In August the news broke that Mrs. O'Leary, the principal of my old school (a Catholic school), quit due to allegations that she stole money. Controversy started buzzing and eventually it seemed that people sided with either Mrs. O'Leary, or the pastor of the adjoining church, Father Gabriel, who allegedly had a hand in getting rid of her. Many people never liked Mrs. O'Leary and many others never liked Fr. Gabriel, so you can imagine how this broke out. Some people said that Fr. Gabriel (a Cuban-American) got rid of Mrs. O'Leary and replaced her with a Hispanic so that he could turn the church into a Hispanic parish. Others really do believe that Mrs. O'Leary stole money. The tension seems to have been building, even though things were never directly addressed, but rather whispered.

Today there was a huge crowd of people at church like it was Christmas Eve or Easter or something. It turned out that a representative of the Archdiocese of Miami was going to talk about what had happened. Just before the final blessing, but after all the other announcements, he went up and read a statement to the crowd from the Archdiocese supporting Fr. Gabriel and telling him to set up some financial committee to oversee things or something like that. Then this other guy came up from the crowd and started attacking Fr. Gabriel's policies. The representative, himself a pastor of another church, went up to the man to try to get him to stop, but some people shouted, "Let him speak!" But then people started getting up and going to leave, including my parents. I was shocked at this completely rude thing. I said to my parents, who are always nagging at me to be polite, "Well, I think that was an extremely impolite thing to do, don't you?" My mom said, "Well, you don't want to hear him, do you?" It seemed that about half the people in the church simply walked out -- before the final blessing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

As we were going out, the man kept speaking, and I had never felt so angry in my entire life. Pure rage seemed to run through my veins, just over the stupidity of it all. I had to restrain myself from shouting about what I felt. What do I feel about this? I feel it's stupid. The whole thing. Everyone's a hypocrite: the Gabriel people and the O'Leary people alike. It's all so political. The thing they should be focusing on is worship, but apparently that gets lost in all the pomp and politics of church affairs. I'm still angry that things came to this -- the adrenaline hasn't gone away -- and I don't support either side.

Here's a bullet piercing a bubble.

A visit to Adobe, the people who bring you software such as Photoshop. It's interesting to see faces being put to those names on the Photoshop splash screens.