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StudentCongressGroup-1
Originally uploaded by romeyinfc.
Here is part of the student group that gathered at our reception this evening at Congress.

Tonight turned out to be a good night.  We held our Catholic Students reception here at the hotel.  We ended up handing out over 100 invitations, but we only got about 24 people.  The numbers in quantity may have been a little disappointing, but we definitely made up for it in quality of the people.  Out of everyone, we reconnected with people from the NCSC Conference, and got to see a lot of famliar faces.  We also managed to get a Bishop to show up (Bishop Ryan from Monterey), as well as Campus Ministry advisors from two regions, and finally our NCSC Vocations Liaison showed up!  So we spent a lot of time making really good connections with people, everyone has laughing and had a great time!  Tonight turned out to be worth-while!

Greetings from Southern California!  I wish I could say sunny Southern California but as I write this I’m sad to say the weather is a bit dreary outside: overcast with some rain…  We came in on Thursday into really nice weather and spent an awesome afternoon driving down the coast, having some great pizza, then finally visiting the beach.  We spent a good 1 & 1/2 hours walking the shore line, getting our feet wet, and simply enjoying the sunny weather.  Here are some pictures of the five of us enjoying this beautiful sunny day.

The rest of the evening was spent enjoying one of the best meals I’ve had in some time: we simply sat at a bar on the pier and enjoyed clams, muscles, fisherman’s chowder and shrimp.  It wasn’t until 10pm when we made our way up to Anaheim.

LA Congress kicked off with a bang on Friday morning, and it’s been really interesting watching it unfold.  This is my 4th LA Congress, but this year I am staying and spending time with 8 people who have never been here before.  Watching Congress through their eyes has been really great to see.  There has been a great deal of chaos, but a lot more fun.

What’s funny with this year is that I have spent a lot more time relaxing and taking care of myself than in previous years.   I ended up missing out on two of my eight sessions, not because I’ve been buying things, but because I wanted to rest up and get some sleep.  Originally I was disappointed about missing the sessions, but now at the end of Saturday it seemed like the best choice.  I feel rested and refreshed, and I was able to be attentitive in the workshops I wanted to be in.

I really need to spend some more time processing the individual workshops and talking about them, but all I really have time to do right now is post some pictures.  I’ll share more later…

See more pictures at my Flickr! site. 

Before I go to bed I need to do one last thing – post and link my pictures from the Philly trip before things get too late. I included a few pictures of interest here, and if you’re part of the NCSC (or just really bored) you can go to all of the pictures at my Flickr site!

This is where I stayed while I was out here – the Christian Brothers Conference "Jeremy House", so we did stay at my house This house was huge!

As you can see I’m continually battling my disorder that prevents me from taking pictures with a straight face – I’m improving…

During our meeting we have a gift exchange where we get everyone on the National Team a gift with a $1 spending limit – so we basically all go to dollar stores. My good friend Erin was very happy with her gifts

I sat by Erin and Andie during dinner, which produced many interesting photographic moments…

And finally, no trip to Philly would be complete without having a Philly Cheese-Steak!

So those are some pictures of a great weekend! I’ll need to tell the "Flux Capacitor" story while it’s still fresh in my mind…

Things have been so unbelievably busy over the last 10 days, and between finals, work, J23 & NCSC activities, blogging fell pretty down on my priorities list, but hopefully I’ll be able to catch up a bit and allot some more time in these coming weeks…

The most pressing issue I’ve been facing on this blog (and arguably in my life right now) is this J23/NCSC storm I’ve been trying to weather my way through.  Since my meetings, many developments have taken place.  So I’ll try to breeze through them and start from the beginning.

My blog may have gotten some traffic throughout the weekend, because I ended up sending the link to the "Locker Room Reaction" entry to a few interested parties that I’ve been keeping updated: J23’s former Pastor, our UMAC Chairperson, and our former Campus Minister at J23 – all of which have been extremely supportive of Campus Ministry and NCSC.  Aside from some advice from my former Campus Minister, I didn’t receive any immediate reaction – which was to be expected during this busy time of year.

By the time Monday rolled around I hadn’t received any reactions to my "Reaction", but I did receive a response from the Campus Ministers from the meeting.  To summarize: the jury is still out as to whether we can support NCSC as a campus minister.  We’d like to help the people that are going, but we don’t have $100.  If you’d like the four of you can give us the money and we’ll register, or you guys can do a fund-raiser and we can get the registration money that way.  What I took away from it was that if I didn’t do anything, we weren’t going to be registered.

At that point I felt pretty frustrated and conflicted.  Truth be told, I had the $100 that I’d be willing to put towards this, but I struggle with buying University Ministry something that they don’t really want.  In their email they cited financial reasons, but it seemed more like an excuse than a complication.  It’d be one thing if they wrote me saying "We love NCSC!  We really want to support it, but we don’t have any money available.", but the email I was seemed more like "Well, we don’t know… I guess can renew…. if you come up with the money.."

At that point I continued to weigh my options, contacting the students immediately impacted by this issue, emailed the former Pastor, UMAC Chair, former Campus Minister.  A few days passed and I was leaning more towards the option of registering our NCSC membership at another parish.  Then Wednesday passed…

Finals ended for the UMAC Chair (who is also a professor at CSU) and he finally got a chance to check his email, resulting in him writing a spontaneous, eloquent, passionate letter urging the CM staff to reconsider their decision regarding the NCSC Membership.  The email was excellent, one definitely worth saving in a file drawer somewhere.  I felt very supported and was hoping positive change could come from this.

Sure enough I got a call Thursday, from the Campus Ministry staff saying that they read the Chair’s email and would like to meet with the two of us on Friday.  I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect.  I told a few people that after the email the Chair wrote, if they were going to say anything besides "We’re sorry, here’s your check." I didn’t see any point in being there.  Things didn’t go that easy.

The meeting Friday was interesting to say the least.  I spent 75% of was a waste of time, and we shifted from dead end to dead end.  First they weren’t willing to concede that any changes were going to result from this meeting – that the point was for us to accept and understand their decision (with no opportunity to change it).  Then we went around in circles about how they never said they weren’t going to renew the NCSC membership, and how we got that out of their email was beyond them.  There were so many times where I just wanted to go Eric Cartman on them: "Screw you guys, I’m going home…" – so many points during that meeting that I wanted to just get up and leave.

About 3/4’s of the way through the meeting things started to turn for the better, we came to a partial understanding, and hammered out a short-term solution I could live with.  Apparently the issue still comes down to funding, and that they still can’t come up with $100 from their budget to pay for this.  We agreed to go to the Pastor as a united front and ask for money out of the general parish funds.  I left it up to the CM Staff to schedule the meeting and kept my availability open to them.

I’m optimistically predicting that our Pastor won’t see this as a big issue and just sign the $100 check, but we’ll see what happens.  If the meeting somehow goes south, or doesn’t even happen (by Thursday) I’m going to just fill out the registration form and put the supportive (other) Parish as our membership parish.  I’m sick of dealing with this crap..  It’s funny to think about how much time I’ve wasted on this, and when you think about how much I make an hour, just how much money this has cost me in my productivity (granted, none of this time was done during work hours, but this could have been time that I could have gotten caught up on work), and that’s not even considering how much the time the Campus Ministers have wasted on this – we could have paid for this membership many times over… 

So that’s the short version of this issue…  Yes, I have been doing other things in my life this past week, and I will post updates (and pictures) as well, but I needed to get this off my chest and hopefully out of my hair…