I think it’s been more than a month since I last posted, and it has been a good month. I’m on a “high” today for LOTS of reasons…maybe I’ll get to some of them in this post.
As far as my personal life is concerned, the last month has been a month of tremendous transition. I’ve had to learn to live without my cat after 18 years. I was promoted at work, and may be promoted again in the next few days — “keep your eyes crossed” as one of my coworkers is fond of saying. My parish, after 20 years of only having a Saturday-evening vigil Liturgy started trying out a real Sunday-morning Liturgy (as small as this may sound to outsiders, it is VERY big news and a very important change in our liturgical life). I’ve learned to appreciate the people in my life better and have rekindled some old relationships that have slid onto the back burner in my haste to reinvent myself professionally and get back on my feet financially after the whole phase as a business owner. For example, several weeks ago I had an awesome Southwestern dinner with some good friends from college. I visited the Vocation Director of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Phoenix to have a period of serious discussion and prayer concerning my future. For the first time in a long time, I went to a friend’s house and made real tacos, Mexican rice, and beans, and shared one of the best times with friends I’ve had since I was in college. I went out bowling (imagine that!) with a couple of friends and had another excellent time. Just yesterday, I went up to Richmond to see my oldest Virginia friend whom I haven’t seen in too long a time. We shared an awesome authentic Chinese dinner of beef tendons in chili sauce, pepper-salt crab, 香肠 (“xiang chang” — a salty-sweet Chinese sausage), 空心菜 (“kong xin cai” — a crispy, hollow, leafy vegetable that is my favorite of green Chinese vegetables), and 三杯大肠 (“san bei da chang” — “three cup pork large intestine”). During dinner, we wondered about and researched the Chinese origins of the English phrase “long time no see,” and discovered that several other phrases common in English actually come from the Chinese Pidgin English of the 19th century. After that most excellent of dinners, we went and saw the new movie The Social Network , a movie about Mark Zuckerberg and the beginnings of Facebook — a movie I highly recommend. I passed my 27th birthday with no fanfare. In short, the last month of September, I have kind of been rediscovering how to live and laugh, enjoy the company of friends, and be optimistic about life in general (something with which my naturally pessimistic self usually has trouble).
Besides the notable personal/spiritual/social transitions mentioned above, I have also experienced other rather shocking changes, especially in the family-life and technological realms. My brother and his wife and kids bought a house and moved out. Okay, so it’s about four houses down from my parents’ house (where I live now), but it has brought a lot more quiet and stability to my life and calm in the house (Hispanic mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law have a legendary propensity towards disharmony, and I have had to witness much of that over the last six months, to my distress). I got tired of Cox and their inability to keep a stable Internet connection for me at home and switched to Verizon’s FiOS High Speed Internet service. I am extremely content with that transition — who would have known that such a stable and consistently high-speed Internet connection was possible these days? I told my father that I was tired of Cox’s games and that I would pay for the new Internet service. When we got it, he decided to switch from Cox’s cable TV to Dish Network satellite TV.
To top it all off, the Linux Mint distribution came out with a Debian-based edition. Having wavered between Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint main distro, I have been dying for something that has the superb robustness and efficiency of Debian with the up-to-date packages of Ubuntu and the elegance and multimedia desktop-readiness of Linux Mint. In Linux Mint’s Debian Edition, I have found it, finally. I have my favorite distribution (Debian) with the pre-configured ease of having Sun’s Java, Adobe’s Flash and Reader, and other “necessary” desktop packages that Debian doesn’t enable by default, AND it’s constantly upgraded with the latest versions of the software making up the base distribution, like Ubuntu and Fedora, only BETTER. Seriously, installing the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) was the best thing I ever did for all my computers. There were only two things I had to do to it to make it something that’s perfect for my desktop needs: 1) install Opera and 2) install Chinese fonts and input method. That’s far less than I would have to do with a Windows or Mac system, and definitely MUCH LESS than I’d have to do with any other Linux distribution. The absolute BEST thing about my new LMDE setup is that the international keyboard layout (for typing in Spanish with accents and tilde-over-’n') and Chinese input method actually work across all desktop applications (including Opera and Pidgin, which have been troublesome to say the least with all other Linux distros) without arcane hacks and workarounds. LMDE has achieved what Linux distros have always wanted: the “ease” of use and elegance of Windows/MacOS with the freedom of Linux. All this combined with Verizon FiOS High Speed Internet and Dish Network TV…I’m in my own personal technological Heaven — that sounds a little Protestant 
.
There are a few reasons that Dish Network has me excited. 1) It’s technically involved. There’s the satellite dimension, but I also discovered that they integrate our broadband Internet connection for programming information, and run it through the electric lines of the house and a dual tuning box that has a UHF remote…the techno-geek in me salivates. 2) It comes with two CCTV (China Central TV) channels — CCTV-9 (English) and CCTV-E (Español) AND EWTN. It informs and energizes my inner Chinese, Hispanic, and Catholic selves, all at once! You’d have to know me and come into my “world” to understand what this means, but I assure you, it’s thrilling. That combined with the American Indian Myths and Legends book I’m reading through, life couldn’t be better.
