Unfinished Thoughts Still Smoulder

Got my H-1B visa extension approval notice yesterday, it came through 2 weeks early, which was kind of nice. Trying to adjust mentally to being at Weimar for, well, if I stayed another 3 years, that would be 14 years in all. Can you imagine that? Hahah.

Just finished watching Chocolat, with Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench (one of my favourite older actresses) and Johnny Depp. The plot of the film is where a young single mother and her daughter come to a very conservative set-in-its-ways town and she opens up a little chocolate shop, during Lent, and all the residents are supposed to be abstaining from things like chocolate! It was quite a good film, set in a little French town, and it was very emotional. I could identify with it because the mayor of the town also controlled everyone's lives, particularly spiritually through writing the sermons that the young priest had to read each Sunday. The mayor was skilled at weaving guilt all throughout the sermons and at making everything into a moral issue.

But near the end, there was one part that really rang true with me. The young priest, in his Easter Sunday sermon, said, "I think we can't go around measuring our goodness by what we don't do. By what we deny ourselves, what we resist, who we exclude. I think we've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include."