This is the Seventh Inning Stretch

Baseball is definitely a game of numbers.

Ask any fan and they will tell you that they minored in Baseball Statistics as an undergrad. As the St. Louis Cardinals' baseball season is well under way and as I see that they are already 10-games over .500, I realize how much I miss watching a game here and there. (And for those who do not yet know the love of the Game, 10-games over .500 in early May means "really good"). Ultimately, though, I am really beginning to miss those friends and family with whom I would (or even would not) watch a Cardinals game. Admittedly, this boy is ready to come home. You can only take so much Europe at once. It is best in small doses. Likewise, you can only go so long without being with all of your family and friends.

Don't get me wrong, I love Europe and I love the eight people whom I'm staying with. But, it's not home. And I do miss many things about the States.


But yeah, life--like baseball-- can be a game of numbers: I am officially 34 days away from my return to the States. Val is 18 days away from her arrival in Rome. Medjugorje awaits us 6 days later. And upon our return, Val and I have 2 and 4 days in Europe, respectively. Craziness.

I had my first interview last Wednesday night. And the very next day, despite their wonderful compliments in the email, they promptly shot me down with my first letter of rejection because of "inexperience." Being 1 for 1, I'm batting a thousand (which non-game-knowers, would be good; but.... in this case it's bad).

Interview 1 follows 4 official "no"'s, even before an interview. My applications have reached 5 states and span over 20 schools. And with a possibility of 10 applicants per position (not including those places where I sent in 4 applications-- haha, just kidding), I have a 1 in 200 chance. Or, 1 in 10, depending on what kind of statistics you're into.


With 20 schools out there looking at my app, and with about 500 kids per school (not including the Seniors), there are roughly 10000 kids currently scared to death that I might be their next year's theology teacher. Mwa ha ha!


But, the WORLD should really be scared. Because each year that I teach, I will be forming 4 or more classes of about 30 students each. That's 120 students each year. Now, I will probably work for 40 years. That means 4800 students will go out into the world with the philosophy and theology I give to them. Now, if each of those students has 10 close friends with whom they share this P&T over the course of their lives, and just half of those 10 friends share it with others as well.... Then, gosh, I will have taught .... carry the one .... 240,000 people!

I'm hyperventalating now. I need a lunchbag.....


Other "completely useless information":
My 10-page Inter-religious Dialogue paper that I wrote over the past two weeks included about 500 pages of reading which took me about 15 hours to flip through. The paper, revised, scrapped, and re-written, took a total of 30 hours to complete. 10 of those hours came the night of its deadline. That's roughly 4.5 hours per page.

Now, there were 4,500 words for this paper. This equates to 17 minutes per word. Or 1070 seconds per word.

Last week's blog on Germany had just over 3,500 words in it. ... and I'm not EVEN gonna start analyzing that!



I have taken over 2000 pictures with my camera while in Rome. Each picture is 1.4 megabytes. That means, I have 2,800,000,000--nearly 3 billion bytes-- of pictures on my computer. Now, there are about 6 billion people in the world. For every two people, there exists on byte.

This is getting ridiculous now. A "REAL" blog will be posted in a day or two.