When your December begins with two of the most enjoyable and most fulfilling events of your life, you know it’s gonna be a good month. I’m going to take this opportunity to finally blog about them… sharing my personal (and shameless) thoughts on them.

Firstly, Camp INCREDIBLE: Heroes for Christ, our parish’s youth camp which was held from the 6th to the 9th. From the start, I knew it was going to be an event that would resonately wonderfully with me. The reason: Superheroes. As part of our pre-event publicity, we did everything superhero-related, from creating Spider-man webs and Hulk footprints and plastering them all around the church grounds, to making Spidey cupcakes, to making mobiles of symbols associated with superheroes like the Fantastic Four, Superman, Batman and the Green Lantern. It was tiring work, but the hype didn’t stop there. Throughout the camp, codewords like “The Observatory” and “The Oracle” were used to keep the theme permeating through the whole event.

As part of the publicity team as well as a group facilitator, it was a good opportunity to try something that was out of my comfort zone, as well as to learn more about myself through doing different things and working with people I normally didn’t work with. Ultimately, though, my time at camp was more of an affirmation to the past four years of journeying as a catechist with a group of young men and women who will always be special to me. Reading each and every one of their notes to me, thanking me for being a part of their faith journey… no greater reward could one enjoy.

The Camp didn’t end that weekend, though… the Youth Mass this past Saturday was a strong reminder to the parish that our youth scene is ready to explode in a big way. With a brilliant and humourous skit performed by some of our most talented youth, an offertory that expressed our thanksgiving to God as youth and a huge show of unity from the many parish youth who stayed back after Mass… it’s an exciting time to be around, and we can only hope to maintain (or even surpass) this in the coming year.

And in the following week there was…

EOY 2007!!!!

It’s only been two days since the event so I’m naturally still enthused about it. It was my first proper cosplay event (I’ve since discovered that CosFest and CosCon don’t come close to the hallowed reputation of EOY) and it was crazy fun from beginning to end. Note: I had fun, but those in the team who were MUUUUCH more involved than me (you know who you are…) truly deserved all the praise for all their hard work, stress, panic attacks and late nights invested into this.

I might have been a little too excited about my involvement in this whole thing, though. I told raydance very early on that I wanted to be a part of the team if there was a character for me… and it turned out there was! The irony, of course, was that when we were at the tailor’s getting our uniforms done in late October… I hadn’t even got past the first episode of the drama that our cosplay is based on: Nobuta wo Produce. But after that fateful Saturday, I got hooked. I began watching it as often as I could (at work, no less!), once even catching three episodes one after another! I then tried to get as many people to watch it as well (succeeding only once, unfortunately) while I started viewing the whole series from the top all over again.

But oh gosh, the day itself was something else. Everyone had fun at the dance medley performance… people bought all the hand-made Nobuta souvenirs (even though my little contribution to that endeavour turned out to be more of a hindrance… >_>;;) and I think there was a really good atmosphere throughout the whole day. But enough from me… I’ll let the videos speak for themselves (sorry about the size).