The Return

I feel like I've been blogging a lot lately, which isn't exactly true, and that I've said very little about my life in said blogs, which is at least more accurate. So this post will try to remedy that deficit.

Students have returned to campus. They started trickling in around last Thursday, and since then, every time I turn around I encounter either someone cool that I didn't meet last year or someone I haven't seen in a year. This means that my life consists of squealing and hugging or conversing with new people; I am living a very extroverted life in that regard. So when I come home, I am glad to curl in a chair reading or chat with Cara for a few minutes, before she retires to the books and I return to campus for a meeting. Sometimes I don't return home between CCM events, and the public library and I are becoming great friends. I can walk there in six minutes from my office and when I have forty minutes to kill, it is a perfect place to be.

My Sunday activities make a good summary of the various sorts of activities I've had in my life lately. I got to CCM an hour before our 10:30 Welcome Mass and floated around the place, helping out wherever someone called me. Then Mass happened, and I was a Eucharistic minister. (I have roles in Mass again, which is weird but wonderful.) After Mass, I helped put various holy things away before ducking outside to the Welcome Reception. I said hi to some old friends, met some freshmen, met some sophomores I didn't know yet, and ate some delicious food. People trickled out of the reception, and I stuck around to help the hospitality team. As I put away food and wiped down counters, I got to continue with the socializing bit.

Then I went off to the library where I pick up an assortment of books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a novel by Madeline L'Engle, and a book from the YA section by Jane Yolen. Upon arriving back at CCM, I drove people to a pool party at the house of a generous couple who does many wonderful things for campus ministry. After the pool party, there was an event involving some of the leadership of CCM and some of the adult-type people who make our programs financially possible. Which was lovely, but definitely the hardest event of the day. I've had several years of practice with socializing with college kids. When you move a step up in the world, my social skills are less polished. However, I did admirably at "mingling" when I compare myself to myself of past lives.

I drove people back to their dorms, got only minorly lost in the dark (there is one corner in the 'burg that gets me every time!), and returned home. And that's my life: liturgical joy, old friends, new friends, college kids, generous adults, required-but-fun socialization, food that other people cook, and only a little bit of confusion.