Um. Yeah. Thanks.

So I just got invited to join a “Fiat 90” program, which is 90 days of ascetic practices for Catholic laywomen.

Except….

Let’s guess how many of these ascetic practices have any relationship to the practices of historical Catholic lay ascetics.

Bing bing bing bing! Not very many!

And the ones that are historical are the exact ones that I physically can’t do, or have no way to manage. So yeah.

I don’t want to say it’s stupid, because it looks like an interesting program for, say, Catholic college students. But you get stuff like “eat only three meals a day with no snacks and fast from meals on Wednesday and Friday” and “do certain exercises every day,” and I’m thinking, “Kids, I have to eat when I can, or I faint. And I run around like a maniac lifting and kneeling and reaching as part of my job.” They have “Sleep seven hours a night,” and I’m thinking, “Kids, I’m middle-aged. It doesn’t matter when I go to bed; I’m going to wake up in six hours.”

Then they also want things like “Go to Confession every week,” which basically means that your group doesn’t go to a normal American parish, with Confession available only on Saturday from 4 PM to 5 PM. Apparently this got changed to “once a month,” which is still a pretty heavy burden on your typical US parish, but might get done.

The one that is really hilarious is “I will limit my texting.” I have a dumbphone. I can barely, barely text in emergencies, and it takes me ten minutes to send a message.

I am pretty clearly not the intended audience…. But it’s beautiful that these girls are trying to respond to God’s call, amend their lives, and discern His will.

Good News: Bad News: Winx

Netflix is doing some horrendous live-action adaptation of Winx Club. There’s a trailer. Nice visual effects and a couple of cute monsters… but otherwise, it has nothing to do with the Italian comic or cartoon. The director apparently hated the original show, and has decided to do a darker, “more realistic” version that looks like Lovecraftian Riverdale meets Firestarter. And just to put a capper on it, they jettisoned several of the most popular main characters (Tecna, Flora), turned Musa the fairy of music into a fairy using headphones to block out other people’s thoughts, and cast a bunch of late twenties actresses to play barely teenaged teenagers. Oh, and they turned several characters that happened to be non-white into white characters. Which is weird, even for 2020. (But hey, they took the characters’ iconic clothing colors away, so why keep the iconic skin and hair colors, even if it’s a sentai team thing?) And there are apparently no fun/ridiculous fashions, because in 2020, nobody is allowed to have fun.

Good news, though: There’s a fan-voiced, fan-cut “The Winx Abridged Show.” It’s pretty funny. (Not for kids – this is that phase in the fandoms when all the original kid-viewers are now in college or have jobs.) The episodes basically assume that you’ve watched a fair number of the original seasons, as well as the World of Winx episodes on Nickelodeon. But it’s accessible even if you’ve only watched a few episodes (or seasons).