Jilliteracy (letters): All dressed up, and...(part 1)

Tonight we have a banquet. It caps off something called 'spiritual week', which sounds really mystic but in practice is just about as commune monastic/Pentecostal as we get: an extended evening devotion time, prayer/reading/meditation/fasting encouraged but not required. If I were back at Lee I'd call it Convocation and gripe about it, but here they have the sense to cancel class and make it useful (loving your neighbor takes on a new weight when your literal neighbors share your class/bathroom/common space/etc.), so I don't complain.

Neither do I complain that there is a banquet, even if we do have to make the food ourselves. Catering/eating out is expensive, and "you're going into the ministry, so get used to being poor" seems to be the unspoken MO of the seminary. After seven hours in the kitchen, as soon as I cut the last finger sandwich and spear the last olive with a toothpick, I make a mad dash to the bathroom and begin the art of getting dressed up.

We've been asked to wear the nicest clothes we have, and when I go back downstairs, I find an unusual scene. All those ordinary people that I eat breakfast in my sweats with are conspicuously clean and, as my dad's side of the family would phrase it, "fancy". Jorge takes the cake, wearing the suit he got married in a few months ago, but the others are changed, too: Meli is wearing a black dress, Camilo looks half strangled by his tie, Julia's heels are impossibly high, Luci's curls are in a Rapunzel-style braid (that I invented), Mecha's white shoes are immaculate, and Ariel looks like a young 007, knows it, and won't stop taking selfies.

And, just like high school prom or any other formal occasion I've been to, we don't know how to act around each other. Whistles as the next person emerges. Giggles. Camera phones out and ready (thanks, Raul, for letting me steal your pictures). At any other moment, we could talk about class, or sports, or music, or food, but tonight is different. Tonight we're going to a banquet.