I think when you're going through a big life-altering event, you lose it a little. The summer before I went away to college, I would drive through red lights at rush hour, not realizing it until a near-miss accident. The same thing is happening to me now--I'm banging into everything (my nose is much better in case you're wondering) and I have a huge bruise on my knee--and I have all sorts of things running through my mind, so much so that I'll split them into parts.
To my knowledge, the Catholic Church doesn't have anything to say about plastic surgery. I went to Catholic school for 13 years and we never really touched on that. We sang a lot of really awful post-Vatican II music ("On Eagle's Wing's", anyone?), did the Cliff's Notes version of Summa Theologica, and were made to feel guilty about having money (but keep the tuition checks coming) and just about everything else, but I'm ill-prepared for this one. Would it fall under the cardinal sin of vanity/pride? Am I going to be carrying a stone on my back in Dante's version of purgatory (why are the proud in purgatory if it's a deadly sin, by the way?) Wouldn't that apply to wearing makeup or dying your hair, then, too? Maybe only if you're a Pentecostal. And anyway, in the afterlife, would I have the old or new nose?
On another note, my confirmation saint is St. Rose of Lima. I really did St. Rose a big disservice. I picked the name Rose because it was my great-grandmother's name; she had died shortly before I was born. This isn't a good enough excuse for your 7th grade religion teacher, so I had to go find a St. Rose, and the only one I could find in the school library was St. Rose of Lima (back in the days when we all tried to claim dibs on the lone Commodore 64 in computer class over the TRS-80s, and the World Wide Web had barely been invented.)
If you follow the link on St. Rose, she's a little alarming. In short, she made herself ugly and put herself through a great deal of intentional physical pain in order to get closer to God. I vividly remember my embarrassment when the religion teacher asked me after my oral report to the class on my confirmation saint WHY St. Rose was a saint and I couldn't give an answer. St. Rose is exactly the sort of Catholic I am not and will never be. If I weren't so hell-bent on picking Rose, or if I were confirmed at a time when my thoughts were a bit more fully-formed, or perhaps had seen A Man for All Seasons, I'd probably have picked Thomas More or somebody.
Anyway, the point is, I sort of feel like I'm betraying my saint. Why can't I just be a good person and be happy with whatever I've been given? Is what I'm doing immoral and decadent? Where is the bright line on that, anyway? Maybe it doesn't even matter.
Forty Lashes With a Wet Noodle. So I realize that I've been bad at keeping up the blog, I've been on travel and vacation, but that's no excuse because the real cause is laziness...I have about four in-progress posts saved and a bunch of others swimming around in my head unformed, so I'm going to really try to publish a little more in the days leading up to my surgery, and should definitely have some material for you after my pre-op appointment with Doc on Friday, I have to tell you about the massage tip I got during my conversation with another nose-job patient, and some more loony things, put down in pixels.
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