A rainy Thursday in the Bronx.

It's raining heavily outside, which makes it glad that this is a day of the week when I normally stay inside. I don't have class on Thursday this semester (or on Friday, for that matter), which makes this a good day to catch up on tasks I tend to neglect during the rest of the week. This includes blogging, though I have a couple of good excuses for not having posted anything since Wednesday of last week.

The first excuse is that I was up in Massachusetts this weekend to attend a diaconal ordination at Weston Jesuit School of Theology and to visit my parents and my brother. The nine Jesuit ordinands included three men from my province - Bill Murphy, Peter Nguyen and Andrew Wawrzyn - and the blogosphere's own Mark Mossa. I enjoyed seeing my family, even if only briefly, but I noticed that the house is a lot quieter now that my sister is in Ireland. On the whole, I had a very enjoyable weekend, but I got virtually nothing done in the way of homework.

This leads to my second excuse for not blogging, which is the mountain of reading and writing that I've had to do for various classes over the past several days. Tuesdays and Wednesdays this semester are stressful even under the best of circumstances, as three of the four classes I'm taking meet within twenty-four hours. Though I enjoy having Thursdays and Fridays off, there are times when I wish my classes were more evenly spread out - particularly on Wednesdays, when I'm invariably fighting the clock to finish a written summary of the week's reading for my Church History class. This week was even busier than normal, as the reading I would normally do over the weekend had to be done on Monday and Tuesday. Finding myself thoroughly burned out Wednesday night, I made an effort to recuperate by lying down and listening to Pergolesi. By this morning, I'd recovered enough that I could look at my next assignments.

On a more important note, the situation in Myanmar remains quite grave. Despite the efforts of the Burmese junta to keep a continuing crackdown on dissidents under wraps, the reality of what is happening is still being reported by the world media. Press reports today detail the mistreatment of imprisoned monks and the torture and killing of pro-democracy activists by the Burmese military. Please continue to pray for the people of Myanmar and, while you're at it, contact your elected representatives and urge them to do something about the situation. AMDG.