what do you do when your friend has joined a cult?

If you can please pray for my friend Shaun, it's late and I should write about this at a time when I've got more energy to devote to the story, it's a long one.

So without any more detail than that I'll just ask you, if you pray please pray for him because he needs as much help as he can get.

thanks

In this installment Chris Rooney thinks seriously about breaking his lease

I don't like living here. I don't like that it is in the middle of nowhere or that one of my room mates is really bitchy and I don't really like living in the same house as my other house mate. I don't enjoy coming home after work and I miss being near the ocean. I think I am going to start looking around and or giving serious thought to moving back into the condo my mom has in kits and paying her rent. The renovations are almost done on that place and while it also has it's problems I would be closer to work and I wouldn't have to live with a bitchy person who doesn't like me or care enough to talk to my face when she has a problem with me.

I think that if I were to give both my landlord and my room mates two months advance notice that would be more than enough time for them to find another tennant and would give me some time to find a room mate to rent that place of my mom's or to find another place to rent.

this buggs me to no end but I like feeling comfortable in the place I live and I don't feel comfortable here.

So, anyone looking for a place in February?

what I really want for Christmas

The thing I really want for Christmas is to hear back from the LA Catholic Worker. I lived and worked with them for a month back in June, it was one of the best times of my life and I still find myself getting homesick for the place.

However I've written them numerous times over the past five months and I have never heard back from them. They send me copies of their paper and one time one of the guests, a very talented poet named Arnel sent me a folder of his poems for the zine, but though I've written to the community expressing a desire to return and volunteer with them again I have never once had a reply from them about it.

I tell myself that they are busy (and they really are) it's no easy task doing all the things they do, and that most of the core community is close to my mom's age and don't really do the internet thing at all, and that's also true. But after five months I would have hoped at least for some kind of reply, even if it was only to say that they don't want to have me back, I think hearing that would suck less than not hearing anything either way.

I sent them an essay I wrote in case they wanted to use it in one of their coming issues of the Agitator but that was almost a month ago and still nothing. I worry that maybe I wore out my welcome there and that though it was an amazing time for me that maybe I was not the guest I could have been, that I imposed on their hospitality and that maybe this is why I have never recieved a reply to my e-mails.

Perhaps this whole post sounds like the whining of a very insecure person but I kind of don't know what to do or how to take this. Is it a snub? Are all of them just that busy? Did I do or say anything while I was there that would cause them to keep me at arms length? It pains me to think that though I had the time of my life and felt so much a part of their community, that maybe in reality I was a burden on them and that I made myself too comfortable there. I'm not going to write them any more because I don't want to keep waiting for someone to write me back. I don't want to think about it at all.

If I was an imposition then I guess this is their way of telling me, and if I'm just making mountains out of mole hills then I would rather not make them any higher. But what I would really like for Christmas, more than anything else in the world is for someone, anyone I was friends with at the LACW to write to me, even if it's just to say not to write to them any more.