Ash Wednesday

I don't consider myself to be very religious, but I'm culturally Episcopalian. My favorite time of the year in church is, oddly enough, not Christmas or Easter, but Ash Wednesday and Lent. The gospel for the Ash Wednesday service inspires me: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." I think these words are beautiful, about treasuring things that are more important than material objects.

Lent for me has always been a time for discipline: a cleansing, introspective process. Since I was 14, I've seriously committed to giving things up for Lent. At age 14, I gave up meat, which prompted me to become a vegetarian that summer. I usually impose strict rules upon myself: no sweets, junk food, chocolates, or soda of any kind, deactivation of Facebook. But here I sit in my room, late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, pondering what to forgo.

List:
-Go back to being a vegetarian after becoming a degenerate vegetarian while trying loads of meat in Spain and Mexico.
-Give up sweets, chocolate, etc. (This will not start until after I leave Oaxaca, as I must enjoy the delicious hot chocolate while I'm still here!)
-Check Facebook only once every week. Well, maybe every other day. Not checking it will start tomorrow...no, the day after tomorrow! Maybe limit to checking it once a day? Man, do I have an addiction.

Last year at Brent House, the Episcopal Ministry at the University of Chicago, I heard someone say that, instead of giving something up for Lent, he makes sure that he writes every day. Following these lines, I could:

-Write in my diary daily. When I was a little, I kept a diary religiously, from the time I was in kindergarten until my first year of senior high school. I'd like to start writing again.
-Read the New York Times every day, along with El País to keep up with my Spanish.
-Go out of my way every day, even if I do something very small, to make someone else happier and his/her life a little more beautiful.

I think that, in the past, I've been way too masochistic about Lent; at any rate, I think it's much harder/more beneficial to learn how to moderately indulge in temptations, be it bars of dark chocolate or celebrity articles on Jezebel, than to completely deprive yourself of them. Furthermore, I think the idea of Lent is not deprivation but personal growth and introspection. This past year has already been a huge growing experience for me, working in Chicago on my own over the summer, immersing myself in Spanish in Spain, and continuing to learn and expand my horizons in Mexico. As I prepare to leave Mexico this weekend, we'll see where Lent takes me into the next chapter of my exciting third year of college.

Things I Did Tonight Instead of Reading

I'm behind in my discussion questions for the week. (Tell me something new!) In fact, I was so stressed today, that when I talked to nuestra profesora about the final project with the other members of my group, she told me not to look so sad and scared about the final, and I started crying. I cried when I got home because I was stressed, sick, overwhelmed, and sad about leaving all of the people I've grown to love in Oaxaca. Tonight, I made progress in The Underdogs (original Spanish title: Los de abajo) while sipping on a chai latte in a cafe, but here are some of the things I did instead of staying cooped up in my room reading:

-Met a 102 year-old woman named Teresa (her 103rd birthday is this month!). Her cheeks are still rosy, but her eyes were tinted blue, and she's not aware of her surroundings, so I suppose it's a bit of a stretch to say that I "met" her; I more just sat across the table from her and stared intently while chatting in Spanish with the nurse taking care of her. Her skin was like white paper stretched over her face, and it looked very soft, almost like a fragile white butterfly wing.
-Went to a restaurant that was on the second floor of a building, with white scarves draped over the windows and a light that cast shadows like crescent moons over the walls.
-In said restaurant, I met an incredibly friendly hairless Mexican dog (Xoloitzcuintle) named Haiku. She even had her own little embroidered shirt!
-Ate some kind of delicious dish: chicken, rice, black sauce, corn. Scrumptious! And mezcal...to kill all these germs I have from being sick, of course!
-Danced salsa for two hours with my friend Juan and his hermano mexicano Saul, an incredible dancer who gave us our own private lessons! I had fun laughing and being twirled around by Saul and Juan.

And nobody gets to tell me that my night would have been better spent reading—not nobody, not no how!