Well folks, it looks like my 4 key is just about shot. It took me three or four tries to get that date to type. Good to know my laptop is going slowly... one bit at a time.
Today has been a bit of a roller coaster. Tuesdays and Thursdays are getting to be not my very favorite days mostly because of Medieval History. I had really high hopes for the class, because I really enjoyed Matt Potter's history classes. Mr Potter went deeply into the causes of the important parts of history and spent time discussing them at length, doing various readings on them, having discussion, etc.
Doctor Hass leaps into history at three hundred years of medieval wars per minute. He doesn't stop to pause or reflect on anything in particular, just spits a ton of hard facts at us and I'm pretty sure he expects us to memorize all of them. When we try to ask questions, a lot of the time he'll answer curtly and abruptly, like he thinks our question was idiotic, or he just doesn't have the time to answer it. Also, he gets sidetracked in history talking about things he thinks are particularly interesting, but don't have anything to do with the material we'll eventually be quizzed on.
So I really hate Tuesdays and Thursdays. And remember I talked about how on Tuesday, Professor Cassidy got all defencive about whatever it was he was saying that I asked a question about? I may not have asked the question in the best way or something, but he kind of flipped on me a little. I went to class dreading sitting through yet another lecture on love and marriage.
Don't get me wrong, I find Fulton Sheen's Three to Get Married book absolutely beautiful and spot-on. A lot of the things he says are things I guess I sort of know or understand or see intrinsically, but he words them so dang well. I enjoy understanding more fully some of the things that are involved in marriage. It's mostly the legalistic stuff about licit marriages, etc., etc., that tend to get me a little frustrated with the way they're worded.
Anyway, out of the blue, in the middle of class, Professor Cassidy flat out stopped the class to point me out and apologize to me in front of everyone for being harsh. Honestly, I almost teared up right in front of everybody, just because it was so unexpected. I mean, I had known that he was very passionate about his subject so I can understand why he would get defensive about his topic, but the fact that he took the time to say he was sorry really meant a lot. I was more inclined to pay attention to what he was saying after that.
So that part of my day went pretty well.
Right around that time after class I came back to my room to do a little reading and I felt really antsy. When Clare left to go to Ministry for Moms, I started feeling really down and lonely. I mean, everyone was leaving to go to other places all around Europe, and I'm still waiting for my debit card.
Clare still wants to stick around for the LCI Conference on Saint John Paul II, and to see her friend Kristin Boutross, who goes to a Catholic Institute in Austria that one of our professors teach at. I guess the students from that institute are coming on Saturday.
I think that if my card had showed up, I would have immediately bought a discount card for the railway and then gotten a train ticket to Hallstadt, which is a tiny Catholic city about an hour away from Salzburg which Mrs. Hull told me to go visit. I just really have been feeling the urge to get off campus, and away from people. I just needed some time to get away, and I was just incredibly sad that I was going to be here and everyone else was out adventuring and I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my weekend.
So I put on my backpack, grabbed a bottle of water, and took off into the rain.
I actually found a new trail - I'm not sure which one I was on, since the trails aren't marked super well and they're all in German. They are all marked with numbers that are supposed to mean the minutes it takes to get somewhere, but what does that mean? Does that mean a six foot tall athletic hiker, or a five foot two person with disproportionately short legs? Or is that a car (some of the roads are gravel roads wide enough for a car) or a human being walking on two feet? I have no clue.
I just started walking up. It was really starting to rain, but honestly I didn't care much. It was so beautiful that I really didn't mind, and I was listening to music.
The whole way up I ended up playing music that was just very calm and reflective, and some of it had really pretty lyrics. I felt like I was sort of praying the whole way up - like I was walking towards God. It felt like a prayer in itself, even though I wasn't directly praying. I'm not sure how to explain it, but it felt like the higher I got, the further away from the world I was, like I was walking out of my body and up into something higher.
I got up pretty high - I reached a place where the road forked in three, and for some reason I started getting worried about bears when I was in deep foliage, so I retraced my steps a couple of times and found a more gravel path. However, the gravel path didn't show any sign of going any further up - it looked like it was leading further into the mountains away from Gaming, rather than to the top. At one point I caught a view of the city down below (I'll post a picture later) and I realized how high I'd climbed.
When I had to come down, I got really sad - I just felt like I was walking away from God and I didn't understand why I had to return to real life and reality and people politics and classes and the struggles of figuring out my future life - I just really wanted to stay on top of the mountain for the rest of my life and contemplate the misty sky and the treetops.
So that felt sort of like a little pilgrimage but coming back was really upsetting for some reason - not sure why. I was feeling really upset with people in general, just because everyone was gone and I didn't have a group to chill with.
However, when I got back to the Kartause, one of the twins (who knows which one it was) stopped me to talk for a bit and told me that he and his brother were also staying back in Gaming just because they hadn't figured where they wanted to go and they had a lot of schoolwork, and they just thought after two weeks of travelling they'd take a weekend break, and honestly that made me feel a lot better. I think mostly it was just because they're super popular so I figured they would have gotten together with some people and taken off into the blue.
Later this evening after dinner and some studying, Clare and I went to another LCI social - they're every Thursday night and they're really fun. Kakha is getting more talkative - I guess he asked Clare if she was coming, and Maria invited us, too.
At the social they were trying to play Uno but there were too many people, and then Irina and Veronica started a game that I guess they call "Crocodile" that is essentially just charades.
Playing Charades with a bunch of people - it was honestly really fun. I mean, I sort of feel like a dork because I'm more comfortable acting on stage with a script and when the audience is completely blocked out by stage lights, so I'm a bit awkward and weird when I have to act out something like "Swan" in front of a bunch of people. Frankly, I think I looked a bit like an idiot.
Regardless, it was really fun, and it was just nice to chill with a bunch of people. Socials in Austria are a lot better than socials on main campus. Trust me. It's a lot more relaxed, and I think it's honestly been really a good thing that Clare and I decided to have an exchange student as a roommate, and that I eventually asked Monika if I could eat with her friends at breakfast, and now we chill with them a lot.
So like I said, the day has had its ups and downs.
I'm just sort of freaked out - if I do have to go back to Franciscan main campus, will I get to keep all the friends I make here, or will it be a little bit like the mountaintop experience where I come back and it's all not like it was on top of the mountain again?
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