Noel. I hope this weekend he stays away from jokes about shooting up past Heaven.

And speaking of which, one of the major stories from the graduating students' retreat, which I can repeat here because none of the students know about the existence of this journal anyway, and besides, it's not as if the names I give out are uncommon enough to be determined if all other identifications are made.

The second student to go for confession, Lino, (there was about an hour and a half allotted for forty students total) took three quarters of an hour telling the priest his sins. This guy has never really gotten along well with his batchmates, and this did not put him into their good graces despite the sharing of reconciliation candles from the night before.

We all know he came from a verly religious high school. Didn't they have retreats there? If they did, was each student allotted an hour to confess to the priest? And to think, compared to the others, who admitted that they hadn't gone to confession since high school, Lino last confessed LAST TERM.

So the conclusion (not that I'm judging him, just trying to analyze his quirks) is that he probably has some very detailed by minor sins to confess, things like thinking bad about certain people, and other borderline negative emotions.

What is bad is that he thought so much about himself that he didn't project how his actions would affect other people. In that case, it doesn't make him a very good Catholic to be so inconsiderate.

And the priest may have hinted as to the guy's problems in the homily, talking about reality checks. For me that means Lino just poured out his insecurities and other concerns instead of "real" sins.

Session 1389 sees only the very small picture. Class dismissed.