Missile-lettes

There is no doubt in my mind that one of the missions God put me on earth for is preparing Mass missalettes.

In Tagalog.
And only for one "client"...Father Steve.

Sambuhay doesn't have weekday Mass guides, so I need to juggle the resources at hand to come up with the liturgy for the day and scrounge about the Tagalog bible for the day's readings - but I've been doing it since July of last year, so I'm quite an old hand at it. The most toxic part is translating the opening, closing, etc. prayers for the day (from scratch! With the aid of a sorry excuse for a English-Filipino dictionary), and laying-out the entire thing for printing. It's time-consuming, but actually very enjoyable, which is probably why I keep taking on the job. I suspect it satisfies some strange obsessive-compulsive drive in my system (plus I get to learn not only the Filipino translation of scriptures but "fun" words like "sansinukob").

And that OC part of me went into OVERdrive today, as I was presented with a new challenge: a WEDDING missalette for the He Cares mass wedding tomorrow - er, later today. I had a petition to draft, a few thousand articles to write, and some editing to do...but I chose the "challenge" instead! Fourteen hours later...(yes you read that right), I'm done, I'm happy, and I now know how to say my marriage vows in Tagalog should the need arise any time soon. And I didn't have to plagiarize any of my friends' Tagalog wedding missalettes (mainly because I was too lazy to look in my files - and the last Tagalog wedding I went to was LP Susan and Joey O's sometime in the last century!)

After breaking my brain trying to translate words like "lawfully wedded" and "covenant" (argh! Tipan! As in, "Bagong Tipan"...grrr), I managed to lay out the missalette with perfect pagination (man, our layout artist Richard has one tough job) and a good amout of grief (note to self: for all desktop publishing requirements, don't go trying out new fancy software like Printshop 20...you'll always run back crying to good old MS Word, which is perfect for a retard like me).

All in a day's work...now all those pretty pages are typed up and booklets ready for photocopying. And the missalette-maniac has too much adrenalin left in her system to go to bed. Even if it's 3:00 a.m.

Hmm. Time to contemplate the sansinukob. ;-)