Back from a bit of business travel to Las Vegas. The weather was nice, the time productive, and the trips there and back without incident. Honestly, that’s about all I ask for these days. I’m home long enough to rest a bit before heading to another formation weekend, where we will complete the second half of our canon law course. Then I’ll come back from that and prepare for a quick there-and-back trip to Charlotte. Such is the life of the jet-setting businessman these days.

On the flight out, I knocked out an assigned text (Annulment: The Wedding That Was, by Fr. Michael Smith Foster) and spent most of the flight home reading El laberinto de la soledad, a collection of essays (or one long one) by Octavio Paz which reflect on the roots and contours of Mexican identity, in particular the historical and cultural movements which shape it, or at least as he perceived them in the 1950s. I’m about halfway through it and finding it an easier go than the fiction so far. Somewhere around here I have a collection of his poetry (A draft of shadows) that I need to take another look at too. I certainly have a greater appreciation for a particular Mexican vulgarity after Los hijos de la malinche!