Scenes from my first full day back in DC

being Thursday, the Feast of Saint Aelred of Rievaulx

6 am. I have set my alarm for 7 am so that I can be fully ready for the day. Naturally I wake up early. This enables me to get the groceries I didn’t manage to get after yesterday’s FAA-caused delays, cook a respectable breakfast (even I can scramble eggs and make French-press coffee), say Morning Prayer, iron my new skinny clothes, and pack my gym bag properly.

9 am. I leave for the gym so that I can get at least a half-hour of cardio before my workout. I am a bit ambivalent today because I feel as if I’ve made some progress over Christmas break, but I don’t want to get my hopes up, because what if I haven’t and I’m just setting myself for disappointment?

10 am. My trainer introduces some particularly hellacious new exercises. Apparently my form on the most brutal of these is especially good. The moment of truth comes at the end: weight and body fat. I needn’t have been worried. I have lost five pounds and three percentage points of body fat since Christmas break started.

That number has to be wrong: according to a gym-bro-in-the-know, you start getting visible abs at around 15% body fat, I can assure you that my abs, like the sun in South Bend, are not going to be visible anytime soon. That said, having visible abs is not particularly a goal of mine, but I’m apparently closer to that than I am to offering a credible performance of Bach’s French Suite in G major, which would be a much more gratifying accomplishment.

11:30 am. I arrive at my office, which is freezing, and hastily put together the rest of my graduate syllabus, which was very nearly done and yet required a ton of very quick work.

12:30 pm. I talk alarmingly fast about Anselm’s life, works, and contexts for seventy-five minutes straight, pausing to breathe only when medically necessary.

2 pm. Time to prepare for my undergraduate class. At a certain point I realize that the most essential prep would be a double espresso and something chocolate. I act on this realization with commendable alacrity.

3:20 pm. I arrive at what I think is my classroom. No students are there yet, and the place looks . . . odd.

It turns out to be the right place, despite the psychedelic colors and bumper-car desks.

3:30 pm. I used to be really good at learning names, and it pains me to acknowledge that I’m just not anymore. By the end of the class I’m only certain of two names, and that’s because they’re the two men in a class of fifteen.

My students seem a bit less talkative than last semester, but when they did contribute, it was always spot-on. They basically fed me everything I needed in order to cover the material.

They do need some remedial catechesis, though. No one could name the heresy they’d be implicated in if they said we can do something on our own to merit grace or salvation.

Kids these days.

This class, by the way, is a “Global Seminar.” It will meet on a regular schedule until spring break, at which point we’ll enjoy an intensive immersion in Italy, paid for through fundraising by the Office of Mission and Ministry. After that there will be no more class meetings, just a culminating project due during finals week. It’s a really cool idea, and I think the students are keen. At least, I assigned forty pages of Aquinas for the first class meeting, and no one dropped, so that has to mean something.

6 pm. Celebratory dinner at Kramers. No one is weighing me or pinching me with calipers for five days, so this is my chance.