It’s been a long and oftentimes hard journey, but full of reward. After leaving my last exam today (it felt somehow appropriate that it was on the history of the Greek language), it was sweet indeed to meet my wife and stroll through the old streets of Oxford—streets which in many ways feel like old friends, especially now that the ominousness of final exams has been banished from every shadow. I will be sad to say goodbye to them and to all the other special bits of this wonderful town, a town which has meant something to me in various ways since I was a small boy. So here’s to following a dream, to finishing strong, and to letting go when the time comes to move on! (And to a great rest of the Summer in Oxford…)

Cheers!

I guess the last few weeks here have been too busy for me to notice such things–a recording project I started with some of the songwriters here has blossomed into something greater than expected, and accordingly ate up most of my waking moments–but that topic deserves its own post (I’ll supply it when I’m back in Terra Ignomino). Then there were the two final events of our House Competitions (you know, the ones between Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris), which had to be bumped up to accommodate my early absence–this weekend’s grand finale was an awesome headache of uncoordinated mayhem! Finally, as we’re nearing Marathon Day (less than a week away), we’ve been hitting the dirt and loading up on running mileage. Yesterday morning’s long run was 26km, with about 2300 feet of elevation gain. On Friday, as many of the race-ready kids as we can fit into a van will be heading to Moshi, Tanzania for the Kilimanjaro marathon. Since I’ll be back in California on that day, I’ll be running the Napa Valley race instead–which will be an easy, downhill, cakewalk of a marathon in comparison.

I did have a strange moment on Saturday, when we took all of Tumaini to the nearby Ruring’u stadium. It has the distinction of being the place where many of the Kenyan refugees in this region are camping out. It also has a track (which is why we wanted to be there). Thirdly, it is close to Huruma, Tumaini’s sister orphanage. When we went to Huruma for lunch in the middle of our track and field competitions, and as I watched some of the younger Tumaini kids greet with wide-eyed astonishment a swing-set and a slide for the first time, I was struck by the dream-like sensation that these were my kids encountering something new. And when little Faith and Gladys tentatively started playing (in that wordless though infinitely nuanced fashion children have) with some of the Hurumans, I felt my breath catch as I waited to see if they would get along and play nice. Perhaps most unsettling to my young, all-too-bachelor self was the sense of responsibility I experienced in it all. If Faith had fallen off the slide, or if Gladys had sucker-punched a Huruman (which she might very well have done), I know I would have been involved in an instant. Does this mean I will be a good parent? No. But maybe it means I won’t be a horrible one!

In one way or another, it’s thoughts like these that come into my head now that I’m about to leave. I’m already missing the dusty red of the walk to town, the brilliant gleam of the high-angle equatorial sun on the plants in the shamba in the mornings, and the exhilaration of cresting a tortuous hill on a long run and being greeted by the overpowering sight of Mt Kenya’s majestic cone and its three glacier-covered peaks. But the withdrawal pains will come most strongly with memories of faces–from Rhoda’s crazed hilarity to Mary’s doe-eyed wonderment to Grace’s far-seeing thoughtfulness to Stacy’s always-ready half-smile… and yes, even Edwin’s post-Christmas-cow-killing grin! The only question is, how long can I stay away?

Right now, there’s no answer to that question, and life has a way of leading us down all kinds of different paths. But I know that, sooner or later, I’ll end up here in Nyeri again. I hope it won’t be too long–but even if it is, I know that the relationships I’ve gained–brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins–will still be here. But for the time being, this is my last entry from Kenya. I hope you’ve enjoyed my third of the blog as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it–and I hope Michael and Emilee keep the stories coming until they leave in a few weeks. I know that I for one will be looking eagerly for them as soon as I conclude my long two days of travel!

As they say in Swahili, Karibu Tena!

Between the running and the music, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to film a short video, set to music by Mary (a student here at Tumaini). The subject of the video is ’time trials’–the 7k or 10k timed runs that Coach Titus has us do every few weeks to get a feel for how the kids are improving.

On this particular day, as you will see, the time trials were not universally understood and respected, whether by the kids or by nature itself–but that doesn’t stop everyone from having a good time.

Enjoy! And let me know what you think of this glimpse into our daily afternoon routine. (Apologies for YouTube, whose compression ruins the audio and whose watermark obscures some subtitles).

In truth, life has been good here the last few weeks since I returned to Kenya, with our biggest hardships comprised of woes like finding the grocery store less than fully stocked, and slightly higher gas prices.

The computer classes at Tumaini have likewise continued, and I have the good fortune to be even at this moment looking at a blackboard with the remnants of what appears to be a lecture on “Computer Security”. The chalk on the board haphazardly forms a list, ostensibly of the various facets of “Computer Security”. They are (strictly mirroring punctuation and emphasis):

• Environmental Threats
• Clumsiness
• Stabili z ers
• Terrorists Attacks
• grudges

Hmm. Apparently, ‘Environmental Threats’ are the most ominous bad guys in the world of computer security. And I can see that; maybe it’s not obvious that computers should be kept out of the rain. But what are ‘Stabilizers’? And why do they threaten my PC? “No! Don’t bring that Stabilizer in here!”

The best, though, is clearly ‘grudges’. You never know when your computer’s security might be compromised by a grudge. And multiple grudges working in concert? Forget it, your RAM is hosed.

You might also be glad to know that from what I’ve overheard, the classes on word processing are just as helpful to the student.

In actual fact, this is a sort of landmark Christmas for our family, since for the first time ever we have opted to forego all gift-giving and holiday money-spending, and instead are traveling to Arizona to fix up my aunt and uncle’s house, which has happened to be in a bit of a sad state. I’m certainly a bit self-conscious about how ‘self-righteous’ this tactic can come across to people (I know I’ve thought that about those people who go work in soup kitchens on Christmas). Therefore, I am in no way passing judgment on those who do partake in The Rush this year. Still, there’s a genuine satisfaction in the idea as well, and indeed, my family can’t go anywhere without having a bit of fun, so we’re also planning a 2-day hike down and up the Grand Canyon. I haven’t been there for probably 15 years, so I’m excited to camp in the wintry desert location.

But all this was hard to explain to the kids, until I got a clue from Cucu Kariuki and decided to start telling people I was going to a ‘harambe’–a sort of Kenyan festival held by friends or relatives of people who are in need, in order to raise money and supplies for them. It’s not the same, of course, but it’s close enough, and it did the trick: as soon as I mentioned ‘harambe’, they understood the need to go home. Still, had it been any other year, I would have loved to stay at Tumaini, and I envy Michael’s and Emilee’s opportunity to share Christmas with the kids.

Well, after a long 42 hours of travel, I arrived back in San Francisco last night. What surprised me most was how unsurprising it was to be back in the States. After my previous 2-month stint in Kenya, the mass of development, the showers, the clean running water, etc…, all caught me rather off guard. It took almost a full week to shake the feeling that something was very wrong somewhere. This time, everything just seems like, well, what it is. I suppose this state of affairs is neither good nor bad, but I found it interesting.

Now, I’m killing the hour or two I have left before our midnight departure to the Grand Canyon. (On family road trips, we like to leave in the 2nd watch of the night, when traffic is at a minimum–and this practice holds a lot of nostalgia for me). I’ve taken my fill of fast internet and hot showers (though finding high-protein vegetarian food has proved more difficult than in Kenya), and will now leave the blogging to those who are actually remaining in Kenya, until I return in early January. Happy Christmas! (And perhaps more appropriate for this particular day: Happy Winter Solstice!)

In addition to the cow, incidentally, several of the rabbits kept here for breeding are purportedly going to be eaten. And, since the rabbits are named (of course) after us and others of the volunteers who have stayed at Tumaini, many of the children take great delight in telling us that on Christmas, “we will eat Michael and Emilee!” And then they laugh diabolically. (Jonathan the rabbit will not be eaten at Christmas; At first I was glad, but then they told me that he has already been “eaten by dogs,” because “he rotted and died.”)

Anyway, the three of us were sitting around last night, and wondered where they typically get the cow that they eat for Christmas. Then we realized they probably just kill one of the cows they keep on site. After discussing, agricultural newbs that we are, the horror involved in slaughtering an animal like that, and talking ignorantly about what method would be used, the question finally arose, Who will kill the Christmas cow?

It’s definitely going to be Edwin.

Edwin, after killing last year’s Christmas Cow

But, “Church” is another entry, deserving of a title different than “Monkey Nuts,” which you may be wondering about. The story I want to tell happened a few weeks ago, and it was in fact during one of those Sundays where Eunice, the Manager (heroine of so many of my blogs, it seems), was delivering the Word of God. As everyone who preaches seems to think, the Word of God by itself can be a bit boring, and so it’s good to spice the message up with illustrations and anecdotes.

As Michael, Emilee, and I were sitting three-quarters of the way to the back of the small church, Eunice began to tell a story about certain farmers in another part of Africa, ostensibly to support a point she was making. I was only half-listening, expecting this story to follow the general pattern, that is, to have no link at all to anything that has been said so far. I think I was right. But anyway, the story went something like this:

These farmers produce, as a cash crop, a certain variety of nuts which sell well in other regions. But, as it happens, a local species of monkey is driven wild with pleasure when eating these treats, and so they do all they can to steal them from the farmers. The farmers, being humans and therefore more ingenious than the monkeys, devised a way to trap the monkeys and save their crops: they would take some nuts and put them into a large clay pot with a very narrow mouth. The monkeys would smell the food, rush to the pots, and insert a little simian hand, grasping the nuts. Of course, their fistful of treasure then makes their paws too big to remove from the pot without first letting go of the prize. Unwilling to do this, the monkeys are forced to stay with one hand in the trap, until the farmers can come at leisure and kill them.

So far, so good. I thought it was a worthy story (in fact, one I’d heard about in 5th grade through science class, and liked). I could see where Eunice was going with it too–the nuts are analogous like those things we foolishly hold on to that are going to bring us to ruin. Therefore, we shouldn’t be like those monkeys (in our spiritual lives), clinging to pleasures that will only bring death.

But while I was thinking these things, Eunice made her conclusion in some unexpected words: “The Lord wants you to release your monkey nuts!”

I snickered, and looked around thinking everyone else must be too. But all the Kenyans were staring straight ahead, some simply nodding in agreement. Eunice went on, excited by her point. And then she said it again, with feeling: " The LORD wants you to release your monkey nuts!"

I realized at once I was in trouble. The Lord wants me to release my monkey nuts? Ha. Ha ha ha. Monkey nuts! Though I don’t laugh at every dirty double entendre I hear, the context, the complete lack of intention, was too much. The corners of my mouth began to quiver, and soon I found myself smiling uncontrollably. A Kenyan to my left looked at me, and I looked down, hiding my face. Then the laughing began: those stomach shakes that I refused to let move up to the throat. “If only I can avoid looking at Michael and Emilee,” I thought, “I’ll be OK.”

But Eunice was not on my side. Really worked up now, she got a bit more personal, and asked the congregation a question, leaning forward from the pulpit and talking in a suddenly low, serious voice: “What nuts are you holding on to?” she said with a penetrating gaze.

And that was it. A stifled guffaw inadvertently escaped my lips, and I ducked behind the pew in front of me, pretending to be reading a Bible. Then I heard movement from Emilee beside me, and saw that she too was trying to keep from breaking out in laughter. I couldn’t see Michael, and that was probably what saved us all from total humiliation. But, that feeling came that we all know, when it’s one of those times where it’s completely inappropriate to laugh, but two people think something is funny, and the mere fact that they know the other thinks it’s funny too makes it impossible to get a grip.

Remembering that I’d read about such situations, I tried a folk remedy and started pinching myself. The pain didn’t help. And so I stayed bowed forward for a full minute, until I thought the storm had passed, and the lashings of laughter subsided. Eunice had moved on, and we were in the clear. That is, until she came to her grand finale, and in full-throated Kenyan fashion made her pronouncement: “It is not a surprise that some of us will burn in Eternal Hellfire because we are holding on to monkey nuts!”

So true, Eunice, so true.

Needless to say, a lot of people were wondering what was going on with the Wazungu, though no comments were made. I tried to make it look like I had been crying (and I was…), moved by the sermon–but it wasn’t that kind of sermon. Anyway, it’s these little cultural or linguistic differences, and other random hilarities, that keep life here exciting. Like tonight, while playing Pictionary with the Form 4 Leavers (the secondary school graduates), when the phrase to draw was, appropriately, “Baby Jesus”. One team’s artist chose to signify the stick-figure infant’s holy status by drawing a manger, and streaks of light shining gloriously around Jesus’ body. The other team’s artist chose a more realistic tack, and decided instead to draw the little newborn, not just as Baby Jesus, but as “Extremely Well-Endowed Baby Jesus If You Know What I Mean”. Everyone in the room had a good laugh for about 10 minutes. Oh, and in case you were wondering: the streaks of shining glorious light turned out to be a better symbol–our team won.

The first few days, we attributed the lack of Internet to environmental causes, like the weather. Or perhaps the guy who holds the data tubes together had fallen asleep. When we run out of water for strange amounts of time, I wonder the same thing.

Then, we began to ask the computer room teacher, Ann, what was going on. She asked us if we’d seen “those wires in the street.” I thought for a moment–yes, running earlier that day, I’d seen some wire coiled up in the street. “The problem is those ones,” she said. Apparently, that was the phone line for the area. And yeah, that would be a problem.

In what seems to be typical Kenyan fashion, every day we asked Ann whether she’d spoken with the communications company and if they were going to fix it, she said, “Yes, they’re coming tomorrow to fix it.” ‘Tomorrow’ kept one day ahead of us, however, and so Thanksgiving passed without e-mail contact.

We took bets on when the Internet would be back. We were all wrong! I began to worry–all my online projects might have suddenly failed and I wouldn’t even know.

Finally, all the ’tomorrows’ coalesced into ’today’, and a Telkom employee came to fiddle with something this morning. The Internet works again! I can catch up on more days’ worth of e-mail than I’ve had to in over 10 years. We can write blogs again–and stay tuned, because a lot of great stuff has happened in the past few weeks. Apologies for our absence!

Like water and electricity, the Internet has truly come into its own as a utility…

Christopher shared easily, with obvious confidence in himself, and with an even didactic air, knowing that what he was saying would be interesting and maybe shocking to us: pampered visitors from a posh and indolent country, who count even the most insignificant inconveniences as severe trials.

An hour later, after listening to the disconnected but always fascinating anecdotes, we were left, as you’d expect, with nothing to say. Apart from our periodic courteous mumblings of attention and empathy, Christopher had carried the conversation entirely by himself. Of course, we never heard another word about the cows.

Instead, we learned about the tribal wars between the Turkana and Samburu in Christopher’s earlier years, how he had seen it break out, and the lives he had seen it claim. He told us of finding high school students dead in the thorn bushes, after being given guns by the local clan leaders–gifts for being in their final year–and asked to kill the enemy. He told us that when they searched the bodies (a practice he took for granted), they often found graded papers, returned that day by the teacher, and perhaps on their way home to be shown to parents.

He told us of the helicopter he saw shot down (“killed”), how it crumpled “like paper” and burned, with nothing to salvage. The men who shot it down, he said, had killed so many people they no longer thought it would be a bad thing to do. Then he looked at each of us and explained sadly, “Some times you can do so many wrong things that after a while your conscience doesn’t know it’s wrong anymore.”

I agreed, realizing he knew a lot more about it than I did.

Interspersed with other random anecdotes (some, thankfully, much more lighthearted), we learned why Christopher had last cried almost 10 years ago, at the death of his grandfather. He had seen so many people die, that he said, “I can feel sadness in the heart, but it will never make it to my eyes.” He agreed, however, that it is good to be sad.

All the while, Christopher’s attitude and body language bespoke an unworried and unhurried mind. Every story of trial long-past was followed by one of thanksgiving. He prayed to go to secondary school, and, after his parents could no longer take care of him and he found himself admitted to Tumaini, he did. In another year he’ll graduate. He prayed fervently that one day he would be able to play a drum set, and the church recently purchased one. Christopher now plays it every Sunday, untutored, but with natural ability.

His childhood was, we would say, defined by poverty and death. But simply because he’s able to go to school, and can play a drum set that he doesn’t even own, Christopher thinks God must love him. Christopher knows and feels God’s love, in those simple gifts.

(Oh, how that shames me and my arrogant doubting! A churlish fool in such a cloud of blessing as I have been placed!)

But even words of thanksgiving don’t stop him from telling yet more stories. And so shame is pushed aside as I struggle to parse Christopher’s Kenyan English. We listen with surprise as he tells us that his father is accustomed to walking from Nyeri to Nairobi (a distance of about 150km) whenever business requires. Why pay the equivalent of a few dollars for a bus ride when you can walk for two days?

Apparently, it’s a family skill Christopher’s father wanted to pass on: when Christopher was in junior high, his dad woke him up one day and asked the boy to accompany him to Karatina and back (about 85km total). We asked Christopher why they went. He doesn’t know, but he has a guess: “He just wanted to see how well I could walk.” Not surprisingly, Christopher is now one of Tumaini’s best marathoners.

Tumaini is such a wonderful place, we often forget that each of the 175 children here have stories much more like Christopher’s than like our own. It is good to be reminded of that, when we have the capacity to hear it.

• Hello! Fine.

In Swahili, Kenya’s lingua franca, one of the standard greetings is the question “Hujambo?” This is a contraction of the phrase, “Huna jambo?”, meaning literally, “You don’t have any problems, do you?” The standard reply is “Sijambo!” – “I don’t have any problems!”. Most people shorten both of these even further, such that the exchange is more like: “Jambo?” … “Jambo!”.

Anyway, when Kenyan children learn English, they obviously learn (paralleling Swahili) that the standard greeting is a question-and-answer: “How are you?”–to which the reply is “Fine.” Here’s how we know:

Just as any language-learners would do, the children seem to take any greeting we give them as this (standard) one, of “How are you?” The other greeting “Hello” seems to have been assimilated into it, such that, almost every time we greet a child with a warm “Hello!”, we get back a cheerful “Yes, fine!”

This is very funny.

“Hello!”
“Fine.”

Of course, it is just one of the many idiosyncrasies of the place we are calling home for almost 6 months–the Tumaini Children’s Home, outside of Nyeri, Kenya. Apart from us 3 white Americans (and all caucasians are classed as Wazungu, or “Europeans”), the orphanage is home to about 200 children, who have been admitted for a number of reasons (the primary one being the death of parents due to AIDS), and a small handful of staff.

I (Jonathan) spent a few months here earlier this year during the formation of Hope Runs, an NGO started by some friends. Hope Runs uses running training to educate the children and provide them with opportunity, while raising global awareness of issues surrounding orphans and vulnerable children.

The three of us (Emilee, Michael, and myself) decided to come to Tumaini for a while, to keep these programs going, to start various others, and primarily to be friends to those here, while at the same time living as an extension of the intentional Christian community of which we are a part (located in Palo Alto, California).

Over the next few months, we hope to take turns writing little windows into what’s happening here, from cultural notes to (hopefully funny) stories, and also to share some photos. So stay tuned! Because “Hello! Fine.” is just the beginning of the conversation. The rest, we’re sure, will be just as nonsensical!

A few years ago, the site went down without any explanation, so in their own tradition I wrote up a fake news article about what had happened. I never got around to posting it, but now is the perfect occasion. Looks like I may have been wrong!

Anyway, here it is:

PLYMOUTH, MI - Marcus Crosby, founder of the online newspaper The Holy Observer, was discovered dead in his apartment early this afternoon. While local authorities have not released any autopsy data as of yet,the police officer who responded to an anonymous tip and found Crosby (himself speaking on condition of anonymity) informed us that it looks as though Crosby had been dead quite some time, possibly weeks.

Suicide appears to have been ruled out, since Crosby suffered a number of massive blows to the head with some large, flat object that was removed from the scene of the crime. Our anonymous source also said that there were curious gold dust sparkles left in the impressions made in Crosby’s skull, which may be meaningful evidence for the crime scene investigators.

While authorities are calling it murder, Crosby was indeed known to be somewhat of a recluse; we spoke with one of the tenants in his apartment building, who said that Crosby would often stay in his apartment for days, working on articles for his Internet newspaper, and only leaving to go for a jog around the nearby park from time to time.

When asked about The Holy Observer, Crosby’s neighbor replied:

“Yeah, I knew he worked on that paper. What I couldn’t figure out is how he could write so many news interviews without ever leaving his apartment! Maybe he always took the red-eye. Anyway, I haven’t read [the news site] much myself, but I know it wasn’t really popular with some folks, you know, the Fundamentalists and all. I bet you that’s who’s done him in; now I come to think of it, isn’t the Fundamentalist Threat Level at “High” or something these days? Crosby must have been a ripe target…he obviously didn’t take the right precautions.”

Crosby’s neighbor left off speculation there, but continued to say that he wasn’t too worried about himself or his daughter, as they went to a nearby mega-church and were doing a good job at pretending to be “regular Christians”.

“It’s just not worth it these days not to believe, what with the religious and political climate in this country, and so many Fundamentalist leaders willing to call for assassinations at the drop of a hat! It’s crazy–they must not be reading their Hezekiah very closely! Aren’t we supposed to observe the news of the Lord?”

A homeless woman who had been spending the nights in the park across from Crosby’s apartment proved to be a valuable resource for local authorities. While they were initially inclined to regard her as delusional, due to her reports of “glorious silver laptops” appearing under nearby trees when no one was looking, she has provided the only sliver of a lead they have. Apparently, earlier in the week, she was woken by the sound of a door closing and looked across the street to see someone run down the stairs from Crosby’s apartment, jump into a white 15-passenger van, and drive off.

She said she took no notice of the event because she thought it was Crosby himself leaving. Crosby did not own a vehicle, however, and so law enforcement believes this woman might have caught a glimpse of the killer and getaway vehicle. Initial reports also indicate that the vehicle was not entirely nondescript, but appeared to be a professional service vehicle of some kind, as there was a phrase written across the length of it. Despite prodding from police psychologists, however, the homeless woman has not been able to remember the words, though she has said that it was not a delivery van, such as FedEx, and instead looked like a passenger vehicle.

Crosby’s next-of-kin are not known, nor is it known whether there were collaborators on his website project, which evidence indicates he was preparing to update with a new issue of The Holy Observer. Unfortunately, his Apple laptop was destroyed, and authorities have found only sketch-drafts of the to-be-published articles. They are now perusing them in the hopes of finding some incriminating evidence the killer might have been trying to prevent being published.

Authorities are also scouring The Holy Observer online (which has been left unchanged since the end of 2004) for clues, and are hoping to add a few names to the suspect list, since Crosby was in the habit of making public vitriolic and/or ignorant feedback e-mails and then commenting on them. We were informed that the most promising lead is one “Carol”, who said that Crosby was a “blight on [the information] highway”, and who might have a grudge against Crosby and The Holy Observer, or other motives for revenge.

A team of analysts has reportedly been set to a somewhat different task–discovering if there are any others who worked on The Holy Observer–with the goal of warning them of and protecting them against similar attacks. Plymouth police chief Frank Cassano has received special confirmation from the FBI that they will be invited to accept the asylum of the US Witness Protection Program, which has a high degree of success in potentially-serial cases like this one.

For now, readers are advised to be aware that the Christian Fundamentalist Threat Level is indeed at orange, or “High”, and to restrict activities which might bring attention from the Religious Right. Furthermore, if you have any information regarding this crime or anyone connected to The Holy Observer, you are asked to please contact Chief Cassano.

My car

When I decided to go to Africa for 6 months (and do who knows what after that), it became increasingly clear that keeping my car was not going to be easy. Insurance payments and finding a place to store it just weren’t options. And so, somewhat grudgingly, I began the process of trying to sell it about a month ago. At that time it was a very practical and financial decision, and I didn’t think much of it. Now I’m sitting here with the fattest wad of cash I’ve ever seen, no car, and surprisingly strong emotions.

I feel, for whatever reason, as if I’ve lost a friend or a long-loved pet. It can’t be the wheels themselves–if anything, having a car has been somewhat of a burden with gas prices being so high, having to worry about maintenance, etc… For the most part, I didn’t need a car in Palo Alto, and I certainly don’t need one to get around here in San Francisco. So why do I miss my beautiful white Civic?

I think a lot of things are wrapped up in it. It was the first car I ever bought, during my junior year at Stanford. I can remember being with my parents at the car lot, learning the tricks of the car buying trade, knowing what I wanted but knowing I couldn’t afford it, and finally finding a good (if expensive) match in my little Civic. That was a somewhat momentous process in and of itself, and the car loan was the first monthly payment I ever had! Definitely “coming of age”.

But fundamentally, it has to be the memories. Memories of adventure, companionship, solitude, of joyful or tearful singing in the only place I could go where I didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing. Memories of driving a girl to dinner (and trying to be all cool because I was driving stick), or memories of the drive up the 280 to San Francisco, hitting the steering wheel and crying in frustration because I’d fouled up yet another romantic opportunity. Memories of driving cross-country with David and camping in a deserted Joshua Tree, or tackling the winding 140 before dawn with Dan dozing, on our way to a climb in Tuolumne.

For me, the car was never something I got into to take me to work–never anything I dreaded. Sure, I used it for grocery shopping and day-to-day errands, but the vast majority of the 40,000 miles I put on it were road trip miles, adventure miles, real life miles. So tonight, as I watched the new owner drive away, it felt somehow wrong, as if he had stolen many of my favorite moments from the past four and a half years. I wanted to run after and say, “No! I take it back!” I think we both got a fair deal out of the transaction, but something inside says that I sold the car (“her”, if you want to anthropomorphize) far too cheaply.

Well, at the end of the day, she’s just a chunk of metal and gears, however pretty she was. And I’m not meant to care that much about a chunk of metal and gears. The memories will have to find another repository, and I’m sure they’ll last much longer than the car, however the new owner treats it! For now, I need the money to pursue the path that I’ve chosen. I could spiritualize the moment more than is necessary, and claim that it was for the kingdom of God (and who knows, maybe it is), but that’s not the point. Whatever the case, I just sold my most financially valuable possession. Not quite “everything”, but it’s a start.

So, in honor of the car’s exit from my life story, I thought I’d post a few (chronologically ordered) pictures to commemorate the role it played in a lot of really important moments for me. Of course, it’s not an exhaustive album, but it will have to do.

Goodbye, Little Car!

The car’s first trip to Tahoe, in 2003 (and my snowboard’s first ride!)

Dav and I in Bishop, CA after a day of climbing on our 2004 cross-country trip to Orlando

Crossing into Florida on the same trip, during the longest continuous drive of my life (24 hours of just me driving, with stops only for gas)

Putting the spoiler on the car with my Dad (it was a birthday gift!)

Driving back across the country with Erin in 2005 after I left my home to live in the community in Palo Alto. This is Kansas.

A few hours of snow accumulation on the car during a trip to Bear Valley with Kyle and Dan (because of snow and avalanches, we had 2 hours of boarding and close to 13 of driving)

Stopped on the 395 (my favorite road) with Dan, on the way to climb Mt Whitney in 2006

Me, tonight, a few hours before the car was driven away for good!

Simply click on the photo below to see the whole photo set at Flickr:

Just click on the picture to access the photo set.

Backpacking in the Sierras

My books don’t fit on the shelves, my clothes don’t fit on the racks, my guitars don’t fit in the corner, and finding somewhere appropriate to display my special beer glass collection is a hopeless luxury.

Being confronted with such constrains has got me thinking about how much Stuff I own in general. My footprint is probably relatively small compared to most of the people I interact with regularly. But when I think about much of the world, whose Stuff could be wrapped in a blanket and slung over a shoulder… well, I’ve got a lot. And let me tell you, it’s hard to be mobile with 2 large bookcases full of books, never mind the ones that got relegated to storage!

On the other hand, my situation could be unique even for Americans, given that I probably have more Kinds of Stuff than most people. I’m not just into books, but music and film, so there go 5 or 6 boxes just for CDs and DVDs. I’m not just into playing musical instruments (adding 5 guitars, a keyboard, and a trumpet to the mix) but into recording, so chalk one box up to computer interfaces and cables, another for mics, and then there’s the oddly-shaped mic stands… And I could keep going–I have 4 large backpacks filled with all kinds of climbing, backpacking, frisbee and snowboarding gear.

In short, if you take away my hobbies, you take away the Stuff. I’m not sure if this is the case for most people or not. But as I have an abnormally large number of hobbies, so I have this abnormally large number of Kinds of Stuff. And, with the exercise of trying to fit a lot of stuff into a small space as the perfect (perhaps ironic) metaphor, I wonder about how and why I’ve decided to cram all these pursuits into the finite space of my life. That’s what I’d call Metastuff.

I suppose answering the Metastuff question for me is the same as answering the question of why I’ve chosen to pursue many things at once rather than focus on one thing (as most people seem able / resigned to do). It’s a question I wrestle with on an intense and daily basis, and it creates a profound ambiguity at the core of who I am which I’ve talked about plenty of times before.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being put in a situation with my Metastuff that mirrors the one I’ve been put into with my Stuff. If life narrowed, I’d be forced to discard some Metastuff, forced to come to terms with the fact that not all of it fits. Perhaps such a pruning process would lead to greater fruitfulness! Or perhaps it would just make me depressed. But one thing I’m pretty sure of: I’m not going to do it myself.

We talk a lot about how we Americans or Westerners have a disproportionate amount of Stuff. So maybe I’m more profoundly Western than I realized, with all this Metastuff. Maybe a superfluity of Metastuff (or Opportunity or Potential or Choice) is relatively new in the West, even. But maybe we should talk more about it, too.

Most people I talk to in my generation seem to recognize responsibility we have to change the world for good in some way. There are a few, of course, who in full awareness decide to seek only self-aggrandizement, money, power, and a life of self-gratification. But for the most part, it has become somewhat popular to think about the world’s problems and how they might be solved or ameliorated. It seems to me that there are two broad ways we can go about this problem: the way most of us tend to do it, and the way Jesus did it.

Most of us, including myself, tend to go about the problem with this train of thought: (1) The world’s problems are bigger than me as an individual. (2) Therefore, if I want to do something about it, I need to get in a place where my individuality counts for more than it does now, as a young post-college person. In other words, I need to get into some position where my desire to help the world can actually command more resources than those already at my command. (3) Getting into those positions, whether in politics or business or large non-profits, will take a long time of working within these various systems, but there aren’t really any other options.

And so, we try to move “upwards”, into the upper echelons of society or a global business community, or the US government, thinking, “when I arrive at a position of power, then I will be able to use my authority to effect dramatic change”. This kind of thinking makes sense, especially from the modernist, Western perspective where change is implemented “top-down”, from those with more power to those with less. In fact, it seems so obviously the way to go about solving problems that it has been a weight of responsibility to me personally, as someone who has (for reasons unrelated to my personal decisions) at least some opportunities to move “upward”. My web development business is doing well, and it’s at least possible that I could follow it up, into more money and strategic places in Silicon Valley. Or, (I flatter myself that) I could go get a PhD and become a respected authority on questions philosophical or theological, maybe even becoming the CS Lewis of our generation, affecting thinkers by the score! Whether or not those possibilities are probable doesn’t matter–the fact that they are there at all has made me ask whether I don’t have a responsibility to grab hold of those opportunities to effect “top-down” change on a large scale. All my friends with talents in the political arena are faced even more acutely with this question.

But at the same time, if we call ourselves Christians, and believe (as I do) that somehow Jesus effected the best kind of change possible for the world, and indeed is calling us to do the same, we are confronted with this:

“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death–even death on a cross!”

So, the man who, if we believe the Scriptures, had the most potential authority of anyone that has ever walked the earth, intentionally chose not to exercise that authority. His strategy for change seems to have been, somewhat stupidly from our perspective, to become the least of women and men, serving them rather than ruling them. God, in other words, chose not to be God, but to be a creature, to be like humans. His answer to the problems of the world was not to “fix” them from on high, as he supposedly had the ability to do, but to live in the problems along with those affected by them.

Jesus’ choice frustrates me, because it seems inefficient. I can even imagine his friends and family, when he chose to leave his profession of carpentry, accusing him of stupidity for leaving behind a growing business. We might imagine that he was even the best carpenter in the region, with a clear “upward” path to greater power and influence in that arena. But without a second glance, he left behind that path, and chose a “downward” path instead–wandering the wilds with a group of men and women, staying at sympathizers’ homes, hanging out with the unintelligent and socially ostracized, and literally as well as symbolically emptying himself for these unworthy recipients. I can very clearly imagine those who knew him since the days of his sitting at the temple and conversing with the rabbis as an equal, looking at his last few years, shaking their heads, and sighing, “He had so much promise.”

And I wonder, in a fearful sort of way, is that how I’m supposed to be? Never mind the theological reasons for it, but… could I handle my friends and family thinking that I’d left behind a promising “upward” path for a less efficient “downward” one? So much of my identity has been wrapped up in that “promise”, in my potential for “great” things from the perspective of our culture. Could I give that up?

I’m not exactly sure, but I have felt that tension coming into play as I’ve wrestled with going back to Kenya. With quite a few “promising” options on the table here in Silicon Valley, it’s been difficult to think of selling my car, going back to the orphanage for a few months, and letting those opportunities die. Less because I want them for themselves (I could never see a computer again and be very happy), but rather because I still feel this sense of obligation to pursue “upward” paths in the hope that they will provide the power and resources necessary for the kind of change I want to see in the world. The idea of hanging out with some AIDS orphans for 6 months seems “good”, but it doesn’t necessarily seem like the most effective or efficient service I could perform with my various skills. Maybe I should instead join with a large non-profit organization that has many more resources!

But every time I read that passage from Philippians, I’m struck with the alien nature of Jesus’ intentional involvement with pain and suffering. It is so, so different from the way that I naturally think about how to deal with those problems that it draws me in, magnetized. It seems like there’s no way it can work! And yet through his laying down of all power and authority came the most miraculous sequence of events in human history. And so I think, what would happen if we turned our idea of social change upside down? What if all the brightest and most possibly-influential people of our age decided, instead of pursuing an “upwardly mobile” philosophy of change, to forget such dreams and hang out with the dejected and downtrodden of our world, becoming in truth one of them?

We’d certainly lose a lot of “progress” momentum. We might not have new, cool Apple computers. We might even revert to a previous technological age. It might be absolutely horrible according to our standards, which value efficiency and capitalism above all else! But… in return, we might get peace, justice, unity, love. At least, that is what came of Jesus’ unique response to the problems we face in our world. And it’s certainly true that as much as we’ve tried other ways to solve them, we haven’t even come close. Maybe, just maybe, we should think more about this strange idea of “downward mobility”, since, against all intuition, it seems to have been the path that God himself chose.

• Inside Facebook

I’ve so far created a suite of 4 of these mini applications, which allow Facebook users to show off what they’re reading (or listening to, or watching, or playing) and interact with friends in each of those spheres. The apps are called Books, CDs, Video Games, and DVDs, respectively. It would be great if you checked these out and added them to your profile! With close to 35,000 total users so far, it’s possible for me to run a small business based on the apps, which would be fun. I’d love your help.

Just for fun, here’s a screenshot of some Books functionality:

But this deserves special notice: Today, we at HopeRuns (the non-profit the friends of mine started in Kenya while I was there) released a brand new website, which I designed! I think it turned out pretty well, but take a look yourself, and check things out:

• hoperuns.org

Gratuitous screenshot:

Oh, something else deserves special notice: it’s my 100th blog on Teleios! Decidedly not that many for almost 2 years, but whatever. Still, a lot has been written…

In each case, simply click on the picture to access the photo set!

On tour with the New Frontiers (Dec 26 - Jan 12)

Schloss Mittersill, Austria (Jan 16 - Mar 4)

Oxford, UK (Mar 4 - Mar 8)

Tumaini Children’s Center, Nyeri, Kenya (Mar 8 - May 1)

Four and a half months after I stopped work and planned to engage in a sabbatical of sorts, I’m back. I flew in from Kenya a day ago, and am now in Orlando as I prepare to help my parents move cross-country to San Francisco.

In many ways, I’m still recovering from Kenya, and cannot yet distill that complex and amazing experience into a weblog entry. In the coming days, I hope to write a thematic series of articles on the various aspects of my time there, which might be a better way of doing justice to it. For now, it’s just hard to adjust to life in the US, and life away from my friends old and new at Tumaini.

I certainly have a lot to think about and process. Between 3 weeks of touring with the New Frontiers, spending 6 weeks at Schloss Mittersill in Austria, and now living 8 weeks in rural Kenya, I’ve had a number of new experiences, and noticed a lot of things about the world and myself which call for introspection, integration, and response.

As I look forward to my future both near and far, I find that I’m more confused about what I can and should do, not less! In that sense, the sabbatical did not live up to my hopes! But I’m beginning to see that this place is probably right where I should be, despite my desires for easy clarity. I think God and other people gave me so many unlooked-for gifts during this time away, albeit sometimes through hard circumstances, so it has been a slow process of gaining the eyes to see their goodness! I’m sure that process will continue in the next weeks and months.

Now, I must focus on re-inserting myself into the matrix of life here, finding work, and pondering next steps. There’s an exciting freedom in not knowing where I will be in a year, let alone two months! But I hope that the right path, if there is such a thing, will present itself to me in enough time to follow it. It usually does, I guess.

So that’s all for now–please stay tuned for the Kenya series, pictures, and other announcements during the next few weeks!

A few weeks ago, Claire and Lara (and therefore me by some kind of implication, I hope) started a weblog with the kids here at Tumaini (the orphanage where I’m “volunteering” in Kenya). I haven’t personally had time to give a decent entry on Kenya or Tumaini itself, which is an amazing place, and full of amazing kids. So I’m happy to be able to point you to their weblog, to get some idea of the craziness that goes on here!

Tumaini Kids Weblog

As a note of celebration, Claire and Lara just found out that the blog has been given Blogspot’s Blog of Note award! We’re hoping the guaranteed publicity that comes along with the high-profile link will lead to greater support for the kids here. I’d love for you to check out the weblog, read some of the (alternately hilarious and heart-breaking) entries, and leave comments for the kids (who are understandably amazed that people from the US would care to talk to them).

I leave Kenya for the States in just about a week; some retrospective articles are forthcoming, though they will probably wait till I’m back in the “developed” world!

You can see my updates and sign up to follow them at http://twitter.com/jlipps!

Basically, Twitter is a micro-blogging service using the web, mobile phones, and IM as equal media. People write short (usually less than 140 characters) updates, which are then sent immediately to interested parties (your group of friends, for example) via whichever communication channel they desire. I’m not sure how useful it is, but given the mobile slant, it’s an interesting experiment in instant/anywhere publication. Check it out, and see for yourself.

It is the Quiet Saturday before Easter Sunday, when thousands of years ago the universe held its breath, awaiting the vindication of God for the as-yet-unveiled Messiah, Jesus. That vindication came in the most unexpected form–the resurrection of the dead! Long looked-for, but almost overlooked when it did come, Jesus became the firstfruits of that most remarkable of events, the completion of which we still eagerly desire.

I am writing at the Tumaini orphanage, near Nyeri, Kenya (where I have extended my stay an additional 5 weeks). From where I am sitting, I can see no end of reasons why we should continue to eagerly await that desire. It is the one fundamental hope that undergirds every other, because it is the hope which defeats the oldest and hardest of all despairs, which is Death itself. I have a lot of reasons (or so I think) to despair at the moment, and when I look at the children who surround me, I know that they have many more and legitimate ones–some have reason to despair even of life, which I know nothing about.

But there is one hope, that the one thing which is the most wrong with the universe can be righted. More to the point, it has been, if we have eyes to see. The fact that people still die is now the illusion, the lie struggling to prevail against the coming truth, which is already true, but which will shine forth in infinite clarity at some time yet to come.

And, as every despair, no matter how small, really derives its life in some way from Death, so the key to every hope, no matter how small, can be found in this one hope of life regained, and made indestructible. Though I have no other hope to cling to, yet this one hope will prove to be my salvation! And this is true, not just for those like me who have never tasted the true Sickness Unto Death, but also for those who have. It is the one firm rock on which to build my relationship towards the universe–the cornerstone which the builders have rejected, but which has, in time and in its turn, become the capstone.

This year, I have not appropriately contemplated all that I could contemplate during Holy Week, nor have I appropriately prepared myself to experience another Easter in the fullest way. However, I am certainly in a place to appreciate and long for the unique comfort which is the hope of the resurrection of the dead (and it is the telltale signs of that future resurrection in Jesus’ own resurrection which we celebrate tomorrow). I believe the renewal and serious appreciation of this hope is just what Easter celebration is all about.

“Tumaini” means “hope” in Swahili.

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In past years, I have traditionally created some piece of art on Easter to commemorate the day (for instance, the two monologues I wrote for Easter 2003 ). I do not know if such will happen tomorrow, but at any rate think that in view of what the hope of Easter really is, nothing can be for me a more appropriate offering than the Suite Apocalyptique I posted in a recent entry (click here to read about and download it), given that its central theme is exactly this one of resurrection hope. Perhaps it will be of benefit to you in your Easter worship!

So, Happy Easter! Christ is risen indeed!

I will leave you with a poem, the lyrics to one of the songs in the Suite ( Mvmt VI: The Sun Rises):

I breathe at last, the work is done
Like shining glass, sea and sun
Are sharp and real, bright blades of love
Which grew to heal the wounds of

Night is over now
Night is over now
The sun is coming up

But don’t turn away from the flames
These brilliant rays annul our shame
The fire burns, but we stand
For which we yearn is in our hands

When we touch the earth, it sings rejoicing
For the day has dawned, and we have returned
To ourselves as we were meant to be
To the world as it has longed to be

I breathe at last, the work is done
The shadow passed, and life begun

This is a first for David and me, and we’re super excited about it–as it turns out, the review is (in my opinion) overwhelmingly positive! Please go and support Paste by picking up a copy (they should be at places like Barnes & Noble, etc…). Our review is, I’m told, on page 69, right underneath Bright Eyes!

Second, if you’re interested in purchasing Hope…, it is now available for sale on iTunes! We have pressed CDs as well, but as I’m out of the country for a while, iTunes is an excellent way to get your hands on a copy now. You can preview tracks in iTunes, or listen to full-length tracks at Splendour Hyaline’s myspace. If you decide you’d like to purchase the album, simply click the link below. Thanks for your support! If you do buy the album, I’d really appreciate it if you also wrote an honest review on iTunes, describing your reaction to the music. Having a lot of reviews helps us out when people are browsing music!

Check out Hope (A Sliver, Like the Moon) on iTunes!

The side of the castle and Mittersill far below

Looking down into Mittersill at night

One of many beautiful sunsets looking from the Schloss deck

The courtyard through a window

The chapel and mountains beyond

A lonely path I took one day

Snowing on the castle at night

The bottom of Krimml waterfall

There are two things that primarily defined the latter half of my time in Austria. First of all, I had the opportunity to have a 3-day, intensive, guided retreat of solitude and fasting. The significance of this time for me deserves its own entry, and I wish I had the time to expound on what happened in my heart over even that short period. In sum, God showed me his love in a new way, almost without the intermediation of my (ever-striving) intellect. It was an experience with which I was not before familiar, and it made all the questions and frustrations I came into the time with (including my physical trials) seem somewhat unimportant in comparison to that love.

In fact, it was that result that stayed with me during my whole time in Austria. Unfortunately, though I continued to pray about many of the issues which caused me to embark on a sabbatical (my arms, etc…), none of these were resolved. Fortunately, I no longer believed that the resolution of these problems was of paramount importance! What had replaced them? I’m not sure exactly, but I could describe it as the sustaining love and peace of God. As I said, I would love to expound at length on the process I went through during the solitude, fasting, and meditation, but this summary will have to do for now. I will, however, share a few pictures I took while on a long walk I took during the retreat:

A floating mountain!

Dramatic picture of an Austrian house

B/W of a lone farmhouse

Secondly, I’d like to share the results of a project I started and completed while at the Schloss. When I first arrived, I began to play around on one of the few pianos at the castle, and soon formed an idea for a concept album. Miraculously (given how slow I usually write music), I wrote seven full songs. Equally miraculously, I had time before leaving to do a basic recording of the whole project. I’ve since done a simple mixing job on them and have put all of them up for download. But first, here are some pictures:

The piano set-up, in the Green Room

I recorded vocals in the chapel, which was, as you’d imagine, great for reverb as well as inspiration

Most often, I had to record vocals at night by the light of my headlamp!

The album, called Suite Apocalyptique, is special in a way, since there’s one theme that guides both the music and the lyrics. Instead of writing about it here, I’ve created a PDF that includes an explanation of the background for the album, as well as all the lyrics. You can download it here - I recommend reading it before listening to the album.

Now, I would love for you to download and listen to the album! It is compressed into ZIP format (which both Mac and Windows can extract easily), and you can get it here: Suite Apocalyptique. I certainly welcome any comments or feedback! I hope the album might be meaningful to you in some way; certainly I have all of you who are supporting me in this venture to thank directly for this project!

Well, there’s much more to say about my time in Austria, of course. Many paragraphs could be spent telling stories and thanking the Schloss community for its support and friendship to me, and for welcoming me swiftly and warmly to the center of their life together. Perhaps such thoughts will float across the blog in the future!

Now, I am in Oxford, where I have been for a few days while waiting for my flight to Kenya (logistics created a bit of a time gap, and it made sense to spend it in the UK). I’ve enjoyed wandering the streets and footpaths, visiting my favorite pubs (including the Eagle and Child) and seeing new neighborhoods (like Iffley and Jericho) that I hadn’t before. I’ll leave you with a few pictures from here:

A lovely little lane

Christ Church cathedral

Thank you for reading! In a few short hours I’ll be joining Lara (of TrippingOnWords) at Heathrow. Then it’s off to Nyeri, Kenya, to the Tumaini orphanage. I’m not sure exactly what’s in store for me there, but I’m sure it will be awesome. I look forward to sharing those experiences at the end of this month, when I return home!

A brief summary of the reasons for such a decision: Primarily, my computer-centric lifestyle (both work and play) over the past few years contributed to a gradually worsening set of repetitive stress injuries in my arms and hands, such that when November rolled around, I was experiencing pain at all times, not just when using computers. Conversations with various specialists enlightened me as to the potential long-term damage of exacerbating my condition, and I decided to wrap up my current obligations and take 3-4 months away.

Another important factor in my decision was my spiritual life, which for a number of reasons I believed would benefit from a time of listening to God and posing certain questions to him, in an environment different than my normal, Palo Alto one.

With help from others, I thought long and hard about how best to pursue a sabbatical for several months, and settled on a 3-part journey. First, I decided to go on tour with my friends The New Frontiers (with whom I went to high school) and Manchester Orchestra. Sadly, this leg of the journey is already complete! For about 3 weeks, I slept on floors and lived in a van with these guys, playing a show almost every night, eating on $5 a day, and generally having an incredible time. The telling of the experiences we had warrants a book, not a weblog entry, so I’ll pass on any further detail here. Suffice it to say, I had a genuinely life-changing trip, enjoyed hanging out with my companions, and received many questions to ponder during the subsequent portions of the sabbatical.

I was able to play a few shows on tour; this is the 585 in Atlanta

In the middle of January, I flew back to Florida for just three days, attended a friend’s wedding, and packed for the remainder of my journey. Then, I flew to Austria, and made my way to the small town of Mittersill, where I’m spending about 6 weeks at a place called Schloss Mittersill (Castle Mittersill). There is a small Christian community living here that lets students or people on sabbatical come to study, think, rest, etc… It seemed to be an ideal place for me to dig into some of the spiritual questions and issues I had raised, and it has proven to be that so far.

For the last few weeks, I’ve spent virtually all my time at the Schloss, getting to know the house team, students, and other workers and inhabitants. Without exception these people have been wonderfully inviting, and I found myself welcomed very quickly into the life rhythm of this place. After adjusting to the time and learning how to get from one place in the Schloss to another, I began to meet with a certain couple who are acting as my “sabbatical liaisons” (really, counselors) during my time here. Since then, I’ve been sharing my story with them, and putting together a plan for how best to heal physically and also make use of this time to seek God. I’ll probably have, for example, a sort of retreat-within-retreat next week for a couple days, in solitude from the rest of the group here.

Most of my time, however, has so far been spent in the Schloss library, or hanging out with people by a fire and talking into the evening, or taking advantage of the incredible alpine environment and going for long walks in the snowy hills (I hope to be able to do a bit of snowboarding at nearby Pass Thurn or Kitzbühel if I can find some gear). I’ve been reading ferociously, catching up on (what seems like) years of lost time, and studying German, Greek, Hebrew, and Swahili. We’ll see how much any of that sticks, but I have been enjoying delving into these pursuits that I rarely have time for. What’s more, there’s been the opportunity for creative endeavors as well–they have a few pianos here, so I’ve been writing some music, as well as working on a short novel that has been under construction for over a year now.

A winter scene from one of my walks near the Schloss

In short, between the amazing community, the study, nature, and the hilarious attempts to practice yoga in my tiny room (we have my sister to thank for that), the time has been incredibly useful to me already. Now that I have gotten a feel for life here, and had a chance to enjoy many of the academic or creative pursuits I love, I hope to move forward into a time of serious waiting on and listening to God, and hopefully come to some resolutions on the spiritual purposes for this sabbatical, on how I should be spending and directing my energies in the coming months and years, and on who I am as an individual in his Kingdom.

I also hope to spend even less time on my computer than I have been, thus to be more confident of my physical healing. I will probably, for example, refrain from e-mail as much as possible, though I would certainly rather be talking to you than not!

Well, so much for an update. I also need to mention that, at the outset of my trip to Austria, I was very fearful that things would not come together financially for these international travels. Obviously, the combination of travel and not working is a bit of an expensive worry. However, it soon became clear that my fears were misplaced! In an amazing display of generosity that left me literally shaken, I was supported by many friends and family, who also, it seems, saw the importance in this move for me. The fact that so many would gather around me in assistance at a time like this, when I truly needed it, is to me an incredible testimony of God’s faithfulness through their love. While not everything is taken care of, I have certainly been humbled by this experience, enough to finally heed Jesus’ words about not worrying about tomorrow’s troubles. For now, my focus is on what I am doing and trying to discern God’s voice in the middle of it.

I am sure that the remainder of my time at the Schloss will be excellent. But that only accounts for 2 out of 3 parts of this sabbatical! Looking ahead to part 3, I’m going to be leaving Austria for Kenya in early March. There is an orphanage outside of Nairobi a ways that I will be staying at, and volunteering at for about 3 weeks (along with a few friends from Stanford). I can’t say much more about this leg as yet, since some details still need to be firmed up. I am certain it will be an amazing time nonetheless, and a completely different experience than the one here in Austria. My hope is that I will be able to be of some service to the children and staff there, however small. We will see; and I’ll be certain to write about those experiences later on.

That is it for now; I have had a virtually limitless number of ideas for other weblog entries, whether theological or philosophical or poetic or what have you, but in an effort to stay off the keyboard, I’ve refrained from writing them down. Alas! Well, goodbye for now, and if you’d like to say hello in an e-mail, please don’t hesitate; I’ll respond as quickly as I can!

No time for a huge entry, but I wanted to post some tour dates. I am hanging out with my friends The New Frontiers on their southeast tour with Manchester Orchestra. At some venues I may be able to play some Splendour Hyaline music. Either way, if you’re anywhere near these towns on these dates, come and say hello!

• Dec 27 2006 - 8:00P - Juanita’s - Little Rock, Arkansas
• Dec 28 2006 - 8:00P - The Hi-Tone - Memphis, Tennessee
• Dec 29 2006 - 8:00P - 3rd & Lindsley - Nashville, Tennessee
• Dec 30 2006 - 8:00P - The Brothers Pizza - Owensboro, Kentucky
• Jan 1 2007 - 8:00P - The Village Tavern - Charleston, SouthCarolina
• Jan 2 2007 - 8:00P - New Brookland Tavern - West Columbia, SouthCarolina
• Jan 3 2007 - 8:00P - Tasty World - Athens, Georgia
• Jan 4 2007 - 7:00P - The Sound - Ft. WaltonBeach, Florida
• Jan 5 2007 - 8:00P - The Venue - Pensacola, Florida
• Jan 6 2007 - 8:00P - The 585 Club - Atlanta, Georgia
• Jan 7 2007 - 8:00P - The Rave Arcade - Florence, Alabama
• Jan 8 2007 - 8:00P - Hal & Mal’s - Jackson, Mississippi
• Jan 9 2007 - 8:00P - Flannagan’s - Shreveport, Louisiana
• Jan 10 2007 - 8:00P - Rikenjack’s Brew - PubLakeCharles, Louisiana
• Jan 11 2007 - 8:00P - Red Seven - Austin, Texas
• Jan 12 2007 - 8:00P - Sons of Hermann Hall - Dallas, Texas

Also, Splendour Hyaline’s new album, Hope (A Sliver, Like the Moon) (cover pictured above) has been released and it will be for sale on tour. It will be for sale later via the internet (including iTunes).

A long blog entry is overdue–some big news for the next couple months (which most of you all have probably heard anyway), but we’re getting ready to drive to Little Rock for the first show. Cheers!

At this time of year, the blog is usually full of ruminations on the birth of Christ (like this entry) or self-pity wallowings (like this rather plaintive entry or this poem from last year). But right now I have neither the time nor energy to be deeply profound nor (believe it or not) deeply self-centered.

So I thought I’d share, as rather paltry gifts, a few links to things I’ve loved recently; you may find them interesting!

First, for anyone who like me has been completely annoyed by (what I am calling) the “Dawkins Meme” of recent months, I want to give this article–a review of Dawkins’ new book by Terry Eagleton (who’s not, I don’t think, a Christian). The problem with Dawkins is not that he’s wrong–if we were to quantify beliefs, I’d probably agree with more of his than your average fundamentalist Christian–though certainly some basic ones differ. The problem is, as Eagleton says, his unwillingness to see surfacely-nuanced differences in “religious” systems that actually have huge under-the-hood ramifications.

Second, to all and sundry, I want to gift two podcasts done by St Paul’s Theological Centre in London, which happen to be interviews with NT Wright. The first podcast is on gnosticism, and the second podcast is on, among other things, “apocalypse”. I would go so far as to make the second one mandatory listening for any thoughtful Christian; it’s that good.

I have to admit, of course, that I’m drinking the NT Wright Kool-Aid at the moment. I’ve been reading his Christian Origins and the Question of God series, and am almost done with the second (long) volume, on Jesus. It’s been one of the most groundbreaking works I’ve read in a while. Last year I read some Kierkegaard and reflected that he had done more than anyone to re-affirm my love of Scripture as something worth remaining conversant with. Now, I’d say the same thing about NT Wright; I feel that I’ve been given a whole new (and better) way of reading the gospels (and much of the Old Testament). It seems as though I was dealing with something two-dimensional, and now the text has sprung to life amidst a vibrant and colorful context. My exegeses of almost every parable and saying of Jesus have been subtly, if not fundamentally, alered, and many things now just make sense that were opaque before.

This isn’t to say that Wright is correct on all his points (though as a novice in historical studies it’s hard for me to launch a critique), but rather that the overall story he is weaving answers, it seems, more questions than any other view I’ve come across. It has the result, of course, of turning much conventional “Christian” (particularly western fundamentalist) wisdom on its head–a result I’m amenable to in any case. So, if you are a Christian who cares about the content of your beliefs and whether or not they make sense, read these books.

Third and finally, I have a gift for lovers of language learning. I recently discovered that the iTunes music store has many language-learning podcasts available for free download. I found one for German that has 100 lessons, each ~15 minutes long. That’s essentially a 25-hour language course, free! I discovered these podcasts from a very helpful list of language-learning podcasts. From what it looks like, iTunes has a lot more that didn’t make this list, so I’m sure further exploration would be fruitful.

So again, I wish all of you a very happy Christmas, focused indeed on reflection on the having-already-come of the Messiah, and the having-already-been-inaugurated of the Kingdom of God. I leave you, therefore, with this excerpt from an article by CS Lewis (one that my family reads every Christmas Eve), which pretty much sums up my feelings about this time of year:

But I myself conversed with a priest in one of these temples and asked him why they kept Crissmas on the same day as Exmas; for it appeared to me inconvenient. But the priest replied, “It is not lawful, O stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left.” And when I asked him why they endured the Rush, he replied, “It is, O Stranger, a racket”; using (as I suppose) the words of some oracle and speaking unintelligibly to me (for a racket is an instrument which the barbarians use in a game called tennis).

But what Hecataeus says, that Exmas and Crissmas are the same, is not credible. For first, the pictures which are stamped on the Exmas-cards have nothing to do with the sacred story which the priests tell about Crissmas. And secondly, the most part of the Niatirbians, not believing the religion of the few, nevertheless send the gifts and cards and participate in the Rush and drink, wearing paper caps. But it is not likely that men, even being barbarians, should suffer so many and great things in honour of a god they do not believe in.

• We Three Kings of Orient Are
• Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
• O Holy Night

(To download the album, right-click the above links and choose the option to download the files to your computer.)

David and I hope that these songs can accompany your 2006 Christmas season, as our previous Christmas EP did last year; if you have not downloaded those songs, you can get them here. Unfortunately, we had a very limited amount of time in which to record the three songs above (very few takes each), so the performance quality on my part is less than superb. (In addition, I just realized I didn’t catch an error in the lyrics of “O Holy Night”. Oh well.) Equally unfortunately, neither David nor Rachel were able to add their talents to the mix. David did, however, produce, mix, engineer, and master the whole album, which is happily noticeable.

That being said, I think things sound great on the whole, and am excited especially about a few classical guitar interludes in the songs. So, please download and enjoy them and, as always, listen with headphones!

At any rate, it is good to be home. One of the tasks my mother has set me for my time here is to go through all my old boxes of saved school projects, mementos, love letters, etc., and to vaguely scrapbook them. (For me, “scrapbooking” involves putting things into a binder).

A few days ago I went through the oldest of these boxes, from first through eighth grade. I was surprised by what a profoundly emotional time it was. Things I thought I’d forgotten forever came back clearly, and I was able to re-enter my mind as a small child. Though of course many things have changed since then (and many childish innocences lost), a definite core of personality has stayed surprisingly constant, from hobbies to dreams to fantasies to writing style. I had a fantastic time reading through the first stories I wrote in second and third grade, and many of them were hilariously non-sensical in a way that only children’s stories are.

In fact, I hope to start a series on this blog where I put up some of these old masterpieces for the comedic enjoyment of the general public. For starters, here is what was probably my first acrostic poem (from the beginning of 2nd grade); guess which movie I was obsessed with at the time:

Munches fast
Our lives saved by him
Never afraid
Goes very fast
Our best fighting machine
One good friend
So good at fighting
Even good for a pet
Jonathan Lipps

Anyway, I discovered that in elementary school basically all that was on my mind was space, dinosaurs, mongooses, fighter jets, and ancient egyptian mummies. Why did things have to get more complicated?

Nostalgia is certainly a theme of the trip so far. In trying to avoid computers, not being able to do much physical exercise either (I’m definitely falling apart), and moreover not having friends to hang out with, my options have been to read or watch TV. I can only read so much academic history, and TV makes me feel dirty, so I have resorted to an old childhood standby: origami! All the way through high school this was a big hobby of mine, but it has fallen by the wayside. With the rediscovery of my paper and books, and with nothing else to do, I’ve been keeping myself occupied folding paper. The best project so far has been a castle, a modular model which required 42 squares of paper folded into various structures and joined without glue or tape. Here’s some glamor shots:

And if are really bored you can watch this YouTube video which is a walk-around of the model:

In addition, I’ve dusted off the old trumpet and started practicing again, in anticipation of I know not what; perhaps it is primarily to again recapitulate my childhood experiences! At any rate, brass instruments require a long period of readjustment as many small facial muscles need to be retrained. Right now I’m no better than I was in 8th grade and can only play for a third of the time. Perhaps I will improve reasonably over the course of the holiday, and, who knows, put trumpet on our next CD! (We hope to record a Christmas album this week–stay tuned for that).

Certainly, I don’t know what the result of all this historical exploration of my past will be. It certainly feels indulgent and unproductive, and sometimes it is painful to remind myself that I am actually connected to a past self that maybe or caused painful things. Still, it is amazing to see certain threads running all through my life, both good and bad. The most brilliant of these is of course the glory and purpose of God, and the grace that I have been given since a small child, which far outweighs all the pain I have experienced or the evil things I have done. And I suppose it is always valuable to realize such a thread exists, for it certainly gives hope of its continued centralizing power in my life!

Another brief highlight of the trip so far has been getting reacquainted with the small family of sandhill cranes that make their home in our neighborhood (2 parents and an adolescent). These elegant (though not keenly intelligent) birds are not afraid of humans yet, and we have thankfully given them no reason to be, so they often wander over when we are outside and hang around in or near our driveway. I find them very beautiful, and it is fun to be near wild creatures that are not afraid of or dangerous to humans:

Well, notwithstanding my desires to continue blogging, day in and day out, about any number of topics, I must force myself to leave off. In fact, I’m going to try and ignore computers and the internet for as long as I can! I know I won’t last long. But if I am not, for instance, responding to your e-mails, please understand that this is the reason. Cheers!

First, let’s define reflection. What is it? I think it’s very simple; I’d define “reflection on/about X” as “purposive thought about X, particularly with regard to my own psychological, epistemological, and intentional relations to X”. In other words, thinking seriously and critically about X.

Second, it is widely recognized (following Quine) that all the (uncountable) beliefs that comprise our psychologies can be modeled as a huge interconnected web, with the more fundamental, tightly-held, worldview-level beliefs occupying the protected center of the web, and the less important, day-to-day beliefs occupying positions along the perimeter. It is these peripheral, maybe temporary beliefs, whether of my current sense experience, or of what I had for breakfast, etc., that border (from the perspective of my epistemology) most directly on extra-individual reality (reality outside of myself).

When I talk about reflection in what follows, I will be talking about it with reference to the more central, “core” aspects of our epistemologies. My observation is that these belief systems are often the ones we take the most for granted. We often find, as a result of this, people in our society whom we can observe to be perfectly “reflective” on peripheral beliefs and issues (perhaps political topics), but who have not, for whatever reason, engaged in any process of reflection regarding the cherished center of the web.

So far, I haven’t said anything about why I think reflection about these central nodes would be beneficial, or what side-effects such reflection might have. It will be my contention both that (a) serious and recurring reflection on these central beliefs is indeed valuable, while at the same time, (b) such reflection can come at a high cost. That the second contention is true should not be controversial–everyone has seen that a spider-web with damage at the periphery can be repaired quite easily by an industrious spider, but a web with destruction at its center is almost irreparable, and an entirely new web must be constructed. So it is with the web of belief–drastic central changes cause everything to be rebuilt, and this deconstruction/reconstruction is a vulnerable, time-consuming, and sometimes hopeless task. Thus the first of my two contentions becomes a contention indeed.

Before arguing the claim that reflection is valuable despite its cost, I want to put two enumerations forward which may be helpful. The first is a list of psychological attitudes one can have towards reflection on a given central issue. First, a person can be “unreflective” about X, meaning she has not thought about X as a distinct entity warranting reflection, or has assumed X to be so epistemologically sure that reflection is superfluous. Second, a person can be “reflective” about X if she satisfies the definition of reflection above with regard to X. Third, a person can be “anti-reflective” about X if she realizes reflection about X is possible, even warranted, but deliberately chooses not to engage in it. We could no doubt think of many examples of friends who fit into each of these categories. We could also name any number of reasons why a person would be anti-reflective, after realizing what a costly enterprise reflection is; cherished beliefs are exactly that–cherished! And to put our cherished things in harm’s way can cause extremely negative reactions. From this list we can generalize psychological or “personality” descriptors: some people tend to be unreflective, some people tend to be reflective, and some people tend to be anti-reflective, when it comes to their cherished beliefs. (Very few people are anti-reflective in all areas of inquiry, though most are un reflective in most areas of inquiry).

Second, there is now an obvious way to chop up a person’s web of belief. Some beliefs will be pre-reflective, that is, beliefs held but not yet seriously questioned. Some others will be in crisis, or under investigation–held, but perhaps tentatively, while a process of reflection goes on. At the end of the process, the beliefs might survive unchanged, or they might be modified, or they might be transported to a different part of the web, or connections between them and other beliefs might be redrawn. They might also be jettisoned completely. Beliefs that do survive we can label as “post-reflective”, that is, beliefs that have a tested relationship with the beliefs around them, all the way out to the periphery and beyond, to the extra-individual reality itself (the universe). I find it important to insist not just on self-coherence (the result of reflection on beliefs vis a vis other beliefs), but on integration with what we can discover of reality outside ourselves (the result of reflection on beliefs vis a vis nature, other people, traditions both familiar and unfamiliar, scientific facts and knowledge, and any other kind of knowledge we can gain on any stratum of reality). More will be said about this later.

So, what I want to contend is that (a) ceteris paribus, it is better to be a reflective person than an un- or anti-reflective person, and (b) ceteris paribus, it is better to have post-reflective beliefs than pre-reflective beliefs. In (b), this amounts to saying that it is better to have beliefs that have been willingly put in crisis and survived scrutiny than otherwise. The way the argument proceeds is simple:

1. Ceteris paribus, it is better (though perhaps less profitable or “fit”) to believe a true statement than a false one.
2. So, ceteris paribus, it is better to have as high a percentage of true beliefs as possible.
3. The process of reflection is the process whereby we seriously question and attempt, as far as we can, to discern the likelihood that a certain set of beliefs is true or false.
4. Therefore, it is better to be a reflective person, and to have a preponderance of post-reflective beliefs.

As you’d imagine, there are a number of places one could ask questions along the way, particularly about truth. What is truth? While it would be sheer lunacy to delve into such a question here, allow me to offer a simple answer without justification, trusting that its sensible nature will be clear, however many objections could be raised to it. Truth is, essentially, a relationship between statements and reality. Reality itself simply is. A rock, for instance, is neither true nor false. It is simply a rock. Truth and falsity are predicates of statements about reality. That the rock is a sandy brown, for instance can be true or false (once the philosophy of language questions have been answered regarding the semantics of “rock” and “brown”–another rabbit hole we cannot dive down at this time–but I take it that you know what I mean by “rock” and “brown”).

On my view, the statement is true if it accurately describes reality, and false otherwise. Such a view flies in the face of some philosophers who complain that we cannot simply “compare” statements about reality and reality itself, or that reality itself is completely inaccessible in any case. While their concerns are valid, I take it for granted that human experience as a whole (not least since the advent of rigorous science) belies the notion that we are completely closed off from reality. It may be difficult–it may be the most difficult human task in general–to really discern whether words and reality cohere, but I believe it can be done, even if imperfectly.

Even if we take the question of truth as settled, why should we believe that it is better to believe truly than falsely? We are often told by psychologists how false beliefs can function as mental crutches in a confused and dangerous world. Likewise, we can all think of examples where believing a lie leads, at least in the short term, to greater happiness (or evolutionary fitness). This is actually a hard question, but I think my definition of truth above informs this discussion helpfully. If truth is ultimately about reality, not about relationships between words and themselves, and if we are ultimately creatures which inhabit that same reality, then it will be the case that, on the whole, true beliefs help us successfully navigate reality, whereas false ones don’t. This amounts to saying that the psychologists may be right about certain psychological benefits of falsehoods, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. The general case is quite obvious–without such a view of truth, modern science would fail miserably, and humans would disappear rapidly off the face of the earth. If I stand on the top of a building and believe that I can run off the edge and fly, I will discover, when that belief is put to the test, the dramatic difference between the success rates of truth and falsity in general.

There is no reason to suppose that the general usefulness of true beliefs is a feature only of our physical relationship to air and pavement. But curiously, normally quite rational people who would never for a moment consider jumping off a building engage in much the same practice with philosophical or religious beliefs about reality. In other words, we have all reflected, however briefly, about the importance of not jumping off buildings (if we want to continue in life). But few, it seems, have chosen to deeply understand the realities which supposedly undergird our philosophical and theological discourses. That is where I recommend reflection, and where I propose that serious reflection in these spheres can bring success in reality just as reflection on the flightless nature of humans can provide success in another part of that same reality.

So, I think we have established my main point, and it is not, in any case, often questioned by serious philosophers (if only because they wish to justify, after the fact, their having spent obscene amounts of time in perhaps-useless reflection). More must be said, however, to forestall a few conclusions that could be reached, given only what I have said so far.

First, a preponderance of true beliefs is not the be-all and end-all of psychological success. I have listed it here as a motivation for reflection, but it is not the only one, even if it is the one most-touted. An anti-reflective individual may happen to have a higher percentage of true beliefs than a reflective individual. While this could be so for any number of reasons, it is, in the limit, accidental (hence all the “ceteris paribus” clauses throughout this essay). But even in that case I would say that it is better to be the reflective person, and not just for the long-term truth benefits. I see a life typified by reflection as having moral and social dimensions as well.

While it is the case, for example, that reflection can lead to knowledge, in many of the areas most worthy of reflection, it may lead simply of an awareness of the vastness of the problem. Often our pre-reflective state is actually much simpler than our post-reflective one. In the process of reflection, we do not simply move from false assumptions to true answers. Rather, we are forced to engage with a reality that is incredibly complicated. We are forced to examine positions and ideas we had not before even considered existing. In many cases, what we find when we do examine those positions and ideas are yet further subdivisions, further choices to be made, and, as it often feels, further ways to be wrong. Reflection is rarely about moving from tightly-held, unjustified beliefs to tightly-held, justified beliefs. Rather, the awareness of the immensity of the scope of possible answers to a particular question breeds an awareness of the infinitesimal chance we have of being exactly right in anything we say, which therefore compels us to be tentative and cautious, to take reality seriously and to not be hasty in decisions about it. Answers are adopted loosely and their mileage is tested, and the experience of past reflections develops a character of inquisitiveness and tentativeness.

Now that I have spoken about character, you can see some of the non-truth-related benefits of reflection. To sum up its developmental benefits, I would say that reflection encourages humility. While the motivation for reflection is truth in the sphere of reflection, be it religious or otherwise, the result of reflection is typically the appreciation that truth is much harder to grasp than we originally thought. Prior to reflection, we come to reality brazenly, arrogantly, telling it how we think it is and assuming that it will respond thusly. After reflection, we realize that, vis a vis the infinitely complex reality of the universe and God, there is very little we can say. At that stage, having bowed respectfully to our partner, we can begin to cautiously build up theories and test them, perhaps (and hopefully) eventually coming to true knowledge. Any other method attempts to ravish reality for what we can strip from it to use for our own ends, which are usually (however subconsciously) abusive. This attitude is not only an intellectual but a moral failing. In short, echoing Proverbs, reflection gives us wisdom, and systematically avoiding it makes us fools.

(Briefly, I should also mention, without attempting to substantiate, a social benefit to reflection: I have observed, and it has been my personal experience, that it is more enjoyable to be around reflective people than anti-reflective people. The latter are often loud, brash, unwilling to compromise, and closed-minded. While these are all concepts unrelated to truth and falsity, they do have a sociological component that makes their carriers unpleasant.)

Anyway, at this stage in the essay the reader may be forgiven for feeling confusion. Further above, I praised reflection for delivering truth. Just above, I praised it for delivering an awareness that truth is well-nigh inaccessible! Which is it? I think both are important for reasons already mentioned, and I think holding both together is the key to engaging in reflection successfully. It should be remembered, incidentally, that knowing what is not true is often as valuable as knowing what is. If the result of reflection for an individual is merely the discovery that a certain set of beliefs is false, well, she has eradicated those beliefs from her web, and added a true belief (the negation of the old ones), thereby causing a net increase in her percentage of true beliefs. So perhaps the conflict isn’t as grave as it looks. Moreover, we have been talking all along as if it is possible for us to know when our beliefs are true. While this knowledge is often possible, it is often not, and so the situation “on the ground” may not be as clear cut as we have made it.

Essentially, holding these two aspects of reflection together is where the “critical realist” viewpoint of this essay becomes clear. The modernist, Enlightenment mentality would suggest that reflection is a straightforward process of doubting all non-“rational” beliefs, and then building the belief web back using only “rational” beliefs. Of course, such a project is not only arrogant but untenable (“reason” turns out to be a moving target). On the other hand, the post-modern mentality would suggest that the purpose of reflection is to realize that nothing true at all can be said about anything, or equivalently that the way I have defined truth is wrong (perhaps sentences carry their own truth).

Over against both of these, I want to recommend a process of reflection whereby we acknowledge the over-simplicity of our pre-reflective beliefs, but interact courageously and respectfully with reality to, as best we can, find out what really is the case. This process will not be easy or obvious, and it will involve many dead-ends, getting lost in circles, and reversals of program. But, after slogging through the morass, we will find after an appropriate amount of time and honest effort that we have actually gone somewhere, even if the net gain is only a few feet forward.

Lastly, I want to suggest that good reflection consists of at least two important stages, namely deconstruction and reconstruction. Deconstruction is the process whereby beliefs are doubted and dismantled, and reconstruction is the process whereby new beliefs (or even the same ones) are developed from the debris, albeit always in a critical manner. Deconstruction, then, is what encourages the humility and respect for reality I mentioned. Reconstruction is the ensuing dance with reality whereby we cautiously build up beliefs, consistently testing them and using only the strongest available materials we have on hand.

Neither of these processes are perfect. We rarely deconstruct wholesale, because of the psychological wounds it leaves. A ship (Neurath’s ship, it’s called, after the philosopher who coined the analogy) traveling on the sea in need of repair can indeed be repaired–but it cannot be re-built from the ground up while on the waves, or it would sink. Likewise, during reconstruction we often have to use imperfect materials–whatever reality has laying about. But we should not, just for that reason, despair of reconstructing at all, because if we leave off this task, a slow leak in the ship’s side will cause the whole thing to sink after a while, anyway. Eventually, judgement calls must be made, or the whole enterprise founders! The goal, then, is an ongoing process of deconstruction and reconstruction based on the best available bits of reality. If the ship can survive long enough, perhaps it can make it to land and harvest new timber!

All of the foregoing means, of course, that two people reflecting on the same questions, even if in largely similar environments, might come to differ on certain points. This is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of the “critical” nature of “critical realism”. Ultimately, only reality itself is the arbiter between two different answers, and given that we do not have immediate and direct access to reality (as in naive realism), we are not guaranteed that such arbitration is shortly forthcoming. This does not mean that all answers to all questions are equal, only that in some cases, if two competing answers both adequately and excellently explain certain features of reality, we may not be able to decide between them on their own merits. In such a case we can zoom out to a wider network of beliefs in which each answer resides, and perhaps put these wider networks to the test. (And even there, we could run into a similar problem). The hope is that as our respectful engagement with reality proceeds, new material will come to light that will arbitrate helpfully. Such has been the founding hope of the sciences, and many examples could be given of how the hope is constantly fulfilled (the discovery of cosmic background radiation, for example, helped to arbitrate between Big Bang theories and their competitors).

So, there is an exhortation to a life of reflection! It can be a frightening proposition to take a cherished belief (say the resurrection of Jesus for a Christian, or the non-existence of God for an atheist) and really hold it up to the mirror of reality, but ultimately there can be no better exercise. Granted, the boat of our psychology must stay afloat to sustain this reflection in the first place (and therefore it may not be wise to completely sink it with undue skepticism). Still, if we choose to avoid it, we are denying ourselves that growth (intellectual, psychological, spiritual) which gives us such benefits as knowledge, wisdom and humility. Therefore out of love for your cherished beliefs, submit them to reality and decide whether they really are worthy of your admiration.

1. Over the past few years I’ve been giving myself what’s called “repetitive stress syndrome” in my hands and arms from excessive computing. It has now flowered into something extremely painful, almost what I’d call debilitating (at least for computer work). It’s frustrating because I need to work on my computer to make money to live, but that work hurts my body, which in turn impairs the amount of time that I can work, so I make less money, so I need to work more, etc… I’m trying to figure out how to get out of the cycle for enough time to heal. On another whiney note, similar problems are plaguing my lower extremities, so my usual pick-me-ups of quick 6-mile (or even 1-mile) runs are now no longer options. Thus I sit around and think how I wish I could either work or play, but can’t do either. On the bright side, I can read, and I’ve been doing a lot of that.

2. I’ve been reading Jesus and the Victory of God by NT Wright (2nd in his multi-volume work on Christian origins and the question of God). It is incredible, and builds well upon the foundation of his first book (excerpts of which I did not share here, unfortunately). Also, to my utter delight my old Greek prof let me borrow a book called Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, which is exactly what it purports to be: a linguistic history of the Greek language within the context of other historical events. Finally, the itch of my curiosity about how the Greek language evolved from a highly inflected tonal language thousands of years ago to the relatively simple Indo-European tongue we know as Modern Greek. Fascinating.

3. I went to visit my sister Rachel in Nashville this week! It was lots of fun to see her and hang out (even though we both spent most our time working on exams or jobs). She took me to some cool places and we finished the trip with a Copeland / Appleseed Cast show which rocked hardcore. Hardcore rockage–that’s what it was! I love both bands, and it was fun to chat with them momentarily after the show.

4. I’ve been wanting to blog reactions to some of the stuff I’ve been reading and other things (including some Enaselvai translations that I’ve been working on), but as it’s not good for me to type unless it’s absolutely necessary, I will have to postpone such endeavors. Indeed, blogging may be a little slow for the next while unless my therapy makes any good progress. (Likewise, dreams of getting back into Warcraft when the expansion is released have gone down the tubes…which in the long run is probably a good thing)

5. I read through a bunch of old blog entries recently (from jonathanlipps.com/weblog) and was again surprised by how often (and how poorly) I blogged back when I started. For instance, in February 2002 I wrote 35 entries. It’s hard to believe it was 4 and a half years ago!

6. FACEBOOK.

Now I must bid you adieu.

The Earth That Was (We Who Were) Mountains, forests, deserts, and seas, full of beauty and life. They are stark as reality but good as truth. There is freedom to explore, to go one way or another, to drink from this or that stream, to sleep now or later, to eat from the fruit of this tree or to be satisfied with the berries from that bush. Whether I go or stay, I rest in the comfort that there was no better choice than the one I just made. I trust myself as a creature amidst creation, I trust myself to be aimed correctly, to never fail to be appropriately situated for the appropriate function towards the appropriate result at the appropriate time. Right and wrong may exist, but if so, they exist as a land beyond the mountains at the farthest reach of my eagle’s sight. Success and failure may exist, but if so, they exist as an imperceptible cloud bank miles off the shores of the sea, held at bay by the unshakeable high pressure of the perfection of the land. At any rate, they are not worth considering. What matters is what is at hand, and what is at hand is pure goodness and joy. How beautiful and fine the brush of God, painting not End but Beginning, not Command but Possibility! The Earth That Is (We Who Are) The universe is a plane, infinite in front and below, but infinitesimal in width. It is a sheet of paper on edge, the cuts of which go deeper than any blade. The abstract has become the real, and the real has been flattened, coerced to serve a harsh and cold master. Life is walking the razor, the thin tightrope of Righteousness which is so ephemeral. To either side the void howls with a commanding rage, black maws agape and hungry. The line is safe but not sure. In fact, it is so thin the very molecules of my feet are sundered, falling into either abyss. I am slit, riven, sinking into the two-dimensional compression, and grasp at the gossamer strand. Oh, but it is made of sharply glistening diamonds and I am not! My hands turn to ribbons of flayed skin. How beautiful and cruel the spinneret of God, casting lines of hope that kill! The Earth That Will Be (We Who May Yet Be) The storm has come over the mountains, and has met the storm from over the sea. The land is ravaged, and not many survive. A great volcano was thrust up, and cast ash and unquenchable fire over the ruined beauty. The land is again ravaged, and now even fewer survive. I leave my shelter and weep over the destruction we have wrought. Where now the beauty? Where now the life? I stand on the plains of desolation and the sun pierces the ash in the sky. I am blinded; I have not seen the sun in a very long time. It illuminates the sludge in front of me. Look here! But it is a whisper of green, gently unfolding, a baby in the arms of mother sun. I remember the Hell where we have been, and Hope suddenly coalesces into Truth. My rebirth blasts Righteousness–diamantine no longer–into so many glass shards. With joy, I stretch my hand toward the naked and shy plant, and I sing. It responds with a movement more melodic than any lyric, dancing, unfolding new leaves, shaking brazenly in the sheen of a summer sun, an island of new in a sea of old. In a moment the buds, and before their fragrance has departed: fruit! Round, full, and inviting. I see that it is, without any doubt, good. I call to my brethren, to we who have outlasted both Ignorance and Knowledge, and with crucified wills we know what must be done. Come, Oak and Owl! Come, Pterodactyl and Tiger! How beautiful and loving the inexorable regeneration of God, crushing death itself with its power! Amen.

These, then, are the data I am taking as given, and trying to model (notice that they are not physical data, but theological and psychological, even moral data):

1. Good and evil are infinitely incommensurable.
2. If we presume that there are beings which exhibit infinite goodness or infinite evil, these correspond to God and the devil, and “infinite goodness” would describe the character of God, as would “infinite evil” describe the character of the devil.
3. The state of spiritual development of a human being can exist on a spectrum anywhere between infinite goodness and infinite evil (though it cannot exist at either endpoint). This datum reflects the observation that humans are never found to be perfectly good or perfectly evil (excepting, in Christian theology, the special case of Jesus).
4. It is easier to be morally mediocre than morally perfect
5. Incremental advances in spiritual development (morality) are easier at a “less moral” stage than a “more moral” stage.
6. Paradoxically, one’s awareness of one’s own depravity (immorality) becomes greater the less depraved one actually becomes.

Now we may take a look at the model. I propose that all these data may be plotted in various ways around the function y = -a/bx and various ways of graphing it: (Please note that all of the graphs here may appear too small to read, in which case you have simply to click on them to load a larger version)

We have chosen for our values of a and b the number 1, since, as we will see, the actual function slope will not matter as much as its relation to certain factors. If it were possible to quantify absolutely any of what follows (which appears to be doubtful), we could experimentally determine a and b, but that is beside the point here.

Here are the initial correspondences ( INF := infinity):

• The values of the function y = -1/x correspond to possible states in the spiritual development of a human being.
• Perfect goodness corresponds to the y axis–specifically at the point x=0, y=INF.
• Perfect evil corresponds to the x axis–specifically at the point x=-INF, y=0.

And we can already begin to see how the model agrees with some of our data:

• Perfect good and perfect evil are infinitely incommensurable (data 1 and 2 above): First, they are located at points infinitely far from each other in 2-dimensional space. Second, they are not even in a continuous spectrum of points–no line which connects them can be drawn, for such a line would correspond to the impossible function y = x + INF. Moreover, they exist in two completely orthogonal dimensions.
• Our observation that human spiritual development can be on a spectrum anywhere between, but not including, perfect good and perfect evil (datum 3 above) is captured perfectly by saying that it is plotted on the graph y = -1/x. The curve never meets the x and y axes, but passes through every other x and y value (though of course not every x/y combination).

Now let us extend the model. Let us define the notion of “spiritual work” to mean the effort (whether internal or external, and relative to persons) required to move along the spiritual development curve towards good. We can quantify this notion, determining the specific amount of work required to move between two points on the spiritual development curve, using the integral of the curve. The integral of the curve between two x-values is the appropriate mathematical construct for our purposes because it tells us the area underneath the curve between those x-values. This area, importantly, reflects our observation that incremental advances in spiritual development become more difficult further along the curve. Let’s look at some examples.

First, take a graphical depiction of the area underneath our curve between the (arbitrarily-chosen) x-values -8.0 and -5.6 (for a span of length 2.4–corresponding to the amount of spiritual “progress” made):

The area depicted happens to be about 0.36, so we can say that for this arbitrarily-chosen progress of spiritual development (a progress corresponding to the number 2.4), the spiritual work required is 0.36. Now, it is important to note that neither the x-values chosen, the “progress” value of 2.4, nor the “work” value of 0.36 have been given any real-world correspondents. The main thing here is that they are related to each other in a certain way–mapping such quantities to the reality of spiritual development is outside the scope of this model (an important limitation of it), and possibly outside the scope of possibility in general.

Now, let us look at another progress-graph, this time progressing from the x-value of -3.2 to -0.8. Notice that again we have a total progress of 2.4.

As is visually obvious, the area (corresponding to work) under the curve between these points is much greater. As it happens, it is 1.39, almost 4 times greater than our previous work value of 0.36! We could, of course, continue to belabor the point with more and more examples, culminating with the discovery that, at any point where we wish to integrate from one x-value to 0, the area under the curve becomes infinite (in terms of work: impossible). Also needless to say, even the particular way in which 1.39 is related to 0.36 is not important–what is important here is that there is an increasing difficulty (in terms of work) as we move closer to pure goodness.

It appears, then, that the model accurately handles our observations of how spiritual progress is made, and its corresponding difficulty (data 4 and 5 above). Already some theological fruit is ripe for the plucking as a result of the model, particularly in regards to work: statements in the New Testament such as “With man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible” take on new meaning as we see via the model that (if it is accurate), becoming purely good is indeed impossible for us. Perhaps, then, these words of Jesus are not referring to such actions as we would normally consider “supernatural” (throwing mountains into the sea, having power over the weather, etc..), but rather to the spiritual development we normally find impossible. Alas, in order to stay on task, we should save such ruminations for a later essay.

Now we come to the last datum under discussion (6 above), namely the psychological observation that, the closer we get to God’s nature (perfect goodness), the farther we often feel from it. A cursory reading of the Apostle Paul’s epistles is enough to prove that this feeling has been with Christians since the beginning. How can this psychological fact possibly be modeled using the same graphs with which we have been working? The key here is in the realization that the datum refers to our own perspective, our own awareness, rather than a definite aspect of the reality of spiritual development. That is, in reality, the closer we get to God’s nature, the closer we are to pure goodness, however we might feel about it. All this amounts to saying is that, if we have made spiritual progress, we have made spiritual progress! The tautology arises because we have simply defined “spiritual progress” as “growth in character which brings that character closer to God’s”. So, given that the datum under discussion is not about our actual progress on the path of spiritual development (the actual location on the curve in the model), it stands to reason that there should be no “real” change to the model necessary to accommodate the datum. And, in fact, this is what we find.

It turns out that, just as the datum concerns perception in the reality of spiritual development, so it concerns perception (better called “perspective”) in our model. Specifically, our feelings about our spiritual development (i.e., our closeness to God) can be mapped to a relation of (a) our position on the curve, and (b) the specific way the curve (always mathematically the same) is represented to our visual senses, via properties of whatever “viewport” (screen, paper) we use to look at the curve.

Take, for example, this graph (the same as our first):

The dot at -0.4, 2.5 corresponds, let’s say, to our current position on the spiritual development curve. (If only we could be so lucky in real life!) Now there are two values we need to fill out the relation between (a) and (b) above. First, there is the x-distance between where we are and pure goodness (call it the “actual remaining progress”). We get this by subtracting our x-location from the x-location of pure goodness; in this case it’s the value 0.4. So close, yet so far away! Next, we need what I will call the “width of the viewport”. That is, the maximum x-value shown on the graph minus the minimum x-value shown on the graph. In this case it is 10. Finally, the value we want is the actual remaining progress divided by the width of the viewport (in our case, 0.4 / 10.0 = 0.04). We can call this value the “perceived remaining progress”. So for this graph, we have a perceived remaining progress of 0.04.

Now, let’s look at another graph:

The dot is now at -0.38, 2.63, meaning that the actual remaining progress is now less than in the previous graph: 0.38. We have become better! However, the dimensions of the viewport have changed. Even though the curve looks much the same, the numbers on the axes give the lie: the width of the viewport is now 5, not 10. (To further deceive, I made it so that the x and y axes are no longer equivalently scaled). In other words, we have “zoomed in”. The perceived remaining progress is then 0.38 / 5.0 = 0.076. It is almost twice the perceived remaining progress of the previous graph, which reflects our observed intuitions that spiritual progress, coupled presumably with an increased awareness of the goodness of God, can actually result in a greater perceived remaining progress (a greater distance from God). This “increased awareness”, then, is modeled here by the act of “zooming in”, which we have already more rigorously defined. The net result is that, even though in the second of the two recent graphs we have made progress, we appear to be further from our goal.

In order to determine what laws, if any, govern the moments at and degrees to which this “zoom” takes place, we would need to engage in empirical observation. We could start with the basic assumption, for example, that every decrease in actual remaining progress brings about a corresponding decrease in viewport width, so that perceived remaining progress is always more or less the same. Of course, this assumption is probably erroneous, if only because it ignores the spring-like oscillations that relate changes in viewport width to changes in actual remaining progress. At any rate, the point here is just to show that the model can handle the data under consideration, regardless of whether we can somehow shoehorn it into another model which can make accurate predictions.

Now, since we have seen that the mathematical model I proposed does indeed handle data 1-6 above, we are left with a few questions. First, is there any feature of the realities of spiritual development as we experience them that cannot be countenanced under this model? We already mentioned the theological claim that Jesus was both a human being and perfectly good. Does this wreck the model as a whole, or can we make special exception for him given his somewhat transpositional nature (much as a physicist does not treat very small quantum particles with the same rules as macroparticles)? In other words, what are the limits of this model?

Second, are there any more correspondences that we could make under this model? Perhaps, for example, we could do more with the y-dimension, treating it analogously to distance from a certain massive object. Then we would employ the physical rules of gravitation to explain why there appears to be a constant “downward” (evil-ward) force with regard to morality (explained in Christian terms as a propensity to do evil as a result of the Fall). For another example, we could attach meaning to the derivative of the spiritual development curve at a given point (the slope of the line tangent to that point on the curve), saying it represents somehow “spiritual momentum” or “commitment”, on a scale of 0 to infinity.

Lastly, in order to make the model useful in application as well as reflection, is there any way to empirically determine values to replace any of the arbitrarily-chosen I have used here? In other words, is there any way to make these values correspond to actual states of spiritual development? No doubt there are some features of spiritual development that are general and could be explored in the same way by everyone, but some are no doubt relative to individual persons. Could the model be extended to include, say, “spiritual constants”, much as the physical laws of motion are extended to handle constants of friction for certain surfaces? Or on the other hand does the very nature of the phenomena under investigation preclude any kind of testable or repeatable introspection (or examination of others)? I am forced to admit that I am not optimistic about finding positive answers to these questions.

Still, I don’t think the model wholly useless, and believe that (as good models should), it can provide clear abstraction of some points of the spiritual development process which help us to better understand what is going on, even if these abstractions necessarily have their limits. This clarity is, of course, what all mathematical models grant to investigators who use them to model reality. At different times and for different strata of reality, they cohere more or less exactly with their subject phenomena, and I hope in this essay to have illuminated at least one possible path of researching and modeling spiritual development that uses the resource of mathematics to its advantage.

On the other hand, there are certain kinds of knowledge, both knowledge-that and knowledge-how (both factual knowledge and skill), that do fundamentally affect how we understand reality. As an example in the first category, take the knowledge that the earth is round. Our thought relationship to such objects as the sun, the moon, and the stars is completely different than that of people a thousand years ago, even though neither the sun, the moon, nor the stars have changed much. Examples in the second category can be found as well (which is what I will mainly be talking about).

So far, I have said nothing surprising. It could all have been stated more succinctly: “Some facts/skills are more important than others.” No doubt anyone would agree. Now I want to make an additional claim: some forms of knowledge are of a sort that, upon gaining, are entrenched so deeply in our mental frameworks that we cannot even coherently imagine seeing the universe in the same way as we did prior to gaining the knowledge. Here is where the skill examples come in. It is easy to imagine, on one hand, a flat earth, even while retaining the knowledge of its roundness. I can form a coherent picture of such an earth in my head. Now take a certain kind of skill–being able to speak and understand English with the facility of a native speaker. Though I know it’s a completely coherent possibility that I see a well-formed English sentence while not understanding it, I can’t actually imagine seeing a well-formed English sentence and not understanding it. Any time I imagine a well-formed English sentence, and look at the words, I cannot help but understand it. That is just what it is to be a competent reader/listener of English!

Other examples abound: before I learned music theory, I could listen to a pop song without any realization of its simple, repetitive chord structure. Now, no matter how much I enjoy the song and would like to hear it without such a musical understanding, I find it impossible. A door has been opened in my mind, a filter put in place, which unconsciously and relentlessly consumes data and presents it to me in the light of a newer understanding.

(Perhaps over long periods of disuse, such abilities atrophy, as most American high school graduates’ abilities with foreign languages indicate. Such a supposition is not relevant to my current point, however, since the language faculty in general, for example, will never fail to be exercised in any reasonably normative human environment. There is also the question of the effects of mental trauma or mind-altering drugs, which I take to be peripheral for this discussion.)

Things become even more remarkable when we contrast a person who has knowledge of this kind with one who hasn’t. Say I am in Paris, and I see a large billboard advertisement consisting solely of well-formed French text. I don’t read French, but my friend standing next to me does. When we look at the billboard, he cannot fail to understand it, but I can’t possibly understand it! (I could hazard a guess as to its meaning, but that does not constitute understanding, even if I turn out to be right). We are experiencing identical physical stimuli, but are interpreting it in vastly different ways. Language is simply the most common of many possible examples–we could think of many more. I want to emphasize how important an appreciation of this point is! It is essentially proof of the existence of meaning. I am not, of course, trying to prove that there is no physical explanation for the disparity in our reactions, merely that events and objects in the world hold meaning, which we may or may not even be able to detect given our knowledge and training. More importantly for the current discussion, once we can detect this layer of meaning (which may exist amid many strata of other meanings), we are unable to “turn it off,” so to speak. We cannot not detect that meaning. To belabor the point: I claim it not possible that any competent reader of English see the arrangement of letters “The grass is green” and not read (i.e., understand) it. While reading is not always tantamount to understanding, in such simple cases as “The grass is green,” to say that it is not is to deny that there is such a thing as a competent reader of English.

So, what is the point of all of this? We have established (a) There are forms of knowledge/skill which can add layers of “new” meaning or understanding to “old” physical phenomena, and (b) Many of these forms cannot be discarded at will; they are “sticky” in our consciousness. Most of the time, (a) and (b) combine for a very positive result–it is wonderful that understanding of our native tongue comes so effortlessly! But the effortlessness can be unwanted: I learned to read as a child in Papua New Guinea, where there was no media, much less large billboard advertisements. When I returned to the US, I realized with a shock that I could not moderate the influx of words that were bombarding me from the side of the highway. The fire hose of information to which we are subjected every day is arguably unhealthy.

But there is another sense in which the effortlessness of using certain skills can be unwanted. That is when the particular layer of meaning unlocked by a new skill adds moral complication. Taking it for granted that knowledge in itself is neither good nor evil, the introduction of a new mode of interpreting reality can deliver unto us vast new landscapes of possibility for interaction with reality. These interactions, unfortunately, can be engaged in well or poorly. In other words, new understanding gives rise to new obligations and new responsibilities (and new ways to be evil), because as we all know, “Knowledge is power,” and power can be used for good or ill. So much is uncontroversial.

Add to this the previous observation that some of these layers of meaning, once unlocked, cannot be hidden, forgotten, or shoved into some back corner of the mind. Then, if a person were to unlock such a filter, but was not prepared in terms of character to handle the powerful responsibility which accompanied it, how much would she be battered and bruised by the potential for great evil she had unwittingly loosed! Of course, there is a hidden assumption here which is important: Maturity of character is a pre-requisite for good stewardship of certain kinds of knowledge. Some may argue that knowledge is the great enlightener, upon which no limits should be set in terms of its flow. Would that it were so! To our shame, many thousands of years of experience prove that perhaps humankind has not always been ready for the secrets it has uncovered. The use of atomic weapons is only the most recent in a long line of embarrassments. (It should obviously be said that knowledge per se is never the adversary–it is always ourselves).

Now we hark back to the earliest example of what I have been talking about–that time or event symbolized by the story of the Fall in the biblical literature. Adam and Eve chose to be awakened to a certain kind of knowledge (in this first story, the knowledge provides understanding of the basic moral layer of reality, of the existence of good and evil themselves), and found themselves immediately both (a) doing evil and (b) experiencing shame. They were not, unfortunately, mature enough to handle the weight of a moral universe. This is what we mean by the loss of innocence, and they felt it deeply as psychological pain (as do we today).

Innocence, then, is the state of ignorance preceding the addition of one of these “moral-epistemological layers” to an understanding of reality. If we agree with the foregoing moral considerations, we can also say that innocence is actually an appropriate state of ignorance, if the innocent’s character is not mature enough to wisely utilize the new knowledge. This in turn implies that there is both appropriate and inappropriate loss of innocence.

The most obvious example of both of these kinds of innocence loss takes place in the stratum of social reality we know as sexuality, because I take for granted the following: (1) There are events (of which engaging in sex is only one possible event) which serve to “unlock” an understanding of the sexual stratum. (2) This “unlocking” is of the type I’ve been describing, in terms of its permanent, welded nature in the understanding. That is, given normal social interaction, once one has come to realize the sexual nature of fellow humans, it is impossible to completely shut off such an awareness. (3) Sexual knowledge is furthermore the kind of knowledge which presents moral considerations; it is a prime example of knowledge which can be used well or poorly, for good or for ill. So, if those three claims hold, we can say that gaining sexual knowledge is an example of loss of innocence, and that it can be lost appropriately or inappropriately, depending on the character of the innocent, i.e., how prepared she is to not do evil as a result of such knowledge.

I think it an uncontested fact that much evil is done, whether in thought or in deed (and those amount to the same thing in the limit), as a result of sexual knowledge. That fact alone suffices to prove that many people have lost their sexual innocence inappropriately. It is another question, of course, at whose feet we should lay the blame for such loss. Knowledge is sometimes given unasked for, and if inappropriate, woe to him who gives it! (Here I am not just thinking of the most obvious and horrible example of rape. A negligent father leaving Playboy magazines for his son to accidentally find fares no better morally).

So much for an example of innocence inappropriately lost. No doubt we could think of many others–social, political, etc… And I will bypass for now a discussion of sexual innocence lost appropriately, since such is probably rare (remember, we are not talking about sex per se, but an awareness, an understanding of what is possible given the constructs of meaning in a sexual reality).

Now we come to the heart of this essay, which unfortunately is a question. We have all experienced the inappropriate loss of innocence in some stratum of reality or another. But what are we to do about it? How are we to put such situations to rights? The answer is of immense importance, not just for those (probably most of us if we are honest) who wouldn’t mind having lost sexual innocence appropriately (or not at all yet), rather than inappropriately. As the story of the Fall shows, the question is the fundamental question of our humanity–we ate of the tree, but were unable to digest the fruit. How are we then to return to our original purpose of naming and caring, loving and ruling the earth, while we are bent over double with the pains of knowledge?

The previous considerations are all used in unavoidably realizing that it can be no answer simply to try and forget. We cannot return–we can never go back to Eden. The figurative flaming swords which bar its gates are simply reality itself–we could no more re-open them than forget language! Innocence lost cannot be regained. What then? Shall we press on and make our best go at dealing with a moral reality we were not prepared to face? It has been our strategy since the beginning, but war upon war, evil upon evil pile higher and higher the dung on the heap we have made out of the world.

Ultimately, this is why I believe we need Christ. Not in some simplistic salvific sacrifice of divine blood appeasing the hunger of divine spirit, but because he both acknowledges the reality of innocence lost, and provides a solution. The solution is neither to go back (naivete) nor to stay where we are (cynicism/despair), but to move forward (hope). Christ is not the old Adam re-born, but the new Adam. Christ was not ignorant of good and evil, but rather so fully human that he was prepared to go through life with knowledge of them both, walking the knife-edge of good, effortlessly. That is why he can be our only exemplar–not Adam, nor any of his line, but Christ.

Still, to say that Christ is the solution is not to say how he will solve our dilemmas–it is simply to provide a path. The path out of lust, for example, is not back to a pre-sexual ignorance, but further on to love. How exactly one must tread to follow that path successfully, I have not fully discovered. Still, I believe that for every innocence lost, there is a knowledge to be redeemed. If Christ was the only one who lived out that redemption, following him will be our only method of achieving it ourselves. Though this seems difficult, there is one more hope: if the knowledge by which we lose innocence is irreversible, it stands to reason that the character which we gain by its redemption is equally so. And then, not before our time, we will have finally become worthy of the knowledge we too quickly gained, and will no longer need fear it for what it can incite us to do. To put it in more cosmic terms: who knows how long it would have taken Adam and Eve to mature in character to the point where they could have partaken of the fruit safely. It will no doubt take us much longer to mature to that character while staggering under the load of its knowledge. But we can be sure that we can still get there! Christ himself is proof of that.

So, to sum up our tortuous path from philosophy to spirituality: First, there are many kinds of knowledge. Second, some of them cause an epistemological revolution which cannot be undone. Third, some of these epistemological revolutions can be harmful if we are not spiritually prepared for them, as the all-too-common loss of innocence in the stratum of sexuality proves. Fourth, in these losses it is impossible to retrace our steps and achieve the state of ignorance we once had. Fifth, it seems the only way out is ahead–not to less knowledge (nor even to more) but to greater character (a worthiness for the gift of that knowledge). Here we run into the problem of how to progress to this more mature character, and we have our options of whom to follow on that score. I believe that Christ is the only one who actually consistently exhibited the kind of character which would be the result of our progress, and thus that he is the only one to whom we should listen for directions. Extrapolated cosmically: how can the world be spiritually transformed to be worthy of the knowledge it has attained (and thus to stop wars and oppression and extortion and rape and literally every evil which festers under the sun)? Submit to the guidance of Christ.

How that submission is maintained beyond the desire to make it is a mystery (just as is how one progresses resolutely from lust to love while in the throes of a ravishing sexual knowledge that bombards us with deliverances of the understanding we cannot assimilate without sinning). I would pay all I have and more to understand it! Though “follow me” is a simple enough command, its obedience could take us half a world away, up mountains and over rivers, or even into dark and seemingly treacherous places. That is why no more can be said in an essay, as much as I would like to read one with such contents myself. That is why we must, if we are to redeem our individual lost innocences, and indeed our corporate ones, listen with attentive ears and open hearts to the call of our First Brother in True Humanity.

The question of whether or not to post this video was somewhat difficult, mostly due to the sudden rampage of videos hosted on my friends’ blog, TrippingOnWords. Claire and Lara recently started adding one or more video spots to most blog entries, and I challenged this decision, for the following reasons:

• Video can be more stimulating, but less evocative, than text
• Video snippets are representative of pop culture at large and therefore should be avoided
• Once you go video, you can never go back–readers will be shocked at text and drop like flies
• Putting up videos of yourselves (especially as two young, attractive, American, globe-trotting females) seems a cheap way to boost a readership

The only problem is, the reasons I really felt bad about their videos were:

• Their blog is more interesting than mine
• They are globe-trotting, and I am not (apart from a week here in Geneva)
• Their blog has many times the readership of mine
• The content of their videos, while not “good” in any technical sense, are the kind of things that people will find cool. They’re quirky, funny, and the poor quality and awkward dialogue just makes them that much more endearing

In short: jealousy. I couldn’t watch those videos without feeling that somehow it should be me making hilarious comments while sucking coffee from a bag. Alas, the life I have chosen to write about on this weblog, while exciting, is not likely to make me reality TV’s next star. While that rankles my underlying and cynically-hidden desire for popularity, I guess I don’t need this weblog to be my vehicle to fame. Truly: I’d settle for its covert functioning as a singles ad! (Only that doesn’t seem to be going too well either)

So, the decision to post a video was hard, because (a) I wondered if I am just doing it out of jealousy, which seems bad, and (b) I have no intention of posting more videos, so I don’t want you to get accustomed to it. Remember, you didn’t come here for fancy, flashy visuals! You came here to hear me whine about myself…oh…

But in the end I was bored enough tonight to edit this together, and here it is for your viewing pleasure. Flaming Desserts: (for those using Bloglines, it may not show–click here)

Now a message for those girls over at TrippingOnWords: consider the fine polish of video workmanship (which causes this jewel of cinema to glimmer with the sheen of greatness) to be a gauntlet thrown down to the ground before you, challenging you to come forth with the best you can summon. It’s a duel! (And no help from outside experts allowed)

If you want to skip right to the pictures, click here

I just returned from Geneva, Switzerland–a trip I decided to take a mere 3 weeks ago. Every year, my parents have a business trip in late September to some international location (for legal reasons, these meetings have to take place outside the US). Since I graduated high school in 2000 and chose to attend Stanford (a quarter school), I’ve had the good fortune to not be in class during these trips, and thus was able to tag along with my folks. We’ve been to some great places–London (twice), Dublin, Lisbon, and Barcelona (after I graduated). I didn’t go on the 2005 trip, but since my work schedule permitted this year, I was able to go to Geneva. (For a few older blogs of such trips, see here for Lisbon 2002 and here for Barcelona 2004).

These trips are always fun, not least because I’ve gotten to know many of the other attendees, all great people. At times there have even been sons or daughters there like myself, and so there are often young people to hang out with, in addition to spending great time with my parents. My friend Laura was there, of this January’s Bahamas trip fame.

The group dinners are generally quite nice, and so it’s also fun to bring “dress-up” clothes to wear consistently. (I wore my suit this week for the first time since last December, I think). This trip was particularly special for me, however, because it happened that my 24th birthday was during the trip, and I had a wonderful time celebrating it with my parents and some friends, both at a spectacular dinner and later at our pub of choice, over fine cuban cigars and cognac. I certainly couldn’t ask for a better birthday experience, though I did miss my friends from home. As an extra special gift, my parents also let me use some of their airline upgrade coupons, so we all traveled to and from Geneva in business / first class. What luxury!

I spent most of my time in Geneva sleeping, hanging out in our great hotel (the Hotel d’Angleterre), working out or using the sauna, catching up on my reading, or wandering around taking pictures and buying sandwiches using poor French. One tourist highlight was definitely the Patek Philippe museum, which had on exhibit some of the oldest and most complicated watches in the world. The sheer amount of time, love, and skill put into these objects by their craftsmen was literally awing. One complicated mechanical watch we saw had over 1800 unique parts, individually designed and produced and assembled. This watch, like some others in the exhibit, kept track of the time, of course, but also such measurements as the day, the week, the month, the year, the lunar phases, sidereal time, the location of certain stars in the sky, etc… (taking into account leap years, etc..–it’s guaranteed to be accurate for something like 500 years if kept wound).

Life in Geneva appears to be very expensive, and the same was true of souvenirs. Accordingly, the only things I brought back were two beer glasses (one a .5L stein (Cardinal), and the other a Belgian snifter (Leffe)), both procured by my dad, free for the asking from bars. Incidentally, the beer of the trip was hands-down the Belgian Leffe (the blonde variety). It had a light color, a creamy texture, and a strong, sweet taste. It was not overpowering, though, and had a very strong spruce hops aroma which kept the whole thing dynamic and interesting. It probably now ranks in my top 5 beer list.

Well, check out the pictures, and let me know what you think!

First, in trying to assist Nyffy with his desire to one day become the Brewmaster of Heaven, a contingent of my friends spent some time this last weekend brewing a batch of Futurebeer:

The current state of Futurebeer

Futurebeer is beer, after a while. It is not yet, however. It’s that same mysterious “already but not yet” we find with the kingdom of God. Anyway, it was fun to go through a process involving (mostly) natural ingredients that will culminate in pure enjoyment after a period of care and waiting. Being a creative person who works mostly with digital or musical media, I was very glad to work with actual substances to create a product. It’s sort of like the joy I have found in cooking nice meals, only greater due to the extended period of time involved in the process.

Second, I received in the mail from Amazon the first three books in NT Wright’s massive “Question of God” undertaking, beginning with The New Testament and the People of God. After hearing much about these works and reading some other stuff of Wright’s, I’m very excited to go on an extended journey of engagement with history, theology, and literary criticism on issues surrounding the origins of Christianity. Thankfully, I’ve finished Alister McGrath’s likewise-authoritative critical-realism-inspired trilogy on scientific theology, so I now have room for another expedition. You will no doubt be hearing various thoughts on the books here, which is why I thought I’d give forewarning. As a bit of a taste, here’s a paragraph from the introduction:

The New Testament has not been around as long as the land of Israel, but in other ways there are remarkable parallels. It is a small book, smaller than anybody else’s holy book, small enough to be read through in a day or two. But it has had an importance belied by its slim appearance. It has again and again been a battleground for warring armies. Sometimes they have come to plunder its streasures for their own use, or to annex bits of its territory as part of a larger empire in need of a few extra strategic mountains, especially holy ones. Somestimes they have come to fight their private battles on neutral territory, finding in the debates about a book or a passage a convenient place to stage a war which is really between two worldviews or philosophies, themselves comparatively unrelated to the New Testament and its concerns. There are many places whose fragile beauty has been trampled by heavy-footed exegetes in search of a Greek root, a quick sermon, or a political slogan. And yet it has remained a powerful and evocative book, full of delicacy and majesty, tears and laughter.

What ought one to do with the New Testament? We may take it for granted that it will be no good trying to prevent its still being used as a battleground. No border fences would be strong enough to keep out the philosophers, the philologists, the politicians and the casual tourists; nor should we erect them if they were. There are many who have come to pilfer and have stayed to be pilgrims. To place all or part of this book within a sacred enclosure would be to invite a dominical rebuke: my house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations. Past attempts to keep it for one group only–the take-over bids by the scholars and the pietists, the fundamentalists and the armchair social workers–have ended with unseemly battles, the equivalent of the sad struggle for the control of Holy Places in the land of israel. This book is a book of wisdom for all peoples, but we have made it a den of scholarship, or of a narrow, hard and exclusive piety.

Inspiring, no?

Third, I am going to Switzerland next week. I would like to get a good digital SLR camera before then. Anyone have one they want to sell? Or any recommendations?

Fourth, I wanted to upload something to YouTube, but only have 3 or 4 home videos on my computer. Only one happened to be appropriately flattering of myself, and since the purpose of the Internet is for people to upload flattering things, I chose to throw it in to the churning mill. It’s from last year in Costa Rica when Justin turned on the camera and told me to go catch a frisbee in the ocean. You can see the video here. After uploading I found many videos of real ultimate frisbee layouts, which were much more impressive. So watch those too.

Until next time, this has been your beer, academic theology, travel, and sports update. Cheers.

First, I’ll show you James 2:1-13 in the ESV:

2:1My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. 2For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, 3and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” 4have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? 5Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? 6But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? 7Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?

8If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. 9But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. 11For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. 12So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. 13For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

Now, here is my version (the “Modern American Version”):

2:1My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism. 2Suppose a girl comes into your meeting with an attractive face and body, wearing flattering clothes, and an unattractive girl also comes in. 3If you show special attention to the girl with the sexy physique and say, “Here, sit next to me,” but say nothing at all to the unattractive girl, or fail to pay her as much attention, 4have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?

5Listen, my dear brothers: has not God chosen those who are unattractive in the eyes of western men to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? 6But you have insulted women. Is it not this cultural system of constant physical appraisal and criticism which is exploiting you? Is it not what is keeping you from loving your neighbors? 7 Is it not exactly what is separating you from truly bearing the noble name of him to whom you belong?

8If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. 9But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. 10For whoever keeps the whole law and yet treats an attractive woman with favoritism is guilty of breaking all of it. 11For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “What is it to you if you love those who love you?” If you do not commit adultery but still only love the lovely, you have become a lawbreaker.

12Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, 13because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment!

Phrased that way, it is much easier (for me, anyway) to feel the sharpness of what James was telling the church. But maybe it is only because I definitely struggle with falling into that game. What do you think?

I won’t talk about two of the songs, the novel, or what dreams they represented, at this moment, because they will no doubt receive special treatment when they are recorded / completed. I did, however, want to share one song, an instrumental piece I composed in Logic with my keyboard. The composition took over many long nights, zoned out hammering keys, headphones pressing a wide canyon in the top of my skull.

Even all the way through the retreat the song had remained unnamed, but now that I have had some time to think on it, I have decided to call it “The Wayfaring Aesthete Engages the Road in Conversation”. (Originally, it was supposed to be called “ReCreation”, but I didn’t want to inflict on it too great a connection with this weblog, and the storied nature of the final name is much more appropriate).

The dream of mine which corresponded to this particular work was that of creating/designing objects/experiences which faithfully and reliably transmit emotion. In a word, “evoking”. I long to evoke responses in others the way that good art evokes incredibly deep emotional responses in me. I treasure those experiences as gifts, and desire to give such gifts to others as well.

Click on the link below to download the iTunes-format version of the song. (The picture is a screenshot of the song’s timeline, with its various instruments).

The Wayfaring Aesthete Engages the Road in Conversation

Let me know what you think. Friends who were with us on the retreat–I encourage you to likewise post your creations, which were all excellent!

I often laugh derisively at any suggestion that these things could be combined into a single role or project; for what pursuit can bring together such disparate fields as philosophy and computer programming, not to mention the others? It struck me today that maybe there is such a project: the design and implementation of a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), of which the current most popular example is World of Warcraft.

Clearly, since a MMORPG is a piece of software, it involves coding. But it also involves World Design–the overarching story and history of a fantastical place (a la The Silmarillion, my favorite book). Clearly creating such an immersive world involves a foray into philosophy (and probably theology, since worlds without magic or arcane technology are boring). Beyond that, what can provide more immersion than Tolkien’s strategy of language creation? Of course, histories of entire civilizations and languages need to be conveyed in as powerful and encompassing wording as possible, thus requiring a skilled writer. Finally, what is a venture into an unknown world without the appropriate stunning visual and audio design? The score would need to be more immense than any 2-hour movie.

Well, there it is! It doesn’t seem like anything important is missing. And it certainly explains my fascination with the concepts behind MMORPGs in the first place. Unfortunately, I don’t know that working for a MMO house would be fulfilling at all to me; curiously, I don’t know why. I certainly don’t think that a life spent to encourage the use of the imagination is wasted–Tolkien and Lewis are my heroes precisely for that reason. Maybe it’s just that my experience with MMORPG culture has made me doubt whether the kind of imagination encouraged is actually of any enduring value. I suppose that at the end of the day I do believe that imagination has a function–that of re-envisioning a broken and fractured reality–and I don’t know that World of Warcraft really inspires this, rather than a mindless grind for powerful virtual items that give one a sense of superiority over other players.

Maybe that’s the difference between The Silmarillion and World of Warcraft–since The Silmarillion is a story, it asks you to enter in and wander around by yourself, unlocking experiences with the imagination. Warcraft, on the other hand, is unavoidably a game, and one not of collaborative imagination as often as competitive un-imagination. (What I mean by unimagination is that many players purposefully de-mystify any imaginative elements in MMORPGs, reducing it to the underlying code systems, so that they might more easily “win” the game. My motivations in playing MMORPGs, on the other hand, are generally rather to have an immersive, imaginative experience). Perhaps there are ways to create a game like this; perhaps that is what real-life role-playing groups find attractive about their sessions (which frankly don’t appeal to me, for some reason); however, I doubt that, even given the possibility of designing such a game, that the result would be compelling to enough people to build a multi-million-dollar franchise on top of (which seems to be the point of most computer games).

But what do you think, O Reader? Should I go try and get hired by Blizzard? I haven’t said anything about the physical pursuits I enjoy (which are also many), or about any actual positive results of work for the poorer and more downtrodden in the world (who might not be able to afford my computer game). What is there to say about that? (But note that I’m not asking the question, “Was Tolkien wrong in writing his novels when he could have been helping poor children elsewhere, very materially?” since I take it for granted that the answer’s no.)

The problem with good stories is that we cannot always live in them (barring the “good story” which is hopefully and supposedly the whole of our life–but right now I’m talking about good fiction stories; the kind that make you wish they were real). The problem with the best stories is their singularity of message: “Good stories are real! Believe in them!” And of course, they’re not real either, strictly speaking. There are no narphs and scrunts lurking round small ponds in my hometown, waiting to magically awaken greatness in me via some ancient link.

Even so, the problem has rather more to do with their truth than falsity. When I look soberly at reality I don’t find the details of Lady in the Water or The Silmarillion or Le Morte d’Artur, but on the other hand I do suppose that I believe reality really is something like those stories, at the end of the day. Reality involves things other than what we can see; reality involves hidden purposes and identities meant to be discovered; reality involves the endowing of normal human beings with abilities that, to someone from a different world, might seem magical.

No, the problem is not with the absence of “magic”–the problem is with my inability to see everything around me for what it really is (magical). And so I leave a good story feeling a sense of indescribable, desperate longing for something more exciting, more adventurous, more exotic, more epic, more fantastic, while steadfastly refusing to consider that if I were in one of those other worlds, I would be wishing the exact same thing, and a great bard of that place who told a story of Earth, her creation, the way that life springs from the very ground, and so on, would inspire me to dream great things. So the question becomes: how can we re-enchant this world? How can we de-familiarize ourselves from the radically “magical” events taking place around us always? It is not easy, and that is why we tell stories–to keep that sense alive somehow. But the result is that unfortunately I begin to desire the reality of the stories more than the reality of the real, based on unfair judgements of the real!

Alas, for now, I will keep running off to hear stories of marvelous and far-off worlds just to remind myself that such things are worth holding on to; but I hope that, instead of becoming depressed after hearing a good story and mourning the “death of the miraculous” in modern culture, I would learn to perceive the miraculous more easily all around. Clearly there is a tension here with my deeply-embedded scientific impulse to categorize and define; to resolve it I hope to be able to know both what a thing is and what a thing means. (In other words, the problem is not with any kind of scientific impulse per se, but rather the presumption of saying that knowledge of a thing’s true identity and significance can be adequately captured by scientific experimentation).

Nonetheless, we should re-establish frequent storytelling as a way to convey the deep truths of reality, even and especially if the best way to convey those truths is to speak of things like magical lands and mythical beings. Remember one of the most powerful lines from V for Vendetta: “Artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians cover it up”.

On the storyteller’s end, let us become adept at using such “lies” to tell the truth of a wonderful reality, but on the listener’s end, let us be adept at loving not the “lie” in virtue of its brilliant and captivating colors, but rather the even more brilliant and more captivating truth it (hopefully) conveys. For those like myself who love to live in the imagination, that second part will prove to be the harder of the two… But I personally hope the other side of that coin leads to an increased ability to tell the truth in story (the first part).

In roughly chronological order:

• I went to Colorado for the Oltrogge family reunion (that’s my mom’s side). We spent most of our time out in the mountains near Winter Park. It was great to reconnect with family I hadn’t seen in a long time, and see places of importance from the past (my great-grand-relations were more or less ranchers in the mountains of Colorado, which I suppose I knew but never really considered). One day we took a drive through Rocky Mountain National Park, and it was breathtaking:

  

• The day I returned from Denver, I hopped in Trent’s car, and we drove down to Santa Barbara in order to prepare for his upcoming bachelor party in Mexico. The following day, we caravanned south, through dreaded LA, San Diego, and across the border. Our destination was 30 miles south at a hotel called “La Fonda”, where we had an intensely awesome weekend with close on 40 guys. Highlights included “La Fonda Trifecta” (a very serious volleyball, horseshoes, and bocce ball tournament, in which my team got 2nd place), eating every meal in the hotel restaurant which was set on a cliff overlooking the ocean, unlimited margaritas and beer, shooting very dangerous rockets into hotel rooms from the beach (accidentally?), and 18 holes of beautiful ocean-side golf (at which I sucked very badly).

  La Fonda from the beach

  Our base of operations

  One of many beautiful sunsets

• Upon return from Mexico, I noticed that my Powerbook was not charging correctly–one of my batteries was dead and the computer would not run with it in, or charge it. With another battery in place, the computer would run, but the battery would not charge. After a phone call to Apple support, during which they had me press many combinations of buttons, the computer would no longer start at all, regardless of battery or adapter state. This was worrisome, because everything that I create or produce, whether for work or otherwise, is done on that computer. So Apple said they would fix it, and sent me a box in which to mail the computer to them. Of course, I foolishly hadn’t made a backup of my hard drive before talking to Apple on the phone, and they make no guarantees that your hard drive will not be wiped, so I was in a pickle. While figuring that out, I began using my PC laptop for e-mail and such things. Less than 24 hours after my Powerbook died, my PC hard drive inexplicably started making loud clicking noises, and died. The BIOS couldn’t even recognize it in order to format it. Thus a week went by computer-less while I tried to figure out how to get the data off my Powerbook drive before sending it to Apple. In the end, I bought a small hard drive enclosure, took apart my Powerbook and got the drive out, put it in the enclosure, and was able to use a friend’s computer to transfer data from the enclosed laptop drive to my backup drive. (After I bought one enclosure which was faulty, of course, causing me to fear my data had been lost forever).

  As it turns out, it’s kind of a delicate and time-consuming process to open up a Powerbook

• In the middle of the computer fiasco, a couple cool things happened. First, I got a CD in the mail from my brother, which happened to be significant because it was the final mix of our most recent album, Hope (A Sliver, Like The Moon). Finally, months of hard work was over, and we had 6 kick-ass songs done! I look forward to pointing to some songs from here as soon as some non-recording type work is finished. Also, we’ve persuaded the design skillz master Chris Nyffeler himself to once again work on cover art for us. Stay tuned for more information.

• I also went with Dan to Tuolumne (in Yosemite) to tackle a climb we’d been thinking about doing for a while. It was called Regular Route, on Fairview Dome. It was 12 pitches to the top, most of which were technically easy, but some of which were quite challenging for me (it didn’t help that some residual snowmelt in the cracks meant for some slippery climbing at points), partly in virtue of the endurance, partly in virtue of the techniques required (much of it was crack climbing / laybacking, which I have not done much of).

  Looking up at the second pitch, you can see Dan as the tiny orange blur near the middle

  All in all, it was the best outdoor climb I’ve done, with some very memorable parts, including a 5.9 roof move, which, when performed 500 feet above the deck, was exhilirating. The last couple pitches were simul-climbed, which I’ve also never done before, and so required a great deal of concentration and focus. We took almost 7 hours to do the climb, but it was a beautiful day (I alternated between being cold and hot, so I suppose the temperature was ideal) and was exceedingly memorable.

  Recovering on the top, before the walk down the backside of the dome

  One of many incredible views from the top

• After returning from Yosemite, I conscripted my parents and sister, who were all at our place in SF, to come down to Palo Alto and help me put together my new room. I had been living with 4 other guys, but one was getting married and had moved out, so I no longer had to share a room with Justin. Glorious freedom was mine! I was excited about the prospects of designing my own space, and with the help of my parents and the local Ikea, I dare say we’ve created a very functional masterpiece in the small space.

  The all-important reading area: bookshelf, chair, light, and a place to put a cold beverage

  The under-the-lofted-bed desk, with record player + LPs, my “mega-amp”, importantly-displayed tobacco paraphernalia, bike storage, keyboard, and place to work on a computer or write

  The piece-de-resistance: track lighting from Ikea that I installed! I love track lighting with a passion

• The day we put my room together, I went back up to SF to prepare to travel once more–this time back to Denver for Trent and Natalie’s wedding. I had the honor of being in the (very large) wedding party, and so the weekend was full of meaningful and fun events, as can only be mixed appropriately when two families come together who dearly love both God and light-hearted enjoyment. The wedding ceremony itself was somewhat haphazard, involving a reluctant flower girl, a forgetful minister, a fainting bridesmaid, and an ill-timed best man’s joke, but such variegations were soon forgotten, and the reception was what one might call “epic”. Between the unlimited Fat Tire on draft and the many hours of dancing in the company of friends old and new, the night was both tiring and satisfying–not to mention the pleasure felt to see to great friends begin a new life together. The day after was occupied with the World Cup final, which many of us watched at a crowded ESPN bar in downtown Denver. France, unfortunately, did not win (Zidane??), which gave me the honor of claiming a very improbable personal statistic: in 100% of World Cup games for which I actually desired that the winner be a specific country, the other country emerged victorious. I should have bet some money against myself! Of course, it felt weird to not have more World Cup games to look forward to, seeing as it had occupied so much of my time.

• Since the wedding I have spent my days somewhat less hectically: enjoying the summer, working, and going frequently to the climbing gym. Most of my free time has been taken up with learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails, to further the breadth of my coding knowledge and experience.

• Books: Importantly, I finally finished Alister McGrath’s Scientific Theology trilogy, consisting of Nature, Reality, and Theory. This is one of the more significant works from the perspective of Christian theology which I have ever read. I hope to be able to do an extended review at some point, but for now let’s just say I was extremely glad to deal for an extended length of time with issues at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and science. More than anyone I have read, Alister remains faithful to the central insights of all three disciplines. Remember, we have his Faith & Science course available here at Teleios. I also picked up and read Graham Tomlin’s The Provocative Church, which I’ve been meaning to go through for years. I was present at the Teleios course he taught on the same subject, but had never read the book. I was immensely glad I did, and anyone interested in evangelism, postmodernity, the heart of “church”, or church formation should read it. On a lighter note, I’ve started the last book of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence–a children’s fantasy series which I hadn’t read since 3rd grade, but had remembered to be excellent. Apparently my taste was good back then too, and I’ve enjoyed being immersed for short periods of time in a world which existed only in my vague childhood memory. Finally (in books), Nyffy and I are almost done reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince out loud (a project we started last summer when the book came out). There was a long hiatus, but we’re back at it, and trying to remember who all the characters are. We’re near the end, and some very shocking things have happened, which we’re not sure about.

• Music: the summer has been good for new music, and I took that opportunity to make a 2-disc compilation for my friends showcasing such new music (and various other tracks particularly appropriate for summer listening, even if from years past). I’m very proud of the compilation, which I called “Summer of Rock”. Anyway, here’s a short list of some bands that have new albums I’ve enjoyed this summer: Band of Horses, Built to Spill, Dashboard Confessional, David Bazan, the Flaming Lips, Josh Ritter, Mat Kearney, Snow Patrol, Splendour Hyaline (!), Stars, The Stills, and Thrice. Check them out!

And there you have it. Summer 2006, so far. Hopefully various non-event-list-type entries coming soon. Thanks for reading!

I sat down against a wall in the center of the town. No one moved about in the heat of the day; for all I knew, the entire town had been wiped out by a sandstorm. I lowered my head and fell instantly asleep.

When I awoke the sun was still high in the sky. I sensed a presence next to me and turned my head. A man was sitting there silent, dressed in white, and with an intricately-knotted turban that topped a wizened face. He looked at me, then wordlessly offered a waterskin. Such gifts are not to be questioned, and so I drank a few gulps, handing the waterskin back and touching my forehead in thanks. He turned and looked at me fully then, and I saw that his right eye, which had been hidden before, was not an eye but a star. He nodded, apparently to himself, and leaned back against the wall, hiding the curious eye.

“You are an idealist,” he said suddenly in a deep, gravelly voice.

He was right. That was why I was half-dead in the desert.

“How can you tell?” I asked. The barest hint of a smile touched the man’s face and his left eye closed. He inhaled deeply. “I can tell,” he said. I let it pass. I didn’t bother to ask why he had initiated a conversation. I had learned that words have a way of multiplying themselves needlessly, and I did not want to start such a cycle. Besides, energy and breath were precious commodities. If the man had a purpose in talking to me, it would become plain in time. If not, the gift of water had bought the man my patience for as long as he wanted it.

I had not long to wait.

“So, idealist: what is idealism?”

It did not surprise me in the least that the nature of the conversation I was engaged in with a strange man in the middle of a desert was philosophical. I had learned that a test of any kind might arrive at any moment. I considered carefully. Though I knew I was an idealist, I didn’t know exactly what it was, or how to explain the force that had driven me here. I struck on an answer born from my own experience.

“Idealism in a sphere is the willingness to sacrifice everything that others consider important for an object of that sphere.”

“Why sacrifice?” He asked, pausing for a moment before the word “sacrifice”, as if to inspire doubt. I thought for another moment.

“Because sacrifice is where what is ideal (belonging to the realm of ideas) is turned into what is real. Thus, since ideas can only affect when made real, anyone who seeks to be a true idealist must sacrifice to make the bind between the two realms. Otherwise, the individual is a false idealist, that is to say, not an idealist at all. We conclude that ideal ism in a sphere, namely the system which defines the exemplar of a true idealist of that sphere, involves not just sacrifice, but indeed the sacrifice of everything.”

I cursed myself for using so many words, but the man smiled more perceptibly than before. He stood up and dusted off his white robes. He looked down at me, and again I saw the star which gleamed in the place of his right eye.

“Well said. Now I will leave you with a question. The object (of the sphere in which you are an idealist) you seek; are you prepared to sacrifice everything for it?”

I was confused as to the point of the question, but not its answer: “Yes. That is why I am an idealist.”

The man smiled again, and his face softened, but looked more melancholy for it.

“Are you prepared to sacrifice idealism itself?”

Idealism itself? I paused, then reeled, then recovered. “That’s impossible,” I said. “That’s self-defeating.”

The man nodded, and a pain grew in his left eye while the star in his right pulsed and throbbed. He looked at me, somehow more deeply, and the star felt sharper in my mind than any gaze.

“I know,” he whispered, like the sound of sand blowing across stone. Then he cupped his hands in the sign of farewell and walked into the roiling glare of the afternoon. After a few steps he glimmered like a mirage, and I saw him no more.

Which was more the paradox: the man, or the message? I sat in stunned silence for a long time, inscribing the exchange on the tablet of my soul, before slowly standing up. I looked uncertainly in different directions, and hesitated for a brief moment. I looked at my hands. Then I stepped into the sun.

Gratuitous picture to get you to read further: Lovedrug’s symbol of the moment

Basically, I discovered that, for every reasonable length of time, there is a corresponding “rock ’n roll quota”, which I am calling the “quota of rock”, that needs to be met. I am here defining “rock” as an experience I have wherein I am able to “rock out” for an extended amount of time to music that I am not playing myself. (There is also a “quota of my rock”, but we’re not talking about that).

To “rock out” means to have an irresistible physical response to certain types of music, involving:

• Motion of the feet (but not so much motion as to be called “dancing”, usually). The traditional motion would be described as a slight raising and lowering of the heel, giving the impression of a runner being restrained to very small movements. Most people perform this motion in time with the basic beat of the song, but I like to get a little more complicated and mirror any further drum work with not just my heels (though they’re the more important part) but also the toes. I’m not sure how this looks to other people, but the great thing about “rocking out” is that, as a very basic method of dancing, no one really cares.
• Motion of the upper torso and head. Many people would call this “head-banging”, but it is in fact somewhat more nuanced (though, to be fair, it probably did evolve, as a more laid-back / adult / shoegazer form, from head-banging). The primary thing here is that the head needs to “bob” in time with the music, and needs to be forward and down on the downbeat. In quieter parts of the song, the head and neck are alone in this motion, but with crescendoes in the phrasing or volume, the upper torso gets involved as well. During particularly loud or violent parts of songs, the whole upper body could be seen to exhibit quite a range of forward-and-back (“rock”-ing) motion.
• If the music calls for it (i.e., if there is a part of the song which is particularly moving or emotional to the rocker), various side-to-side motions might be added. Typically this is done first with the head–but it’s important to note that any swaying is in addition to the forward-and-back rocking, not instead of it.
• In more punk-style crowds, or if there is a piano - fortissimo transition (as when a rock band might suddenly halt all noise on the downbeat of 3 in 4/4 time, providing a silent tension, and then come crashing in on the next 1), you might also come across jumping motions. Again, these are simple up-and-down motions that go along with the base beats of the song. In the punk-style crowds, the jumping is accompanied by certain hand motions, but I mostly stay away from these–I like to keep the feeling of a tense core, taught but fluid.
• In line with the last thought, hands are infrequently used in rocking out. For me, they typically remain in the pockets, or if I’m feeling like a change is needed, they can be brought out and crossed across my chest. Once in a while, if I’m in a more emo mood, the hands can be used as drumsticks on the chest.

Let that suffice for rocking out, in general. For me, however, there is another very important element to rocking out which isn’t necessarily universally shared: singing along. Certain environmental attributes need to be in place for singing along to be valid, but the most important of which is that the music needs to be loud enough so that, when singing at max volume, my voice is still relatively quiet enough not to affect other concert-goers’ experience. I don’t mean that they shouldn’t hear me at all, but rather that my personal rock contribution would mix well with what is coming from the speakers. In fact, I myself like to hear those next to me singing as well–it gives a sense of unity and solidarity…there is nothing quite like rocking out with a group of good friends. There are those, less-initiated perhaps, who go to shows and become indignant when the rest of the crowd participates via singing loudly and/or rocking out around them. I learned long ago that I can’t worry about what such people think about me, because they don’t know what’s going on. As a rule of thumb, if you go to a rock show and don’t want to be involved in the rocking out, sit at a table somewhere in the back.

Rock shows consist of a number of bands (usually 3), so they tend to last for a few hours. Thus to sing and rock out with total abandon for that time period is a tiring proposition. We can formulate a Law of Rock Fatigue, in fact: F = Rl, where F is physical body fatigue, R is a constant denoting the rockingestness of a given band, and l is the length of time the band plays ( tend - tstart). Things become more complicated when you add multiple bands in a row, and we have to define the temporal fatigue quantifier (Q), which has been experimentally determined to be: Q = ((t1 - t0)/10) + 1. Here, t1 - t0 is the time in hours between the time the given band starts and the time the first band started (meaning, for the first band, Q = 1). Thus for any given show, rock fatigue (in units I will call “tireds”) is calculated via the formula (where n is the number of bands playing the show):

F = Q1R1l1 + Q2R2l2 + … + QnRnln

All this is to say that after rocking out, you might expect to have increased in at least a few tireds. That’s ok, though, because the number of tireds gained as a result of rocking out is directly proportional to the increase in the quota of rock, which is what this whole entry is about.

Anyway, over the past year, it has been obvious that my quota of rock has been largely unmet. Thus it was with great relish that I felt the tank of rock being filled up last night at the show. The opening band, Cast of Thousands or something like that, was unimpressive. Their music was good, but their stage presence exuded self-importance, posturing, and over-dramatization. Thankfully Lovedrug was none of the above, and they rocked out like crazy, increasing the heights of rockage to which I myself aspire. There was much Jonathan-esque rocking out, including singing along with the lead singer’s odd, high, crooning voice, which melded perfectly into the wall of strident guitar anthems. Lovedrug plays a kind of dark and beautiful rock (at times heavy, at times not) accompanied by brilliant vocal melodies, reminiscent of Muse, but in my opinion better. Importantly, they completely nailed their set, and what’s more, I could tell they were playing their hearts out; it is rare and awesome when those two events coincide.

The headliner for the evening was Smoking Popes, an old punk-style band from Chicago (I believe it is their reunion tour). I went to the show to hear Lovedrug, but Chuck had given me some Popes stuff beforehand, and I thought it was fair; so I was surprised when their live performance was far better than fair–it was incredible! An hour went by like a minute amidst a happy crowd bouncing and rocking out to catchy and sincerely-delivered melodic indie punk tunes.

The bottom line is that I need such experiences far more often than I remember to go after them. There’s something very satisfying and purifying about rocking out, and I feel very much at home in an indie rock crowd, despite all the pretentiousness that could justifiably be attributed to it. Also, going to shows tends to inspire me to write more music and care more about getting my music around. It is a yet-unfulfilled dream that Splendour Hyaline would have the opportunity to tour as a band in our own right, maybe with awesome folks like Lovedrug. Of course, there are many barriers to pursuing such a dream, but it is fun to be reminded of it nonetheless.

Well, so much for rocking out–now I’m heading out of town for Memorial Day weekend, where I will hopefully be doing another kind of rocking out–on real rocks. And wearing the awesome Lovedrug zipper hoodie that I bought to support such a great band–it’s blue with that sweet Pegasus guy on the front. Cheers.

PS: Check out this music video for Lovedrug’s song Spiders, one of their less-hardcore, more-accessible songs (maybe the single?).

I saw the movie a few days ago, and so I thought I’d make a short list of some important ways that it was different than the book:

• The movie’s plot was less complicated.
• Langdon was more of a spineless religioid. (In the book, he knew about, and believed, the Priory’s story. In the movie, he calls it a “myth”, tacks “according to the Priory myth” on the end of all his statements, and argues unconvincingly about it with Teabing–using much the same arguments as moviegoers would expect frustrated Christians to use). Ultimately he comes across as having gone on a journey of personal discovery, which is not at all the character of the book.
• Bezu Fache was more of a religious fanatic, and a forensic dupe (as opposed to the brilliant, hard-as-nails police captain from the novel).
• Teabing was a much more lively character than I would have assumed from the book.
• The conclusion, especially regarding Sophie’s family, was far less satisfying.

Apart from the Teabing bit, all of these were disappointments. The one change I really liked about the movie was the part where Robert finds the seal under the sign of the rose in the keystone. It is covered with “mysterious writing” (in reality, just English written reflectedly). In the book, the characters agonize for a long time over its deciphering. But it is quite clearly (there’s a picture in the book) English. In the movie, Robert takes one glance at it and says, “We need a mirror,” as any non-catatonic English-speaker would. So it cleared up one embarrassment.

Now, mostly what I want to talk about is two broader-picture statements which occurred in the movie explicitly but not in the book. As we will see, it’s to Dan Brown’s credit that he didn’t write such laughable dialogue into the novel. (Or if he did, it was done in such a way that I missed it).

First, there is a statement Ian McKellen’s character (Leigh Teabing) makes after the argument over the truth of the Priory myth. He says:

As long as there has been the one true God, there has been killing in his name.

The statement, of course, is true. But it’s only an interesting statement in light of another proposition, which I take here to be necessary and implicit, namely that (a) if we hadn’t “invented” the one true God, there would have been no religious killing. Or, (b) if we “de-invent” God, there will be substantially less killing. Or, what would be most absurd, (c) if we were polytheists, we wouldn’t kill people.

Obviously, none of those statements come anywhere near true. The fact is that, while religion does spawn its fair share of killing, it is only insofar as religion is being used by those with power to kill those they don’t like (for, I’m certain, fundamentally non-religious reasons). In other words, the base motive for religious killings is the same as the base motive for any other type of killing–but the word “God”, like the word “patriotism” or the words “national security”, gets mouthed as a way to spin deaths so that they seem less barbaric, less arbitrary, and less for a certain party’s benefit.

Pay attention: when the wizard behind the machine of war is finally revealed, we will all stare, not into the face of some lie about God’s existence, but into our own hearts, and our own lust for power and control.

So it is strange to me how often I run across people who are saying, in one form or another, that many of the world’s great ills are somehow caused by God (the idea of God, that is, according to them). I feel it is strange not because the data don’t support such a supposition, but because it is so obviously a superficial reading of the data. I can’t believe anyone would put it forward who has taken a serious and hard look at human nature, religious or areligious.

Now to the second quote from the movie. It was a bit longer, so I’m sure I’ll get it wrong and this is more of a paraphrase. But it went something like this (when Teabing is trying to convince Sophie to “reveal herself” as the heir of Christ, in order to bring the secret truth of the Priory to the world–Teabing is talking):

Sophie, you have the power to take thousands of years of bloodshed, and the oppression of women, and racism…with this one act you can make it all go away, put everything to rights at last!

I have a hard time imagining the script writer thinking that such a statement would come across as anything but naive absurdity. Again, the basic fallacy is the same: no doubt Christians have collaborated in all kinds of evil schemes involving bloodshed, the oppression of women, and racism. But that is not to say in the least that ridding the world of Christianity would rid the world of any of those ills. No–unfortunately, evil can transform any system into a guise, a front for its operations. Women were oppressed because evil men wanted power, not because men where Christians. It just so happened, even if the correllation is true (which it’s not, really) that Christian language could be used in the mouths of evil men just as easily as any other kind of talking.

Again my worry is that somehow, after seeing the movie, people will think there is some basis to such a lame duck of an analysis of the history of evil over the past 2000 years. I mean, I can certainly see the appeal of a scapegoat. But we need to be aware that the cause of oppression, racism, and war is not some system that has a name and that we can topple–no, the cause is us. It’s the ones perpetrating the injustices, and the ones letting it go on happening. Of course, we will use whatever is at hand to justify evil action and inaction, even if that is Christianity (as it was apparently used to keep slaves in America from trying for freedom). But were Christianity not around, we would just use something else.

(Side note: maybe that’s where a post-modern, deconstructionist methodology could actually aid us–it is very good at laying bare the hidden motives of people and systems, and the flow of power.)

Anyway, that’s that for my Da Vinci Code kick. I just thought it was a good opportunity to take on some of the more silly things that people think (enough people, apparently, for those philosophical memes to have trickled down into mass media). Also, it was fun to actually write about something besides myself for a while. Hopefully the trend will continue!

Update: found a great review of the movie in the New Yorker…check it out!

First, it’s a fun read. The plot is more or less a movie script–chopped up into small scenes, and everything described seemingly just for the director of photography. In some cases I even had the strange feeling that when I see the movie this weekend (or whenever), I’ll have predicted most of the zooms and fades that will be a part of the cinematography. I guess that’s supposed to make The Da Vinci Code bad literature. I don’t really have any love for the lit snobs, but Shakespeare aside, it was sort of annoying. It felt syncopated, and like I was being coddled or overfed. You just can’t have 100 climaxes in one novel; there needs to be more foreplay. But all that is to say, I think it will be a great movie. The plot itself is certainly fast-paced, and the mysteries are for the most part not inane. Some of the clues were easy to figure out beforehand, but others weren’t. Anyway–a fun read. And quick. Moreover it appealed to the cryptologist in me–I used to study and write ciphers and codes when I was a child, and spend hours reading about their historical uses and such.

Second, it’s easy to see why Christians would protest the book. After all, one thing we know about Christians is that they will protest anything that looks like it could undermine their already-fast-eroding image in popular culture. The fact that this is the subject of The Da Vinci Code just makes people pay less attention. The book’s basically saying, “Christianity acts to silence things it doesn’t like”, so whatever the factual state of the content which drives that polemic vehicle, people will feel it is corroborated by Christians acting to silence it. In “responding”, Christians will unwittingly substantiate the very claims they want to debunk. This is both unfortunate and unfair. I say it is unfair because the situation is set up in such a way so that any “response” will seem hollow from the outset. I say it is unfortunate because, again, things are set up to disincline people on either side from looking beyond the red-herringed, surface issues. What matters at this stage is not, as you might think, whether Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and all the rest. What matters is that such a suggestion will rile Christians up so that any interlocutor will sense a great amount of defensiveness, and feel justified in affirming the book’s central tenet. What is that central tenet? To illustrate, I’ll quote a longish section (from the end of Chapter 82, in a conversation between the main characters):

“There’s an enormous difference between hypothetically discussing an alternate history of Christ, and…” He paused.

“And what?”

“And presenting to the world thousands of ancient documents as scientific evidence that the New Testament is false testimony.”

“But you told me the New Testament is based on fabrications.”

Langdon smiled. “Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith–acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.”

“So you are in favor of the Sangreal documents staying buried forever?”

“I’m a historian. I’m opposed to the destruction of documents, and I would love to see religious scholars have more information to ponder the exceptional life of Jesus Christ.”

“You’re arguing both sides of my question.”

“Am I? The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth.”

“My point exactly,” Langdon said. “Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.”

“But it appears their reality is false.”

Langdon chuckled. “No more false than that of a mathematical cryptographer who believes in the imaginary number ’ i’ because it helps her break codes.”

Sophie frowned. “That’s not fair.”

There are many, many things to unpack in this segment. We might begin by pointing out that Sophie’s retort at the end is right on–it is unfair for Langdon to assume the non-reality of i. The non-reality of mathematical entities is by no means a settled (or majority) philosophical opinion. The larger issue is of course The Da Vinci Code’s implicit claim that there are really two “realities” that we exist in. One is the reality of objective truth, where “scientific evidence” belongs. The other is the reality of “fundamental guideposts”, of “religious allegory” that “helps millions of people cope and be better people.” Here Brown reduces to a strident echo of the vox populi of our age, and he fails to adequately respond to Sophie’s insistence that “their reality is false.”

There really is a deep philosophical tension here. Why is it at all appropriate to sidestep questions of truth in favor of a pseudo-reality that somehow “helps people”. Why would we think there is any guarantee that pseudo-realities can “help” people? It seems that in our most primitive of experiences (walking, eating, and so forth), departing from that more “objective reality”–the one where science operates–comes with deadly consequences. Everyone knows there are a million examples, but I’ll give one: it does me no good to declare that, although Drano, scientifically speaking, is not food, in my “spiritual reality” or whatever, I can partake of it for sustenance. Now, it is one thing to talk about partaking of Drano. If, on the other hand, I really engage in the activity, I will soon learn that my self-constructed “spiritual reality” is no match for that other reality. It seems that The Da Vinci Code agrees so far (“The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.”)

So let’s ask another awkward question: How could it be beneficial to believe in anything that we don’t consider to be a part of that “objective” reality? How could it be beneficial to me to believe that Drano is sustenance if I simultaneously know that Drano is not really sustenance? The imagined response is that the Drano example is nonsensical, whereas if we’re talking about Jesus, the answer is obvious: Jesus inspires people. He was the proto-feminist, he was a liberator, etc. But this dodges the issue, for the issue is why it would be beneficial to continue to speak of things like Jesus’ divinity, his virgin birth, his miracles, and his resurrection, if such things did not happen. The only way out appears to be to say that these things are all symbolic–they remind us and point out to us the things that actually are real in the non-religious sense of “real”, e.g., his proto-feminism, his love of outcasts, and so forth. But does this not seem like some sort of Da Vinci Code itself? Some sort of serpentine path of clues that leads right back–to where we started. My point is this–if you believe certain things about Jesus and not others, you will ultimately only be inspired by the things you believe about him–not the ones you don’t.

And yet there is a bit of positive insight in the passage we just read as well–people do try to “get at” God, or the “unprocessible” via metaphor. Metaphor is extremely valuable in this sense. And of course, as The Da Vinci Code suggests, to believe literally in these metaphors is to commit a fallacy. But it is not a fallacy to believe literally in the thing the metaphor is attempting to “get at”. Moreover, it goes without saying that Dan Brown pulls a bit of a fast one in that it is presupposed that language of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection are metaphorical. While it is inappropriate to take a metaphor literally, it is not inappropriate to take a literal statement literally. “Jesus Christ is Lord of the Earth” is thus a statement whose metaphoricity, and therefore the appropriateness of its being taken literally, depend on the epistemology of the one uttering the statement. In fact, metaphor always operates this way–so it is curious to see The Da Vinci Code proposing the metaphor as existing somehow objectively. What should be proposed as existing (or not existing) objectively are facts which substantiate the literal form of the statement. If there are none such, those who believe the proposition can be stated literally will eventually find themselves in the proverbial Drano-drinking situation. So it is at this stage that it begins to matter whether Christ resurrected or not.

Anyway, all this is supposed to highlight: The Da Vinci Code seems to propose that it is OK to “believe” things that, strictly speaking, we know to be false (in the “real” reality), as long as we just talk about believing them, or believe them in some vague non-propositional way, or engage in some other as-yet-undiscovered propositional attitude like “believe-as-metaphor” towards claims like “Jesus is divine” or “the Buddha came from a lotus blossom”. The instant we transfer those claims to normal propositional attitudes like “believe-to-be-true”, however, we have transgressed. Why? Because, according to The Da Vinci Code, they are not really true (in the story, remember, there are “thousands of ancient documents” which prove such claims to be false). But there is no good reason given for why anyone should think it is OK to believe things we know to be false, other than that it helps us become better people. Why better people, rather than worse people? It’s unclear, when it’s exactly the thing that needs to be the clearest–something is practical only insofar as it is seen to be useful for a certain, pre-defined end. In this case The Da Vinci Code is supposing that “false religious belief” is practical, but the only end in sight is this one of “becoming better people”. Since such an end requires definition and elucidation, but none is forthcoming in the book, we are left at a dead end.

Ironically (but perhaps sensibly, given what I’ve said), the story’s main characters do not seem to spend a lot of time pondering whether they should adopt some false religious beliefs to better themselves. No–they are enlightened because they have the knowledge that these beliefs are actually false, and so feel no pull towards engaging in belief of them, metaphorically or otherwise. Robert and Sophie spend their time deliberating what to do about “all those poor people who actually really believe these things”, and settle on this strategy of protecting their schizophrenic reality. You definitely get the feeling that they are looking down from the heights of enlightenment and power because they actually know the truth. They’ve chosen to keep that truth hidden, for the psychological safety of the world, but the last thing they’d do is engage in beliefs that contradict that truth.

Thus the book sends an odd message, which if I were to paraphrase it, would be like this: “Seek the truth with all your heart, and when you’ve gotten it, congratulate yourself on being more enlightened than the rest. Go to great lengths not to disturb others with your enlightenment, because the brutes aren’t ready; they might be destroyed. Now contemplate the sacred feminine.” Or something similar. So there is a very devious talking out of both sides of the mouth going on. On one side we have the age-old draw of Gnosticism–come closer, and I will ravage your soul with secret knowledge that will transform you into something greater! It’s no less Gnosticism for the fact that, in The Da Vinci Code, it could be construed as atheistic. And on the other side we have a very un-thought-out religious pluralism, where religious beliefs live in some sort of “personal reality” that, when all is said and done, don’t affect anyone’s lives at all. (“Jesus is divine” just ends up meaning “Jesus was a feminist” or something). In this story, the Gnostic heroes end up being the guardians of the rest of humanity, and their secrecy is reinforced

It seems to me that, once all these issues are on the table, the door is opened to discuss the factual nature of The Da Vinci Code’s claims about Christianity, specifically. As it turns out, most of the more juicy ones are quite historically off, or uncorroborated, or pure speculation spun into a good mystery (but taken by many as true). I won’t go into any of these specifically here. But I will mention that we at Teleios have recently partnered with Alpha in the UK to deliver a video seminar of theirs on The Da Vinci Code, where they do go into some detail. I’d recommend taking a look at it–but only after having read all the foregoing. As I said before, jumping right into defensive debates about the facts can only reinforce that message of the book which says that Christians do have something to fear. To get to the course, just go to http://alpha.org/davinci/. Incidentally, I’ve got a Reddit going trying to promote it–if you find the framework/video valuable, please go to this page and vote for it!

The second part of what I want to say has to do with what I would call The Da Vinci Code’s misconstruing, not now the facts of Christianity, but rather the meaning, or message, or point of it. Here are some key implications from the book:

• The nature of Christianity is such that it is constantly engaged in covering things up, hiding them
• Christianity opposes free thinking
• Christianity subjugates women
• Christianity glorifies masculinity and silences femininity
• The Church, not Jesus, is the source of our understandings of him
• The Church opposed paganism, not because she (curiously, the Church is often thought of as female, something which doesn’t make sense on The Da Vinci Code’s reading of it) thought it was false, but because it was afraid paganism would reveal the Church’s true roots
• Christianity is anti-sexual, and tries to suppress our natural and good longings for sex

…and so on. These are the things that really frustrated me, because it showed a very deep and personal (on the part of Dan Brown) misunderstanding of Christianity and the Church. Let me put it very bluntly: to the extent that those statements describe an actual religion or an actual group of people, that religion and/or that group of people are not Christianity or the Church!. The fact that so many people obviously resonate with The Da Vinci Code’s vision of Christianity shows that these claims have been too often corroborated in people’s experience. That is where our shame (as Christians) should be–not that we have hidden or covered up anything (because we haven’t–not like the The Da Vinci Code says, anyway), but rather that actions or words of ours have been interpreted as substantiating (or, worse, really did substantiate) those claims.

What I want to do is uphold both Christ’s resurrection and Christianity’s reverence for both the male and female roles and purposes and all the rest. There is no need to invent a Christ who married Mary Magdalene to convince me that Christianity promotes equality for women. But the tone of the book is that such is indeed the way of things. Another example: there is a sharp line drawn, in The Da Vinci Code, between a “healthy” sexuality, and Christian practice. While of course I would disagree with many people’s views on what is a “healthy” sexuality, I want to deny that Christianity has anything to do with repressing sexual desire in general, or treating it as unholy, or punishing people for certain thoughts, and so on.

I guess in sum it is just sad that The Da Vinci Code’s accusations have found such a ready reception. It means that they are obviously not baseless, in terms of how Christianity is seen and what some Christians have done in the world. But they are baseless in terms of who Jesus Christ was, and how it was intended that Christians live their lives, even and especially on an orthodox view of Christ, including his divinity and resurrection and all that. It is the pages of the Christian scriptures, not the Gnostic ones, that hold the keys to true freedom, liberation, and happiness–indeed the very kind of freedom, liberation, and happiness that people want! (Not some made-up “church” kind. Actual, real happiness).

Now, let me bring things to a close and restate my thoughts more succinctly: First, the way The Da Vinci Code phrases its claims is somewhat sneaky, in that some ways of responding to it could actually inadvertently substantiate those claims. So in talking about it, some groundwork must be laid. Second, whether or not it is OK to be a Christian actually depends on some facts about the world (like whether or not Christ rose from the dead)–not just on whether I can, in some reality distortion field, make metaphorical claims that sound like Christian tenets. Luckily, The Da Vinci Code doesn’t dig up anything that need cause those central issues to be doubted (though it should be said, of course, that if one held certain non-central issues as central, one might find them eroding). Third, we (Christians) need to do something to re-educate the world about our views on the list above, to show that, really, they have no basis in the life or teachings of the one we supposedly follow.

Well, I’m looking forward to seeing the movie this weekend or soon, and watching the reactions. As always, I will hold my breath more out of fear that the “Christian” response will be inappropriate or stupid, or not nuanced enough to see the questions that are really beneath the surface, and not the ones on top. But that’s just the way it is! Meanwhile, the general spiritual backdrop of our time continues to shift further away from the Christianity of modernism. While that shift will continue to be attended by pockets of popular (but unsubstantiated) speculation, like The Da Vinci Code, it is in my mind a good thing, overall. One has only to visit certain churches in the US to know that, even if there was no cover-up, something, somewhere down the line from Christ, has been lost. Maybe it would be better for us to engage in the search for that Holy Grail than to worry about how Dan Brown is defining his.

Event 1: On Thursday, I went to an Over the Rhine and Hem show in San Francisco. I have loved and followed Over the Rhine for years. Karin’s (the singer’s) voice is like magical, sensual, chocolate and wine-filled lovemaking. I think. I have never had magical, sensual, chocolate and wine-filled lovemaking, but it is at least how I would imagine it going. The show was at the Great American Music Hall–my favorite SF venue, where I have seen most if not all of my favorite artists over the past 6-7 years. After Hem’s flawless opening set, Over the Rhine kicked things off with “Latter Days”, possibly my favorite song of theirs. From then until the end of their hour-plus set, I was in a world of enchantment which I can’t coherently relate. Many things rose up in me and got stuck in my throat that I wish I knew how to remember. Times of such beauty are rare.

Event 2: Last night (Saturday), my housemate Trent’s fiancee and friends were all out for some “bachelorette party” or something. Not to be outdone, many of us non-women had an “anti-bachelorette fiesta” of sorts. While the real anti-bachelorette celebration will take place in Mexico in a little while, we settled for much pizza, beer, the viewing of a movie, and some “drunken frisbee golf”, as we like to call it, on Stanford’s campus. This is one of my favorite events. Indeed, it does consist of a certain amount of frisbee golf, but the “drunken” adjective is not as accurate as might be feared. There is, it is not to be doubted, a good amount of alcohol which is consumed beerly. However, the primary attraction to “DFG” is not any actual state of drunkenness (which, as good Christians, we studiously avoided), but rather a state I like to call “playing frisbee golf with a cigarette and pulling a cooler of cheap beer behind us every once in a while drinking some”. For some reason the image is just plain titillating. Beer or no, I had one of my better rounds on the Stanford course, finishing like 10 over par or something.

Event 3: Tonight (Sunday), I went to church. Gasp! It has been a while. But I had ulterior motives. Not, surprisingly, to ogle at hot church-going women (though that may or may not have been a previous ulterior motive). In fact, his greatness himself, the fabulous NT Wright, deigned to speak at MPPC’s “Postmodern” evening service. Candles and big TV screens in full effect, NT gave one of the better talks I’ve heard inside the walls of a church in a long time. I’m not at the moment in a position to sum up the talk, but suffice it to say it scratched my itchings. I haven’t read much of Wright’s considerable bibliography, but am now planning on it. I also find myself wishing the man hadn’t decided to get involved in the church. If he had opted to stay in academics, for instance, I would have been easily persuaded to travel to Oxford and study under him (such was his facility with history, philosophy, and theology).

Apart from these events, there were also two amazing birthday parties (at Tiburon and Half Moon Bay, respectively), and three amazing games of Ultimate Frisbee. Today at our third game session, I felt a magically-increased ability to read the disc, to run to wherever it was, and to just generally be happy with my performance (a relative first for me in the realm of sports). I suppose I have always underestimated the power of practice to actually make better the thing practiced. Maybe it is because I’ve always quit things when the practicing got slightly difficult–but Ultimate has kept my attention quite well, and I am happy to call it my favorite team sport. (And no I am not a hippie). Also, not to be forgotten, I held a CD release party for Splendour Hyaline’s latest offering. A good number of my friends showed up and we rocked out to my music. Apart from the ego-stroking, it was a very meaningful time and I was glad to celebrate the completion of a new art project with many of those I love.

In other news…I am planning on reading The Da Vinci Code. God help me and my literary (in)sensibilities.

Working on an improv synth solo for So Talk About It at 3am

I have a strong desire to share all our new songs with everyone here, but a few things remain to be worked out. First, I don’t have an “official” CD–David does, and he’s in Africa for a month. Second, I’m not naive enough to think that the mix I have will be final. We usually go through rounds of tweaking, and, while things sound excellent, there’re always one or two minor changes to make. Third, the album has no title. Fourth, the album has no artwork. I’d like all of these things to be present before I unveil everything officially. So just hold tight for now! I’ll probably break down and put one or two up here anyway, since the only reason I feel secure is that I am validated by my peers.

Speaking of being validated by my peers, let’s go on a tangent: those of you who are e4 weblog owners or frequenters might have noticed that I have added trackback capability to the e4 weblogs. Trackbacks are a cool example of the way the web is supposed to work–now, when you write entries, e4 will check out any links you make, and attempt to send a trackback ping to that site. If the site is trackback-enabled, it’ll accept the ping, and people who visit it will see that your entry references the page! Likewise all the weblogs here are now trackback-enabled, so anyone can send pings from Movable Type, WordPress, or wherever. Let’s just hope for no horrible spam!

(For you e4 bloggers, you can play with the trackback preferences at your weblog config page)

Well, I am now officially back in California for a while, so hopefully I’ll have time to write some more reflective posts soon. Ciao!

Somewhere in college that changed…probably after I realized that the quality of both the idea and the mp3 were less than excellent. One of the effects of this realization was a drastically lower songwriting rate–from something like 12 a year at the end of high school to just a couple a year at the end of college. I’d like to think there was a proportional increase in song quality, but still, it was kind of sad to look back on a year and not have a lot to show for it, musically speaking. Although in truth, the songwriting hesitance had less to do with music theory and more to do with lyrics–I was just dissatisfied with everything I came up with; I was no longer writing “worship” lyrics, and I was no longer writing “how I’m feeling” lyrics, which meant that coming up with ideas was much, much harder.

All of the above is just meant to elucidate my surprise when, on Friday night, I sat down with the guitar, came up with a part I liked and a vocal melody to accompany it, and then in about an hour also had a complete set of lyrics for the song! I played it for Dav when he got back from hanging out with friends, and we decided to put it in the queue for the album we’re recording now. Hopefully that means you’ll get to hear it soon. It’s fairly original (I think) and is in 5/4, so I get props for that anyway. I called it “The Restless Slumber of Dry Kindling”, and I’ll reproduce the lyrics here:

Rising, a sliver, like the moon
Take me right away to doom
Hope shouldn't be the end of me
Yet whispers say I'm 23
Rugged, the way to sanity
A lonely, sad old colony
Overlooked by all who've gone before,
Easier to sail to other shores

More to the point is I don't know
Which way it is that I should go
Newness, a sharp-lit symmetry
Attractive; does reality
Speak up, gently colorize
Halting the heart's unconscious rise
Freezing the blood that wants to stir?
Hibernation is a lonely word

So wake me up, wake me up

Can't stop the fires
that are running
Through trenches
towards me

Oh no

Ooooooooo

If flame is the order of the day
Responsibility for fuel is laid
With you so don't waste our time
I can only sing so many rhymes
Love's only if I close my eyes
Still I can't help but look to the prize
Watchman's vigil in a tower room
Spiteful of the brazen rising moon

So how long, how long

Can't stop the fires
that are running
Through trenches
towards me

Oh no

Ooooooooo

Well, off to do more recording…

It should be said also that we did have an excellent time, were in great physical condition (we rocked the climb and the altitude) and health for the duration, and got back a day early, safe and sound. These are all good things, and the whole experience was overwhelmingly positive. I’m sure Dan and I will be writing a full trip report to post at Summit Whitney, so I’ll post here when that happens. At that time we should have a number of awesome pictures, too.

About a day after I got back from Whitney, I left for Florida to be at work and with family for a week and a half or so. Since my brother David has gotten in to Duke law school and will be moving to Durham pretty shortly, we decided that Splendour Hyaline (which consists of the two of us) needed to make a new record, and fast. So apart from work, we’re pretty much in the studio (Spareroom Studios, that is). So far things are going great–we’re planning on releasing a 5 or 6 song EP. The recording quality we’re getting, both mechanically and in terms of performance, is light years beyond our previous attempts, so definitely stay tuned; we might post some unofficial mixes here or at our myspace page.

On another music-related note, you’ll notice a new sidebar on my blog, which consists of recently-played tracks from iTunes. All e4 blogs now have the ability to get data from last.fm if you have a last.fm username and some implementation of AudioScrobbler (downloads here for all platforms). If you’ve never heard of last.fm, you should check it out–it’s a cool web application that tracks your music listening and gives you cool statistics about it, suggests new artists, and connects you with people with similar taste. All that is to say, if I’ve been listening to iTunes recently (and had an internet connection), you should now be able to see that info on my blog! (If you also have an e4 blog, just go to the weblog config page and put in your last.fm username to take advantage of this feature too).

Well, the days have gone by, and we’ve been training to the best of our ability; now we are on the eve of the climb. Right now Dan and I are having a gear check, then we’re going to start the drive to Lone Pine, CA, at the foot of Whitney. The drive is made longer since we can’t go through Yosemite at this time of year–we’ll have to go all the way up to Tahoe, then catch the 395 down. We hope to get in a bit of bouldering at Bishop if we have time.

I’m not exactly sure how the trip will go, but any worries will have to be put aside, since now is the time for action. It’s time to trust in our guides, our gear, our training, and our resolve to get us safely to the summit. The Summit for Someone website recommended that we ‘be in the best shape of [our] lives’ for the climb. It’s probably safe to say that we are!

We’ll do a full write-up and post pictures whenever we get back, after a hopefully successful summit. For now, your prayers for safety are appreciated! And of course, you have our thanks for following our progress and for donating to support our climb. We’re confident that your contribution will have a great impact on kids’ lives this summer.

Here it is, exactly as I wrote it out over the 10-day adventure (any editorial additions or comments will be italicized and in brackets):

Things that are true

Things that are true, honest, bare, stripped down, inspired. The result of travel, solitude, conversation, thought, pain.

1. I love languages. I love being in places where there are many spoken. I love learning them. I love reading them. I love thinking about words, their histories, their variants.

2. I love being overseas. I love being in a place where I know so little that my goal is to understand. In the States, I criticize. In Greece, I try to understand. This is better. I don’t know the rules of the game, so I can’t judge people or systems. [For example,] I don’t know what faith means here, so I can’t judge. It is a relief.

3. I love foreign women. I love it when we catch eyes. We can’t understand each other, but there is a connection. I want to understand…I want to progress in knowing. Maybe a foreign woman is not necessary for this, but there is some real, obvious symbolism in the juxtaposition of languages and cultures that makes me think: here, there is something in which I can progress in understanding.

4. I really want someone to love. I long and yearn for the possibility of a caress or kiss–these physical realities are central and important to me, and I feel deprived of them. I know they must correspond to emotional and spiritual realities, but I am blessed with friends and companions so much that I do not feel deprived in those areas. Thus right now the daydreams focus on the physical–not meaning sexual–since it is what I lack.

5. I love solitude. I am beginning to realize this again after years of growing in social skill. I love community, but at the root I am an individual, and I need time alone. To think, to play music [without wondering if I am annoying roommates or neighbors, without being afraid to sing loud], to wonder, to be sad, to pray… I think I have been deprived of this lately. What I need is radical, intense community, and radical, intense solitude. Recently, I have had neither. Even when I am married, solitude will be important to me. Separation and union, separation and union–Riddle-maker of Hed style [which won’t make sense to any of you unless you read this book]. Is this healthy? In any case it is new–in relationships I am usually clingy–tending toward perpetual union. But now I taste the desire for solitude and space even in that [most intimate] relationship.

6. I am ashamed of Christian symbols. The Bible on the table, the “I went to Bible school,” the cross necklace, the mentioning of Christian band names, etc… I am afraid when a stranger sees or hears these things on/about me or someone I am with, they will assume I am a certain way–corresponding to an image of a Christian they have in their head. But I am almost certainly nothing like that at all! [Maybe the more general observation is that] I want no one to be able to stereotype me in ways I don’t encourage. Is this possible? Should I care? Is this feeling tantamount to being ashamed of Christ?

7. In social situations, I am a paradox. I have two contradictory drives. One is to avoid notice and attention–to be like everyone else–to fit in. Another is to insist that I am different–to stand out. Maybe the rule of thumb is this: in situations where people would think I am the same as those around me (church, for example), I insist on my difference. And in situations where people would think that I am different (Greece, for example), I do all I can to avoid this attention–to blend in.

8. In general, I am very wary of people making assumptions about me. In fact, I hate it. For example, I am easily annoyed on this trip with my sister partly because I see people assuming that we are dating/engaged/married (she has a promise ring on her wedding ring finger which could be mistaken for something else). It really rubs me raw–not sure if it has anything to do with Rachel or if it would be the same with anyone. [After reflection, I’m thinking the latter…it is just hard to flirt with girls if they think I am with the person who is actually my sister] 9. I love exploring. I love going places other people aren’t, especially if it involves difficulty. I love doing it alone, and finding secret hidden treasures! (Or places, views, moments…)

10. I love moving. I love motion. Whether running, biking, driving, mopedding, sailing, ferrying, flying, swimming…. I love the feel of wind or water against me. I especially love it when I am controlling the motion–I have a natural affinity for driving, flying, boating, piloting anything [and by affinity I don’t mean skill, but rather something more like “joy”]. And, I always want to do these things as fast as possible. It seems beautiful to combine speed and controlled motion. I will always choose such activities over standing still.

11. When I am learning languages, random words that I recently learned tend to pop into my head, and I roll them over and over–I don’t forget these words, but I do forget others.

12. I need someone who is skilled at drawing me gently out of the depths of myself at the right times. Those depths are beautiful, but can be suffocating. In return I will draw her in to that world where there is much wonder to be experienced.

13. I am deeply and irrevocably romantic (though it may only last until I find a girl, or she finds me). Every time I go outside, or ride a bus, or fly on an airplane, or whatever, I believe with a real hope that girl X who sits next to me has been divinely put there so that we can start a beautiful story. Just like how all romantic movies begin.

14. I do not know if my desire to be in love is selfish. [By which I mean, I do not know if it is purely selfish] 15. I am not accurate at guessing girls’ ages. Or guys’, for that matter….

16. Some people inspire me to think great thoughts–they don’t think the thoughts themselves, necessarily, but rather spur me towards an exciting personal intellectual discovery. Some people inspire me to dream great things in areas other than intellectual (say spiritual, social). Some people, on the other hand, frustrate me, and leave me feeling like I’ve gone nowhere, or backwards. Others don’t have either of these effects. Two observations: (1) After being around the inspiring kind of person, it is such an incredible experience that I unavoidably want that in a girlfriend/wife. (2) I can understand the need to be around the frustrating and ambivalent types, but right now I feel that those are the strong majority of people who surround me. This causes unhappiness.

17. I really want a dog.

18. I have an inflated view of my appearance. On the inside I feel dramatic, dark, mysterious, and enticing. I walk around feeling/imagining myself this way. When I see pictures of myself, I am always surprised at how disappointingly not like this image I am. It does not lower my self-esteem, however, because as soon as my eyes leave the photo, I believe I am the image again. Thus my self-esteem is very good, but based on a lie. That’s referring to my facial appearance, hair, mannerisms, etc… i.e., things I can’t easily change. Things I can change via exercise, like being ripped/fast/strong/sexy, I “fix”. But that’s not what I mean when I talk about “image”.

19. When I hear stories of great and heroic deeds or discoveries, or about great leaders or thinkers of the past, there is a deep resonance in my heart and soul. Maybe I have just read too much fantasy, but I believe I have a high and important destiny. Thus when I look around and see that this is in all likelihood an illusion (there are no more real adventures to be had), I am deeply saddened. The progress of humanity has destroyed the possibility for true individual greatness, and so I feel that I was born for another time and place; here and now, greatness is dead.

20. I identify with archetypes and archaic or mythical roles and persons–not real people living here and now.

21. It is much easier for me to flirt with girls in other cultures than in the States.

22. I have a high opinion of how responsible I would be with a lot of power, and the revolutionarily Christian way I would use it for good.

23. I can do everything, but the world is set up for people to do just one thing.

24. Going out for the sake of going out is expensive and often a disappointing waste of time. But it is all some people do.

25. Music is my great companion and comfort, the way that I believe God loves me. I believe another such doorway will open when I fall in love with a girl. For now, it is music.

26. I love logic, symbols, and mathematics.

27. It never occurred to me until recently that I might not become an academic.

28. Of all the cultures I have traveled to, I find that Americans have the worst attitudes and are the least helpful in service roles.

29. I form habits extremely quickly, but discard them much less quickly. (The first part relative to others). Hence I often force myself to switch things up, arbitrarily, in minor issues.

There ended the list from the trip. But in the last few days, I would have added one more (if only to round it out to 30):

30. For me, joy is inextricably linked to hope. If am hopeful, I have joy. If I am hopeless, I do not. For any number of reasons, I have not been hopeful for over 4 months, and that explains why joy has also been absent. This is kind of a problem–hope has to do with the future, but joy is supposed to be concerned with the present. But it explains why I always like to have some trip or something fun on the horizon to look forward to–it ensures that there will always be a minimum of joy in my life.

I was hoping that maybe the process of creating this admittedly random list might help me with my current life dilemma, which is that, given that there are no practical limitations on where I might live and what I might do next year, where should I go, and what should I do? We could make it a binary dilemma: should I stay here and do what I’m doing now, or not? As should now be apparent if you read the list, there does seem to be something in me that wants to live in another country, for example, or devote myself to learning a new language. The problem is that such a choice would come with all kinds of sacrifices…and I don’t know how to navigate them.

In the end I don’t know if the list helped. As I should have expected would be the case, I just feel more confused. Any ideas? Well, I hope the foregoing has been illuminating as regards my personality; I am certainly happy with it as the fruit of my solitude during the trip.

Columns from the temple of Olympus Zeus

4-9, 11:30 AM, Somewhere over the Atlantic

Wow, has it really been 5 days [since I last wrote]? Shamefully, I did not write at all during the visit to Prague. Now, I’m sitting on the plane from LHR to JFK, so I have time to wrap up this trip journal. (That is, if the worst flight attendant in the world will stop being a jerk about my bags on the floor). [She had given me this really pathetic, patronizing lecture about exit row protocol, using a voice that I would only use with a 2-year-old, wearing a smile that was oozing smug sarcasm. Ugh.]

Well, the morning after I last wrote, my sister and I had some amazing breakfast crepes in Fira–the best I’ve ever had. After that, I did end up finding a greek Orthodox bookstore, where the proprietors did not speak very much English, but I hung out with them for a while, and eventually picked up a wonderful New Testament, with one page of each pair being the ancient Greek, and the other being modern (though I learned they still use the polytonic accents in the modern translation, out of reverence for the text). With that, our time in Santorini was more or less over, and we dutifully endured the long ferry ride back to Peiraias. It was quite a bit more crowded than before, and of course the one screaming child in our cabin was seated right next to me. I don’t understand obnoxious screaming kids. Don’t they get bored or tired after a while? Guess not. I hope to God mine aren’t like that! We got to port just a few minutes after the metro stopped running, so we had to hire a cab for the ride back to our hotstel on Kydathineon street downtown–and of course the cabbie tried to up the price on us when we left. Ridiculous!

The next day was one of traveling. Rachel and I left our hostel mid-morning, taking leave of our traveling companion Victor; we made it to the airport OK, then took a Swiss Air flight to Zurich (before which, we were able to get into the British Airways club for an hour and have sandwiches, beer, and internet–thank you AA Platinum!). Zurich was a well-designed airport, but very hot. Our layover was not long, however, and soon we were on our rather small regional jet over to Prague!

When we arrived in Prague, the weather was cool and very refreshing–I was glad to be able to break out my jacket, finally. We took a crowded bus (it was 6 PM) to the crowded metro [to Namesti Miru], then another crowded above-ground tram to our hostel, the Czech Inn. It was by far the cleanest and nicest hostel I’ve stayed in, and cheap too! It’s brand new, and done in a very elegant modern decor, all sans-serify. Moreover, the bar was excellent, with equally excellent Czech beer on tap, at about $2 a liter. My sister rushed off just as soon as we arrived to go to a dance with a friend of hers from Capernwray, Peter, who’s from Prague. While she was busy being the belle of the ball, I entertained myself with beer and some Czech snacks [consisting of clumps of cheese, oil, onions, and rye bread; it looked and sounded disgusting, but went perfectly with the beer]. After a while, Rachel’s traveling buddy from Capernwray, Vince [who’d been traveling with Rachel in the UK earlier], showed up. He was to join her and my mom and brother (due to arrive the next day) for the next few weeks. I went to bed exhausted and pleasantly full.

The next day (Friday), Rachel, Vince, and I were met early by Petr and his friend, also Petr. The two of them acted as tour guides for us pretty much the entire day, taking us to some of the main spots in Prague, but more often to out-of-the-way places where there weren’t as many tourists. It was wonderful to have people who were knowledgeable about the city, and who could translate for us! [This was particularly important at lunch, when we wouldn’t have been able to tell the (important) difference between, say, pork and tripe] We visited the national park otuside the city, walked through the center, then went to Vysehrad where we had lunch at a very local pub-type place and ate some traditional Czech food.

In the afternoon, I learned that some of Petr’s other friends were going rock climbing, so I asked if I could go with them. Around 4;30, I met up with them at Dejvicka station and we were off to the gym (though they didn’t really speak English, except for one guy, and I never really figured out their names). The gym was pretty far out of town, and it was insane–all top-rope, and all lead–so even the first-timers were being taught how to lead-climb at the same time as they were learning how to tie in! Crazy. I climbed OK–I was dehydrated from too much beer at lunch and no water subsequently, but had a good time nonetheless. [In fact, after a couple hours of climbing, I experienced some strange temporary blindness, until I drank 1.5 liters of water in about 5 minutes] Anyways, I thought we were going to be there about 3 hours, then meet back up with Petr and Rachel and Vince (and hopefully my mom and brother, who were scheduled to arrive then) for tea and dinner. Instead, we were at the climbing gym for about 6 hours–until it closed at 10:30. Ahh culture differences! Well, it was great to climb, and fun to do something, some activity, with all-local people, where we didn’t even really need to speak the same language–climbing was universal! It was fun to have that connection.

Anyway, by the time I finally made it back to the hostel, David and my mom had already arrived and gone out to diner with everyone (they wisely brought back leftovers for me!) and it was great to see them, since it’d been a really long time. We were all exhausted, so I had one more beer for the day, and we all went to bed.

Saturday was our “be a tourist in Prague” day. We went to all the major sites, took pictures, browsed shops, etc… I was surprised at how touristy Prague was for what was, in my opinion, not a whole lot of really remarkable things. Or maybe I just didn’t care as much about statues as those people. Anyway, we had a great and long day, walking, cafeing, talking, etc. That night (last night), since I was leaving this morning, just us Lipps went out to dinner at a really excellent cellar pub, again with excellent and cheap beer. We talked about all sorts of stuff and it felt good to reconnect as a family–we haven’t really all seen each other in a long time.

Back at the hostel, we said our goodbyes and packed up. I was to leave in about 4 hours, and the rest were to be off mid-morning, starting the long train journey around Europe. We each had a shot of Absinthe to commemorate the adventure, and that was it! I woke up on time, made it through the extremely-crowded 5:30 AM bus trip to the airport, and made my flight to LHR. There was some security trouble or emergency there, so I almost missed my connection to JFK, but here I am on the flight!

It really was an incredible trip, and one I will remember forever. I was glad to see new places, to hang out with my sister, to start learning Greek, and to have lots of good transcendental plane/boat rides. Hopefully the fruit of these times will be evident soon–already I’m glad to have been working on my “Things that are true” list, since I believe there are a number of valuable insights there, pertaining to the issues I mentioned in the first entry of this journal. So there we have it! Thanks to God for a safe and awesome trip. Amen.

There we have it, indeed. Not a super-exciting trip journal, but I hope it was at least moderately enjoyable. I think I gained the most benefit from just setting aside time periodically to write, and with pen and paper–no computer glare or anything else to do. As I mentioned, though, most of the more intense and focused writing centered around a certain list, which I very simply titled “Things that are true”. I’ll reproduce that here soon, as the preface to a question I want your help in answering, but first I wanted to get pictures up for you all to look at, which will provide a break from all this text. So stay tuned, pictures coming up!

4-4, 11:30 PM, Fira, Santorini

Picking up where we left off…after the sunset, we had an hour’s wait in a cold drizzle for the bus back to Fira. When we got the hotel, we bid goodnight to the ladies (and hello to Victor, since he’d been elsewhere all day), and also goodbye, since the girls were scheduled out on a boat the next day. Then I proceeded to have what has been the best sleep of the trip, so far, by far: about 12 hours, with none of that waking-up-at-4am-wide-awake nonsense that sometimes happens.

That brings us to today. Today was somewhat less exciting, but very relaxing. Rachel and I spent most of it wandering around Fira, looking at random shops, drinking coffee, eating crepes, buying books, and so on. I had a lot of time to read and write, and also to play with the numerous dogs which roam freely about Greek streets. For the most part, they are clean, well-behaved, and healthy-looking animals–our tour guide in Athens said the government actually takes care of them! Dogs are great. Anyway, we had a late dinner with Victor, then a few drinks with him and a Canadian couple at an Irish bar here in Fira. I didn’t like it–the bar felt fake, with American waitresses and music. I suppose if I’d been gone for longer, I’d have liked it, but it felt wrong in this place, like it was spoilng something. It was there that someone told me that Florida won the NCAA basketball championship vs UCLA–which, if true, means I had a really awesome basketball bracket. Well, time for bed–tomorrow I hope to find a modern Greek Bible, then we’re on the afternoon ferry back to Athens, where we’ll spend the night. We had to Prague the day after (Thursday)!

4-4, 6:05 PM, Fira, Santorini

The last few days have been incredible. The long ferry ride to Santorini was peaceful, and productive. I thought, wandered the boat, stared at the myriad passing islands, read Greek, and watched Howl’s Moving Castle. Like all Hayao Miyazaki’s films, it was excellent. Like the others, there was a story, but it refused to let you see any character as totally good or bad, or totally on one side or another.

When we got to Santorini, Victor, Deana, and Lisa (new friends from the Athens hostel and tour, respectively) joined us in the ride from the new port up the windy hill road to our hotel at Φίρα (Fira). The accomodations are good–2 beds, couch, bathroom, kitchenette, patio for 20 euros a night per person (Loizos apartments). That first night 4 of us booked an island-hopping boat tour for the next day, then wandered around Fira to find a place to eat. We were persuaded to sit down at a cafe/bar overlooking the sunset-ready sea, where the management ordered some cheap and good gyros from another place, and furnished us with a steady supply of ouzo and beer. We had a downright beautiful show of a sunset, and stayed for hours talking, drinking, laughing, and hanging out with our Albanian waiter, Roland. We got back home after 11, buzzed and ready to fall asleep.

The next morning (Monday, the 3rd), Rachel and I were awake early to buy food supplies at the supermarket with which to avoid paying lots for lunch and breakfast. We readied for the day, which promised to be warm, donning swimsuits and making sandwiches. We took the 600 long steps down to the old port, where we arrived in plenty of time for our 10:30 tour boat departure. The boat took us and the roughly 40 other tourists first to the volcanic island in the middle of what used to be the Santorini atoll [or caldera]. We disembarked and hiked around for an hour and a half, following our tour guide as she pointed out random craters and shared local myths. There was a continuous stream of mumbling from everyone about how difficult the hike was, about which I had many an internal smug smile, since I wasn’t breaking a sweat. Rachel was doing equally awesome, too.

Next came one of the more memorable parts of the trip so far. Our boat took us around the volcano (which, incidentally, was the site of the most violent volcanic eruption in recorded history–weighing in at 20 times the power of Hiroshima, the shock wave was heard 3 times by all the earth’s inhabitants, as the force of the eruption rippled through the air, around the earth again and again) to a smaller island, where there were reportedly some hot springs. The boat had to stay a ways out from the island because of the rocks, so all those interested in visiting the hot springs were asked to dive into the ocean and swim to shore, where the spring was supposedly just offshore, amidst a patch of brown, sediment-filled water. Everyone who went was required to be a strong swimmer, because it was probably 125-150 meters from where we dropped anchor to the spring. It being by that time a very hot day, I was glad to be the first to dive off the side of the boat and let my muscles pull my smoothly to the springs. I have no real swimming training, though, and so by the time I reached the brown patch, my form was much less than smooth, and I was exhausted. Moreover, there was not a noticeable difference between the ocean’s temperature and these “hot” springs, with the result that after I stopped moving, I was cold. [Incidentally, between the springs at last year’s dude’s camping trip at Big Sur, and now these Greek ones, I have officially sworn off any “hot” springs boasting a temperature of less than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s just not worth it.] I was shivering uncontrollably and having a very unpleasant time, so I made my way back to the boat, which was harder due to the current at that location. Nevertheless, moving was much better than sitting still, and when I climbed the boat ladder, my muscles full of lactic acid, I felt refreshed and alive. But even in the hot sun, with my black jacket on, my teeth were chattering for almost the next hour.

The third stop on our tour was the island of Θιράσσια (Thirassia), a gorgeous, rocky-coastlined island with only 300 inhabitants. There we had lunch and I took some time by myself to run up the cliff path and explore the town up there. when I reached the top and wandered alone through the empty streets and through flower-strewn fields, I felt an astounding sense of peace. It seemed that in that place, life and time moved together at the correct speed. I wanted to stay for hours, but our boat was scheduled to leave, so I ran back down the stone path to the dock and we were off.

The fourth and last stop of the day was at the port of Ωια (Ia), and there the 4 of us (me, Rachel, Deana, Lisa) decided to leave the tour and walk up the cliff path to the town, which is one of the most picturesque in all the Greek isles. It was then only mid-afternoon, and we wanted to see the sunset, so we killed time for a while by wandering, sitting in the shade, reading, and napping. Everywhere I looked, beauty attended my glance, and I wore out my camera with photos of houses, churches, the sea, other islands, etc… As sunset neared, we got gyros at a stand and walked to an old tower on a point, from which was supposed to be the best view. Unfortunately, a swift-moving cold front decided to bring many clouds, which blocked the sun and spoiled (we thought) our hope for a beautiful scene. Sadly, we made our way to the bust stop, where we arrived just in time to see the sun dip in between two cloud layers, and light the entire sky with absolutely unreal shades of pink and purple. Had there not been power lines and ugly houses in the way from that spot, it might have been the most beautiful (albeit short) sunset I’ve seen. Oh well–that’s the result of lack of faith!

[Then it was time to leave for dinner…to be continued…]

4-2, 8:11 AM, The Aegean

I slept fitfully last night…it didn’t feel like I slept at all, but 5:30 AM eventually did come. Rachel and I were out of the hostel at 6, meeting up with our hostel-mate Victor, who was traveling to Santorini on the same boat as us. We walked the deserted Athens streets and caught the Metro to Peiraias in time to buy a sandwich and board our ferry–a large, cruise-style ferry with first class, cabins, etc… I think it counts as the biggest ship I have ever sailed on. The seats are large and comfortable! When we set sail, I went to the deck and took pictures of the sunrise as we were leaving port. Again, there was a sense of excitement, as well as a sense of deep sadness. Here at this port and in this ocean were spawned the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Great men and adventurers saw the same hills as they worked their sails in the harbor. Then, leaving was actually meaningful–the weather was fickle, and there was never a sure return. Traveling took adventure and commitment. Now, all it takes is 30 euros. The port was bustling this morning, as it would have been 2,500 years ago, but today it was filled with the noise and smell of cars, and the waiting ships spouted black smoke in the air. What sadness! Are there any adventures left? It doesn’t seem so. The ocean is a sea of calm, barely a ripple as we glide through. But I wish, just a little, that a storm would come and make things more interesting.

4-1, 7:30 PM, Athens

So we arrived OK. After a long, cramped ride from Chicago to London, I settled in at British Airways’ executive lounge, where Rachel arrived shortly after I did. It was good to see her, and she looked all pro with her backpack and whatnot. We had a long layover, and boarded our plane to Athens around 9:45 PM. We’d tried to talk about how things were going with us [our relationship] in Heathrow, but I was very tired and kind of annoyed so it didn’t really go anywhere. It didn’t help that I couldn’t get my mind off of “my troubles”–made worse in public places, where there are hundreds of girls for me to be constantly evaluating–not sexually or anything, just… [hmm, this one is kind of hard to explain sensibly…]. So, the peace of airplane solitude was definitely broken.

On the seat in front of us on the flight, there was a young Greek woman, and I realized again how attracted I am to foreign girls. Something about speaking other languages just makes them infinitely more beautiful…I wonder if that’s something that would wear off, if it’s something I should really care about or look for…I don’t know. Is it true mystery or just surface mystery? Probably depends [just like with women in my own culture] on the girl.

Anyway, our flight got in on time, and Rach and I found the bus to Syntagma square alright–10 minutes later, and we were waking up the receptionist at our hostel! The room was small but we were tired, and it was after 4 AM. The next day we slept until about 2 PM, then braved the ancient Athens streets for the first time. I was pretty amazed by how close our place was to the center of everything–the Acropolis, the temples, etc… Rach and I found a grocery store and got a loaf of bread and some chicken salad for lunch. Not quite gyros, but cheap. Then we proceeded to get ourselves lost until dinner, taking in the maze of old streets, the views of the agora [the ancient agora] and the acropolis which promised an enjoyable morrow. [Even though] tired, we decided to walk across town to the Lykebatos hill, on which was a church and some awesome views of just-past-sunset Athens. Food there being too expensive, we walked all the way back to our hostel and ate at an estiatorio [restaurant] next door around 9 PM–the meal, which was excellent, lasted till 11 or so!

This morning, being Saturday, the 1st, we woke up relatively early to go on our walking tour. It was as you’d expect such tours would be–a lot of walking interspersed with some ancient monuments. Being some of the most important ancient monuments in the world, it was an incredible experience. In the space of 15 minutes I’d stood where Socrates had taught, and sat where Paul had preached in the Areopagus. So much history I was overwhelmed by it–but the hundreds of other tourists there didn’t seem to be–talking, laughing, smoking, littering…on the Areopagus, the stone smelled of cheap beer from a recently-broken bottle. It made me angry at humanity, both specifically for littering there, and more generally for creeping with its ugly modernity over and into places which should have been kept holy as monuments to the more important kinds of progress–philosophical and religious, for example.

In my opinion, to be in ancient Athens and to be anything but in awe is to be disrespectful of our own nature–all that God has given us to be. So in that sense I’m actually quite glad I don’t live here–these monuments can thus stay mysterious and far-away, otherworldly. The chattering tourist mob still kind of ruined it for me, but at least my imagination could still conjure up the sights and smells of a bygone era, when people were probably exactly how they were today, in terms of forgetting how to be in awe. Even then, better to have been the pilgrim from a distant village than a desensitized resident of the Acropolis. Well, I’m rambling–I should get Rachel and find a place to eat dinner. Tonight we pack, for tomorrow we leave very early for the boat to Santorini, where we’ll spend the next 3 days!

3-29, 10:40 AM, SFO

Well, I don’t normally keep a journal of any kind apart from a weblog, but I feel that this trip may be an important one, so here I go. I’ve spent the last couple days preparing, and I feel that I haven’t forgotten anything important. my two major stresses are only that (a) something at Teleios might crash while I’m gone, and (b) I will feel really shy in situations where I can’t communicate in Greek or Czech. Grant me grace in both those things!

I have some high hopes for the trip:

• I hope to get to know Rachel better and deepen our relationship significantly.
• I hope to take advantage of solitude on planes and being in new environments to take stock of life.
• I hope to understand and come to grips with my desire to live overseas, to see what is underneath and evaluate why it’s important.
• I hope to have many good conversations with God, in a way that only being outside my normal mode of existence can bring.
• I hope to become pretty good at basic Greek.

Grant me success in all these things!

OK, enough for now: time to learn more Greek. By the way, the official soundtrack for the trip is the album Peregrine, by The Appleseed Cast. It is dark and brooding, with occasional flashes of hope amidst chaos. Very representative of my life right now, actually.

Rachel and I aren’t too sure how we’re going to spend our days in Greece–we’ve heard that Athens is cool but not sustainable, so we’re going to try and visit some of the Isles or maybe some coast towns on the Peloponnesian.

After Athens, we have a couple days planned in Prague, another place I haven’t been. The word on the street is that Prague is almost not cool any more, now that all backpacking college students know it’s a good place to visit…but hopefully we’ll survive the tourism. Rachel has a friend from Capernwray who lives in Prague, and he has promised to show me where to find the best beer. Excellent!

I’m obviously looking forward to every part of this adventure, but given that a lot of it will involve some cultural or linguistic stresses or awkwardnesses (and given that I’m pretty sensitive to those situations), I’m honestly looking forward, at this very moment, to the plane flights. I think I’ve mentioned before how plane travel is a very “healing” sort of experience for me. It promotes the kind of solitude that helps me grow, helps me come to grips with myself, what I’m doing at the moment, what I’m doing in life, and so on. Since I’ve decided not to bring my computer along (can’t risk loss or damage), I’m also excited to have some companions who couldn’t possibly ask me to do work. I have 5 or 6 books which I hope to finish off, and I also put Howl’s Moving Castle on my iPod to watch, which I have been looking forward to seeing for a very long time.

Of course, I’m also very excited to have some extended time with my sister, whom I don’t get to see very often, and who I’m sure has changed a lot after this past year of school abroad.

I’m hoping that this trip will help provide clarity in my heart about what sorts of things I love, and maybe provide some clues about what I should be thinking about doing as I look ahead to next year and beyond. I have so many desires and dreams–they need some kind of ordering scheme or I’ll never be able to make any decisions that I feel good about. Oh well, I’m rambling…and I’ve got a lot of packing and e-mail writing to do. If I find a way to get on the inter nets where I’m going, I’ll try and check in here. Αδίοσας! (or however it might be spelled)

My main contribution was a song I had written the day before the “retreat”, but I will save its lyrics for the time when I have a recording to go with it. I also wrote a short poem while on the top of Mt Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, where we had all gone hiking on Saturday. From Mt Tamalpais there is a glorious view of the SF bay, and this apparent division of the world into air and water, juxtaposed all about by land, inspired the poem, which I am calling “Tesseract’s End”:

Rugged shoulders to spines on back
A strange animal I traverse
Its own life an undefined breath
Overlooked substratum of heaven on earth

I walk sometimes up, sometimes in
Phase shift accomodating forms that
Disregard boundaries of texture--
Oh that my soul felt the same!

To swim or run or fly between
The lines that slice the diff'ring spheres
A hardened wire of surface tension
That feels, from altitude, as rock
(on it I fall, and am crushed)

To be of wing or fin was given
To marvels of motion and muscle
But lightspeed travel twixt high and low
Alone can I exhibit
--if only I could breathe at Tesseract's end

Now, I want to preface this whole entry with a bit of history, since to many of you it may come as a shock that for most of my life I have considered myself and been considered by others a “gamer”. If you want to skip the history and get to the point, scroll down to “The Reason for this Entry” below.

A Personal Gaming History

My dad was into computers and hardware since I was a baby, so we always had a computer in the family. I think the first one was an Apple, but when we moved back to the States in 1988 from Papua New Guinea, our home computer became a PC with MS-DOS. Being a technically-minded youngster, my dad and I would spend hours together playing with hardware, installing hard drives and so forth–and he taught me how to use DOS commands like “cd”, “dir”, “md”, and so on; he even taught me how to create .bat scripts! Later on I furthered my own education and learned how to write .com programs in assembly using “copy con”. Anyway, seeing that I took well to these sorts of things, my parents allowed me to play games on the computer, even though we had a no-Nintendo policy. Thus began a long love affair with PC gaming (and not, of course, console gaming).

Games were like books to me–little consumable pieces of fun that would transport me to different worlds, or allow me to be creative and imaginative, or give me a chance to learn more about computers (back in those days, things usually didn’t just “work”–before running many games, you had to edit system startup files to allocate the correct amounts of memory to different parts of the system, or set IRQ settings for multimedia equipment because different games used different ports). I would get games usually via one of four ways. Occasionally my dad would bring home a game he’d borrowed from a friend (like Gunship 2000), or found overseas for cheap (like Prince of Persia). More often I would be messing around on one of the many Dallas-based BBSes, looking through the downloads section for shareware games to get and try out (incidentally, BBS culture and reminiscences are worth their own entry, but I probably won’t ever have the time to write such things out). Otherwise, I’d borrow and install games from my friends Nathan or Sean or Ben. This was before the days of cd-roms and copy protection, of course. Very occasionally, I’d spend what little money I had on a game.

Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to make some lists for posterity’s sake, and also to underscore how much of a gamer I was in earlier years–a world which is probably strange to most of you who spent your time at soccer practice or doing homework or whatever. If anyone wants to analyze the psychological implications of all of this, please do so in the comments. So here are lists of my favorite games:

The Elementary School era (1988 - 1991) During elementary school, we had a computer class every day which was supposed to teach us math or something, and if we finished our lessons early, we could go up to Mrs Mehta and ask for the 7.5" floppy of the game of our choice, which we could put into the Apple IIs and boot. I’d always play one of four games: Conan: Hall of Volta, Moon Patrol, Number Munchers, or of course, the mighty Oregon Trail.

The MS-DOS era (1988 - about 1996) The MS-DOS era overlaps quite a bit with both the Windows 3.1 and the Windows 95 era, since both of these operating systems were more or less pieces of software running on top of DOS, and so games created then were typically written for DOS. That’s why the era extends until 1996, even though I’d been using a graphical OS for quite some time. There are a lot of important games to list here, so I’ll do so by genre, and roughly chronologically within that.

Educational games - the first games I played were educational games my parents had bought for the edification of myself and my siblings. For the most part, they didn’t teach me anything, but they were fun nonetheless and so I spent lots of time with them. For example: Reader Rabbit, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, Math Rescue, and my favorite, Word Rescue.

Board games / Strategy games - I wasn’t as big a fan of this genre, but a few games did suck up my childhood time: Hexxagon, Battle Chess, The Incredible Machine, and the tank strategy Scorched Earth.

Side-scrollers (top-down scrollers, too) - This was possibly the most popular style of game for this era, since it allowed for exciting action while avoiding the challenges of 3D. All were more or less awesome: Pharaoh’s Tomb, Secret Agent, Dark Ages, Jazz Jackrabbit, Commander Keen 4, Duke Nukem (the infamous), and Raptor: Call of the Shadows. By far the best of the lot was Prince of Persia. Unfortunately, my dad bought the game in Singapore and it came back without a manual. Many of this era’s games used words in the manual as keys to enter the game, to ensure that you had purchased it legally. Thus we could only play the game after successfully guessing the requested keyword (which happened about 1 in 50 times–until we began writing them down).

Sims (space sims, plane sims, jet fighter sims, racing sims, worldbuilding sims) - We had flight sims like F-15 Strike Eagle, MS Flight Simulator 5, Jetfighter II (probably my favorite–I distinctly remember flying at over Mach 1 underneath the Bay and Golden Gate bridges…and then turning south to fly for over an hour down to the LA coast–where there were only 1-color land/sea bitmaps), ATF, Gunship 2000 (the best helicopter sim ever), [Falcon 3.0](http://www.mobygames.com/game/lhx-attack-chopper>LHX: Attack Chopper, and <a href=). We also had space sims like Wing Commander, Wing Commander II, Descent (and Descent 2), Star Wars: X-Wing (the first time I ventured into the Star Wars gaming universe, which has provided endless entertainment since then), Star Wars: Tie Fighter (the best sim experience I’ve ever had), and Terminal Velocity. Notable racing sims included one of my all-time favorites, Stunts, which let you design your own racetrack with jumps, loops, corkscrews. Definitely a plus–and you could even record yourself driving on the tracks and replay them later. Also: SkyRoads. The lone sub sim I played was Silent Hunter. There were two cool mech sims I liked: Ultrabots and Mechwarrior 2. Finally, I already mentioned Sim City and Sim City 2000.

Role-playing games - unlike the MMORPGs of today, the MS-DOS era’s role-playing games were single-person adventures where you typically had to use your brain to figure out puzzles and guide a character through an adventure. My favorite experience in this genre was undoubtedly King’s Quest V, which my friend Nathan and I agonized over together for quite a long time. The most technically wowing game was Return to Zork, which was a first-person adventure utilizing the newly-released cd-rom drives to deliver actual video content as part of the game. Other memorable games included: The Secret of Monkey Island (Guybrush Threepwood is my hero!), King’s Quest VI, Space Quest IV, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, the extremely original, genre-bending It Came from the Desert!, and Solar Winds.

First-person shooters - A fledgling genre, but later to become my favorite, more or less. I played Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom (but only at my friend Michael’s house, since my parents would have banned it).

Other - I used to play one fighting game with my brother: One Must Fall: 2097. Also there was the excellent Nibbles, run as “qbasic nibbles.bas” – I had tons of fun looking at the source code for that one when I was beginning to write my own BASIC programs. Also, this doesn’t count as a DOS game, because it was for the early Macs, but I was absolutely addicted to Bolo in junior high, primarily because it was multiplayer! Also, another fun sim-like game was Coaster, which let you have very fine-control design over coasters, and then ride them, monitoring g-forces, rider experience, etc…

The high school era (1997-2000) Sometime before high school, I discovered Star Wars: Dark Forces - the Star Wars FPS that would spawn the series I’ve completed the most games from. I probably spent more time playing Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight during freshman year of high school than any other game. In multiplayer (by then the internet had become useful for playing games), I was literally unstoppable if I had the rocket launcher. The subsequent games, Jedi Knight II: Outcast, and Jedi Knight III: Jedi Academy were equally fun, with somewhat more of an arcade feel.

But back to high school: Quake and Quake II initiated the era, but soon I discovered a new genre that would prove to be the one that I thought would be my favorite (but in fact wasn’t): the real-time strategy. First there was Command and Conquer, and its flow of unit creation / control / combat was intriguing. I didn’t get very far in the game, though, before I became bored. Later that year, I traded C&C with my friend for Warcraft II, which turned out to be a much more important game in my gaming history. It was the first time I’d heard of Blizzard, but I loved the way they’d set up the game much more than C&C, because it was fantasy-based as opposed to modern. What really got me, however, was the story–Warcraft II came with a manual which had a short book included, telling the story of the game world. The depth of that story, and the clever way it was integrated into the game itself, hooked me a lot more than the actual mechanics of the game, which were good, but which wouldn’t have hooked me otherwise. I had such a fun experience with WC2 that I went back and bought the original Warcraft as well, which was laughably worse, but still fun. Anyway, Warcraft II was impactful in that it caused me to spend hours and hours on the forums for Blizzard’s upcoming RTS Starcraft, discussing all aspects of the game for almost a year before it was released. As it happened, I was way more into the game before it came out, and I didn’t finish any of the campaigns.

While I was waiting for Starcraft, I enjoyed several other strategy games: Riven, Myth: The Fallen Lords (which had the most awesome 3D RTS engine to date–it actually let you move the camera around!), Age of Empires, and a family favorite, Lords of the Realm II.

During and after the move to Florida in 1999, I played Battlezone, The Wheel of Time (an excellent, very much under-appreciated game based on the Robert Jordan book series), Total Annihilation, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (an unfairly-lampooned RTS with a very original story line), Age of Empires II (a vast improvement over the original), Thief: The Dark Project (an extremely original first-person sneaker), and most importantly, I finally got around to playing through Half-Life, which was without doubt the best game of its time. The summer before Stanford I also attempted to tackle the new breed of adventure/role-playing games by taking on Ultima IX: Ascension, but it proved to be too much of a time sink (a lesson I apparently didn’t learn, given that I later played both Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and World of Warcraft (which readers will remember).

College to Current (2000 - 2006) College was mostly a sad time for my gaming habits, as other parts of my life were fleshed out and took precedence, including but not limited to the newfound athleticism I was cultivating partly to fit in to the more-active Stanford crowd, and partly because it just felt right and healthy. Of course, freshman year would give the lie to that statement, as I would game with my roommate Eric or my whole floor to all hours of the night, playing Counter-Strike. But games were definitely on the downswing as a whole…while I continued to buy games I thought I would like with my bits of disposable income, I rarely had time to finish them. One notable exception (other than the Jedi Knight games), was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was the most scary first-person shooter I’d played to date. I would play it with the lights off for a while, but occasionally I’d have to jump out of my chair and run down the hall to get rid of the goosebumps. Needless to say, it was excellent. One summer, I was accepted as a beta tester for the now sadly defunct Savage, a boldly-conceptualized hybrid of FPS and RTS. It was fun to see a game change while I was playing it.

Since I was a Blizzard fan, I also picked up Warcraft III on the day it was released, and finished it over the next couple of years (though I’m still not done with The Frozen Throne. Since college, I’ve really only played two games: the extremely awesome Half-Life 2, which is probably the best FPS game ever, and the ubiquitous World of Warcraft. Oh wait, I did finish Halo for mac, as well.

Anyway, so much for my personal gaming history. I’m not sure what principles we can draw from this, but I will say that most of my best gaming experiences have been ones that have involved other people in some way–I can remember hours of pure, awesome fun playing games with my brother over the LAN, or with my friends. I also formed some friendships online through gaming that, while not particularly long-lasting, were not meaningless. (This would be harder to now, given that most people who play games on the internet are about 10 years of age, or have that mentality).

Essentially, being in communities formed around gaming has made that gaming more meaningful than it otherwise would have been. Which is not to say that these are good or helpful communities, but more the general observation that doing things with people makes you like the things themselves more. That’s why some people have positive connotations of consuming alcohol or tobacco, where others don’t.

The Reason for this Entry Now that it is clear exactly what kind of nerd I am, I wanted to share news of an exciting game that is in the works. It’s called Spore, and it’s being designed by Will Wright, the same guy who designed the SimCity and Sims games. As the Wikipedia article says, he generally designs “software toys” rather than goal-oriented games–essentially, things that you can play with and do what you will with for an indefinite period of time–there is no set beginning or end. Think about SimCity–you could spend your whole life building and running it if you wanted; there is no endpoint, only your own creativity and tolerance. You can watch a video of a talk by Wright at last year’s Game Developers Conference, where he says a lot of interesting things about game design. In the middle of the talk he gives a demo of this upcoming game Spore which is possibly the most amazing piece of interactive software I have seen. If you don’t want to wade through the talk, you can go straight to the gameplay video.

Basically, the game is a world sim of the most epic proportions. You start out controlling a microorganism, and through eating and modifying the organism through various generations of existence using the game’s editor, you propel your creature-line through various stages of evolution: bacteria, small macroorganism, fish-type thing, amphibious walking creature, etc…

The micro stage

At a certain point your creature becomes sentient and the game changes–you’re now controlling a society, which you grow in ways familiar to Civ players. Other asynchronously-user-designed societies exist on your world with which you interact in friendly or hostile manners depending on how you have been training your creatures. At this stage you use the same world editor to “buy” and/or create from scratch various buildings and technologies, which enable creation of vehicles, colonizations, and other possibilities.

The city (“civ”) stage

Eventually, assuming all the previous stages have been successful, you gain off-world transportation power and are able to travel to other planets in the solar system, using terraforming techniques to make them habitable.

View of your planet

With the resources gathered by all your civilizations, interstellar travel becomes possible, and using SETI-like mini-games, discovery of other sentient beings throughout the galaxy becomes only a matter of time. These sentient beings have been designed by other players–though they are copied from a central database and your actions with them do not affect that player’s world. Anyway, peaceful or warlike negotiations are possible here just in the same way as on your home planet, and thusly you can explore the galaxy. And finally, it is even possible to zoom out from the galaxy and fly around at the most macro-scale imaginable, swooshing past countless similar galaxies, each with their own star systems and habitable worlds, populated with procedurally-generated or other-user-generated content.

While the game itself looks like it will probably be the most fun game ever released, the way it has been conceptualized/designed is fascinating and inspiring to me. First, the game is basically an analogue to the Powers of 10 phenomenon which is so breathtaking–only you’re zooming out instead of in. Second, the game behavior actually changes at each step backwards. In other words, you don’t have one game with one set of game mechanics that you play until completion–no, the rules, methods, and goals of the game change depending on what level of detail you are at in your universal evolution. This promises to provide a completely different gameplay experience than most games, which are somewhat statically designed. Third, everything in the game is procedural or algorithmic, which completely fascinates me. Wright explains at the beginning of his talk how in the early 90s the exponential increase in data storage capacities (via the cd-rom) made game designers think almost exclusively in terms of massive content creation, because they now could, instead of thinking in terms of dynamically generating content based on smart and compact algorithms. This part of the game blows my mind–every creature, every building is customizable in thousands of ways, but the software knows how to treat everything so that it works exactly how it’s supposed to in the world.

In the gameplay video, Wright shows off some of the variety you can have in the creature editor, and he made a creature with three legs. We don’t really have any of these on Earth, so in my mind I didn’t even have a good idea of what a three-legged creature should walk and move like. But the game’s engine analyzed the skeleton of the tripod animal and decided that it would have to walk in a certain way, and it looks completely real. The amount of physics research that must have been done to produce such an engine is incredible.

Another inspiring design point Wright made was that, in their research into gameplay patterns, people are almost always happier when they are given tools with which to be creative regarding content. That content might not be as good as content designed by professionals, but given that it belongs to me, I am more invested in it and therefore feel that I am having a more meaningful entertainment experience. I resonate deeply with this mode of thinking, and feel that it might be the thing that saves electronic entertainment from being completely useless. Fundamentally, entertainment needs to be recreation (see weblog title!), by which I mean re-creation, or creating-after. Games that facilitate this creativity will be much more beneficial for people than hack-and-slashers or for most of the crap that Hollywood spews out (the same principle holds true for other forms of media, even if it’s less fundamentally interactive–good films are the ones that require you to creatively generate something in order to correctly experience or understand it–whether that creativity is in the intellectual or emotional sphere). So this is the tie-in to the personal gaming history, because I’m wondering if Spore might have some ability to re-deem and re-integrate gaming into a well-rounded and well-recreated life.

Moving on to another theme: as someone who essentially designs interfaces for a living (but who is beginning to realize this is neither always nor typically enjoyable), the way the interfaces are designed in Spore is dazzling. Everything is simple, clean, and organic. What is necessary is at hand, and what is not is hidden away. I’m not sure if this good design was easy given the organic nature of the game itself, but regardless, someone is doing something right, and I am excited to get my hands on a copy just to see how they solve all the UI problems that must exist in a game with as large a scope as this one. (Incidentally, I couldn’t find a release date anywhere…hopefully 2006 sometime!)

Lastly, given recent thoughts about evolution, in biological, sociological, cosmological, and theological terms, the bare premise of the game is philosophically interesting. I want to see how the story of evolution is told, what explanations are given, and so forth. I mean, what we have here is basically a model of “theistic” (rather, “guided”) evolution, where the player is actually making cognitive decisions for how to affect the physical or cultural aspects of a creature or society. Given that this is an interesting model in general, I really want to play around with it and see how deep the “procedurality” of the game goes, and how much of it is hard-coded AI.

If anyone has made it this far: what do you think? Did you watch either of the videos? Why am I so excited about this? Is it just my Five-wing expressing itself?

The idea was to imbue some more constrained object (a few paragraphs of prose, or a haiku, or a rant) with a more focused, albeit artistic, answer, with the hope that this presence would be actually a more meaningful way to share than just saying verbally whatever would have come to mind. Indeed, I was very surprised at the level of depth I felt we were able to achieve, seeing as we were working with a significant economy of words; in fact, when we came back together and read what we had written, we had enough time to go around twice, in order to further understand people.

Hopefully at least a few of us will post what we wrote on our weblogs here–I’m going to start with my work of the evening, entitled The Amnesiac Shipbuilder. It’s a story.

Land, that once felt safe and so sweet
Now a detestable spit of sand
What gave life and surety to feet
I'd banish if I thought it would heed a command

Water to drink is no good if it keeps
Life alive but alone, incomplete
Fruit follows suit, it belongs in the deeps
If health is all that there is in this heat

I have in the wreckage a thousand tomes
Whose wisdom's satisfied a thousand men
But my adventure lies not at home--
Useful a shipbuilding book would have been!

Resignation is my lover at night
With whom I wrestle sensuously
But her charms are not even close to delight
And in daylight, I spurn her contemptuously

Laziness would no doubt have been my bane
If I thought effort could affect
But helplessness never gave one gain
Unless him for rescue did God (or fate) select

Either one would be fine.

We left reasonably close to the 5am goal and made record time to the central valley, but after making our way up into the hills, things got interesting: a regular blizzard was in session, and the roads were soon quite treacherous after the snow was compacted by tires in the sub-freezing temperatures. At one point we were stopped on a slight incline behind traffic, and when it was time to go, the Civic refused to move forward–traction had disappeared. Luckily, the car behind us happened to be a police officer and so he held traffic while I mustered all my clutch ability and eased into first gear and then to the side of the road where we put chains on the tires for the rest of the climb.

It soon became apparent, as the snow kept piling up, that we were going to have serious problems, and it was indeed so: the pass to Kirkwood was closed for avalanche control, and so we were out of luck. Determined to get on some mountain, we went all the way back down and took another road, intending to find Bear Valley, a lesser resort. The pass was not quite as high on that road, so there was a good chance it wouldn’t be closed, and it wasn’t!

Of course, though open, the road was still dangerous and the going was slow. Even with chains, the car would slide and fishtail with anything but minor changes in velocity or minor turns of the wheel, making it exhausting to drive many miles at such a slow pace. Eventually, though, we made it through the whiteout (parts of which were so white that it was impossible to make out where the road was and where the snowbanks to the sides of it were) and to Bear Valley, where we were able to get 2 hours of snowboarding in before the slopes closed.

I was exhausted from 7+ hours of driving, and I hadn’t been on a board since 2004, so I had quite a few amazing spills–none of which were very dangerous, given the multiple feet of fresh powder there to break my fall! So we had a crazy fun time careening down the mountain and trying to make the most of our short time. Here you can see the snow that accumulated on my car after just that short time (and this was just the residual, post-storm effect):

Another 5 hours of driving (not including the horrendous chain installation/removal events which definitely tried our collective patience), and we were back–a very long, very intense, not-too-snowboarding-filled day! But you have to love these little adventures.

Basically, Standpoint is an online community organized around formulations of, and reasons given for, beliefs. The basic unit of Standpoint is a “claim”, or a proposition, towards which you can take a few attitudes, including belief, consideration, or “disbelief” (which is more complicated). You can create your own claims, believe ones others created, disagree with people, and in general try to have discussions using very short, disjointed, and atomic sentences. At least that’s the idea–in practice, people aren’t very good at keeping things short, atomic, or well-formed, so it gets interesting (and at times frustrating to the logician-philosopher inside me).

Anyway, I thought that making it to 1000 beliefs was a fun landmark in the short existence of Standpoint–if you want to check my profile out, go to jlipps.standpoint.com. Please do sign up, play around, add your beliefs and reasons, ask to be my friend, etc! Some new features should also be rolling out soon that will greatly enhance the Standpoint experience.

• Read Reality by McGrath
• Work on a song / play guitar
• Play Half-Life 2 on my newly reconstructed PC
• Go next door and watch the Olympics
• Watch a movie
• Sleep early
• Clean up / organize my bedroom
• Work on my constructed language Enaselvai
• Keep working on my modern Greek lessons (in preparation for trip to Athens)
• Write overdue e-mails
• Taxes
• Put my new budget into Quicken
• Drink alcohol
• Get my old reconstruction of English letters out and re-learn it so I can write in “code” again
• Write a weblog entry on the relationship between physical and spiritual training
• Test the current e4 client
• Get my piano (keyboard) out and play beautiful droning melodies until I am lulled to sleep
• Listen to the new Paste sampler

…and I could keep going. You can see I have literally dozens of options. Unfortunately, I’ve sat here in front of my computer for over 30 minutes just thinking about what to do–and so drain the sands from the hourglass of opportunity. All of these possibilities range from work-related to completely fun/useless, from productive to escapist, but I’m finding it impossible to settle on one thing. Maybe it’s the pain of not being able to do others that keeps me from doing one? I’m not sure. Anyway, I thought that while I was sitting here experiencing that pain I might as well chronicle it, so that the absurdity will be made known to the world.

Well, it looks like salvation has come in the form of a phone call–turns out ski jumping is on the Olympics now, and I’ve been saying all week how I want to watch it, so my choice has been made. But we can make this entry fun yet–out of the list of options I listed, which one would you have picked? Don’t be shy now!

Shapes in clear water when moving
are blurred and the fuzz provides fear
For unknown says death's always seeking
and will in the end become near

So sun and life soon are forgotten
if only for a space of seconds
Heart and mind illusion-smitten
propel the soul back to the sands

From the shore heartbeats are slower
Embarrassment looks like the heat of the day
The water is clear, it seems fear need not tower
O'er a reckless rejoining the fray

But horizon reveals, dark symbols appear
Omens or fins? both blacker than sky
Recklessness checked, the imagined is here
It seems a more rational soul would have died

The view from the hot tub (…of another hotel)

One autumn, there was a terrific earthquake that shook the roots of the mountains of the king. The foundations of his castle were strong, and sunk deep into the earth, but that only put them closer to the impossible forces that were rising from deep underground. The inhabitants of the castle stayed in their homes, frightened, until very gradually the stones of the castle’s wall, and the high graceful arches that spanned tower to tower, began to crack and fall. Then, chaos and panic drove everyone out of the town with whatever they could carry, and higher into the mountains where nothing could fall on them.

Though his people had fled, the king stayed in the great hall of the keep, sitting in shock on his throne. He could not bear to think about the destruction that was happening around him, to his beautiful castle. In his mind, he resolved himself to stay where he was until some falling stone crushed him and ended the horror that was brought upon him as his most treasured object was dying. Fortunately, the king had a wise steward who had not only helped to organize the disorderly flight of the people, thereby saving many lives, but who knew the king would need persuading to leave. Patiently but insistently, the steward convinced the king that he owed more to his subjects than to the town he had constructed for them, and so the king allowed himself to be led out of the great hall, out of the keep, and out of the high walls.

Once the earthquakes had subsided, unfavorable terrain, lack of food, and roving bands of wolves drove the king and his people away from the ruins of the castle. It was weeks until the king returned to survey the damage. In truth, very little remained. A few towers stood, looking cracked and forlorn, lonely when once they had companions. The inner parts of the castle were for the most part one large heap of rubble, though a ghostly skeleton of the great hall remained. The king felt that this was worse than if everything had been flat on the ground, for the hint of structure mocked him, reminded him of the glory that once existed in and around it.

The king sank to his knees on the ground and silently mourned the loss of his life’s work. Then those who were with him saw a change occur–the king clenched his fists and shook with what appeared to be anger. Immediately the king strode to the nearest pile of debris and pulled out some of the remains of a stone wall, throwing them wildly away from the old perimeter of the castle. His companions asked what he was doing, and his only reply was to order that every man, woman, and child be engaged thenceforth in the dismantling of all that remained of the castle, the pieces of which were to be scattered around the whole country, so that nothing whatsoever of the castle remained to mark the spot where it had once stood proudly.

With great sadness, the former inhabitants of the castle turned to do the king’s bidding, and to erase the memory of a place where they had spent so many happy years. But the king’s steward, seeing that the king was acting out of anger, sought to dissuade him from his plan. He reminded the king that it was now nearing winter, that they had no means to recover their storehouses of food, which had been spoiled, that they were ill-equipped for the cold, and that in order to survive they would need to abandon the mountain’s heights and take refuge with their country’s lowland neighbors, who had had good harvests. Once again it was only his obligation to the people he ruled that convinced the king, and so even though he hated now the very sight of the poor castle that had once been his greatest accomplishment, he relented and led his people down the mountain, where they passed the winter in the generous hospitality of those who lived there.

When spring came, the folk of the high mountain castle were loath to leave the friendly lands where they had wintered. Not only were they eager to help with the crops and livestock of their benefactors in order to show their significant gratitude, but they had become friends with their neighbors and had grown to love the milder environment, where meadows and ponds were in somewhat more plenty. Indeed, some of the newcomers had even intermarried with their hosts, and so had no trouble at all forgetting the magnificent castle when an equally magnificent and peaceful life looked open to them where they were. Since such was the heart of his people, and given the insistence of his friend (the king of lowland people) that he remain, the king and his subjects spent several years living and working as guests, though as the time went on, they felt less like guests and more integrated into the life and culture of their new country.

The mountain king, for the most part, did not think about his loss. As an expert architect, he was always helping the lowland king with a bridge or windmill or grain house, and of course he attended to all the typical kingly duties, which were made no fewer without having an official throne. On some of the colder nights, however, his steward would see the king staring up at the mountains to their north as the sun set between two peaks–the same two peaks that the king’s former castle was nestled between. The steward also noticed that the king never replicated the angry visage he had shown on the first day of their descent to the lowlands, except when the lowland king mentioned the mountain king’s castle. This happened infrequently, though it was obvious that the lowland king had admired the mountain king’s castle, and hoped that now that he was a guest in the lowland king’s lands, he might help the lowland king with a construction of a castle of his own. But the mountain king, in these instances, kept his jaw so tight and his tone so non-committal that the lowland king soon learned there was no use in asking.

When a few springs had passed, there was word that some barbarian tribes had made allegiance and descended from the north, threatening the scattered homesteads and villages in the lands surrounding the mountain king’s former domain. These homesteads had not been affected seriously by the earthquake and had decided to remain where they were, despite the migration south by the king and his people, and were now paying the cost of the lack of protection of a nearby monarch. Neither the mountain king nor the lowland king could bear the thought of such innocents being ravaged, so they agreed to spend the latter portion of winter in battle against the barbarians, which, with their combined forces, they would surely win.

During one of the northern marches of said battle, the mountain king realized they were near to the spot were his castle had been, and since they were not on a particularly pressing campaign, he was able to take a small band, including his faithful and wise steward, to the spot where the shakings of the earth had leveled his beloved town. He approached the ruins expecting to feel the same burst of anger that he had felt on those nights in the lowlands when he chanced to look up at the mountains, but instead, when they arrived at the place, he was shocked into silence by the change that had been wrought there. Instead of the harsh crumble of stone, the king saw a gentle carpet of green moss over all the castle. It was a sad moss, and spoke of lost glory and beautiful days that would be no more–but if softened the scene and left the king feeling wistful, rather than angry. As the king moved across the nature-strewn rubble, he saw something even more powerful–a tiny fir had taken root in the very center of the remains of the great hall, and was having, on all appearances, a grand summer. Such new life and potential majesty caused the king to forget his thoughts of hatred towards the castle, and made him ponder the flow of time, of nature and its inexorable drive to live.

The king stood by the fir sapling and realized that he owed very much to his wise steward, for he knew all of a sudden that the correct response to such destruction and loss as he had experienced was not to eradicate everything which reminded him of such loss–no! The king realized in that moment that memories of great things, even though they might be destroyed, were worth keeping, for great things are worth remembering, even if they were thought to be greater than they were. The king laid his palm against the fir tree, and begrudged it not that it stood where his throne had sat, because he saw that such a place as the one around him was as perfect for firs as for kings and castles.

Then, the king thanked the wise steward and promised him that he and his line would inherit the throne (for the king was childless), since it was because of the steward that the king and his people had survived the great earthquake, and seen the beauty that nature had wrought over a scene of such destruction. It was not that nature made it so that the destruction never occurred–instead, between the time and the trees, the king had realized that the ghosts of his past were not to be annihilated, but to be treasured and viewed in a particular way–the way of the present. So the king descended from the mountain to his people, victorious in the battle against the barbarians, but more importantly, healed from his anger against the castle, and fully ready to give his life to the people, even if the houses of the lowland king were not as grand.

As the time approached, it became clear that much more work would be required than I thought. Building an online store is pretty rough, particularly when the API is complicated, uses lots of tools, any of which could break making it very hard to debug, and one is given no specifications at all for how it should work or what it should look like or what will even be in it. Moreover, since I don’t have a working PC at the moment, I was unable to test the design for IE as I was going along (and I didn’t want to in any case). I realized one night at about 1am that IE doesn’t support transparent PNG files (picture files), so all the cool little black-and-white auto-generated buttons you see in Firefox and Safari…well those were not-so-cool little black-and-white-and-neon-green buttons in IE. I tried a million hacks to get it to work, but to no avail with PHP-generated image code. And that was about 4 unplanned and unnecessary hours of wasted time.

So here’s the point: as soon as I realized that I would need to spend a lot of time on this, I went in to what I will call “consumed” mode. In other words, I decided that I would eat, drink, and not sleep coding this site until I was done. Of course, along with that decision came the loss of all vestiges of a healthy lifestyle…I was awake from 9 or 10 am until 5 am, sitting at my computer, not eating anything, like a little hunchback gnome typing away at keys. My right hand was and is completely fried–either tendonitis or something else render it a continual mass of dull pain. I switched over a year ago to using my mouse with my left hand, but it hasn’t really helped.

I realized throughout that, in consumed mode, I actually get a lot of stuff done! I mean, I didn’t read, go outside, make or play music, hang out with people, spend time thinking about life or real issues, or do any of the things that makes mine a well-rounded and satisfying existence…but I was a coding fiend. My work efficiency increased tenfold. It occurred to me how it must feel to be one of those people who really focuses on one single thing in life, and it was kind of cool. It made me wonder if that’s not a way I’m supposed to be…you see there’s something about my personality which makes it very easy to enter consumed mode when I first discover something new that I want to create or excel in. A sport, a class, a song, a book, a hobby, a writing project, anything… The initial moments are intense and productive, but then I quickly get bored or realize that it will actually take a lot of work, and I lose interest and move on to other things.

This habit has meant that I have had an extremely wide range of experiences, have tried many new things, and have the gear/paraphernalia for more hobbies/pursuits than anyone I know or have heard of. What it also means is that I tend not to (a) excel at things to the extend that I have the ability, and/or (b) finish projects that I start. On my computer right now are probably failed attempts at at least 5 novels, and twice as many sets of song lyrics. If it doesn’t happen in the first day, it doesn’t seem to happen at all. That’s typically the way my music writing goes–a blast of creativity, and then, if that spark doesn’t carry me through to completion…the song usually never gets fully written and I forget about it.

So, I have been trying to think differently and grow in my creativity by actually setting aside time to work diligently on songs or writings. I’m working on a song now, for instance, where for the first time I sat down with paper and pen, drew out staves, and worked on a melody line in standard musical nutation, over the course of a whole week. It’s giving me a lot of frustrations and when I sit down with a guitar to work on more of it, I’m always tempted to try something else that holds the promise of being a quick project. However, I’m trying to believe that by actually working on this song, it will be better, not worse, for the amount of time I put into it. We shall see.

I’m very wary, of course, about committing too much to one thing (i.e., being in consumed mode all the time). I mean, I very much feel the pain of not being able to say that I am passionate about one and only one thing. In fact, I felt that pain tonight very strongly, as I went climbing with a group of people who are all vastly more committed to the pursuit than I am. I felt like I very much wanted to commit myself to climbing to the same degree, so that I could do the things they were doing and have the ability to climb so many more routes and types of routes than I can now. But, I knew that if I made that decision, I would have to give up so many more things…and I just can’t bring myself to do that.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what is the most healthy for me. Some people are in consumed mode for work all the time, and others for a sport or a hobby. I can’t seem to want to live there for very long. What surprised me most of all, to tell the truth, was that I was able to force myself into it these last few days at all! It must say something about the type of work that I have that, when my paycheck is neither on the line (that I know of) nor overlarge, I’m still willing and able to pull 4 all-nighters in a row for a project. I wouldn’t have thought it possible in general, but especially for that length of time. Now the task is to re-enter life and to try and find a healthy balance. Finding this balance will be more on the forefront of my mind now, however, as I’ll maybe start to think if there any things I should let go in order to excel in other things I love more deeply. Honestly, I think the problem is that I love so many things to such a deep degree that that would be a nonsensical venture. I’ll be thinking about it, though, especially now that I know that spending a lot of time on something actually produces results–it’s an alien concept to my personality.

I took BART underneath the bay and to Walnut Creek, walked out of the turnstiles, handed over the cash, got an iPod, and got back on a return train within 2 minutes of having departed the last one. I walked straight to the Apple store in SF and exchanged my newly-purchased iPod for one from the store (I wanted a black one), sans receipt. All in all, an incredible experience. The next day, I used craigslist to sell my old iPod for a price not too far from the one at which I had purchased my new player! Brilliant.

This experience spawned two discussions I wanted to share. First, I realized how easy it is for me to become fixated on some material goal, to the extent that I am willing to spend hours and hours monitoring websites, e-mailing people, and taking trains all around the bay for it. I am one who forms habits fairly quickly, and after a few days of constantly checking craigslist, I noticed something changing in me–the iPod which was the object of my desire had passed from being a toy which I thought it would be fun to have, into something that subconsciously I truly believed I needed. I was Frodo, but instead of a burning wheel of fire in front of my eyes, there was a slick Apple-designed piece of obsidian, thumping with seductive media possibilities. Luckily, this scared me enough that I was able to take a step back and evaluate whether such a new toy was really healthy. Under the circumstances, which were that the purchase would involve little to no financial sacrifice, I decided it was OK to upgrade. My hope is that if in the future I become fixated with something less benign (say an expensive car, or a new bike, a new snowboard, or any of a million things it could occur to me to want), I will likewise feel the sort of uneasiness I experienced last week while there is still time to evaluate in a level-headed manner.

Secondly, I had ample time to think more deeply about “iPod culture” in general. It seems clear that an iPod exists to serve consumers in two ways. To begin with, it lets you control the what of your media consumption/experience. It allows you to listen to your tunes, or watch your videos. No more listening to the radio, to the clatter of the train, to the conversation of those people over there, to the sound of the birds, to the dumb thump of the rap music in that car. With the advent of video content, you are now no longer forced to watch whatever is on TV, or whatever your friend is watching, or whatever your family is watching. You have complete control over the what of your media.

You also have complete control over the when of your media consumption. The iPod fits in your pocket. You can listen to it now. You can watch videos on it now. This is probably obvious, but maybe it’s worth saying that having control over the when of your media consumption means an increase in media consumption. No one buys an iPod to listen to music less! So you can listen to music or watch videos whenever you want, and whenever that is, it is more than you listened to or watched before.

It should already be clear that the creation of such an environment is incredibly good for business. The individualization of music and video tastes leads to greater sales–we no longer need to sell to an entire household; we can sell to each member of the house! Dad likes different movies and music than daughter, so they each buy their own preferred set. The time-ubiquity of music and video also straightforwardly lends itself to business–more time spent listening to tunes means that more tunes are required and therefore purchased. Apple and the other digital content providers are well situated to make a killing off of us (and they have been doing so).

So far everything that I’ve said has been value-neutral…but is there anything to seriously praise and/or criticize about this digital media lifestyle? On the one hand, I am extremely glad to be able to control what sorts of media I consume. My tastes in music have not usually been particularly mainstream, and so having the option to listen to music I like instead of what is on the radio is quite nice. Likewise, my appetite for new music, for efficiently searching and finding new artists and sounds, is greatly helped by being able to listen to music for just about 100% of my waking day. I can rise from my bed and throw iTunes into a party shuffle that lasts for the full 8 hours of the workday. If I drive anywhere, I can plug my iPod into the audio-in jack in my car stereo. If I walk or run anywhere, I can do it while listening to a randomly-generated set of songs chosen from any of my scores of smart playlists. Moreover, I could rinse/wash/repeat every day for 4 months without hearing the same song twice. In sum, it is quite easy to become a music consumption machine–pop in a song, manufacture a feeling or memory, and output a time-dependent value judgment. Art literally flows through my body more often than not!

On the other hand, one wonders if there are any unhealthy side effects to all of this. In fact, it seems like both the what and when aspects of the iPod lifestyle can have negative results. Let’s tackle the when aspect first–it’s simpler. Basically, when you are listening to music or watching a movie on your iPod, you are eo ipso not listening to or watching something else, namely what is going on around you. Perhaps human senses were designed to be continually titillated by manufactured and produced sights and sounds. But perhaps they were not. What are we missing while consuming media? For some people, maybe not much–in truth, maybe it helps some escape from otherwise dreary family situations. But one thing is certain, which is that it precludes silence. It therefore precludes the kind of silence that our culture studiously avoids, which is the kind wherein you cannot get away from the questions you haven’t been asking yourself (but need to). For many of us, the constant presence of music might be nothing more than a numbing agent designed to frighten away an insistent silence that we have been putting off for so long we’re embarrassed even to recognize its existence.

Beyond silence, headphones also shut out other kinds of music, not produced in studios by important men in ties while watching 18-year old company-made superstars gyrating in front of unimpressed microphones. I am, of course, referring to the noises found outside of our iPod-induced isolations. Birds, wind, rain, the voices of a crowd, footsteps, and all the rest. Headphones function both ways, too: they don’t just keep other things away from you; in addition, they keep you away from those other things. They can be effectively a wall, which is precisely why so many people wear them so visibly.

Now, to the what. iPods allow me to listen to what I want, alone. I don’t have to consult anyone else to see if she is OK with my choice of song or video. To see why this is important, I need to introduce the concept of responsibility for consumption. Humans are made to consume certain things in certain ways. Food is an obvious example–humans need to consume food, and it is good that they do so. However, as various eating disorders show us, there are healthy and not-so-healthy ways to engage in this project of food consumption. To the extent that our own (and only our own) choices lead to health or illness, it seems right to say that we have a responsibility for those choices. In the case of food, this responsibility is cashed out in terms of responsibility to our body. Exercise is also a responsibility we have in the same area. None of this is surprising.

What I want to claim is that media consumption (and here I would distinguish “media” from “art” ) bears similar responsibilities to food consumption, in that these are all things which we take into our bodies (or minds), and which affect us in certain ways according to their particularities. Hot dogs are different than apples. Handel is different than Britney Spears. More than that bare difference, I want to argue a value difference in media, analogous to a health difference in food. I wish it were the case that there were no “bad media”, but unfortunately there is. In the same way that some foods are unhealthy and/or addictive, some media can affect us negatively or engender addictive behavior (pornography being the classic example, and new forms of it joining the audio realm–the addictiveness proven by a trip to Odeo’s Top 40).

So, every time we decide to consume a piece of media, we have a certain responsibility to ourselves, just like when we are eating. For the most part, this responsibility stays hidden in the background, and we don’t have to worry about it–our natural inclinations take care of us just fine. But in unique situations, such a responsibility can become a very palpable burden. With the proliferation of media via the internet, and the classic gatekeepers of media art (the record labels, the video studios) not being able to staunch the flow of new independent artists willing to self-promote, we are completely surrounded on all sides by songs and movies clamoring for our attention, screaming for the privilege of being on our iPods. Since in iPod culture we make all our own media choices, this means that we are left all alone to deal with this onslaught. The responsibility to consume healthily now becomes harder, as we have to choose hundreds of times a day whether this is good music or bad, whether I like it or not, whether I should watch it or not, and so on. Eventually, these choices paralyze us, and we are left looking at a device which promised to give us just what we want, but no longer having the ability even to know what that is! I can’t count the times I’ve spent upwards of 10 minutes scrolling through my iTunes library because every time I see an album I’d like to listen to, I can’t be sure that it’s really the “best” to hear at the moment.

Ultimately, this is just another facet of the modern, consumeristic, capitalist lifestyle where the market is flooded with dozens of basically-identical products, the marketing behind each of which aims to convince us just how different they really are. We go to the grocery store and see a hundred different kinds of cereal, and we are immediately besieged; which of these cereals is the best? Which is the best value? Which is healthiest? Which tastes best? Sometimes you feel like leaving the store because you just can’t handle that kind of pressure. And it is exactly that pressure which threatens to hover over us as we carry our iPods to work and on our afternoon jogs.

None of that is to say that the personal media player is evil or even slightly bad. I merely want to emphasize how, in our current cultural context, an iPod comes with more than a $400 price tag–it actually comes with a surprisingly large set of responsibilities, both to oneself and to the world. Or maybe it’s not so surprising–with any technical or economic advance comes an increase in power and possibility, along with a concomitant increase in responsibility. Apple’s marketing is really great at portraying the possibilities their media players can grant us, but we cannot trust them to know, or to tell us, what sorts of responsibilities might go hand in hand with the power they provide–the power of instant, on-demand, and infinitely customizable media. I hope I’ve been able to illuminate both edges of that sword.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go watch a few episodes of Firefly on my new video iPod. Or wait…should I watch Arrested Development?

• A monthly subscription is expensive.
• The game is designed in such a way that, after an initial phase, the entertainment it provides is exponentially related to the amount of time you put into it.
• In order to get the maximum value out of the game, in terms of both money and entertainment, one is forced to play a lot.
• Playing massively-multiplayer games a lot can be intrinsically unhealthy if in a person’s lifestyle it precludes other more important activites. It is also potentially addictive, and can be unhealthy in that way as well.

Now, I haven’t been playing in an unhealthy way–in fact, I haven’t been playing at all. My decision to quit is more a financial one, and also as a result of the dilemma above, which shows that to get the desired amount of entertainment, one must choose effectively to be unhealthy in some way.

That being said, my visits to Azeroth (the fantasy world in Warcraft) were indeed fun and provided many hours of enjoyment, particularly when I was able to play alongside my brother and sister. Such cooperative play was made all the more meaningful in virtue of the fact that I live across the country from them and had no real other way to hang out. I will retain many fond memories of our quests, guild drama, and laughing at the plethora of idiots that occupy any online community (but particularly gaming communities). So here’s to Telarian, Telariz, and Tsarmina!

Telarian and Telariz surveying the snow plains below Ironforge

• Vision, Values, and Praxis for a Community of Faith

• summitwhitney.com

This year, T-Bone accompanied me to Cocoa, where we were greeted by an absolutely amazing sunrise, replete with a flock of gulls that would zoom and flutter about, putting on an amazing show:

But then, a few minutes later, we saw this:

Look at the middle-left of the image: that’s right! A shark was cruising through the water, not 30 feet off the beach (notice the pigeon for scale). Actually, there were two sharks, though I only got a shot of one. The fins were only above water as the waves would break over them, so it was hard to get a good view. Was this shark a sign of some kind? Was God warning us about something?

Later on, not realizing that if two sharks were a sign of anything, they would surely import “DON’T GO IN THE WATER!”, T-Bone and I took a swim in the ocean. What could be more relishing than being able to go in the water on January 2nd? It was a bit cold, but quite bearable and refreshing. And, as we have now proven, shark infested. Unless, of course, one of you is a marine biologist and believes the picture is actually of a dolphin.

Note: if the event which I am describing has been written about previously on one of my weblogs or something similar, I offer a link to that entry, called “read more…”.

• 2005 began somewhat inauspiciously at my family’s then-residence in Orlando, along with most of my Stanford draw group. We were too busy playing cards and drinking white russians to give the incoming year much attention, so it sort of snuck in. More importantly, as has likely been told previously, New Year’s 2005 was situated in the middle of a very significant process for me, namely making the decision to move back to California or not. I’d spent a good amount of time back in Palo Alto since November, and had talked seriously with some friends there about forming a sort of spiritual community. Of course, I eventually moved (see below), but at that time things were very much still in the air, and so I was constantly weighing options and feelings, and hoping that God would lead me one way or the other. (read more…)
• (Early January) Version 1 of e4:online (the web app I have been developing for Teleios since Oct 2004) went live. It had minimal features, and looked a whole lot worse than it does now. It still doesn’t look/work quite well enough, so the last year has been spent on the same project, which will hopefully be more done soon.
• (January 16) I ran a half-marathon by myself in Orlando, in 1h50m. It marks the longest distance I’ve ever run (the record still stands). Unfortunately, shortly thereafter my knees begin to act up which impedes my running for the rest of the year. (read more…)
• (January 20) Back in Palo Alto, I write a song which is tentatively called “Chapter II”. The song is significant because it is the first to be written for the concept album I recently imagined. It’s basically a story-format album, with each chapter unfolding a bit more of, for lack of a better genre, a fairy tale. Since then, I’ve written a number of other songs for the album (including the one also for Nyffy’s wedding–see below), though it is not finished at the end of 2005. “Chapter II” was later recorded in April (get it here.
• (January 22) In what was, in hindsight, the first community retreat for our group in Palo Alto, a few of us went up to my family’s apartment in San Francisco for a weekend, with the goal of hammering out a vision of community we could put into words and use as an invitation for our friends. We wanted something fairly concrete to approach others with, and so we spent a good many hours thinking, writing, and praying. This event was significant for a number of reasons. It more or less defined the shape of the experiment that we wanted to try over the next year, but beyond that, it solidified my feeling that the best course of action for me was in fact to move back to Palo Alto.
• (January 23) At the end of the weekend, we had a meeting with about 15 people at the Bott household, and shared our vision with them. Out of that night, probably more than any other specific moment, came the community which is now my home.
• (Early February) I met with my boss Pavi over lunch and inform him of my intentions to move to California. Out of sheer graciousness, he agreed to let me continue working for Teleios (then Excelsis) long-distance from the west coast. With only such green lights ahead, I felt increasingly confident that I had made the right decision. (read more…).
• (February 8) I gathered what things I could fit on the airplane and flew to San Jose, officially moving to California. 3 months ago, the idea would have been completely preposterous, but now it had happened (read more…).
• (Rest of February) I lived in the 447 house with a bunch of girls, since I had no place to stay in Palo Alto, and since Erin was gone for the month on a trip to Peru, leaving an empty room in the house. It was a really fun time, and I discovered that for the most part girls are fairly pleasant house companions. Cleaner, on the whole. I lived at their place until April (excepting the few times when Erin was in town, of course).
• (March 2) I flew back to Orlando for a few days to pack up my car and belongings, in preparation for the drive out to California which would complete my move. Erin had agreed to co-pilot cross-country, so we weaved our way west, stopping to see various people we knew along the road.
• (March etc) For a month or so, I took a break from working on the web app and spent some time fixing up and outlining the transcript for Graham Tomlin’s summer 2004 course. This was a significant experience for me, as it enabled me to engage once again with material that was very formative in terms of my current faith experience, especially as it pertained to community.
• (March 23) Started writing iRateTunes, which I finished about a month later. (more…)
• (March 30) I flew to Gainesville to be with my brother David, whose engagement with a girl had just ended. They were to be married in a few months, and it was an incredibly hard time for him and our family. Dav and I needed something to do, so that’s when we recorded “Chapter II”.
• (April 10) Excelsis becomes Teleios. What will be next? Will it be another word in some ancient language?
• (April 11) I moved in with Justin Smith and Dan Gannon at the unused Young Life house in East Palo Alto. EPA is a very different place than the Palo Alto across the 101, and things like shootings and drug deals happen all too frequently. So close to Stanford, but we were very insulated there from the reality on the other side of the highway. Justin and Dan each had their own reasons for living there. Mine were (a) cheap rent, (b) living with Justin, and (c) exploring life in a less affluent part of Palo Alto, to see if maybe our community had a place in a location like that. I lived there with Justin until early July, when we finally got our current apartment (and were kicked out because Young Life decided to use the house again). I avoided buying any furniture and successfully slept in a sleeping bag for 3 months, and managed to live very simply there. I can’t say that I even tried to integrate myself into the surrounding neighborhood community, except for sporadic (but meaningful) conversations in Spanish with our next-door neighbor. Ultimately, while the state of the area did constantly break my heart, the issues our own community of friends were exploring demanded all of my time and passion.
• (All spring) Things with community had begun to pick up, and we had started to have long dinner-gatherings once a week. These facilitated our drawing closer as a group, our exploration of many topics (including the one of service-based housing choices etc), our worshiping together, and so on. In addition, our lives began to be more integrated with one another’s, and we experienced many cool events and times together which I will not chronicle here. These experiences, of course, were not always attended only by benefits, but sometimes frustrations as well, which was to be expected.
• (April 17) We started planning for our community retreat to Costa Rica, which eventually took place in August
• (April 23) Epic backpacking trip in Big Sur with the guys, replete with really cold hot springs.
• (April 27) Flew to Gainesville for my brother David’s graduation from UF.
• (April 28) Started reading El Alquimista, which, since I actually finished it, became the first full-length Spanish book I read, apart from the New Testament
• (April/May) Community had discussions centered around whether or not we wanted to live all together in one big house, or more separately. I had a lot of excitement towards the idea of living together, and it didn’t pan out, which was frustrating. (read more…).
• (May 12) Family retreat in Napa.
• (May 28) Epic trip to Santa Barbara (see pictures…)
• (June 1) Ultimately, in lieu of the community house idea, 5 of us guys decided to find an apartment together. We ended up choosing College Terrace over EPA, which was a hard decision but made because we did not feel that the community was ready to be placed in an environment like that yet, and moreover some in the community in PA would have refused to go to EPA for various reasons anyhow; we put a high premium on physical proximity. So began the serious hunt for apartments
• (June) Climbing in Pinnacles, Su Madre movers day, epic night-hike of half-dome, and Nyffy’s wedding in St Augustine (for which I had the honor of writing a song). (Read a lot more / see pictures…)
• (Late June) My family moved homes in Orlando, to the place where I’m now writing.
• (Late June) Nyffelers move to Palo Alto and find a place a mile from our future residence, it is awesome! Thus commences auditory readings of Harry Potter 6.
• (Early July) My future roommates and I finally found a place to live in College Terrace, right by Stanford. Miraculously, two 2-bedroom places opened up right next to each other, and right next to the Botts’ apartment. So 7 of us were in the same building, if not the same house!
• (July 11) I sprained my ankle very badly playing tennis, which put me out of athletic commission until Costa Rica, mid-August.
• (August 1) I write one of the more important blog entries of the year: My Defining Sadnesses
• (August 9) Current design goes live at teleios.us!
• (August 10) Community retreat for 2 weeks in Costa Rica; there are 10 of us. It is a very incredible time–overseas, so I love it, and I get to use and refine my Spanish. We rent two 4WD SUVs and go all over the country, exploring beaches and jungle. We get to a cool spot and spend 5 days there, pretty much all alone, which is a very meaningful time spiritually for all of us, and it really solidifies the community. For perhaps the first time, I feel that we are all on the same page. (read more…)
• (September 3) Another epic backpacking trip in Hetch-Hetchy with the guys. I spend most of my time in the beautiful scenery rather depressed about girls, and take any opportunity to go climb up rocks and hills by myself, and stare off into space, and feel alien to the world. This feeling only intensifies over the next few months, and begins to define my experience, which I write about later. Anyway, (see pictures).
• (September 13) Justin and I code podornot.com (read more…)
• (September 14-15) At Anne’s invitation, I speak to two of her history classes about philosophy. It’s the first time I’ve taught since I TA’ed a few years ago, and it was a really cool experience.
• (Mid September) Community stuff begins to be very frustrating to me, and I begin to see a lot in myself that I don’t particularly like as well, especially in terms of how I interact with others in the community. These frustrations eventually come to an emotional head in late October / November before they are resolved. (read more…)
• (September 26) I turn 23. (read more…)
• (September 30) In a move somewhat reminiscent of desperation, I decide to e-mail one of Jenna’s Italian girl friends. She seems cool and then all of a sudden stops responding. Oh well!
• (October 2) I finish reading the Kierkegaard anthology I have been working through. Reading the book was a very deep and spiritual experience, and propelled my thinking further than it had been before in a lot of areas. (read more…)
• (August - October) Sigur Ros’ new album, Takk, completely captivates me, particularly their music video for “Glosoli”. (read more…)
• (October 13) Recent interactions with Christians push me further and further away from any stake I have or want to have in Christian culture, and I express it by writing this.
• (October 14) I ran the Palo Alto moonlight 10k, the first race I’d done since freshman year. I did well, coming in at 44:40. Importantly, my body felt healthy during “training” and after the run.
• (October 15) Dan and I were accepted for the Whitney climb for 2006’s Summit for Someone campaign. (blog entry to come)
• (October 23) Saw the most amazing sunset of the year with friends, at Windy Hill. (read more…)
• (October 31) Nick, Jenna, and Justin accompanied me to Orlando for Teleios’ seminar with Alister McGrath, which we filmed at a Disney soundstage. It was an amazing week which reawakened my love of academic interaction (I got to spend a bit of one-on-one time with Dr McGrath and ask some relatively burning philosophical questions), and awakened an interest in his project of a “scientific theology”. I got a copy of his recently-published trilogy, and am working through it now–it is very fruitful for my current thoughts on many issues. (read more…)
• (November 7) Some tensions based on different understandings of the vision/goal of the group had been slowly building within the community. We were able to lay these out on the table and discuss them in a very healthy and growthful way, which was incredible. Where we ended left me very sad, though, owing primarily to the way I’d been using community emotionally in a potentially-unhealthy way. Realizing this, and where other people were at, left me feeling simultaneously foolish, alone, and abandoned. I understood that a lot of what had happened fit similar patterns to how things tend to develop romantically for me. This brought to the fore the frustrations with that sphere, and illustrated how they undergird most, if not all, of what appear to be my central hurts. Such thoughts propelled me into a state of despair (a better word than depression) like I hadn’t experienced (or hadn’t allowed myself to). That’s when I wrote this entry. A few days later, I wrote the corresponding song. While these exercises helped, especially in the area of anger against God, the feelings I describe still define, though more dimly and numbly, my current day-to-day experience. I am not excited about this, and hope more than anything else that 2006 holds the key to moving on from here.
• (November 17) I finally finished rating my whole iTunes library. (read more…)
• (November 20) Went to Orlando for a really wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with my family and extended family (from both sides). Also, for certain reasons felt a good deal more hope, unrelatedly in regards to both community and women, than on November 7.
• (November 23) My brother Dav and I recorded a Christmas EP (more…) at our new studio, which we designed along with our family’s new house in Orlando, and which is awesome. In fact, throughout the last six months we had been piecing together songs for a new album–not the concept album I mentioned, but a re-recording of many older Splendour Hyaline songs, and some new ones as well. The recording is slow going, but the quality we are getting is fantastic, and we can’t wait to share the fruits of these labors with you.
• (December 1) Our community had a weekend retreat in Tahoe, which contained a good deal of hanging around. It was significant because I felt that the tensions which seemed so sharp in October and November had lessened a good deal, and we were all able to interact as friends and spiritual compatriots regardless…which seemed a rare and awesome gift in any group of people.
• (December 8) I saw The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was a very emotional and powerful experience for me. Those stories have been such a part of my life and mythology for so long (I mean, our band is named “Splendour Hyaline”…) that seeing many things come to life on the screen just caused me to weep. I never wrote any sort of review of it, but my friend Mr Lowe has done a wonderful job, so I don’t feel the need to.
• (December 15) My family flew to England to meet up with my sister, who is attending Capernwray this year, up north of Manchester. We wandered around the lake district, and then on to Wales. The trip was excellent because (a) the UK is a very magical place for me (maybe owing to the stories I read as a child, which were usually written by Brits), (b) of all the many times I’ve been there, it has never been right before Christmas, so it seemed extra magical, and (c) it very rudely reawakened my passionate desire to be in different cultures and learning different languages. There was a deep sense of nostalgia hearing people speak Welsh, even though I’d never heard it before. At this point I don’t know what the long-term significance of that reawakening will be, if anything meaningful. (read more…)
• (December 25) Christmas came and went without too much in the way of ceremony this year. Still, as my favorite holiday, it was a special time, and helped to ease the pain that had been surrounding my heart over the last few months.

And that brings us to now, where I sit writing. Let that, therefore, suffice for 2005.

I’m now waiting for the first of our New Year’s guests to arrive. We are expecting quite a crowd this year and I am looking forward to an epic party. Guests and drinking mean, of course, that the observational entries I promised regarding the UK will have to wait (and, if history is any indication, will never arrive), and I will next be writing to you from 2006!

For now, let us offer one final toast to 2005, which held so much change and so many surprises, good and bad; and, as always, so many indicators of God’s faithfulness (though they were sometimes, and often still seem, very hard to see). Cheers!

Some violent days the red and rain are all too thunderingly silent, staying stored in Heaven when Earth’s ironies are Hellishly blue and clear, spying down on cracked and broken souls that move and labor searching amidst blood for each other to wish wreckage was external, indicating the spiritual state–less existence equals less pain but color is beautiful and cannot be slain (only why won’t it rain singing water, rising up to drown unworth?), but grace prevails, the ship sails and souls float, regarding unjustly their inevitability of being, the world a mockery of them and they of it, made now of shimmering sand when floods should rule till penitence dies and comes again in more wrath and less doom, carving channels of whistling light to lands where mirrors give heed to more than sight, and true lenses perceive the matching hue of Heaven and Earth, for the first time: above and below to agree in mirth.

Apart from being pretty sick the first couple days, it was great to be with family, to be relaxing and eating well, and to be tramping about the windswept hills in 0-degree (celsius) weather.

It reminded me how much I love the UK, and being overseas in general. That, plus the generously long (and cocktail-filled) plane flights, made for some good observations and reflections about things I saw or realized last week. I’m hoping to write a few entries on those topics soon. Until then, here are some pictures, so you can at least see what things looked like in general over there.

Pictures from the trip at my .Mac picture site

Recently, I have become aware that community is much like this. One might think that a community is just an aggregate of particles (individuals), and so it should behave like an aggregate of individuals. Another might think that a community is like a wave–it behaves like a single extended entity. These people will treat community differently; the first person will place ultimate foundation in each individual, and will argue that their motions (i.e., the influence of God’s will in their life, and their response) qua individuals define the epiphenomenal motions of the community at large. Those of the wave persuasion will argue conversely that God directs the community as a whole according to his will, and the motions of individual members follow like crests and troughs in a wave–all very connected.

It is hard to know within which paradigm I should be viewing community right now. Are we fundamentally separated, and therefore at the end of the day we must discern our calling from God as pertaining to ourselves alone? Or are we fundamentally connected, and must therefore all collectively submit our motions to the movement of the larger group?

Right now, it seems appropriate to view the motions of some as following the particle paradigm, and others as following the wave paradigm. Are we therefore separate entities (i.e., in separate communities)? Or are we exhibiting the true essence of community and just failing to describe it in classical sociological terms, exactly the same as physicists failed to describe quantum phenomena using Newtonian language?

We have been gathering data for a while now, but I think we still need some more. Anyone else have any data worth sharing?

(cover art by Chris Nyffeler)

• God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
• O Little Town of Bethlehem
• It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

(for those of you using iTunes, you’ll see the album art is already attached to the songs. Otherwise, feel free to copy the image from this page)

NOTE: Songs are now considered to be the final mix.

(Picture taken from our backyard, looking towards Lake Hart–one of the few Orlando water bodies that’s actually somewhat a lake and not a retention pond)

I’m not sure exactly how many songs I had then, but it was probably in the vicinity of 5,000. So even if I rated one song a second, it would have taken an hour and a half. What I decided to do, though, to be fair, was to listen to each song fully before rating it. If an average song is 3 minutes, we need to multiply that 1.5 hours by 180–270 hours! I was somewhat optimistic that this 270 hours would pass by quickly while I was working or what not.

I soon discovered that rating songs one-by-one in iTunes was a somewhat inefficient task, given that the only way to rate something was to go into iTunes and click on the little star for that particular song. Not a bad method if you’re already in iTunes, but if you are working on something else and would rather not have your workflow interrupted every 3 minutes, it’s less than optimal. So I wrote some software (iRateTunes) that let me rate songs with keystrokes, without going to iTunes.

(I also created a little app that showed me info about my iTunes library in the OS X status bar, including the number of songs left to be rated, and the total amount of time I’d spent listening to songs in iTunes. This was so I could monitor my progress)

Still, even with these tools, it was slow going. It turned out that the mental energy required to rate song after song was somewhat exhausting, so if I could get 100 done per day, that was good. Most days I got far fewer songs rated, and some not at all, depending on the intensity required by my work. An even more exhausting task was keeping a consistent standard with which to rate the songs. There are all sorts of options–should the ratings be relative to just the songs in my library? Or should it be relative to all the songs in pop culture? Should I try to keep a nice bell curve, so that there are about as many 1-star songs as 5-star songs, and far more 3-stars than either? In the end, I’m not sure I was super-consistent.

But anyway. Today, over a year after I began, my iTunesCount status bar reads: “6794/0 | 52.74” This means that I have 6794 songs in my library, and 0 are unrated! Finally! The 52.74 lets me know that the total amount of song air time with this iTunes library is 52.74 days (I created the library in July of 2004). That’s 1,265 hours! And I don’t let iTunes run while I’m not there listening.

Stats per rating category: 1-star: 443 songs (6.5%) 2-star: 801 songs (11.8%) 3-star: 2752 songs (40.5%) 4-star: 1836 songs (27%) 5-star: 962 songs (14.2%)

Today I walked in to Starbucks in San Francisco to use the restroom, and noticed that everything inside was red and green, with white spinning snowflakey thingies. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was playing, and all sorts of “seasonal favorites” were available for purchase. Mention was made in the various wall advertisements of some “spirit” of the season which is supposedly upon us, whether we like it or not.

Well, I don’t like it! Not yet, anyway. What is everyone trying to pull? Is nothing sacred? I’m actually very angry at our culture right now for trying to tell me that the “holiday season” is here (and not for any spiritual reasons). The earlier in the year we put up Christmas decorations, or decorations for any holiday, for that matter, the less meaningful they become. Yes, I want to experience the festivity of the various holidays that are soon to arrive. But I don’t want to be so bombarded with incessant greed-driven reminders that they are going to be here that I lose all sense of excitement over them.

I can’t think of any more effective way to take the excitement and meaning out of Christmas (or any date-based holiday) than by prepping consumers for it two months in advance. Is there a clearer way to say, “We don’t care about the holiday” than by implying, “What we really care about is the money you spend for it. So spend it now and often…there’s only two months left to give us all your cash! Hurry before time is up!” ??

Ugh, it’s disgusting.

I finished recording around 6am (record time, but it felt even faster in my sleep-deprived state combined with the music-induced haze-drone) and took the rough cut on a walk to a nearby hill to see the sunrise and set the song free to God. I listened to it over and over again, noticing how I’d surprised myself by making it a little hopeful at the end, which I didn’t think I had in me. But listening to the song, I felt that it actually gave me the hope that I’d written into it, in a way that I couldn’t have got it directly. It felt transcendent.

I thought I’d link to this rough unmixed/unedited cut here. It’s stripped down, but to my mind still pulsing with the sorrow and raw emotion I put into it. I have no idea how it will impinge on your auditory senses, but I would definitely recommend listening with good headphones in a quiet place (or outdoors underneath grey skies). If you can, give it your full attention and let it take you where it wants to. I believe that this will clue you in to my current life experience much better and more directly than, say, by reading my last entry.

Since the song is so connected to what I was writing about in that entry, though, I named it after a phrase that I liked from it. So here it is:

A Storm Of My Own Devising (it’s in iTunes format [m4a] - you’ll need to right-click and Save Target As or whatever)

Cheers. I’m off to take a nap.

Basically, I haven’t been able to think of a negative adjective recently that hasn’t in some way or another been able to apply (truthfully and in full reflective honesty) to myself. My “bad state” is not any low self-esteem resulting from that observation, however. On the contrary, it is precisely the opposite–I really can’t bring myself to want to be any different right now. Different than what? Well, my thoughts and actions are being ruled by desire, anger, passion, arrogance, loneliness, distrust, self-pity, impatience, selfishness, lust, frustration, jealousy, deceit, and fear, and I am enjoying it all too much to want to escape my dark little corner. I feel myself pulling away from my friends and not wanting to talk to them. I feel very poignantly the gulf that separates each of us, but I do not want to call on Christ to bridge that. I am tired of how different I feel from everyone, tired of the loneliness of which I am such a connoisseur, since it so quickly drives me to dwell on my self-inflicted self-image (self-illusion, self-delusion): dark, wrapped in a black cloak, hiding great thoughts and great power that no one else understands or cares to understand, seeing things others don’t, too proud to give up my precious individuality and collapse into the sea of mundane personality, of people who can’t see beyond their closed eyelids, can’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel the beauty that is in the world, the terrible darkness and sorrow that define the noble soul… This is what I imagine myself becoming, and I love it. I plunge in wholeheartedly and wallow in it, and it is a self-reinforcing cycle, since because no one else follows me to that place, it further illuminates the loneliness which defines the illusion. It is a dark and joyless fantasy which I adopt to become mysterious, to become a mystery which I desperately hope someone will want to solve (yeah, right). I cry out like a child for someone to do that, to come and find me in the storm of my own devising, but no one notices the whirlwind of aloofness ironically designed to attract; to everyone else, I am just like they are (but with flashes of melodrama, which is what this entry will be chalked up to). And so bitterness grows and becomes a palpable wedge and I want to run. I want to run now, away from the mess of misunderstanding and hurt feelings and people that have gone from being my salvation to being my despair. I want to be alone with myself, but then again that’s the last thing I want… I don’t know what I want, and this confusion goes right to the core of things and sometimes I am so befuddled with it I want to hurt people just so they will send me away. I want to hurt the people I am supposed to, whom I want to love, so that they push me away so I don’t have to love them, because I can’t give that. The black-cloaked, high-minded wanderer does not reveal himself in love! No–he is pursued and uncovered and persuaded to love by someone who has discovered how to do this pursuing and persuading, and then he is able to love. But right now, love cannot escape the cloak–his unnoticed “mystery” (plea for attention) suffocates it before it can be free and bring life…

It has been a long time since I have found so much ugliness in myself, and my response is isolation. When I am with people, I am only reminded of lack: they cannot give what I need, and I cannot be what they want… But when I am with myself, I am only reminded of my own insufficiency. (Oh yeah, God doesn’t seem interested in meeting those needs either). For the first time in perhaps ever, I feel hope truly dying. Hope that this community experiment would start me on a path that would remain new and exciting and would change my life forever. Hope that some girl that I want to love me would actually want that too. Hope that there are hidden and beautiful things just waiting to be named. Hope that I would stop writing blog entries in anger against God and just fucking submit. All kinds of hope, draining through the floor as I type. Underneath my cynical exterior, I have always been deeply hopeful. Now, I sit here and stare ahead, and in my deepest of hearts, it really does look dark. I moved to California for the hope of living out faith in a community that I could be myself in without neverending conflict, and for the hope of finding someone to love. A year later, I don’t just feel no closer, I feel tricked.

I don’t know whether it is God, the world, or myself, that has done the deceiving, and I don’t really care. None of the options make any sense to me. A month ago I was hopeful, and my life was as integrated as it had ever been. Now, I’ve never felt any more dis integrated, and despair is in my lungs like water, drowning me. All the things I thought were real and true have been laid bare, deconstructed, and at the bottom of many of them I see my own plans, my own machinations, my own desires, my own subconscious urgings…and maybe nothing more. I see the same motives of mine that have caused me so much pain in the past being replayed in new contexts, being brought out all of a sudden like a twist in the plot, and I’m devastated.

Enough words. Here is how I feel: I want it to rain for a long time. I want to call it forth and let it run like rivers all over, and I don’t want it to stop.

The content is basically science, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, theology, and where we can find a healthy and fruitful convergence of these disciplines. Of course, I’m all about that, so I’m finding myself taking more notes and asking more questions in three days then I did in most whole courses at Stanford.

Best of all, I was able to convince Nick, Jenna, and Justin to come to Orlando, stay at my house, and attend the seminar as well. We are having great times of hanging out at night, chilling in the hot tub (look, a joke!), cooking, maybe a little beering, whatever. It’s meaningful for me to have them here especially today, since it’s one year exactly since I took a hindsightedly fateful flight from Orlando to California, and met up with people there for the first time since graduation. This of course spawned that whole series of discussions on faith and community that lasted months, and culminated in my eventual (and gradual) move back to Palo Alto, which was a decidedly big switch in life trajectories. I’m still in the middle of the fruits of that decision, but I’ve already seen so many wonderful things come of it. I’m only hoping for more, though I have no idea what it might or might not look like.

So, even though I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep due to, ahem, World of Warcraft with my brother, and there’s no doubt lots of things I could complain about in various areas of my life, it would be a supreme travesty to feel anything but a profound sense of gratitude at this moment. That gratitude also conveniently enables me to put aside my perennial worries about the future and girls and so on (mostly girls), at least for a while, and it’s a welcome relief! I can always pick those worries up again when I get tired of being at peace (which will probably be in about 5 minutes…never had much luck with the stuff).

• Semifreddis cinnamon swirl bread
• Drinking tea again, since it’s cold enough to
• The Velvet Teen
• Jimmy Eat World’s Stay on My Side Tonight EP
• Takk
• Jed’s Other Poem
• Installing Kubuntu and trying to get wireless drivers working
• Ndiswrapper (see previous item)
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
• Ruby on Rails
• Cron + PHP for the win in easy archive/backup
• “tail -f access_log | grep IP” for tracking use patterns on this site in real time, and “tail -f access_log” in general for a good procrastination method
• The World of Warcraft grind
• Flaming Dr. Peppers
• The Palo Alto Moonlight 10k (for complicated reasons having to do with not paying the sign-up fee, I ran as “Ryan Frederick”, in the 30-39 division, though I am still only 23)
• Intense ultimate frisbee with friends
• Dropping temperatures and overcast skies
• Pad Thai all the time
• Harry Potter VI out loud with Nyffy (the Chris one)
• The Firefly Complete Series
• Arrested Development - Season One
• favicon.ico
• Pizza + beer + WoW with my brother at my family’s place in San Francisco
• Uncomfortable honesty
• A dream in progress
• Strong community
• Hope that doesn’t die for some reason

(OK, I did get a little deep at the end; I couldn’t help it!)

More Photos

I’m now pretty much exclusively writing at my teleios weblog, which, although it has less snazzy of a design, was in fact completely coded by me (take that, Movable Type!) and exists in a network of a bunch of other cool people’s weblogs. So please make sure to be checking that site as frequently as you used to check this one, or better yet go there and subscribe to the RSS feed, or even better yet sign up and choose to get e-mail notifications when new entries are posted.

So for now, farewell from jonathanlipps.com/weblog!

• Adam did not have an earthly father
• We know anything at all about the end of the world, or that this world will be physically destroyed
• We know anything at all about Satan, devils, or angels, or anything at all about how they do or might affect the world or humans
• There are more than, oh, 5 people in the world who are really Christians
• Our task in the world is to make more Christians, rather than to become Christians
• We should pray about anything other than our own inability to mature spiritually
• We should bow our heads while praying
• Worship music has some intrinsic value
• We will be conscious immediately after we die, i.e., there is life immediately after death
• Heaven is another plane of existence
• Hell exists, and/or we know anything about it
• God makes it so that some people do not choose him
• “Christianity” means something useful
• The scriptures are always supposed to be applicable to our daily life
• We should study the book of Revelation for clues to what the end times will be like
• The first chapters of Genesis should be taken in any way literally
• We can regard modern “Christianity” with any attitude other than cynicism.
• Religious leaders of today are different from the Pharisees of Jesus’ day
• The New Testament tells us something about practical sexual morality
• We understand the point of spiritual disciplines
• This or that person is sinful in the eyes of God
• We must ask Jesus for forgiveness for all the sins we committed since the last time we asked for forgiveness
• We can improve on the Lord’s Prayer
• God put the forbidden tree in the middle of the garden just to test humanity
• God “knows the future”
• Persecution is necessarily a sign of following Christ
• The narrow door is wide open
• We know who is blessed and who is cursed in this life
• We should be sad that we don’t see the miracles of the New Testament nowadays
• We know what things are of God and what things just happened
• God audibly speaks to people
• Spiritual growth can happen consistently in groups of more than 10 people
• We should agree with some categorization of spiritual gifts
• God hardens people’s hearts
• Christ came primarily to die on the cross
• … and more, if I spent another 10 minutes writing

I still believe some of these things, and I even act like I believe some things that I doubt the most strongly. And I’m talking about today’s doubts–tomorrow’s will be as different as yesterday’s were. Moreover, I’ll even defend some of those things if I’m in an environment where people are deriding them out of hand. But I also feel a great need, in the opposite environment, where it seems people just assume those things, to make my doubts known.

Most importantly, I don’t feel particularly bad that I doubt them. In fact, these doubts are not burning me up with the need to answer any questions. I’m quite comfortable remaining exactly here! Of course, it would be nice to know for sure one way or another, and it is likely that I am silly to doubt some things in the list, since they will turn out to be obviously true, but I’m tired of hiding the doubt, and tired of people who don’t seem to have doubted them in the same way. It feels a bit suffocating and alienating–I feel the need to go wander alone in the desert.

In sum, it is not my doubts that cause me consternation–they’re like old friends–but rather how to interact with people who do not share them.

Anyway, for the purposes of providing some small reassurance, I do not seriously doubt, nor have I ever doubted, as far as I can remember, the following things:

• God exists
• God created the universe
• The Trinity is real–Christ is God incarnate, and the Spirit is God in us
• Christ shows us the way to life and God (salvation, if you want to call it that)
• Our hope is in the coming of the Kingdom, which has been happening for a while, but which will happen in a final sense in the future
• Death is not the end of the story for those with that hope

Stripped-down, but real to me.

There are other ways to ask the question of course–what is the goal of this community? Why are we doing this? What is it we are doing exactly? Why are we here? But my favorite is still, “what are we trying to become, and why?”

My bet is that people would not all write the same thing, nor would they feel the same about what others wrote. What does that mean? How much should we want to “be on the same page” (i.e., have unity of vision), what does it take to get there, and what’s worth sacrificing for it?

My conclusion, after seeing it, was that it’s probably the best sci-fi movie I have seen in the theaters, for as long as I can remember. The problem with sci-fi movies is that they’re typically either “sci-fi”, meaning, not sci-fi in spirit, but set in space, so everyone thinks it’s sci-fi, or that they’re sci-fi in spirit, but horribly written and acted or produced.

So, movies like The Matrix and Star Wars fall into the former category, because they are clearly not in the sci-fi genre, though being set in space and/or a digital reality. (What exactly counts as sci-fi I’ll leave for a later blog entry, but if you’ve read Dune or pretty much any Asimov, you’ll know what I mean).

Speaking of Dune, the Sci-Fi Channel’s miniseries The Children of Dune is a great example of the second category–great sci-fi world and story, but poor execution. Granted, it was the best they could do, and after seeing The Village, I retroactively liked William Hurt in The Children of Dune, but in the end that’s no excuse.

Suffice it to say, then, that while the Serenity trailer looked like another Sci-Fi channel blunder, the movie itself was a real joy to watch. The characters, which given the trailer I thought would be overdramatic and overacted, were actually very nuanced and well-done in the movie viewed as a whole. They were, for lack of a better word, believable! That’s sci-fi’s greatest challenge–to make a set of believable characters in a barely-believable world. Almost 100% of the time, either the writer or the actor makes some serious mistakes in that task.

But anyway, that strength held the movie together and made it something I will definitely want to see again. The effects actually looked worse in the trailer, too–all clunky old-school CGI. I mean, it was there in the movie as well, but it looks like they picked some of the cheesiest renders for the trailer, and in the movie you didn’t really notice it.

The cinematography, while not groundbreaking, was just plain interesting. It was never boring, and steered mostly clear of the clichéd action-movie shot sequences.

Lastly, the writing was fun in that the dialect(s) of English being spoken in the movie were subtly different, mixing some archaisms and some neologisms, and some things that I’d never heard before. It added to the believability of the story taking place in a post-Earth solar system.

The movie also had some morals you could extrapolate about human nature and creation and control, but it didn’t beat you over the head with it so neither will I.

Bottom line: if you consider yourself a fan of true sci-fi, you’ll love this movie. If you don’t, it may be because you’ve never actually seen a true sci-fi movie done well, so give it a shot anyhow.

Man, when did I turn into a movie reviews site. This is weird!

I want to leave you, my good reader who has valiantly suffered through my musings on Kierkegaard, with something he said near the end of the address, and which I think is what Kierkegaard himself would have wanted us to remember maybe more than anything else in his massive corpus:

Imagine a solitary wayfarer, a desert wanderer. Almost burned by the heat of the sun, languishing with thirst, he finds a spring. O refreshing coolness! Now God be praised, he says–and yet it was merely a spring he found; what then must not he say who found God!

And then:

But Thou, O God, who art unchangeable, Thou art always and invariably to be found, and always to be found unchanged. Whether in life or in death, no one journeys so far afield that Thou art not to be found by him, that Thou art not there, Thou who art everywhere. It is not so with the well-springs of the earth, for they are to be found only in special places. And besides–overwhelming security!–Thou dost not remain, like the spring, in a single place, but Thou dost follow the traveller on his way. Ah, and no one ever wanders so far astray that he cannot find the way back to Thee, Thou who art not merely as a spring that may be found–how poor and inadequate a description of what Thou art!–but rather as a spring that itself seeks out the thirsty traveller, the errant wanderer: who has ever heard the like of any spring! Thus Thou art unchangeably always and everywhere to be found. And whenever any human being comes to Thee, of whatever age, at whatever time of the day, in whatever state: if he comes in sincerity he always finds Thy love equally warm, like the spring’s unchanged coolness, O Thou who art unchangeable! Amen!

Amen, indeed.

…We are what is called a “Christian” nation–but in such a sense that not a single one of us is in the character of the Christianity of the New Testament, any more than I am, who again and again have repeated, and do now repeat, that I am only a poet. The illusion of a Christian nation is due doubtless to the power which number exercises over the imagination. I have not the least doubt that every single individual in the nation will be honest enough with God and with himself to say in solitary conversation, “If I must be candid, I do not deny that I am not a Christian in the New Testament sense; if I must be honest, I do not deny that my life cannot be called an effort in the direction what the New Testament calls Christianity, in the direction of denying myself, renouncing the world, dying from it, etc.; rather the earthly and the temporal become more and more important to me with every year I live.” I have not the least doubt that everyone will, with respect to ten of his acquaintances, let us say, be able to hold fast to the view that they are not Christians in the New Testament sense, and that their lives are not even an effort in the direction of becoming so. But when there are 100,000, one becomes confused.

And:

Or (merely to take one example of what is everywhere present in the New Testament): when Christ requires us to save our life eternally (and that surely is what we propose to attain as Christians) and to hate our own life in this world, is there then a single one among us whose life in the remotest degree could be called even the weakest effort in this direction? And perhaps there are thousands of “Christians” in the land who are not so much as aware of this requirement. So then we “Christians” are living, and are loving our life, just in the ordinary human sense. If then by “grace” God will nevertheless regard us as Christians, one thing at least must be required: that we, being precisely aware of the requirement, have a true conception of how infinitely great is the grace that is shown us. “Grace” cannot possibly stretch so far, one thing it must never be used for, it must never be used to suppress or to diminish the requirement; for in that case “grace” would turn Christianity upside down.

So while September 26 is no longer a cause for unbridled joy and wondering if I may have some good presents waiting, it is of course a good excuse to do things like take a midnight shot of sub-30-degree vodka. Mmmm.

Somewhat randomly and incidentally, yesterday and today were the first days I’ve taken any time in the last few years to work on Enaselvai, my constructed language. Many people do not know I have a constructed language, and for their sake, I prefer to keep it that way. I find that people cannot handle this knowledge gracefully. Anyway, things have remained largely static over the last few years, but for some reason I felt emotionally compelled to work on it a bit.

Everyone knows that artists create art as an emotional/intellectual response to things they are going through. I do this with music quite often, and understandably, as many artists are musicians. I also have this tendency to create linguistic art–not art with words, but words themselves as art. So cracking open the Enaselvai dictionary and going on a word-creation spree is no doubt my artistic response to something that is happening right now or moving me in some way; not sure what.

But anyway I thought I’d give you all, hobbit-fashion, a birthday present on this day; a fresh, brand-new sentence in Enaselvai, never before existing! It’s always exciting to write these sentences, like fresh tracks in a new linguistic snowfall…but I’ve catalogued this feeling elsewhere.

It’s actually a translation of a Bible verse, though which one I’m not going to say. It’s not a particularly meaningful verse anyway, but I wanted a translation project, and I wanted something that I am in some ways or in some senses hoping will characterize the upcoming year for me. Here it is:

Ecó nai le’potényue se’elódum, lea’beréleose, ter vi vánlea berélec io lairévarse.

Kudos to anyone who can guess what verse it is. I followed the Greek syntax pretty nearly, but that’s not a very good clue. Also, don’t guess out loud.

Here’s a better clue; a veritable Rosetta stone and a marvelously alliterative sentence in Enaselvai–possibly the first one-line poem in the history of the language!

Vi van vódca.

Which of course means, “Vodka is good.” Slainte!

In other news, my theme song has officially changed. For the year following my 22nd birthday, it was the rather in-hindsight-unappropriately-but-hopefully-named “Fell In Love At 22”, by Starflyer 59. Now, it is the more numeric but more appropriately-named “23”, from the recent Jimmy Eat World album. I think it’s going to be a good theme song, and while there’s not quite the optimism in the title, I think I can live with that.

In my however many years of being in Palo Alto for the second half of September, it has never rained even once. And for my however many years of going to Stanford, it has thundered at most once a year, always faint and fleeting.

What does this mean? Nothing at all probably, but it is very exciting to let the imagination run wild (in a Day After Tomorrow sense); maybe this global warming thing is actually going to change our climate… How long can we hack away at our ties to the earth before it comes back to bite us?

The simple man who humbly confesses himself to be a sinner–himself personally (the individual)–does not at all need to become aware of all the difficulties which emerge when one is neither simple nor humble. But when this is lacking, this humble consciousness of being personally a sinner (the individual)–yea, if such a one possessed all human wisdom and shrewdness along with all human talents, it would profit him little. Christianity shall in a degree corresponding to his superiority erect itself against him and transform itself into madness and terror, until he learns either to give up Christianity, or else by the help of what is very far remote from scientific propaedeutic, apologetic, &c., that is, by the help of the torments of a contrite heart (just in proportion to his need of it) learns to enter by the narrow way, through the consciousness of sin, into Christianity.

A camel passing through the eye of the needle, indeed! It is so clear–am I not rich in every imaginable way?

Christ offended the rich young ruler when he told him to sell all his possessions… Kierkegaard’s point is that it was very natural and reasonable for him to be offended while the disciples were not when Christ called them.

Assuming I am even able to recognize the offense in my case (which is a point in favor of the rich young ruler–he knew what Christ meant for him), what will I do? Will it be the offense that moves me (“Go, sell all your possessions”) and sends me away, as it did the young ruler? Or will it be the invitation ("…and come follow me.") that moves me and draws me in? It seems that being a Christian just is getting over the offense somehow, having faith in spite of it–and the richer/wiser we are, the more easily we are offended, therefore the harder it is to have faith.

For me, I hope it is the invitation I ultimately embrace, in spite of the offense. But I am realizing I cannot take this process for granted, neither its outcome!

Here I am, beginning finally to uncover my weakness, to see that I am truly weak; I am in awe of it!

But this precisely is now the misfortune of Christendom, as for many, many years it has been, that Christ is neither the one thing or the other, neither what He was when He lived on earth, nor what (as is believed) He shall be at His return, but one about whom in an illicit way, through history, people have learned to know something to the effect that He was somebody or another of considerable consequence. In an unpermissible and unlawful way people have become knowing about Christ, for the only permissible way is to be believing. People have mutually confirmed one another in the notion that by the aid of the upshot [effects] of Christ’s life and the 1,800 years (the consequences) they have become acquainted with the answer to the problem. By degrees, as this came to be accounted wisom, all pith and vigor was distilled out of Christianity; the tension of the paradox was relaxed, one became a Christian without noticing it, and without in the least noticing the possibility of offense. One took possession of Christ’s doctrine, turned it about and pared it down, while He of course remained surety for its truth, He whose life had such stupendous results in history. All became as simple as thrusting a foot into the stocking. And quite naturally, because in that way Christianity became paganism. In Christianity there is perpetual Sunday twaddle about Christianity’s glorious and pricelss truths, its sweet consolation; but it is only too evident that Christ lived 1,800 years ago. The Sign of Offense and the object of Faith has become the most romantic of all fabulous figures, a divine Uncle George. One does not know what it is to be offended, still less what it is to worship. What one especially praises in Christ is precisely what one would be most embittered by if one were contemporary with it, whereas now one is quite secure in reliance upon the upshot; and in reliance upon this proof from history, that He quite certainly was the great one, one draws the conclusion: Ergo that was the right thing. This is to say, That is the right, the noble, the sublime, the true thing, if it was He that did it; this is the same as to say that one does not trouble oneself to learn to know in a deeper sense what it was He did, still less to try, according to one’s slender ability, by God’s help to imitate Him in doing the thing that is right and noble and sublime and true. For what that is one does not apprehend and may therefore in the situation of today form a judgment diametrically opposite to the truth. One is content to admire and praise, and may be (as was said of a scrupulous translator who rendered an author word for word and therefore made no meaning) “too conscientious,” perhaps also too cowardly and too feeble of heart really to wish to understand.

Christendom has done away with Christianity, without being quite aware of it. The consequence is that, if anything is to be done, one must try again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.

It doesn’t feel good to realize that you have been treating people with less than the fullest of respect; and it feels even worse to not know how to go about changing, or whether you even want to. Christ help me.

Do you think what I think?

Do you see what I see?

Do you know what I know?

Do you like what I like?

Do you believe what I believe?

The question is:

When you hear this song, do you feel what I feel?

…

And my fear is that the answer is always no. That is what I mean by loneliness.

Podornot is a fun mash-up of the new podcasting trend (internet buzz, anyone?) and the old Internet time-wasting stand-by, Hot or not.

The idea is to generate a random audio experience; you never know what you’re going to get! But as you go through, you can rate the podcasts you hear, and maybe someday we will use this information to create lists of the hottest podcasts on the web. So go to the site and check it out!

Graphic/visual design right now done by me and Justin, hopefully to be improved in the near future.

Anyway, it’s fun to have an idea, to implement it rapidly, and to see it pretty much near completion in a short amount of time. Go visit!

Recently I’ve taken to a strategy which has been used, to great effect, by almost every software giant in existence. This strategy doesn’t so much solve the workday synchronization problem (as getting up at 4:30 am would, for example), but instead says that, actually, desynchronization is the solution! Namely: around-the-clock development.

This is how it works:

At 6am Eastern, Joe and Pavi get to work at Teleios headquarters. They put in a good 8 hours of work, writing new code and testing code that I’ve written previously. In the course of this writing and testing, they come up with a number of bugs having to do with my web app or with the integration process.

Then, around 12pm Pacific, I stumble out of bed and wander bleary-eyed in my underwear to my computer downstairs, where I check my e-mail and immediately wish I hadn’t. I’m greeted by the results of Teleios’ hard labor the previous day (well, it’s the same calendar day, but I got up so late it’s effectively after their work day), namely a huge list of bugs for me to squash.

So I spend a good 4-5 hours fixing bugs and wondering when it was that I wrote that particular line of code and was I on drugs at the time? About then it’s dinner time, so I’ll do that and hang out with people, play sports or games or talk or whatever. Then around 10pm-12am, I’ll put in another few hours of work, and this is when I code new features, since all the previous part of the day has been spent on fixing old ones.

Sometimes I’ll code (like I did a few days ago) to 3am, which is just about when Joe and Pavi are getting into the office in Florida. Now it’s their turn to be greeted by a bunch of new code which may or may not play nice with their own respective pieces of software!

In this way the proverbial sun never sets on the Teleios workday.

Rawr!

(Can I just say I love that Wikipedia is also a World of Warcraft strategy guide?)

It was the first time I’d been to one of these events, and needless to say I was shocked by the high price of the tickets. I realized halfway through, however, that I was watching one of the finest performances I’d ever seen, anywhere. The physical training and prowess displayed easily surpassed any other show of ability I’d seen, whether in sports or arts, and the live music must have been played by some of the best musicians in entertainment.

The show was also particularly interesting for me because it was one of those things where there’s always something going on. There was always someone or other dancing or doing something clever in the background, or flying across the upper parts of the auditorium on a wire, or whatever.

As a rule, I’m hyper-aware, so it was a feast for that hyper-awareness to always have things to notice. Every time I saw something I wasn’t intended to see because my attention was supposed to be focused on the main act, I got excited and leaned over and told David, who probably didn’t care. I’m just talking about times when the cast would surreptitiously clip a safety carabiner to a hidden harness on their way to a dangerous move, or when the electric violinist you could barely see, hidden behind several layers of columns, was really rocking out. I loved all this background stuff.

But, having been thinking a lot about community and spiritual things lately, I was surprised to also have several somewhat awesome realizations whilst watching this display of artistic excellence, relating to the spiritual life lived in community. I remember having 3 or 4 of these realizations, but all that I can recall now are two:

1. Unity is awe-inspiring. There were a number of times throughout the performance where a group of performers would be doing something incredible on their own, for example rolling around in these huge circular wire cages, or playing with this insane chinese yo-yo thing (I know, I need video clips). Anyway, it was amazing, and the crowd burst into applause.

Then, these groups of performers would do something even more complicated, namely performing with their respective props, but synchronously. That is, their actions and motions interplayed with the actions and motions of another, forming this intricate dance whilst maintaining an impossible individual routine. And of course, the crowd bursts into applause.

But then, the best thing of all would happen–two of the performers would actually pretend to be one person! In other words, say there were two girls doing tricks with this chinese yo-yo thing, which requires both hands to manipulate in all these incredible and impossible ways. Well, they would get together and share the same prop, using the right arm from the rightmost girl, and the left arm from the left, to act as one performer.

This subtly blew my mind away…the level of focus and control to do what they were doing seemed to require having one mind. It was insane how their hands could move as if they were receiving instantaneous instructions from one source. So now, the crowd goes the most wild, because they unconsciously realize this point–being that on-the-same-page with another human being is truly awe-inspiring.

The spiritual lesson: it is the same with our community relationships! If we do things with a unity like that the Cirque cast has achieved physically, then the crowd (read: outside world) will involuntarily shout out in applause, because it is delightful and amazing.

2. Discipline brings freedom. At one point during the show, a well-muscled, gymnast-looking man grabbed hold of two narrow red curtains which had dropped from the ceiling, took a short run, and then jumped. He proceeded to soar, arms back and back arched like gliding bird, in a huge arc toward the sky. With the fluttering of the sheets around him and the fact that his body was kept perfectly still, he appeared to serenely lift. In truth, it looked less like the curtains were pulling him upward, and more like his body was actually propelling them with its own power of flight.

The lie was given when the next act took center stage, and I glimpsed this man in the shadows, stomach heaving with the exertion he hadn’t shown during his routine. It had looked like nothing special for him to iron-cross through the air without even solid rings, but in fact it was hard even for this burly guy. It would have been strictly impossible, of course, for anyone in the audience.

But he had trained his body to such an extent that, with every muscle in it straining, it looked like flying was completely natural to him. This training came at a certain cost–daily discipline. No doubt he had some latent physical ability from birth, but without the discipline he would have been like the fat guy they picked for the mountain biker to jump over earlier in the show.

I’m imagining that, in none of his practice sessions, whether it was lifting weights or running or doing scores of pull-ups, did he ever feel like he was flying. To the contrary, his body probably never felt more tied to the earth than when he was bench-pressing something insane. But twice a night (or however often), he gets on stage and flies like a bird, with a smile on his face, and in the freedom that discipline brings.

The spiritual lesson: spiritual disciplines will probably not feel very illuminating or liberating. In fact, they may feel very much like chains. More importantly, they are not instant pathways to anything or at all related to my desire for the end state they bring, in the same way that, even if I wanted to be like this flying Cirque du Soleil entertainer, it would take me years at least to be physically able…who knows, it might even be impossible, given that I have been set in certain physical ways for so many years!

But in the end, after years of hardship and training, spiritual disciplines will pay out in the most unimaginable of ways–the ability to truly fly, spiritually. And if and when I do, those around will greet it with awe, believing that this is some supernatural power being shown, when in reality it is simply what happens naturally in a life that is oriented in a certain direction. It is a genuine natural miracle–natural because built into the fabric of life, and miraculous because it is the work that God desires to do in us.

Well, between these two things, I think there is a lot to ponder. The most excitement comes, in particular, with thinking about the integration of these two lessons–can you imagine a spiritually unified, disciplined group of individuals? I would like to see it; I would like to be it. It would be so amazing, just like the performance that moved me last night.

In truth I don’t feel like giving my usual play-by-play of an international trip, but shall instead point you to my other weblog, where I wrote about my feelings upon arrival back in the States. That entry is here.

Wait…I have another weblog?? Yes, I do! I am happy to announce that the web application I have been developing for almost a year at work is finally going live (beta, of course). I think it’s pretty cool, and it has a weblog system I wrote from scratch, so I’ve been writing entries in it for a while now to test it out. My weblog is here, and you can get to the main page here: e4:online.

There’s a bit of a description there of what the site is for, so feel free to sign up and play around with it!

I decided that my e4:online weblog will be where I write most things of some interest to people who don’t care about my deep personal issues, or whatever it is I’ve been writing about here. I’ll continue to keep this weblog for both those things.

Sorry to go double-weblog on you, but I’m sure you can handle it, and if not…use bloglines and subscribe to the RSS feed for this weblog and the Teleios one. Cheers!

It goes beyond the intellect–sure, I may struggle with some arguments for a period of time and then come to some conclusion on them, but they have never felt convincing.

So we were talking about where these feelings come from, and Pavi brought up a framework centered around authority, to explain our epistemological attitudes. Essentially, we filter all knowledge and beliefs to certain degrees through various authorities. There are internal authorities, such as reason and experience, and external ones, such as books, people, groups, schools, etc… (We could narrow these down to several fundamental authorities if we were interested).

When it comes down to it, of course, there is no authority, internal or external, which is 100% self-sworn. That is, we can always question any authority to some degree, even our own internal authorities of reason or experience, because we can always wonder whether (a) the deliverances of reason are certainly true, and (b) a certain experience we had was even real.

So it’s basically the same Cartesian doubt cashed out in terms of authority. And, depending on who we are, we may trust these authorities more or less than other people. There’s really no objective psychological explanation for this, but the one we came up with is simply analogous to personal trust: if you believe an authority, and it “lets you down” (ruins your life somehow, like an oppressive Catholic school headmaster might), you will begin to distrust that authority.

That, ultimately, is what we decided doubt is. Philosophically speaking, doubt and faith can be very easy to define: set a level of certitude (willingness to assent to a certain proposition), and say that if you hold to that proposition more than that certitude level, you have faith in it, otherwise you doubt it. Quick, clean, easy–only uninteresting. We have simply defined doubt as unbelief and faith as belief. But just as I think faith is much closer to the concept of trust than the concept of belief, so I now think that doubt is much closer to the concept of distrust than the concept of unbelief.

This actually has some pretty large ramifications because, if it is right, most people don’t doubt God’s goodness because they disbelieve he exists, or anything of the sort; rather, because at some point in their lives, something has happened to make them distrust this God or this idea of God, whether it was an unthinking fundamentalist pastor or parents who were oppressive, or maybe an overall death of the trust faculty due to something unrelated to God–a father walking out, or whatever.

I like this theory because it seems to explain well the way people actually interact with issues of faith. And certainly I don’t want to recommend trusting just any authority, for instance ones that tell you pink unicorns are dancing on the roof But it does put atheistic and theistic types on more of a level footing, since in the end it turns out atheists are just trusting different authorities than theists. And certainly some authorities are better than others (I think), but the question becomes how you determine this.

I like it because it nicely steps away from the purely intellectual debate where not much interesting happens anyway, but asks a question which needs to be answered even before the debate, which is “who do you trust?” Who do you trust, and why? Some might trust God and some might trust science (i.e., scientists) and some might trust culture and some might try their best to trust no one (or themselves), and when that is on the table the proper debate can begin, over who/what is actually worthy (or not) of this trust.

Keep in mind that it is a very individual discussion, since trust is a relationship between individuals and other individuals, and so the discussion is less likely to get sidetracked away from the people who are in it.

Well, a lot more thinking needs to be done here, but this idea of doubt being actually a very different kind of thing than mere skepticism, and faith being very different from mere belief, is a fruitful one, I think.

We spent hours each day getting to know each other more and learning of our deepest-rooted fears and hopes and scars, in the context of a real adventure where we forded rivers with 4x4s and got stuck in potholes multiple feet deep.

We were able to find our own little place on the Guanacaste coast and stay there for 5 days, having practically our own private beach to surf and play in. Each night we were treated to the best and most authentic Italian food we have ever had, prepared by a talented chef solely for our group (including fresh, hand-made pasta) and served by an impishly delightful old Italian woman, world traveler and former NYC dancer.

We were able to sink into a rhythm for a few days that did not consist only of work and sleep, but something more real as we felt the freedom to engage in each other’s lives without worrying what else we had to do.

In truth, we fell in love with Costa Rica, with its country motto, its country beer, its country liquor… But more importantly the people and the way of life we saw, which while so much more crude in some senses than life here in the US, was so much more beautifully simple. There were many dreaming discussions about moving down there, starting a school for local children (including ours eventually), teaching in a new and more profoundly spiritual way, building homes without cutting down trees, and developing without destroying the essence of the place (which destruction we saw beginning to happen with American-owned resorts popping up along the coast). Big dreams and big ideas, from the philosophy of education to housing development!–see, the kingdom knows no boundaries.

And lastly, we talked long and hard about how we could maintain some of the practices we engaged in upon returning to our Silicon Valley locale. We are very hopeful that our experience will help kickstart a new, more vibrant, and more prophetic way of life here. But honestly, now that we are back, I think we are all a little overwhelmed at the difficulty of that task. The first thing I did when coming home was to check the absurd amount of e-mail I received, and it reminded me of all the subtle ways in which our culture literally oppresses us and makes true community, true life, nearly impossible at times.

If we can figure out how to maintain our spiritual order here, though… if we can do that–I believe it will be one of the most powerful and miraculous things that can happen. And that is our hope.

Just wanted to drop a line and say hello–hope you folks get along well without me while I’m gone. Doubt I’ll have internet outside of San Jose here–we’re going to some remote (and awesome) hot springs and beaches starting tomorrow.

So far Costa Rica is a cool place–very Centroamericano, and the country saying is–“Pura Vida”. I love it.

See you guys in some days! (I forget how many)

Assuming we survive and make it back OK, I’m sure I’ll be posting stories and pictures here!

If you know who I am talking about, good for you, and get excited for the official release! It is definitely going to be one of the most amazing albums of the year.

Anyway, I just mention it because I listened to the album nonstop on repeat yesterday (imagine that I will today as well), and it is a perfect and moving example of the glorious beauty which, for me, causes sadness and even pain.

Unfortunately I don’t dare betraying trust by posting an audio sample; you’ll have to wait!

Basically, there are times when I feel that my heart gets so heavy, so full (don’t think of these things as contradictory), that I am unable to contain any more of what it is full with, and it has to be released in the form of some emotion. For me the appropriate emotion has always seemed to be sadness, or whatever you call it when tears come. So on the outside, it looks as if I am sad about something, when really the case is that the sadness is just my involuntary response to the depth, or the power, or the reality, or (especially) the beauty of whatever it is that I am thinking about or looking at or pondering. I suppose that for others, the emotional response might be different. Maybe it is excitement, or maybe it is frustration. For me, it is sadness (i.e., the appearance of it).

I noticed recently that there are really only a few things which make me feel this way. Themes, I guess you could call them, and they recur with frequency. I rarely come upon them immediately or intentionally, but typically after pondering or considering something unrelated. Oftentimes I’ll be reading a book and realize that I’ve been skimming for a few paragraphs, not really comprehending any words, and suddenly my heart is off on one of these themes. At that point I’m effectively paralyzed–I have to sit and soak in the experience whether I like it or not, or find it convenient or not. If it happens when I’m around people, I become irritable. Most often, though, it is the result of music. Since this ties into one of the themes itself, I’ll handle the explanation for that later.

So, what are these themes? After a little while’s reflection, I believe there are 4 main ones, but, as you will see, they are all really connected. I’m not sure what the nature of the connection is; is it hierarchical or is it a flat network? I don’t know. But here they are, my defining sadnesses:

Not having found my one female companion

Don’t laugh–it’s true, and it is the theme that has been most in my mind recently (of the four), and I’ll probably write most about it here. Now, remember what I said earlier, I am not sad in the unfortunate/unhappy sense when I think about my singleness. Rather, I believe that I am having an entirely fruitful life experience, and especially in my human relationships, what with the incredible family and friends that constantly surround me. No, the sense is somewhat more general, almost unrelated to my life per se.

There is something deep within me that resonates with the concept of a pair of separate yet unified human beings, essentially different in their masculinity and femininity, but pulled together in an ever-deepening dance which traces out the steps of love. I also resonate, as you might have guessed, with Lewis’ imaginative and deeply true and free account of gender in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.

You mustn’t think as a result of that that I hold to any particular way that male and female are or should be related, whether that pertains to spiritual authority or social roles or even whether it is good to marry in the first place. I especially wouldn’t want you to think that I believe this sense I have is necessarily found in every human. No, I can sidestep all those issues; I can even sidestep that fearful Christian question of whether I am supposed to be celibate! I do that because I’m not talking about here about what I think I should do or what I think is good for me or anything like that. Rather, I am describing a part of myself which is core enough to be defining, and that part wholeheartedly embraces the idea of male/female love elucidating God’s love. “It is not good for man to be alone,” just like, apparently, it wasn’t good for God to be alone.

I have had these ideas and desires for that kind of love as long as I can remember. Maybe it was the fact that since before I was born my parents were exhibiting it. Maybe it’s the books I read. Maybe it’s the fantastical nature of those books, with their fairy-tale romances and their insistence that (despite what you might think), love beats out magic any day. Maybe it’s because I learned early on that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted to do, in terms of my abilities, but that all of those things had to do with me. Love requires another person, and to make it good love with that person requires more than brains or physical ability…it requires the heart of Christ.

My relationships, while being mostly disastrous from a certain perspective (and mostly awesome from others, of course)–the perspective of my own maturity (i.e., lack of it)–merely whet my appetite for a healthy and lasting relationship.

Anyway, the point is that after many years, I have decided that the bare fact is that I am made for love. I could be wrong about that, but if I am, it will be a long and painful road to that discovery (so I’m hoping I’m not wrong). In other words, there is a very real sense in which, while I feel completely satisfied in every part of my life, and can’t even think of any real practical benefits to being in a serious relationship at the moment, incompleteness lingers. It is always there in the back of my mind, gently pressuring. I have often mistaken this pressure, which is really just a reflection of my deepest personality in believing it is made for love, for attraction (attraction as including but not limited to physical desire)…which has left me in the embarrassing position several times of realizing that I’m not actually attracted to so-and-so, even though I’ve been telling her this!

Fortunately for me, every other time or so, things “don’t work out” before I come to that realization, and I am spared hurting someone horribly. Still, I myself feel duped (by myself) when I gain enough clarity to realize I was going after someone specific, not for any specific motivations, but because of this general push of my heart, when what (I decided) really warrants a pursuit is a specific push, if that makes sense. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt one of these, but now I’m hoping I’ll be able to recognize it.

So I ponder this often, and the deep roots into my heart the theme has often led me to this melancholic sadness I’m describing (which is all the more poignant when I don’t have any pursuits, like right now).

Not being able to learn all the world’s languages

I just realized this is one of my defining sadnesses this weekend. I was sitting at my desk, working or something, when I glanced up at my bookshelf. As I scanned it I noticed all my “teach-yourself” language books, or grammar references, or whatever, of which I have over 20. My eyes moved from Old English to Welsh to German to Japanese to Hindi to Thai to Portuguese to Latin to Greek to Spanish, and at each stop I felt a slight twinge of, believe it or not, emotional pain.

Maybe it came from remembering the times at which I bought each of those books. I was probably standing in a bookstore in the language section, dreaming of how awesome it would be to know such-and-such a language. I probably picked up the book, flipped through it, thought how easy it would be to read it and work through it in the course of a few months if I just dedicated some time to it, and then dreamed some more about being in a foreign land where I could cut through the foreignness with mutual communication, which means of course mutual educating and inspiring.

But life and responsibilities turned my plans to nothing, and now I sit years later looking at each of these books as a dream that has more or less died. Inevitably, though, the spark of excitement comes back, and I once again slip into my dream world of being able to communicate with everybody. Although, communication per se isn’t exactly what I seem to want; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s babelfish doesn’t attract me, because it is cheating. Part of being able to communicate with someone is having gone through the process of learning their language, learning the proper context for that communication.

Anyway, the excitement is the pathway to sadness because I know that there is just not enough time in my life to learn even 10 languages, let alone 6,000, let alone the one that I’ve been creating… Not given the enormous amount of other deep interests that I have. The thought that I will die long before I could ever learn all the things I want to know, and create all the things I want to bring into the world, is one of incredible poignancy to me. Again, I don’t think of myself as unfortunate, and of course I realize that the world is this way for everybody, and in fact if it weren’t, who’s to say if I would find anything at all interesting, without time as a limiting factor that gives meaning to choice? Not that I think God hasn’t figured a way through that one; at least I hope he has, or else his Kingdom will be somewhat less than what he promises.

So there is number two–the realization that time limits my fullest expressions of thirst for learning and of creativity.

Loneliness

My third defining sadness is loneliness. This is odd, because I am very rarely lonely, especially now that my dream of living in a loving community which is around all the time is starting to be fulfilled. Nor is it the kind of loneliness that one feels even when tons of other people are around, due to the fact that there is no communication. No, I am not living in a Tokyo apartment building. I have the liberty of sharing my thoughts and feelings with my closest friends (and, apparently, the entire world, on this weblog!), and they have the same.

My next guess was to say that this loneliness I speak of is really just the same as my sadness over not having a girlfriend. Isn’t that a kind of loneliness? Yes indeed, and I think this is one of the ways that these themes are connected. However, it wouldn’t be right to say that the themes are identical. What I mean by loneliness is less lack of company, or female company, and more the shock of my own individuality.

This should make sense, given how I keep harping on the point that these themes which cause “sadness” don’t really have anything to do with anything negative or bad, or any misfortune or any way in which I feel that my life could be better. No, loneliness here is what happens when I realize that, when it really comes down to it, I am myself. It is only me who is me, and I am not anyone else. Obvious, yes, but it means that, at some point, I am going to be some way, and the people I am with are going to be a different way.

The times when my individuality is thus more pronounced are therefore times when I feel that there is a very real distance between me and other people. Moreover, I have this idea that I am different than other people to a higher degree than other people are different than each other. It’s probably a false statement, and certainly only true from several narrow perspectives, but I mean…look at what you are reading! Who writes this kind of weird stuff? A handful of people I can think of. The same goes for a number of things which I hold dear–the books I love, the music I love, the ideas I love, the art I love…more often than not, I find myself in the minority. Oh, and let’s not forget this whole overanalytic melancholiness which is the subject of this entry…for some reason I feel that the number of people who can relate in experience to it is small.

The result of these separations, which usually happens when I am in groups of people, and for whatever reason I get whisked off by a train of my own thought to some place that I don’t think the whole group would want to be, is a sense of homelessness. There is feeling that there is nowhere for me to safely land, because landing is a vulnerable thing and more than likely the current conversation is not an appropriate or understanding place for it.

I am glad, as a little interlude, that I am living in a community one of the purposes of which is ostensibly to intentionally confront feelings and fears like this, and I am anxious to get to the point quickly where we know each other well enough for me to actually experiment with this without fear of pushing people away.

But there it is–all my life I have felt that the thoughts that occupy my time do not occupy the time of those around me, and so I became withdrawn. And just think, this is probably true of everyone in the world, though they might react to it differently…

Beauty

And now we come to the crowning theme, which really pulls the rest together (I now think, after having written all of the previous).

You see, loneliness is beautiful. It is broken and beautiful, but it is beautiful because it is the voltage that allows the electricity of love to move from one person to another. Not being able to learn all the world’s languages is beautiful, because it is a perfect picture of the striving of us humans, the good striving, but the striving that cannot be fulfilled in this world. And finally, romantic heartache is beautiful because it is the art of spirit. It is the Great Art, and it is (to my complete and utter surprise and joy) the same between man and woman as between humans and God. We paint with our hearts as brushes on the canvas of the world, using our very lives as the medium. What is the picture? It is the story of love.

Beauty can move me like no other thing. Sometimes I am so overwhelmed by a beautiful song, a beautiful sunset, a beautiful story, that my heart is pierced through with a cold sliver of eternity, as if eternity itself were caught by surprise and accidentally jumped forward like an eager racehorse, ripping through the fabric of the universe to marvel, forgetting that I am not yet made of the stuff of eternity, and it is too real, so real that it injures me.

The end of a song can leave me reeling from a wound like this…so much beauty that I never want it to end, but yet I know that if it had gone on for two more minutes, I might be permanently marred.

The sight of a beautiful woman also has this power, though I have so conditioned myself to look right through the beauty and to how I can gratify myself via a self-constructed fantasy world, that I am hoping I have not forever lost the purity to see holy art in a woman’s face, instead of my own greed reflected in her eyes.

The absolute hugeness of the universe, the alien and powerful stars and galaxies that surround us, the endless mysteries that we can never hope to plumb, the uncharacterizable motion of the waves under the moon in places where people cannot live, the answering whisper of the trees on the land, the full-throated joy and recklessness of the mountains, the unbounded curiosity of men and women, the colors we see and the eyes we see them with… The world indeed is a dangerous place even to think about, when very nearly everything has a hidden power to display beauty when least expected!

When my heart comes into contact with this beauty, it cannot contain it within itself, and it is released as–a profound sadness that is really a joy that is really a gratitude that is really a love.

Well, that emotion is so complex and so out-of-place in our world of the even-keel and the efficient, that maybe it is no surprise that I have only just pinpointed it as a core part of who I am. But I hope that I will continue to explore what is happening in me, and where these sadnesses come from. Mostly, though, I hope that God will continue to grant me the grace to see heart-rending beauty in the world (heart-rending indeed, because often beauty is preceded by unforgivable pain and even evil), if only because it is this beauty that gives me the strength to believe in God in the first place.

Anyway, the conference call was the result of some chance interactions that several in our community had with Millard (which, incidentally, were the reason I heard about Koinonia, etc…), and the purpose of it was to see if there were any good ways for us to partner with Millard’s new organization, the Fuller Center for Housing. This new company aims to help people who are “too poor” for Habitat to work with.

Some in our community were pretty excited about the prospect of doing work with an organization like this, even before the conference call, and as we listened to Millard share his vision of basic housing for the entire world, it was indeed inspiring. Already there are lots of projects all over the world for the Fullers–more than they can handle, in fact.

We discussed a few next steps for various members of our community, and we will probably try to get together with Millard again soon to talk more. We’re hoping that, at the very least, all of us could go work for a short time on a project somewhere, maybe overseas in Nepal.

Personally, I have no desire to devote myself to hammering nails in Nepal, even if that is a genuine need in the world and even if it is a mandate of Christ to do that sort of thing. Well, that’s not true–I do have a desire for it, just not as great a desire as for other things which I feel have an even stronger hold on my passions and abilities, and my heart. This dream of ours at Teleios, for example, is keeping me very centered in my “calling”, to use a bad Christian word.

Still, something about physically bringing some of the signs of the Kingdom to a part of the world is very attractive, and I think that discipline is all too often overlooked by Americans in particular, and evangelicals especially. So I am glad to be in a community where such disciplines are true loves, and where I can support efforts to those ends with the resources that I have, whether it is friendship or freelance web design or physical action.

So I’m not sure what is going to happen with this; who knows, maybe in a year a few of my friends will be moving to Sri Lanka to head up housing projects there! For me, I’m excited to see what will happen.

I was looking at all the different landing sites, and I was surprised to see, as I looked very close, that the moon is actually made of yellow cheese! Who would have thought?

Thanks, Google, for this huge contribution to modern astronomy.

I didn’t really read for edification, but more for enjoyment. While I had a love of learning and of the sciences and all that, I stuck pretty much to fiction, except for a couple years in grade school and junior high where I read every book in the library on astronomy, every book on codes and ciphers, every book on programming languages, and every book on origami. While that sounds like a lot of books, it pales in comparison to the number of fiction (usually trade paperback) books I read.

I stayed fairly well within the bounds of the Fantasy/Sci-Fi genre, occasionally dabbling in YA fiction and the more popular non-fantasy fiction like Tom Clancy novels or Michael Crichton novels. On average, I would probably read a couple hundred pages a day of this stuff, so I very quickly became acquainted with all of the authors I was recommended or found on my own in the library.

I’m not sure why I was attracted to this genre. Maybe it was that when I first learned to read, some of the first books I tackled were the Chronicles of Narnia novels, and the magic of those experiences drew me into worlds that were created to be very different from ours. Maybe I empathized with the main characters of fantasy stories, who usually had some sort of mysterious hidden powers which set them on a great adventure, because I fancied the same thing was true of myself, albeit in a very earthly and more boring way. But anyway, I’ve never figured out if I really liked fantasy because of who I was, or if I became who I was/am because I read fantasy. Probably both are true to some degree, but whichever wins out, we were a good match.

Indeed, my first read of The Lord of the Rings, in 5th grade I think it was, was a life-changing experience for me. I recognized in those novels a creative act so profound and imaginative and detailed that I immediately knew that I wanted to emulate it, whatever it was. The vastness and beauty of the world and stories Tolkien created had a very deep impact on me, and all the more so because of the linguistic ingenuity and toil that went into developing the languages that he did.

While I had dabbled in codes and cipher languages beforehand, it had never occurred to me to create an artificial natural language, with its own complete evolutionary history, grammar, morphology, lexicon, and all the rest. Of course, I began on one of these immediately. I’ve since lost all my work for that, and the one or two that came after it, but the point is I’ve been working on languages as a creative, not an educational, exercise ever since then. While this is a pretty big example of how I am dramatically different (in an odd way) than your average American because of the books that I read as a youngster, it’s certainly not the only example.

The main thing my love of reading got me, almost by accident, was a facility with words and putting them together in correct or interesting ways (depending on how I needed to use them). Without ever taking a writing class or wanting to (English was my least favorite subject, though I always made the highest grades in it), I became a good writer. For a young student, anyway. That ability may have left me completely by now, or may have dulled in comparison with the bright stars that are my excellent peers.

So it is surprising that, after beginning at Stanford (even, to some extent, after moving to Florida the year before), I pretty much stopped reading for entertainment entirely. Part of it was my newfound hobby of exploring Christian philosophy and apologetics, which lent more to reading non-fiction texts, but I think a good deal of it was that I started to hang around people more, instead of retreating to a room by myself with a book. While I have fond memories of that particularly comfortable action, I guess I decided that I was just too big of a nerd, and I needed to learn how to make friends and have winning social skills, or something like that.

Then, with the move to study philosophy at Stanford, I spent so much time every day reading philosophy that I had no desire left to open a book, even if it was one that I’d been wanting to read. Also around that time I began to take physical activity much more seriously. I got into running and rock climbing and began to devote much of my free time to those pursuits. They opened up a new and entirely enjoyable world to me of physical discipline, which I’d never been particularly turned off to, but rather had never got into because I was (and everyone told me I was) the “nerd type”. Team sports were therefore out of the question in high school, because people would expect me to suck at them and not give me a chance to improve, so I ended up actually sucking at them. Maybe that’s why I got into climbing and running first–individual sports where I was my only judge. There is much comparison with others in those sports, of course, but you rarely let others down by sucking. Anyway, I ramble.

The point is, my life began to take a much more well-rounded shape. I am very happy for this, and today, four or five years later, I feel that my mind is sharp, but also my body is in the best shape it’s ever been, and allows me to engage by myself and with other athletes at a decent level, at just about any activity (disregarding my current sprained ankle).

We were moving houses in Orlando the other week, though, and so I was unpacking my library of books into bookshelves. Each one that came out was like a little bit of nostalgia, reminding me of the time that we were friends. Some of the books even seemed to sulk accusingly, wondering where I’ve been. It triggered a bit of a lament, that something which was so important to me, and which I still long to spend time with, has been sort of shoved to the back of my personality. I don’t think this is really lamented in my community, as no one else really seems to have been the bookworm (though many of us are nerds, of course), so there’s also a sensation of loneliness when I regard this current lack of mine.

I didn’t stop reading absolutely completely, of course, and I was very glad to be spending most of my reading time studying philosophy, which I love. It did mean that I would read something like 4-5 novels a year, instead of 40-50 (during my most bookwormy days).

One of the other things I miss about reading a lot of good fantasy stories is the way that they hook into my memories along with music. This fact about music and story was one of the first things I realized about myself when I first began to self-reflect heavily. I can listen to a CD that I used to listen to when reading a particular book, and somehow it will bring back a flood of associations with that story, but also with the time in which I was reading, and whatever else was going on in life then. Actually, I’m not sure if I really like the fact that many of my memories are tied up in stories rather than reality, but on the other hand I don’t want to dismiss the importance of story in our lives that way.

At any rate, much of that is to say that I am looking forward to not being able to run or play sports for the next month in some ways, primarily because it means I might be able to catch up on my reading. You see, various family members and others who knew of my love for books never actually stopped giving them to me as gifts, even though I’d stopped having the time to keep up with them. So I’ve got a whole bookshelf of stuff that I’m sure is really good, but I never got around to it. Hopefully that will happen now.

As a matter of fact, I’ve spent some good time pretty much every day in the last couple weeks doing some reading. I never used to work through more than one book at a time until I got to college (mostly because I read them so quick there was no need to), but I’ve been working on a few. I just finished El Alquimista, which is the Spanish translation of The Alchemist, originally written in Portuguese by Paulo Coelho. It’s not so much a fantasy story as a fairly short fable with a great story and message. I read it primarily because it was in a genre that I enjoyed, and because I felt that I should work on my Spanish. It actually marks the first novel that I’ve read cover to cover in Spanish, so I am proud to have done that (even though it was rather short). For some reason the translation of it is much, much easier to read than the translation of Harry Potter that I’ve half-heartedly picked up now and then. Anyway, I’ve also read the English version of this book, and it comes highly recommended.

I also just finished a book that Dan got me a couple years ago for Christmas, called Tales Before Tolkien, edited by Douglas Adams. It’s a collection of short stories by authors that Tolkien liked, or that influenced him, or that were his contemporaries, and things like that. Of the 20 or so stories, there were only a few that I didn’t really enjoy, and it was cool to see what “fairy tales” were like before Tolkien really catalyzed the “fantasy” genre.

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog for long, I’ve also been very slowly working through A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited I believe by Bretall. It is fairly heavy reading, but every time I commit time to it, I feel that I am immensely rewarded. In fact, of all the philosophers/theologians that I have read, I feel a very curious kinship with Kierkegaard. Maybe it is his insistence that he is a poet which I resonate most with, or maybe it is his whole-hearted devotion interacting with his genius that I long to emulate (with whatever fraction of genius it is that I have).

In any case, he is almost singlehandedly restoring my faith in the Bible as a text which remains deep and mysterious and fruitful for me to continue to study. I just read a portion of Works of Love, for instance, where he expands on the exhortation, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”. In 20 pages, he said so many interesting and deeply true (I believe) things about love that every now and then I had to shut the book and my eyes and just process. I don’t want to blindly follow whatever he’s saying, but when I read something of his and feel that I really understand it, I can’t help but thinking that it is both insightful, true, and what’s more encouraging. On the whole, I think the repudiation of him in the current Christian culture (as the father of Existentialism or whatever) is pretty much unjustified and a result of a shallow understanding of his thought (though I’m not yet a scholar, of course).

So, I’m feeling hopeful as regards reading, and I’m already wondering what it is that I’ll pick up next. Perhaps the new Harry Potter–Nyffy and I are going to have a series of reading parties with that one, I think. Stories like that are especially fun to read aloud (though maybe not as fun as The Chronicles of Narnia, because Rowling’s writing is so modern; it just doesn’t sound like one is reading an old fairy tale), so Nyffy and I enjoy trading chapters to read while the other smokes a pipe–another thing that Lewis and Tolkien bequeathed to us.

Well, there it is–an ode to the place of reading in my love and a pledge not to forget it entirely in the name of “balance”.

**What follows is a rather uninteresting account of some nerd stuff**

For instance, here I am on a Sunday night in Wisconsin about to go to my grandmother’s 80th birthday. I’ve spent the past few weeks getting this fun server back into shape after it practically exploded with Plesk/PHP5/Apache/MySQL conflicts and incompatibilities.

The kind people at [insert our hosting provider’s name here], where we host, went back and forth, fixing one problem and breaking something else in the meantime, to the extent that I resorted to several ultimatums demanding a working server or I’d take my business elsewhere, etc…

Well, a week or so ago, things finally settled down, PHP started working (which is important, because it is what is running the scripts that make up this application), MySQL stopped not working (which is also important, because it is the database server which holds all the information in this web application), and the little server ecosystem was more or less at peace. So I’d gone back to something I actually know a little about, which is coding, glad that my ignorance at web server administration had ceased being put to the test.

But like I said, here I am on a Sunday night in Wisconsin, and all of a sudden I get an IM from Faith: “Uh, what happened to the server?”. Whoops–all PHP scripts are now returning an error 52, which is a “no data” error. I take a look at Apache’s error logs, and all I see is a bunch of “segmented execution fault” thread errors. I have no idea what this means, because these aren’t sensible web-server errors, but instead just signify that some binary somewhere blew up somehow.

To make things really awesome, my whole team is actually at work on this Sunday night, because tomorrow is a Big Day. It’s one of those Days where the work we are doing actually needs to work, behave, not have bugs, integrate well, and so forth. I can’t say exactly why it’s a Big Day, but it is. And now, my simple little web application isn’t working. It wouldn’t be so bad only from one perspective it’s really the glue that holds a lot of the online functionality for Teleios courses together. Whoops!

So we’re at T-minus some small number of hours, and my server blows up. I’m not too excited about my chances of getting actual tech support anytime soon, since the last time I had a problem it took two weeks to get it worked out. So I called our hosting company and asked about getting a new server ASAP, one with all the pieces working from the factory, instead of one that I hacked for a while then cried for help on, then got help that actually blew more stuff up, and so on. They said it was a no-go, as was our option for an OS reload and reinstall tonight, because, “I don’t even know if there are any guys that do OS reloads back there right now”.

Needless to say, we’re experiencing some major frustrations, as lots of testing needs to be done tonight and there’s no server to test on. So I plead with the tech support guy I’ve got on the phone, and he promises to take a look at things himself and fix it if he could. Meanwhile our backup plan is to hack together an in-house server for the Big Event and get a copy of this application installed there. Only thing is, I’ve never installed the application somewhere else, databases aren’t set up, data is not backed up, and… I can’t even have access to the in-house server because it’s…in-house! Meaning, behind a firewall in Orlando, and I’m in the middle of Dairyland, getting on a plane in a few hours where I won’t even have internet.

So I’m trying to remember how exactly to get this app running on a server, what all the parts are, how to set up the database, and kicking myself for not writing a nice little delivery script which would just install on command anywhere you wanted. I’m writing Joe a very detailed set of instructions on how to set all these things up, and hoping they’re detailed enough to get things right the first time, because if something goes wrong, well, I’m on a plane, and I can’t help.

Then, when everything seems most desperate, I get word from the tech support guys that they fixed the problem! They described it in detail to me, and I realized it’s something that I should have known how to fix myself (just a configuration file misload for apache), but couldn’t troubleshoot because I’m not that smart at linuxy stuff yet. I’d really like to be, so that I could actually handle some of these problems myself, but alas, I am not.

The story has a good ending, and has taught me some very valuable lessons about server administration; most importantly, don’t let them get screwed up. Because if you do that and try to fix them, you’ll probably break things worse. And then it’s all over!

Ever since the idea for the large community house in East Palo Alto didn’t pan out for a number of reasons, I’d been more discouraged about our interactions for the coming year, but now it seems my fears were unfounded, since we’re basically all ending up in the same building anyway, sans 1 or 2 in a house about a quarter of a mile away. So really there’s not a lot to complain about. We are in ritzy Palo Alto of course, paying an exorbitant number of dollars for rent, and far from the realities that most of the world experiences. But, we hope that we’ll remain untainted by the glut of rampant capitalism that surrounds us (please don’t take that too communistically) and not get too sucked into Silicon Valley culture and indolence (while affirming and remaining inspired by the innovation and other great properties of the place).

I’m also excited to be back close to my Stanford stomping grounds, which is great for running and cycling and playing on Stanford-owned fields and courts (which we do quite happily even though none of us are really students anymore. In fact, I was driving over from EPA about once a day, whether to visit people or play sports or whatever, and that was about the only driving I was doing since I work at home. This means of course, that on an average day I will no longer need a car, since I’m within a mile of all these places! That’s good news for me.

Of course the talk about sports is a bit ironic, since a week ago I was playing Tennis with Justin and had a little fall which resulted, I thought, in a broken ankle. After 6 hours in the emergency room, I learned that it was only a bad sprain, which was quite a relief, but still puts me out of commission for about 4 weeks. I was even on crutches for a few days, which was a new and interesting experience for me, and which I rather liked, but it made just about every action take twice as long. I also learned a great deal more balance, as I had to take my long showers whilst standing on my left foot the whole time.

Another great irony of the week is that our move in day is today (Saturday), but am I even in California? No, I’m in Wisconsin. I left on Thursday for Florida, and braved the airport sans crutches, hobbling along rather self-consciously, as the only way I can currently walk is to not bend my ankle but treat my leg as a big stump, from hip to heel. I spent one night in Orlando, then had another day of traveling with my family to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where I’m sitting in my hotel room at the moment; we’re here for my grandmother’s 80th birthday party.

But it’s ironic because moving in in Palo Alto was to be one of the crowning moments thus far of our little community, and a very symbolic act, and because it took us about a month longer to get a place than planned, there was no way to avoid being gone for the move in. Ah well, the other guys are taking care of things while I’m gone.

So, there’s a lot of excitement right now, and I am looking forward to getting back and setting things in order, and finally feeling like I have a home in California. I’ll be sharing a room with Justin, which will be a little tight, but will hopefully also have my own little desk area downstairs where I can keep all my computer and work paraphernalia (which is a massive amount of trendy technology, let me tell you).

Well, I just wanted to celebrate that important milestone in my life at the moment. Here’s to the coming year!

After the fireworks, we watched a slightly different film.

This film was a documentary, called Briars in the Cotton Patch: The Story of Koinonia Farms, and it indeed was the story of Koinonia farms, a small farming community in rural Americus, Georgia in the 40s and 50s, founded by Clarence and Florence Jordan. The farm was interesting because there, (a) people were living in very close Christian community in much the ways that our community is trying to live now–sharing meals, working together, etc…, and (b) blacks and whites were treated genuinely equally.

Both were radically counter-cultural, but Koinonia got into a hell of a lot of trouble for treating blacks the same as whites. While people in Georgia were happy to let an odd little Christian community be all communal in their farming in living, they were certainly not going to stand by and let them treat blacks as equals!

The story of Koinonia from its inception through to now was incredibly inspiring for those of us watching. They weathered oppression of almost every kind–religious, financial, and physical. Their farm was bombed and shot at and boycotted and almost muscled out of town, but the resolve that theirs was a true way of life kept Koinonia members in their path.

Later on in their history, Habitat for Humanity was born out of Koinonia, and that is now an internationally-recognized Christian organization which actually does some good for the world.

What I took most to heart about the documentary was this: when trying to live a life out of an authentic and genuine interpretation of what Scripture tells us the full life really is, we will naturally bump up against the things that need to be confronted in our culture. For Koinonia, it was very much the issue of racial segregation and prejudice. While the rest of their country was content to kick black folks out of white churches, Koinonia stuck with an authentic interpretation of what church is supposed to be, and as a result of that they were vilified (by Christians in Americus no less than non-Christians…though everyone was “Christian” then anyhow).

The question it raises for us as we try to live in our authentic communities is then, what is the issue or issues, not that define us, but that define the fallen state of the world around us, which we will naturally come into contact with and will inevitably have to decide what to do about? Is it maybe peace, international policy? Is it poverty? Is it aid? Is it HIV/AIDS? I’m not exactly sure. But I am excited to live a deeply true life with Jesus in community, and have no doubt that he will guide us directly to the hurts of the worlds that are around us. I hope when that happens we have the courage to address those hurts and not assume, like the white people in the 40s did, that that was just the way things were supposed to be.

Koinonia farms is now Koinonia Partners, and they have a bit of history on their website: check it out.

This latter fact means a few things: (1) when you pre-board Plat/E.Plat folks, the whole plane basically gets on at once, which defeats the whole point of the boarding-by-group system, (2) every time I try to upgrade to first class for free (something you can do occasionally as a Platinum), 50 or so other people have already put requests in, so it is inevitably impossible (I know, poor me, no first class…), (3) everyone’s the trendy on-the-go business traveler with a huge laptop bag or pack, along with an oversized roller bag. All of these things have to go into the overhead bins, of course, which means if you’re not cutthroat with your boarding procedure, you’ll end up with nowhere to put your own huge laptop bag and oversized luggage. Anyway, just some minor annoyances that you wouldn’t even notice if you aren’t a part of corporate traveling culture (which I suppose, ironically, I am a part of now).

The more important part about being on a plane is this: of all the places in the world that I typically go, I get the best meditating and thinking done on planes. Something about sitting by a window looking out onto invariably-beautiful scenes (unless we’re completely in a cloud), having my ears filled with white noise (or listening to good music really loud, which is more often the case), and having nowhere else to go… well, something about it makes my mind sink deep into my soul, where they can meet and hang out for a while.

Oftentimes they’ll invite my heart in as well, but this is generally only if I do get the first class upgrades and it’s late enough in the day for me to be drinking (as I am right now, incidentally. I always order the same drink on plane flights–vodka and coke. Today when I ordered it, and I suppose it was only about 10:30 in the morning, I got a funny look from the flight attendant. I suppose it’s not a common drink to begin with, and no doubt the whole AM thing had something to do with it. Well, that’s what I get for flying east-to-west, I suppose).

But I keep rambling; and, since I have roughly 3 more hours to write this entry, I will probably continue to do so. Reader, prepare yourself! Gird thy loins with the belt of blog-patience. Either that, or secure thy hands with the gloves of clicking-the-back-button! (Sorry, too much World of Warcraft recently…and the Bible, I guess. Breastplate of Righteousness: 600 armor, +8 agility, +7 stamina, +3 fire resistance)…

–break–

…actually, I didn’t keep writing this on the plane. I was sitting next to a young woman who looked about my age so we started up a conversation and ended up talking for the remainder of the flight. We talked about everything from philosophy to religion to ethics to family to love to relationships to truth to community…well, as much as you can talk about these things in 3 hours. Definitely the best random plane conversation I’ve ever had…

But enough of the hard-to-follow skips through time in this entry. My point was about airplanes and how they are for me a place of solace, rest, and meditation. I suppose it is ironic that I was writing about that just as I entered into a conversation, which by definition would make solace, rest, and meditation impossible–but irony or no, what transpired was much better than whatever I would have gained by a few hours’ solace.

Nyffy did a graphic design project a while ago that connected various people’s places or moments or experiences in which they tended to feel a sense of transcendence. Unfortunately I missed the cut-off date for submission to his project, but I was planning on writing about airplanes, how they are for me a place where transcendence is immanent, where life is (for the moment) pure and I can be honest with God and myself. So I cherish the times spent in the window seat, listening to music and pondering and looking out at the big world passing below, seeing memorable landmarks, like Half Dome or the Grand Canyon, or old or current residences of mine.

But all of the foregoing is merely a longwinded preamble (a pre-ramble, I should say) to the original point of this post, which has not yet been divulged to you but which I have had in my crafty mind from the beginning. Yes, the point is none other than to let you, my faithful reader, know what has been going on in my life! Do hold the applause till I am finished; I know all of you were awaiting this information whilst seeing who could hold her breath the longest.

In short, the last 5 weeks or so have been incredible, primarily because each weekend I’ve been able to do something reasonably awesome with close friends. First (and this may have been covered in my May update) there was a trip to Santa Barbara, which consisted of much outdoors time, bouldering and bushwacking and scrambling through rocky terrain, following rivers upstream and diving from heights into clearwater pools… Not to mention beach volleyball and Jack Daniels, cigars, and spiritual conversation in hot tubs. [ Pictures]

Not to be outdone, weekend #2 took 8 others and myself to Pinnacles National Monument, a few hours away, for a day of climbing and hiking. Dan and I introduced some of our friends to outdoor sport climbing for most of the day, then we had an intense hike to the peak of a nearby mountain to catch sunset over a beautiful valley to the east. [ Pictures]

The following week, my boss Pavi came to CA for the Apple Developer’s Conference, but we spent a lot of time hanging out in Palo Alto and San Francisco, coding, talking about life, talking about community, looking at the future, and generally having a good time. I’m hoping that that good experience will convince him and my other Teleios cronies to move out west.

That weekend (June 11-13) was Stanford’s 2005 graduation, and so there were a number of parties and events I went to to celebrate my friends’ successes. I was very graciously invited to Dan’s family graduation dinner, which was of epic proportions and quality. Yet even more exciting was the day of graduation itself, which went something like this: 5 or so of us guys went and rented a large moving truck, put on wifebeater undershirts with our codenames on the back and “Su Madre Movers” on the front, and headed to campus.

We were all accoutred for the task (which was soon to be at hand) in various garb. My uniform, apart from the shirt, consisted of a trucker beer hat, aviator sunglasses, headphones, and cigarettes, one of which I tried to keep lit and in the general vicinity of my person for the remainder of the day. Others sported the “gangsta beanie” or the classic 70s headband.

Thus prepared, we took our behemoth of a vehicle to campus and proceeded to scour various residences for booty. Not the rear-end kind, mind you, but that wonderful treasure coveted by pirates. In our piratey case: anything of value, but mostly furniture. We stopped at every dumpster on campus (which has a considerable area), finding gems here and there such as couches, mattresses, vacuum cleaners, breadmakers, unopened bottles of vodka, baseball bats, desks, and the like.

Encouraged by this success, we decided to start going into residences and ask those moving out if they had anything to donate. Often we were greeted by skepticism, but even more often people seemed happy to unload all the things they hadn’t been able to sell before moving out. This was no doubt due to the professional look of our “Su Madre Movers” shirts.

At the end of the day we had two truckfuls of items of various worth, which we may use in our new apartment, or which we may try and sell on craigslist. More importantly, we had a day of incredible fun, riding on the back of a moving truck over speedbumps and around corners, smoking cigarettes, stealing things from Stanford students… We even had one very brave female join us for most of the day, and she has accordingly now garnered almost enough cool points to be an honorary Su Madre.

[ Pictures]

The next weekend (actually, the next Monday), I drove to Yosemite with Jenna, Emilee, and Em’s brother and dad. We were planning on doing a night hike of Half Dome, which is one of my favorite things to do in the world, and which I’ve written about on two other occasions. On our way, there was some doubt as to whether we would actually be able to do the night hike (as opposed to a day hike), because we needed to be back early on Tuesday. Thankfully, I was able to convince everyone that we would be OK doing it at night.

We spent the day eating lots of food and resting up, and then finally started on the trail around 11pm. The four of us made a good pace, but there was no hurry since we had a lot of time until sunrise. All the sections of the 8.5-mile uphill trail were familiar to me, having done it quite a few times before, and so we made our way with no more difficulty than the trail would have provided in the daytime.

As in previous times I’d done the night hike, we’d timed it well. The previous day had been a full moon, so she was still out and bright. In fact, it was the brightest and clearest I’d ever soon it on this hike, so I knew we were in for a treat at the top. It was, unfortunately, very cold, and though we’d brought many layers of the appropriate type of clothing, the extremely strong wind and at times sub-freezing temperatures were a little uncomfortable. Our early start time proved to be a disadvantage, as we got to the top long before sunrise and had nothing to do except sit and freeze. It is amazing how little you feel the cold when doing the hard aerobic workout that hiking half dome is, and amazing how much you feel it when you stop.

The sunrise came in due time, and actually earlier than on any other day of the year, for it was the summer solstice. The beauty moved me deeply, as it always does, and I felt at home in the alien granite landscape. Time was of the essence on this particular trip, however, so we had to be on our way, after firing up the stove and having some hot chocolate and oatmeal.

We made it back down by 8:30am, where Emilee’s dad was waiting to take us four weary hikers back to Palo Alto.

[ Pictures]

Not to be tied down, I left a few days later for Orlando, along with my guitar. You see, I was flying home for a very special occasion–the creation of another Nyffy! That’s right, Nyffy was getting married and passing his very odd last name to a very awesome (and fortunate in all other respects) lady. As part of the specialness of the occasion, I’d tried to write a song for them, which they ended up wanting performed at their wedding.

I drove up to St. Augustine, on of our favorite places in Florida, on Thursday, along with Andy. We met up with Chris and his groomsmen and had an awesome night of hanging out at the pool, eating Pizzalley’s and drinking beer. Someone woke me up on Friday and told me we were going to the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Jacksonville, and so all of us ended up there around lunchtime. We took a tour of the facilities, which was capped off by some free beer and many A-B advertisements. An interesting expedition none the less, and good fresh beer.

Wedding rehearsals tend to happen on Friday, so we did that, and my brother Dav drove up with his new djembe to play along with me. There was a rehearsal dinner, much roasting and talking, good food, and all that should be there the day before two friends start their new life together. The 10 or 12 guys who’d come up to see Nyffy off stayed up late for a very awesome (and confidential) time of sharing and encouragement (and of course, Jack Daniels).

The next morning was a time of practicing the song I’d written, for the infamous Jason Killingsworth had arrived with his own acoustic axe, and I had to teach him the song we were to play. Long before we were really ready, the wedding actually happened, and it was a wonderful ceremony. Chris and Anne’s pastor from Gainesville gave a moving little homily on marriage, the old organ guy was right on, and there was much crying in the audience (even, I am glad to report, during my song…which seemed to be executed at the high standard which Chris and Anne deserved).

The reception was joyful and full of good food and drink, great conversation, and of course some crazy dancing. The young men did the customary deface-the-newlyweds-car thing, unfortunately in a not very clever and blatantly crude way…but what can you do? I drank way too much beer while staying mostly sober, and then all of a sudden we were lighting sparklers and chasing the bride and groom to their shockingly sexified chariot. We all said our goodbyes, and I gave Chris a slightly tearful hug, then they were off!

Luckily for me, I have just a few days to see Chris and Anne again, since they are moving to Palo Alto, of all places! Chris got an internship with Ideo here in town, so I am looking forward to living closer to him than I ever have before. World domination will be just a few steps away. That, and all the great beer that I am sure we will brew.

Driving home from St. Augustine was not in any particular way relaxing, however, since the next week in Orlando was to be full of work and unpacking. You see, my family had been building a house near the airport, and it had finally been completed just that weekend. So all of our free time was taken up moving boxes and unpacking them. The house is very exciting however, particularly for me and my brother, since we convinced my parents that it would be a good idea to make the upstairs bonus area studio-ready. That is, it consists of two rooms separated by a pane of glass, so we have a recording room and a control room. Dav and I also just bought a lot of new sound equipment, studio foam, etc… So we are looking forward to putting out some great new Splendour Hyaline music soon.

Anyway, the week was full of driving to and from Teleios downtown (which is a much longer commute from the new house, unfortunately), coding at work, hanging out with folks from work, and unpacking. I got very little sleep, up until the morning I got on the plane back to Palo Alto, which is where we began this story.

Well, I apologize for the play-by-play here…just some things I know I’ll be glad to have written later on. This truly was a string of awesome weekends and weeks in between, and here’s to hoping that I’ll wrote some more interesting things soon!

Because that’s what I tend to do when I’m alone–reflect. As the word implies, most of the time I end up reflecting reflexively, that is, on myself and my feelings or desires. Occasionally something not related to me will come up in a train of thought and I’ll leave behind my little camp of selfish narcissism to follow it and reflect (if only duly) on it, but for the most part I just wallow in whatever is currently clouding me, in the hopes that the fog will burn off in the bright glare of my intellect. I’ll let you guess how often that happens… But reflecting remains one of my fondest hobbies.

Tonight, reflection returned to reminiscence, and I thought back to a year ago, when I was finishing up classes and papers, climbing Snakedike with Dan, hiking Half-Dome with my friends, preparing to drive cross-country with Dav, and saying goodbye to Stanford. The reminiscence aroused a strong sense of nostalgia for me, probably because that particular series of weeks last year is still accounted by me as the best time of my life, in terms of the euphoria related with graduating and moving into the next phase of life, etc…

Driven by that nostalgia, I ended up back at Stanford, which I realized I hadn’t visited in some months now, despite it being only a few minutes away. I parked in the Oval and headed slowly to the Quad, which was the place on campus I would always go at night when I wanted to think or pray or feel or be alone. The atmosphere there is incredible to me–the architecture is amazing, and made genuinely awesome by the soft and subtle lighting all around the old sandstone arcades.

At times the facade of Memorial Church is lighted by spotlights cleverly hidden in nearby palm trees, and then I like to sit and ponder while looking at the beautiful mosaic of Christ teaching. Tonight the church was lighted in this way, and as it came into view from the Oval I almost began to cry as the memory of all the previous meaningful time spent there came back as experience.

What’s more, I had the luck to be walking towards the church as some chorale group was giving a concert inside. These are my favorite times to be in the Quad, because I can go sit in the rose garden to one side of the church, and hear the music bleeding in ghostly strains from the stained glass windows, an audible analogue to the light from the windows, soft and wavering, barely pushing through the color.

So I sat and continued my reflection and remembrance, becoming increasingly emotional as I remembered all the things that had transpired in the last five years, and how they have made me into who I am. I decided that I have become this way, curiously, not just because of Stanford and my experiences here, but in many ways, in spite of them. I reflected that Stanford probably didn’t want me to turn out exactly how I did. What’s more surprising, I don’t think some of the more anti-“Stanford” elements of my experience here (Christian groups/culture, for example), would have really wanted me to turn out this way, either! I feel like I’ve become something new and, importantly, exactly what I want to be at the moment.

Nostalgia and reflection also have a tendency to cause me to revisit my current state of loneliness (not in the community sense; the romantic one) and engage in some very useless, pathetically sad, wishful thinking. As I said before, I don’t know where these things come from, but I see them as forming some of my core struggles with God. Some struggle with faith–believing that God is real or that he works in the world. Some struggle with identity or purpose–who they are or what God wants them to do. I’ve struggled with these things too, but only, it seems, on the road to struggling with love. They’ve never occupied my every waking thought; I could put the struggle aside and go on with life. That’s been much harder with this new contest.

But at any rate, it should be said that I am certainly more annoyed than you, the reader, that all of my otherwise-interesting ramblings eventually degenerate into painful whining for a girlfriend. That itself is a large part of the problem. Oh well, patience is the order of the day, and so I ask you all to have patience with me while I learn also to have it. That, or stop reading–but who’d want to experience that kind of withdrawal?

Enough of the result of tonight’s reflections. I wish they’d involved more of the non-personal things I’ve been thinking about lately, for instance the extremely stimulating philosophical discussion on the nature of language and grammar that I had today with Nick and Justin. But alas, I am now and will always be more driven by the thoughts of love or nostalgia than any important philosophical question. I am glad, though, that I am back here at Stanford, illusorily lonely or no, and can once again visit the Quad at night, or go for a smoke in the rose garden and hear angel-song drifting from the church.

One of those topics was the death of apologetics as a useful Christian enterprise–not that we no longer need to study it, but that it is no longer sufficient on its own to do any real good for the world. I won’t get into my reasons for thinking this (which would take a real weblog entry that I don’t feel like writing), but instead note that thinking about this topic was occasioned by going through my old e-mails. You see, I’ve kept every e-mail I’ve ever sent or received since early 1999. For some reason, I felt like switching from Entourage to Mail 2.0 as my default e-mail client, and so I had to import my Entourage folders into Mail. Mail started importing, but as the e-mail count reached 20,000 before the progress indicator got to 50%, I decided that some cleaning up was in order.

I went back to Entourage and decided to go through all my archived e-mails and permanently delete the unimportant ones–you know, the mass mailings, the spam, and the like. Let me tell you, going through thousands of e-mail messages by hand is not a quick or easy task. But it had some fringe benefits. I got to skim over a lot of the things I wrote and received in the process, and some of it was shocking. Not so much because it was bad, but because it exhibited a personality and a faith which are so very different from those I have now. Anyway, much of my time in 1999 and 2000 was devoted to studying and disseminating apologetic concepts, so much so that in a number of e-mails I wrote to people about my Stanford acceptance, I claimed that the only reason I was going was to set up an apologetics ministry to those “smart kids”.

I read stuff like that and smiled…such passion and naive pride, unaware of the events that were to unfold which would cause a revolution in how I saw God, my faith, and even (in particular) my reasons for being at Stanford. Now, after 5 years of intense study, I hope (and think) I’ve come away with a more healthy and humble view of my ability to desire and understand truth.

So there’s an example of some of the things I’ve been wanting to write about. I’ve also wanted to log some recent events in my usual over-flowery prose, for posterity. I can’t recall when the last time I really wrote anything of substance was, but since then I’ve flown back and forth to Florida a number of times, once for my brother Dav’s graduation from the University of Florida. It was a wonderful time, and I was proud of him–he double-majored in philosophy and political science, in only three years!

Of note, my whole family came out here to San Francisco a few weeks ago, and we had a retreat of sorts that lasted 3 or 4 days. We spent some time up in Napa, and even had this complete health spa experience, replete with mud bath, mineral bath, sauna, massage, etc… It was absolutely incredible, though of course overpriced. We were also able to do some hiking in Muir woods, watch the Godfather trilogy, hang out at our apartment in SF, and have a good number of philosophical/theological conversations. At any rate, it was a much-needed break and together-time for all of us, despite the philosophical conversations.

I’ve also started flying back to Orlando (from my rather undefined home here in East Palo Alto / Palo Alto) for about a week a month, in order to check in to the Teleios (no longer Excelsis) office. This last week was one of those weeks, and I spent it holed away in Pavi’s office, coding like mad. It felt good to sprint for awhile, especially since I’ve felt recently like I’ve been more or less treading water with work. Well, no more! I’ve got enough on my plate now to last me to July. What’s better, it’s stuff that I enjoy thinking about–very creative app design stuff with which the details of which I won’t bore you.

Unfortunately, this is where the brightness and happiness ends. For some reason, the last month or so has had more than its share of hardships (relatively speaking, of course–emotionally, I’m sure I have things easier than just about anyone else). Of some note are the physical ones: I’ve had a pretty high standard for my physical ability recently, particularly in the areas of rock climbing, running, and ultimate frisbee. Unfortunately, a sort of recurring knee injury has come back in full force and severely limited my ability for and the enjoyment of those activities. That, and I’m beginning to think that my computing habits are taking their toll on my neck, back, and hands, and wreaking all sorts of havoc. Then there is a laundry list of other minor things that are wrong with me from head to toe, all of which I should have seen a physician about months ago, but have been putting it off. That’s got to change.

I haven’t touched my guitar or keyboard in a few weeks, and I’ve been feeling decidedly un-creative. I’ve got to use creativity for work projects, and for some other things I’ve been developing, but I’ve been frustrated with my lack of artistic progress. I have so many things in my head that I feel would make worthwhile songs, but every time I sit down to write lyrics or otherwise solidify the idea, I’m unsatisfied. The idea is either too cynical or not cynical enough. Not original enough. Too inauthentic. Or any other of a number of things which make me despair.

But most importantly, things with community out here have been more frustrating than normal. As you know, I moved back out to Stanford in January to work with a community of friends on how we can be church, in some meaningful and important sense which we’ve been trying to discover together. One idea we were throwing around was whether we should try and get one big place and all live in it together, reminiscent of monasticism, or the early church, which everyone is so fond of pointing at. We’ve been thinking about this idea, and how it could fit in with our larger goals and values, for a number of months now. I was a pretty big proponent of the plan, for a number of reasons, and despite all the trials I foresaw as a result of it. In our discussions, it seemed like people (roughly 8 of us) were excited about the idea and open to moving forward with it.

Last week we had a meeting to make a decision once and for all on the issue, because we couldn’t put off looking for housing any longer if we were going to do it. And all of a sudden, the idea kind of fell apart. For a few not-bad reasons, some people had to say they couldn’t be a part of it, and as a result others couldn’t (it’s complicated), and as a result, poof! It was gone. Not just “it”–the dream was gone. Now, I have to trust the process we went through, and I have to realize that the community house idea was an idea which was always only meant to be ancillary to the larger community vision which all of us still share. Still, I saw it as something which would particularly challenge and grow us and push us towards realizing that vision, while challenging societal norms, being provocative, etc…

Add to that a general lack of momentum with community things (various events which we were trying to hold regularly just haven’t happened, and none of us have really been pushing forward to make them happen, whether because of being out of town or being busy or whatever), and it’s kind of depressing. For the first time since November, I’m sensing a real lack of excitement amongst us. I can’t decide where this is coming from, but it’s not fun and I’m not sure how to proceed. It’s a hard time of the year, anyway–many of us are finishing school and moving away, others are going away temporarily, yet others are going on small trips here and there… So there’s a real practical inability to be committed in the way that I would want us to be, and without that the whole heart of the community suffers.

My heart also decided it would be a good time to wrestle with its nemesis–love. Or the lack of it. Or the desire for it. Or the misunderstanding of it. Or all of the above. There’s no need to detail my inner train of thought whenever my mind happens to alight on something which relates to love (which is about, oh, every 5 milliseconds). I’m sure it’s more or less the same for everyone. What’s interesting, and frustrating, is that I feel I’ve never been so (a) desirous of love, and (b) desirous of not desiring love in the way I have been desiring it, at the same time. The first is easy to understand. Everyone goes through that at some point, some more than others (let my bitterness tell you in which camp I belong).

The second is a bit harder, but part of it comes from a realization that most of the pain I experience is a result of my chasing after love without heeding wisdom or the possibility that I am likely blinding myself on some things just in order to have a chase. This leads to a distrust of the heart.

I’m left in the very uncomfortable position of desperately dreaming of love and feeling ready to begin to explore it in the way that it is meant to be explored, and yet realizing that anything I myself do towards that end is likely to be unwise, deluded, and futile. It’s like…say you’re a runner, and there are runners all around you heading towards the finish line. So you’re pretty sure that you’re supposed to be heading towards this finish line too, but you know that if you take one more step, your legs will fall off, thus preventing you from reaching the line. So you stop, but that means you don’t get there, just the same as if your legs had fallen off.

The answer? You need someone to carry you. But that depends on someone else. And my mind can’t think someone else into being, or think them into carrying me. Thus, impasse. And a bit of frustration with the Someone that is most obviously into carrying people, that he is apparently not.

Anyway, enough ramblings for now. I should go to bed, and hope for a different view tomorrow (view of tomorrow).

But before I do, some albums to check out that I recently got:

• The Forgotten Arm, by Aimee Mann
• Funeral, by The Arcade Fire
• On My Way to Absence, by Damien Jurado
• Picaresque, by The Decemberists
• Headphones, by the Headphones
• Woman King, by Iron and Wine
• The Everglow, by Mae
• Summer in Abaddon, by Pinback
• Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice, by Starflyer 59

Yes, that does mean my horrendous CD-buying habits are back.

We had a regular, rousing philosophical discussion, and I was glad to once again be defining terms and weighing the morality / consistency of whatever actions we were considering. Despite my decision not to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, it seems I haven’t lost the taste for it entirely. Anyway, I’m not going to talk about that discussion per se, but instead one of the paradoxical conclusions we came to as a result.

Basically, there is a deep sense in which God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and Lord of all life, is unsatisfied. There is a deep sense in which he is sad. At first glance, this looks contradictory; how can a being who is wholly x (where x is any positive property), experience dissatisfaction or sadness? How could he experience pain? Doesn’t a perfect existence preclude pain? Certainly our (well, American Christianity’s) concept of heaven, as a state of unending perfect existence, doesn’t usually come with pain.

Our answer, as you might expect, had to do with the self-limiting nature of creating beings with truly free wills (which in itself is an area ripe for exploration, and gives new and tremendously insightful meaning to Christ “humbling himself and taking the nature of a servant”). But as I was reading Kierkegaard (his Philosophical Fragments) today, I stumbled upon another understanding, which has the sorrow of God as being, not merely the logical result of having to share the will space, but actually essential to his character–a result of his deep love for us. This isn’t particularly related to the question of justice, but I think it is even deeper. Here’s a passage:

Not in this manner, then, can their love be made happy, except perhaps in appearance, i.e. in the learner’s and the maiden’s eyes, but not in the Teacher’s and the king’s, whom no delusion can satisfy.

(Here, “love” refers to the love of a king for a humble maiden in a story referenced earlier, and the love of God for us, which was the analogical purpose of the king/maiden story. The talk of delusion goes back to the point of this part of the work, which is to attempt an answer to the question of how the king (God) could ever be sure of the humble maiden’s (our) love for him, and how their love is mutually understandable)

Thus God takes pleasure in arraying the lily in a garb more glorious than that of Solomon; but if there could be any thought of an understanding here, would it not be a sorry delusion of the lily’s, if when it looked upon its fine raiment it thought that it was on account of the raiment that God loved it? Instead of standing dauntless in the field, sporting with the wind, carefree as the gust that blows, would it not under the influence of such a thought languish and droop, not daring to lift up its head? It was God’s solicitude to prevent this, for the lily’s shoot is tender and easily broken. But if the Moment is to have decisive significance, how unspeakable will be God’s anxiety!

(The “Moment” is a complicated concept to elucidate, and it is what the whole work is about. Basically, it is about how we come to know eternally True things. Socrates’ view was that it is impossible to seek to know Truth, because if you already know it you cannot seek to know it, and if you do not know it, you do not know what you are seeking. His resolution is that we all have Truth latent within us, and it just needs to be “remembered”. Socrates, in his own view, simply helped people to remember in this way–he did not teach them in any real sense. Kierkegaard’s observation is that this act of remembering is much less significant than a deep “coming to know”, and so it minimizes the moment in which you “remembered” it. In other words, real conversion would be impossible! So Kierkegaard tries to think of another paradigm of Truth, where it is not latent within us but we are actively running away from it, as a result of free choice. The Moment gains significance now, in that we need a Teacher who will not just provide us with the stimulus to realize Truth, or the content of Truth, but must even give us the ability to comprehend it!)

But here’s the part I liked the most:

There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought that no man could see God and live.–Who grasps this contradiction of sorrow: not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved! The minds of men so often yearn for might and power, and their thoughts are constantly being drawn to such things, as if by their attainment all mysteries would be resolved. Hence they do not even dream that there is sorrow in heaven as well as joy, the deep grief of having to deny the learner what he yearns for with all his heart, of having to deny him precisely because he is the beloved.

So we have here a fundamental paradox (or tension if you think paradox means contradiction) in the heart of God. Love demands that the lovers unite, and share their love! But the ontological inequality of humans and God (i.e., the humble maiden and the glorious king) demands that the king not reveal himself to the maiden, lest his magnificence destroy her (or worse, cause the magnificence to be the object of her love and not the king himself, which is again the death of love). It looks like God has a self-destructive goal: to unite with us in love entails that we (or the love) are destroyed, but if we are destroyed, there is no one with which to unite! What incredible sorrow this must be.

What is God’s response to this tension? To “not consider equality with God something to be grasped”, to become more humble than any human being (with “no place to rest his head”), in order to win our hearts in such a way that (a) our response of love is not a delusion, and (b) we are not destroyed.

Well, I wanted to share that because I don’t think I ponder often enough the humility of God, even the tentativeness that comes across here in the analogy of human love–in Kierkegaard’s terminology a care not to offend us. There is something central to our faith here, and it is, I think, the primary take-home point of the Incarnation–God took the nature, not just of a human, but of a servant. God, himself, put himself at our service, in the most humble way possible (dying), in order to ask for our love. And this was the only way to do it so that both he and we would be satisfied that our love is real, and not an illusion.

Sorry, PC folks–this is a Mac OS X-only application. And moreover, I don’t imagine that it will be extremely useful for everybody. But, if you ever want to rate your entire library, it will save you precious seconds many times over, equalling a great increase in efficiency. I’ve found it to be so, anyway.

Well, I’d appreciate any comments if anyone happens to try it out!

It’s kind of funny–I left my nice guitar in California, so we recorded using Dav’s cheap Yamaha, and we’re in a small apartment so we couldn’t record acoustic drums, hence the electronic ones, but it turned out to be one of our better recordings! I think we’re finally getting the hang of this process. No bass or anything yet; it’ll come when we record the song for real to go with an album. But for now enjoy it, and let us know what you think.

Chapter II

I realized that this must be how God can choose to see the world–not just as better than it is, but as it actually will be, redeemed and full. No fire and charring of the elements, maybe–I believe, right now, that God’s redemption and revolution will come in a way we do not expect; it will come from the inside out. Just as Christ died and was transformed, not destroyed, into something new and magnificent that heralded the truth and the promise for the rest of humanity, so the entire world will be remade, not undone. In a way, of course, remaking is undoing, and it is in this sense that the old heaven and the old earth will pass away. But they will pass away, leaving in their places, not new versions of themselves, but themselves, new.

At this point in my reverie, the sun broke over the eastward hills, brilliant and uncontrollably powerful, turning everything that was colorless (bloodless) and ghostly (dead) colorful and alive, full-bodied and recklessly physical, joyful and singing. The world around me was resurrected in a commemorative play that God had instructed his creation to perform, acting out the Resurrection that happened to one man long ago, and that will one day happen to each of us, and each blade of grass, and each far-flung star, if we keep hope alive.

Just as soon as it came, the moment, that window into God’s promises, passed with the sun behind the gray clouds that were to obscure it for the rest of the day. Though the warmth of the memory remained to comfort me in the chilly cold of the morning, the veiling of the light was a reminder that the time we hope for is still not yet, and all that we can experience for now are previews–previews that change the world, but previews nonetheless. The real show will come later, and at that time we will see the real playwright’s best work, and we will all of us drop to our knees in awe, because that work will be love for us, demonstrated mysteriously (openly) from the beginning of time until its end.

In other words, HE IS RISEN INDEED, and this curious, absurd truth is the only thing that can give us hope for ourselves and the rest of the world, because it is oftentimes the only thing we can point to where creation has gone the right way, the way it was supposed to go; that is, sans death. 2,000 years of time and, more effectively, our own various doubts, muddle that picture for us, but we cling however tenuously to it, knowing that, not just is the world without this hope a cold and hard place (in fact, our hope does little to change that many times), but, indeed, without this hope there is no world at all, no sense for even our doubts.

And that is why, incidentally, I believe it–because of the difference between eighteen seconds before sunrise, and eighteen seconds after.

42They devoted themselves to Rick Warren’s teaching and to the megachurch parking-lot traverse, to the breaking of small tasteless crackers and to special music. 43Everyone was filled with boredom, and no wonders or miraculous signs were done by anyone at all. 44All the believers were isolated and had nothing in common. 45Hoarding their possessions and goods, they gave erratically, and only out of guilty feelings. 46Every once in a while they carefully exited their suburban mansions, going to one of a million disparate meeting places, and avoided eye contact with the people around them. They broke bread in their cars on the way to soccer practice and ate apart from one another with troubled and lonely hearts, 47wondering where God was and suffering both the scorn and the indifference of the people. And the Lord took away from their number daily those who believed.

It was both a short and a long process, from different perspectives. From my perspective, however, I engaged in it (the decision-making process, that is) for exactly the right time–long enough to be sure of my motives and the commitment of myself and those others who would be involved in the community, but short enough to be sure that the idea, the dream, didn’t die of suffocation while I dawdled about second-guessing the feasibility of the proposition. I also feel that I was able to involve lots of different people in the process–all of my family (including a lot of extended family), friends from California and friends from elsewhere, and co-workers. The result of our conversations was consistently a feeling that, while there is no guarantee of longevity or success for a community like the one we want to start, there would be nothing worse than failing to at least try it–idealism tempered with a sort of jolly and familiar understanding of potential failure.

In sum, I had two options–to go, or not to go–and the first appeared to all my senses to be faith, while the second just had a vague smell of the safety provided by fear and reluctance. With that opposition in front of me, the choice became much clearer.

So, early in February, after my last trip out to Stanford, I met with my boss Pavi to discuss the conclusion I’d come to in my thinking. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but Pavi had been a part of the process from beginning to end with me, and so was in a good position to comment on how I was going about it, and to help with his own wisdom (since he has been and is engaged with community projects like the one we’re envisioning). We discussed what it would look like with respect to Excelsis if I were to move out to California, and decided that it would be hard. This is where, with any other boss, the door would have been closed and I would have been forced to decide between California and Excelsis–the two things which are the most important to me (in terms of what I feel like I am supposed to be doing in life) at the moment. Pavi’s response, on the other hand, was: well, what can we do? I guess we’ll have to try it and work through the difficulties as best we can.

In other words, I was given the official freedom to retain my job and work long-distance from Palo Alto! For me, this was the last piece of this puzzle that needed to come together; I was set to go. So, last Monday (the 7th of February), I had a goodbye lunch of sorts with my team at work, and explained what I was doing and why. With their encouragement for the future, I packed up some key things from my office and took them home in the anticipation that they would give the office to someone else soon. It was a bit sad, and I hadn’t planned on it happening so quickly, but I had a flight to San Jose the next day.

So, crazy as it seems, I moved back to California on the 8th, with just the few pieces of luggage I could fit on the plane. Since I didn’t have an apartment or anything yet, I left most of my belongings in Florida, figuring I could fly back and drive with them in my car back to Stanford whenever it was appropriate. The timing so far has been pretty fortunate–my friend Erin is gone to Peru this month, so I am able to stay in her room, help her out with some rent, and have a home base while I get my feet under me here and start to look for my own place. Currently, the plan is to fly back to Orlando on the first of March, pack up my car, and do the 3,000-mile drive back, so that I am more permanently situated on the west coast.

This first week has flown by pretty fast, and I am adjusting to working at home (which is pretty nice–I can roll out of bed and be working on my powerbook in about 30 seconds, while some fresh tea is brewing and some Eggos are in the toaster or something). Sometime in the next few weeks, community stuff will hopefully similarly roll out of bed, ready to hit the ground running. The benefit of my previous trip to California was that a few of us here were able to have a retreat of sorts and strategize some concrete plans for where we need to go and what we need to do with our community in these first, crucial months. So I am looking forward to a crazy, awesome, and likely difficult time with getting all that going.

But mostly, I have had one consistent feeling: it is good to be home!

What you see before you is none other than the greatest meal I have ever created. Yes, it is sweet and sour chicken (on a bed of fluffy jasmine rice, no less!). What makes it an accomplishment is the fact that I whipped up this delectable treat completely from scratch. I deep fried the chicken in a pot of molten lava (er, oil)–which was a first for me (and there are some parts of my arms that don’t have oil burns on them)! I even made the syrupy sweet and sour sauce all by myself! (Who knew the “sour” part came from vinegar?)

Oh, and yes, that is Guinness sitting at the right hand of the plate (which, as everyone knows, is the place of honor for any esteemed beverage).

I hope you enjoyed this foray into the unexplored territory of my skills with pots, pans, and hot insoluble substances! If you’re lucky, there won’t be many more. I suppose, moreover, that the fact that this simple meal is my crowning achievement, the recounting of which being worthy of cluttering the blogosphere, proves only that I have far, far to go before I can consider myself an adept of the gustatory art.

(I.e., I have more important stuff to write about, but not enough time, so I’m showing you what I ate for dinner). Stay tuned.

A lot of the reason for my consistency in running recently (and by consistency I just mean running more than once a week) has to do with a cool gadget which my folks gave me for Christmas. It’s a Nike Triax CV10, which consists of a watch, a heart-rate monitor chest strap, and a foot pod which goes on one’s shoe. Together these devices allow me to know up-to-the-instant data on heart rate, pace, distance, whether or not I’m in certain “training zones” which I can set, etc…

Most of the features are a bit overkill, since I’m not really training for anything and don’t have a real reason to monitor my heart rate closely; however the pace/distance features are really useful.

Anyway, so I’d been running a bit more than usual, and I ate a lot of carbohydrates this week, so I figured I could handle a long run. I planned on going about 8 miles, got all dressed up in my spandex and climacool shirt (it was pretty chilly outside for Florida, and it was drizzling), and connected my gadgets (sans heart-rate strap because I figured on a long run it might irritate me).

Well, the gray drizzle was actually awesome to run in, as it kept me nice and cool–so I settled into a moderate pace and enjoyed myself, after experiencing some stomach pains the first couple miles, due to the large Italian meat and pepper sub sandwich I’d had for lunch…the thought of running on that is pretty nauseating to me even now.

About mile 4 or 5, when I started to relax into the rhythm of what I was doing, it occurred to me that, if I felt up to it, I could try and run farther than 8 miles–I could run 10! In fact, why run only 10 when 3 more would get me to 13, which was basically a half-marathon? The thought got me kind of excited, because I’d never run that far before, and moreover had considered training for half-marathon races in the past. Well, it was a good day, I was feeling strong; why not just get it done with now?

So that’s more or less what I did–I ran 13.2 miles, though for many of them my vision was somewhat off due to the rain and/or condensation on my glasses. I’m glad I didn’t run into any cars or stationary objects! And, thanks to God, my knees and joints and muscles and tendons all held together for the most part–telling me they hated me once in a while, but never giving out completely (which has happened in the past, and which puts a halt to any lofty goals!). Moreover, my blood sugar level seemed to do OK, and I didn’t get too dehydrated (thanks to the cooler weather and the rain, I think). So it was a fortunate run.

All told, I did the 13.2 miles (though a real half-marathon is only 13.1, I believe) in 1h50m. That’s an average pace of 8m24s per mile. To me, that was a pretty big accomplishment–not only did I run farther than ever before, I did so at what I consider to be a respectable pace. On top of that, for the most part my mile splits got shorter as time went on, meaning it probably wouldn’t be too hard to improve considerably on that time.

Well, I just wanted to write all that for posterity. On that note, here are the mile splits:

Mile****Time18m37s28m54s38m49s48m46s58m28s68m28s78m21s88m16s98m19s108m14s117m58s128m11s137m49s13.21m29s

(There was a strong headwind going eastbound on the path I took, so that is usually what accounts for any increase in times.)

WARNING: This will be very long. Feel free to read it in chunks, if you wish. Now, you may proceed, with caution.

There were two more hurricanes in 2004, one in early September (in fact this may be the same as the one I described in the last entry; I’m getting my dates muddled). But if so I’ll talk about a different significance of it. You see, there’s something I haven’t been mentioning in all these stories: a girl. In fact, a girl who worked at Excelsis, and had done so since the previous summer (of 2003), when I met her. For various reasons which I’d find it tedious to go into, I thought she was really cool and was attracted to her. So, when I found out senior year that I would be moving back to Orlando for work, I was excited about the possibility of a relationship with this girl.

Accordingly, I spent a lot of time, once I moved back, getting to know her and generally making it obvious that I was interested. At times she seemed to have caught on to the fact, and at times she seemed oblivious–to the point where my over-analytic mind wavered between deciding that she was just unaware of my feelings, and therefore I should make them more obvious, and on the other hand that she was more than aware, and simply not interested herself.

Well, after a few months of this, and just a lot of vague tension and awkwardness in the air whenever we would hang out, we were talking during that early September hurricane. The conversation got to a point where we were talking about romantic relationships for some reason, and so the context was ripe for innuendo. And innuendos did indeed fly–so clearly, in fact, that I was almost 100% certain that my second guess above was right–she knew what I was thinking, but was not interested herself. So there it was–door closed on the possibility of a relationship.

I was pretty bummed out and disappointed for a few days, but in reality felt more foolish for letting my heart get so into the possibility of a relationship than sad about or angry with her. In the end I felt much better, without this cloud of vague uncertainty always hanging around–I felt freed, and a bit cleansed. In fact, silly though it is, it was essentially an imaginary breakup. That’s how much my mind gets carried away!

Anyway, I didn’t have too much time to think about it, because just a few days later, I went to Spain! I’d flown through Madrid before, but had never had time to wander around, so the prospect of a week and a half in Madrid and Barcelona was enticing, especially given circumstances just mentioned. I was traveling with my parents, the larger half of which had business there (in fact, it was my fifth time to go on this annual trip with my parents–previous destinations included France, England, Ireland, and Portugal). We spent a few days before the business meetings in Madrid, hanging around, eating dinner at 10pm, drinking one of the two kinds of beer, or preferably sangria de cava, having a go at various tapas, and so forth.

The meetings were in Barcelona, and we were set up in an awesome hotel in the shopping district. Some of my Dad’s colleagues had brought a kid as well, including one Laura whom I’d hung out with on previous trips. Moreover, since my awesome pal Nate Akers, from Orlando, who sort of randomly knew Laura (who goes to Cal Poly), was in Italy for a semester abroad, he hopped on a plane and came to Barcelona to chill with Laura and I. So, I spent most of the days wandering miles and miles of the Barcelona streets with Nate and Laura or my parents and their friends. It was incredibly relaxing, not to mention the insane dinners that were thrown at us every evening. Time with my folks was very positive, too, as I was able to talk about everything that was going on in my life at great depth, including my endless (i.e., endlessly overrated and whined-about) struggles with the females. My folks, being wise people, were able to give me lots of helpful comments there.

Well, enough about Barcelona. I already put a photo album of sorts online, so instead of adding pictures here, I’ll just link to that: Spain Photo Album. Some pretty good photos in there, including the one from which I made the new banner at the top of this page! (It was from the inside of La Sagrada Familia).

About the time I got back from Spain, I was finishing up on transcriptions for Excelsis (I’d actually been doing a lot of that in Spain on my laptop, believe it or not). This was cause for much rejoicing, despite the fact that I absolutely loved the material I was transcribing. My next project was to be designing and implementing the web application which would serve as not only a helper application to the Excelsis desktop client, but also as a gateway into the course material and a stockpile of community tools for those taking Excelsis courses. This was to take me even longer than the transcriptions–I’ve only just finished a bare-bones v1.0 beta, at about 4500 lines of PHP code.

Anyway, so I was working on that, and then I turned 22 on September 26. This was, maybe ironically (though I can’t figure out how it would be ironic), during the last of the 2004 hurricanes. This one may have been called Jeanne. My family had a nice little dinner for me while the storm did its thing outside. The previous year had been probably the best of my life, and I was sorry to see it go, but very excited about the future, given my love of what I was doing for work. My biggest wish (or did I dare make it a prayer?) for the upcoming year was, as it has been since I was 13, that I would fall in love. Yes, it’s stupid–I just read way too much fantasy in my formative adolescent years, and now I’m stuck with the sentiment. To my credit, I’m pretty realistic about the quality of the sentiment, and am able most of the times to treat it as just that: a sentiment. On the other hand, people occasionally ask me, “What if God doesn’t mean you to fall in love?” And I just laugh. Not because I don’t believe in God, but because to me the question sounds like, “What if God doesn’t mean you to be saved?” That, of course, is a silly question (unless you believe some wack predestinatorial deal, I guess). It might be helpful (or at least less painful) to be less confident there, but I can’t.

At this point (in the story), things with the girl at work are fine, as far as I know. I’m now just doing my thing, not making a whole lot of (read: any) attempts to hang out with her after being (or imagining being) brushed aside some weeks ago. Moreover, I’ve successfully stopped having feelings for her–which is a good strategy in these situations.

Then, around the middle of October, she invites me out to this cool little indie bar that we both like to go to, just to hang out and read or something (we’re both avid readers. Or, I was until college and am trying to get back into the habit). I figured it was a good idea–you know, re-open the lines of communication, don’t burn bridges, be friends, that sort of thing. So we’re reading, and so on, and eventually I get up to leave, when she says, wait, we need to talk.

Woah. We’re actually going to talk about this using words and not innuendos? This is getting interesting. I figured she was going to chew me out for ceasing all kinds of contact after the early September conversation, and was ready to explain about how I liked her, and then felt dismissed, and had needed time to regather my thoughts and feelings, and it’s OK, I’m not really into you anymore, so don’t worry–it’s even kinda funny that I liked you to begin with, right? Let’s have a good laugh at how silly humans can be and go on with our lives.

That would have been fine and great–you know, clear the air, remove all ambiguity, make a fresh start as friends, etc… But what she said instead was more like, I knew you liked me all along, and I liked you too. However I didn’t think it was wise so I pushed you away. Then, when you were pushed away, I felt very miserable. So maybe that was the wrong decision.

Well, this was unexpected. But interesting, because rarely is the girl that I’m into also into me. So I thought, let’s see where this goes! Hours of discussion later, we were “officially” “dating”, whatever that means. Hooray! The first “official” girlfriend in, what, 2 and a half years? You, as the reader, should be asking me, But I thought you said you’d stopped having feelings for her? I know, I know…but it seemed like a golden opportunity so I made the switch back. (Note the stolid independence of the individual here, not willing to be changed by any external circumstances! Hah.)

Also during this same weekend, Chris Nyffeler asked his longtime girlfriend Anne to marry him, and she agreed. Stacking up the weddings for the upcoming summer, I see…but can it match up to 2004? But this was great news–the second of the Eastwood Posse to get hitched.

Time then started to pass very quickly, because I was spending it with her. Most of it was spent talking, because we’re both very good at talking, and inevitably we dived into the deeper things there are to talk about in relationships. Also there was a good deal of meta-relationship discussion. We talked about it, about how things were going, about how she or I was feeling, about this little problem between our personalities or about this or that big difference between our families, and that sort of thing. And because we have basically the same personality in many ways, we actually got places when we talked. We understood each other and figured stuff out when it needed figuring out. This was a new experience for me.

Anyhow, this was the way of things for about two weeks–intense but good conversations where doubts and hopes were freely expressed. I felt very positively about the relationship, and even though I knew there were some things about this girl I would rather be different, I figured that’s the way of life and community/relationship of any kind, and was willing to see where it went. Then, one morning when we were about to meet for breakfast, she just sort of inexplicably broke things off. It was more or less without warning, and so it happened and she left without it really registering for me. Then, similarly inexplicably, I felt like shit. I mean, yes, I did just get dumped, and that sucks, but a two-week relationship? I felt vastly more emotionally affected than that length of time seemed to warrant.

To this day I’m still not exactly sure why that was the moment where I’ve, thus far in life, felt the most emotionally hurt. I must have put a lot more of myself and my heart into things than was apparent to me. And if so, it was unwisely, as events proved. But it probably had something to do with everything that had come before–the year-plus of attraction, the letting go of it, then that fateful conversation which re-ignited it, the fast and unwitting descent into a kind of intimacy…who knows.

What made the situation worse was a complete lack of community here in Orlando. That is, my family was all either off to school or in San Francisco, and likewise my friends. The only person I’d been hanging out with was, of course, this girl. So, I felt very alone. Moreover, I initially had a lot of trouble with the reasons she cited for why things could not progress between us. They did not seem thought-out, and smacked of haste and fear. So our first conversations afterward consisted of me challenging, in a way, her decision and questioning its validity. Eventually, however, I realized that this mission of mine was itself driven pretty much only by emotions, anger included. I saw, though it hurt, the long-term wisdom of the decision, and started to feel OK about it.

My emotions needed somewhere to go, however, and so I began to be angry with this girl for the conversation in mid-October, feeling like that was what caused this whole waste of time and energy. And in some respects I still do think she acted unwisely there (as did I). But primarily what I felt was loneliness, and it became oppressive as I looked forward to weeks of working at Excelsis in proximity to this girl, and going home to…nobody. My usual pursuits of climbing or running or movies or reading or music or computer games or whatever seemed not to be able to cheer me up at all. I did do one productive thing, however, and that was reinstitute the working condition of this weblog! It felt good to lose myself in design for hours.

I discussed all of these things with my boss at work on Monday (the “surprise” was on Saturday), who’d actually been a confidant over the past months in which this story unfolded. He was able to give me, as a friend of both myself and this now-former girlfriend of mine, a lot of clarity and insight into why things played out the way they did. It served to cool me down and helped establish that peace I described above. He also suggested that I fly to California, to my apartment in SF, so that I could be with my parents and get my mind off of being alone. I’d wanted to visit my friends out there anyhow, and this situation was not only a good excuse for that trip, with the blessing of my boss, but I felt that the trip was necessary to my emotional sanity. So I used my vaunted status with American Airlines to get a free next-day mileage ticket out to SF.

Less than 24 hours later, I was working on the balcony of our apartment, being loved by my parents, and making plans with Stanford friends to go down there and spend a week or so just living and hanging out. Being back in California again felt so much more like home than Orlando, I knew that I had missed it deeply. In addition, getting away had lifted the huge weight that had settled on my soul–that oppressive feeling of being trapped in Florida with no friends and no (horror of horrors!) romantic prospects. A sense of adventure had returned, and, little did I know, I was about to embark on one.

Going down to Stanford again intensified that feeling of being back at home, and I spent hours just wandering around campus and its surroundings, feeling alive in the brisk autumn air (something which doesn’t exist in Florida, except for 2 days sometime in December). Being with friends was likewise intoxicating–each reunion or reconnection seemed to restore a small piece of my heart. I realized then how much I was missing out on in Orlando. I had been so focused on pursuing this one romantic relationship that I hadn’t felt the slow decay happening to me as a result of not being part of a broader community. I wasn’t going to church, of course, for a number of reasons, some of which have been discussed on this weblog previously. Most of my friends from high school had drifted away, either still at university or working elsewhere, and in any case my attempts at refocusing those connections were laughable during these months (to my shame). It was pretty much my family and this girl that were my community. So, take away the family due to travel, and take away the girl, and I had nothing to stand on! Virtual relationships, or long-distance friendships were no good to me then, and all of a sudden I sensed this huge need of mine for a strong community of loving friends, which heretofore I’d been able to satisfy via little crumbs from the familial and romantic relationships.

Enter into the context of this realization process Nick Bott, my friend with whom and Jenna I was staying (how do you like that grammar? It’s phat). We were driving somewhere and he mentioned the fact that a lot of our friends (most of whom had settled temporarily right around Stanford) were somewhat apprehensive about jumping right into what the world’s typical process is after graduating: getting a job, moving away from your friends, living alone, overworking, eventually having a somewhat mediocre marriage and family life, getting that white picket fence and your coveted personal space, spending your retirement on big white yachts, dying…

There was this sense that maybe the most fulfilling life is actually closer to the kind of community we experienced while at school, and not as much the American Dream, or whatever. As you can imagine, this sense resonated very deeply with me, given all that I had been considering. So we started to throw around some ideas and questions to tease out some more specifics from this vague sense. For instance, one of the questions was, what would it look like if, instead of people looking to their jobs to dictate where they lived, they looked to their community of friends instead? That is, what if people considered who they were with as a higher priority than what company they worked for? The most obvious outcome of a life lived this way would be financial sacrifice. But what benefits could there be? Eventually, we began to feel very strongly that there were a great number of benefits, and that they spoke to areas of the human life that were much more central than the financial.

Gradually we brought this discussion to more and more of our friends, and I even set up a weblog where we debated many of the merits and faults of forming various kinds of communities that lived out various counter-intuitive (according to the world) ideas. Because these discussions seemed to me to be very fruitful, I even extended my stay in California so that it totalled almost three weeks. When I left, I felt extremely encouraged, and the pain of the breakup had all but disappeared. It was to settle in again for a time, but I would say that my trip to Stanford did more than anything else to heal me. That, and of course the time spent with family in SF–Dav and Ellen had even been planning on visiting my folks there before I made my trip, so we were all together (sans Rachel, unfortunately), for one weekend.

For the latter part of November I was back in Orlando, continuing to work on the web app, and continuing to think about community ideas and opportunities back in California. I grew more and more excited about it as I combined the ideas that had come up in discussions with friends, and ideas that I’d gleaned from the last two summers of TCS, specifically from Graham Tomlin’s seminars. The combination effectively produced the idea that I am currently most excited about: a community of people dedicated to each other and to living the fullest human life possible together, which is at the same time no more or less than a church. That is, church would just be this community, and vice versa. No need for buildings or Sunday-morning services or potlucks. Church would just be living life together: eating, playing, wasting time, observing the world around, and yes: worshiping, teaching one another and being taught, reading Scripture, and helping the poor and oppressed. But these things would not be done in separation from the rest–for not only are worship and teaching valid activities in everyday life, but eating together and wasting time together are valid activities for church.

Around then, plans were made with a group of friends in California to have a vacation/retreat of sorts up to Tahoe in mid-December for some skiing/snowboarding and hanging out. I decided to go, and also hoped that that time would help me to make the decision which I knew would be required of me sooner or later: whether or not to move back to California. The community ideas we had been considering, while awesome and inspiring and worthy (I think) of putting into practice, come at a fairly high price: they require that one be physically involved. It’s not something that I could really be a part of from Florida. Moreover, leaving Florida, I realized, could come with its own set of sacrifices: would I be able to keep my job? How would I deal with the loss of free food/housing (I’d been staying at home in Orlando)? Serious questions, and the fact that I was thinking about them proved to me my own seriousness regarding the community. So I was hoping that Tahoe would be a good opportunity to gauge the desired involvement of others, which I could potentially use to then gauge the possibility of success of a home-church/community and thereby the probability of my move. Complicated, I know.

December 6th, when I had planned on flying to California, couldn’t come quick enough. I started to once again feel the oppression of being alone in Orlando during that interim time, and this change of optimism regarding life in general also caused there to be doubts about whether my high-flown ideas about community in California might not just be escapism, or foolish dreaming, or a subconscious way to be back where there are single women… So I had to go through a process of making sure that my motives were not completely overwhelmed by some taint, obvious or unobvious. I think I engaged in that process successfully.

Tahoe was an awesome time. Between snowboarding like a maniac, hanging out with everyone, playing games, watching movies, runs in the cold air, making dinners together, and long serious discussions about life and community, it was about as awesome as a time can be. To my disappointment, however, I didn’t happen upon the clarity I was hoping to receive regarding my own potential decision to move to California. I’m not sure exacctly why, but I think it became somewhat obvious that my idea of a home-church/community, while immensely attractive to me and a few others, did not catch on as immediately as I’d hoped. I think the context in which the idea was shared was somehow forced, for one, and also I’ve had the luxury of the past year and a half to come to grips with it and explore a lot of the ins and outs. At any rate, the primary sense I came away with was still encouragement, as there were some people who seemed interested in attempting to put some form of that idea into practice.

I was back in Orlando for a week before I went to Dallas for Christmas with family there. That week, and indeed the following few weeks, were insane times for my web app coding. I realized suddenly how much I needed to get done by January (a somewhat arbitrary deadline for v1.0 of the app), and worked frantically on it all the way through Christmas Eve. So my time was fairly well taken up with that. I did, as I mentioned, get to Dallas with my family, and we had a wonderful Christmas with my mom’s relatives, as well as various family friends like the Morrises (of whom Ellen, Dav’s fiancee, is one) and the Petersons. We were even able to go down to Austin and Temple to visit some aunts and uncles.

We didn’t quite protest the consumerism of Christmas by settling on not buying gifts for each other. Partly it’s because that’s just a hard thing to do–being consumeristic is actually fun for brief stints if you have the resources with which to do it. But mostly, we love to give gifts in celebration of Christ’s birth (whether or not there is any real spiritual tie to the Nativity), and ones that are useful (as well as thoughtful)! While handmade things tend to be awesome, they also tend to be less useful (though my sister handmade a number of useful gifts this year). So we decided to allow ourselves to buy gifts for one another, but we did away with Christmas lists altogether. That is, no one was allowed to tell anyone else what he or she wanted. We hoped that this would encourage us to focus more on the giving side of things than the receiving. In my mind, it was a great success! I put a lot more thought into the gifts I gave, and was pleasantly surprised (as opposed to barely satiated and relieved) by all the things that my family gave to me.

Well, I flew back to Orlando on the 28th, and got ready for an awesome week with the Griffin 302 boys (sans Kyle and Dave, who we seem to always be sans, unfortunately). Justin and Jonathan arrived that day from South Carolina, and we made a sweet dinner (plus many, many cocktails) with Tyson at my place. The next day the 4 of us took a little drive to Daytona and played some frisbee golf on the beach, then followed A1A up the coast to St. Augustine, where we wandered around until night time. Then it was back to my place in O-town, where we were greeted not long after arrival by Emilee Shim, who happened to be in Florida and stopped by! We made another excellent dinner, and watched a movie. The next day consisted mostly of sleeping and mini golf; but let’s not forget dinner with the Vozzas at some awesome steakhouse on Sand Lake. Dan flew in, finally, on the 31st, and it was off to Cocoa Beach for more disc golf. We got back and made a late dinner of pasta, then had a long and stimulating discussion about how we could/should aid the poor, and what that means. By that time it was nearing the new year, so we got together our poker skills and had a very long poker tournament, which I lost my money in. We were sort of keeping track of the ball on TV, but when 12:00AM came around, I realized I’d forgot to ice the champagne. So instead we took shots of vodka from shot glasses made of ice. New year’s, Russian-style! But then it was back to poker and white russians (I told you, Russian-style) until we about passed out.

Definitely the most chill New Year’s party ever–so much so that 2004 passed and 2005 came with just that one little toast, and none of us seemed to really care. But there we were, and our class year passed. Sort of sad, in a way. But with so much on the horizon for 2005, none of us are looking back.

Everyone took off the next day, and I unfortunately went to work for 7 days straight, rushing to get my app in working order. And now here we are–I’ve done enough work on the app for now, and am taking a breather, commenting my code (which I didn’t do as I coded–bad habit), fixing little bugs here and there, making a wishlist for version 2, climbing, running, playing World of Warcraft, and preparing for my next trip out to California, which will be on January 18. Hopefully this one will serve to give me any added clarity I need to come to a solid decision on California. As that guy from the Matrix says, “Exciting times!” Whatever happens from here, I feel like I’ve been a part of a little adventure which, at the least, has been helpful in my own personal, spiritual, and emotional formation. Who knows, though–maybe it’s just the start of an adventure much more epic in scope.

Oh yeah, it looks like Erin Spokes and Wes Bolsen might both be visiting me this weekend! Before a few months ago, no one from Stanford had visited me at home in Orlando–now the total climbs to 7. This pleases me greatly. Hey, if you are still reading, you’ve got some stamina. But since no one will read this anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter what I say. I could say, “you don’t got no stamina!” and it’d be all the same. Wot! Well, later. Llama love!

So, I spent a few days getting acquainted with my new office at Excelsis in downtown Orlando, and with my first assignment, which was to transcribe one of the seminars from LA. The process of transcribing is rather slow and tedious, but it was to be my life for over a month. For all the tedium, however, I was glad to be going over Graham’s material again, and at a very slow speed. Graham Tomlin spoke, you see, at between 160 and 180 words per minute, whereas my top sustained typing speed is much closer to 75 words per minute. The solution was to slow down the audio recording, while retaining pitch, so that it sounded roughly like Graham was extremely drunk (and wise), and so that I didn’t have to stop and rewind the recording all the time.

The slow-downing (as we technically named the process), while making the overall transcription more efficient, did mean that I transcribed audio at something like 1/3 the rate of the actual recording. In other words, it was going to take a long time.

Thankfully, I had a break on the near horizon, and so on July 23, I think it was, I drove up to Newberry, South Carolina. I met Jon that evening, and he took me fishing in a little boat on his family’s pond, to which we got via a dusty farm road in his grandfather’s old pickup truck, past some people rounding up horses. The south, indeed.

No fish were caught that night, but the next day was a little more fruitful. That is, we shot guns. Shotguns, in fact, of various sizes and recoils. His uncle had a clay pigeon thrower, so Parr and Tyson Vozza (who’d come the night before) took rounds shooting. It was great fun, and I didn’t do bad at all, shooting about 85%, even though I’d never fired a gun before. My performance would improve the next day, when I shot 100% of the targets!

Many more friends trickled in during that time, and we attended all sorts of wedding-ish parties and what have you, until the actual wedding on Saturday, for which all of us Stanford folk were late. Who knew the minister would start exactly on time? The reception was outdoors nearby and full of great food and dancing, followed by a late night out at a lake where we’d had the bachelor party not 24 hours earlier. It was a wonderful way to celebrate Jon and LeAnne.

I left the next day after sleeping enough to ensure that I wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel, and got home just under 7 hours later.

The next weekend I got word from my brother that he had indeed asked his girlfriend Ellen to marry him! So the first of my siblings to get engaged. It was a pretty weird (but awesome) experience, and I was glad to start with the preliminaries of welcoming someone new into the family.

The rest of that month wasn’t so exciting, unfortunately, filled as it was with transcription and, surprise, a couple hurricanes! Charley and Frances, to be exact. For Charley, it was just my sister and I at home (our folks were in England celebrating their 25th anniversary!) as the relatively small, but ferocious, hurricane passed directly over Orlando. While many properties were damaged, ours suffered no real harm, despite the winds and the things flying around outside. Frances was much more chill (or maybe it was Jeanne? Let’s call it Frances). Ellen’s family had come to stay with ours for that weekend, and so the 7 or 8 of us were essentially locked in the house for a few days, eating, sleeping, and partying (no seriously, partying). Again, while Frances proved to be a very serious storm, the brunt of it passed by us and in retrospect we probably didn’t even need to board up our windows.

As we neared September, I had the honor of flying out to Stanford to be in Nick Bott’s (and Jenna formerly-Shuer’s) wedding as a groomsman. So for a few days before the wedding, Nick and all his entourage, from both Stanford and St. Louis, hung out and did all sorts of fun bachelor-type activities. We were even given the gift of a sailboat ride around the SF bay, which was all the more cooler when my dad was able to get out the telescope from our SF apartment and tell me how many fingers I was holding up on the boat out in the bay! We also spent time with Nick and Jenna’s families, and Jenna’s bridesmaids. The wedding itself was on Sunday, in a beautiful redwood grove by a secret little lake up in the Santa Cruz mountains. The ceremony was beautiful, the string quartet was beautiful, and dare I say it, even the “special music” was beautiful (Nick asked Alex Polk and I to play Come Thou Fount). The reception was even more beautiful, if that is possible, followed by a night of dancing and being emotional about friends getting married and so on.

But that is where the story must stop temporarily. This whole “What’s Happened Since Graduation” series has taken much longer to write than I had planned, so I am going to have to move more quickly from here on out. In fact, I think what I’ll do next is simply do a basic recap of the last part of 2004, which does deserve a recap due to the important things which have happened in it. But I can’t spend all my time catching up, because then I’ll never write about anything besides events, and we all know that sucks. So bear with me, and we’ll pull through it soon!

TCS stands for “Text. Context. Soul.” Or, “Text, Context, Soul,” if you prefer less trendy punctuation. It’s essentially a learning/teaching/training/equipping seminar series that Excelsis (the company I work for), in partnership with GCM (some vaguely-defined missions-and/or-church-planting organization), puts on. This summer marked the second annual TCS (I talked about last year’s earlier—it was a good bit of the reason I decided to work for Excelsis).

Anyway, The trade between Excelsis and GCM seems to be (and I’m not a part of any of this so it’s just my guess) that in return for some financial (and other) backing, Excelsis gives a sort of priority admittance to the seminars to GCM staff (who together comprise probably around or over 95% of those who do attend).

The basic idea behind TCS is, as I mentioned, equipping (which is another trendy word in my circles that just means teaching/preparation/training/etc). Who are we trying to equip? Essentially, Christians. With what are we trying to equip them? Essentially, better (sometimes newer, sometimes not) ideas about a variety of issues pertaining to Christian life, spirituality, and philosophy. Or at least, better than the ones they now have. Ideas armed with which they will be more prepared to live successfully in, and have more fruitful interaction with, the world. How are we trying to do this? Well, we take a bunch of possibly full-time Christian service-people, i.e., missionaries or college ministers or church planters or pastors or seminary students, which role has thus far been filled by the GCM staff who have attended. Then we take a highly-trained academic, say a theologian from Oxford or a philosopher from USC, who supposedly has some of these good ideas or research. Then we say, have at it! Teach, learn, share, interact, discuss, and hopefully create a unique environment where true learning (this equipping we want) happens.

Meanwhile, us Excelsis folks worry about providing the venue for these seminar events, making it look pretty, and ultimately filming it with enough equipment to make a feature film. The idea is that we can then use this footage, together with the interactive transcript of the seminar plus a huge research library we are building, to create a new breed of e-learning products.

And that’s more or less exactly what happened for 3 weeks. The first week-long seminar was, as I said, in Orlando. We took over a large theater and installed tons of lights, various pieces of artwork, tables, chairs, candles, and whatever trendy little things were around. Then we (well not me personally, of course, but…) set up 3 or 4 full camera rigs, including one huge boom camera operated by a burly guy with a mullet.

Our speaker for most of that week was Bill Edgar, an apologist from a seminary which I’ve forgotten. Maybe Westminster or something? He talked about the art of Christian persuasion, in the style of Francis Schaeffer (he was a student of Schaeffer’s). On the whole his presentation was well-done, and helpful I think to many there, but I found that it didn’t really connect to my experience in a meaningful way.

On the other hand, his use of film, art, and music to point out the progression of society since however long ago was quite intriguing. I’ve always loved art and art history for that reason (not that I know anything about it).

During these days, my job was to run media such as powerpoint, music, and video. So I sat in a little booth back with the live-edit video crew, fiddling with the new Powerbook G4 I’d got. Lunch was catered for the crew and myself, so while everyone else went out, we ate Quizno’s and threw DVDs on the big projection screen we’d set up. I finally saw Spirited Away which was excellent.

Bill Edgar concluded on Thursday with a jazz piano recital which was frankly amazing; I wish I had anything like that kind of technical skill with a musical instrument. Friday, the first week of TCS concluded with a mini-seminar by Gordon Pennington, former marketing director for Tommy Hilfiger and other New York-type companies, on culture. So there was a lot of stuff about media and TV and mind control and so forth; generally good, though his style was fairly abrasive to me. But don’t listen to me; obviously I’m just a critic.

One of the downsides to the week was that the workday went from 8am to 9pm, affording me no time to unpack in the evenings. And on Saturday, I flew along with some other Excelsis folk to LA for 2 more weeks of TCS—so my stuff continued to reside in various boxes.

The flight to LA was unremarkable, and when we got there we were chauffeured minivan-style to Kairos, a church near the Hollywood, Sunset blvd area, where we accompanied a rather large crew in getting the place ready for filming. We effected a pretty total transformation, drawing on the skills of various interior-decorator-inclined folk, and by the end of Saturday things looked pretty good.

That Sunday we did a sort of test drive of the cameras, lights, and all the rest, by filming the Kairos church service. I spent the rest of the day hanging out with Chad, the film/media guy for Excelsis and the director for the seminars. We were to be roommates for those two weeks in the illustrious Ramada Hollywood, just a few blocks from where we were filming, and conveniently located by the headquarters of the Church of Scientology, where we saw no end of interesting goings-on whenever passers-by we became (of it). So anyway, Chad and I walked around Sunset Blvd and had a few beers at one of those touristy, overpriced LA bars.

Then, I had the good fortune to run into my friend from school Chris Haughey, who I’d known was in LA and wanted to connect with. It happened, also quite opportunely, to be the 4th of July, so I went along with Chris to a party he knew about over in Santa Monica (I think it was). It was good to catch up with him and jointly ignore the rest of the people at this party (and drink all his donated rum, which no one else seemed to want).

Then the weeks began in earnest, with Graham Tomlin kicking off TCS week 2. My official job was no longer media guy, since the church had employed some volunteers for that purpose. Instead, I ran the dolly cam. That is, I pushed an expensive camera and camera operator on a little trolley up and down a 12-foot track. And I did it hundreds and thousands of times a day, whenever I got the word from Chad over the ClearCom headsets the whole crew was wearing.

At first it was fun, and since the quality of the picture depended on how smooth the dolly op could control the vehicle, I felt kind of important. Moreover, there was definitely a “trick” or two to getting it to run smoothly, so I felt like I was learning a somewhat valuable skill. For a while. Then, after about 5 minutes, it got incredibly monotonous. “Go to 1, Go to 2, Go to 1, Go to 2”—this is what I heard for 2 weeks. So, to break some of that monotony, I and the camera ops availed ourselves of every opportunity to crack a joke or say something funny in the headsets. Because of that things were actually bearable.

Well, that and the fact that I was getting to hear Graham teach, which is something I deeply enjoy. Again, Graham was just right on and I wanted to write down everything he said and digest it more slowly. Well, I got what I wanted later on when I did end up transcribing every single word of that week’s seminar. I’m still digesting much of it, and reaping many benefits of that reflection.

Graham Tomlin teaching in LA

The nights were mostly spent hanging out in the hotel and reading, or hanging out with the camera crew, who I grew to be pretty good short-while friends with (most were from LA, but one had come from Orlando, and we’d hung out the previous week). On Thursday, it was a short seminar day, so a bunch of us went over to the Getty art museum—it’s rockin.

Friday was a bit crazy. At around 9pm I had someone take me to the airport where I boarded a plane for Indianapolis for my good friend (and Eastwood Posse dude) Andy Wolfe’s wedding. I got in around midday on Saturday after some flight shenanigans in Chicago O’Hare (an airport no one should choose to fly through, ever), then Mark and Christian drove me to Bloomington for the wedding. It was pretty short and sweet, and I was an usher. Ushering is awesome. Plus it was really weird to see Andy get married—a feeling I’d experience twice more in a month and a half. But that’s later.

The highlight of the trip was definitely the reception and after-party thing. Free beer and wine, good food, crazy fun people that I knew and crazy fun people that I’d just met, dancing, much defacing of the newlyweds’ vehicle, inappropriate comments in shoe-polish on the window, and so forth. All the Posse was there except Josh, so we counted it as Altimar V.

But the trip was short—at 4am I was driven back to Indianapolis after not having slept due to partying, and then I was flying back to LA, where I was met by some film crew guys, who took me out to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles for breakfast. An excellent Hollywood restaurant if you ever get the chance. From there we went to the LA Dodgeball League, which was co-founded by Rob, who was co-directing the TCS event with Chad. Apparently a lot of people from that dodgeball league were in the dodgeball movie, including Rob. So I played a bunch of rounds, doing alright for myself. It was fun, and brought back great memories of childhood, except for the fact that large men can throw considerably harder than young children.

That night a bunch of us went to the LA House of Blues, where Mark Pontius, the camera op who I pushed back and forth all day, was playing with his band Malbec. I’d had a chance to listen to their demo CD, and it was really good, as was their live show. The beer was very expensive, however—something I was growing to dislike LA greatly for.

The next week’s seminar was lead by Dallas Willard, a philosophy prof from USC. He talked about Spiritual Formation, which is basically the issue of what it means to, how one can, and what processes allow one to grow in order to, most completely live (as a Christian).

For me, it was once again edifying to hear what I recognized as desirable wisdom during the course of that week. Or at least, what I could catch while pushing the camera around and making jokes.

And that’s really all there is to say about it. Of course, I did more things in LA—I went to Amoeba, shopped at various bookstores, patronized various Thai eating establishments, and sat in deadlocked traffic jams on various highways. But Saturday, July 17 came soon enough, and then I was on a plane home. The airline lost my bag for a few days upon return, which was inconvenient, but it all got worked out like it usually does, and so I set myself to the task of moving in.

Monday, June 14, 2004 Dav and I woke up early that morning in our family’s San Francisco apartment, and packed up our things. We also hadn’t planned a specific route home yet–we just had some vague notions we wanted to visit a few key places. So we got online and printed out a few route options, figuring nothing was set in stone. Our only hard-and-fast deadline was that we needed to be in Orlando by the 25th, since I started work on Sunday, the 27th. With the help of our family, we got my bike and snowboard back on top of the car, loaded the trunk with as many boxes of my stuff as possible, filled the backseat with our climbing and hiking gear, and were off around 9am.

Our first stop was Castle Rock State Park, my “home” climbing area, being the closest to Stanford at about a 45-minute drive. There we met my college roommate and climbing partner Dan Urban for a morning of lead climbing and bouldering. We wanted to make sure to do some lead climbing under Dan’s more professional eye, to make sure that, if Dav and I wanted, we could set up our own lead climbs during the course of the road trip. So, we spent a few hours training and having fun, and then it was time to set off on the first major leg of our adventure: Yosemite.

We said our goodbyes to Dan and then made a brief stop at the Saratoga REI, where we loaded up on camp food and miscellaneous gear. Then it was off to the Valley–about a 4-hour drive away. It was an uneventful drive, except for a little apprehension on my part as it was the first time my bike and snowboard were subjected to sustained high speeds. But Yakima be praised–everything (including my self-guided installation of the rack) seemed solid.

We rolled into Yosemite about mid-evening and spent a little bit driving around, showing Dav some of the cooler formations like the Cathedral and El Capitan. When it got dark, we made our way to Camp 4, my resting place of the previous weekend. Being the summer, there were no campsites available, so Dav and I threw our sleeping bags on the ground somewhere on the outskirts of the camp and settled in for the evening. I didn’t sleep very well, since a lot of weird feelings were rolling around inside me regarding graduating, leaving my home, starting a road trip that wasn’t planned very well, being “in charge” and responsible for myself and for my brother’s safety.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004 But the early morning came soon enough anyway, and so Dav and I packed up our things and drove to Happy Isles, where we picked up the trail to hike up Half-Dome–a trail which by now was looking very familiar, given the 4 times I’d traversed it just 10 days prior. I was feeling really good, and Dav was keeping up, so we blasted through the first section of the trail and kept a pretty intense pace up past both waterfalls on the stairstep sections. We’d started relatively late (6am or so), so we passed up a number of groups on the way up.

Dav and I practically raced the rest of the way, slowing down only near the final set of stairsteps before the cables, when Dav began to feel ill. As it would later become evident, he had contracted altitude sickness (undoubtedly due to our fast ascent). I didn’t think that was the case at the time, though, given Dav’s high level of fitness and the relatively low altitude we were at (say 7500 ft). So I unwisely pushed him to continue at a pretty decent clip. As we neared the cables, though, it soon became apparent that something was fairly seriously wrong, and Dav was having to take frequent breaks and fighting off intense nausea. We were close then, so he didn’t want to turn back; he manfully kept on, following me up the last, most difficult segment: the cables. And then we were up! I looked at my watch then to see how long it had taken us, and I was surprised: only 3 and a half hours! A whole hour and a half faster than the last time I’d done the hike, and that even with the relatively slow finish.

We thought having a good long rest would settle Dav’s problems, so we munched on energy bars and tried to take a little nap on the warm and sunny summit (such a different experience than the frigid night of the previous week), enjoying the view.

Dav and I on Half-Dome

Instead of improving, Dav’s condition worsened, and he eventually started vomiting up his food and water. At that point I began to get very worried, because if something was so wrong that he could not keep water down, it would be a pretty dangerous 8-mile trek back to the car. And then what? I didn’t know how to get any medical attention, even if we could make it back! I kept these thoughts to myself, and focused on getting us down. So we started down the cables, down the long stairs, and back to the “treeline”, where, wonderfully, Dav pronounced himself all better. It finally occurred to me that he had indeed been experiencing altitude sickness, and most of my fears went away. He was fine the rest of the way down, and we took it pretty easy.

Cool rainbow at the bottom of one of the falls

Me in the mist!

After we made it back, we enjoyed some burgers and beer at Curry Village, and even ran into some family friends from LA. Well, the first stop on Road Trip V2 had been a success, and so it was time to move on. We got the car ready, and navigated the confusing Yosmite road system, trying to find the eastern exit to the park.

On the way, we were treated to some of the most amazing scenery I have ever looked on, from majestic forests to granite cliffs and mountains, to bright green glacial meadows, to nearby peaks with snow in mid-summer. This was the area called Tuolumne, and I will definitely be visiting it again in future adventures. Here are a few pictures:

A random beautiful lake

An alpine meadow

On this route east through Yosemite, we went through Tioga pass, which marked the highest elevation my car had ever been: 9,945 ft. As proof:

Tioga pass gate

From there it was downhill into the elevated desert of eastern California. The plan was to hit Bishop, CA that night, camp, and boulder in Bishop the next day. We knew nothing about Bishop except that it was reputed to have some of the best bouldering anywhere. And we knew its location, thanks to our TripTik.

All told, it was probably about a 6-7 hour trip to Bishop. We didn’t see any boulders or campgrounds in the small town itself, though, so we decided we needed to ask around. Luckily, there was an awesome outdoors store that we stumbled upon, and its staff was more than helpful. We got info about campsites and bouldering areas, and purchased more camp food (dried spaghetti and meatballs), a guide to the bouldering in the area, and a road atlas of the US, Canada, and Mexico (something we’d left home without, and something which came in very handy).

Blurry picture of the sunset on our way out of Bishop

We left the store at dark and made our way to a self-pay campsite which we’d unknowingly passed on the way in, about 10 miles outside of town. It was supposedly close to the Happy Boulders, which was the bouldering area Dav and I had decided to check out in Bishop (there are several, as well as some good top-roping in a nearby gorge). Unfortunately, after we paid, we discovered that the campsite was hell. It was right by a small stream, which we thought would be excellent in the arid climate, but which turned out to mean billions of mosquitoes and other bugs. It got so bad that, even though the temperature had to be well into the 80s (even after dark), Dav and I put on pants, gloves and jackets, and fashioned turbans out of shirts. We then proceeded to protect our faces by smoking our pipes as furiously as possible while getting the dried spaghetti and meatballs wet and hot enough to eat over my camp stove.

After we executed the tactical move called “get your ass into the tent and don’t let any of those little shits in with you”, the night got considerably better, and we slept pretty well through the hot, moonless night.

Wednesday, June 16, 2004 The sun rose early, and so did we. We packed our gear up amidst the bugs that were still faintly buzzing around, and drove to a nearby well where we pumped water into our nalgenes just like you’ve seen them do it on Little House on the Prairie, or whatever that show is that I didn’t see where people live in the country. From there, we took my little Civic on the most torturous dirt roads she’d ever seen. We cruised at a sweet 5mph over giant ripples in the dirt for about 2 miles to where we decided the trail to the Happy Boulders started.

Then it was up a steep trail for about a half a mile until we came to the south end of the Happies, and had a half-day of some excellent bouldering. We saw a few other boulderers (with whom we had friendly, climber-like conversations) but for the most part the region was ours, save for the vultures floating ominously overhead in the dry air.

We tried a number of bouldering routes that were outlined on the map we had bought, but most proved to be beyond our ability. To give you a sense of perspective, some of the routes in the area were rated V10 or V12, whereas the hardest route I was able to complete was rated V1 (I don’t think I pulled off a V2, which would have been fitting for the trip). That route was called Beer Tumor, and it was possibly the funnest outdoor bouldering problem I’ve done. It started at a pretty burly sit-start in a cave, then out through a roof up onto some really sharp crimpy stuff for an athletic mantle finish. (Of course, being a V1, words like “burly” and “athletic” should be taken relatively). Here’s a picture of me making my way out of the roof:

Me on Beer Tumor

As 11am rolled around, Dav and I started to wear down, and the sharp volcanic rock of the Happies started to rend our hands useless for further climbing. The temperature’s own climb into the high 90s also influenced our decision to call it quits for the successful day.

Dav and I posing with the car after bouldering

So we got into that car and headed south from Bishop, down the eastern edge of the Sierras. The terrain in this part of California was very interesting, as to our right we had the Sierras with their snow, and to our left the deathly dry and hot salt flats, or dried-out lake beds, or whatever it was. Once we almost ran out of gas going up a very long incline, and stopped to refuel in Johannesburg, CA. As the following picture proves, it is a very small town.

Post Office, grocery store, and gas station, all in the same building

Well, eventually we’d got far enough south, and decided to head southwest, towards LA. The idea was to hit the 10, which we would then take east to the 62 (or whatever road it is), north to Joshua Tree national park. We found the 10, and immediately wished we hadn’t (as does anybody who’s driven on the 10, probably). But after the sucky traffic in the middle of nowhere that didn’t make any sense, we got out into the real nowhere and headed north to Joshua Tree. We drove in around 6 hours after we’d left, scored one of the many campsites (Joshua Tree is very hot and empty in the summers), and went back outside the park to the actual town of Joshua Tree for some dinner (at the same Sam’s Pizza and Indian Food restaurant as this last time I went to Joshua Tree, when I almost died). We got this amazing picture on the way:

Sunset leaving Joshua Tree

After dinner, we headed straight back to the tent and tried to get some sleep in preparation for the next day of bouldering we had planned. Since it was such a warm night, and since I felt very comfortable in Joshua Tree after the last time I’d been there, I decided to sleep outside under the stars, on the rock. It was beautiful.

Thursday, June 17, 2004 We woke up with the sun again, in order to conserve as much coolness as possible, and drove over to the Wonderland of Rocks to mess around on some boulders. We worked on a few problems, and then stayed at Gunsmoke, a real, live V2, for a while. Gunsmoke is a really fun, very long traverse which works various cracks along two sides of a corner wall.

Dav on Gunsmoke

Me at the same place on Gunsmoke

Neither of us did the whole problem from start to finish, but we did enough for me to proclaim it the trip V2, if only so that we have something to justify the name!

From there we moved to another area of J-Tree, and did some more problems, but it was starting to get insanely hot, and our energy was sapped more and more by the minute. So again we called it quits around midday, and packed up our campsite to head out.

Our next destination: Phoenix. We didn’t know exactly what we would do there, but we used to live there (I was born there, in fact), and have a good number of friends there, so we figured we could stay for a day or two and hang out, or recover from the intense, showerless few days that had passed.

Another 6 hours on I-10, and we had made it, through some of the craziest desert headwinds I’ve ever been in (I’m sure the bike-shaped sail on top of my little 4-cylinder car didn’t help). On the way we had made plans to stay with the Carusos, family friends from when we were little kids. We pulled into their place in south Phoenix (or it may have been Tempe) just before dinner, and frightened them with our grizzled appearances.

After showers, they recognized us, and we had a wonderful dinner with Jim, Marla, Amy, and Kaitlyn (Amy and Kaitlyn are Dav’s and my age), catching up on life since the last time we’d seen them (which was probably closer to 10 than 5 years ago).

Friday, June 18, 2004 The following day, Dav and I woke up late, and took a drive around Phoenix, seeing some of the places we used to visit whenever we’d come to Phoenix in the summers as kids. We drove around ASU, where my parents met and got married, and went to lunch at In ‘N Out (just because I’d forgot to take Dav to one in California). We tried to get in touch with some other people we knew, but on such short notice it didn’t work out.

That night we went along with the Carusos to their weekly family dinner, with relatives who lived nearby. It was a fun group, and cool to see so much family that had stayed in one place and made it a point to get together frequently. In fact, they’d all purchased some land and were planning on building houses together.

To close off the evening Dav and I went over to Amy and Kaitlyn’s apartment and watched Legally Blonde, and did some more catching up and talking about life with them. It’s awesome to have friends who, no matter how often or when you met them on the path of life, there still seems to be something of a common bond and a shared experience within which you can talk about just about anything.

Saturday, June 19, 2004 On Saturday, Dav and I drove up to Rimrock, AZ, where my aunt Cindy and uncle Jeff live. Jeff is a volunteer firefighter, among other things, and Cindy works at a nearby hotel. It was good to spend the day with them, since of all my close relatives we probably see them the least!

We imposed on the Carusos for one more night, and went with them to see a local league indoor soccer game, where guys from their church played some other team. It made me remember how much I missed playing soccer. And that’s really all there is to say about that day.

Sunday, June 20, 2004 Dav and I slept in on Sunday while the Carusos went to church. We woke up and did some laundry, then packed for the remainder of the trip. Incidentally, this is when I used their computer to check e-mail and weblogs, and noticed that this weblog (along with the rest of what was on my two web servers) had been deleted. Threatening letters were sent to my hosting service, but to no avail. Also, when I was working on the computer, it died, and the contents of its hard drives were erased by a virus (which had been downloaded before I used it). All in all, not a good day for information technology as far as it related to me.

At 2pm, we thanked the Carusos for their hospitality, and started the drive to Texas. We planned on driving from Phoenix to Austin, straight through the night, and it was supposed to take 18-20 hours, depending on any number of variables. So we were off!

The drive through the Arizona and New Mexico desert was without incident and quite beautiful–the stretch of I-10 from a few hours east of LA into El Paso is one of my favorite pieces of highway in the country. When the evening hit, we stopped at a Love’s truckstop in New Mexico, where we got dinner and I lost one of my nalgene bottles. Then, David got behind the wheel for the first time of the trip. I had a fair bit of anxiety as Dav had never really driven stick before except once or twice, and I was giving him all sorts of verbal instruction pulling out of the truckstop. Thankfully, it was an easy, non-hilly move onto the highway, and we were again on our way.

We hit Texas around 9pm, and drove through El Paso, with the big, white, American Interstate lights above us and the softer, yellow-gold, haphazardly-placed lights of the Mexican city Juarez to our right, just across a border which was invisible in the night.

A few hours east of El Paso, we ran into an inspection station, where Dav experienced his first stop and go traffic with a standard vehicle. The only problem was, the car wasn’t going–he kept stalling it! So a huge space was opening up in front of us, and I was worried that the officials would notice something odd going on, get suspicious about our vehicle, and want to search it. We had so many boxes in the car, I didn’t want that kind of wasted time on our hands. So I gave Dav 3 tries and then told him to switch seats, even though I could tell he really wanted to do it on his own. Thankfully, nothing strange happened with the inspectors–they asked me if the car belonged to me, and that was it. Not a fruit inspection as usual, so I wonder what they were looking for.

So I was driving again after a few hours’ rest, through the dark of west Texas. There was a large storm up ahead which took up the whole eastern sky, and would periodically expose the stubby trees in a ghostly blur with beautiful lightning as the car sped past them. I’m somewhat paranoid when it comes to Texas storms, though, especially in the summer, since I’d experienced a fair number of tornadic or near-tornadic events; this meant the storm, beautiful though it was, made me unsettled. What’s worse, it seemed as though we were getting closer only slowly, which meant that it was probably moving in the same direction, which in turn meant that getting through the storm would take that much longer.

Monday, June 21, 2004 Luckily, I-10 took a more due-easterly turn, and so we seemed to be on a course which would circumvent the bulk of the storm. Still, for hours upon end, it stayed on the horizon, menacing and wild.

Eventually I began to get sleepy and the car needed gas, so we pulled off somewhere after Sonora, TX, where we refueled and I gave Dav another chance to drive. He did fine without the pressure of the inspection station, and I was soon fast asleep as he drove, listening to David Gray.

I woke up again before dawn, only a few hours outside of Austin. When we needed gas again, and when we left I-10 in favor of a more direct country road, I took charge of the car and took it all the way to our destination: my uncle David and aunt Sarah’s house in west Austin. I don’t remember exactly when we arrived; it was probably 7:30 or 8:00 am. Our aunt was ready for us, though, and had made up some beds so we went right to sleep.

Dav and I woke up a little after 12, and spent the afternoon hanging out with our little cousin Ryan, who is like 5. He likes video games, so Dav and I had no problem entertaining him and ourselves with whatever console my aunt and uncle had.

For dinner that night, the 5 of us went out to a supposedly classic restaurant near UT which I’ve forgotten the name of, but was known for its “down-home cookin”. There we met my other aunt Sarah, who lives a ways north of Austin. She gave us a surprise during conversation; she had just found out she was pregnant! So I have another cousin on the way. If all goes well, that will bring the total cousin count to 2.

Tuesday, June 22, 2004 Dav and I said our goodbyes to family on Tuesday morning, and started the 3-hour drive north to the Dallas area, where we were to stay for a few days. We used to live in Cedar Hill, TX, which is a suburb of Dallas. Cedar Hill is full of interesting landmarks like this one:

The water tower

We got in about midday to the Morrises’ house. The Morrises are family friends like the Carusos, and were some of our best friends in Texas. As it happened, David had been dating Ellen Morris since the previous October, due to a number of circumstances which there isn’t time to relate. But anyway, they had become serious in their relationship and Ellen was moving to Gainesville so she and David could relate to one another in a short-distance sort of way. We spent the next few days helping her pack and get ready, as she and David were going to drive her car to Orlando while I drove mine. Caravans!

I hung out with Nathan Pettijohn, my best friend growing up, that night. While I was waiting for him at Barnes and Nobles, I randomly ran into a few other friends from high school, which is odd, because I’ve never ran into anyone from high school in Cedar Hill since I moved. So Nathan, Claire, her friend, and I hung out, listened to music, and had beer at Bennigan’s until late in the evening.

Wednesday, June 23, 2004 The next day, I indulged myself and allowed myself to visit CD Warehouse, which, in the Cedar Hill / Duncanville area, tends to have some of the best and newest indie-type music around. I picked up some cool stuff by Muse, Elliott Smith, the Doves, and Aimee Mann.

Importantly, David took Ellen’s parents out to dinner that night, and asked for her hand in marriage, while I stayed behind with Ellen and her cousin and her aunt and talked about what David was doing (for some reason there wasn’t much of a secret). Well, there it was: just a matter of time until my brother was (probably) engaged. Crazy.

That night I took a drive up Central Expwy to Cafe Brazil to meet a friend from Stanford, Joe-Joe Chen, who was living in Plano at the time. It was pretty crazy to see a Stanford friend in that environment, since Stanford and Texas have never mixed for me, since I’ve been living in Orlando as long as Stanford was a potential or actual part of my life. In fact, only Tyson Vozza, of all my Stanford friends, has ever visited me in Orlando. (That will change in a month, however).

Anyway, I got back late, which was very bad, because we were planning on leaving at 6am for the long, straight shot to Orlando, which was supposed to be around a 21-hour drive.

Thursday, June 24, 2004 On Thursday, I did the most driving I’ve ever done in one day in my entire life. Originally, Dav, Ellen, and I had made plans of rotating drivers and giving the off-driver a chance to sleep. However, the two lovebirds were obviously having such a good time hanging out by themselves in their own car, that I ended up driving my car the whole way by myself.

Ironically, I was the most tired at the beginning of the drive (probably due to only getting 5 and a half hours of sleep), through the gently rolling hills and forests of east Texas. We were in Louisiana before I knew it, though, and from there it was just more and more of the same.

Some bridge in some south-eastern state

The only problem was, it rained for roughly 95% of the trip. In fact, the only time I can remember seeing sunlight was when the above picture was taken. Not only did this slow us down, but the constant storms demanded a lot more mental control and energy to drive safely in. We finally passed through them just as night set in, after hitting the Florida panhandle.

Me rocking out in my car, getting close to (or possibly in) Florida

We were in Florida for at least as much time as we were out of it; the panhandle is surprisingly long. Apart from stops for food and gas, though, we made good time. Right about Tallahassee, I started feeling a bit drowsy, so I pounded some of those caffeine drink things and pretended they would help.

Friday, June 25, 2004 And that’s about all there is to tell; we stopped in Gainesville (home of the UF Gators) to drop off Ellen’s car, since David’s was in Orlando and they could drive that up the next day. So Ellen, David, and Hunter Trek (Ellen’s dog) slept soundly in my little car as I drove the last 2 hours home. We finally pulled in around 2 or 3 am, and my parents welcomed us into the townhouse that serves as their interim home, and is where I still live.

After a lot of sleep, I woke up and began to unpack, a chore that would not finish for about a month (and still can’t be said to be complete, I suppose). David and Ellen drove back up to Gainesville to settle into their apartments and start summer school. And I braced myself for the next adventure: starting work!

All Spring Quarter, Dan Urban (companion of previous adventures) and I had been dreaming of doing another summer night hike of Half-Dome in Yosemite, like the one we did in the summer of 2002. Except this time we wanted to get all of our friends together for an end-of-college, last hurrah sort of adventure. Accordingly, we planned a night hike of Half-Dome for the night of Saturday, June 5, 2004, and invited just about everybody we knew.

Being somewhat climbingly oriented, Dan and I wanted to do a little more than just a night hike. We wanted to climb Half Dome via a route called Snake Dike, rumoured to be one of the funnest climbs in Yosemite, with stunning views. Snake Dike is (I think) a 9-pitch climb up the side of Half-Dome (not the back, where you can hike up, or the front, with its sheer face)–around a thousand-foot climb. Certainly longer than anything I’ve done before (my longest route was a 2-pitch in Thailand. Snake Dike had a rating of 5.7R, which means a rating of 5.7 with “runout” pitches. 5.7 is just about the easiest rating–in a gym, a route with that rating is often climbable by people who are climbing for the first time. Still, things are different outdoors, and when you have a 9-pitch route, with some bolted clips and some trad protection, it becomes another story. All the same, the climbing was well within my level, and well below Dan’s.

The “R” was a little scary though–“runout” means that sometimes there is a very long way between bolts or protection points (which is where climbers put a piece of gear into a crack in the rock or into a bolt in order to provide protection in case they fall). The way lead climbing works is that, if you make a mistake and fall, if you are currently above the last piece of gear you placed, you will fall down to that gear, and then the same distance again, since you are on a rope (plus some rope stretch). Snake Dike reportedly had runouts of up to 75 feet. This meant that if a climber fell just before reaching the bolt which was 75 feet away from the last, he would fall 150 feet before the rope would go taut. Clearly, falling 150 feet is a bad idea. So: an easy route technically, but long and with no room for mistakes.

Dan and I tossed around the idea of climbing Snake Dike at night, while our friends hiked Half-Dome the normal route, and meeting them on the summit. But we threw away that notion because it was (a) too obviously dangerous, and (b) nullified our goal of hiking with our friends. Therefore, since it was absolutely necessary that our friends experience a night hike, as opposed to a day hike, Dan and I realized we would have to summit Half-Dome twice: once on Snake Dike during the day, and once with our friends at night. As we further looked at our schedules for our last week of school, we realized that we would have to accomplish all of this in a short amount of time, with relatively little rest in between endeavors.

So ultimately, the plan was this: drive to Yosemite on Friday the 4th, get an early sleep, wake up before dawn, climb Snake Dike, hike the 8 miles back down Half-Dome, eat dinner, meet our friends who would be arriving, hike back up the 8 miles of Half-Dome at night, greet the sunrise on the top, and then come back down. It seemed like a good plan, so we settled on it, and left Stanford at midday Friday as we had decided.

The drive to the Valley was successful, and we found a spot for our sleeping bags and camp stoves at Camp 4. This was illegal, since the camp was “full”, but we were planning on being out before the rangers came around the next morning, so we didn’t worry about it. Around 9:30 or 10:00 pm, we finally had eaten dinner and settled in for sleep. I slept well, but was nervous thinking about the long climb the next day.

Half-Dome in the sunset, taken while driving into Yosemite Valley

We woke up before 5am, packed up our gear, and drove to Happy Isles, which is at the base of the trail up Half-Dome. We were on the trail fairly quickly, for the hike to the base of Snake Dike. That hike follows the Half-Dome hiking trail for 3 or 4 strenuous miles, and then goes off-trail towards the dome (while the regular trail continues to circle around the dome).

A view from the way to Snake Dike. The route itself follows the shadow on the left side of the dome up to the summit.

Since there was no trail, we followed little cairns (piles) of rocks which previous climbers had used to mark the way. Sometimes these were devious guides, though, and led us in the wrong direction. But after about an hour of trucking through forests and even a swampy area, we came to the very base of the dome itself–an area of slabs.

“Slab”, in climbing terminology, just means any rock which is leaning away from you (as opposed to “overhang”, which is rock which is leaning towards you). If a wall is “slabby” enough, you can walk up it carefully without any ropes (just like you would walk up a steep hill). We saw that a series of cairns went up these slabs towards the base of Snake Dike so we followed them.

The foot of the slab approach to Snake Dike

The slabs kept getting steeper and steeper as we went up, and pretty soon I was feeling very unsecure with the shoes I had on, which were quite good trail running shoes, but lacked the sticky rubber of climbing shoes which enables one to put less foot surface area onto the rock while maintaining friction. We saw that we were getting closer, though, so I pressed on, with Dan a ways ahead (his shoes were slightly better suited to the task, having this climbing rubber). There were a few points where I had to make a sprint for a tree or some other anchor sideway across the slab, since if I moved any slower my shoes would fail and I would slide down however many hundreds of feet. Once you start sliding down a steep slab, it’s incredibly hard to stop–and if you start tumbling, it’s pretty much over.

Finally, I had made a lunge into a position which was impossible to get safely out of. The slab was too steep to press on, and the scree all around made it impossible to go down (since going down requires more friction than going up). Dan was fortunately able to get to a rock outcropping above me about 30 feet and blindly toss down a rope, after he had anchored himself around a tree. After a while I caught the rope and was able to pull myself up to Dan. From that vantage point, we could see that we had come up the wrong way–while we had followed a few cairns, the vast majority of them did not go up the slabs immediately as we had done, but made a level path on the shallower slabs until it came to a more step-like and less slabby way up towards Snake Dike.

Needless to say, I was exhausted from the thousands of feet of hiking, the hundreds of feet of crazy slab running, and hauling myself up a rope. And in fact, being trapped on slab where I could not even rest my muscles fully had scared me pretty bad. So we hiked the last hour up the pretty grueling terrain to the base of the climb with a good bit of apprehension. But we had finally finished the non-climbing part of the climb. And it was 9am.

Looking up from the base of Snake Dike

In the picture, you can see a dot a ways up. That’s a person climbing the route ahead of us. We had started at 5:30 am, and this group was at least an hour and a half ahead of us! That’s dedication. But to give you a sense of scale, the climber is not even a third of the way up the route.

Dan on a crazy runout

Here we can see Dan on one of those really long runouts I was talking about. If he had fallen there, things would not have looked good for him (or me, if he landed on me). Luckily, Dan’s climbing prowess was not overestimated, and we made it to the end of the 9th pitch without any problems, a few exhilirating hours later. The climb wasn’t over then, though. We unroped and prepared for the last leg–more slabs, but this time we had our climbing shoes on and the going was not as frightening. It was steep and difficult, however, and terribly aerobically taxing at almost 9,000 feet above sea level. Nothing was about to stop us at that point, though–we finally made it!

Dan and I on the top, Sierras in the background

After a brief rest (and a brief bask in the admiration of those hikers at the top who happened to notice we had come up the wrong side), we noticed it was about 2pm ( Snake Dike takes a long time when you make 1 person lead, as I made Dan, since you have to switch gear at every belay–I wasn’t about to try any runouts!) and started the descent. We didn’t push ourselves and got down sometime in the late afternoon, probably between 4 and 5. So, at least 5 miles of uphill hiking, a thousand feet of climbing, and 8 miles of downhill hiking later, we were exhausted. We rewarded ourselves with an extra-large pizza and a pitcher of beer and joined a table of climbers who were a bit more seasoned than ourselves for some friendly conversation.

Around 7:30 we settled back in our car seats for whatever nap we could get. I woke up around 9 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I started preparing for the night hike, rearranging gear and packs and water and so on. After 10pm or so, our friends rolled in in a disorderly caravan of vehicles–many more people than we had expected given the poor reception our invitation e-mail had received! All in all there were about 15 people ready to tackle the dark, bear-infested heights.

With so many people it took a while to get headlamps and packs in order, but we were starting up the John Muir trail not too long after 11–just 18 hours after Dan and I had started our Snake Dike adventure. I had been feeling pretty exhausted, my legs were virtually destroyed, and I was worried that 16 more miles of hiking would be out of my reach. But everyone else’s excitement, the bright moon (we had planned it for a full moon), the crisp air, and the steady pace lifted my spirits and I felt ready to push again.

A night hike of Half-Dome takes a fair bit longer than the same hike in the day, because much more care is required in order not to trip over hidden roots and stones, go off the edge into a waterfall, or slip on slick rocks. There were also a number of points where the trail itself is easy to lose, and Dan’s and my short term memory from earlier in the day proved valuable.

The group, which consisted of people at all levels of outdoors experience, went surprisingly quickly. We trekked through all the kinds of terrain there is on the beautiful hike up, and eventually made it past the “treeline” to the beautiful moon-reflecting granite near the summit. The panorama for the last hour of the hike is truly amazing in the moonlight, with all of Yosemite Valley clear, but ethereal and ghostly and quiet. And then we were at the Cables–the last, very steep push up to the top of the dome, assisted by heavy cables you use to pull yourself up.

We arrived around 4am, making for just under a 5-hour hike–not bad, especially for such a large group! I immediately began to fire up my stove and make some hot chocolate, because the sudden ceasing of movement gave me a deep chill. I had foolishly packed most of my technical hiking clothing away for moving to Florida, and was wearing layers of cotton, which, when soaked through with sweat, practically turned into ice in the 40-degree air and swift winds.

The small size of the picture doesn’t show it well, but this is a pretty sweet long-exposure shot of the stars above the sierras

From there I degenerated physically pretty quickly, since I had spent all of my energy stores, and was now freezing cold. So I huddled rather miserably under a rock and awaited the sunrise. It came pretty soon, as you’d expect at high altitude, and flooded the Valley with amazing brilliance and beauty. It’s really impossible to describe how the light goes from non-existent, to gentle, to jewel-like, to fiery, to terrible and blazing, on the slopes of the Sierras.

Our group played around on top for a while, exploring the large surface of the summit and making oatmeal on our stoves. Much of the wonder was lost on me, unfortunately–not because I’d been to the top twice before, but because I had begun to feel very ill, and had no idea what was wrong with me. I figured it would pass, and so I pretended like everything was OK until we started the descent later on in the morning. I was helping some of my friends down the cables when I realized why I was feeling ill. Without further ado I let go of the cables and practically ran down, then up the next hill until I could find a suitably private spot. Then, with the help of some friendly bushes and an uncomfortably rough rock, my body was freed of the burden it had been carried, and which had made me ill! Of course, no one else in the group needed to know about this little scouting trip.

The cables head on look very steep–it’s a fantastic optical illusion! (Credit: Dana Hornbeak)

That done, I was relieved that I wasn’t in any serious physical trouble, and was confident that I could make it down to the cars without any problems. Indeed, a number of us felt that it was better to jog down than to hike, to make use of gravity and allow our legs some more free movement. So the whole of us hiked and trotted down, not in any hurry, the 8 miles which had become so familiar to me over the past 30 hours.

The bulk of our group taking a break on the way down (Credit: Melanie Chuen)

One of the benefits of the night hike is that you meet very few other hikers on the trail, and you feel as if you have Half-Dome to yourself. On the way down, however, we met scores and scores of early-morning hikers getting a good start up Half-Dome, and it became very tedious and crowded. So for the last 2 miles or so, on the relatively easy downhill, I let loose and ran (along with a couple of other guys) for the finish, playing games like “dodge the hiker”.

And then, it was over! We had made it to the base and walked the mile back to the cars. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been, but also exhilirated that Dan and I had pulled off an amazing expedition for ourselves, and one that all our friends had enjoyed too. The pain and soreness in my legs over the next week made me feel a little foolish for running the last bit, but I had final papers to contend with, so there wasn’t much room for regret.

The downside of coming back from that wonderful extended church service in Yosemite was that the coming back was to academic hell. Of course, I’d left plenty of work until the last few days, and so I scrambled to slap together some excellent work. Excellent work isn’t usually slapped together, but I thought it ought to be possible, so why the hell not? As it turns out, the work wasn’t quite as excellent as I’d hoped, but it was a good deal better than I’d thought it actually would be, and apparently my professors did too.

So on Wednesday, June 9, I walked out of Bldg 100 in the Stanford Quad, and had completely satisfied all my academic requirements for what is very probably ever. The next day, my grades were in and I had satisfied all the unit requirements for the BA and the MA in Philosophy–with 0 extra units. I do like to cut it close. As exhilirating as the Half-Dome hike was, I don’t think that I’ve ever felt quite as much relief as on the day. Well, it spanned a couple days–all the way through the night of graduation.

Graduation weekend was spent packing and figuring out how on earth I would get all my stuff back to Florida. There were also parties to attend and lots of people to say goodbye to. Graduation itself was Sunday morning, and was unbearably hot under the California sun. But I didn’t care. I had my cool MA hood on and I allowed myself a little pride, just for effect, but mostly all I felt was relief. I received my two diplomas from our department head in the private department ceremony in the Philosophy department arcade.

Then I loaded up my car, slapped my bike and snowboard on top, and drove to San Francisco for a family graduation dinner and party, with grandparents and aunts and uncles and everybody. It was simply amazing, and still all I could feel was relief. So I drank a good amount of vodka in praise to God and fell blissfully asleep.

Thus ended the longest and most significant chapter of my life (to date, anyway).

You’ll notice the new title and design (becoming a yearly October tradition!) – I hope you like it. The picture up top is from an amazing cathedral in Barcelona, my trip to which would have been eminently bloggable. The title comes from Pedro the Lion, of course. If you haven’t heard the song, go to the iTunes store and buy it now.

Well, I’m actually a working man now (for Excelsis–look back 3), so I’m heading to bed. Here’s to another year (i.e., 6 months) of webloggy goodness!

“The only faith that can found a universal church is pure religious faith, for it is a plain rational faith which can be convincingly communicated to everyone, whereas a historical faith, merely based on facts, can extend its influence no further than the tidings relevant to a judgment on its credibility can reach. Yet, due to a peculiar weakness of human nature, pure faith can never be relied on as much as it deserves, that is, [enough] to found a Church on it alone.

“Conscious of their impotence in the cognition of supersensible things, and though they allow ever honor to be paid to faith in these things (as the faith which must carry conviction for them universally), human beings are yet not easily persuaded that steadfast zeal in the conduct of a morally good life is all that God requires of them to be his well-pleasing subjects in his Kingdom. They cannot indeed conceive their obligation except as directed to some service or other which they must perform for God–wherein what matters is not the intrinsic worth of their actions as much as, rather, that they are performed for God to please him through passive obedience, however morally indifferent the actions might be in themselves. It does not enter their heads that, whenever they fulfill their duties toward human beings (themselves and others), by that very fact they also conform to God’s commands; hence, that in all their doings and non-doings, so far as these have reference to morality, they are constantly in the service of God; and that it is absolutely impossible to serve him more intimately in some other way (for they can act and exercise their influence on no other than earthly beings, not on God). Since every great lord of this world has a special need of being honored by his subjects, and of being praised through signs of submissiveness; nor can he expect, without this, as much compliance with his orders from his subjects as he needs to rule over them effectively; and, in addition, however reasonable a human being may be, he always finds an immediate pleasure in attestations of honor: so we treat duty, to the extent that it is equally God’s command, as the transaction of an affair of God, not of humans; and thus arises the concept of a religion of divine service instead of the concept of a purely moral religion.”

Of course, what we really need is a purely moral religion, Kant wants to argue. Does this have the result that the contingent facts of Christianity are irrelevant to the real moral/spiritual truth? One way of reading Kant is that he thinks such facts are a crutch, and actually an inhibition to forming the right kind of ethical community (the Church). Then again, he realizes that such an ethical community is best founded on “a holy Scripture”. What does the indefinite article there admit of? Anyway, these are important paragraphs and everyone should think about them.

But somehow, I’ve turned into the biggest bundle of depressed stress I’ve been in a few years. I can’t possibly have as much work as I had in previous quarters, but somehow it seems all I’m doing is work, and somehow I’m still behind, yet without even the trade-off of hanging out with friends. Recently, I also found out I have to re-write a paper from last quarter in order to graduate, so all of a sudden it’s like I have an extra class.

Then earlier on my campus bike was stolen, so I’ve had to walk to and from class once or twice a day, which adds at least a half-hour of nothing (I live almost a mile from class). Then last week I somehow forgot my really expensive noise-cancelling headphones on an airplane. Then splendourhyaline.com goes down, and neither the registrar nor the web hosting company sees fit to respond to any of my e-mails or phone calls. That should be (and probably is) illegal, but there’s nothing I can do about it now, even if I had time. It gets me so riled up I want to hit something, but usually I just think nasty phrases in my head.

Basically, a lot of the things on the periphery of my life are falling apart, so to speak; these are things that are not essential but whose presence and functioning I took for granted. Since they’re not really essential, when they go, I try to tell myself not to bitch about it; after all, compared to most of the world I’m insanely rich and pampered and if I really care that much about my noise-cancelling headphones, well, I’ve got a scary life ahead of me. All the same, given the timing of it all, my patience is being sorely tried on all fronts: school, financial, physical (I was sick for a few weeks), emotional (seeing your friend get married is awesome, sort of like dying of thirst while your buddy’s got a brand new case of Evian), and spiritual. Needless to say, such trials are unwelcome as I face my last month of college, drawing as they do a picture of gloom and an expectation of a hard, gasping crawl to the finish line, instead of the leisurely stroll that I’d planned on. Well, whatever. I don’t even want to think about it.

Of course, lots of good things are happening too, though my mind allows them to be overshadowed by the threat of final papers due. The last two weekends were awesome, as I went to Atlanta for the aforementioned wedding, and then to Orlando, where I was able to see Pedro the Lion, Over the Rhine, Ester Drang, and several other awesome bands, as well as (more importantly) hang out with my family and hug my mom on Mother’s Day. Incidentally, I picked up the vinyl version of Over the Rhine’s recent record and got Karin and Linford to sign it, which was awesome, especially after practically weeping at the beauty of their live performance.

Unrelatedly, but more or less simultaneously with all these other things, I also went through a couple days of very intense self-history. For a sort of group project I was doing with some close friends, I mapped out over 500 events that happened in my life since the day I was born, with an eye to their significance. This included (as it always does) those deep-dark-secret type things, as well as various errata that most people wouldn’t consider significant but that somehow held meaning in my life or were a turning point of some kind (for example, how I treated the girl I had a crush on in third grade). I am still sorting through the aftermath of that endeavor, since I’ve never quite seen my life from such a bird’s-eye perspective, and I’m somewhat disoriented. But, as I hoped, certain themes began to spell themselves out in relatively stark relief, and I am not quite sure how to deal with these aspects of me that were uncovered. While this truth is refreshing, it is also debilitating, and with everything else that is going on I think I have tended to hopelessness in my relationship with it so far, instead of hope. May that return.

Anyhow, this is all just to say that I am decidedly less sanguine about this quarter now than when I started, and I want to kick something in the knees for taking away my sunny dreams for it. No doubt in the future I’ll be glad for the struggles; maybe it will make being done that much sweeter. I certainly can’t imagine anything sweeter right now than never taking another class again (so yes, that means plans for going on to a PhD program are being reconsidered and postponed indefinitely). Well, one month to go. See you when it’s over.

Of course, vagueness has its value, and for me that was being able to manufacture the perfect description for the particular person asking about the company. If I didn’t want to give her the impression that it was very much linked to specifically evangelical Christian theology, I didn’t have to. If I wanted to be especially curt, I could usually just say I was doing web design, and people would stop asking questions. That’s another thing–the lack of clarity on the company I was interning for spread also to my own job description. I never knew from day to day what I would be doing, and it was rarely what I expected. Obviously, I liked this situation, and it worked well for me, since I never really had time to get bored with a particular project to the point where I was trying to find ways to make it look like I was working on it while really surfing the internet. On the other hand, I did, I will admit, write a good many weblog entries while at work.

The highlight of my internship was attending a seminar, put on by Excelsis, taught by Graham Tomlin of Wycliffe Hall at Oxford. In many ways, that seminar was the organizing agent of all the confused and scattered thoughts on culture and religion I’d had over the course of my Stanford education (not implying that Stanford had anything to do with the thoughts). Its title was the same as a recent book by Graham, called The Provocative Church, and the subject matter was, for lack of a less clichÈ concept, the relationship between modernism and postmodernism.

During the sessions of the seminar, I realized I had a very narrow idea of the interplay between modernism and postmodernism. Like most of my philosophical knowledge before “purification”/“objectification”, it arose as a result of apologetic endeavors. That is, I viewed “postmodernism” as nothing more than a longer version of “relativism”, and therefore the enemy of true Christian faith. As it turns out, I was completely wrong on the definition, and the inference is decidedly less clear than it used to be.

In any case, I began to see postmodernism not as a well-formulated though anti-logical doctrine, but instead as a haphazard jumble of values, cultures, literatures, emotions, semi-philosophical thoughts, and the like, that had one common thread: a deep suspicion that modernism, or the de facto state of the world for the past however long, was not going to bring us to utopia. With this realization, many floodgates were opened, and I saw that, to my surprise, I really had more in common with what I would now call the “postmodern” than the “modern”. Indeed, I saw that many of my struggles with church, with philosophy, with the apologetic approach to Christianity, were the struggles of a postmodern soul seeking refuge from antisepticity, but likewise afraid of going the other direction to pure, dirty, rawness.

Complexity abounds, though, so I would not go so far as to simply proclaim “I’m postmodern”. As I’ve mentioned, it’s not clear what exactly that even means, and whether it is more a positive or more a negative concept. Looked at as a philosophy, there are no doubt things I will want to take up and things I won’t, just as with modernism, which gave us valuable fields like analytic philosophy. There are other ways to look at it, though, and maybe more important than the philosophical viewpoint is the cultural viewpoint. I like to think that I am a very culturally aware person (to a painful degree at times, especially when with people who are less so), and if this awareness extends to myself, I will be right if I say that I am in many (if not most) ways uncomfortable in “modern” cultures, and more comfortable in “postmodern” environments. This must be qualified by saying that the kind of postmodernism I am discussing is not the variety that has run, fad-like, through many of today’s churches. Youth group leaders are eager to chop off their hair, get an earring or 3, turn off the lights, burn incense, spout phrases like “lectio divina” and so on, while remaining at the core perfectly modern. As far as I am concerned. I am not talking about that.

But enough with the labeling that I don’t want to get into anyhow. The point is, I felt like I was given just the right lens through which I could analyze the unanswered questions of my personality, my relationships with people, and my faith. The main point of the seminar, of course, was on the engagement of the Christian church with this dynamic of the postmodern replacing the modern, and therefore useful to the entire community present, not just myself individually.

Sadly, the analyzing I spoke of is not yet done, though I’ve been working on it for this entire school year. That might end up taking longer than I thought.

Right now, Excelsis is working on turning that seminar experience into an interactive learning tool which will essentially become a self-contained class on DVD. Having seen a prototype of the interface (and having transcribed a good deal of the text from the lectures, Q&A sessions, and so on), I am really excited to see how the final product looks. I can only think that, if it was the perfect vehicle for propelling me into a completely different mode of thinking about things, it could very well do the same for many other people. And then we’re one step closer to influencing Christians to be more aware of what is going on around them. (Ironically, I went into philosophy hoping ultimately to be able to influence non-Christians to come to faith, but now I think I am more concerned with the Christians, as we are in what appears to be a rapidly sinking ship).

Over the past year, Excelsis has (in my intern’s opinion) grown up and grown more focused. Seeing progress on the project which before was sketched out only in ideas and dreams, and seeing plans to hold four more seminars this summer, has given me a sense of what Excelsis is about (or one of the things it is about) and what it has the potential to do. Moreover, they’ve hired a few more people, bringing the total team size to a whopping less-than-10. It’s a good thing I like this team (of which Pavi and Faith keep weblogs of their own), though, because I have agreed to work for Excelsis after graduating. In other words, I have a job! As a soon-to-be-philosophy-graduate, this is more than I can expect, ask for, or even dream about.

Honestly, I am excited about Excelsis because it seems like it could be, for me anyway, the next chapter of a good story. The next step towards Mt. Doom, if my story is an epic. (I hope it is. In epics, depending on what character you are, you actually find the beautiful warrior princess you are looking for. Sometimes it’s even more towards the front of the book!).

Luckily for me, that next step is not through the ash-ridden plains of Gorgoroth, but to Orlando, FL, well-nigh paradaisical! Living at home with my parents (and occasionally, my sister or brother) will be awesome, and I can’t wait to finish up here, pack up my car, stick my bike on the rack, and drive cross-country just so I can start my new life there. I’m always ready to start a new stage in life–to wash the staleness of the old one off: to reset, tabula rasa style, and commit once again to avoid compromise, to love people, to believe in people, to give God another chance to show his face, and all the rest.

For now, it’s time to put my head down and stick it to the man! That is, finish well and actually graduate. But I’ll have a toast nonetheless: to the future!

(PS: For more info about Excelsis, including an idea of some of their initiatives that I did not mention, you might as well go to the website: excelsis.cc.)

Nothing feels to me like it has been more redeemed in my own person (and by “redeemed” I just mean, “rescued from its ’natural’ state and returned to its truly natural state”) than creativity. I am at the core a creator, a designer, a crafter of words and music and ideas, and ultimately systems and worlds. I can’t help but think God, if he thinks of these things in the same concepts as we do, gets enjoyment watching me fashion my toy-block castles down here, in mimicry of his creating the cosmos. Anyway, I wanted my Easter service to be centered around an expression of this faculty of mine.

Last year, my creative Easter act was to write two monologues (entitled Friday and Sunday), the first from the point of view of Judas, and the second from that of Mary Magdalene. It was the first time I’d ever taken a given time and set it apart for creative work as a specific act of worship. But I was so moved by the process that I hoped I could, in doing something similar this year, have “church” here in my room in a way that would be maximally meaningful for me. (Incidentally, even though I did not plan on going to church, I somehow ended up at Catholic mass, a first-time venture for me and very interesting).

So, I invite you all to see the result of this year’s endeavor. It happened to be a song, which I am tentatively calling “Liability” and which I wrote and recorded today. The lyrics are semi-opaque as usual, but I think they are extremely relevant to the Easter story, since the song poses some questions to which I think the Easter story provides good and meaningful answers. The kind of answers I cling to with that tenuous hope of mine, not quite willing to let go.

Also as usual, the recording was rather hasty, and this should only be considered a rough cut. But here it is, and I hope that, even though Easter is done for the year, the song might remind you (or make you ask yourself) why you believe the story, if you are one that does.

- Liability -

Wrapped up in blankets / Numb from the shock / Blind from horrors / How could God let this occur? / They were innocent / Young and so much left / The bastards on the evening news were so composed / With suits that didnít smell of blood or burning hair / Calmly they proceeded to explain the tragedy / Was caused by shoddy wiring in the plants overseas / They were innocent / Young and so much left / Empires crumble on their own / But now we have so many ways to kill ourselves / When will there be something new? / When will there be something that frees us? / When will there be something real? / We need to see something come back to life / We were innocent / We’re young with so much left / Empires crumble on their own / But we have learned so many ways to fool ourselves / We were innocent / So come and bring us back

We have already heard how I went home to Orlando in mid-March, frantically wrote a term paper, then came back to Stanford for dead week (a semantically uninteresting term referring to the week before finals week), along with my family. The night before I left for Thailand, I stayed for the first time in our family’s awesome new San Francisco apartment we are renting for my dad.

View from the apartment window; that’s the Bay Bridge.

The next morning my brother, sister, and dad flew back to Orlando while my mom and I got on a plane to Tokyo–the first leg of our trip to Thailand. Because American Airlines loves us so much, we flew business class for the almost 11 hours. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t able to fully enjoy the free drinks or personal movie device, since I was planning and outlining for the second of my three term papers; this one was for my theories of truth class.

We had a short layover in Tokyo, then got on a Cathay Pacific plane to Hong Kong. I decided that flying coach in a 747 is to flying business in a 777 as “sucky” is to “awesome”. After 5 hours of wondering why Asian people are generally smaller, more compact, and more courteous than Americans, and being glad that I am not what you’d consider a large person, we landed in Hong Kong, and checked into the airport hotel to await our flight to Bangkok. We had crossed the International Date Line, always a fun thing to do, so it was now something like 36 hours after we left (only about 19 or so of which were real).

In Hong Kong we met up with my friend Samuel Chan, with whom my mom and I were in Honduras, back in 2001, and who had, through various trips, become friends with our family. His parents and he had been kind enough to suggest that we use the few hours we had in Hong Kong to our advantage, and take a midnight tour of the city. Needless to say, I was excited about the opportunity, not only because I’d never been to China (admittedly, Hong Kong is very different than many parts of the country that come to mind when someone says “China”), but because a night tour of a city is always cool.

Hong Kong is a huge place, and it took us a while to get from the new airport to something like the city center. The first thing we did was to have an authentic Chinese dinner at about midnight, at a small shop on some street somewhere, surprisingly busy for being so late. Maybe due to the fact that none of the dishes we shared corresponded very closely to the Chinese food we have in the States, I thought it was much better.

From there we checked out some shopping centers and what have you, then drove up to the summit of a range of hills between which and the sea Hong Kong is nestled. We got some good views of the city proper, amazing with its lights in the night.

Yes, that is a national monument. Yes, I am climbing it.
Awesome view of Hong Kong

Since at that point we’d spent a few hours driving around and checking stuff out, I thought the Chans would deposit us back at our hotel, but they were hyped up about giving us a good tour, so we caught a few more main sights.

The water front
Picture of me and Sam

In regards to that last picture, apparently the graffiti on the column there was written by a very famous crazy person, who claimed to be King or Emperor of China or something. The writing details the evidence for his claim to the throne. Supposedly, this is a major tourist attraction, and the Chans were very adamant about me taking a picture with it. I am now thinking that this was all a ploy: the writing no doubt says something like, “I’m a stupid American, look at me taking pictures by this dumb pole as if it were a major tourist attraction.”

Well, time wore on, and about 3 or 4am, the Chans dropped us off at the airport for a few hours’ sleep before our flight. Actually getting on that flight proved to be a bit difficult, since the customs officer at Hong Kong did not believe that I was actually me. The pictures on both my passport and driver’s license are both from when I was 16 (and neither close to expiring, actually), and I don’t really look like I did when I was 16. So after holding up the line for 15 minutes, grilling me about where I lived and so on, he finally asked me for my signature. Of course, I’ve changed my signature since I was 16 too, so he wasn’t really convinced. Ultimately he got some second opinions from other personnel and let me through, to our relief.

Another short Cathay Pacific flight later, we were in Thailand, waiting for our domestic flight to Chiang Mai. I was still depressed about my lack of progress on term papers, so we waited in a bar where I could drink Heineken while working. Anyway, we were on board the commuter 747 (!) soon enough and landed an hour later, to be picked up by our hosts, the Fains. The Fains are friends of my parents from Orlando who had moved to Thailand in January to pursue missionary work there, and, importantly, they had offered us lodging!

Chiang Mai turned out to be hot and dusty, clogged with the smoke of burning brush and slash-and-burn farming techniques–just the kind of international place I like! The Fains lived not far from the airport (window-rattlingly close, in fact), in a great little house which was to be our base for the next few days. The first order of business for me was to contact Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures, whom I was hoping to hire to show me some good rock climbing in the area. I got them on the phone and finalized plans for the next day, then settled in to work on my truth paper before bed.

The next day the climbing guide folks picked me up early, got me all signed up, and sent me with my guide Son (amongst some other folks) to the local crag, about 30 minutes away. What followed was an amazing and intense day, where I led two single-pitch climbs (probably mid-5.9) and followed two double-pitch climbs (5.10 or higher, maybe). The climbs themselves were really interesting, all overhanging and gymnastic with bomber holds and pumpy sequences. At points I stopped to think and realized I was basically campusing almost 300 feet up in the air. Anyway, enough with climbing jargon. Here’s some pictures.

Far-off view of the crag, Crazy Horse Buttress. Probably at or just below 300 ft of vert.
Looking up at the first pitch of an awesome climb that went up through a cave, then around and out a face.
Close-up view of the top of the crag, from the summit of a single-pitch climb.

Needless to say, after 6 pitches of climbing in a hundred-degree swelter, I was tired. But after parting ways with the climbing guides (they gave me a free t-shirt!), it was dinner time, so I got ready to go out with everyone. Now, food was one of the best things about Thailand. First of all, it is cheap. I don’t recall if we ever paid more than the equivalent of 50 cents or a dollar for an entire meal. Secondly, it tastes great. And I had Chinese and Indian food there as well that made all the stuff I’ve had in the States pale in comparison. Anyways, after dinner at a local shopping mall thing, and picking up a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in Thai (who knows, I’d like to learn Thai someday), we were on our way to another of the best things we experienced in Thailand: a two-hour Thai massage.

I’ve never had a professional massage in my life, of any kind, but after a day of climbing it sounded like a really good idea. And let me tell you, it was. All 8 or so of us (our group had expanded to include various other Americans) were herded into one room, where we each had a pallet and a masseuse. They worked on us, talking between themselves as if they were folding clothes when they were really contorting our limbs into various oddly possible positions. At the end of the full-body massage, my muscles literally felt to my hands all gooey and buttery, and I think I fell asleep a few times on my way to the door. All for under $10, if you can believe that!

Our next and last full day in Chiang Mai, we took a guided tour of the city and the surrounding areas, which included, inter alia, elephant rides! As I said before, elephants are large beasts. Indeed, I sat on one’s head, and it was not only large, but prickly and smelly too. Very endearing, though. Our elephant driver allowed me to take over for about half the ride through the forest, teaching me the commands to tell the elephant to go left or right. I must not have been doing very well, though, since our beast liked to take lots of snack breaks and eat plants, even when I told it to keep going, or it would let all the other elephant rides win the fastest and least scatter-brained elephant award!

Scenery from the back of an elephant
More scenery
My mom and I on the elephant. I’m sitting on its head.

Other perks of the tour were an ox-cart ride and a bamboo raft ride, all through some pretty sweet Thailandscapes.

Rice fields (?) from the ox-cart
They also let me pole the raft for a while. Cool sombrero!

After some hours of these expeditions, we were tired, but the guide company would have none of it. We went to a paper-making facility where they were making paper out of elephant dung. During the how-to session, someone was explaining how the dung is purified during one step, and then in the next steps people can handle it safely. To me, it just looked like they were playing with the dung of elephants, but I couldn’t deny that eventually it turned into paper. I even bought an elephant-dung journal, mostly because I feel there has to be something very ironically symbolic about that. Lastly, we visited an orchid-and-butterfly farm. The orchids were pretty surreal, growing as they were free of any soil, roots hanging happily in the air.

One of my favorite orchids from the farm

Eventually we made it back home, and turned right around for our last adventure: the Chiang Mai Night Market. Or, Night Bazaar, or many other names. Place Where You Get Fake Stuff for Cheap is what I like to call it. It looked like many other third-world-ish markets I’ve been to, and it was fun to brush up on my haggling skills. Still, I often overestimated the value of various products, coming, perhaps, as I did from the States. For instance, I got a shirt I wanted down to the price of $2.50, only to see it advertised at another vendor for about $1. I was incensed until I realized I was talking about a difference of $1.50. The best buy of the evening was a technical climbing backpack, made by “North Face”, for $15. It will probably fall apart soon but looks great!

And that was about it for Chiang Mai! I did, thankfully, finish my term paper on truth that last night before we left, but unfortunately had an entire one left to do, and the trip almost done. Anyhow, the next day the Fains drove us to the airport and we got back without incident to Bangkok. Since our flight out of Bangkok (straight to Tokyo this time) didn’t leave till the next day, we had opted to stay at the Peninsula Hotel in Bangkok, a world-class 5-star hotel which we could only afford to stay in at Thailand, given the extremely low cost of living and all. No need to mention prices, but I’ve stayed in Best Westerns for as much. Needless to say, it was an interesting treat, but I probably shouldn’t get used to being picked up at the airport with bottles of Evian and a Rolls-Royce.

The last highlight of the trip with my mom is that we were able to get a tailor to come to our hotel room and make us some high-quality suits, at prices far below US rates. For myself, I came out of the deal with two tailor-made suits, five shirts, and a tie.

That part of our trip was over all too soon, and the next morning early we boarded our Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo, where we would catch our 777 back to San Jose. Since said 777 was operated by American, we again flew business class, and I worked on my last final paper, on possibility and necessity, for the entire duration of the 10-hour flight. I actually finished just as we began our descent, and felt at last free from Winter Quarter 2004. It’s a shame that I couldn’t enjoy the trip to Thailand a little bit more, however, and I have decided that I need to go back and live there for a while to make up for it.

Anyhow, my mom and I parted ways at the airport since she connected on to Orlando, and so I went back to Stanford for a day and a half. That Saturday, I got in a car with Dan, Jon Parr, Tyson, and Justin (roommates from Stanford) and we drove to Park City, Utah. Well, before that I stayed up all night packing and discovering that my campus bike had been stolen (damn!), and that I had an overdue DVD out from the library. Oh well. Adventure behind and adventure ahead, I couldn’t balk at a little adversity, even if it was my own stupid fault for not leaving the machine locked. So we drove the 10 hours to Utah without incident, stopping at Willemucca or some God-forsaken place for lunch, where I found the Saddest Round Table Pizza in the World. Seriously, this run-down hole was not only in bad structural and hygienic condition, the people who were eating there were the saddest I have ever seen. There was even a kid having his 12th birthday party there, with like one friend. It was the saddest birthday party I have ever seen. I ate a slice or two from the saddest buffet I have ever seen (it consisted, honestly, of two personal-pan pizzas, half-gone by the time I got there), and left feeling altogether better about my life.

The rest of the drive was spent playing video games while my companions listened to Stanford losing in the NCAAs on the radio. Enjoyable for me, but then again I didn’t care about basketball. Everyone else seemed to be depressed, so I made fun of them for being depressed about sports. They got mad at me for some reason.

Eventually we pulled into Dan’s condo at Park City, where we were to stay until Wednesday. But not till after we shopped for food at the local Albertsons, where we discovered that, in Utah, all liquor/cigar stores are State-run and closed on Sundays, holidays, evenings, lunch breaks, during snow storms, during rain, and during sunshine. Moreover, all the beer in grocery stores have an alcohol content of no more than 3.2%. Now, I don’t really care so much about alcohol content, but this seemed to me ludicrous. Or perhaps sensible. I don’t know. Anyway, I had been planning on making my signature dish–chicken con broccoli over angel hair pasta in a garlic wine-butter sauce–but we couldn’t find any wine.

The next day, Sunday, I slept in, and kept sleeping, while the rest went to Salt Lake City to check out the Mormon temple or what have you. To me, sitting in the cabin and reading and playing video games sounded funner, so I did that. Then, we got pumped up for skiing by watching Bowling for Columbine, a very excellent movie.

And at last we get to the mountain (skipping some sleeping and minor details…). The conditions were relatively good early on, but since it was about 60 degrees on the slopes, things got slushy quick. Still, I had a great day and felt really comfortable on the board, keeping up solidly with the rest of the guys (who were all skiers).

The intrepid adventurers at the base

Since it was cloudy but not raining or snowing, a business day, and between the hours of 4 and 4:30, we found an open liquor store and bought some wine so I could make my dinner, which was very tasty. Then we all got ourselves some glasses of fine spirits and watched The Ladies Man, a movie that never ceases to shock me. Awesome nonetheless.

This is getting long, so let me cut to the chase: the next day we drove down to BYU for some reason and played mini-golf, which I lost. Last place lost. Then some more movies followed, some sleep and so on, and eventually a drive to Las Vegas, where we checked in to the Mirage hotel. Vegas is a town I would never want to live in. We played that night at the Bellaggio. I set myself a limit of $40 and proceeded to immediately win $15 at video poker. Believing myself invincible, I decided to throw away $20 at roulette. Then, to the slots, for about 20 minutes of the most depressing shit I have ever experienced. To my left and right, fat people with buckets of quarters, the machines reading “425 credits”, spinning and spinning, not even looking at whether they were winning, mindlessly pulling the lever and draining their lives into nothingness. And I joined them, as if in a trance, until I realized I had $5 left. Even then it was hard to pick up and walk away.

Finally I tried my hand at blackjack, and got back up to $55, when I decided, mostly as a result of the lesson slots taught me, that up was up and up was good and up meant time to leave. The 5 of us walked around Vegas some more until we all agreed that it was depressing and burdensome just to be out on the streets. I had heard that it was commonplace to receive pornographic advertisements from people passing out flyers on streets, so I made sure to keep my hands in my pockets and tried to keep my eyes from wandering over the “business” cards strewn over the ground. But I wasn’t prepared to see smut being passed out by small Mexican women wearing red t-shirts that said, “For Immediate Service, call …” I couldn’t decide whether to be angry or sad or guilty or innocent. But I did know that someone somewhere was being wronged somehow in a particularly egregious way. Whatever.

We couldn’t wait to get out of the place, despite the fact that we all ended up winning money from the Bellaggio, and so the next morning we got out of town and headed for Orange County, where we had planned to while away the remaining days of Spring Break 2004 at Dan’s house in Mission Viejo. Notice the pattern of using Dan for his homes! And that’s exactly what we did–we went to the beach, played a few tournaments of whiffleball, walked the dog, watched Waiting for Guffman, ate Dan’s mom’s delicious cooking, sailed around Newport Harbor in a Duffy boat drinking box wine, and had what could only be called a rather fat and indolent time. In other words, a wonderful time.

To top things off, three of us lucky contestants got to fly home to Palo Alto in Dan’s dad’s airplane. Since I sat co-pilot, he even let me fly the thing for about 45 minutes. No joke. I followed waypoints, changed elevations, and even descended into Palo Alto. And now I am addicted to it. Sadly, the only thing I’ll ever be a pilot of will be a flight sim, unless I somehow become spontaneously rich.

Our bird. I mean, Dan’s dad’s bird.

With that, the vacation was over, and it was back to Stanford for my last and final quarter. That’s last and final. Lord willing. And so, there is a rather long-winded account of the last break from school I’m ever likely to have (unless I go on for a PhD or something).

From a bamboo raft

The Sunnybrook house

Last weekend I went home to say goodbye to our house (above), which we’ve lived in for almost exactly 4 years. On the way there from San Jose I passed through San Luis Obispo, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and Chicago, IL, for a total of 15 hours in airports and 9 on planes. At least the horrible travel experience wasn’t a complete waste: I wrote this awesome paper, a 20-page term paper for a philosophy of mind class, which I’m afraid will be ripped to shreds by my professor despite its inherent awesomeness. The highlight of the Orlando trip was not being stuck on planes, obviously, but sitting in the hot tub for hours 3 nights in a row. Goodbye, sweet hot tub!

And then,

Me on a traverse in Castle Rock. Dav is cameraman

My family came to California to visit our new apartment in San Francisco (where my dad will stay the weeks he is working out here), and so I had to take David bouldering at Castle Rock. Fun times, but unfortunately for me at no point during this great week did I get either of my other two term papers done. And now, I am packing for Thailand, a country I will be leaving for in just about 12 hours’ time. I am going because I figured I should take off finals week, I wanted some more airline miles, and I’ve never been. I have never been to Thailand, but in the past few weeks there have been plenty of people who were willing to give me their opinions of the it: the food is great, the beaches are great, the climbing is great, and the hookers are great…Incidentally, I learned that the area of Thailand I will be visiting supposedly has some of the greatest sex-per-dollar ratios anywhere. But that’s neither here nor there, since I’m not typically into visiting brothels, you know.

But that’s not the end of it! Like my life is some non-stop action movie of sweetness, after I fly back into California from Thailand next Friday, I pack up some warmer clothes and drive to Utah with my roommates, for half a week of snowboarding. When we get burned out on the slopes we’ll drive to SoCal for some beach relaxation and a stay at Dan’s place.

Somewhere admidst all that awesomeness, I’ve got to cough up some more term papers. But I’m losing motivation fast, which means things will probably go quickly (since the less motivation I have, the less I care how well my papers are written).

In any case, this will probably be my last transmission from Jonathanland until Spring quarter rolls around and I’m back at classes for what may be the last time of my life. Until then, sweet dreams and send money to my PayPal account. Key term for this entry: “awesomeness”.

I saw the film on Monday, at a pre-showing. Technically, it was flawless. From beginning to end I was completely enveloped in the world of first-century Jerusalem, owing not just to the more common excellences Gibson exhibited (cinematography, effects, music, etc…), but also importantly to the linguistic environment. While the dialect of Aramaic developed for the film was necessarily only a scholar’s imitation of language we have only hints about, through modern Aramaic, I was completely sold on the fantastic realism of it. What a pure joy it was for me to hear the flow of the words, closing my eyes and imagining that some very similar audio streams were actually sent through the air and echoed off stone walls thousands of years ago. The Latin spoken by the Romans in the film was likewise a treat–spoken quickly and lively by the soldiers without the pomp of oration, it made me believe that it actually used to be the lingua franca of the world, not just something my classics professors made up.

The technical merits of the film were necessary conditions for its being great (not, of course, sufficient). What they did, essentially, was to free my critical mind from accusations of poor acting (not a hint of which ever appeared onscreen), or poor dialogue (which I would not have been able to understand in any case), so that I could pay attention to the story. And what I realized was that I had, for all the hundreds of times I’ve read the gospels, never heard that particular story before. Something like that is the only explanation, anyway, of how I could spend the bulk of the movie shaking and unsuccessfully choking back tears. The viscerality of the torture unmanned me and left me wide open, so that every last bit of sadness I saw in the film, or of beauty, or of symbolism, or of meaningfulness, or of pain, passed right through the usual barriers of intellectualism, or of decorum, or of self-consciousness, or of distraction, and rent my heart; there was nothing that could stop it, not even the embarrassment of crying in a movie theater (an embarrassment made more or less null since everyone seemed to be suffering it at one point or another).

Tears were not the only thing to be inspired unbidden–there was anger (never at the Jews, or even the Romans who executed the tortures, but more globally at the character of Lucifer and his damned actions that traced back all the way to his serpenting in the Garden, as well as at the evils of human nature that we alone seem to be responsible for) and also a sense of awe as all the things I’d ever heard about Jesus’ experience were realized on the screen. Most importantly, I was drawn to the character of Jesus in a way that I never have been before. For the first time, I looked at him and thought, " That’s how I want to be." Sure, Christians say shit all the time about “being like Christ” or even how that is the goal of Christianity, but it was never compelling in more than a general way. To me, “being like Christ” was just equivalent to “being good” or “being like a perfect being”, and I have an awful hard time caring about being morally perfect. I suppose I never understood that, while “Christ” and “perfect being” might have the same semantic extension, their intensions are separated by an immense chasm. A chasm out of which somehow sprang the personhood of Jesus, to which I was drawn. I wasn’t, in seeing his skin flayed and his blood spilt, attracted to the perfectness of Christ. What perfectness there was was covered under ochre. But the blood and death–I can understand that because it is all around us, and if ever there was a man who embraced it like Jesus did in this film, that is a man I would follow.

So there is an account of what the film did for (rather, to) me–it compelled me to come to grips of a sort with what kind of person Jesus must have been like to do what he did, and I found, to my surprise, that I loved that person, so full of love himself, and purpose, awareness of cosmological tension and the power to relieve it. In other words, everything that a human is meant to be.

I have been trying to decide what I would have thought of the movie had I not already considered myself a follower of Christ, and it is difficult. Certainly, if one goes into the movie with an agenda of any kind (whether Christian [say, to be inspired or something useless like that], or otherwise [say, to tally up the possible anti-semitic sentiments]), one will miss the intended impact of the film. If one watches it, on the other hand, as one would watch any other story which she’s never seen before (recall your first viewing of Braveheart), it seems to me that the attraction of Christ is inescapable. This attraction, again, is not to any belief about the metaphysical structure of reality, or to any set of mysterious creeds, but to a person. Ultimately, that fact is what sets this film apart from all other Christian attempts at filmmaking, since it is the story of a human being–a story that can teach us about love, and perhaps even more about love than any other story–instead of a thinly-veiled excuse to moralize or evangelize.

In other words, get off your ass and go see it.

At 6 AM last Friday morning, Dan and I woke up ready for the 8 hour drive to Joshua Tree. We were hoping that the odd start time would allow us to avoid much of the weekend traffic in the city areas and getting into Joshua Tree itself (we also wanted to score a decent campsite in the park, and those are preciously hard to come by on a Friday night). There were no incidents on the way there, and we made pretty good time, despite numerous stops, at Carl’s Jr for lunch, WalMart for the requisite 2 gallons of water per person for the weekend (there’s no drinkable water in Joshua Tree, or any water at all, really), and the Five-Ten outlet in Redlands for some sweet deals on rock shoes (I got some brand new Huecos). We got to the park, situated at about 5,000 vertical feet amidst the Mojave desert, just before sunset. As luck would have it, we were able to find a smallish campsite in Hidden Valley, the most sought-after campground in the park, so we set up the 2-man tent Dan had brought and settled in.

Before it got too dark, we took a short walk to Saturday Night Live, a classic JTree V3 boulder problem. I worked on it some but wasn’t quite able to send the scary dyno. Meanwhile I got a pretty sweet picture of Ryan Mtn in the glow of the setting sun. [ Awesome Friday Night Sunset] Night came (along with the freezing temperatures of a desert in winter), so we headed back to the campsite and fired up our camp stoves for some dinner and hot chocolate. Then it was early to bed; we wanted a good night’s rest to be prepared for the routes we were to climb the next day. I slept pretty well, bundled in many layers of clothing and my sleeping bag (which is supposedly rated down to 20 degrees).

We were up fairly early on Saturday, and made some good old oatmeal for breakfast. [ Me cooking oatmeal on my camp stove] Then we headed out to Ryan Mtn (same as in the previous sunset picture) in order to climb Walk on the Wild Side, a sketchy, slabby, run-out, 3-pitch 5.8. It was a bit of a hike there, and the base belay point was a bit awkward, so it took us a while to get all our gear sorted out and ready to go. Eventually, Dan was ready and started the lead up the first pitch. It was a fairly hairy experience, and even though it was technically not too difficult, the climb was balancey and run-out, so one slip of the foot would send Dan falling 40 feet (though hopefully not all the way down). [ Dan 2/3 of the way to the anchor point] He made it without falling of course, set up the belay from the first-pitch anchor, and I followed him. At some points I was pretty scared, because my strength is generally in power and not tricky technique, and also because I was climbing with a pack full of my rope, but 30 or 45 minutes later Dan and I were both dangling 120ft up from the belay, tied into an anchor. At that point we decided, since it was after lunch time, not to do the next two pitches, and so we rappelled down, got our gear together, and went back to the campsite for lunch. [ View from the belay]

Our next project was to be a climb called Mental Physics, a super-long single-pitch 5.7+. This is a beautiful climb with a bit of everything–face climbing, crack climbing with fist jams and hand/foot jams, slab climbing, bomber trad placements and an amazing view at the top. Mental Physics is located in an area of the park called the Wonderland of Rocks, which exhibits so many geological oddities I’m not sure scientists have figured it out quite yet. If you were to picture giant babies playing with millions of boulders and just dropping them on the ground to form valleys and mazes, you might come close to picturing this location. Anyhow, the hike to Mental Physics didn’t follow a proper trail, but wound its way through these valleys and mazes of boulders–pure 4th class scrambling interspersed with cacti, basically. I was very glad to have some good and sticky trail shoes, because jumping from boulder to boulder would have been next to impossible without them.

Anyhow, we made it to the climb late afternoon and I set up the belay while Dan got out his trad gear (nuts, hexes, cams, and the like). [ Picture of the climb while getting ready (the end of the crack is actually only about 2/3 of the way up)] Dan did an admirable job up the climb, placing gear every 6 to 10 feet, and eventually made it to the top. [ Dan a ways up] At this point I could tell we needed to hurry a bit, since shadows were starting to work their way up the face as the sun was setting. So I tied in and started to work my way up the crack, taking Dan’s gear out and clipping it to my harness as I went along. With the length of the climb, however, and the trickiness of some of the segments, it probably took me a good 40 minutes to get to the summit, just in time to see the sun set behind the canyons of boulders.

We were starting to worry a bit, with the sun going down, and it getting a little colder, so we tied our ropes together and made to rappel down. Unfortunately, the ropes got tangled on a ledge 1/3 of the way down, and so we couldn’t continue the rappel (you might get stuck indefinitely if the ropes get caught). Moreover, it had become too dark to see the bottom clearly, which is a necessity for a safe rappel. Finally, the seriousness of the situation hit us: we were stuck 200ft off the ground, looking at a night on a rock completely exposed to the wind and cold (I think I already mentioned that temperatures drop below freezing at night in February) with only one long-sleeved layer apiece, and our water down at the belay. Of course, neither of us had kept our headlamps on us; if we had, we probably could have rappelled down still, or made easier the ordeal that followed.

It was then that the epic adventure truly began. Luckily (providentially), Dan recalled that there was a walk-down from the summit. Now, “walk-down” usually means an easy, no-climbing-required descent, but the route we eventually clambered down was anything but easy. Not only was it extremely steep and did it involve trusting holds which we couldn’t tell were safe, we soon realized that, without a moon, it was really dark. That’s right–new moon = no light. Anywhere else, for example sitting at a campsite, we might have been glad for the chance to see the stars that much clearer, but then I was just realizing that the stars are really only good for seeing, not for seeing by. Well, miraculously, we made it down to the other side of the mountain without accident, and took stock of our situation.

Things stood something like this: first, we were at least 45 minutes to an hour from our car if we followed the quickest and safest route back. Unfortunately, and as I noted before, there was no established “route”, so our chances of stumbling blindly back on the path we had made on the way there were close to nil. We had a general idea of which direction we needed to head, but since just about all the landmarks looked the same, we weren’t all that likely to actually find anything which could tell us if we were close to getting home or not. Second, we had no food or water, and had just got done with a longish climb. Third, we were weighed down with quite a few pounds of gear, and no easy way to carry it–we had all sorts of trad gear and quickdraws and such clipped to our harnesses, and had fashioned a self-carrying backpack out of each of our ropes. I hesitate to estimate, but all this could have weighed between 20 and 30 pounds. Fourth, the only footwear we had was our climbing shoes. Climbing shoes, of course, are not made for walking or hiking of any kind, as they are meant to contort the foot into an odd, tense shape which is beneficial for the technical moves required on the rock. Moreover, I was wearing the new Huecos I had bought, and one generally buys rock shoes a bit small, knowing that over the course of the next few weeks they will expand gradually to the desired size. Needless to say, my feet had already been in complete pain during the climb for solely this reason. Fifth, we were not prepared for cold weather at all, since we each had just one long-sleeved layer of clothing with which to face freezing temperatures. Sixth and finally, we had no light to see by, since we had foolishly left our headlamps in the car, and since the moon had decided to play hooky that evening.

Realizing all this, we had two options: we could either try to make it back to our car, taking our chances with the terrain and our senses of direction, or we could find a good place in which to huddle together and pass the night, hopefully not contracting hypothermia or the like. After deliberating we opted for the first choice, since we reasoned that at least moving over the difficult terrain would keep us from being cold and that, however long it took us, we would more than likely hit one of the park’s roads eventually, which we could follow back to our car. Then we had another decision to make: whether or not to try to find the base of the climb we had done, in order to retrieve all the gear we had left there. The positive results of such an endeavor would be that (a) we could put on our trail shoes and free ourselves of a good deal of pain hiking in climbing shoes, and (b) we could consolidate all our equipment into packs, which would be safer and more comfortable. Ultimately, however we decided that such benefits would not be worth the danger of both possibly wasting time and energy in a search that would be very difficult (since no features could be made out on the rock, so we would not know which segment of the mountain held our belay station), and injuring ourselves (since the scramble up to the belay had taken the utmost of care and concentration even in full daylight).

Decision made, we took our bearings via the constellations (and the trusty north star), and decided that a south-easterly course was best. We worked our way through the valleys as best we could, since the going was less dangerous there, but all the same it was by no means trivial. To emphasize how dark it was, I will say that it would have been impossible to see Dan, even when he was only 10 feet in front of me, had I not been looking out of the corner of my eye (where light sensitivity is greater) and had he not been wearing a glossy white helmet. This, combined with the necessity of climbing up and jumping/sliding down boulders, made for some very interesting leaps of faith as we at times committed ourselves to a downward slide on a boulder, hoping that the ground, or another boulder, would stop us soon. To make this matter worse, what we could make out in the night appeared to us at deceptive distances. A fall that looked like a manageable 3 feet would turn out to be 4, and my stomach would lurch for that last foot as I wondered if I had miscalculated even more. Or, what looked like a differently-colored patch of rock would turn out to be a shadow caused by a change in elevation, with obvious and painful consequences.

After about an hour of picking our way through one boulder-strewn valley, it became clear that it was turning us too far to the north, and that we would have to crest the hill to our right. This turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated, and during the climb (and increasingly thereafter) I became glad that I was wearing climbing shoes. Despite the constant pain in my feet (which I was sure would be permanently damaged), the shoes provided an extra level of safety on the rocks, which was an incredible boon given the dangerous scrambling and the layer of grit on the boulders which made traction hard to come by. Curiously, this grit appeared to be made of quartz and something else, because every time our shoes would slide against it at any decent pressure, we would see faint flashes of luminescence. Another annoying hindrance was the vegetation which was scattered throughout the boulders. Every scraggly dead plant seemed bent on snagging my rope or my gear, making my rope a tangled mess, and I could never tell whether that patch of desert flora in front of me was an innocuous shrub or a cactus. Moreover, sometimes, as I was sliding down a boulder or something similar, one of Dan’s hexes would get stuck in a crack in the boulder (just as it was designed to do, in fact), leaving me caught on the middle of the small slope while I tried to work the piece of gear free.

On the other hand, these distractions proved to be useful for exactly that–distracting me from the fact that I was wandering around at night in the desert with no water and, basically, working out. It would not have been good, I wager, for me to start thinking about being thirsty or about what being dehydrated feels like.

At any rate we made it to the top of this particular valley of rocks, and caught a glimpse of the only real landmark; a nasty pond of sorts which had seemed quite out of place in the desert on our way to Mental Physics now glimmered enticingly far beneath us, a breath of fresh air to our despairing bodies. With renewed energy we scrambled down the other side of the ridge into this new valley, and tried to guess where exactly we were on the circumference of the pond, eventually deciding we must be somewhere on the north-east. We remembered that there was one and only one fording place that would allow us to get from the north side of the pond to the south, and thereby to a trail we knew had to be over there. But a while spent searching the edges of the pond didn’t reveal any such ford to us, and after Dan stepped right into the curiously boggy pond thinking it was solid ground, we decided the search was fruitless and resolved to head east into another valley (we couldn’t just skirt the lake because of the sheer walls to the south).

Heartened that we were not going in completely the wrong direction, we entered the physically most challenging portion of the journey, as this particular wash seemed to have decidedly nasty boulders. After dragging ourselves a ways along it, it seemed to us that the ridge to the south was especially low, and that we might be able to climb up to it and take a survey of the surrounding land, to see if there were any car headlights that would alert us to the direction of a road. That decision turned out to be bad, since after some fairly technical scrambling, we were faced with a featureless slab climb to the top. I was too scared by it to attempt the climb, but Dan gave it a shot. He got about half way up when it became clear that it was too steep and too gritty for him to get safely to the top, or back down if he did (down-climbing, especially on slab, is always harder than the climb up). From there it was a risky bail for Dan, and he made his way back down as I prayed silently.

Since we had no real choice but to continue on in the direction we had been going, we managed our way back to the valley floor and pushed east, keeping our eyes open for another opportunity to move south over the ridge. Eventually we were forced to try this, whether we wanted or not, since the wash we had been following came to an end. Surprisingly, even though the ridge was higher here, it proved to be easier to feel a way up to the top than in our previous attempt. Dan made it up first, and said he was fairly sure he had seen some headlights far off, over another ridge. By the time I got up they were gone, however, and all I could see were dark walls of rock all around. At this point I was probably the most hopeless I had been all night, since, by our calculations, once we had crested this ridge, we would be looking into the valley where we would have been walking had we made it around the pond in the way we wanted. And that, of course, was supposed to contain a path which led out of the wonderland of rocks, through a brief section of open desert, and to the parking lot. More importantly, in the direction of the parking lot there was only desert–no rock formations. But as I looked around from my vantage point on the hill, it was just, I thought, valley wall after valley wall on all sides. So we must not have been, we thought, where we thought we were.

We went down into this new wash anyhow, though the going was difficult, because we knew (or hoped) that at some point if we went that direction we would run into the open desert, and that would be a good sight better than the damn wonderland of rocks. To our surprise and great delight, however, as soon as we were all the way down, we ran right into a trail! And not just any trail, but a real trail, made by the good folks at Joshua Tree National Park. We knew this because we saw one of those informational posts that tell you about desert life and whatnot. Ironically, when we read it by the light of Dan’s watch, it was about “water in the desert”. Yes, we know it’s hard to come by. Thanks.

Our spirits rose even higher as the trail we were on intersected an even larger trail going south; this one even had posts that delineated the sides of the trail. At this point we knew we were saved, because trails this good are only by parking lots. Minutes later (it seemed like bare seconds), our feet hit pavement, and we found ourselves in a parking lot. In fact, the very parking lot where Dan’s car was parked! So then, as I looked around, I realized that what I had taken, on the last ridge, to be a close-by rock formation blocking the way to the parking lot was actually Ryan Mtn, at least a mile off and distanced by the very open desert I had hoped to see, and would have seen, had not the darkness made all silhouettes appear at similar depths.

As soon as we stopped, weariness, thirst, pain, and cold all seemed to crash down at once. I was shivering uncontrollably, and couldn’t understand why I had not once felt cold during the ordeal. The first thing we did after making sure the car was indeed Dan’s was to offer up a prayer of thanks to God, whom we had been supplicating all along. Truly, it was near-miraculous, if not actually-miraculous, that neither of us was injured or hurt, despite the hundreds of opportunities for it. More astounding to us was the pathfinding sense which we felt we had been especially given, as it turns out we worked our way in more or less a straight line from the climb to the car (though this was not, unfortunately, the easiest way). Finally, we looked at our watches and learned that it had been over 3 hours since we first started down the back of Lenticular Rock (which Mental Physics was on). That’s 3 hours without a stop, a breather, or a mouthful of water. And somehow our bodies managed to perform at the high level we required. In sum, all the things we said or thought during that time could be divided into two groups: curses and prayers. I remember one plant in particular that seemed to be hell-bent on getting all my gear tangled in its thorns, and how I gave it such a verbal stream of four-letter words that I thought it should wither right there on the spot. It didn’t. The point is, of the two, it seems that the prayers were actually effective, and Dan and I were both overwhelmed with a feeling of being intentionally guided and spared.

From there we drove straight into town in search of food to ease our exhaustion. We passed by a Thai restaurant that had just closed, but I spoke with the proprietor, and they gladly let us eat all their leftovers for a nominal fee. It tasted amazing. We also ordered a round of Singha beer for a toast to our survival. At that point I was tempted to proclaim it the best beer I had ever tasted; that’s how giddy I was at being happily seated at a warm restaurant, alive. To finish the night, I received an entirely appropriate fortune in my fortune cookie, which, if we had followed its instructions, we would have been spared all our trouble. It read, “What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.” Clearly, we were fools to start that climb at the end of the day.

And so, Dan and I celebrated Valentine’s Day without so much as a lament over our singleness, which was, as I look back, quite a relief.

We went back to camp then and slept until dawn, when we woke up, put on our running shoes (still no trail shoes, remember), and drove back to the wonderland of rocks for the hike to Lenticular Rock. As we progressed on our way there, we recognized some of the places we had felt our way through the night before, and realized where exactly we took the harder routes. At one point, we were a mere 10 feet from the ford we were looking for to cross the pond. I also took a few pictures of some of the terrain we had walked blindly through. [ This one] is a general picture of the wonderland of rocks area, actually taken from Lenticular Rock, and [ this one] is a picture of the final ridge we worked our way down just before we stumbled onto the real trail. Well, we successfully retrieved our packs and shoes from the belay station, and went back to the car, even more freaked out about the night before, now that we had seen all the places we could have fallen and broken a leg, etc…

We thought about setting up and working on another big climb or two, but we were both feeling a little exhausted and not a little gun-shy, so instead we spent the remainder of the morning doing some bouldering. [ Here] is a picture of a fun boulder near Cap Rock. Bouldering soon lost its appeal, though, since our hands had been rubbed completely raw during our scrambling the night before, so we headed back to the campsite for a chill afternoon of reading and sunning (the middle of the day was actually quite nice). I took a neat panorama shot of Hidden Valley, where our campground was located, from the top of a nearby rock. [ Panorama–our tent is hidden in the left 1/4]

After that, our trip was pretty much over, since I was scheduled to leave early the next morning with Dan’s car and drive back to Stanford, while Dan stayed on another day and climbed with a friend from Orange County. I did, however, catch a cool sunset on our way to get some pizza for dinner (at Sam’s Pizza and Indian Food, if you can believe that). [ Sunset 1] and [ Sunset 2]

I woke up the next morning at 5 AM in order to beat the holiday traffic and took Dan’s green Civic, armed with what I hoped were good memories of directions, CDs, water, and trail mix. And those were, in fact, my constant companions on the drive home, which I made in a record 6.5 hours (that’s 500 miles!). Yes, that is an average speed of 77 MPH. I love I-5. And thus ended my weekend adventures, unless you want to hear how bad I smelled after not showering for over 3 days, and after wearing the exact same clothes every day (even after our ordeal). In case you also wanted to know about that, I wore my awesome CoolMax shirt from Target, on top of which I added a really stylish Pedro shirt my brother made for me (worn, in fact, in his memory, since that studly climber is stuck in Florida and couldn’t make it to Joshua Tree).

Needless to say, I have increased the level of respect I plan to have for outdoor activites and Nature in general, and will therefore do my best to never again get stuck in Joshua Tree at night in the winter with no water and no light. Finally, know that my camp stove is awesome.

Before I give some examples to flesh out exactly how I have been “self-reflective”, it is worth guessing at why I have been driven to it specifically in the last few weeks. I think, ultimately, the answer is that I am lonely. Of course, there are many different kinds of loneliness and I’m not sure which it is I am experiencing. It’s sort of a longing strangely mixed with an ennuiish hopelessness, as if I were this world, wishing to be full of magic and adventure but knowing that all that ever happens is cause and effect–law-driven necessities not admitting of departure from the norm–atoms interacting and explaining everything: structure without substance. It is difficult, however, to always be precise about these things, because whatever form of loneliness I am actually experiencing, the end result is that I want a girlfriend, and that move tends to radiate too much noise for the undertaking of a profitable metaphysical inquisition. Anyhow, what connects this loneliness to self-reflectivity is that there seems to be no outstanding reason for it, and so I am driven to look inside and figure out whence it comes.

So, one thing I have done, as an initial foray, is to lay some of the groundwork for my biography. That is, I have spent some time trying to remember every event of significance in my life, since my earliest memories around age 3. The first observation I made was how quickly certain pictures and events come to mind, though I have not thought of them in 10 or 15 years. The second was how different everything looked (in terms of significance) from my current perspective. In other words, some things which, at the time, I may not have thought were key moments in my life, I now realize had a substantial impact on my life, or set the stage for future choices, or initiated characteristic patterns (of personality or whatever) which I still exhibit today. At this point, I have gotten through most of junior high in my list-making, and so I am expecting even more surprises as I get into high school and beyond. The benefit of this exercise (and I use the term “biography” very loosely, of course) is that I get more of a sense of direction for my life–not for the future, necessarily, but the direction it has gone. And that, obviously, helps me to understand why exactly it is that I am here, now, and experiencing the things I am.

As a result of that project, and also some other, less “scientific”, realizations that have come to me recently, I have learned more about (1) the core of my being–what pushes me from day to day and causes me to like certain things and not others, judge some things of more value than others, and so on, (2) my patterns of interaction with people of various kinds, and why they are such that they are, (3) what a woman will have to be like if there is to be any chance of me loving her forever, and (4) what I see as my biggest insecurities and flaws. Since all of these lessons are still more or less in progress, I’m not going to share any details at this point, but I hope that, if I continue to unravel these mysteries at the current rate, I’ll have things figured out before Christmas. Of course, that’s optimistic and it won’t happen, but I didn’t want to be honest and just say, “Too bad, I’m not telling.”

Another great opportunity I had was to go on a snowboarding trip to Lake Tahoe, all by myself, this weekend. Originally, I had been planning on going with some friends, but, in the end, no one else could go, so I decided to make use of the weekend, and my snowboard, anyways. I love road trips partly for the reason that, somehow, driving puts me in a pensive mood, and I am able to come to interesting conclusions about things spontaneously. I’m not sure if that happened on this particular trip, but I did gather my thoughts from the previous weeks into something of a coherent whole, and I think that as a result I am ready to move into the next stage of “self-discovery” (taken in the literal sense). On top of that, the snow was awesome–a good deal of fresh powder was there on Saturday morning for me to make tracks in, and I felt that my snowboarding skills improved greatly, as my carving got tighter and I was more willing to pick up speed and trust that I wouldn’t eat it. Another unexpected benefit of being on the mountain alone was that I could go in the singles line at the lifts, saving a ton of wait time. I was also able, for that reason, to have a lot of cool conversations with the people on the chair beside me.

Incidentally, I have a few pictures from the weekend that might be fun to look at: My snowboard and car, Self-picture, View from the top of a run.

Of course, despite the clarity that solitude brings (and brought), I don’t think my solo snowboarding adventure did much to help cure my loneliness. On the other hand, maybe loneliness is exactly what I need at the moment, since it is spurring me to so many useful ponderings. Unfortunately, it looks like I will be running out of time in which to do these ponderings (not that I ever had it to begin with), as the quarter is coming rapidly to a close. It ends all the sooner for me since I am planning on taking finals week off to go to Thailand with my mom. It should be a fun adventure, and maybe I’ll get a chance to do some climbing there. The only problem is that I’ll have to finish my 3 term papers a whole week early. I’m also heading back to Orlando the week before that, to say goodbye to our house, which has been sold! It’s a good house, with many great memories attached. In any case, maybe further self-realizations (if important) will fall out of the daily work and school I am doing.

In conclusion, I should mention that the subject matter of this entry is fitting, as the entry marks (nearly enough) the 2nd anniversary of my weblog. And the weblog is, of course, primarily a tool of self-discovery through somewhat exhibitionist writing (unless we are in a more noble mood, in which case that description sounds cheap–but I’m prepared to accept it as true without much argument). I’d like to think that my weblog has changed as much and in similar ways as I have–in content (deeper), style (more involved), and appearance (more sexy). Well then, happy blogaversary to me!

I, being not only awesome but benevolent (as any good philosopher king is) have decided to put 2 of the 5 songs from this EP online. You can download one here: Arctic Wastelands in the Quest for Character, and the other here: Love is Around. Please listen and enjoy using your choice of fine MP3 players (iPrefer the iTunes).

Incidentally, there are rumors, not yet to be confused with truths, that I will be spending a good amount of time in Florida next year (that is, after I graduate and leave the Stanford Farm for good). If that does turn out to be the case, Dav and I will no doubt kick it with some more recordings and lots more shows. Hell, maybe we’ll even add some folks so I don’t have to play 3 guitars and bass at the same time, since that’s really hard. In any case, Splendour Hyaline sails on!

Well, let us know what you think.

In any case, even though I know everything, something occurred to me (which, of course, isn’t possible)–and what occurred to me is this: how completely and utterly unfair it is that the letter K has no representation in the titles of this weblog. Never mind the English language, which uses the letter K far less freqently than the letters E, T, A, O, N, R, I, S, H, D, L, F, C, M, U, G, Y, P, W, B, and V–clearly, English is and always has been an Earchical language, full of Eimperialism and Edogmas. Sadly, most of the other letters have fallen in line with this E-centered meta-narrative and resigned themselves to being second-class citizens of the alphabet world. Z is the most pitiful of all–last not only in frequency, but also in the alphabet song itself (which is to the letter-people very much like the Declaration of Independence is to Americans).

I, being enlightened as to the plight of these glyphs who have been suffering so long under the thumb of E, so to speak, have always tried to be fair in my use of them. Unfortunately, it is rather hard not to put E up front, since it is so damned useful as a vowel, especially given its glowing history in Scrabble and Wheel of Fortune. But today we recognize this injustice in the literary world, even if we don’t do anything about it: today is for K! Today I have given K a voice (even if it is a harsh, back-in-the-throat, sort of voice). What does K say? K says, “Krazy Karl’s Kaloches are Kookily Kool!” Well, there you have it.

In reality, I mostly just wanted to move past the last entry (where the number of times I said “fuck” betrayed the fact [all the other words to the contrary, of course], that I wasn’t having a particularly good day). Ironically, not too much has changed, but I am back at Stanford in my second week of the quarter and my philosopher’s mind is being given all sorts of things to put together and synthesize in class, if not life. The busy-ness is good, but things are boiling under the surface–indeed, much has already come to a head that I wish I had time or inclination to write about at the present time. Alas, it is not to be. All the same, the lethargy and paralysis of break have been pushed far from my mind and I am again in a desperate fight for my life, trying to manage 4 classes, 3 part time jobs, a good amount of climbing, running, cycling, hanging out with friends, sleeping, reading, watching movies, writing songs…

Incidentally, and I’ll close with this, I am going snowboarding this weekend! I have indeed purchased my first snowboard. Actually, my first two snowboards, though I am taking one back for a full refund (it was really expensive and after I bought it I realized I didn’t have any money. Hooray credit cards!). In the end, I bought a barely-used one, with bindings, off a guy from su.market, for a third of the price of the other. It is white with a sort of firey Chinese dragon on the bottom. Go figure. Let’s just say I’m the Dragon of the Slopes, whatever that means (and that’s exactly the point. Exactly). I’m hoping to go up to Tahoe 4 or 5 times this quarter and get some good use out of the board, before I graduate and there will exist the possibility of never living in California again. Well, here’s to stuff and my rampant consumerism, and let’s all pray I don’t break too many bones this weekend. Or any, for that matter.

It doesn’t help that the flood of events has mirrored this pattern: every now and again something will happen, but it doesn’t have any relationship to anything else that’s happening, and then I go to sleep, only to wake up to something even more unrelated, like a dream about wizards who turn into animals and the realization that I’m sleeping beneath some very odd peach-and-burgundy floral-print comforter and matching sheets. Why are they on my bed? Who knows; it’s how it was when I got home and I’m too lazy to change them.

Or my good friend will come over and we’ll hang out and he’ll tell me how he’s engaged to a girl I’ve never met. And I’m happy for him and that’s worth writing about–engagements are worth writing about as a unified whole because now 5 close friends are getting married before the summer of 2004 comes to a close (before I’ll have even found a job, probably), and i’m so incredibly happy for all these people. But then I start feeling a little depressed that I don’t even have any prospects, and how I probably won’t have any for a long time because I’m so self-centered, and I don’t really like girls anyway, at least not the right kind, I just like being infatuated with them, and I have no idea what love is. And if I don’t have any idea what love is, how can my friends, and they’re all headed for disaster (I’m actually jealous), and I told you so…

…and I’m glad you never listened to me, even if I had actually been so stupid as to say something instead of just think it and then watch it fall out of my head and fall to pieces and wash down the drain and isn’t it cool how the drain makes a little water tornado? I hate tornados. Fuck tornados and all that destruction…and that earthquake in Iran…fuck that too.

Or I could have tried to get some unity of thought about Christmas, and write some pompously literate-sounding thing about the Incarnation. If I ever make it sound like I understand how God could be born in a manger in some actual place in our world, or why he would do so just to die for us, please do something hurtful to me. I don’t understand it, but it is real, more real than most things I do understand and I need it more than I need closure this afternoon, some semblance of reason, defragmentation…

This year has drawn to a close with a whimper and a sigh, without definition or plan for what will be different next year. No resolutions forthcoming, no energy to take regret and turn it into progress. Just a kernel of praise and thankfulness to God that I am still alive, and a lot of pain. Pain from loneliness and a desire to be with someone, and a desire to be alone, to sit and let rain fall on my head and turn to snow and then melt and then the sun comes out and maybe some branches start growing and ten years later I’m a tree. I need to see myself grow somehow–it might as well be into a tree, since I don’t have enough motivation to actually put my sins to death or become a more loving person or stop being addicted to expanding myself instead of Christ in me.

It’s funny; I never realized I came back from the quarter wounded. Tired, maybe…lazy, certainly. But wounded…that would explain the fragmentation, the lackluster way I’ve taken in images and events and why I’ve been sick with the flu and why I resisted pulling together any thoughts to make a more hopeful weblog entry. But where is the hurt, how deep is it, who did it, and can it be healed? Maybe 2004 holds the answers. Maybe it does. 2003 certainly did not. Odd years are like that, I guess.

C˙ni en Èdras,
LaÌren weth th·nod,
¡po orÈt nov·wer

But, and perhaps not regrettably, reality in this case cannot be denied. Or at least, I can’t visit the place where I spent my formative (and thus undesirable) years and not feel an incredibly subtle mix of emotions. There is the surprise I mentioned in the previous paragraph, of how familiar everything seems, as if living somewhere for 10 years isn’t enough to make things familiar. Then there is the uncontrollable rush of images and stories and names that flood back into my mind, stories I thought I’d forgotten and names I’m sure I haven’t thought in 5 years–little modules of myself that have always been there but are suddenly noticed again, like little alien homunculi floating around in my mind. There is the unavoidable confrontation between myself as I was when I lived here and myself as I have become (and where did all my in-between selves go?).

Since we are on the eve of the release of Return of the King, it might be appropriate to draw a bit of an analogy to the hobbits’ return to the Shire. Just like Hobbiton, it seems that the fires of industry have consumed Cedar Hill. I don’t know when it went from being a small Texas town of 10,000 to the capital of Suburbia, with 30,000 inhabitants happily segregated into families with 2.5 kids, a cat and dog, and 1.5 Starbuckses, but some day it must have happened, to the utter surprise and chagrin of all (though I notice a lot of dry eyes, so maybe the town itself was in cahoots with the Big Bosses, conspiring to Barnes & Noblify my memories). Needless to say, the sense of familiarity I talked about is tempered by a jarring sense that something is different, and I’m not sure I like it.

Maybe the moral of this story is, you can always go home (even if you don’t realize it is home until you get there), but home is never the same. Towns change, landscapes change, people change–too many of your high school friends, though they never really left like they needed to, have somehow become the opposite of who you expected. Some are married, some are pregnant, some are off on what seem like permanent trips out of reality. Of course, that’s a bit superficial, since I’m often not too in touch with reality either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a core people recognize. So it is in this case.

These past few days have been a wonderful experience, visiting with family and friends in Dallas and Austin, if only for the very awesome reason that I have completely and perfectly regained a Texas accent. No doubt I will lose it just as completely in a few days, when I continue on to Orlando for the Christmas holidays, but I honestly thought I would never again have used “y’all” and “fixin’ to” in the same sentence. In fact, I think the drawl I have developed in the past 24 hours is more pronounced than any I ever had when living here.

Well here is to you, Cedar Hill (as I switch figuratively to a personificatory monologue), to memories good and bad, to the overblown class, racial, and pastime distinctions that ruled my high school (dumb petty shit), to the friends I haven’t talked to in forever but am able to hang out with now as if I never moved to both coasts, to Mr. Jim’s pizza, to the wonderful haven of Dangerously, Ignorantly Nationalist Christian Fundamentalism that is North-Central Texas, and to the weather that changes its damn mind every two seconds. I’ll admit that you sucked me back in for a while, and that I was completely unprepared for both how you have changed and how you haven’t, how you have grown and how you haven’t. I’ll have to give you a bit more respect, I guess, more of a place in my story as I tell it. But for now it’s goodbye, and maybe I’ll see you again in some years.

Of course, it never seems like work because of the two 6-CD cassettes which have contained the same Christmas CDs for what must be a decade (the continuity here lets us know that this Christmas, though it might be in a completely different year than before, is really going to be the same sort of thing), because of the cookies my mom makes, and because of the egg nog. I have always liked egg nog more than is perhaps considered normal, and wouldn’t mind if it were available year-round.

Unfortunately, my family had to do all these things without me this year, since I wasn’t able to go home for Thanksgiving. That notwithstanding, I resolved to do something to get into a Christmassy sort of mood, and so the three of us that are left in my suite at the moment went out and bought a tree, some decorations, and, of course, egg nog. Then we had ourselves a merry little Christmas party while putting things together and discovering (after a succession of empirical tests) the best ratio of Safeway Lite Egg Nog to Beverages N’ More’s [not quite] finest brandy. The answer, of course, was all in the nutmeg to begin with. Music was courtesy of the Canadian Brass, whom we had imprisoned in a tiny glass disc and made to play just about all the standard tunes.

It was an exciting event, being the first time I’ve ever decorated a tree without my family. I’m fairly sure that at some point I’m going to get a picture printed of myself, Kyle, and Justin with the tree, and stencil “Our First Christmas!” on it as a really awesome joke. But for now, let this picture suffice. Our wonderful little tree, replete with tin-foil Star-of-David and holy glow (and that without Photoshop, I might add).

At any rate somehow I’ve avoided going to this game for the first, second, and third years of my college career. Maybe I was out of town, didn’t feel like going, or (what’s more likely), didn’t feel like shelling out the $50 for the tickets. Such was also the case this year, though I was a bit more remorseful for having not put any effort into going, since it’s a major Stanford tradition, and since it’s my senior year.

Now enter Beefeaters’ Autumn 2003 Special Dinner, put on in the eating club by yours truly, together with the two other managers (if words like “Beefeaters” and phrases like “eating club” are unfamiliar, see this entry), on Friday the 21st. After the dinner, where there was much good food and much cheap wine, I retired with a flock of mostly-sober friends, among whom was my date for the evening Marie, to Marx, where we watched two and a half hours of mXc. If you ever get the chance to do this, by the way, grab that opportunity by the balls! (Or whichever body part is most painful to have grabbed while being less offensive to talk about).

While engaging in this very worthwhile mindless activity, I told the general populace of my desire to go to Big Game, and that I have not been able to go in previous years (I made it sound like it wasn’t my fault, I must admit). Marie, who is head yell-leader and captain of this year’s school-spirit-inducing crazies, came up with a devious suggestion: why not have me don a Cardinal jumpsuit and enter the stadium with the yell-leaders, posing as one of them and thus avoiding the necessity of paying $50 to get in? Our friend Steve also “jumped” at the opportunity, and since there was a veritable bounty of jumpsuits, we made a pact (in blood, if you like) to go through with the daring plan.

The next morning I woke up, ready to brave the cold in my red Dickies jumpsuit, only to find out that things had gotten a little more adventurous than previous plans predicted. Steve, who was good friends with a number of important officials in both the LSJU [Stanford] Marching Band and the Tree Protection Services (to be explained later), was made privy to recent news concerning the Stanford Tree. Most people think the Tree is Stanford’s mascot, but to my knowledge this is not so. Instead, the Tree is the Band’s mascot, and the official mascot of the University is the color Cardinal. Needless to say, it is hard to dress up as a color, and so the Tree has taken on the role that a general mascot has at most other universities (running around, fighting other mascots, etc…).

Anyway, I learned from Steve that earlier in the week, just prior to Big Game, Cal (as we call UC Berkeley) had stolen the Tree costume, no doubt to see if it was smokable. The person who is this year’s Tree, anxious to have a Tree costume for Big Game, spent many hours making a new mascot, when he and the Tree Protection Services, which is a group consisting of Trees of previous years, and the purpose of which is to protect the Tree from mobbing and overzealous policewomen, got an anonymous tip that the stolen Tree was in a dumpster in a shopping center in the East Bay. They retreived this tree, battered and torn though it was (and missing an eye!), and resolved to one-up Cal somehow with it.

And that is where I and Steve enter the picture. Since it was known that we were to enter the stadium sneakily anyhow, and that we had no other obligations, we were given the following task: we were to pick up the old Tree from the Band Shak, wrap it in a burial shroud (i.e., a large tarp), and carry it somberly in front of the Band and Tree/TPS as they made their classic music-filled entrance into the stadium. This was, no doubt, supposed to elicit a general curiosity (questions, you know, like, “What’s in the tarp?”, and so on). Steve and I performed marvelously in our red jumpsuits, and were even searched in a delightfully friendly manner by the Stanford police at the gate, who nevertheless seemed certain that the mass of PVC, cloth, and foam bundled in the nylon tarp was was worthy of suspicion.

But the mission did not end when we made it (successfully and without paying a cent, I might add) onto the field. We had to arrange for the delivery of an industrial-strength wood-chipper to the field at half-time. You see, the TPS wanted to have a ceremonial destruction of the old Tree, indicating that it had been soiled or made unworthy of existence insofar as it was stolen by Cal. When said wood-chipper did arrive, it was big and yellow and easily the most dangerous piece of machinery I have ever seen. It had upwards of 20 warning labels on it, including warning labels about the danger of not reading warning labels. My favorite one had a heading to the effect of, “READ THIS WARNING AND BELIEVE IT: YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT”.

At any rate we were able to get the wood-chipper on the field (more accurately, the sidelines) at half-time, and then Steve and I led a respectfully dirgeful procession, carrying the “dead” body of the old Tree in its burial shroud towards the TPS, who were waiting. After we stepped politely aside the fun began, and there was much shoving and jumping on the dangerous machine, and then many showers of brightly colored materials flying around, followed up with much insane dancing in the “ashes” of the deceased. All the while I stood there, probably being looked at by more people simultaneously than has ever happened in my life, and tried to be awesome. I think I can safely say that I was awesome, in my jumpsuit and Oakley sunglasses.

The rest of the game was spent on the sidelines, talking to the Band, getting expensive pizza from concessions, and talking about how best to protect the Tree if the Cal fans swarmed the field after the game (which happened last year, to the utter decimation of the goal posts and the injury of many people, and, fortunately or unfortunately, did not happen this year). Many of those around me also spent their time being breathalyzed by the hordes of police officers (one of whom had a go-cart with a large sign that read “MASCOT CONTROL”). Somehow I escaped this fate, though I would have preferred to have been breathalyzed, since everytime someone passed, he or she was given a loud hurrah by those present. (I guess for this to have been a rational preference I would have needed to be sure of my sobriety, which, luckily, I was).

In the end, Stanford lost the game, but I feel that my Big Game experience was not significantly dimmed by this fact, particularly in light of the price of admission. More importantly, I met a good number of current Stanford personages whom I otherwise would probably never have talked to, and had a central and exciting (if small) role in the proceedings of the day. The adventure, unfortunately, seems the less adventurous now that it has been a week, now that I am writing it in a weblog, and now that I have used about twice as many words as necessary to tell the tale. Then again, what secret-agent, getting-into-stadiums-for-free-wearing-a-jumpsuit escapades have you pulled off lately?

Typically, my way of dealing, my way of massaging the strained muscles of my insipid humanity so that they do not snap, is to write music. Oftentimes the music will flow directly from whatever [exaggerated] angst I am experiencing, and at other times will have no obvious correlation to it. In either case it seems that the mere act of creation restores some balance, allows me to press on with whatever mundanities I am slogging through and leave behind thoughts of going postal. In other words, I am not an artist frivolously, nor am I an artist on weekends or just when it is convenient or popular–I am an artist because I need creation to live. It really is food for my soul.

In an interesting twist this past week, I wrote a song, not in order to confront any particular inconsistency in my life, but more as a procrastinatory tool. However, in the process of writing it, I came to realize that there was a lot of unresolved tension in my heart, and this threw me into a withdrawn spiral of motivationless paralysis. I skipped class for the second half of the week and just refused to turn in homeworks that were due. The only thing I could do, it seemed, was record the song I had written. So I did. Listen to it, and you will enter my world as it has been for the last month.

As for the lyrics, they will not likely make much sense, so let me put it this way: the song is a story. Importantly, it is not a story about me. But I feel as if I am in it.

That being said, you can download the song, which is neither mixed nor mastered, nor inclusive of the various percussion instruments which I would like my brother to later add, here. Now maybe I can get on with all the work I’ve let pile up.

Yet hope there was still, and my heart was troubled with it as I went home to do work that night. I ended up awake until 4 AM, a large portion of that time on my knees on the floor, head buried in my futon. Anger gave way to hopelessness even as frustration turned to our Savior for hope, and the contradiction of independent will and that inevitable fatalism we all fall into squeezed prayer after prayer out of my heart and soul, while wringing the salinity from my eyes in lonely little drops. Eventually I faded into sleep, only to wake up to the e-mail: Nick’s dad had passed away. “Fuck!” I thought with the little half-laugh that means I am desperately angry, along with most of the other unclean words that have recently taken up residence in my head language. And that was that. A big fat “No” from our Heavenly Father, who promises us every good thing. Case closed. Sarcasm apparent.

Thursday I flew, along with two of Nick’s other friends, to St. Louis for Mr. Bott’s memorial service. The visitation was that first night, and so we stood in line at Bopp chapel to say something to each of the survived. We mumbled the usual empty condolences and longed for some more tangible way of showing our love and our empathy. How do you make conversation with someone who has lost a family member? But Nick was happy to see us and seemed to be filled with a peace and joy completely out of place under the circumstances; obviously, it flowed straight from the realization that the waxen and cold collection of flesh always in sight, a mere 6 feet away, was not the end of his father. Indeed, it wasn’t his father. Not anymore.

That was the first time I had ever seen a … (shit, how do I call it? A “dead body”? A “corpse”? Certainly not that, and certainly not a “cadaver”. Damn all the insensitive words we use). There was an aura of wrongness about the whole thing: some essence of humanity was missing from the coffin. It was hard to classify the remains inside; here was the physical construction that had loved and raised a family, and had been a part of God’s kingdom on earth, yet I’ve seen figures in a wax museum with more life. It is as I said before–the thing before us was not Mr. Bott, but some kind of outer shell he had shed. I realized with a shock, then, that in death we have proof of the soul, since if nothing left our bodies after death, we wouldn’t be bombarded by this overwhelming sense that something is missing, fled, gone. Blood not circulating and synapses not firing don’t explain that.

Friday morning we attended the funeral at Nick’s church. As at the visitation, the number and diversity of people present were a testament to Nick’s dad’s love and the sphere of good influence he had. Nick himself gave one of two eulogies, and I almost lost it as I saw him up there saying goodbye to his dad, and taking the opportunity to explain why he had the hope that his father was no longer the body, now closed forever to the world, on the pedestal in the center of the church. He shared powerfully, with conviction and joy, and I didn’t wonder that his dad was cheering him on from Heaven, if such things are possible.

For the rest of the weekend, I and Peter and Dave (that had flown in from Stanford) did our best to take Nick’s mind off everything. We visited some of the apparently standard places to eat and hang out in St. Louis, and saw Matrix 3 with Nick and some of his high school friends. Very little of the time was super meaningful, but it was good just to be there with Nick and have that be evidence of our love for him and his family. There’s really nothing to say, anyway, that can make it easier for them. Love, in this case (as in most others, I’d guess), has nothing to do with words, but presence. I can only hope that our small extension of his Stanford community was a comfort to him.

Now I am back at Stanford, and feeling, perhaps to a tenth of a degree, what Nick is probably feeling: what we are doing here is not ultimately what’s important. An A+ in a course, a degree from Stanford, a million-dollar-a-year job…none of these things will stave off the inevitable or bring us closer to the eternal souls of other people. So how do we live in the world while extracting the most, truly long-term, riches from it, when we are advised, and indeed our very nature tells us, not to? Who knows. Trust God and love people, maybe. And keep in mind that someday I will leave behind my own wrinkled shell, trading the copy for the real thing: sharp, beautiful, physical, and real.

_For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
_ _so great is his love for those who fear him;
_ _as far as the east is from the west,
_ _so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
_ _As a father has compassion on his children,
_ _so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
_ _for he knows how we are formed,
_ he remembers that we are dust.

From there, all you connoisseurs of that tangled and irreverent personality that is Jonathan Lipps should be able to surmise the progression. The just-noted, and highly irrelevant, difference between myself and those around me turned into a matter of equally irrelevant pride. And, since this is the only kind of pride I can really have in the circles I run in, without getting a lecturing-to, I relished it until it grew and took form of its own accord, becoming the odd fact it is (or was, I should say) today.

You see, it made me so damn interesting. Someone I knew (or didn’t know: picture a first conversation with a pretty Stanford girl, perhaps) would be talking about how she “has to go the library to study,” or might be asking me a question about Green, Stanford’s main library. “Do you know where Special Collections is?” let’s say. And I could throw back, in a delightfully offhanded tone, “Oh, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there.” To which there would be the usual shrieks (“Shit! You’re a senior!”), proving that I, the quintessential I’m-not-a-part-of-this-stupid-culture-er, am truly not a part of this stupid culture.

I imagine that this strategy has in some ways backfired, forestalling all the intimate “study” dates I might have had at the library. But I like to think that the newfound respect I accrue after conversations like the above is worth something more in the long run.

Anyway, it’s hard to keep up a tribute of my not-going-to-the-library-ness after I’ve just given up on it (or given in, as it were), but I thought, by way of eulogy, that it behooved me to report it before it grew dim, hidden in the reaches of time. So, here’s goodbye, unimportant habit #2,058!

Well, the short of it is, after a year and a half with Blogger, I decided that our relationship really wasn’t working out anymore. Now enter Movable Type, with whom I flirted earlier this summer in helping Jason to re-make his weblog. Since then, I’ve been dreaming of switching over myself, and have just been waiting for the perfect opportunity.

Now enter said perfect opportunity in the form of schoolwork. One (you, for example), wouldn’t think that schoolwork could be an opportunity for web design, since they both generally compete for my time. However, I have found that it is really only when I have serious work to do that my procrastination takes the form of a useful endeavor. If I had no schoolwork, I would “procrastinate” by playing video games or climbing or running or playing guitar. If I were to state the principle more broadly, it might be this: the more serious the workload, the higher the utility of my procrastination. All in all, I’m sort of a fan of this way of life because it makes me more productive when I am supposedly “loaded down” with work. Backwards, I know.

But there, you’ve got a bit of the story behind this particular design change. As for the chronic nature of my re-design tendencies, I don’t have a particularly good answer. I do, however, have a chronicle of these chronic itches [that was some kind of literary device I used there: “chronicle”/“chronic” right together like that] located in the ABOUT section of this website. Check it out!

So much for that. Anyway, I hope you’re happy with the new interface and I hope you use it well. Unfortunately, all your comments from my old blog have been completely lost. The upside to this is that, the way I had them before (using YACCS), they would all be lost eventually anyway. Now your comments will be stored with each entry forever, and never archived or made invisible. So comment away!

Lastly, I do apologize for not having written in such a long time. My life is interesting right now and I know you’re all dying to live vicariously through me [“dying to live” – that’s another literary device there]. I am just hoping that the sweet awesomeness of this new site will make up somewhat for that lack. Cheers!

the short of it is i am back at stanford amidst the busiest quarter of my career (so far). i’ve got classes more or less settled on, and enough homework to make me procrastinate. but like i said, that’s not really interesting.

of some interest, maybe, is this: in roughly 3 hours i will be 21. the last coming-of-age experience of my life. here already…..and i don’t know what to think about that, this toeing the line between “young man” and “man”. there’s an incredible sense of loneliness, silly as it may seem, moving from a smaller, simpler, and maybe more innocent class of people into the class of people that most just consider “everyone”. i will be fully a citizen and an adult of this world, with all rights and privileges appertaining. it’s funny that in the states effectively the last privilege of adulthood is that of drinking alcohol. it seems so completely arbitrary, and it is. it is. but it’s a marker of freedom for me to drink; not just freedom from condemnation by uncle sam, but the spiritual freedom we have in christ. if that sounds odd or backwards to you, i am sorry.

it’s the coming-of-age that draws and excites me, though, not the thought of the liquor that i will no doubt be guzzling in shameful quantities in a few hours. that’s the external, the base and unrefined and uncouth symbol of a nobler internal reality–the rite of passage phenomenon that has been a part of man’s (and here i mean male) life for ages. and there is a contradiction here, you will say, a cheapening of that reality (which you maybe doubt exists) via the external actions used to signify it. but i say, the problem is not in the base and unrefined and uncouth, for all these things i assuredly am, but who am i to pretend to a nobler inner reality? and so if there is a contradiction it is because i am reaching for something higher than i am, not because i already have it.

i will agree, however, that were it not for the fact that i am listening to the deep and beautiful music of sigur ros, i might not have just made such outrageous claims. this does not lessen the strength of my belief in them, though you might catch me tomorrow laughing at myself for having said these things. haha! like that.

the point is, i am now grown up, whether i like it or not, and regardless of the fact that a number (21) is the most arbitrary of all forms of measuring maturity. with that growth comes responsibility, whether i like it or not, and whether its existence is a self-made phantasm.

these are heavy things for me to ponder on and to give to god, but i for one am just glad to have had 21 years of existence and to have been blessed in all ways undeservedly. still, i must not let myself look back and linger too long on my story just yet, because i might get caught up in its beauty (and it is beautiful, though i had no part in making it so) and forget that the story is not finished, but beginning. but i let slide a few tears of joy anyways, first because i believe that i have a story, that i am a story, and that i am part of the vectored story that is christ’s universe, and second because the shadow of grace has always hovered over the chaos of my soul.

the first thing i will do at 12 am on september 26, 2003, will be offer my entire being in prayer to the god of my heart. and the second will be to down a pint of the finest beer i can find in palo alto, drinking that god’s health. slainte!

i’m looking forward to the year with quite more than the usual bit of fear, because there are a number of things that will have to work out just right in order for me to graduate, as i’ve been planning, with two degrees in june. there’s also the fear of thinking about applying to doctorate programs, if i decide that’s what i’m going to do. i picked up an application packet from oxford university when i was there last week, but i haven’t looked at it yet. summer’s not that far gone!

there’s also, of course, a sense of excitement: that good old back-to-school feeling i’ve had ever since elementary school. and while the joy this year will be not so much in supplies and shiny new trapper-keeper notebooks, but in seeing friends and moving into a new apartment, it is a joy nonetheless.

as part of the reflection process i went through yesterday morning, and also last night as i sat in the spa and smoked my peterson standard system 303, i’ve been confronted with things about myself that will have to change if i’m going to have a successful and growthful year. these are, for the most part, the same sorts of things i’ve been confronted with all throughout college, but somehow they’ve evaded my steadfast self-control and escaped eradication (the sarcasm should be obvious there). and yet as i look backwards, my own character flaws and personal failings are more crystallized, more real and thereby more easily laughed at (it’s funny [no pun intended], but i think self-humor is an integral part of the growth process). thus i am hopeful for a year that is successful, not just academically, but also personally, and in my relationships with christ and the beautiful people at stanford (everyone’s beautiful).

so it will be a year of change, if only because i can’t see beyond it: there is no certain “next step”, the way there has been for the past 15 years of my life, and that’s exciting. this also might be the last time i will sit in my house on sunnybrook ct. in orlando, because it’s going up for sale and might be sold before christmas. things are shaking in life, and that’s a place i love to be.

well, now it’s time to go to the airport and board a plane bound for san jose, so here’s to the end of summer, and the start of my last year at stanford! cheers.

something happens every time i go in there. i notice a cabinet which, i think to myself, i may not have discovered before. it’s off in the corner, so it wouldn’t be a surprise that i hadn’t come across it. on it there is a little label which reads, “snacks // extra supplies”. for a moment, when i see this, my heart stops beating. snacks! could it really be? could there be free snacks at work, which i could take back to my desk and eat? in a rush of joy i open the cabinet door to find…a couple salt shakers and a box of coffee filters.

in a sad, betrayed sort of way, i slowly close the door and stand for a second or two, drooping and defeated. my steps back to my desk are slow and somber. that cabinet lied to me, and about something so precious as snacks!

there’s a little glimpse of hell, i think, when you’re promised snacks and you get…salt.

\\\*

in other news, altimar IV was fun! we hung out at the beach and played games for days straight. glorious. furthermore, chris’ mysterious utterance via the comment board on my last post should now be regarded as having been a prophetic utterance, and the of-ageness of 80% of our brethren did indeed play a part in our recreation.

well, david and rachel have now both gone off to school for the year, leaving me in orlando with just mom and dad. one and a half more weeks of work, and then my summer will also come to a close as i go off to europe and then to school!

altimar. AL-tih-mar (or, optionally, AL-tuh-mar). it’s a word to strike awe into the hearts of all who hear it. it is a good word, and it betokens connotations of sun, sand, and the beauty of friendship. of course, it is a made up word (one which, however, has entered into quite common usage in some circles).

some might think that it is derived from the latin/spanish “alt”, signifying height or tallness or greatness. others might think that the phoneme “mar” is likewise derived from latin/spanish, and must therefore impart information about the sea. given the fact that altimar is indeed great/awesome, and given its necessary connection to the ocean, these etymological guesses would seem to be right on. unfortunately, they are wrong. “altimar” is derived from no previously existing words and relies neither on any for its meaning.

well then, what is altimar? it refers to the one weekend of the year, usually sometime in early august, in which the Eastwood Posse (consisting, as you know, of josh (aka dj jazzy josh, aka josser brown), chris (aka chris cross aka nyffy), nate (aka naughty by nate), mark (aka markemark aka stumpy), andy (aka skinny talls aka andor), chris (aka scratchmasta slim aka soundfxman), and myself (aka wycliffe jon aka uncle caveman)) goes on a camping trip. here is a brief rundown of what’s gone before:

altimar i - 2000: we went to st. augustine and camped. we had the first annual grocery shopping competition. many pranks were played. andy’s jeep broke down. it was possibly the most exciting and adventuresome altimar ever. we had lots of hot dogs and mayonnaise. josh and mark bought some really dumb bug-eyed sunglasses. i made a cool video of the trip. (oh, and josh met his hemmingfriend). unfortunately, nate couldn’t make this trip.

altimar ii: reloaded (also subtitled attack of the spydars) - 2001: camped at st. augustine again. it rained a lot. we played a lot of beach sports, including whateverballTM. this was the year of the chick-cruisersTM. all 7 of us had skateboards and razor scooters, which we cruised around downtown st. augustine with, picking up chicks left and right. the girl at the pizza place called me her husband, and we made a skate video in a deserted bank parking lot. we did a lot better on buying food. all 7 of us were there!

altimar iii: return of the spydars - 2002: the most recent altimar! it was definitely the most chill. we camped at st. augustine again, but spent most of our time off the grounds at a smoke shop, where we became great friends with ticker, the manager. we all chain-smoked cloves (except nate and andor) and cigars. there really isn’t a lot more to tell, except one night we made up a great game with the frisbee and a flashlight. it involved there being two teams: one with one person and one with everybody else. the solo guy had a flashlight which he could use to blind everyone else, who all tried to throw a frisbee at him and hit him. we also had a long game of hide-and-seek where i eluded everyone until they lost interest. once again, all 7 of us were there and had an awesome time playing at the beach, smoking, and playing euchre.

altimar iv: revolutions - 2003: i’m calling this year “revolutions”, since we’re doing something majorly different. we’re not going to st. augustine! and, we’re not even camping! instead, we’ll be going to the marvelous “el caribe” at daytona. staying in a resort room right on the beach, we will have immediate access to the sand, and cover when it rains. nevertheless, despite the obvious advantages, it’s really a toss-up how this altimar will turn out, since we will have strayed from the formula. i, for one, am betting that it will be completely awesome, and that many songs will be written about our great exploits. but we will just have to see. unfortunately for us, both josh and nate are out of state and won’t be at altimar this year. it will be that much less of an experience without them, but the 5 of us who are left will press on and smoke for 7 (or more).

well, i’ll be back sunday. here’s to the greatest tradition ever!

july 25th, 1749

that thing which i have feared above all else happened yestereve, and the events of today confirm it beyond no doubt. i am the last of our order. my order, i should say now. i had known we were few, declining in the world, but so few? i suppose the curse has accelerated and, one-by-one, fallen on my brethren in england and india, and i despair that our great libraries at bombay and cambridge will fall out of existence. so much wisdom and learning, covered in dust for too long, is now to become it.

but that is the course we chose when we closed the doors to our order and sued the gods for immortality, hoping to preserve things as they were forever. why in all our wisdom could we not see that immortality is always at someone’s expense? why didn’t we anticipate a counter-suit? and the particular gods who had granted us immortality so swfitly were all too happy, in their damnable treachery wherein they derive their twisted joy, to grant the prosecutors’ request just as swiftly. so we were cursed. marked.

not all of us were, immediately. in fact, i didn’t believe in the curse until i heard about the Passing of professor ransfeld, and then later made sure of it with my own eyes; professorship had assuredly Passed to my colleague darmon, who transformed in front of me as proof. this was a curiosity! we had thought there would be no more Passings after we became immortal, but the gods had found a loophole in the pact: we never specified that we wished to live forever in our world. among gentlemen, and respectable gods, this would have been taken as given, but is clear that the gods we dealt with were barbarians and connivers.

and so, because these demons, as they should more properly be called, stole life from innocents (against our knowledge and will) and gave it to us, and because the innocents objected (as one would expect), the demons cursed our order, so that the current professor would eventually leave this world and be forced to live out his immortality in another (and knowing now how cunning are the gods, i would not wager that this other world is a kind one). since the binds of the rite of the Passing are restricted to this world only, it has returned, even though ransfeld never actually died.

we were somewhat relieved that the curse only affected the current professor, but that is the trouble with immortality: because of the curse, we would all eventually be professors, and be forced to suffer that the curse depart us from this world. and so it happened to me last night. it happened to me, the lowest in our order and therefore the last to be Passed the professorship and the last to remain yet on the earth.

i proved my professorship to myself by becoming an owl and flying to sorgues and then the six miles to avignon and back. it was exhilirating, but already the curse is doing its work. i feel that my professorship will be the shortest in the history of the order, and now i understand why ransfeld and darmon and the rest went crazy before they left; they could see glimpses of the world to which they were going.

when i laid myself down to sleep last night and closed my eyes, i had my first vision of it, and it burned my eyes. i saw that i was in a wide expanse, and there were people around me. a red mist swirled about us, choking me and causing tears to stream down my face, and so for a long while i could not discern what these others were doing. i learned, after clearing my eyes, that they were tilling the earth with some kind of glowing implement, which i took to be molten metal that somehow retained a solid shape. the pain involved in holding the tool was obvious, and it seemed that the red mist actually emanated from the subdued groans of the people and from there made a link with the others around them, so that if i looked carefully i could discern that the mist formed a moving grid, with heavier and lighter patches, that connected everyone together.

the folk themselves were dressed in heavy black cloth, robed and cowled so that i could see nothing of them save the pain. they did not notice me, and in fact i did not feel as if i were physically in that place, or i would surely have been burned by the dead, steaming sludge that passed for earth. i never learned why the people were working the hellish field, as there was nothing growing, nor do i think there could ever be anything good grown there.

just after i had been able to notice this, i shuddered with the most potent feeling of shame i have ever experienced. i saw that i was not completely disconnected from the world i was spying on, for all the slaves, as they obviously were, stopped their meaningless toil and shuddered as well. they seemed to draw into themselves, as if experiencing the same shame i had felt. and then i saw the source of this emotion, which, upon reflection while writing this diary entry, must have been one of the minions of the very gods we had made a pact with.

at that point, however, i was altogether consumed by the shame-producing object that was approaching. it is hard to describe it though it seared my soul: it was not a shameful thing, but instead much more like shame as a thing. it had no particular shape as it floated among us, but flickered from form to form, conveying failure and indecency (one of its favourite forms was unmistakably a phallus). wherever the thing went (and as i looked about i noticed that there were more than one of these unholy spirits drifting through the vast fields of black-robed sufferers), the red mist which tied the slaves to each other and to their harmful labor grew stronger and more defined.

the people, though it was obvious they knew the floating devils were there, took no notice of them, but instead turned their faces as if to hide them deeper in their black hoods, endlessly churning the burning soil and endlessly churning out more ethereal chain via their pains.

i realized, since i was only seeing a vision and not yet a vassal in the fiery fief myself, and since my mind hadn’t been continually ravaged by pain and shame like those of the slaves (my great tutors ransfeld and darmon were among them, as i eventually caught their faces, grimacing and unawares of my presence), that these shifting, floating demons were the police, the very right hand of the god who was king of this hell.

then i opened my eyes, and i knew that no time had passed at all since i’d closed them. the vision was gone, but small flames started to lick at the edges of my sight. they are doing so even now, and i know that it will not be long before the bindings call me to that world permanently.

i do not know if my predecessors were granted the same extensive vision of their future home as i was. and i do not know if my mind will be altered so much when i arrive there that i will slavishly allow my own shame to provide ever-stronger bonds to useless existence. but maybe as the last of my order to pay the price for our dealing with devils in laws and magics in which we thought ourselves wise, i could be the first to throw off the burden of shame and strike back against the evil gods. what we need is a rebellion, right now, and i intend to lead it.

but presently i must order things here for my departure. i will speak a command that all record of the order’s activities, purposes, and existence be destroyed on my Passing (for such is the right of professor), except that this journal entry be left unspoiled. for what i have seen with my eyes closed is too horrible to be ignored, and if by reading this some might come to be aware of our order, against the regulations that have been in place since the beginning, it is but a small thing compared to the good it might do to warn the world against making agreements with treacherous spirits, and what curses can be avoided thereby.

resolved,

roger s. choltham

1. i got a new electric guitar! it’s a carlo robelli ush-500hb, and it is beautiful and cool. (and, i will be using it to play the first splendour hyaline show ever, tomorrow night!)

2. i started playing ultimate frisbee again. dav and i have been going out sunday afternoons to a place in lake nona. it’s good to run around and throw the disc, and occasionally make a spectacular play. competition is always pretty good!

3. i started work at excelsis, a non-profit company here in downtown orlando. it’s really cool, and i’ve been having a sweet time as the summer intern. check out the website for more info on what excelsis is. the only downside to the whole deal is the driving to work (leave house at 7:40am), and the driving home (get home at 6:15pm). since i need a lot of sleep, that means my free time per day is about 3 hours. no fun! i haven’t got to hang out with practically anybody.

4. dav and i have been climbing pretty frequently as well, since we got memberships at aiguille, and we’re starting to see some marked improvement after our rather poor start-of-summer attempts.

5. i’ve been beta-testing a new online computer game called savage. because of work i haven’t really been able to play very much, but i’ve got pretty decent and it’s a fun game.

6. last weekend, dav and i drove up to gainesville to visit chris and jason and paul. we each (sans paul) ate a stogie burger from conestoga’s on saturday. they contain 1-lb hunks of meat. wow. that’s a lot of meat. we also visited the gainesville ale house, place of much repute and renown. the highlight of the trip, though, was seeing jasser’s and nyffy’s new project: the bewitching hour, which is a superb work of art.

7. as you can tell, dav and i have been hanging out a lot.

8. i’ve been reading the chronicles of narnia (in chronological, not authored, order). i put down the first two before gainesville, and then horse and his boy and prince caspian this weekend at gainesville. i’d forgotten how much these books really rock (in fact there’s been at least one point in each story where i have teared up. it’s more gripping now than it ever was as a child).

9. i did something sneaky and underhanded and bad: i went behind your backs and created another blog. a lot of people i have met from work, and some of their relations, have a weblog community which i have been privileged enough to join. don’t worry–i’ll still post here! but you may want to check the other occasionally for more on-topic and well-thought-out posts.

well, that is about it. other than that i am growing fat and tired from sitting at a desk all day, all week. i love school, where i can bike to class.

oh, i lied, there’s more:

10. i bought a bunch of cds. soon i will update the sidebar with the info, so stay tuned! bye! and leave me comments, i love you guys. of course now you know i am somewhat of a liar…and doubly so, because i have another list item:

11. tyson vozza came to visit me yesterday in orlando! well he didn’t come because of me but he was here so we hung out and saw pirates of the caribbean. not a bad flick at all. anyway it was the first time any stanford friend has ever visited me in orlando, so it was a bit weird but cool.

rock.

i made friends with another 20 year old guy named take, and a german missionary who spoke english and japanese named tobias, and our soccer team dominated. i will confess, however, to quite shameful performance at dodgeball (they play a rather different style of it, which involves much more strategy than i remember).

that night was sushi dinner with aiko fukuda and her mother-in-law, and it was fabulous. here are some pictures: [ plates of sushi, oh how good!] [ “unagi” over rice (eel). it was amazing] [ my dad and i with aiko and her mother-in-law].

and with that, our time at the fukudas had drawn to a close. on monday, the next day, the plan was to do a little more touring around the city, then to go to a hotel near narita, which we had got reservations at before talking with the fukudas, where we would spend monday night. tuesday we were to leave for the states!

and all did go pretty much according to plan: on monday we toured around a different part of town: asakusa, an older and more formal area. kazu was once again our guide, along with his girlfriend and her friend, both from the east coast of the states. it was fun to have some more americans around to talk to. the most memorable event of the day was visiting the senso-ji shrine, the largest buddhist temple in tokyo, i believe. here are the accompanying pictures: [ lantern gate] [ view of another tower] [ same tower from another angle] [ my dad and i in front of the lantern gate thing]. there was also a pretty huge market leading up to the temple: [ market by senso-ji]. after hanging out around the temple for a while, we got some lunch at a ramen bar, and we all had a fun conversation amid the slurping of giant noodles.

then, it was time for us to take leave of kazu & co. so we headed back to tokyo station via the subway and metro [ metro station] [ subway station]. from there we took the narita express, a fast train from tokyo to narita, which beats the limousine bus service any day. we got to the airport and took a free shuttle to the holiday inn hotel where we were to stay that night.

from then on things moved much more slowly and relaxed: we had a quiet dinner at the hotel restaurant that night, i took a long bath and read, and we watched CNN. boring, yes, but it was nice to slow down some. the next day, tuesday, was our last day in japan. we got to the airport 4 or 5 hours before our flight, and went to the admiral’s club. there i started reading a book series i had brought, consisting of the riddle-master of head, heir of sea and fire, and the harpist in the wind, all by patricia mckillip. i’d read it before, but i was struck again by what a fantastic story it is, and i ultimately finished all three books before landing in san jose. also, in the admiral’s club, i had a few jack and cokes, toying with the idea of trying to match Jonathan’s Day of Most Alcohol ConsumptionTM. i also took a picture of the 777 which turned out to be our bird to san jose: [ american airlines’ flagship].

sooner or later we got on our flight to san jose, and absolutely nothing interesting happened on it. i read non-stop, as i mentioned before, and finished the trilogy i had started. i didn’t end up drinking a lot; for whatever reason i guess i didn’t feel like ingesting a conintuous stream of wine. we arrived at san jose something like 5 hours before we left (go back a few posts to my itinerary, if you want), and hung out at the admiral’s club there before our next flight, which was late. it left eventually (which is more than you can say for some flights!), and we got to dallas no problem. we paid our respects to dfw’s admiral’s club also before our flight to orlando. i mostly just sat and thought about the trip, since i was too tired to do much else. but in order to fight of jet lag i didn’t sleep on the flight to orlando, either: it, like the rest, was without event and we sailed smoothly in tuesday night.

it was a real adventure, i think, full of physical and mental and spiritual challenges to overcome. more important than that, though, i became rather enchanted with japan and japanese culture. i would definitely love to go back, spend a year or two there, and learn japanese. i would love to talk to japanese people, with their emphasis on personal respect (something that has not only gone down the tube in america, it has completely left the tube), their reserved nature, and their hard-working minds and hands. but the future–who knows. i doubt that i will ever love one place enough to settle there when there are so many places that i’ve not yet visited, so many languages left unsampled…it is overwhelming sometimes, but i guess that’s just what happens when you have, as a personal goal, to know everything and be able to speak to everyone in the world.

for now, i am just happy to have been able to spend a week there, in a real house with real japanese people, and not stuck in a cramped high-rise hotel afraid to dive into the differences below. and, i am happy to have been able to spend a week with my dad, for the time was precious, and the memories it created will be even more precious the further back they point, like a map to better times.

the end.

we made it down in about 2:45, and on the way i took these beautiful pictures at sunset: [ view of valley below] [ clouds rolling in the hills below] [ the shadow of mt. fuji on the clouds]

so, we got back to the 5th station a little after 7pm. we had done it! we were extremely tired, but excited. the plan was now for renee and sue to drive my dad and me to fujiyoshida station so we could catch the 7:57 bus back to tokyo (this was, of course, the last bus of the day). we stopped at the convenience store at 5th station to get a drink and ask if perhaps there were any trains that left instead of buses, when we found out two very disturbing pieces of news: (1) there was a gate on the road down from 5th station to the base of the mountain, and (2) the gate closes daily at 7pm. we checked our watches: 7:05pm. oh no! we ran to their car and sped off down the mountain road to get to the gate and hope it wasn’t closed.

it was practically dark now, and the road down was long and windy (it now seemed much longer than it did when coming up, even though we were going faster, since none of us wanted to be stuck on mt. fuji for the night, what with it being out of season and there being no accomodations anywhere). on two occasions we almost ran over something in the road: the first was a deer (which i saw and yelled “stop!” in as curt and commanding a voice as i could muster without accidentally causing sue, the driver, to have a non-deer-related accident. thankfully, she jammed on the brakes, only then seeing the deer. i shudder to think what would have happened it i hadn’t seen it). the second was a cone (which i saw again and yelled “cone!”).

anyhow, we eventually made it to the gate, at around 7:40pm, and it was definitely closed. it was a big metal affair, padlocked securely with no hope of breaking it open. so, my dad and i got out of the car, slid under the gate, and walked down to a guardhouse, hoping that someone might still be there. as it turned out, there were still some workers there having their dinner, and with hand signs and short, one-word sentences, we were able to let them know that our car was on the wrong side of the gate. they were only too happy to get the key and unlock it for us, no doubt not wanting 4 gaijin wandering about on their mountain any more than we wanted to be there sleeping in the car all night.

our adventure was not over yet, however! we realized as we left the foot of mt. fuji that none of us had any idea where fujiyoshida station was…we had been driven from there by mrs. takahashi, and we had even got lost on the way up with her. so we just drove wherever we thought looked best, going somewhat the right direction, but losing hope all the same. sooner or later the clock turned to 7:55 and we knew that we’d never be able to catch the bus back to tokyo. we were resigned to finding an expensive hotel (they’re all expensive in japan) somewhere in the area and then heading back to tokyo the next day (which would also have the effect of causing the fukudas to believe that we’d died, certainly). but just then, we drove by a hotel which i recognized, and which had its own amusement park…i saw a sign which read “fujikyu highlands”, and then i remembered! our bus had stopped there, 2 or 3 stops before fujiyoshida, on the way in that morning! so, if we had any luck at all, we would be able to catch the 7:57 bus from fujiyoshida station as it made its way back to tokyo, since it was 8:00pm and the bus could not have got to fujikyu highlands yet! we pulled into the parking lot and talked to the station manager who was just leaving, but affirmed that, yes, the bus to tokyo was going to stop there, and that it left at 8:04pm.

yes! my dad and i rejoiced that we’d be able to get back despite getting lost. we thanked god once again for orchestrating events to our benefit. and we thanked our friends renee and sue for breaking a number of traffic laws, trying to get us to the bus on time. we said our goodbyes to them, and then a few minutes later got on the bus back to shinjuku station in tokyo. from there we took the metro back to soshigaya, and walked, tired, sore, and covered in volcanic dust, back into the fukudas house.

after assuring the fukudas that we were ok and had made it to the top (they were impressed), we went immediately to bed. and i dreamed happily of the beauty and power that god put into creation.

on saturday, my dad and i took a bus to shibuya, a younger, hip, shopping and music district of tokyo. there we met a young man named kazu, the nephew of aiko fukuda, who is from japan but is finishing up his theology master’s degree in the states (so he has excellent english). we had been able to persuade him over the phone to give us a tour, and that he did. we spent much of the day wandering around shibuya, doing a few touristy things and going to a few touristy shops (in one of which, miraculously, we met michael, our mt. fuji bus friend! that’s three random running-intos, which made me wonder if something was going on “upstairs”. but nothing came of it, really). we also visited the meiji shrine, a shinto temple in which is enshrined the emperor meiji (and i forgot the history of it by now, of course, though kazu was a veritable fount of knowledge concerning it). here are some pictures: [ a few sake barrels in an enormous mosaic, donated by various companies to the shrine] [ a procession of shinto priests and priestesses in the temple courtyard]. none of my pictures of the temple itself turned out that great…

that afternoon we also went to another part of town east of shibuya, where we went to a five-start hotel to look at some art. there was a wedding going on, so we weren’t allowed into some places, but they did let us see some banquet rooms, with gorgeous art all over the walls and ceilings [ meguro gajoen hotel banquet room]. this hotel is probably the nicest i’ve ever set foot in. here’s an example of how classy it was: the men’s restroom had a fountain and natural-looking stream with koi and rocks and plants in it, nice dark wood and bamboo, tasteful plants, black marble sinks and floor, and the list goes on. i should have taken a picture of it!

outside the hotel were two little shrines, one of which is buddhist for sure, and the other one of which i’m not exactly sure about. here are the pictures: [ shrine 1] [ shrine 2].

after the hotel, we three went to a great little tempura bar in another area of town, and had probably the best meal i ever ate in japan. they killed and cooked and fried all the food right in front of you, and gave you a huge variety of all kinds of things. it was fascinating. ah.

anyway, we said our goodbyes to kazu and went back to the fukudas to sleep.

eventually we got through the scrambling part and made it to the 8th station (i don’t think i mentioned this, by the way, but there are 10 stations, and the 10th is at the summit. the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th are all fairly close, and then there’s quite a ways between the 8th, 9th, and 10th). [ my dad and i at the 8th station]. after the 8th station there was a little more scrambling over the big odd-shaped rocks [ side view of volcanic scree and rocky path], and then it turned into more crappy terrain and steep switchbacks.

from there it was pretty sustained until the top: sliding terrain, super-steep paths, harmful wind, and a beating sun that burned my neck horribly, though i didn’t realize it till later because the temperatures had quickly dropped into the upper 40s. i had given my dad his backpack back for the scrambling part of the climb, because i couldn’t do it with a pack on my stomach. soon i had to take it back because the steepness and the altitude were getting to him (i was starting to feel shorter of breath as well–we were probably at 10,000 ft. now). i took this picture, off to the right of the path, where you can see huge ice patches still there despite the sun (and i wondered what it would be like to slide down it!): [ ice patches].

what felt like hours later we reached the 9th station, or thereabouts, and encountered michael, from the bus! he was on his way down, in shorts and a light sweater. he told us that he’d made it to the top in about 2:45, which was phenomenal. i was a little jealous that he’d had no companions to slow his progress, but then was immediately ashamed, since the whole ordeal was very much a father-son thing for me, and i wanted both me and my dad to make it to the top (which was why i had been carrying my dad’s pack of course–he’d suggested that i go on ahead and he could wait for me to come back down, but i would have none of that!). anyway, he warned us of the winds at the top and then kept jogging back down.

finally, not too long after that, we caught a glimpse of the wooden shinto gate that marked the entrance to the 10th station, a few hundred feet above us. then, we knew that we would be able to make it. and, a long time later (having to stand still and take cover with the howling wind, we were not moving very fast), we were there! [ shinto shrine gate and lions at 10th station entrance]. and once through the gates, we crested the lip of the crater and were able to see the inside of mt. fuji. the winds were phenomenally powerful (around 100mph, we estimated), and we had to keep low to the ground in order not to be blown off our feet. we had a thermometer, and it was in the 30s, so very cold! [ my dad and i with crater in the background].

i took a short video with my digital camera at the top, showing that we had actually made it. it’s a little big (5mb), but you can download it here: [ video from the top]

also, i took a panorama shot from the top, which is kind of hazy because of the wind and elevation, but here it is: [ panorama from the top]

soon enough, however, the going got fairly steep (we thought, but little did we know it was practically flat compared to what was to come), and we got mired in problems. my dad, jogger extroardinaire though he is, was having trouble with the intense cardiovascular nature of the climb. thus, we had to rest frequently, and my hopes of getting anywhere near the summit before we had to turn around to catch the bus began to diminish steadily. still, we made it to the 6th station alright, and, trying not to look up and see the vertical mile we still had to go, pressed on. shortly after that, i took this picture, wherein you can get an idea of how far we had to go (you can also notice the swirling clouds at the top and the ice patches still left even in summer): [ don’t look up].

then began the Switchbacks of Death, as i like to call them. hundreds and hundreds of switchbacks, each fairly short, but extremely steep, and consisting of volcanic gravel that was extremely hard to gain purchase in. it wasn’t so much hiking anymore as slogging through shifting rock. my dad was still having some trouble tiring out quickly after each rest, so we were stopping more often and longer than i liked–at each switchback practically. so, since i was feeling alright, and as if i could run up the mountain if i wanted, i took my dad’s pack and carried it on my stomach. the combined weight of his and my packs was probably around 50 lbs (8 liters of water is heavy, and i had all my cooking gear–stove, 2 pots, food, though i was never able to get the fuel tank filled. so it was a lot of useless and dead weight). needless to say, this evened the playing field a little bit: i stopped getting so far ahead and my dad stopped to rest less often.

however, i had already settled on not making it to the top, since at the rate we were going, we were going to take at least 6 hours up. then, when i had lost all hope, two americans caught up to us from behind (which was odd, because so far we hadn’t seen anyone else on the mountain–it was fantastic! a beautiful day, and no one in sight!). their names were renee and sue, and they were wives of americans working in tokyo. we got to talking, and soon realized what a blessing it was that we had met each other. they had been wanting someone to climb with, and also they had not brought much food or water. more importantly, they had brought a car to the 5th station. my dad and i, of course, had plenty of water, having brought some for cooking that we would no longer need. we also had an entire 5lb bag of kirkland’s signature trail mix, and all sorts of other useful hiking gear (first aid kit, moleskin, etc). so we decided that we would all go up together, and that way they would have food and water, and we would have a ride back to the main bus station at fujiyoshida! it almost felt as if god had been steadily increasing the possibility of our being able to climb up to the top, from getting us a ride to the 5th station, to sending two people who could help us and whom we could help.

anyway, that renewed my spirits quite a bit, and i trotted up with hope, still carrying my dad’s backpack. our joining the two ladies also had a positive impact on my dad, maybe because they were around 40 and he didn’t want to be shown up by women not much younger than him. at any rate they were better at encouraging him and each other than i was (all i had been able to manage was “come on, dad! your body can do this, you just have to keep a sustained pace and not give in to the pain”, which i guess wasn’t very helpful).

in talking with michael, we also discovered that there was a bus from the 5th station back down to fujiyoshida, so that, if we were to try hiking the mountain, we could get back to tokyo on our own (one of the logistical problems we faced had been getting down from the mountain, even if we could convince the takahashis to drive us to the 5th station. we were under the impression that no buses or taxis ran from the 5th station back down to the fujiyoshida station out of season). unfortunately, the last bus down from 5th station (5th station, remember, is about halfway, elevation-wise, up the 12,376 ft. mountain, and it is where the summit hike begins. you can drive up to it.), we were told, was at 4pm. we figured that the soonest we could start climbing was probably 10am, and if we wanted to catch the bus we’d have to go up and down in no more than 6 hours. seeing as the average up-hike alone takes 6 hours, my dad was doubtful that we could possibly make the last bus. i was game for trying anyway.

the bus ride ended soon enough, and we met mr. takahashi and his wife and fujiyoshida station. there we tried our best, standing in the wind which was abnormally strong even at the foot of the mountain, to persuade them to take us to the 5th station and then let us climb up the mountain. eventually, after showing them that we were well supplied with gear, food, and clothing, they acquiesced, and my heart rejoiced! it didn’t rejoice too quickly, however, because my dad reminded me that we’d need to be down by 4pm, whether we had summited or not, to catch the last bus back to fujiyoshida (so we could get back to tokyo). i agreed, and settled for going as far up as possible.

the first night there my dad and i went to bed early, due to jet lag, and woke up accordingly early on thursday morning. that day we went to work with takashi at the wycliffe center [ takashi and my dad on the way to the station to go to the center]. (i should actually put “center” in scare quotes, since it was a one-room office with a living quarters directly above). my dad wanted to see the office for obvious reasons, and i was excited to see how wycliffe was doing things in other parts of the world (it’s really a fascinating organization, with divisions in most of the world’s countries). there are 5 or 6 people that work in wycliffe japan, of which takashi is the director. we hung around the office for a bit, and i got to know some of the employees a bit. i also learned how to type japanese on a windows computer, which was, to say the least, fascinating. i really wish english had as interesting a writing system.

more began to unravel then in the mt. fuji debacle. takashi had asked a pastor friend of his (takahashi-san), if he wouldn’t mind showing us around the base of mt. fuji. the plan was, my dad and i would take a bus on friday morning to fujiyoshida station, in a town at the base of the mountain, and mr. takahashi would meet us there. he would drive us in his car up to the 5th station of fuji (which is “open” all year round, and from which the traditional hike to the summit begins). that way, we would get as close as takashi wanted us to get, without attempting to do something as foolish as climb to the top. takashi and my dad (who had been somewhat wary of doing mt. fuji out of season in the first place, and who was probably wiser in me in that the many stories of people dying on the ascent made him take heed) cheered this plan as excellent, but to me it was the worst of all possible plans. i could think of nothing more unsatisfying than to drive to the base of the hike, look up to the top, and then turn around and head back, hearing, “now wasn’t that fun?” i was definitely in a conquering sort of mood, not a be-conquered sort of mood. but there was nothing i could really do except act disappointed, which i did in such a way so that my dad would get it and not takashi (i didn’t want to offend our host).

anyway, after that, takashi conscripted the wycliffe secretary there, misao, to take us on a tour of the shinjuku area, which she did [ shinjuku 1] [ shinjuku 2]. we visited the bus station to get our tickets to fujiyoshida, and went to a christian bookstore in the area, where i picked up a very nice japanese bible, written in furigana (kanji with the hiragana readings). then we took leave of misao, caught a train from shinjuku to soshigaya-okura, and walked the mile or two back to the fukudas, where we arrived just in time for dinner!

my dad and i talked before going to bed that night about the fuji situation. he understood my disappointment and said he wanted to climb himself. one way or another i convinced him that we should bring all our gear in our packs the next day to fuji, just in case we could get the takahashi’s to give us leave to climb the mountain. he agreed, and so we filled our hiking packs with 4 liters of water each, tons of trail mix, my stove and fuel canister (empty at the moment), warm clothes to combat the near-freezing temperatures if we should reach the summit, and various other necessities. then we slept, and i dreamed of standing happily on the crater of the volcano i so wished to defeat.

our itinerary took us to chicago, where we would catch our non-stop bird to tokyo. there (once again because of my dad’s status) we were able to use the international first class lounge (a step above the admiral’s club, even), which was absolutely fantastic. we had a half an our to kill before our flight, so i went ahead and started Jonathan’s Day of Most Alcohol ConsumptionTM. drinks were free in the lounge, so i kicked things off with a cranberry and vodka, i believe. then we took leave of the smallish high-rolling lounge and made our way to the plane. once boarded and settled happily in business class (where i couldn’t even touch the seat in front of me with my feet no matter how hard i tried), i availed myself of one, then two, glasses of champagne from the helpful flight attendant (drinks are free in business class, too). after takeoff things really get going in business class, with drinks, then the international flagship dinner, then a lunch before landing. i think i had two or three glasses of wine before dinner, which (at my choice) was a traditional japanese-style meal, with sushi appetizers and all sorts odd-looking things in a box for the main course. it was very good. with dinner i had a few more glasses of the white chablis. for dessert i switched to a graham’s port wine, which complemented my chocolate mousse-ish-cum-cheesecake thing very nicely.

before lunch was the japanese snack, consisting of soba noodles. at that point i decided to try something new and ordered some chilled sake. no good–i am not a fan.

then were the long hours of the flight, of which i slept a few, but spent most of which reading my japanese book. thus i whiled away the time until lunch, with the help of a few jack and cokes. lunch was pizza, so i had to switch to the french red wine they were offering. after two glasses of that, i was happily satisfied until landing. thus ended Jonathan’s Day of Most Alcohol ConsumptionTM. of course, as you’d imagine, i was up and down going to the lavatory almost constantly. oddly, though, i never felt particularly buzzed.

we landed something like a day and a half later, on the 18th, in tokyo (the whole crossing the international date line thing, remember!), at 2pm. we changed some cash and ordered bus tickets from narita to shinjuku. we didn’t know it then, but shinjuku is one of a few “downtown” areas in tokyo. it’s a pretty big transportation hub and shopping area. anyway, 2 hours on the bus later (narita is far from tokyo proper), we got to shinjuku. we fiddled around with the phones for a bit, trying to figure them out, until a lady was nice enough to let us use her phone card, with which we called takashi fukuda at whose house we planned to stay for much of the week. takashi and his wife aiko work for wycliffe bible translators japan. since my dad is legal counsel for wycliffe usa and wycliffe international, he and takashi had known each other for a while. i myself had met takashi a few years back when he came to urbana with wycliffe.

takashi met us at the station and called a taxi to take us all back to his place. on the drive we began to get to know each other, and soon enough the topic of mt. fuji arose. you see, we had expressed our desire to climb mt. fuji with takashi during the e-mail exchanges of the previous week (wherein we planned on staying with him), but the response from takashi was, in possibly typical japanese fashion, “no, the mountain is closed. you cannot climb now”. out of respect, we pushed the matter no further, and for the moment accepted his advice on the issue. i was decidedly disappointed, however. i knew that we could climb it, and while i appreciated takashi’s care, i hated that our reliance on him might mean we wouldn’t be able to climb the mountain (you see, we had no idea how even to get to fuji, and even if we could find public transportation there, we’d have no way to get back without a car, since trains stop running fairly early). we asked discreetly a few more times that night, but the answer always came back, “no”, meaning, “crazy americans. of course you can’t climb when the mountain is closed!” apparently some canadian missionaries from a friend of takashi’s church had attempted to climb out of season once, and had got lost in the forest surrounding fuji and had died, which probably explained takashi’s reluctance. all the same, i was feeling rebellious. but soon enough the taxi arrived at the fukuda’s house…

the fukudas live west of shinjuku (which is itself rather westerly compared to other things in tokyo), near the soshigaya-okura station of the metro. they have a two story house, which rather surprised me with its size, the number of amenities (you would not believe the number of electronic gadgets that were connected to their toilets!), and the overall niceness of it. you see, my impression of tokyo so far, from the bus ride, was that it was a sprawling metropolis, consisting entirely of old (but clean) buildings built in the reconstruction after wwii, having a rather bland and industrial feel throughout. i was mostly right, and i was even right in thinking that houses were extremely expensive (tokyo is one of the more expensive cities in the world), and that space is a truly coveted commodity. as it was, i had been preparing myself to be sharing a 10 by 10 cubicle with my dad in some nameless monolith of an apartment building. so the fact that we were in a suburb (bustling and crowded though it was), in a house separate from the surrounding buildings, with each a room to himself, a bathroom and shower close by, was a blissful wave of relief to me.

here are some pictures taken in the house: [ backyard garden] [ long exposure shot of the ceiling light in my room]

takashi’s mother, an old woman of 80 or so years, lives in a house facing the fukuda’s, so they actually spent most of their time over with her, leaving their house to myself and my dad to relax in. we were able to make ourselves breakfast and sit and watch japanese television. i played the yamaha grand piano they had, which was in excellent shape. playing it, i felt as if i were weaving a bubble of my culture and personality, slowly growing it in an unfamiliar environment. i forgot for a moment where i was and the strangeness of being in a strange place. i wondered if the neighbors had ever heard anything but scales and classical etudes drifting in through their windows, and i wondered how the average japanese musical gestalt would interpret the decidedly un-classical sorts of things i was creating.

on tuesday, june 17th, i woke up early, because that was the day that my dad and i were going to leave for tokyo, japan. the fact that we were going to japan was cool enough, but even more exciting was how fast things had come together. you see, originally i had planned on bringing my beautiful little honda civic (name still pending…i should have called her arwen but i foolishly named my new digital camera arwen instead, and once you have named something you can’t revoke the decision) home for the summer. i was going to do a cross-country road trip! of course, that plan fell through because it turned out to be hard to get someone to drive it with me. the next idea was to ship the car home, but that was going to cost in the neighborhood of $900.

so, i decided that i would just leave the car in california, and find some other way to have an adventure before i started work for the summer. i called up my dad, since we like to go on international trips together, and we made a short list of about 5-10 interesting locations around the world. some other cities/countries on this list, besides tokyo, were moscow, hong kong, peru, new zealand, the cook islands, cameroon, and chile. as it turned out, when we began to price tickets, tokyo turned out to be a far better deal. you see, my dad and i are mile junkies, so the primary consideration for which trip made the most sense was, of course, the miles-per-dollar rating. tokyo’s rating was about 20 miles per dollar. which, if you fly very much, you know is pretty good. at any rate the whole trip would cost much less than shipping my car home, so we felt justified.

anyway, we made the decision and bought our tickets right around the 1st of june, knowing nothing of japan or tokyo or japanese culture or anything. after that i began to research what i could on the internet, learned a smattering of japanese, went through all the .swfs on “how-to-bow.com”, and became enchanted with the idea of climbing mt. fuji. nothing looked so picturesque, mysterious, and yet eminently doable. to that end i read all sorts of guides to climbing the mountain, and other people’s accounts of doing the same. the exhortation from all these texts was: don’t underestimate the mountain. on top of that, i learned that the official climbing season for mt. fuji was july 1 through august 31 (weather, during other times of the year, is apparently extremely unpredictable and dangerous on the mountain). we, as you know, were going to be there during the third week in june, a week and a half before the mountain opened for season. of course, they don’t shut it down or anything (it being rather difficult in principle to shut down a mountain), but every website i visited said: “WARNING: do not climb out of season unless you are an experienced professional climber”.

i was in a bit of a conundrum, then, because i didn’t want to do something stupid in the face of all the warnings (we’ve all heard stories where people die that way), and yet i strongly believed that these websites were exaggerating a little, most likely to save themselves from lawsuits and such. two other factors increased my resolve to climb anyway: (1) i had no idea if i would ever be able to visit japan again, and i wanted to climb mt. fuji, so my date options were limited to ones out of season, and (2) i had read that, in season, the mountain was so crowded, especially on the opening days, that in climbing it you were trudging in a line of thousands and thousands of people. that was not my idea of a fun outing with a natural colossus, to have the noise of thousands of people whining about their blisters following me up the mountain.

so i did what any good outdoorsman should do: bought gear! i won’t go into it too much, but i got plenty of goodies that would enable my dad and i to eat several hearty meals at the high elevation in cold, stay warm, and basically healthy. a stove, headlamps, rain gear, 2 nalgenes + 2 hydration packs apiece…i got us stocked!

but enough of mt. fuji for now.

it was a great trip, and i have great stories and great pictures to share. unfortunately, i took the latter half of last week to do just about everything except blog, and now i have started working full-time.

still, with japan and other recent events, so many exciting things are happening in my world at this time that i can’t afford to leave you out of the loop. look for some real posts soon, in which i will document all said awesomeness.

ps blogger has changed its look, and i’m not sure i like it. i may have to change to movable type…

thus, i will now present to you my somewhat-ambitious reading list for the summer 2003, in no particular order:

1. the chronicles of narnia, c.s. lewis. it’s been awhile since i’ve read these, and i picked up a beautifully illustrated hardback version.

2. christianity and the nature of science, j.p. moreland. pretty decent phlosophy. i started this one last year sometime and it’s been collecting dust. time to put it to rest for good.

3. the silmarillion, j.r.r. tolkien. i’ve read it 4 or 5 times, but just ordered a nice illustrated hardback version (i’m into those i guess) from bn.com. so i look forward to savoring it.

4. no free lunch, william dembski. the follow-up to the design inference. an argument against certain forms of evolution, from information theory. pretty interesting.

5. signs of intelligence, dembski et al. an easier-reading survey of the current trends in the intelligent design community. i’m a bit skeptical of this one but it’s short, so why not.

6. god and other minds, alvin plantinga. top-notch philosophy from my current hero. plantinga is the man.

7. the structure and interpretation of quantum mechanics, r.i. hughes. yep, it’s what it sounds like: a [hard] book on the philosophy of quantum mechanics. i couldn’t get enough in class, i guess.

8. an introduction to mathematical logic, herbert enderton. this was my phil 160a textbook. i thought i’d pick it up again for a bit of light reading.

9. ultimate japanese. we’ll see if i continue to study after my tokyo trip. japanese is fun.

10. harry potter: the order of the phoenix, j.k. rowling. she is also the man (“the man”, you know, like…authoritarian society…or something). harry potter is cool.

11. the spanish new testament, mostly paul. i’ve been reading this semi-consistently for about a year now. i want to finish it this summer. and move on to portuguese. or japanese if i can find a bible there, and get decent readability.

12. how people grow, cloud & townsend. a christian book. it might be good, or it might not. i have heard good things about it. i will decide when i read it.

13. the emergent church, some guy. about the postmodern church or something. which is so…90s. haven’t you heard? post-modernism is out, man! the book is “required reading” for the leadership team of ccc. who knows, it might also be good!

i’ll check in at the end of the summer and let you know how many of the books i actually read.

i’m also planning, of course, on finally beating warcraft iii, a jewel of contemporary computer gaming, and enter the matrix, which, if you haven’t played it, makes you feel damn cool, like a jedi. or neo.

lastly, i bought the new canon s400 digital elph. it is like a beautiful woman. i will call her arwen, since she is an “elph”. arwen just took a picture of me, which is weird because the light in my room is weird. but here it is! it’s a hello from me picture.

i just had to say goodbye to stanford 2002-2003. it was a fun year. it saw a lot of changes in my life. a lot of changes in who i am. i’m not sure if i like all of them yet, so i may not be keeping them. although the ridding of them may be more difficult than i might think.

still, so many obviously good things happened it would seem strange to say that god was not likewise obviously at work in this year. though i may not be able to admit it to myself yet i think i have actually grown! and so it is appropriate to thank god and all those, my friends, my acquaintances, or people i have randomly happened upon, for making this year what it was. it has been a wonderful 21 months of living in california, and i look forward to september, for what may be my last 9.

now, as i shut down my computer in griffin 302 for good, i can’t help but feel that standard twinge of nostalgia. unfortunately there is no time to reminisce about the year, because packing, studying, and sleep are all vying for my undivided attention.

when next you hear from me i will most likely be safely ensconced in the floridian resort castle that is my home. and i will most likely be procrastinating on writing the final paper which is due this friday (i just had to bring work home with me). until then–adieu!

1. school - today was my last day of classes. before i am officially done with the quarter, however, i must successfully complete one logic final (all questions of which having to do with godel’s incompleteness theorems), and write two papers, one for philosophy of quantum mechanics (this paper will be on whether or not the quantum logic interpretation of quantum theory has a solution to the measurement problem), and one for my seminar on intentionality (this paper will be on whether or not there is a plausible way to naturalize the semantics of words referring to uninstantiated properties, like that of being a unicorn). assuming i can get all these done by next week, i will officially be a 4th-year undergraduate student and a 2nd-year graduate student!

2. japan - for the not-too-bright among you, my last (albeit lacking somewhat in the html arena) post was meant to say that i will be going to a japan for a week, starting june 17th. in preparation for that trip, on which my dad is also going, and in which we plan to visit much of tokyo, as well as climb mt. fuji, i have been learning japanese. the going is slow, but i’ve got about half of the hiragana (one writing system) memorized, and am working on some basic vocabulary as well.

3. music - in the last few weeks i have seen pedro the lion, starflyer 59, ester drang, pete yorn, and coldplay. all the shows were absolutely wonderful, and i think last week marked my 8th time seeing pedro the lion live. wonderful.

4. summer is here! i’ve been doing plenty of outdoors things instead of working on the aforementioned school items (it sucks to get out of school in the middle of june). for instance, on sunday, my intramural soccer team (the chicken nuggets) played 3 playoff games to come in second place overall in the coed division. it was a good run, and for my first involvement in intramural sports, a job well done in my opinion. needless to say, i was in pain after playing 3 whole games within a few hours (we had no subs, so constant running). unfortunately, not a lot of climbing has been going on, for whatever reason.

5. home - i go home to orlando next tuesday. i’ll be spending the summer working for a company there called excelsis. i’m not exactly sure, but my guess is i will be doing web programming/design, and maybe database programming/administration. i will spend the summer working, playing music with my brother, hopefully writing and recording new splendour hyaline songs, hopefully playing shows at lots of clubs around the area, running and climbing on a daily basis between the two, traveling to gainesville frequently to hang out with nyffy and jason before he leaves, and of course, sitting in my hot tub.

next time: stunning prose the likes of which you’ve never before seen!

the point is that any night full of shooting lasers at zombies, and full of going for the 100,000 hole in skee-ball (with zombie-like tenacity), is bound to be a night of deep questioning, soul-searching, and identity-seeking. and what better method for searching than google? you see, it occasionally occurs to me to wonder who i am, how i am identified, and such. i am sure questions like these occur to most people a good deal of the time, but i am blessedly unperturbed by them for the most part. still, there are moments where i would wish to examine my roots, revisit the history of my life, trace out the pattern of my growth–essentially, to assure myself that i am not disconnected from my own history, and that the narrative of my life is unfolding in a meaningful and acceptable way.

roots, however, are notoriously hard for me to come by. where am i from? not california. not florida. texas? maybe. maybe not. papua new guinea? i wish i could say yes, but i can’t, on pain of posing. arizona? probably not. which are my childhood streets? there were so many…

of course, i jealously regard my childhood as the best imaginable, and the multiple moves as pre-requisite to a fuller understanding of culture and the world. so in the end i can’t be frustrated with the situation. and i’m not. still, it makes my past more hazy to me–more mysterious. less accessible by car or phone. all my pre-collegiate friends, from 1st grade on, are thousands of miles away. so who is there with me, keeping an eye on who i’m becoming? no one.

so it becomes necessary for me to go back periodically…to engage in the equivalent of looking over old scrapbooks and what have you. tonight i opened up microsoft outlook and went to my e-mail archive. i am fastidious about the storing and organizing of e-mails, so in a moment’s time i was reading the oldest e-mails still on my computer. as it happens, i have every e-mail ever received or sent by me since exactly 4 years ago. before that, alas, i was not so concerned with saving such information (all too precious, little that i knew) and the memoirs of my early internet days remain lost, forever unable to be teased piecemeal out of correspondence.

luckily, enough was left from before the move to florida that i felt sufficiently transported into the past. i was slightly shocked by what i read: my words were so very different, and yet so very alike, to what i would write now. the attempted wit and sarcasm were very much there, but it seemed so young, so un-cynical. i was less wise, and also less foolish at the same time (if you think this is impossible, you are wrong: i sense both growing in me every day, to my frustration).

i pored over e-mails to and from old friends with whom i haven’t spoken, in some cases, since those very letters were written. it became addictive, drug-like…i couldn’t get enough of the words of the previous selves of my friends, and the words with which my previous self responded, sometimes after having been painstakingly constructed to impress, to delight, to woo, to influence, to control…

clearly, the past is a powerful thing. powerfully dangerous, of course: nothing is easier than becoming mired in it. but powerfully instructive. i hope that these old e-mails will continue to exist, as they age like good wine, ripe for the tasting of my 40-year old self. how much wisdom will i have then? probably not so much that i couldn’t learn still from the advice of my friends and myself: age 16. a digital time capsule, if you will.

but i ramble. the excursion into the former days inspired me to look up old friends and see what they were up to. hence the reference to google earlier. thanks to its speedy algorithms i now know, in some cases with surprising detail, what a number of my friends from texas are doing, where they are going to school, etc… and though i didn’t speak with any of these friends, or connect with them in any real way, i feel as if i did connect in some sense, as i was reminded that they continued living their lives after i left. this comes as a shock to me every so often–that people move and think and grow when i am not looking at them. it’s a scary and humbling thought, really.

of course, the decision to extend the night further and write about this melancholy has taken some of the sweetness out of the past’s draught. reminiscing is very certainly one of those things that must be done, not talked about, for it to have any use. and now i have destroyed its gift. but it is not a loss without some recompense, for some day, possibly years from now, i may read this entry and come to realize some important thing about myself through it. which is, of course, exactly what has been under discussion. so it is no doubt a reasonable expectation.

but it’s damn late. good night.

the few days after that were filled with parties. graduation parties, mostly, but i also attended one wedding (an outside wedding, on the grass, sunny, 95 degrees, and humid as a glass of water). the parties were also fun. at the first one i went to (my sister’s), i was able to run around with my brother outside in a terrific thunderstorm, tossing a frisbee. later on in that same thunderstorm duty found me on the roof, unclogging one of our gutters, and praying that if lightning decided to strike, it would go for something besides me. the rest of the party was spent gradually losing a game of chess to my good friend josh, and eating little croissant hot dogs or something.

i realized all of a sudden at these parties that my sister and her friends have grown up. it seems that until last weekend i had still been thinking of them all as if they were high school freshman, trapped in shy and insecure bodies and minds. and then, magically, they now appear 5 or 6 years older. the girls are all beautiful and no longer the annoying, giggle-prone crazies everyone knows high school girls are, and the guys are for the most part taller than me, laid back, studly, and surprisingly wise. for the first time, maybe, i was able to hang out with many of these people, not because they were my “sister’s friends”, but because they were fun in and of themselves. (this again shows my snobbiness in who i find enjoyable, and for what reasons. however, i think maturity is a somewhat allowable criterion for enjoyable hanging out)

obviously, most of these kids were just as mature and just as fun a year ago, and so you might wonder what the big deal is. the deal is, i think, that there is a line crossed when someone graduates from high school, and this line, in the friendship calculus, adds a few years. so, if i am allowed to be friends with people at most 3 years younger than me, i will be able to hang out with high school freshman when i am a high school senior, but when i am a freshman in college, i can only hang out with high school seniors and up (or perhaps juniors). this puts those who were high school freshmen when i was a senior out of my “friend” range until they graduate.

obviously, that’s a bunch of crap. but it’s fun to make up. the point is, my little sister’s all grown up and i’m so excited to see who she will choose to be in life! and the other point is, if you are an older brother with a younger sister, don’t be too mean to her and her friends when they are in the awkward high school phase, because if you’re not careful they will grow up to be amazingly hot and you’ll be kicking yourself. then again, you could always date older women, like me.

what else did i do in orlando? i went running a few times with david, once at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, in a sunny 95-degree swelter. i went to a pool hall for the first time in my life and lost miserably at cutthroat and nine-ball. and, get this, i randomly went to the pete yorn show at the house of blues in orlando on monday, thanks to the paste-musicking of jason killingsworth. it was a pretty good show.

soon enough, of course, the fun and not-working had to end, and i flew back to stanford on tuesday. luckily, i had a lot to look forward to, as the following night was the pedro the lion, ester drang, and starflyer 59 concert. it was in san francisco, and i went with show-loving friends mackenzie, chuck, and alex. i haven’t thought about it enough to say for sure, but it may have been my favorite SF show ever. ester drang was beautiful, starflyer was actually entertaining, and pedro rocked harder than he ever has before. in particular, the live version of ‘second best’ (played with 6 people on stage) alone was worth the price of admission. on top of that, not being satisfied to provide us with musical delicacies which can only be likened to the sad addictiveness of life itself, dave bazan was on his best verbal game, making clever comment after insightful observation time and time again.

and that brings us to now. 2 am. back from seeing the matrix reloaded a second time. as i said, good stuff. and as i now say, good night!

one day the future will be tomorrow

i drove down to santa barbara on thursday afternoon with one of my suitemates, dave. we stayed at his house near thousand oaks thursday night, then woke up early friday morning to reserve a campsite north of santa barbara at el capitan state park. we did this because last weekend was the class of 2004 cornerstone surf and camping trip. as it turned out, there wasn’t a whole lot of surfing, because the waves pretty much sucked. instead, we played hours and hours of beach football and volleyball. i had lots of fun scrambling around the seaside cliffs in the cool air that brought out the bright blue of the sky. we cruised around santa barbara like the studly men that we are, picking up chicks left and right. there were so many chicks following each of us, you would not believe. we barbecued and lit stuff on fire and generally had a sweet time. i slept outside in the 40-degree weather, no tent: just sleeping bag and therm-a-rest. it was gorgeous to roll over and see the ocean shimmering with the reflected light of the bright moon, and to feel the strong sea breeze. california is where it’s at.

next weekend:

i’m going home on thursday for my sister’s graduation (which is the following monday). i plan to (a) see the matrix 2 with my friends, (b) hang out with my friends and family, and (c) sit in the spa for an obscene amount of time smoking various forms of tobacco and reading. this will more or less be the extent of my time at home, and i will love it.

now:

in between these two trips, i will struggle to find motivation to (a) catch up on the work i didn’t do last weekend, and (b) get a head-start on the work due when i get back from next weekend’s trip. in the end, i won’t find that motivation, and i’ll spend way too much time sitting in front of my computer either procrastinating or….well, that’s about all you can do with a computer i guess.

on the positive side, there’s really nothing due until 2 or 3 weeks from now, when i have 3 massive papers and projects to turn in. also, tonight i’m playing laser tag. life is good.

until now, i have never failed to go through this gauntlet successfully. either i use my mad biking talents to navigate the choppy waters, or i realize it’s futile and walk my bike along.

today, i said to myself as i approached said Corral of Death, “this will be the hardest one yet!”, meaning of course that it looked well-nigh impossible to turn without crashing into the other bikes. i thought for a moment about calling it quits and walking safely through, leading my bike at my side like a trusty steed (in fact, the brand of my cycle is “iron horse”). instead, i recklessly decided to take my chances.

i neared the Turn of Utter Dismay and slowed down to a halt, using all my balance to keep steady (this is exactly what you have to do to make it–stop almost completely and then hop the bike around while stationary). all was going well, and i let out a bit of air to release some pressure. just at that moment, my right pedal brushed the rubber of a nearby tire, and caught slightly–of course, i knew then it was all over. i struggled valiantly but ultimately vainly to regain balance, but my initial over-compensation shot me down to the left, where i crashed into a girl’s pink mountain bike. this bike was attached to a rack so it stayed where it was but just turned sideways–me on top of it and my bike on top of me.

i took stock at that point and realized that my leg was pinned between the two bikes, my foot having scraped along the gears on the way down. i tried to right myself, but i was horizontal and my bike’s drop-forward handle bar extension on the left side had interlocked with the water bottle holder of the pink bike, making it impossible to clear the way for some leverage. eventually i had to extricate my leg, scraping it again on the chain in the process.

then i was able to untangle my bike, right the other one, and walk the five meters back to my suite.

it was a failure, true, but i’m not ashamed. i don’t think anyone else could have managed it, either. of course, i do have a few scrapes to show for my hubris. fortunately, one of them, when looked at from the appropriate angle, looks quite like south america, and the chain grease and blood on my foot form a pattern that clearly resembles a ribbed and leathery dragon wing. i feel that these battle scars are a glorious form of art, and i shall leave them unattended until i am forced to take a shower late tonight.

by default, of course, i respect no one. these are the ways in which i can come to actually respect you:

1. you can be as good as or better than me at philosophy (this is major respect)

2. you can evidence substantial merit in some academic field (except Urban Studies or shit like that)

3. you can be suitably athletic

4. you can be humble to the point that in our interactions my own arrogance is made obvious even to me

5. you can have some really amazing skill or talent (music, art) such that i know i couldn’t do what you do

6. you can be outgoing and always the center of attention (i.e., popular)

7. you can prove me wrong

8. you can be from another country

9. you can speak fluently languages other than english

10. you can do something that just amazes me, like, buy 6 acres of land in costa rica as an investment

and, for girls:

11. you can be really good-looking (although, this one can’t stand alone. so it only works by itself until you open your mouth)

and, when i do come to respect you, i will do anything to make you my friend. if on any given day i think you have some reservations about me, don’t like me, are disappointed with me, or some such situation holds, that day will feel like the worst in my life. i will feel like a failure. i will basically try to make you as integral a part of my life as humanly possible, because your value is automatically internalized, and i want it.

now, i’ll spare you the list of things which make me go from having a neutral attitude towards you to one of disrespect. because that’s not the point. what is the point? the point is that respect, as defined by the list i gave, is what denotes my relational attitude to you. and, defined that way, it is clearly wrong. it is wrong to not desire to interact with people just because they don’t fulfill some criteria. but this is, i think, exactly how i operate.

so, the solution is either to give up respect as the thing which motivates me to seek relationships with people, or to re-define respect so as to make it acceptable (say, by adding “you can be a human”). here are the problems with those approaches: for the former, it seems impossible to change what naturally motivates me to like people and want them to like me. or, maybe i should just not have any criteria–i should like people indiscriminately. either way, i’m not foreseeing anything that is within my power to change. and, as to the latter option, it obviously won’t work, because the list is unfortunately ad hoc: i don’t come upon person X and decide if i respect X by checking X’s properties against the list. no–i respect whom i will (i have no idea why)–i just built up the list from examples of people whom i respect. bottom line is it doesn’t seem possible to create an a priori set of things i respect. so modifying such an a priori set is even less possible.

i’ve been speaking of relationships generally, but all of this holds just as well for romantic relationships. of course, romantic relationships have their own special difficulties. here’s an example:

if we assume that eventually i figure out how to like people and seek deep relationships with them equally, and not based on some “jonathan’s ad hoc system of merit”, this raises a problem for romantic relationships. because, if i apply my new understanding about relationships in general to them, i might as well date anybody. girl X will work same as girl Y. but you are saying “well, that’s one of the reasons we know romantic love isn’t like community/relational love in the first place. so you have nothing”. ok, granted. but we can think of the problem in a different light: when i choose to date someone, i either have criteria or i don’t. and, if i do have criteria (i.e., before i date you i make sure you fit the bill, whatever that is), it seems that i am being unspiritually chauvinistic (in the technical sense of the term). but if i don’t, it is hard to see why i haven’t been married for the past 4 years.

the answer? i dunno. maybe it is to have some criteria, and make sure that those are the right criteria. still, i think the ones that we can say with certainty are right (like, “is human”) leave too many options open: it’s too liberal to explain what all the fuss is about finding “the One” (or even “the One I Happened To Meet of Several Possibilities”).

it is at this point that the christian idea that god will make my mate obvious (even if there are multiple possibilities to him) becomes very attractive. because then it is no longer about who fulfills my sorry criteria, or about which desiderata she doesn’t meet. it is about who i am meant to love. of course, we have to assume also that god picks someone, as the person i am meant to love, whom i actually will love. but since god is probably a better judge of character and personality than i am, i trust we can let him make that decision. there–problem solved? sure.

see, attractive! but also not, because it means all my philosophizing is more or less useless. it means that writing long blog entries like this because of thoughts about life, love, and why are ultimately exercises with no purpose. spinning wheels. treading water. dry heaves. shooting blanks. or, maybe that’s not a bad thing–maybe these have their uses. treading water may not get me anywhere, but the more i do it, the more prepared my muscles will be for the time when i’m actually ready to go somewhere! (now that i think about it, none of the other actions in the list have any particularly beneficial purpose, ahem).

and with that, we end: more useless logic-chopping to come, just you wait!

so in celebration of the promise of moving to the next level in my climbing ability (assuming i continue to climb 3 times a week), i purchased a pair of boreal pyros climbing shoes. (click here for info). this pair of shoes is much more technical than my current pair. right now i have boreal ninjas, which are a very comfortable slipper, and a great gym shoe (easy to take on and off, and not too hard on the feet). unfortunately the ninjas aren’t too great on really overhanging routes or ones that require super-tight footwork. the pyros, on the other hand, will be less comfortable, but will afford me an advantage on the intense, but short, sport routes i find myself on most often. they even feature the special fusion 3 rubber on the top of the shoe over the toes and on the heel, which makes toe-hooking, heel-hooking, and certain kinds of smearing much easier.

needless to say, i am hoping that this purchase will fuel my desire to become a really good climber, and help me reach that goal by making it technically within my reach and providing a new sense of excitement. i can’t wait to try them out on monday, when i think they might arrive!

i apologize to give a detailed description of things of much less substance than what i have been writing about recently, but i’m mostly writing because i’m bored, and i just got back from the wall.

alas, no philosophy of girls this time around, either. more of that, undoubtedly, later.

“and is there no end to the darkness?”, i screamed inwardly as i continued to run and the crazed and adrenaline-pumped energies started to coalesce into a huge pit of dread in my center. “judas was not enough. his eyes were not enough, that never stopped roving where they should not. his stealing hands were not enough, that harmed the poor we were trying to help. and of course his betrayal was not enough! neither was the sin of the priests so high that it could not be topped, even in executing my lord—for now the most base deed has been done. they have taken my lord, and i do not know where they have put him!”

these were my thoughts as i ran, still, as always, not comprehending the truth. and these were the words that fell in shattered pieces out of my mouth, between gasps, to peter and john when i arrived at the place where they were hiding. when they realized what i was saying and believed that because of my obvious exertions it must be the truth, their already-drawn faces fell all the more, but in peter’s eyes i saw a spark of defiance and anger. immediately he thrust me, not unkindly, out of the doorway, and began running. john saw that i got some water and then was off like a shot after peter, quickly catching up and overtaking him even while i could still see them.

i fell to the ground then after satisfying my thirst and contemplated how i would die. later it surprised me when i became aware that this was the lowest point of my life–where my heart passed closest to what it must feel like to be in sheol. my lord was now not just dead, but gone, forever unreachable except in blurry memory. then in utter desolation it occurred to me to go back to the tomb and commit suicide there, in the last place i had seen my lord. i recalled how i had dropped the burial spices at the tomb to run the more quickly, and figured that if i ingested these i would die.

with this hint of purpose all the pain in my side from running subsided, and my mind grew deathly calm. i trotted back to the tomb fancying that samson must have felt much the same with his hands on the pillars at his sides, although i hated that, unlike samson, my death would not cause the thieves of my lord’s body to be crushed and destroyed. do you see, child, how far gone i was? and how short-sighted?

when i reached the tomb john was outside with tears still on his face, but looking more thoughtful than anything else. at that time peter strode out of the cave with fury and murder written in his eyes. i saw his hands shaking, and i knew that, had the thieves been there, those powerful hands of peter’s would have struck down any number of the villains. he glanced at me and then left, intent on doing i know not what. john left shortly thereafter by another route, leaving me alone with the jars of spices, the gaping tomb, and my dark plan.

it was then that i became aware of another person in the area. i turned around and saw an unfamiliar man, who i assumed had been hiding nearby while peter and john were examining the tomb. my first reaction was an anger that surprised me–i felt that this person, whom i thought to be the gardener because of his clothes, was symbolic of all those in jerusalem who had, in one moment, crowned my lord the ‘king of kings’, and in the next laughed and jeered as he was lashed. but before i had even a chance to give vent to this anger, a huge wave of shame came unbidden and pierced my heart, as i thought of my plan to die there. the smooth stone of the jar that i had picked up seconds before now felt heavy and scalding like heated metal. i dropped it to the ground and my own scalding tears joined it, mixing with the embalming fluids that pooled on the dirt.

with the intrusion of the unknown man and the inescapable weight of shame, all the stoic, self-destructive purpose that was driving me disappeared, and pain and grief once again flooded into my body. the presence of the man made my shame all the greater, and my eyes were downcast.

“woman,” he said, “why are you crying? who is it you are looking for?”

anger rose again as i saw that his words proved he must have been eavesdropping on peter and john, but i had no strength to display it. instead, my voice came weak and small, and i hated it. “sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and i will get him,” i said, not daring to look up and feeling nauseous.

“mary”

the voice came like a knife to my heart and a splinter of light to my benighted mind. not daring to look up, i froze as a rush of images and memories joined the reverberations of the voice in piercing my heart. i felt that a thousand needles were running to and fro inside my body, and above all, a massive fear shadowed my mind…the fear that i would raise my eyes and see just the gardener, or worse: nothing at all. i had thought it could not get any worse, and now i was being taunted by the very voice of my lord!

and yet…and yet the addicting gentleness of the voice still called to me long after the echoes had died down, insistently but not urgently, as if the speaker had all the time in the world. in that instant i knew that my mind, in all its delusion, could never manufacture or reproduce such a sound–a sound of command, yet patience, grace, and love. with that realization hope exploded throughout my body and i trembled with the warmth of it. it grew until it would no longer be refused, and i turned my eyes from the broken jar at my feet (the very instrument of my death) upwards in glorious surrender to hope, not quite daring to believe what would meet my eyes.

“rabboni!” i cried, recognizing jesus at last, and with that cry the world exulted. i felt in that moment as i have never felt before, and i knew that the greatest secret, the greatest surprise, the very telos of the universe had just called my name. my name! i was suddenly aware that every blade of grass, every grain of sand, every tree, and every mountain had been dying with me, and was now full to the overflowing with joy because death had been defeated! i knew that i, the most humble of people, a woman and a prostitute, had witnessed the unveiling of the purpose of humanity and of existence. and i knew that god delighted in making his mystery known first to a broken and suicidal prostitute.

truly, i had never felt more embarrassment and shame than in that moment. i had never before been so unaware and disgusted at my failings–at my body and the tears and the evil things that occuppied my mind. and yet i had never experienced more acceptance. i saw that in and because of my lord, all the things that were broken in me, that were broken about me, could be redeemed! i saw that, one day, i would be able to be naked without shame, as even adam and eve were unable to be for long. i saw this and i knew it, because of the living proof in front of me.

and now, though that proof is gone and taken into heaven, i know it will not be long. i can feel the transformation will take place soon, and my body trembles at the very imagining of it. i can no longer hear the voice that opened my understanding for the first time, and that called my name–that spoke inside the walls of my own house! nay, too many years have gone by and that memory has faded with all the others. joyfully, it no longer worries me, because the image of his love is burned onto my scarred heart, just as the image of the sun is burned into our eyes if we look at it, but everlasting.

and know this, child (for though you are grown, you are still a child to me): if jesus of nazareth chooses to save me, whom they call mary magdalene, the lowest of all the women in judea, he will without a doubt open his love even unto you, and to any who asks it of him…

therefore, child, ask!

but what have years of wandering around the sewer districts of insignificant villages in samaria, producing food from god-knows-where and “healing” people (it’s very easy to be “blind”. i could do it myself. i wonder if jesus would pay me as much as he paid his plants), got him? the applause of rabble! and then, their sticks and stones, because of his repugnant habit of quoting irrelevant passages from the law and the prophets at the wrong times. not only did he pick the wrong kind of followers, he turned them on himself! if anything is a miracle, it’s that he’s still alive…

…or maybe it’s that i’m still around. at first, things were going smoothly. he wasn’t as prone to do so many damn rashful things. i smelled promise. and my companions weren’t so thick-headed. but he kept saying incomprehensible shit, and that gradually addled their brains. you’d never have thought so many fishermen could become so many useless mystics in such a short time! particularly that simon: going around, calling jesus the anointed. anointed, of all things! i’d make a better anointed than that carpenter. of course, jesus encouraged it, arrogant as he is, and “rewarded” simon by calling him peter. ha! i’m sure “peter” will get his fill of rocks when the people drag him to the gates and stone him for calling a carpenter the anointed. what will he think of his reward then? i hope i’m there to see it.

of course, as the only “disciple” with his head on straight, i was given charge of the money bags. and this, you see, is primarily why i stuck around and disgraced myself with jesus and his lot. for whatever reason, people opened their purses to us whenever he came by. in hopes of “healing” or some unimportant favor, no doubt (and he never tired of granting the most insignificant things to the most insignificant people! it was insufferable, not to mention a waste of time). this was especially the case after news about lazarus got out–lazarus, by the way, perplexes me. he never struck me as the kind who would pretend to die so jesus could “resurrect” him. in any case, it usually happened that even after feeding ourselves and that wretched gaggle of hangers-on (whores, to a one), there was a good deal of silver left over.

i kept faithful watch over the money, taking some for myself only as my services warranted, but i knew the other disciples were jealous of my position and probably tattled lies to jesus about my use of the funds. no matter. i could deal with those fools. but i couldn’t deal with jesus when popularity turned against him and the money stopped coming in. i knew then that i had to leave the crazy charlatan behind before he dragged me into the mess he’d prepared for us (“if it were not so, i would have told you”!). the night that i made the decision was the night one of his prostitutes poured an entire jar of myros nardos on his feet! that jar could have fed us for months, but he just sat there with a sad smile on his face (why, i’ll never know–i can’t fathom what goes on in his diseased mind) and let her do it. mary–that was her name, and not a bad-looking girl. i wouldn’t have minded meeting her in her whoring days (i know your types disapprove, but the bonds of business are stronger than those of morality, eh?). i complained, of course, but he responded with more of that nonsense that i can’t even remember.

so, here i am. you want jesus and i want money. i think we can come to some sort of agreement. but remember, we’re not talking bronze here: i’ll have to go into hiding or those big brutes of fishermen will come after me after they’ve got over the fact that their “anointed” is gone forever. i want silver. thirty pieces, and no less. well? do we have a deal?

(1) i have never been in school in the month of july

(2) i have never had a girlfriend in the month of april (at least, until the 26th)

so here’s the paradox: this sort of confidence is clearly the easiest and most natural thing to have, since the way things are (here, the way i am) is immediate. any falsehood is constructed (assuming of course, that my self-truth-perceiving faculties are in order). so then, why do i oscillate between insecurity and arrogance, passing through confidence without stopping so much as a second? inevitably i fall prety to scylla or charybdis, never navigating that strait successfully. but, i submit, this is really hard! i say it’s hard because in the case of insecurity, i have to construct one of two false beliefs: (1) that i am worse than i really am, or (2) that being worse in a given area than person X is of any real importance. likewise, when i am arrogant i must either be believing that (1) i am better than i really am, or (2) being better than person X is of any importance.

the question becomes: what is it about these four erroneous belief possibilities that is so magnetic? why does my mind, which has to work harder to believe falsehoods, run so naturally after any of these beliefs, unless i intentionally and pointedly make sure it does not?

it’s a problem. but you are perhaps wondering/suggesting, “why be confident in the first place? just give in to your oscillation, as you call it”. well, apart from the fact that you sound rather like the proverbial devil-on-the-shoulder and that for methodological reasons i should chop off your tongue, i’ve heard that girls are attracted to confidence (in the same way, i’m told, that they are attracted to guys with girlfriends). therefore, all spiritual/philosophical considerations aside, confidence must have value.

(i had to talk about girls somewhere in this post, as i’ve managed to in the last few and i didn’t want to break the trend. heh.)

1. quantum mechanics is wack. and i mean that seriously. but at least i’m finally learning matrix arithmetic and eigenvectors.

2. only 4 of 90 people in my buddy list are online right now. an all-time low. i feel as if the world ended but they forgot to tell me.

3. my world ended today when the stanford post office again proved its infallible inefficiency. cds sent out priority mail on monday still haven’t arrived. my weekend of new music i’ve been looking forward to all week is now shot.

4. peterson’s sunset breeze is an amazing tobacco, especially when smoked in a peterson standard system pipe.

5. in the absence of port, scotch, brandy, or some other legitimately refined liquid, mountain dew serves as a wonderful aperitif.

6. is it just because i’m extremely narcissistic that i want my “perfect” girl to be like me in so many ways? (for instance, if i found someone who was a cigar connoisseur, a lover of good indie music, into rock climbing and/or running, a decent guitar player, deep-thinking enough to take well to philosophy [among other things], and appropriately stunning [we might as well add christian to the list, it being rather important], i would probably die of shock while running to ask her hand in marriage). and if that is so (meaning, if it is just because i am narcissistic), should i not actively try to disenforce my natural dissatisfaction with the women i found around me (dissatisfaction due to the fact that they’re not carbon copies of myself, basically)? but then what’s the difference between that and ‘settling’ for something i’m not really really excited about? if we agree that my current standard for deciding whom to like is just plain dumb (and it is), then we run into the problem of coming up with another (since having no standards gets really dangerous). and as far as i can tell, any standard other than my current will fail to motivate me emotionally, and i’d feel i was liking someone out of duty. then again maybe that’s just what kant would approve of.

7. minidiscs are beautiful. small, but with the promise of so much information. little sci-fi packets of aural goodness.

8. why is it 3 am?

9. i am in trouble now that i’ve discovered the joy of collecting dvds. cds is bad enough. i can’t spend the other half of my income on movies.

10. what will i do when i graduate? i have no idea. what will my degrees get me? not sure. not true love, probably.

i question why, when i stand in the shower for over half an hour, it is absolutely impossible to get out a full sentence to god without some irrelevant, trivial, inane, or what’s more likely, naughty, thought intruding. or why i can sit and play so intently with my left ear lobe indefinitely yet not make it through a single chapter of the bible without finding myself rushing because of “time”.

still, i went snowboarding last thursday and was awed to the point of insane joy at the power and beauty of a snowstorm at the top of heavenly. it whited out my vision with an infinity of miniscule hexagons as i carved blindly downhill, exulting in the speed and recklessness and biting wind, praying that there were no sharp turns or looming cliffs. i felt closer to god when i realized more acutely how much my life was in his hands.

i was also able to perform a rather kick-ass set at stanford’s 2003 art affair (which i helped to a small degree to put on, and for which i stayed up all night in white plaza guarding artwork from drunken marauders [after having not slept following snowboarding, no less]), using every sinful vocal chord to sing of things like its creator.

also of great importance, i ordered 13 cds, which i am looking forward to receiving with great delight.

of little importance, on the other hand, are things like my job and school, which have been taking up all of my time. (that is, until the cds arrive)

oh, and a parting catch-22: i tend to think that i’m not ready for a romantic relationship until i’ve changed traits/habits x, y, and z about myself, but the best way i can think of to change x, y, and z is to become romantically involved. how’s that?

i’d like to point out, in response to imagined complaints over the length of part I, that this spring break’s blog had only 2 parts, not 5, like that of last spring break (some parts in march, some in april, in the archives). speaking of those posts, i went back and read them yesterday, and was struck in particular by the fact that it’s now been over a year since emily and i broke up. i felt a pang of remembered sadness as i looked over that day in particular, and a fresh sort of guilt in realizing what a bad, or more accurately, non-existent, friend i’ve been to her since then. being fully and purposely occuppied with life here has that disadvantage for my non-californian friends. anyway, a lot has happened in this year of singleness, and i think i’ve certainly grown in a lot of ways because of it. but back to now…

so, friday, after waking up and spending some time unpacking and getting all the UK trip expenses and finances sorted out (we did great with money and had about as cheap a week in england as one can have while still enjoying oneself), i hopped in my beautiful little car (which probably could use a name–female, of course, because it is cute and small, with a little bit of that vicious edge i look for in women. suggestions welcome!) and drove down to mt. hermon, which is in the mountains just west of santa cruz.

there i stayed in the house of some family friends, the millers, who are like my grandparents here. they were gone for the evening so i availed myself of the most comfortable bed in the world, which happened to be in the guest room. being slightly below ground, it was dark and cool, and i fell asleep around 4:30 in the afternoon, only to awake to the delicious smell of sunlight the next morning, at around 7:30am. not only was i exhilarated at having beat my previous sleep record by just over an hour, i felt gloriously refreshed and aware! to top it off, mrs. miller made me a wonderful breakfast of eggs, bacon, fruit, toast, and milk.

then, when i thought the day had nowhere to go but downhill, mrs. miller suggested that since it was a nice day i go to santa cruz. the beach! what an obviously perfect plan! i hadn’t thought of it, because all my previous trips to santa cruz had greeted me with gray skies and cold winds. this day, however, i was able to take off my shirt and drive with the windows down and the sunroof open. i zoomed down the mountain road to santa cruz, where i meandered joyfully without much in the way of direction before finding a parking spot right at seabright beach.

the day, as i said, was beautiful! it must have been around 80 degrees and completely sunny. i laid and tanned and watched people with their dogs and other people with their kids and even more people with their significant others. i was too tired to nap, so i read some, but mostly sat and thought and prayed for direction and discernment in the upcoming quarter. all told, i allowed the sun to kiss me (though on that day it could more properly be described as making out) for at least two hours. beautiful.

while at the beach (or was it before?) i made a list of goals for spring quarter. this is mostly a joke, since making lists of goals has never been known to help me actually do anything, but i thought it might help me gain perspective. here they are, in no particular order:

- read the word every day

- find a bible study method that helps me grow and isn’t just reading the bible over and over

- climb 3 times a week

- run 16-20 miles a week

- climb at least one outdoors 5.10c or higher

- flexibility training! (be able to do the splits by the end of the quarter?)

- start on philosophy papers at least a week (!) before they are due

- \\ \\/\\\\ (sorry, that one’s for me alone)

- don’t be afraid to go on dates

- hang out with small group friends outside of small group

- read a non-school book on average a few hours a week

- sleep 8-9 hours a night

- wake up before 10am on a daily basis

- learn german

- work on enaselvai an hour/week?

- set apart 30 min/day for prayer/devotions

- be intentional about my new motto, “less sarcasm, more love!”

so, there it is. it’s probably not even physically possible to do all these things along with school, jobs, and my other commitments, but whatever. we’re thinking big.

when i got back to mt. hermon it was late afternoon, and i had nothing to do before dinner so i gave my car (she needs a name!) a careful and thorough wash and cleaning, to make her feel happy inside and out (i also bought her premium gas, just this once, since she got me up the hills to mt. hermon without dying, even though we were out of fuel).

dinner, at my request, was pasta with chicken and broccoli, followed by home-made apple pie. clearly, the millers knew how to set me on the right road to starting the quarter well! shortly after dinner i said my thank-yous and goodbyes, and drove home, taking the 17 through the mountains fast, but not recklessly, like the skilled racecar driver i was pretending to be.

the next day, sunday, i got up and spontaneously went for a run around the lake a few times, since the day was so beautiful! the rest of the morning was filled with errands and endless headaches at the mountainview walmart, which always ends up being the last place on earth i want to be after i leave it. still, i got the stuff i needed and spent the afternoon again in the sun, sitting on the balcony, reading and smoking my reading pipe. the scent of irish whiskey and coffee filled the air and i felt at peace.

some of my suitemates got back from peru that afternoon, so we planned a barbecue for the evening, and bought supplies. the barbecue was executed flawlessly, to the satiation of all present, and after that and a showing of the “psychological thriller” insomniac in the suite, the most relaxing weekend in a long time was over.

spring quarter 2003, bring it on!

note: i will include links to pictures throughout the extremely long narrative. you will recognize these links because they will be within brackets–square brackets, like “[” and “]”. there may be no other designation that these are links, so keep an eye peeled. pictures are at 35% size and are in .jpg format

another note–“the crew”, “the guys”, “us”, or other similarly first-or-third-person plural designators usually refer to: dan urban, joey carucci, and myself. dan you all should know already–he is my suitemate, was my roommate last year, really likes weezer, and can make cool crap with metal using lathes and stuff. joey carucci has long black hair, is the most inquisitive/challenging person i’ve met, and is without a doubt the most italian-looking of the three of us. lastly, i, of course, am simply me.

we left thursday night for the airport with 2 small bags apiece–carry-on, naturally. true adventurers travel light. we got there, surprisingly, on time, and our flight went without a hitch. i started reading dave egger’s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. more on that later. after landing in new york, we deplaned, went through another security checkpoint every five feet (where they decided different things concerning the permissibility of vaguely weapon-shaped objects in our possession, like keys or cellular phones), helped a spanish-speaking woman find her way to her gate, discussed scientific theories which postulate unobservable entities or philosophically suspect notions like multiple universes, and boarded our 777 to london.

again the flight went smoothly and we got to london about 8:30pm local time, where we raced to customs ahead of the other passengers, went through, and met my parents, who were waiting for us. we had realized some weeks earlier that they and my sister would be in england around the same time as us, and thought it would be cool to hang out with them for the few days our stays overlapped. as it turned out, this was a tremendous blessing, because of their helping us with transportation and housing.

they drove us from london northwest-ish to horsleys green, a little hamlet next to a little town called stokenchurch, which is adjacent to the perhaps-better-known city of high wycombe. horsleys green is the location of the wycliffe uk headquarters, and because of my parents’ affiliation with wycliffe, we were able to stay at the wycliffe campus there, in dorm-style housing, for as modest a fee as can be found.

dan, joey, and i shared a room, which we put to immediate use because of jet lag. the next morning we woke up earlier than desired (jet lag again), but breakfast was served at the bright hour of 7:30am, so we met my parents and sister at the dining hall for a veritable feast of assorted grain cereals and the liquidy, goopy, yogurt which seems to be the popular thing there. afterwards, the 6 of us piled into the rental van my parents had scored at an incredible bargain, and took off for bath, england–a 2-hour drive.

on the way to bath, we took a short detour and stopped at stonehenge, an incredible site in the middle of nowhere, with only the grazing sheep and tourists to keep it company. of course, the lack of nearby civilization did not stop someone from charging visitors an exorbitant fee to get within a chain-link fence boundary. being true adventurers, we spurned this commercialism and viewed the literally monolithic structures from outside the gate. [ stonehenge through the chain-link fence] [ some intrepid travelers (from left to right) a. looking cute, b. gazing at stonehenge in the distance, and c. fiddling with something]

as if having just stopped for a bathroom break, we left stonehenge after the requisite moment of awe and continued to bath. some time later, a most horrific thing happened. i was in the back seat, listening to the new further seems forever cd with my beautifully expensive noise-cancelling headphones, when all of us in the car noticed a huge bird step into the road. now, this bird has an extraordinarily long neck. it’s not a chicken or a turkey or a goose or a swan or anything else i normally see–to me it looked like a pheasant on steroids and with some giraffe ancestors. anyway, the bird is apparently also very stupid because it begins to cross the road, which, being in england, is being driven upon very very quickly, by us, who are, incidentally, in a van with a very low front bumper. the next moments were full of honking and cursing and swerving not quite into oncoming traffic, all to no avail: with a great thud the bird was hewn down like wheat to a very dull but very fast and violent scythe. and yet this is not the whole of it: hardly daring, i turned around and attempted to survey the damage. what met my eyes made me involuntarily scream with horror, agony, and excitement: the bird had exploded into a million feathers, as if a bomb had been planted inside it! they drifted around in crazy patterns, as their wearer had done in life, a tribute to the end of a meaningless existence. but enough of picture-perfect roadkill.

we got to bath, found parking, and bought some lunch. then my family split while we guys toured the ancient roman bathhouse which is bath’s namesake. [ joey and dan looking at the baths with the handy electronic tour guides] it was cool, but my third time seeing it, so a little boring. by now it was late afternoon, but for 6 world travelers the day was yet beginning! we trucked back to the van, where i was tempted to paint one bird on the driver’s side door, in hopes that we would continue to score more hits.

from bath we made our way to a little town called castle combe, which is the most quaint town i’ve ever seen in my life. we ate dinner there. here are some pictures. [ side street in castle combe] [ the 4 kids in the town centre] [ a lot of the doors had these cool locks and handles] [ another view of part of the town]

that was day 1, and it ended as i fell asleep in the back of the van on the way back to horsleys green, tired from who knows what, full from good solid fare at the castle combe pub, and still savoring the two pints of thick local beer that somehow found their way down my throat without much in the way of resistance.

day 2 began early again, as we repeated the same morning routine as day 1, with the addition of bacon. also, the three guys took a walk into the wood adjacent to the wycliffe centre, which is one of the things i always make sure to do when i stay there. the morning was crisp and surprisingly clear (as were all our days in england, to our great fortune). [ part of the wood, with some lens flare action] i saw a peacock, too. shortly thereafter, the guys and my family drove north to warwick, so that the three studly guys could see warwick castle while ’the fam’ went antique shopping or something. all i really need to say about warwick castle is that it is an old castle made into a tourist stop, and it is quite amazing. we paid our entry fee and walked around the place for a few hours, which is when i took these pictures. [ the big tower at one corner of the castle] [ shot of the surrounding countryside from another tower, through an arrow slit]

i believe it was at warwick during a time of sitting around that dan and joey and i decided that pretty english girls (they should be called ’lasses’, not girls, of course) are really hot, owing to the accent. on the other hand, we concluded that there were less beautiful english girls on average than american girls. usa represent! still, if you took identical twins with a good amount of future hotness and separated them at birth, bringing one to the states and one to england, and if they grew up to look exactly the same, the brit would be about one and a half times as hot.

anyway, after warwick we rejoined my family and drove to the cotswolds, an area of england consisting of hills (downs), trees, and picturesque countryside (much like other areas of england, in fact). we stopped at stratford-upon-avon to pay lipservice to shakespeare in the form of looking at the house of his one-time wife, anne hathaway. [ anne hathaway’s house, a tourist attraction] [ i wanted to take a picture of myself in front of that house] from there we drove to bourton-on-the-water, where we had high tea at a cool place we’d visited before, and where a few of our party payed to see a model of bourton-on-the-water, but a few more sensible (ahem) of the party went to a pub and each had a pint of guinness.

we drove (all this driving! now you see the benefit of hanging out with my family, as opposed to finding how to get to all these places via public transit) back to horsleys green for dinner. in preparation for the massive amount of grading i would have to do that night, i had another 2 pints of guinness with my meal. ah.

did i mention grading? yes, i did. in fact, i had 88 bluebooks to grade–the results of the final exam for phil 78, the class i TAed winter quarter. as the exam was on the day i left, and as the grades for my students were due while i was going to be away, i was forced to carry the exams with me overseas to grade. and grade i did, for hours and hours that night–examining 88 long essay questions is no joke. i finished sometime around 2:30am and e-mailed the grades to my prof, finally completing all duties related to winter quarter 2003.

and so we slide into day 3, where my parents and sister leave and the guys strike off on our own! we had breakfast and said our goodbyes to my family, then check ourselves out of the wycliffe centre. a bus stop was a short ways from there so we walked to it with our bags and caught a 10:30 bus to oxford. on this bus i finished dave egger’s book. i’m still not quite sure what i think of it. at points i was hilariously engaged and enthralled with his style, and at other points the self-awareness grew too heightened even for such an introspect as myself. moreover, the book was about his life and so sometimes i caught myself not caring when things got a little slow or boring. to his credit, these moments were few. perhaps the thing which brought the book closest to my heart was that most of the events took place in the bay area. his prose, his ruminations about berkeley culture, and his pinpointing of the spirit of the age, even a decade ago, gelled remarkably well with thoughts and feelings i’ve had about this weird place. it was just fun to recognize half of the places he talked about, and even be acquainted well with a few.

once in oxford, we toted our luggage to the backpacker’s hostel we were to stay at that night. the hostel was a funky sort of place (in fact, owned by a company called “funky hostels”) where we stayed in a co-ed room with many bunkbeds and too many not-hot girls hanging around in their bras. anyway, we dropped our bags off and started our day of walking around oxford. i suppose we did just about everything worth doing. we stopped in for a while at my favorite store there: frederick tranter’s pipe shop. i gave in to various impulses and added two beautiful pipes to my collection: a peterson standard system 303, and a reading briar (a long-stemmed pipe), as well as a six-seater rack and some exclusive tobacco. [ my 3 pipes (the one in the middle is from frederick tranter’s a few years ago) and rack]

we also took a tour of christ church college [ looking up from a small courtyard in the college], which they used various parts of for filming the harry potter movies. [ me standing on the main hogwarts staircase] since dan also bought a new pipe at tranter’s, we sat for a while in front of the college and smoked and read. as it was getting on in hours, we made our way north to the eagle and child pub, the selfsame establishment wherein c.s. lewis, j.r.r. tolkien, and other members of the inklings met regularly to discuss whatever they discussed. there we met a friend of dan’s who was studying at oxford and had dinner (i believe i had 2 pints of guinness–no, one of bass and one of guinness). in fact, we sat in the very small room where lewis and tolkien sat, ate, drank and smoked their pipes. thus, to round out the roll-call of habits we had to break out our pipes and smoke a bowl (of tobacco) for our patron saints.

later that night we went to the stanford house on high street, where we randomly caught up with a few friends who were there at oxford for their last night before leaving for spring break and coming back to stanford. i hadn’t expected anyone to be there at all, so it was fun to see some kids from my freshman dorm. it was also fun to use their computer cluster. anyway, it was time for bed and we left. the night at the funky hostel went without incident or worse, nudity, so let that be enough for day 3.

day 4 was packed full of stuff, so let’s look at the highlights: first we took a long bus from oxford to london, then bought tube passes for the day at the earl’s court underground. our first trip was to trafalgar square, where we met kyle van houtan, a former cornerstone intern. he was in england for a bio-something conference at cambridge, or something. with him in tow we tubed to paddington, got lost, then found our hotel so we could drop off our suitcases. then we took the underground downtown to the westminster/parliament/big ben sort of area. [ the guys in front of westminster abbey] we took our picture in front of westminster abbey, and i noticed that in most of my pictures of buildings the sun was in just the wrong place. oh well.

anyway, lunching commenced shortly thereafter at a pub named “finnegan’s wake”, an utterly cool monniker which should be someone’s band name. after lunch we breezed by some more important city monuments, then back to trafalgar square to meet kyle’s traveling companion who did not show. we used the opportunity to go into the national gallery and spent 15-20 minutes looking at the most gorgeous monets, picassos, van goghs, seurats, and whatever other mind-numbingly beautiful originals they had there. if i worked in london i would definitely take my lunch break at that place, in order to let my eyes feast on the fruit of that train of geniuses whose blood must have something a little more than human in it.

then, it being kyle’s time to take his train to cambridge, we went back to the hotel, got out his luggage, and bid him adieu. then we steeled ourselves for the walking that lied ahead, and went to work dissecting the town with our feet. using the tube only when convenient, we must have walked between five and ten miles that afternoon, seeing just about everything left to see in the city. [ sign near the tower of london that i found humorous] [ one third of a gigantic piece of art in the tate museum of modern art. it was the most aweing thing i saw the whole day. i was astounded. go there and see it.] [ the sunset off a bridge near the same musem]

we ended our day at harrod’s knightsbridge, where dan and joey bought gifts for family and i bought a decent bottle of port for the suite. then an all-too-expensive dinner at a fabulous underground night-club/pizza place nearby, with beautiful portuguese waitresses. this was the only day i did not drink at least 2 pints of good beer, mostly because the three of us shared a bottle of a french cabernet at dinner, thus eliminating the feasibility of such consumption. after dinner we zombied back through the tube and collapsed in our beds at the hotel, which, frustratingly, was out of hot water for the evening, prohibiting showers for the second night in a row. my anger, however, melted into dreamless sleep quickly enough.

at glorious last! we have reached day 5–the last full day in england. after waking up and feeling old angers flame up afresh at the realization that lukewarm was the best the shower could do, we walked and tubed from paddington to king’s cross station. there we bought train tickets to cambridge and our train left shortly (there is a platform 9 3/4, by the way). our day in cambridge was probably my favorite of them all–we toured king’s college and cathedral (more awe, of course), had lunch at a smart little place nearby, and even went punting on the cam. this was probably the most physically strenuous hour of the trip, as we switched, between the three of us, poling our little boat down, then up, stream. dan was by far the best at punting and using the long pole as a rudder, and i caught on reasonably well. joey, on the other hand, couldn’t punt or steer to save his life, so we gave him a paddle, which his massive pectoral muscles put to good use. scenery along the river was gorgeous. [ me at the prow of our boat, emma, with the mathematical bridge in the background] [ dan punting and joey fiddling, again] [ some nice scenery along the cam] [ joey and i in the boat]

later that day we stumbled upon a college with signs for the conference our friend kyle was supposed to be speaking at, so we wandered inside and, lo and behold, kyle had just finished his presentation and was taking q&a! when he came back to sit down we grabbed him and went outside to talk for a while. it was, obviously, cool that we had seen him again, and we made plans to meet for a drink after dinner at the eagle, the oldest pub in cambridge (and maybe england?). we putzed around cambridge some more, hung out in the cambridge university press bookstore (this is a big deal), then went to our last dinner in england. we sat outside in the beautiful, crisply cold evening, praising god that we’d had 100% beautiful days and no rain the entire trip (this is unheard of).

kyle met up with us as planned, and we talked, then went back to st. catharine’s college, where he was staying, to play pool and foosball until it came time to take our train back to london. it might be interesting that this day was the day of most alcohol consumption for me on the trip, as i had a glass of wine with lunch, 2 pints of beer with dinner (old speckled hen and guinness), and some blue-raspberry-tasting smirnoff ice ripoff while playing pool, which i should have been ashamed to drink but wasn’t.

eventually we said our goodbyes to kyle, fairly ran the 25 minutes back to the train station, and caught our train. we stumbled exhausted into our london hotel room around midnight. the next morning we rose a bit late, ate breakfast, packed, and called a coach to take us to the airport. as when dealing with all taxi-or-coach drivers anywhere, i gave it a less than even chance that we would make it to our destination alive, but thankfully our luck held out. mine continued to hold out, and i was upgraded to business class for the flight to chicago (joey and dan, unfortunately, had to stay in coach). it’s hard to overstate how really important this kind of upgrade is on a long international flight.

well, the flight went smoothly, as did our connection in chicago, and sooner or later we found ourselves breathing san francisco air again, at about 9:30pm on thursday night, when exactly a week before we had been sitting in the same terminal waiting for our plane to depart. being more attuned to public transportation after the trip wherein we used it frequently, we took a bus home from SFO (only $1.25 a person!), though it took about an hour and a half.

as with all international trips, it will take some time for all that has happened to settle in my mind, so i can discover whether or not i’ve come back changed in any significant way. what i know for sure is that spending a week with dan and joey was great, and i got to know each of them much better.

and with that, the week of adventuring was officially concluded. spring break 2003 part II, or “two days of sleep and relaxation”, will follow soon.

“Tune into CNN: you can have the war, narrated by the indefatigable Dr. Sanjay Gupta at camp Iwo Jima somewhere [he can’t say where] in the northern Kuwaiti desert roughly 2km from the borders of Iraq, broadcast live into your living room! Hear about the mysterious possibly-chemically-or-biologically-armed missile which made a noise and caused camp Iwo Jima marines to put on gas masks until the all clear was given! See live pictures of a random street in Baghdad where nothing happens! More false alarms and top-secret U.S. war plans to be internationally blabbed to God knows who [and we don’t care!], after the break. [Closed Captioning provided by Flonase: ‘Flo, for your every nasal need’]”

may god protect us from treating the conflict as the next and greatest in a long line of increasingly sickening reality tv programs.

=|=|=

“This…this is an idea. I hope you guys understand” – David Bazan, before singing:

There once was a time one could flee to the north,

But Canada’s not what she used to be.

Boycott the war? Well, she could not afford to

Thanks to the new American king.

it looks like we’re not quite there yet, but getting closer.

tonight i stood outside in the cold with dan, smoking tobacco mixed by an old man in st. augustine, florida [memories of home], in a pipe bought years ago in oxford, england [rite of passage]. i put my hood over my face and allowed the beautiful scent from the pipe to drift up and be caught in it, obscuring my vision with an aroma that did its best to take me far away from here. i looked back over the quarter, and saw a bleak landscape that i never realized was so heartless.

large distances can deceive, and as i gazed back upon the ash plain that was this quarter’s journey, it didn’t seem half as wide as it really was. landmarks looked compressed–small, and close together–further confounding the sense of how far i’ve come.

still, it’s not the distance that is most ineffable– where i have spent all this time getting to is equally unknowable. what did i do this quarter? i’m not so sure…it all seems so insignificant now. i took three classes; i was a TA; i didn’t exercise; i didn’t eat well; i did go to my classes for once in my life; i still procrastinated on papers, and to a point never before imagined; i put out a CD that i really love but that no one here seems too excited about [of course, expectations for stanford people are low to non-existent]; i took some small steps forward in my relationship with god, and made some incredibly dumb decisions in the same; i took my chances and decided to like a girl–decided to actually do something about it instead of internalizing every damn feeling–only to get shut down, for what are no doubt very good, if very unwanted, reasons; i decided that inconsistencies run deeper in me than i ever realized; i admitted to myself for the first time that i’m a habitual liar; i drank on more occasions than perhaps i would have liked; i learned that two is the perfect number to go along with the object known as the 15oz. guinness draught; i smoked on less occasions than i needed to; i didn’t play guitar enough; i suppose i learned some stuff, but mostly that bullshitting papers doesn’t glorify my creator; i became increasingly scared of my trajectory, but at the same time increasingly uninterested in where everyone else seems to be heading…

the question stands: where have i gotten in all this? what have i achieved? altitude, perhaps. a bit of a view. the dignity that can only be bought with pain. the right, at least, to throw my cloak around my shoulders, wrap it tight against myself, alone. the right to stop moving, to turn and feel the biting wind color my surveyance. the right to look at the rocky, ash-ridden plain and smile, seeing god’s grace strangely supervenient on this graceless terrain. the privilege, finally, to turn back around and start again with hope that it is the next bend which brings a new world.

of course, i only sold 6 cds, so i’m not really well on the way to paying back my investors. still, i have hope.

i spent all day yesterday at beefeater’s eating club (the one of which i will be kitchen manager next quarter and next year), helping to set up for their special dinner. really, “helping” should be in scare quotes, because i was there much longer than any of the current managers, and between myself and the two other new managers we basically did the whole job for the current managers (which is, as they say, ghetto). still, it was good practice for when it’s our show to run next year.

in other news, jonathanlipps.com has been taken down since all the relevant music info is at splendourhyaline.com. i’m thinking of ideas for what to put up in its place, when i get some time to do some more designing.

this thursday is approaching rapidly, when dan, joey, and myself will take off for the UK. i’m a little bit nervous, because, while i’ve been overseas quite a few times (and to england 4 or 5 times), i’ve never been in charge of a trip with other people before. i suppose that technically i am not “in charge”, but i’ve done all the planning and made all the reservations, so i feel that if our time absolutely sucks it will be my fault. but we’re laid-back guys, and we’ll have fun whatever happens, so no worries.

of course, before thursday gets here there are about a million things i have to do. i have a 12 page paper to write by monday (which i haven’t yet even done any reading for), a final on monday, 24 final papers to grade, and then, on thursday, between noon and when i leave, 25 finals to grade for medical ethics. somewhere in there i should also do laundry, since by my calculations it’s now been over a month. my room has a decidedly unpleasant odor when the window is closed and there’s no fresh air.

it’s a beautiful day today, and i wish i could unclench my heart and my will, and go enjoy it. i’d love to go running. or maybe not. it would be nice to just sit in the sun, at this special time of the year when there is actually a greenness here that could be called lush, and look at the trees and the foothills. but no, i have to stay here tied up in stressful knots, cursing my procrastination and struggling to get done on time.

soon…

virtual disc on spin: we have the facts and we’re voting yes | death cab for cutie

it is now 3:15 am, 7.5 hours later, and i am done. the paper is 14 full pages. during my time writing the paper, i procrastinated a total of 4 times (procrastination was defined as leaving my desk for more than 10 minutes at a time), including one longish trip to the eating club for sustenance. during those 7.5 hours, i did 120 pull-ups on the shower bar in the bathroom (in multiples of 10) in order to stay awake.

i now have 7.5 hours until i have class and the paper is due. i am extremely grateful to god that i can now use this time to sleep! in fact, i’m amazed by god’s grace in allowing me to finish the paper so quickly–taking out breaks, i was writing at a pace of over 2 pages an hour (of philosophy! on kant of all things!) of course, before i get too excited, i have to realize that my paper sucks. it seriously isn’t very well thought-out, nor is it obvious what i’m trying to argue until close to the end (bad, bad). still, since the paper is on kant, i had no hope from the beginning that i could say anything coherent about any topic from the critique at all. thus my prayer this morning was that god would enable me to get something down, in a timely manner, that would help me pass the class. and that’s exactly what he did! now, of course, it is up to him what grade comes back. but i’m not worried.

now all that’s left is one more term paper due (only 12 pages this time), and one final on monday. that, and of course about a bazillion and twenty papers to grade and things to do for the class that i’m TAing.

download mp3s and buy the CD! (unless you live in stanford, in which case talk to me, or orlando, in which case talk to rachel, or gainesville, in which case talk to david or jason killingsworth about how to get the CD without paying s&h).

ready to give up and spend my life paralyzed by good music, manufacturing whatever emotion i feel like having at the moment. though i would always choose just one: self-pity. there’s nothing like that particular emotion to lull me into thinking that all that matters in life, and i’ll that i’m good for, is listening to good music and feeling self-pity. it’s a magnificent circle, isn’t it.

someone tell me to shut up and go to bed.

really, it’s a little game i play called “hit the close button!”. here’s how it works:

1. right click on a buddy’s screen name

2. click the button labelled “close” on the away message that pops up

the trick is to try and click on the close button in the very instant it becomes visible (meaning of course, that you told your finger to press down on the mouse even before the close button is visible. this requires knowing exactly where it pops up–a skill i’ve honed to a very fine degree).

the CDs more than met my expectations: chris’ fabulous design work came out in perfect detail, and there’s not a single thing wrong with the printing or the packaging. in fact i’m blown away by how clean it is.

the sound quality lost nothing in production, and as i sit here listening to the CD with a pair of decent headphones, i’m mildly shocked that we were able to put out something that sounds this good (in terms of quality–well, what the heck: in terms of whatever you want, i think it’s good)

thanks again to all of you who provided help with and inspiration for this project–you all rock!

now, to business: i’m sure a lot of you are wondering how to get your hands on one of these babies (and if you’re not, you should be), and i’d be glad to transfer ownership of a small number in exchange for a small fee (i’ve got to pay back my investors). if you live in stanford, the best way to do this is to talk to me. if you live in orlando or gainesville, i’ll be shipping a large quantity to each location, to be sold by my sister and my brother, respectively. if you live anywhere else, i’ll be setting up an online store, which will be accessible when splendourhyaline.com is launched. you can use this, but be warned that i’ll be charging more for the CD and for shipping online.

and don’t forget, for those of you in the area: there will be a CD release party show at the CoHo on thursday, march 13th!

disc on spin: between | splendour hyaline

today i actually had breakfast: 2 eggs and 2 pancakes, cooked to order in my eating club.

today i drove my new car around, pretending that i rock at driving stick and really wanting to listen to cake’s ‘going the distance’, or whatever.

today i sat in my shorts (and no shirt) outside our suite, skin staring at the sun, amazed at the gigantic differences in temperature that the wind makes, and wondering why josser’s nipples are so much bigger than mine.

today i read far too many pages of philosophy, about moral realism and intuitions as evidence for generative linguistic phenomena.

today i decided it was time to figure out life, love, and why.

today i came no closer to figuring out life, love, or why.

today i became more confused about life, love, and why.

\\\____________________________________________

that’s why there is such a thing as tomorrow.

unfortunately, the realization didn’t come with the sweat. the most i can say, then, is that it [the craving] is a “tightness of the heart; a hope, yet veiled…”

but for all that helps, i might have called it a veiled heart…you’d think something so internal and central to the self would be an open book to the one to whom it is immediate. instead, my heart surprises me daily both in its heights and depths–both in the clear sympathy it has and in its astounding capriciousness. i am surprised on occasion by its seasoned and discerning understanding of what is wise, and on almost every same occasion by its attempts to wriggle away from wisdom as fast as its little aortas can carry it.

it’s exactly this juxtaposition which, of course, has already been described:

[“wellspring of life” <– | –> “deceitful above all things”]

maybe, then, the simple answer is that i shouldn’t even care what my heart is mysteriously and ineffably craving? now that’s not very emo…

then again, it’s all about transcending emo…

virtual disc on spin: if i told you what i was listening to, you wouldn’t believe me.

my parents were in town friday and saturday helping me look for it, and my dad’s finely-honed negotiation skills, guided by the good grace of god, landed us a truly unthinkable deal on the car. i won’t go into it, but rest assured there was indeed evidence of the invisible hand at work. rock.

importantly, the car is under my name, and today i purchased my own insurance with progressive. thus, for the first time in my life, i have a car (and a nice loan to go with it, of course) and insurance under my responsibility. i am glad for this next step into adulthood–i’m 20 years old, so it’s about time. time to catch up to friends like josser who’ve been working through these responsibilities on their own for years.

also, the car has a manual transmission, which i have since had to learn, and i am really enjoying that new aspect of driving.

more good news came today: the Splendour Hyaline cds have shipped! they’ll be at my door in less than a week. i suppose i should start working on splendourhyaline.com.

in other music news, i’m headlining a show at the coho on march 13th. details to follow (but if you want them you should sign up to my e-mail list, go to www.jonathanlipps.com for instructions).

disc on spin: how to start a fire | furtherseemsforever

1. starting next quarter, i will officially be the new kitchen manager for beefeater’s dining society here at suites. what is that, you ask? i tell: all the people who live in suites eat at one of four eating clubs: beefeater’s, bollard, avanti, and middle-earth. which club you eat at is determined by where you live in suites. for instance, this year i live on the third floor of griffin, so i eat at bollard. anyway, these eating clubs have a club manager, a kitchen manager, and a financial manager, who together are responsible for running and managing all aspects of the club. i applied for one of these positions, and was assigned kitchen manager, as i said. what that means is that i will be living in suites next year, will get free board, and will have to work a certain number of hours per week making sure my club (beef, as they call it), runs smoothly. as i was looking at a sucky year going unpreferred in the draw, this is a blessing and a step-up. the job starts in april and goes through the end of my senior year!

2. parent’s weekend is this upcoming weekend, so my mom and dad will be visiting! it will be great–and they’ll be helping me look for a car, so lord willing if we find a good deal i might have a car soon!

3. i have had really strange eating habits the past two days. yesterday i gorged myself on starbursts to the point of sickness. today i’ve eaten probably 10-15 of those little chocolate candy bars, like kit kats and stuff. plus another 20 or so starbursts throughout the day. and i had a huge dinner. enormous, i mean it. now i just ate more candy while typing this blog. it’s really scary–i’ve never been this ravenous in my life, where i don’t get full. i know i will regret eating junk food later this week when i climb worse and have more zits. but oh well.

4. yesterday i did so many pull-ups it’s not funny. anytime i was bored of work (which was quite often), i ran and did like 10-15 pull-ups on the bar in our shower. i must have done somewhere between 1 and 2 hundred over the course of the day. between that and eating only junk food i’m feeling kinda weird.

5. last night, i was directed, by someone who will remain anonymous to protect his/her reputation, to www.emogame.com. i spent a few hours playing this game. honestly i’m really not sure if it’s had a horrible impact on my life or not. but anyway, the premise of this internet arcade game (somewhat a mix between like the old simpsons arcade game and a role-playing game) is that the get up kids have been kidnapped by steve tyler of aerosmith (i won’t tell you why, because this blog is only rated R, not NC-17). and then you, who are in control of various emo-band frontmen, like chris simpson of mineral for example, have to work your way through numerous levels killing yuppies and hippies and sell-outs and all manner of un-emo people. in the process you discover what makes emo so special (i won’t ruin that surprise), and are able to boost your score through various emo quizzes throughout the game. now, before all you little emo-kid friends of mine run off and play this game, i want to make a rather large disclaimer: the game is about as offensive as something can possibly be. i myself had to turn it off after seeing so many little cartoon people screwing each other in the background (of the screen, that is–it’s actually an integral part of the plot). there’s all sorts of cartoon graphic violence and sex of various disturbing positions. for that reason, i’d recommend not playing the game, if you are of weak constitution. but, if you can handle it, the plot really is quite funny and there’s nothing like playing chris carabba and using his “special power”, MEGA-OVARIES!! it’s simply fantastic. enough said. oh, postscript: if you are not pretty seriously into emo music, i’m fairly sure that 95-99% of the value of this game will disappear (flying straight over your head).

virtual disc on spin: american football | american football

of the two girls i’ve dated starting at the age of 16, i was only going out with one over valentine’s day. that was last year, when i was dating emily: we went to england with my family (see the post from 2.19.2002). you could say the whole thing was a valentine’s trip, since it happened before and after the day, but we didn’t technically go out on a date, if i remember aright, since we were traveling.

so maybe 20 is a bit late to start figuring out what valentine’s day is all about. i dunno. actually i think that’s a pretty dumb sentence, honestly. forget it.

anyway i asked out mackenzie, and we went to dinner and a movie (look at the post from 2.8.2003 – she went with me to junior formal last week!). and then coffee and hanging out and tv and and and….it turned into quite a long date, but very fun. unfortunately, we were both sick to different degrees the entire evening: as for me, i could barely talk and had a fairly consistent cough, which made things suboptimal. no worries, though.

for the record, at no time were we sitting on the couch alone watching romeo and juliet, or any part thereof.

off the record, i have to say it’s a pretty decent movie once you get past the fact that it’s valentine’s day and you’re watching freakin romeo and juliet.

conclusion: the night was low-key, low-stress, and i had a wonderful time. i hope all valentine’s days from here on out are as nice.

but sorry, no more details for your gossip-hungry ears. i know you are all asking “do you like her? does she like you? are you guys dating now? tell tell tell!”, but it will just have to wait. and mark “the rebel” rogers, no more rebel comment posts from you about girls.

we leave on march 20th, return on the 27th, and have spent $330 each on transportation from san francisco to london and back. quite a good deal. now it’s all about finding in-country transportation and lodgings at a bargain.

plans for what to do while in the uk are not firm (or even existent), but ideas include visiting such places as london, oxford, bath, edinburgh, cambridge, and dublin.

now, back to the drudgery and toil of winter quarter. let’s all just pray i’m alive in time for the great spring break adventure.

american football | american football

sunny day real estate | how it feels to be something on

the gloria record | a lull in traffic [ep]

the gloria record | the gloria record [ep]

belle & sebastian | the boy with the arab strap

living sacrifice | reborn

sixpence none the richer | divine discontent

and hooray for 4 posts in one day! all you un-friends out there (alex zane) will have a hard time catching up.

now, hours later, i’m feeling a little bit freer, a little bit lighter, as if a great weight has been taken from my back. although, if i did it again i wouldn’t stop cold turkey. serious addictions are not to be toyed with and we’re all lucky i didn’t go drown myself in lake lagunita.

in other news, splendour hyaline CDs are being made as we speak and should be shipped to me in the next week or two. also, i’ve been looking at taking out a loan and trying to get a car. i decided i really need one out here this year. last, dan, joey, and i will be heading to the UK for 6 days over spring break. we hope to visit a number of places in england, and maybe spend a day each in edinburgh and dublin if we can swing it. i’m looking forward to that adventure!

the conclusion being, of course, that it is more important to listen to music than to perform any of the academic gyrations they ask us monkeys [students] to exhibit, like reading abstruse philosophy.

i wonder, though, about this, for without such philosophy i would not have been able to make an analogy to platonic heaven, nor to really understand transcendence (inexplicable supervenience?). such considerations of paradoxes must wait for the morning, however. and it approaches all too rapidly.

junior formal was held in the carnelian room atop the 52 stories of the bank of america building in san francisco. needless to say, the views from the event’s two admittedly-crowded rooms were nothing short of spectacular. before arriving at the dance, we sat to a late dinner at 8:30pm at the cosmopolitan cafe, an upscale live-jazz type restaurant. the food did not disappoint, and everyone ate to his or her utter satisfaction.

of course, food, dancing, and skyscrapers are all purely secondary considerations. what makes or breaks an event such as this is, obviously, the date! and, while i can remember plenty of dances in the past years, i feel that i must have particularly lucked out on this one because of my date. i had the privilege of taking the beautiful miss mackenzie wallace, a student at santa clara university. she looked stunning in her red dress (of course), proved to be an interesting conversationalist (for me, this means taking in stride my off-the-wall and irrelevant comments, my propensity to focus the attention on myself, and the random gibberish noises i make occasionally), and didn’t even like dancing! three very admirable qualities. she also smelled good, which is something i’ve noticed about girls in general but they must do something special for dances. or something.

but now is the sucky time when everyone’s gone home and i’m sitting awake at 3:45am trying to resurrect the experiences of a few hours ago and put them into blog form. honestly i would have liked nothing better than for the night to have continued indefinitely. i don’t know exactly what that means, but i think it was because of a combination of (1) enjoying my date’s company and (2) dreading the thought of having to get up tomorrow and work all day, and all the next day, and all the next days until next weekend. either (1) or (2) would have sufficed as a reason for the wish on its own, and so their concurrence lent fuel to the frustration that time moves forward without much in the way of stasis.

still, i think this is a key area of my personality in which i can grow; namely, that i always want a good experience to last forever, mostly out of a fear of returning to the baseline of the normal. i can’t seem to internalize what i think is the correct view: good experiences are good partly just in virtue of the fact that they are not forever…if they were, wouldn’t they lose the very distinctions which make them good? due to the failure of truly grasping this, i have a horrible problem in coming down off of any kind of ‘high’ in experience, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. i tend, in fact, to get immediately frustrated for a short time after one of these events because i haven’t let go, or really believed it to be over. kind of like a kid on one of those little rides outside of k-mart–the helicopter, or the horse, or the racecar–the quarter’s long spent, and the pistons long still, and yet the tyke keeps gyrating and balancing, pretending the wind into his hair and denying reality the chance to catch up with his fleeing it.

of course, the last thing i wanted was to turn this blog into a pity party or another tedious recital of things i want to change about myself. who cares? not me! (maybe this is a problem). at any rate the fact that i’m writing right now and trying to hold in my lungs the spirit of the fun time i had tonight shows that it was, really, a fun time! so i can stand back, package it up, smile one more time, and give it to god for safekeeping. hopefully that will solve all my problems and clear my mind enough for the sleep which i desperately need, having been awake for about 21 hours. that being said, adios y que el les bendiga.

virtual disc on spin: it’s hard to find a friend | pedro the lion

whether you’ve been around since the beginning or only just found this page, thanks for reading. it’s been great [writing], and i hope that it continues for years to come.

the change, while it makes me look a few years younger (no more illegal alcohol runs), is welcome. life feels more manageable, and it’s not such a pain to put my headphones on.

also, being more aerodynamic now, i hope to shave a few seconds off my mile time.

Between is a location defined not on its own, but in relation to two other places. One is behind, the other ahead–one past, the other future. As such, being between carries an inherent vertigo, a constant reminder that I am not…really…anywhere. I have begun the journey, though its resolution is not in sight. Land has long since disappeared off the Western horizon, and not yet emerged in the East. Will I eventually reach my destination, or, instead, fall off the rim of the world, deluded? In truth, we are all between–between life and death, between the extremes of utter evil and pure altruism, between clarity and self-deception. Such tension is a tightness of the heart: a hope, yet veiled, that beats with failing wings, against the airless cold of space, in flight toward a Radiance that burns downcast eyes.

Between, the first 12 steps in the life of Splendour Hyaline (consisting of Jonathan and David Lipps), will be released on compact disc in the last week of February 2003.

Look for splendourhyaline.com nearer to that time, for free sample mp3s.

Was this the fault of the author or the translators?

alex told me today that i am a gatsby; that what is really important to me is “girls”. that i am only really excited when i am involved in them, and dull and cynical otherwise. whatever that means: alex zane is a deep man i can’t claim to understand.

are these two characterizations of my life contradictory? it’s a good question, and left as an exercise to the reader. some considerations to help you [the reader] in answering: are we talking about life goals or persona descriptions? do girls really not equal music and philosophy (definition of all terms required here)? could alex zane just be wrong?

in any case, thanks to all of you who have so far responded to the last post, and keep it coming.

the time has come for the second semi-to-multiply-annual tradition called “pick the cover song jonathan may or may not play at his next show”! here’s how it works: first, you know that i have a show coming up. i don’t know exactly when, but sometime in february. second, i give you a list of cover songs that i might play. generally, i start a show off with a cover to get in the groove and get people paying attention. then, you leave a comment with whichever song you think should win out. finally, i calculate which song received a majority of votes, and decide whether or not to play that song. if history is any guide, i’ll probably play something not on the list.

that being said, here it is [the list]:

1. motion picture soundtrack (radiohead) [this is the live version, not the studio one with harps ’n stuff]

2. wedding dress (derek webb)

3. only hope (switchfoot)

4. of up and coming monarchs (pedro the lion)

5. the scientist (coldplay)

6. living in your letters (dashboard confessional)

7. screaming infidelities (dashboard confessional)

so, now is the time for you, blog reader (whether you be outward friend, faithful or faithless reader, known or unknown to me, stalker or suitress, lurker or regular commenter, first-time or hundredth-time visitor), to give me your input. click the comment link at the bottom of this post (which changes depending on how many people have commented; confusing, i know) and vote! you don’t even have to leave your name (but i’ll find out who you are anyway, muhahaha. just kidding, i don’t know how).

virtual disc on spin: no good for no one now | owen

this year, the almost-naked woman became the icon of america, or so the commercials would suggest to a visitor from another planet. in fact, amongst the numerous boob shots and ass close-ups, such a visitor would be hard pressed to tell the difference between national television and softcore porn. maybe that’s just the idea…the real question is this: when we hit rock-bottom (in the next decade, i’d guess), do we (1) bounce back up, (2) lay there bleeding on the concrete, or (3) pick up shovels and dig till consumed by the fires of a Dantean inferno?

in any case, long live the superbowl and the recent scientific advances which make beer an acceptable post-workout thirst quencher.

tonight is a juliana theory concert at stanford. i probably wouldn’t pay money to see them otherwise [addendum: actually, i probably would], but the fact that a semi-not-mainstream act is playing here is so mindblowing i had to go, if only to see who else on campus is really indie underneath it all.

i’m pretty much not into writing about anything right now. although i’ve noticed a strange trend in my eating habits…i’ve been craving those little snack packets of cookies or ritz s’mores or nutter butters. i have no idea why, i never used to like them before. what’s next, tomatoes? never!!

CD update: art is pretty much done, mastering is done, everything is done. now i just have to send it off for production. rock.

also, i love xml. it is so tasty.

let’s forget all the fancy crap and go right into the news:

1. i’m a TA this quarter for phil 78, medical ethics. wahoo. i lead two 1-hour sections a week and whatever else….i guess it will be fun and challenging!

2. we’ve been working frantically on the CD. we have a band name now (yet to be released, of course), and are working on an album title. the CD is mastered, and we’re just waiting on the album art before we send it off for production.

3. i’m probably going to the UK sometime this quarter if i can swing it with classes, for fun and adventure

4. new web design projects are taking up a lot of my time

and that’s it for now. stay posted for CD announcements.

well, new year’s came and went in my blog without much in the way of commendation. much in the way of anything, really.

the last few days have seen a flurry of activity with the soon-to-be-released CD. we recorded i don’t know how many songs, spending roughly 8 hours a day on it. when you factor in the reality of my situation at home, namely that i’ve been sleeping on average 11-12 hours a day, you realize how little else i have been doing.

i did go out friday night for bowling and pizza (BOR-ing), and saturday night for dinner and a movie with my friend amy, but other than that human interaction with anyone besides david has been virtually non-existent.

anyway, so we recorded a bunch of songs. 12 to be exact. the last was recorded saturday night at 1am, merely half a day before we were scheduled to pack up the studio and drive david and his drums back up to gainesville. i stayed awake that night until 7:30am (a fuzzy, drizzly sort of dawn greeted me sunday morning) attempting to successfully mix and master the songs.

you see, it is one thing to mix a song, and another to mix a song on an album–the reason being, of course, that all the songs must be related correctly in terms of volume and flow. you can’t have a quiet song be, overall, as loud as the grand finale of a rocking, hardcore song. but this process of mastering the songs–making sure the levels and EQ for every piece are the same–is a long and tiresome affair of listening to part after part after part and making tweak-like adjustments.

to make matters worse, i’ve got nothing that could be remotely considered ‘mastering equipment’, whether hardware or software. in fact, the program i used to master the songs was called “leon’s free software audio mastering program”. obviously not the development monstrosity i’d have hoped would produce the software i use. but whatever.

sooner or later, as i grew more and more tired, my accuracy in listening grew abysmal and i went to bed. of course, i had to wake up (what seemed) soon after that to start taking down the studio.

i hadn’t thought about it before, but as we rolled up the cords and placed the mics back in their cases, i felt a pang of sadness. despite all the grueling work and frustration, recording was fun. i could definitely make my living doing it.

all that’s left now is a few final mastering touches, and the cd will be done. i spent last night in gainesville with two people who, as you know, have been instrumental in making the album–chris nyffeler and jason killingsworth. we discussed band names, album names, album art, and track sequencing, and i feel more confident that this project is actually going to be finished, and successfully.

every time i listen to it i will think “i wish i could have done that better”, or “i wish i wasn’t a quarter cent flat there”. but whatever, i think it’s the best set of music i’ve ever put out, and at the best quality. the production will also be the best–real replicated (not duplicated) CDs, jewel cases, shrink wrap, and the rest. that’s what makes this project a success in my opinion–not that it is perfect (and when could it ever be?)–but that it is better in every respect to anything i’ve done before. and what more can i ask? especially given that we were working on an utterly laughable timescale. no one records a full-length album in 2 weeks. 2 months is closer to the correct scale, though in reality it’s probably even double that.

conclusion: we had fun, we recorded good songs, we recorded them well if not perfectly, and we have a healthy ambition for pursuing the project through to its completion. i wasn’t always sure of this but now i am: i won’t mind a thousand copies of this album floating around the world. and though i’m not certain we’ll even come close to selling that many, i definitely hope.

today was a day of revision. revision is something i hate. i never revise papers. occasionally i’ll revise a blog entry if what is up pisses me off enough to change it. but yeah, back to papers for a moment - on all the papers i wrote this last quarter (4 to be exact), the process was this: (1) briefly outline [note: the outline for each paper was the same. it consisted of I. introduction II. arguments and II. conclusion]. (2) write the paper straight through, stopping only for snacks or to crack my nose (an odd-sounding bad habit which i’ve acquired mostly from writing papers). and that’s it. no going back, no changing anything.

but i’m getting a little far afield here–the point was just that revision is not something i relish, as it is, i think, for certain friends of mine, like this guy.

today we re-recorded tracks on ‘hear this’ and ’escapism is fantasy’. we even added some backup vocals (bgv) on ’escapism’, sung by the beautiful and talented rachel lipps. after my previously-recorded vocal inconsistencies were smoothed over with today’s replacements, and the songs roughly re-mixed, i’m in a much happier state regarding the tunes. at least, i would say that now, more than any time before, they are done, if done they will ever truly be.

to celebrate a successful session of what i now term ‘catch-up recording’, myself, dave, mixerboy, the aforementioned guy, and one other random person, had a ‘session’ in the hot tub. you see, i am trying to see how many times in one week i can sit in the hot tub. so far i’m at 4 times, which is a personal best, if not a world record.

i think all the heat and steam is actually making me lose quite a few pounds, so don’t be surprised if i waste away into nothing in the next few days.

in the last two days, we’ve been recording quite a bit, and have completed (or so we think), 4 songs: ’escapism is fantasy’, ‘small are the words’, ‘regarding present fears’ (formerly called ‘hope’), and ‘rainfall’. these have not been easy, but i think they’ve turned out very well. anyway, that brings the total up to 7 songs done, leaving 6 to be completed (or, 7, if we record a secret track of some kind).

we have, i think, got the process down to a kind of science now. the time it takes to transition between recording different instruments has become steadily less, and the process of mixing a song steadily more natural. with the help of mixerboy, equipment and levels are set in a flash.

luckily, (or perhaps unluckily for you), there has been no real drama to speak of. things are going very well, and tomorrow we are planning on recording ‘a veiled hope’.

in other news, i’ve been spending most of my time trying to get a new wireless network hub we bought to work in the house. it seems they didn’t intend for you to use it if you wanted to retain an already-existing dsl router and wired network. but 3 hours on the phone with technical support today seems to have done the trick, and i’m writing and posting (or could be) from a hammock out on the patio.

but now it is time for my mom’s birthday dinner, and focaccia bread with olive oil and vinegar calls my name!

i enter a dwelling of sorts, and it blurs between wood and stone, thatched and open-air. the scene flickers like three-dimensional images on glass, and sometimes the dwelling is in the middle of a smallish town, sometimes it feels more on the outskirts.

like continually-molded gel humanoid figures gather at the edge of my vision. i say the edge, because only one thing occupies my attention. like a flattened vortex seen head-on my sight is focused inexorably on something that stands out from the rest in virtue of being real. more real, even, than my thoughts as i look–they, too, are only shifting flits of particles in comparison.

as i gaze in wonder and self-abandonment at the beauty crystallized before me, looking the more far away for its size, i unbiddenly echo the amazement of boromir as the weight of the ring grew full upon his mind. or, perhaps his utterance is really the inverse shadow of mine–his a reaction to an unspeakable horror and mine to unbounded joy.

strange that the fate of the world should rest on so small a thing.

dave and i woke up around noon today and got to practicing and recording a few hours later. today we attempted a song many of you probably know, ‘a pixelated life’. i’ve had an old recording of that up on the internet for about a year now, but i wanted it on the new CD so we had to re-record it for quality’s sake. we spent about an hour or two practicing the song, and then got to recording. i laid down the guitar track in two takes, so we switched the mics to vocals, and i was able to get a good take on the second try for that as well.

the drums, however, proved to be something of a difficulty. apparently the song is such that dave has a hard time thinking of a really cool drum part to go with certain sections of it. so we did take after take that david wasn’t happy with, either because he messed up, or the drum part just didn’t sound cool enough. eventually we all (chris was over again helping out) got a little burned out and frustrated and we weren’t making progress. so, we decided to call it a day and made some digiorno’s pizza for dinner (it was 6:30 by this time).

there was no more recording today, as there was a christmas party we went to at 8 at our friend kelly’s house, and then we came home from that late and watched the royal tenenbaums. i think we’ve also decided not to record on christmas eve or christmas, because that’s more a time for family, egg nog, wrapping presents, playing sports, and, most importantly, reflecting on the significance of the entering-into-the-world of the christ child.

you might wonder what happened to saturday–well, my family went down to west palm beach for part of the weekend to spend some time with my grandma and aunt and uncle, who live down there. we got back at 2pm today, and dave and i redid the drums on ‘so talk about it’, since we decided we weren’t happy with them. hopefully third time’s the charm! but i think we have a finished or near-finished product, anyway. then duty called and we had to go to a christmas party until 7. once all the weekend’s obligations were over with, we began to practice and record ‘hear this’, a song i wrote this summer, but haven’t played at any shows this year, since it’s rather long, and hard to nail the vocals on.

compared to ‘so talk about it’, the process went very smoothly. we were done mixing and mastering the song by 1am. of course, we did have the artistic and technical help of one chris nyffeler, who was kind enough to come hang out during the entire session.

we also came up with a tentative title for the forthcoming album, but i of course can’t divulge that information until everything is finalized.

well, i guess not a whole lot particularly interesting happened during the session–and i wont bother going into as much detail as day 1, since all the mic placements and what have you were the same. tomorrow we’re slated to try for 2 songs, though, so maybe there will be some exciting news soon!

yesterday, thursday, was Day 0. Day 0 was spent practicing all of the songs (most of which dave and i had not played together and so he needed to write the drum parts). it was a long day. also on Day 0 i decided that it would be cool to keep a recording session journal of sorts–comment on each day’s progress, what we are working on, that sort of thing. possibly, some of you will find this interesting. so, here we go!

day 1: friday 12.20.2002

i woke up early today (11am) since i had to take my dad to work. i did some christmas shopping while i was out and came back at noon. i woke david up and we started working. for about 2 hours we practiced ‘so talk about it’, a song i’ve played at shows recently, and probably my most poppy song. the song is easy enough to play, but has some parts where i play around with the time signature a bit, making it tough for a drummer to follow. dave, of course, had no problems at all, and came up with super-groovy lines for the different parts of the song. probably around 2 or 3pm, we decided we were ready to start recording. we got a click-track going, and i layed down the guitar lines for the song in 2 takes, after setting up two oktava mk-319 condenser mics in an x-pattern in front of the sound hole of my guitar. satisfied, and glad that all the practicing we’d done had meant i knew the song perfectly, we moved on to vocals. for these we used just one of the mk-319s. i did a couple takes, and thought i was happy with the most recent, but decided that all my upper range notes were on the flat side. i recorded again and fixed this as well as it was going to be fixed. shifting the mics to drums (we used the 2 mk-319s for overheads, an audio technica pro 25 for kick, and a shure sm-57 for snare) took a little while, since we had to find decent equalization and compression settings. eventually dave started tracking, and somewhere between 5 and 10 takes later we had drums.

at this point dave suggested that we add some electric guitar to the song, to give it a little more powerful edge at the crucial parts of the song. i was skeptical, not wanting to clutter the song, but decided that we should try anyway. we miked the guitar amp with the sm-57 and i searched for the warm, fuzzy sort of distortion that i liked and thought would help out the song. we did some sound checking, and then i laid down a few lines with the electric. i was happy with the first take, so everything was super.

deciding that all the parts were right on, i started the mixing process. by this time it must have been 6pm. i mixed for about half an hour, doing volume and pan evolutions, bringing out this and quieting that…mixing is a subtle art which i would very much like to be good at, but for which i have neither proper training nor proper tools. still, i did my best, and around 7pm, dave and i had a Song. a Finished Song [close enough anyway]. i was excited to listen to it and hear all the parts work together to create just the kind of feel i wanted the song to have – catchy, yet technical, fun, yet sarcastic and a little edgy. i burned the song to a CD and played it in our home stereo–it sounded great!

then duty called and dave and i went out shopping for christmas presents. in the meantime, we listened to the song some in the car, and dave decided he needed to redo the drums. so when we got home, we miked up the drums again, tried for a little different sound, and recorded dave. he had decided that he wanted to play a slightly less-complicated, more-groovy sort of beat, that wouldn’t take away from the rest of the parts as much as he decided it had. we practiced the new version some, and he made 5 or 6 takes until he was happy. that was all well and good, but then i decided i needed to re-record the electric guitar. something about it just sounded like i was playing out of a cardboard box and not the nice, big, amp i was borrowing. i switched the sm-57 to the mk-319 and tried for a different sound. eventually i fiddled with the EQ settings enough to get something that i thought was halfway decent. with no hope of getting it any better with the equipment we had, i layed down the electric guitar track in one take.

this is probably 10 or 11pm now, and i finally start mixing the re-recorded tracks into the rest of the song. still, it didn’t take me too long, and soon i was mastering the song and trying to up the levels so it would be as loud as a song from any commercially-produced CD. at midnight, all our toil was done, and i burned the new version onto a CD, and also made an mp3. i’ve listened to it quite a few times now, and despite a minor mixing change or two, i think it’s as good as it could possibly sound with our gear and our understanding of recording techniques. so, i am a tired, yet happy, man, and it feels great to be able to listen for the first time to a song of mine with drums played by an excellent musician, and with some electric guitar punch to augment my usual acoustic sound.

i’ve decided, unfortunately, not to post any mp3s of new songs to the blog until the whole CD is done and finished. too many changes could be made any day to the songs that there’s really no point in putting anything but the finished product up here.

still, if you’re really interested, stop by the house and hang out while dave and i record. or, talk to me on IM and i’d be happy to let you in on a listen to whatever’s currently done.

and with that, i’m off to bed.

virtual song on spin: so talk about it | jonathan lipps

now let’s make my writer’s craft(y/ &) intent transparent and force that into an analogy for what i really want to say: i wish with all my might that i was under a different kind of blanket right now–the kind that means the end is at hand, or in sight. a blanket that helpers throw over the shoulders of a disaster survivor to let him know he is safe and on the way home, for example. here’s another: the one that is worn like a cape around the skinny frame of the victor of a 26-mile battle. or, lastly: the linen wrapping (yes, christ’s shroud no less) that is the tape binding two souls for the first time as they begin their life’s journey thenceforth as one.

right now, i am in the middle of the air crash (please pull me out); in the first mile of the race (and fading fast); and wondering with all the rest of the world if and when i will ever be full enough of love to give it to someone else.

to all those not yet done with school, good luck.

still, in a matter of hours, whether done successfully or done having failed, done will i be. and then, it’s party time.

the thing that’s been keeping me going this week is the thought of recording a CD this christmas–that’s right, i’m recording a CD with super-awesomex drummer david lipps. i’ve got about 12 or 13 songs written since i put out the Effortless ep, and it’s time those got recorded. no more shoddy dorm-room work, though–dav and i went all out and got a ton of top-notch recording gear. if all goes well and god is with us, we will be spending 8 hours a day playing and recording (and of course working out to remain the buff studs that we are), and emerge sometime in january with a set of professionally-done songs. that is exciting.

if you want to be notified when all that is done and songs are available for download or to buy on CD, head over to jonathanlipps.com/list.html and sign up on the mailing list.

in other news, i need to get back to work on my paper. out.

this is a link to the song. click it now.

the previous line was a link, in case the bold font completely flew by you. there, that should do it. cheers, everyone.

maybe music has preoccupied my thoughts recently because of the shows: sigur ros last saturday at the warfield, and pedro the lion tuesday at the great american music hall. the time has certainly passed for writing an emotion-driven entry about either show, since the high can last no more than a day or two (except, perhaps, in the case of sigur ros, due to the large amount of pot being smoked at their concert). moreover, no one, i think, could profit very much by hearing whatever thoughts i have about the shows. either such a person would like the artist, or not. if not, she certainly wouldn’t care. if so, the thoughts would boil down, for her, to whether or not the show was good. the answer is, yes.

sigur ros was beautiful and haunting and tormented and insecure and fuzzily cynical and hopelessly joyful = YES it was a good show.

pedro the lion was gruff and embarrassed and hilarious and piercing and wise and never to be successfully heckled = YES it was a good show. i stand wholeheartedly behind my friend chris’ assessment of the tour (he saw the orlando show): in many ways, going to this particular pedro the lion concert was very much like sex. and because i feel like being sensational, i won’t bother adding the necessary qualifiers to give you the correct context of that statement. or, perhaps i mean it just like that.

i left two days early to come home for thanksgiving. my plane tuesday night was overbooked, and due to some quick thinking and walking i became the only volunteer off the flight. american airlines put me up in the wyndham hotel for 6 hours, put me on the first flight out wednesday morning, put me in first class, and put $300 in my pocket in the form of a voucher, all because they sold too many tickets. i love it. thanksgiving itself was great, and the first time i’ve had it in our house in orlando (even though we’ve lived here for three and a half years).

still, homework count is at 0, while movie count is at something like 5, so some things need to be ironed out in my schedule. i guess that’s why i’m staying here till thurs. of dead week.

i am tired from waking up late, from walking barefoot on the hot sandpapery roof putting up christmas lights, from a few hours of football, from a too-big dinner, from the egg nog and cookies, the glow (the crisp, DVD glow) of the movie we just watched, and from wishing i was a jedi, or at least that magic was real or that i was a hero. i think i’m going to bed. maybe tomorrow i’ll wake up and realize that a jedi’s life is not really so envious. maybe i’ll realize that if magic was real it wouldn’t be magic. maybe i’ll realize that there are all kinds of heroes and there’s nothing to stop me from being one.

virtual disc on spin: love | the juliana theory

second, there is the size of my collection. it is, relatively speaking, large, consisting of nearly 200 discs and corresponding artwork. a substantial size is necessary for the definition i wished to show. imagine, to the contrary, a person X with only 20 CDs. the chances that there is some person Y with the same 20 CDs is, on balance, high. much higher than the chances that there is some person Y with the same 200 CDs as me. each CD i buy is added information about myself…added specificity that becomes exponentially harder to randomly duplicate. here is an analogy: say you have a certain number of words with which you can describe yourself. if you have to describe yourself in 5 words, chances are that someone else would use those same 5 words. however, if you allow yourself the thousands of words that make an autobiography, it is inconceivable that someone else would unknowingly describe herself in exactly the same way. thus with each purchase of burned plastic i add telling lines to the sketch of myself.

lastly, and most importantly, there is the extension. “extension” is a word used very precisely in set theory to refer to all the objects in a particular set. so, the extension of the set of letters in the english language is simply a - z. likewise, the extension of the set of my CDs is defined as those specific CDs which are in the set. obviously, this is what matters most in the whole dialectic, since it is the fact that i have one CD and not another that most exactly defines who i am. as before, each new CD says something about who i am and about what my personality is. for, what is personality save the union of all our choices past and present, which influence strongly even future choices? of course, we must assume here that in buying CDs i do in reality exercise a power of choice according to a certain axiom, namely that of only buying what ones likes, or thinks one will like. immediately, however, we run into a problem: what of old and no-longer-loved CDs? i certainly have some that i would no longer proudly display as part of my collection. in this case we can simply stipulate that the person may define his collection in light of the aforementioned axiom, thus ruling out disliked CDs from the outset.

in the end, we can form the set JLCD to contain those CDs which i own and like. and, all that is required for this set to uniquely refer to me, and not anyone else, is that the extension of JLCD is unique among all sets of CDs in the world. more formally, the intersection of JLCD with any other set S of CDs cannot be such that JLCD is actually a subset thereof. if this result obtains in the world, and i believe that it does, or at least that there is an extremely high probability that it does, we are assured that i am correct in asserting that JLCD uniquely determines me.

you might think that the added claim that the previous result is sufficient for describing the totality of my person is unwarranted. unfortunately there is no way to logically demonstrate the truth of such a claim, but i’ve no fear here of stepping back from first-order logic and stating something without proof. music is my soul, and my soul is music. that is who i am, and so if anything is to be the embodiment of the sum total of me, why not the music that drives me in life? i suppose a better analogy would be that my music–the music i listen to and the music i write–draws a maze of arrows, all of which, pointing beyond nature at the forms which are actually the building blocks of my nature, trace where i come from and where i’m going.

virtual song on spin: “almost there” | pedro the lion

next thing i knew, i was asked to chant a lament: 2 samuel 1:19-27. this is where david laments for the death of jonathan and saul. i’d never chanted anything before, but i made a go at it, and all of a sudden i forgot myself, forgot when i was, and became one with the grief of god’s servant over the passing of his best friend. my emotions were also strangely flooded and charged, since i was chant-singing verses of mourning for my namesake–my self, almost. my voice died down finally and i was shaking, mostly from being nervous in front of a group, but also substantially from how cool it was to be involved with the words as they flew across barriers of time and culture. i’ve certainly never felt that engaged with a psalm before.

we ended the night singing the doxology. it’s hard to understate how meaningful that is.

i am a philosopher by trade, but i have a suspicion that the root, the backdrop, the canvas of reality does not consist in platonic forms, propositions, the cartesian product of infinite sets, or linguistic acts.

i suspect we will ultimately see that it is all poetry, thick with the living imagination of god.

random song on spin: “priests and paramedics” | pedro the lion

i’m sure someone, somewhere, has made an analogy between the human life and the brief glory of ultrafast burning dust, so i won’t bother. also, i’m not sure i would agree with it.

in other news, it’s been confirmed by all reliable sources that i am in fact addicted to procrastination. useless procrastination, at that: i’m growing fat in addition to lazy. well, i’d better get back to my addiction.

virtual disc on spin: greatest hits | bjork

in other news, in the past few days i’ve had special dinner, played paintball, read the first two harry potter books, watched a few movies, played guitar, and contracted frostbite. though not necessarily in that order. one of the more salient features of this list, of course, is the fact that it makes no mention of schoolwork, or, more particularly, the logic problem set which is due tomorrow and has yet to be started. thus, i am off for a long night of work and little sleep.

regards,

my little black umbrella did little to help keep off the rain, though it was very useful in trying to pick me up off the ground and turning itself inside out. anyway, i got to class on time, only to see someone taping a sign on the door: “greek class cancelled today”. needless to say, i fumed, i raged, and i almost cried. then, with a resigned and broken sigh, i clutched my soaking jacket closer around my defeated frame, letting the cold seep in. utterly in hate with circumstance, i slogged through puddle after puddle back home, where i took off my sodden shoes and water-logged socks and fell into a fitful sleep that should never have been disturbed.

thankfully, friday night more than made up for the horror of the morning. we had suites formal. the theme was “high school homecoming”, and the title for the evening was, “a night in heaven under the sea in paris under the stars”, no doubt a tribute to those geniuses of originality that were our high school student councils/governments/presidents. always early and on top of things, i asked the wonderful erin spokes if she would be my date for the event late thursday night, and she accepted! a group of about 20 friends went to p.f. chang’s for dinner, and then boarded huge charter buses full of (thankfully not too many) drunk people. we were shuttled to sinbad’s, a club in san francisco, where we danced the night away to hip-hop tunes.

there were the usual sketchy-stanford-dance-party-event antics going on, and therefore never any lack of entertaining/immoral behavior being realized merely feet from my person. still, our party survived mostly unscathed. i was exhausted when the dj shut things down at 1am, after two straight hours of being on the dance floor without a break or even a stretch. since i was still tired from thursday night (only 2 hours before ‘class’, remember, and then only another 2 before i had a meeting friday morning), i wasn’t on my best game, but no one could say that i didn’t get my groove on, what.

all i’ve done today is shoot some paintballs in lake lagunita, so it was obviously very exciting. and that brings us to now, where i write what i’m listening to and then click ‘post & publish’.

virtual disc on spin: wings to fly | plankeye

still, more important things beg telling. i’m in sort of a dilemma, you see. friday, being, technically, the day after today, is the suites formal, which i plan on attending. unfortunately, to attend said formal i need a date, preferably female, as there seems to be very little chance of ‘going stag’ and at the same time maintaining the illusion that i am in fact cool and socially normal and all the rest. normally, there would not be this mutual exclusion, but circumstances being what they are, there is. thus i have one day (less than 24hrs) to decide on a girl and ask her. i guess i should start thinking.

in other news, i want to buy a giant hookah.

still, there is something fascinating about the hours between 3 and 5 am. i feel like, if any time is my time, that cold and pregnant third watch is mine. maybe it’s just that, since no other soul is awake then, i feel a legitimate and unchallenged monarch of that two-hour domain. i love the tension, the restlessness, the fear that if you drop off either something horrible will happen, or something amazingly beautiful will flicker briefly into being without consulting or notifying you, and then just as quickly disappear, all while your consciousness lays chained behind closed eyelids. there is no such a crisp, cold, and clear time as the dead of night just before dawn, and whenever i am awake during it i feel as if i might accidentally start an adventure.

unfortunately, i used my free time last night searching the internet for long lost friends (from my old, more nerdily inhabited, days whiled away in the star wars cantina: an internet chat room on the wbs network), taking a shower of record length (probably close to an hour–yes, i wasted a lot of water, yes i feel suitably bad about it), and listening to the four cds i bought on impulse yesterday at an exorbitant price.

i did, of course, read a few chapters of mostly harmless, book five of the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy trilogy by douglas adams. it is a work of pure genius, as were the four novels before it. this is most clearly evidenced by the fact that his trilogy has five books in it: who else could boast of such a thing? anyway, i will very rarely laugh when i read books, even if they are freaking hilarious, and i laugh constantly when reading adams. ergo: the series is freaking hilarious times a billionfinity. ergo: read it.

it struck me just now that, not only was i foolish enough to stay awake all night for no reason, which will throw my clock off and prevent me from designing a website today by 5:15 (an externally imposed deadline, of course), i actually went to my 8am class instead of going to bed. how dumb you can you get? i mean … hey.

virtual disc on spin: ( ) | sigur ros

already i could begin to make metaphors for the experience, but we’ve not yet got to the crux of it. the light was just so, such that my eyes couldn’t exactly focus on anything at any particular depth in front of them. the ceiling was no help–glowing ephemereally as it was, it completely failed as a point of reference. thus my focus involuntarily went up and down (or outwards and inwards, as it were), causing a most curious sensation.

this sensation was more or less perfectly symbolic of the music. for over an hour i was virtually comatose, willingly paralyzed by ( ), the new sigur ros album. it faded into and out of view, hazily, just as it flitted shadow-like away from my attempts to force it into a structure. heavily atmospheric, unbelievably sad, despairing even; yet, triumphant, brokenly joyful; annoyingly beautiful and implacably angelic. the hour passed, and when the room lights were flicked back on, dissipating the hovering cloak dripping with musical fantasy, it felt as if i’d gained a year, having spent it still and silent amidst the sorrowful singing.

never pass up a cd listening party for a band reputed to have the makings of genius, especially if that band is from iceland.

virtual disc on spin: agaetis byrjun | sigur ros

in other news i am no longer going to england over thanksgiving, since i ended up finding cheap fares home after all, so i’m going to orlando. unfortunately i get in at 7pm thanksgiving day, so we’ll be having a late thanksgiving dinner. still, being with family will be great.

i’ve been “writing” a paper for the last few days and it has been hell. this is a new and scary experience for me, and i hope it ends up ok.

fall retreat this weekend for crusade, so i’ll be out through sunday. should be pretty cool, but i have a tendency to get bored at these things and so stop paying attention. anyhow, i’m now officially procrastinating for that paper and other work, and this is something i promised not to do until friday, so…au revoir.

virtual song on spin: “rooms and gardens” | appleseed cast

still, i feel as if i’ve been spared my full share of consequences, and here i sit without too much to do this afternoon before i leave tomorrow for home. that’s right–home. my aunt linda, elder sister of my dad, is getting married for the first time on saturday. i have the dubious honor of being cameraman for the event, and, while the honor may be in question, the advantage of such a situation is certainly not: i won’t have to sit and fidget for the entire ceremony.

last night i checked out and watched lock, stock, and two smoking barrels, precursor to the highly-if-hesitantly-and-carefully-recommended snatch. if a certain amount of gratuitous violence and one certainly gratuitous strip-bar scene don’t scare you (perhaps prudently) away, watch this movie. it is genius.

in other news, i am attempting to go to england over thanksgiving break. don’t ask me why–it’s a strange combination of wanderlust, escapism, forethought, playing the mileage game, wisdom, and stupidity. but, i’m hoping that it will be an official trend affect theory 217 event, in that premier stud chris nyffeler (aka nyffy, aka dj chris cross) might come. if we can pull it off, we may just have an altimar 3.5 on our hands, which would be totally sweet.

nothing else interesting is really happening, save that i’m combating a number of physical ailments at the moment: ankle tendonitis, a recovering sprained toe, a recovering sprained finger, a recovering dislocated shoulder, a strained hip tendon, and, to top it off, a wart on my finger. needless to say, a number of these are fairly inhibitive as far as running, climbing, and playing ultimate frisbee go, so i’m not having the best of times in those areas.

my perspective, though, is sometimes realigned when i think of those who were never able to run at all, or those confined to a chair for the remainder of their lives. i really don’t have much room to complain.

virtual songs on spin: random shuffle of my 7.8GB cd-turned-mp3 collection. played end-to-end, it would take 5 days, 18 hours, 46 minutes, and 20 seconds to hear them all. i love music.

satisfied with my lazy indolence, i ousted my sluggish self from the suite and went to wilbur to play an hour and a half of pickup ultimate. i didn’t do well, but neither did anyone else really and it was low key and fun. then to dinner and back to the room to watch gladiator with nick bott. we both love that movie to a great extent, and we took full advantage of our new, beautiful surround sound system purchased at cost and well worth every penny. i’ve already discussed how powerful the score is, and the story is just as fantastic. each on its own has the power to bring that longing tear-tightness to my eyes, and both together is a rare cinematic experience indeed.

alternating couch-sitting with physical activity, the next and most recent step of the day was broomball at the ice oasis in some as-yet-unidentified portion of the bay area near menlo park. i ran like a crazy man for about an hour and shouted generally unintelligible things in an attempt to guide our team into some sort of winning strategy; of course, nothing of the sort exists in broomball, but it was great fun anyway, and i had several very existential moments while sliding on my back on the ice, or while running full speed into a plexiglass window in order to “check” someone from the opposite team.

of course, some of you may be wondering what i’ve been up to since october the third, but i’m afraid that for now most of that will go forever unnoted in this space. in any case, nothing of terrible importance happened, and i’ve used up my allotment of allowable non-important relata for the post, so it will have to pass. you can probably extrapolate most of my actions from my various involvements (groups) and commitments (classes), because these are the things in which i’ve poured my time.

my only disappointment recently is the my seeming inability to hang out with girls. i know there are lots of awesome ones around, but i can’t figure out what people do here, so i never have any reason to call anyone up to hang out. it’s this incomprehensible lack of creativity when it comes to thinking of ways to pass the time, or perhaps it’s a standard of which ways are cool that is set far too high. whatever, the point is that i think it would be good for me to hang out with people besides my guy friends, so that i don’t go around thinking the world is all like guys and guy emotional frameworks, etc… or maybe i’m not so wise and noble. maybe i have no reasons or justification, and need none. maybe the bottom line is that it’s just super lame to sit around with the drawmates and talk about hanging out with girls, a topic which has such a frequent occurrence in our conversations that the negative implication is straightforward: we talk about because we don’t, and because it’s not a natural part of our social lives. and maybe it’s this way with most stanford guys, apart from their predatory party stalkings. whatever it is it’s stupid, and i’ve spent far too much time staggering drunkenly around an issue that’s not even clear and that i wasn’t planning on talking about.

maybe i should just shut up and try and live out existential moments like this guy.

my last week at home after portugal, before stanford, was really fun. i went up to gainesville for a few days to hang out with my brother and best friends there. we watched movies, ate big reds, smoked pipes, climbed rocks, and had an all around freakin awesome time. chris domeck went up with me, so the whole posse was there, sans andy, who’s in indiana.

a few days later i went with mawk to a rock show at the social in downtown orlando, with embodyment and blindside headlining. it was a dope show, and i totally rocked out hardcore. i felt as if i’d gone through an intense workout afterwards, when the seething suffocation of the mosh pit faded. needless to say, both bands just freakin kicked, and it was awesome to hang out with sean a bit before their set and catch up on life.

let’s see, what else…i went down to west palm beach to spend a day with my grandma, aunt linda and her new fiance peter. it was an interesting dynamic, as i’d never really spent alone time as an adult with my extended family like that (i.e., without immediate family also there). however, i would classify the time as really cool, because i was able to actually get to know them as people and not just family that gives presents at christmas. on the way up i stopped to see hannah at palm beach university for about 5 minutes…a totally random little surprise.

one of those days i went to see the sunrise at cocoa beach, which has become a solemn tradition for me. sometimes alone, sometimes with other people: whatever the case it’s always a huge mechanism for centering my life on what is important (christ) and sorting everything [else] in its right place. incidentally, the beach sunrise has become a sort of running theme or motif for myself and thereby my online presence, thus the new jonathanlipps.com design has as its centerpiece a picture i took on my most recent outing. anyways, i invited my friend amy to come with me, and that was fun. i was glad to be able to hang out with her several times while i was back, because she’s cool of course, and then also because most of my friends were away and i was pretty bored!

soon, of course, my halcyon week of summer laziness and fun came to an end. i flew back on friday the 20th, and got in to stanford that night. miraculously i got into my suite, though the move-in date wasn’t until sunday. unfortunately, i didn’t have a key. neither did i have any of my boxes which i’d scattered to various peoples’ homes for free storage. my room being more or less uninhabitable, then, i roamed around campus trying to see if any friends were around. to that end i joined the infamous orientation weekend band run, and went along with it from start to finish. ultimately i saw just about everyone whom i was expecting to be on campus there, and some besides. more importantly, it took up a lot of time and made me feel my travel exhaustion to the point where i was able to sleep on the bare mattress in my room.

saturday looked a little brighter, though smelled a little duller because of the cold that somehow sprung up then, whether because of the traveling or because of the unwise sleeping arrangements. i participated in crusade’s one-day ‘retreat’ where we planned what the quarter was going to look like. crusade planning meetings were to take up the bulk of the next week for some reason, and sunday, monday, and wednesday nights were thus occupied.

eventually i was able to get my boxes from kingscote, sammy, and the millers as they trickled in at various times and in various quantities. their arrival was coordinated with that of my drawmates, who began to arrive on sunday and were rounded out on tuesday with dave guo. those few days were filled with unpacking, getting things organized, choosing classes, and crusade stuff. from that point things have been a little blurry, and probably a lot more uninteresting to relate. basically i’ve embarked on a seriously hard quarter and between schoolwork, getting our apartment ready, playing a rocking show last thursday, and whatever else, i haven’t had time to do much of anything fun. sad, yes.

the pace seems to continue unabated, and i’m sitting here writing only because i’m waiting for my laundry to finish drying so i can go to bed, and i’m too brain-fried to continue reading “ontic decisions”, by willard quine. i really want to quote a paragraph of that text, just so you can see what an impossibility it is to actually do anything remotely considered reading to these words. better words would be parsing, translating, or deciphering. as you can imagine, 40 pages of deciphering is an amazingly daunting task, though our professor seems to conflate that with the commonplace notion of “reading”. sigh.

still, it has been fun to start classes at the graduate level and at least feel like i am not the least comprehending one in the group.

well, it seems i’ve run out of things to say. oh yeah, i turned 20. that was fun. and guess what? i actually got a birthday present from friends here! you know what it was? a GUN! a paintball gun. that’s right. i’m so excited. i can’t wait to shoot stuff with paint. “go go go!” “fire in the hole!” “you take the point” “affirmative” “get outta there she’s gonna blow!”

that should round it out. speaking of round, i missed my favorite live band tonight because i had responsibilities at crusade to lead worship. sorry, my spacecoaster! commitments come before shows, though i’d naturally cast it the reverse. i do try.

autumn quarter 2002: here goes nothing, with all the love and fury i can muster. lord help me!

virtual disc on spin: my spacecoaster | heartstrings

last wednesday we flew out of orlando at 2pm, to miami and then across the atlantic to madrid, spain, on an iberia flight. the flight was nice because we were surprisingly upgraded from coach to business class–a fantastic difference in service and comfort. going against the spin of the earth, we arrived in madrid thursday morning, only to smoosh ourselves on a crowded 1-hour commuter flight to lisbon.

thursday and friday i spent at our hotel, the carlton palace, which was originally a noble family’s residence and recently renovated as a hotel. it was rated 5-star, but i would certainly class it as better quality and service per dollar than any other 5-star hotel you could find. my hours were divided between reading, sleeping by the pool, working out, and eating. and eat we did…for the portuguese, dinner is an event which requires at least two hours to finish, and one which doesn’t generally start until after 9pm. thus, dinner was, most days, the last thing i did before sleeping. a bit of a change from school culture, where i would generally only go to bed after second dinner.

i won’t bother telling about the restaurants we visited for dinner over the seven days, because they defy description. let it suffice to say that not one was disappointing, and the food and wine at each were so exquisite as to make me smile and sigh happily just at the bare thought of remembrance. one particular meal, fresh-caught stone bass cooked with bananas, has entrenched itself as my favorite gastronomic experience of all time. perhaps not as interesting was the fact that i served as our group’s interpreter at a number of meals, because out of the 30 of us, i was the only one that had learned any portuguese at all prior to the trip. i will say that i fared reasonably well, despite the occasional surprise when the dishes came out.

apart from dinners, i only went into town three times (our hotel was very much on the outskirts, so to get to downtown one had to take a taxi, but they were very cheap): once on a tour bus that took our group on a 4-hour tour of the city and some of the most salient monuments, once to visit a castela do sao jorge (the castle of st. jorge) and the shopping district, and once to a roadside market sort of deal. so, all told, i didn’t get around too much….however, i think i did soak in quite a bit of the city’s atmosphere the times i did go out, and it was nice to just stay at the hotel and relax, like a legitimate vacation.

some other highlights of the trip:

• spending a few hours with my parents learning about port wine and some of its finer points from a vendor in the hotel

• sleeping for 6 hours in the sun by the pool one day

• late night cigars and port with some of the men in the group, discussing non-profit business tactics, banking strategies, philosophy, and ancient greek

• taking a risk at the hotel lounge and ordering an unknown cocktail, and receiving a pepto-bismol-pink beverage with a little umbrella on the top

• dressing up every day

• becoming a minor connoisseur of white wine

• talking with cab drivers in portuguese

• talking with laura, the only other sub-40-yr-old on the trip, who goes to cal poly

• watching terminator 2 in portuguese

• not checking e-mail and not having a phone

• flying home on september 11th, with all the flights less than half full, and reflecting on the meaning of that

hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea of what things were like. on the whole i am very refreshed and relaxed, and looking forward to my last week at home before i go back to stanford!

disc on spin: a rush of blood to the head | coldplay

not that i’ll be out on the streets needing to use my language skills anyway–my home away from home will be the carlton palace hotel, a designated national monument and 5-star accomodation. within the hotel and its grounds are gardens, restaurants, workout rooms, an indoor track, 2 indoor swimming pools, hot tubs, saunas, sweat rooms, and, of course, a gymnasium (for the dogeball, i’m assuming). with all this and the free in-room nintendo system, i don’t think i’ll ever need to leave the place.

still, it would be a horrible tragedy if i didn’t get out and explore lisbon or the nearby beaches, at least. such is what i plan on doing, then, perhaps in between the hot tub and the pickup dodgeball.

i am taking the computer, but more for watching dvds on the plane than for checking e-mail or blogging, so keep that in mind if you were planning on trying to get a hold of me this week. all that being said, adieu, and good night. in 12 hours i’ll be on a plane to miami to catch a plane to madrid to catch a plane to lisbon.

até a volta!

estou escutando a: learning to breathe | switchfoot

i knew that the cunning of the evil monster holding my 3 discs captive was too great to be overcome by myself alone, so on thursday i recruited a team of hardcore disc-rescue veterans to help with the cause. the members of this newly-formed counter-discnapping force were as follows:

team leader: jonathan lipps
callsign: throwmaster flex
skills: insane speed, tactical genius, looking dark and cool in a trench coat
job: strategy, execution coordination, primary munitions expenditure

team member: marie white
callsign: hilariokins
skills: having a car, finding dvd players
job: getaway driver, munitions management, taunting the enemy

team member: james boyd
callsign: boyd, james boyd
skills: knife fighting, the stickshift, commando training
job: secondary munitions expenditure, tactical advising, shooting things

with this intrepid group i was ready. first, hilariokins and i went to safeway munitions factory to gear up, buying 200 ft of intense string (really intense), and 2 lbs of hot tamales. then it was back to the battle field–the engineering quad–after stopping by kingscote to pick up the secondary munitions–a bundle of coat hangers.

boyd, james boyd, arrived not long after we did and surveyed the scene. then, the team arrayed for stealthy combat, we tied one end of the string around a large rock (probably 4-5 lbs). i threw this rock over one side of the beast, and it fell directly through its gaping maw to the ground in the center. carefully i retreived the rock and string, now neatly straddling one of the four edges of the DiscMagnet™, and launched it a second time, over the opposite edge. success again–now the string was thrown completely over the top of the entire gargantuan.

hilariokins and boyd, james boyd attached the secondary munitions to the long end of the primary munitions, and we had our Rescue Sweep Device, or RSD. thus armed with our powerful RSD, we used it to scour the high and invisible surface, causing, i believe, incredible pain to our nemesis in the process. and, lo and behold, the two s.m.u.t. discs were caught in our RSD and flew happily and freely from the top of the monstrosity. victory!!, we cried.

alas, we had awakened the sleeping monster who heard our victory cheer, and it became immediately enraged, thrashing this way and that, until our RSD was mangled and useless. we tried in vain for the next half hour to retrieve the s.w.u.t. frisbee, a beautiful disc that should never have been captured in the first place, but, as i said, it was in vain. we threw away the element of surprise, and the DiscMagnet™ was once again the master of its domain.

still, two out of three is not bad, and we were glad to have saved any discs at all from the hideous thing’s clutches. perhaps when i arrive back at stanford i will go on another reconnaissance mission and see if disc #1 is still alive, or if she has been devoured by the monster.

for now, though, the fight against the Stanford DiscMagnet™ is finished, and i consider myself the victor. we all know, moreover, that the victor is he to whom go the spoils. thus with pride and sincerity i claim the following spoils: world peace, love, free taco bell for eternity, and a girlfriend. now i just need to find who exactly it is who gives out these spoils.

coming soon: part 3 of the DiscMagnet™ saga.

we were all probably a little tired from the tedious drive, but excited to be out of the car and ready to be on our way. we stashed our extra food underneath the car so that bears wouldn’t rip the car open trying to get at it, stretched a little bit, then started walking the mile or so to the trailhead. at the base we said a quick prayer for safety before beginning the epic trek. we opted to go up the mist trail, a shorter and much steeper trail than the john muir, until it intersected john muir at nevada falls. the first hour of the hike was fairly intense, and most of the going was up narrow stairs hewn out of granite and placed at precarious angles along the sides of the mountain.

bears are more or less numerous in the forested yosemite valley, and night is their hunting time, so we had to be careful to make a continuous stream of conversation lest we be too quiet and catch a bear unawares. so with all the talking and stair-hiking we were pretty exhausted by the time we reached nevada. we ate our only trail food, a ration of 2 granola bars each, and refilled our nalgenes with water filtered from the stream above the falls. my pack had a platypus hydration system, which i found to be the most fantastic thing in the world, and which lasted all the way to the summit.

after our very steep introduction, the relatively level section of john muir just past the falls was a welcome break, but the odd sand floor made the going a little slow. still, it was nice, because we were able to turn off our headlamps and walk like stealthy (but noisy) wraiths, our shadows just as visible as ourselves under the light of the moon. soon the trail started cutting back and forth uphill, and we passed the first of the many hikers we were to see on our ascent. as it turned out, there were probably 4 or 5 other largish groups of hikers who were attempting the summit that night.

until we neared the top, the hike was more or less uneventful, staring at the ground and plodding quickly up the steepening trail. we did make one half-an-hour-long error where we missed a fork to the summit path in the dark, and didn’t realize it for about a mile. unfortunately for those who were just close enough behind us to see our lights, they followed us astray. still, not much damage was done and we went back and found the missing fork. from there the cardiovascular nature of our hike increased threefold, and we sweated and pushed our way up neverending winds of stone and forest, tired, but excited about the adventure and wanting to push our endurance some.

finally, we got to The Stairs–steep, narrow, and dangerously sandy prismatized rocks providing little better footing than the granite slabs surrounding them on the last leg to The Cables. we gritted our teeth and pushed up hundreds of them. eventually dan and i forsook the stairs for the smoother, if more dangerous and adventurous route of the rock wall. it was quite angled, but not too much for a good scramble with dan’s 5.10 approach shoes and my grippy trail runners. at the top of that second-to-last peak, i got a glimpse of the cables for the first time, just across a small dip. i got really excited. from my elevated vantage point it looked like the twin metal cables ran at a nearly vertical angle to the top of half-dome. as we got closer, i saw that the angle probably wasn’t more than 45 degrees. still, 45 degrees is more than it sounds like.

the next 15 minutes were spent gloves gripping the cables and pulling myself up, step by careful step, to the top. it was only when i finally crested the last round that the elevation hit me, and i could tell that the air was a little thinner–the final exertion had made me more aware. half-dome stands over 8,000 feet above sea level, and the base of the valley around 3,000, if i remember correctly. so, we had hiked 8 miles in length, and 1 mile in height, to get to the top.

i can only say that i can’t wait to do it again–as i stepped out on the highest rock on the summit and looked around at the moonlight panorama that greeted me, i was immensely joyful. there is a perfect 360 degree view of truly amazing scenery. to call it “scenery” seems a little blasphemous. “scenery” is used to decorate stages for school plays. what i saw were raw, huge mountains thrust upwards from the earth in an immense ring, covered in beautiful coniferous forest, shining with a dim white light, the photons of which reached my eyes across a phenomenal space: clear, without sign or sound of the ravages of human progress. a giant frosty field, the stars gleamed like cold, bright diamonds as the wind whipped across my body, carrying 40-degree-fahrenheit air. i was exhausted, sore, and happy.

the time was 4:30am, roughly 5 hours after our embarking. to our delight and credit, we had reached the top before any of the other groups, all of which started hours before us. thus for about an hour we were the masters of the yosemite early morning, and we used our reign to thank god for his creation.

the spectacle, fortunately, was not yet over: the sunrise was yet to come. we hunkered down in between some rocks to fight off the cold, and made hot chocolate with dave’s whisperlite stove. thus armed, we made it through until sunrise, which greeted us like a color brush to a black-and-white world. all i’d seen for so long was the dull (enchanting nonetheless) palette of the moon, so the sun surprised me with its color as much as its warmth. we expressed our delight at dawn by cooking up instant oatmeal for breakfast–3 packets each, and i’m surprised we weren’t starving for more.

after the sun had been sufficiently raised in the sky, we explored the enormous top of half-dome, chatting occasionally with the others who had finally made it to the top for sunrise. we found a nice rounded crest looking west at the shadow of our monolith, and each had a celebratory cigar, brought specifically to enjoy on the summit.

sooner or later we decided that we had better begin our descent while we were still awake, since none of us had slept in 24 hours and we might have begun to fade fast. we geared up, then went down the cables. going down was nothing like going up–i would grab hold of the cables, give a little jump, and slide from one pole to the next, feet in the air below me. in this fashion i sped down the side in record time. dan was right behind and dave joined us shortly.

from there the descent was mainly mechanical–we moved our feet quickly as we dreamed of the large pizza we would devour upon reaching curry village at the base. all told, excluding one stop at nevada falls to wash feet in the cold stream, we made it down in under 3 hours, following the longer john muir trail from nevada instead of mist. the last half mile of the trail, our legs were so sore that we had to jog, to ease the joints and relieve some tension from muscles. but finally, we made it back and had our ginormous pizza.

food was simply marvelous, but we needed more–sleep. we layed down in various ridiculous positions in dave’s van and napped for a good 3 hours before waking up and deciding that it was time to head back. the original plan had been to camp at yosemite (or outside, for free) saturday night, but we figured that that would be superfluous, since no more events were planned. thus we loaded up the car and made record time back: 3 hours and 15 minutes.

the weekend was most definitely amazing, and seemed like two amazing weekends for the amount of time i was awake. it’s always awesome to see completely stunning examples of god’s power and beauty, not to mention the little touches like grace and love.

dan and dave evans and i are leaving today for yosemite. we aim to get to the park and find a campground by around 8pm, then rest for a few hours before our ascent hike up half dome. it’s a full moon (or just about), so as long as we stay clear of bears it should be a beautiful and surreal experience. we aim to have breakfast on the summit as the sun comes up over the valley, and then take the rest of saturday to hike back, relax, and maybe do some climbing if we can find a good spot.

i am all geared up after my trip to rei yesterday, and i can’t wait to crank out the uphill miles under the ethereal white light of the moon. i’ll be back sunday.

notwithstanding, i got some great shots of my captive discs with the IGSD, making sure to stay as close to the roofline as possible to avoid detection. i have decided to put the results of my espionage up here. click on the thumbnail to view the annotated versions of the IGSD stills, one from a dangerous location quite close to the DiscMagnet™, and one from the top of durand.

in the next few days i’ll have to use this information to make a legitimate rescue plan. i only hope that the discs have been working out and preparing for escape, so that they will not be caught unawares when i come for them.

virtual disc on spin: can you hear us | david crowder

the fourth object is the Stanford DiscMagnet™, located in the engineering quad and better known as the 11th hole of the stanford disc golf course (or one of the courses). it has the mysterious property of attracting plastic discs ( my discs in particular) in the same way as a physics class magnet attracts iron filings, and has ruthlessly stolen the three aforementioned discs from me while playing the 11th hole.

normally, i would call it the way of the game, the world, or the little faeries that must exist in frisbees to make them spin so fast and perform nature-defying feats like the ‘scooper’. however, total merchandise currently beached on top of the DiscMagnet™ sculpture approaches $30. this chafes, since it’s the worth of at least two CDs, gone to waste on top of a glorified ’techy’ tin can. not to mention the fact that my supply of discs is rapidly diminishing.

thus with steeled will i convinced dan to go with me last night at 11pm to the engineering quad in order to retrieve my discs. we brought our climbing gear, rope, and sharp wits to battle the complacently stolid (yet smirking, i know) fiend. unfortunately also sharp were the edges of the overhung top of the DiscMagnet™, making it an impossibility to use the rope and climb to the top. we explored other ideas of lifting ourselves to the top of the 30-foot beast, but none of them had an acceptable risk factor. we were willing to save the frisbees, but not to lose our lives in the process.

my last idea was to take a bite (a loop) of rope and attempt to toss it completely over the top through a hole in the middle (which was, of course the hole for the golf course) and then slowly drag it back across the top so it would act like a net and scoop any discs in its path off the top and into the hole. as it happened, though, the rope was much to heavy–its own weight precluded it from being thrown 30 feet in the air and then some, in order to make it land on the other side.

all told, it was an hour’s hard work with nothing to show for it. i shook my fists in silent defiance at the stolid cement-and-copper behemoth as we packed up our wonderful, useless, gear and walked away.

still, defeat is only temporary, i assure myself. reconnaissance is now the order of the day–i must find a way to the top of one of the surrounding buildings to see if i can spy the exact location of the frisbees so i can plan the next attack accordingly. i know now that i will have to make good use of the element of surprise…maybe a night parachute drop, or hiring a troupe of ninjas to form a human ladder to the top with lightning speed. anything else and i know the DiscMagnet™ will anticipate my every move.

here’s to imminent victory!

disc on spin: lift yr skinny fists like antennas to heaven | godspeed you black emperor!

dan and dave evans and i had a legitimate 2-hour jam session…rock, blues, jazz-funk – we played it all, with the help of a few electric guitars and a very long extension cord.

and, you won’t believe this, there was a ninja practicing his moves in the quad while we were rocking out. i tried to give him my guitar so he could wail on it, because everyone knows ninjas wail on guitars, but he obviously wasn’t a real ninja because he declined. but still he had some cool ninja moves.

it seems as if everything i do is confused and hesitant, a class of things that roll unfamiliarly from the tongue and awkwardly from clumsy hands. my actions show that i am still less than fluent in language, and i’ve realized what it is:

i’m still not completely identified with that second skin my body wants to reject though it knows it is its only hope. i’m the ignorant fool who keeps drinking salt water, thinking it will quench his thirst.

trent, a friend of ours, had invited us to road trip down to his place (a 5 hour trip) for the weekend. the invitation happened some time ago (to our eventual frustration), but only on wednesday night did we decide to accept it; i rented a buick regal from enterprise and we planned our drive for late friday evening. friday evening came quickly, and nick and i made our preparations. sooner or later one of us realized that we needed to call trent and let him know we were coming down. i called his house 3 times that night, with nothing but the answering machine: “hello, you’ve reached the wiesens, please leave a message. beep”.

still, we thought, he had invited us for this weekend; he was just out of the house–obviously not out of town or anything. so we figured we had better get a move on, and we’d continue to call while we drove. we pulled out of stanford at 10:30 or 11:00 pm, and started the long trek. it was a great night–moonless, but the stars were out, and no one else was on the road. feeling the freedom of the long dark stretch ahead of me, i couldn’t restrain myself, and pushed the car over 100mph several times. sadly, it seemed that there was a governor of some sort in effect, because as i hit 110mph the engine would drop down.

needless to say, we made great time to santa barbara. the downside was that, while nick and i knew trent lived in or near santa barbara, we didn’t actually know where his house was. we had kept calling until the hour was no longer decent, but to no avail. thus it happened that at 4am saturday morning, we made the choice to give up on finding trent for the time being, and we directed our course southwest from downtown, where we hoped to find a beach. without too many wrong turns we eventually stumbled upon leadbetter park on the south coast of santa barbara, near the harbor. we pulled into the parking lot, exhausted from driving and singing loudly to CDs the whole way.

it was worth the drive, however, to stumble out into the crisp, foggy, night air and feel cool sand beneath my feet, and to hear the susurrative crash of waves just outside my vision. that night we slept in the car, and woke up around 9 or 10 am.

the first order of business on saturday morning, after leaving leadbetter (and paying a parking fee–they had kindly started charging us for parking at 7am), was to find out what the deal was with trent. no one answered at his home, still, so we called his aunt who lived in los altos. she gave us the address of his house in santa barbara, and we stopped at a gas station to look it up on a map. it turned out he lives 15 or 20 miles north of where we were, so we got in the car and made our way north to goleta. it was difficult to navigate the maze of residential streets based on the sketchy (and sometimes wrong) information from the map at the gas station. eventually, though, we found trent’s house. sitting outside, we called the place again, but no answer. they were definitely not home. we composed a short note and went to stick it to their door, asking them to call when trent got back.

at the door, we noticed motion inside….was someone there after all? we knocked. the door cracked open an inch, then another inch, then a foot..suspicion…the person behind the door was asian, possibly vietnamese, male, and looked to be about 22. nothing at all like trent or his family. nick and i were obviously confused, but as the man made no move to initiate conversation, we asked, “is trent there?”. in halting english came the counter-question: “are you the police?” nick and i looked at each other. “no, we are just looking for trent–we’re friends…not police.” he opened the door a little wider and looked around. then he informed us that the wiesens were gone on a family vacation until the 13th.

we thanked the man and left, never finding out who he was, or what he was doing in the wiesen’s house.

for a moment we were disappointed, but then realized that the possibility for adventure had definitely increased. our minds began to imagine all the places we could go with a car and nothing better to do. some of the suggestions were the grand canyon, phoenix, las vegas, orange county, san diego, death valley, and a host of other tantalizing locations. we soon faced the hard truth, however, that many of these places would take 8 or 9 hours to drive….leaving us with a 12 or 13 hour drive back to stanford on sunday. coming back to reality, we decided to stay in santa barbara and hang out at the beach on saturday, and maybe go visit the wine country on sunday on our way back up.

we did hang out at the beach all saturday–reading, sleeping, throwing the frisbee, and in general feeling that pleasant laziness that comes from the sun kissing with poisoned lips, sapping strength while exuding golden nectar. as it happened we got hungry around the same time we were going to start roasting, so we went in search of dinner. our search ended very abruptly upon sight of a fresh choice eating establishment on state street. we stuffed ourselves with all-you-can-eat salads, pastas, breads, soups, and pizzas. fat and happy, we lumbered across the street and caught the 7:20 showing of signs at the paseo nuevo theatres. a great movie with a lot to say for it, and it had wonderfully visceral tension without being grossly shocking. the characteristic darkly toned suspense i’ve come to expect from m. night shamalayan.

after the movie we were once again exhausted, so we parked our buick next to the same beach as the night before, and slept peacefully (if fitfully) in the cushy reclining front seats.

sunday morning was more of the same–inspiring devotionals on the beach just after sunrise, then more baking in the sun during the midday. i finally finished a book i’ve been working on for over a year: warranted christian belief -- the concluding book in the trilogy concerning the epistemological notion of warrant, by alvin plantinga. a must-read for any epistemologist with at least a few years of philosophical training.

sunday afternoon found us on state highway 154, snaking northeast through beautiful mountainous desert interspersed with the occasional lush vineyard. just past solvang, the dutch experiment in california, we turned into the grounds of the bridlewood winery. we sat at a table looking over a small valley on which hills grew the lush varieties of grapes used to make exquisite wines. we talked about deeply important, philosophico-theological things, like the meaning of hope and the conundrum of coincidence. it didn’t surprise me anymore that nick would bringn these things up as topics of conversation – his love for stretching his mind in contemplation of spiritual truths had been amply demonstrated to me time and time again. a refreshing quality.

also refreshing was our retreat from the sun into the cool, oak-lined hall where we tasted 5 of bridlewood’s best wines. nick and i voted unanimously that the 1999 chardonnay was possibly the best wine we’d ever tasted. and at half price, we couldn’t resist picking up a bottle.

with that, our adventure was officially over–we got in our de facto motorhome and i braced myself for the long 5 hours of driving ahead of us. stopping once only, for gas and subway sandwiches, we made great time and passed many slow people on our way north. the highlight of the drive was at sunset–flying at 90 mph with the long shadows of gigantic poplar trees on the left making dark furrows in the golden green of the farmland to our right, as dead ahead and to our sides we were ringed by mountains and hills that looked like gigantic sand dunes that god had raked his finger through, while we were listening to what can only be described as a paean of absolute beauty in the form of the final anthems of the gladiator soundtrack, and realizing with each charged strain, the transcendental lens of music, that sometimes heaven can’t help but bleed through to the earth.

we rolled into nick’s half moon bay beach house at 10pm, and relaxed in the hot tub after celebrating our safe return with a glass of the chardonnay. i spent the night there and drove home this morning, shirking work and all other responsibilities in order to go grocery shopping and take a much-needed shower.

our search for trent was futile, but the trip was most definitely not.

here’s to altimar, guys, and i can’t wait to see where we end up next year for altimar IV!

ep98-02:true

and tomorrow it begins: ALTIMAR III. one of the best weekends of the year, if not the best.

it will be nearly impossible to top altimar i and altimar ii, but trends like this can’t be stopped by mere impossibility.

i wonder what is in store for us this time.

• Its on the tip of my tongue (4)

• humorous naked bbq photos

• from the tip of my tongue

• tongue cleaning

• 160a stanford

• Jon Lipps

• jonathan lipps stanford

• jonathan lipps (2)

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• Stanford CoHo summer hours

• divx to vhs

• fake languages conlangs

• stanford blog

• my spacecoaster

• how to draw cool spaceships

• Erin Spokes (3)

• being sick and have a few little sores on tongue

• i burn my tongue picture

• medical problem i can’t taste sweet on my tongue

• human tongues list of tongue sores

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• tip of my tongue lyrics

• tongue

• how long it takes to move into an apartment

first things first: if you were the person searching the net for “humorous naked bbq photos”, please do not come back to this site. ever. likewise for the seeker of “i burn my tongue picture”.

secondly, i simply find it odd that (1) many of these searches actually happened [we are now using the internet to ask questions like, “how long does it take to move into an apartment”???? as long as it takes you to move your stuff, buddy!! come on], and (2) people who were serious and specific enough to look for “medical problem i can’t taste sweet on my tongue” strayed from their search and came to my page. which, and it were obvious, has nothing to do with that at all.

thirdly, it’s a little bit dishearening that just as many people found my blog looking for my friend erin as found it looking for me. ah well.

virtual disc on spin: come away with me | norah jones

so, you, my faithful blog readers (of which i’m sure there are now none) have been left out of both the inane and the exciting. better this way, in my opinion, than just receiving the inane.

in any case my observation over the past two weeks is this: life without a blog is the same. i did no better or worse in any area of my being, and no observable changes ensued during the unintentional blog fast.

mostly, this made me breathe a sigh of relief, as i can now safely put to death the false accusations of blog-haters (secretly blog-enviers, no doubt) everywhere and their silly arguments as to the addictive and/or harmful and/or useless nature of the blog.

unfortunately, i have neither read anyone’s blog for the past few weeks, and so i don’t know what’s going on in the lives of many of my friends. sooner or later i will catch up, i promise.

listening to: the sound of my brother sleeping

somebody rescue me, it’s friday night.

in my life i have yet to experience the power of true action.

i realized that what i have been experiencing is passion, in the philosophical sense: being acted upon.

in other words, i have felt the power of emotion, felt the power of joy and sorrow and the fantastic intermingling thereof with nostalgia, etc…

and yet, when emotions die, as they do moments after their inspirations, they leave nothing, save perchance a fading resolve that crumbles under the weight of its duty.

real change, real progress of character must come instead from decision, from action. emotions can ignite but it is the will that must drive–however the will will, be it on its own power or only by grace [i certainly know into which category falls mine].

but, i think, it is exactly this sustained force of willful avowedness which i do not posess. and so i have yet to discover the possibilities of growth which may be unlocked by that key.

i am young frodo, and my passions are the shire: i’m still in love with little brooks and streams to paddle down, soft meadows and pleasant hazy evenings. in my heart i am not yet old enough to perceive the majesty of the misty mountains, the whispering magic of lothlorien, the echoing stillness of moria, or the piercing white silver of ecthelion. i am not old enough to desire more than my little comfortable corner of personhood; not old enough to realize that sooner or later i had better be off Questing, or my little world could abrubtly…end…

so i stay, and paddle down the streams, and lie in the meadows on sunny afternoons. an easy life, replete with occasional, exciting bouts of emotional energy, but nothing so serious as to be… difficult. an easy life…

but there are times, like now, when i glance at the road beneath my feet and something deep inside stirs…an ancient dragon halfway waking from sleep, one eye open…there are times when the road seems more like a stream, flowing faster and faster into other streams, all leading somewhere–and those times i want to follow the soft suggestion of the road, no less urgent for being whispered, to go.

finals week came and went, without much in the way of commendation. i fared decently in terms of grades–not too great, but not failing. but god damn mediocrity (that’s a sincere request, not profanity). you know, i really want to be excellent in my academic life, but i just can’t seem to bring myself to get there anymore. i suspect some deeply rooted problem which if i’m smart i’ll get sorted out, with god’s help, before september.

the weekend after, i moved into my apartment in the basement of kingscote. it’s a dark, musky, ratty sort of place with one small room, one small kitchen, one small closet, and a bathroom down the hall (which i share with an invisible man named bob).

everyone else was at graduation, so i rented a car for the week, to help move things, and to take myself to the airport the coming thursday. anyway on sunday i moved all my belongings, virtually alone [jon parr and shannon helped for a few minutes here and there, thanks guys], and exhausted myself after 13 hours of carrying stuff and shopping for food and necessities.

the next morning i started my job, which is creating and managing three websites for the stanford in vivo medical laboratory (or something like that). unfortunately, my boss seemed to have left on a three-week trip, so i was left to do whatever i would in the way of getting things going. that being the case, i worked half days monday through thursday.

i’ll pat myself on the back, here: i’ve been eating pretty well. i’ve used the stovetop to cook about 80% of my meals, and they’ve all been more or less well-balanced. i like cooking, and i’m already feeling like buying some more arcane sorts of things (a griddle, for instance) so that i can experiment with extremely difficult recipes (for example, a decent chicken and pasta entree). [i realize that one doesn’t cook that sort of dish on a griddle, it was just to give an idea]

on thursday at noon i drove to the airport and flew to orlando for a weekend at home. you see, alister mcgrath and graham tomlin, of wycliffe hall oxford, were coming to orlando to discuss some things with CNL about plans for new facilities at oxford. moreover, they were going to be involved in some planning meetings with wycliffe execs [to make things more confusing, ‘wycliffe execs’ refers to leaders, not of wycliffe hall, but of wycliffe bible translators, based in orlando], etc… so, wycliffe hall is a college of oxford which focus is theology and christian studies. my dad (a wycliffe exec) and i thought it would be advantageous for me to meet these gentlemen (being rather important scholars, christian or otherwise) in the event that at some point i want to go to oxford to pursue a d.phil or what have you. the weekend went well–i attended various meetings and other functions, and met a lot of orlando business leaders as well as the oxford duo. “networking”, some people would say. i’m not much of a networking person but it was good.

needless to say, it was also great to see my family.

and now i’m back. and done with a 9-hour work day. the first in my life? maybe… the last? no.

not to mention, [cf. my last post] i feel like i’ve just been told the last spoken line in the matrix.

virtual disc on spin: false cathedrals | elliott

therefore sin is mud in water, a smudge on the canvas. it threatens to blur the sharp lines of reality. it takes beauty and stifles it–no, instead it dulls our senses of beauty and truth (it can never actually harm them). it is self-replicating and narcissistic. the only paradox is that it does not self-annihilate. or maybe, it does, in a vacuum–it requires hosts to thrive. weak hosts–but not too weak, or it won’t last long. whatever the case, it never lasts forever. either the parasite or the host die. if the host waits too long, they both die, passing from existence with the mingling strains of the shrill laugh of victory and the echoed whisper of powerless regret.

if only regret weren’t powerless. it’s such a great injustice that that which most naturally motivates us not to sin always occurs after the error we should not have made.

i suppose that’s what was wrong with nature.

romans 8:20-21.

neither for writing a blog

there is work to do

how’s that? a little haiku for you all. haikus make me think of lush chinese rainforests. are there rainforests in china? i don’t know.

moving and organizing takes a lot of time. buying crap takes a lot of time. working less than 8 hours a day takes a lot of time.

goodbye to my dreams of lazy summer evenings spent reading good books!

i will be in orlando this weekend, for meetings. see you there.

on friday morning, i woke up at 8:20, rolled out of bed and on to my bike (it was waiting beneath my bed like a trusty steed). i was seated in the room for my philosophy 102 examination by 8:30. at roughly 8:50am, i left the room after stamping my seal on the completed exam. i was sound asleep by 9:05.

when i woke up again, i was too busy wondering whether i’d missed lunch to realize that, oh most glorious of days, my sophomore year was over.

well, not competely: there is the small matter of reading 5 different selections of ancient greek from various texts by wednesday, but that’s so far in the future i can revel in the summerness of summer for as long as i want. and, it’s just reading.

so i celebrated. i went to a cornerstone party-like-event at the oval, and also to jenna shuer’s birthday party. i kicked back and hung out, having nothing else to do. finally dan and i celebrated by beating return to castle wolfenstein, the end of which was great–i had to defeat a resurrected, immortal [wait–if he was resurrected, he was dead..so he couldn’t have been immortal. ah, don’t think too much], undead, battle lord named Heinrich I. how cool is that.

now i’m back from climbing at the wall for an hour, sitting in my room amidst the usual mess, compounded by the various boxes sitting on the floor waiting to be filled. i can’t wait to move into my apartment for the summer. only one complication: i have to vacate my current room by 10am on thursday morning, and more than likely i won’t be able to move into kingscote until friday. a dilemma, then.

goodbye plato, descartes, locke, kant, hume, wittgenstein, and gettier. hello dreamweaver, flash, asp, perl, javascript, html, and c++. from one world of abstraction to another. perfect. i think i’m going to love my job.

song on spin: “drive on to me” | elliott

unfortunately i wasn’t able to sleep at all on wednesday, because after class i worked on finishing up my new song so i could play it at the coho. i also learned pedro’s “options” to cover.

the show itself didn’t go that well…i felt…tired. and it came out in the first 2 or 3 songs. i scrapped “options” after i sucked on the first few lines. plus we were running sound out of another guy’s system, which was very big and so it made me a little nervous. there were quite a few people there too. oh well. it made me resolve to actually practice my songs, because they are rather hard for me to play sometimes and i need to have them down before i do shows. i forget my lyrics a lot too. ah well, it was fun. i ran sound for mikey’s band ‘midget mosaic’. they played a 1.5hr set, so i was really tired by the end. they had me come up on one of their last songs and play lead guitar, and that was cool of them; they’re neat guys.

and now i’m at work for the last time this year, possibly ever (if i don’t have this job next fall). it was a good quarter. but i forgot to study for my final tomorrow, and i need to do that.

minidisc on spin: live show | midget mosaic

the story: for weeks, now, no–months, even–i’ve known that i had a 10 page paper due tomorrow [today], june 5th. and yet, miraculously, i avoided even thinking about it until roughly 6 hours ago. at that point, i thought long and hard about which topic i might want to do, and then decided to play return to castle wolfenstein, a new, wonderful, computer game where you run around and shoot nazis, cyborg monsters, and even the undead. fun, strategy, and carnage, for a few hours. eventually i picked the topic with the least number of letters in the prompt, and started working. pretty soon i had my introductory paragraph, so i played some more computer games. i realized immediately, that at that rate, there were not enough hours left in which to finish the paper before it was due. ah well–i keep wanting adventure, and now i’ve got it. so here i am–pulling my first (second? third?) all-nighter of the quarter.

i’ll just shoot some recent news out there in rapid-fire mode:

1. i got the summer job i applied for at a medical reserach laboratory at the stanford hospital. i’ll be doing web design and possibly other programming projects. so i’ll be staying in kingscote until september, when i go to portugal and home for a month.

2. i’ve got a show tomorrow night [tonight] (june 5) at 9:30pm at the coho! please come! hopefully i will be awake then, though it’s looking grim.

3. i went climbing on sunday at castle rock with dan, and it was tons of fun, though i was really week from not having done anything for a while

4. trip to dallas this weekend was cancelled for lack of a cheap plane ticket, and because now there’s a lot of things here i need to take care of in order to get the summer rolling

5. i finally sold my computer [again], bought a new, much-improved minidisc player and sold my old player. i love su.market

6. been doing some ASP coding recently, and i have some plans for the blog, muhahah

7. oh yeah, i have a spanish presentation due tomorrow, crap.

8. i work best under pressure. bring it on.

minidisc on spin: control | pedro the lion

dan and i agree that this calls for a celebratory cigar.

just think–no more dining halls and coed bathrooms. and, somebody wake me up, open kitchen!!!!.

needless to say, tonight has gone a long way towards fixing problem #4.

virtual disc on spin: musicforthemorningafter | pete yorn

and the more i think about them, the more they really piss me off. some of them are simply dumb habits that elude breaking. some of them are so petty i’m glad i hide them behind my veneer of cynicism. or do i? i’m sure they show through to those people who are discerning about such things.

so now, without further ado, My Problems [the short list, in no particular order]:

1. laziness. where does the time go? half of it i don’t even remember what i did in the last hour, except for the fact that it wasn’t productive. if i weren’t in the midst of the easiest quarter i’ll ever have, i would be screwed. and i will be if i don’t realize that sitting in front of my computer looking at my desktop picture is dangerously close to omega level.

2. cynicism. somewhere in the last year i decided that i never wanted to be disappointed again. so i lowered my expectations of myself, god, and the world. the [utterly unfounded] fear of god failing me, especially, sent me down that dark road.

3. sarcasm. not to be confused with cynicism, this isn’t so much about worldview as it is about relationships. i hurt people with my unthinking sarcasm, and that sucks.

4. lack of faith. if i look at my actions, instead of what i tell myself, it becomes apparent that i don’t really believe that god has things under control, or that he really is good and wants the best for me.

5. arrogance. i look down on other people for the stupidest reasons.

6. insecurity. strange that it exists in such an equal proportion to arrogance… i’m always afraid that people don’t think i’m cool, or that i really don’t belong at stanford, or in the philosophy program. and instead of just pushing these fears away i let them lead me to others, like fears that [god forbid] i don’t know what i’m doing in life, and that i’m not doing anything important.

7. deconstructionism. cynicism, lack of faith, my major, and stanford in general have given me the crappiest deconstructionist attitude about everything. i always have to make some smart comment that’s purely argumentative. because this is what is popular.

8. then there’s those other things which i won’t mention. a little bit deadly, that’s all.

at this point someone would probably say that i’m being negatively one-sided. after all, what good is a laundry list of sins and faults? isn’t that what jesus came to abolish? yes, of course. and self-deprecation is too obviously trendy.

still, i can’t help but sigh longingly in anticipation of a time when above problems will no longer belong to me. i can’t wait to get my head up out of this cesspool. and, i don’t think it’s wrong to try to get there as soon as possible: my destination is the stars, and my legs can’t jump that far, but that doesn’t mean i shouldn’t exercise in preparation for the day when they can.

also, believe it or not, many of these problems only recently came to my attention. and what better way to deal with them than to shove them into the glaring light and the clean air, away from the dark, mucky corners of my heart where they thrive?

disc on spin: oh, inverted world | the shins

in other news, come to my show a week from today!

orlando was sweet. i got in thursday morning at 6am. i was a little tired but i didn’t want to go to bed until that night or the jet lag would suck all weekend, so i went running. i hung out with chris nyffeler for a good bit, because he left friday morning for japan.

anyway there’s no use in just logging my days. here were some of the highlights: my brother’s graduation, hanging out with friends every day, seeing family, going rock climbing, and going to a my spacecoaster concert. the concert rocked so hard–it was a tiny little club, and probably no more than 15 or 20 people came to the show. so i was right up there with the band rocking out and screaming with john lamonica. a bunch of my friends came to the show with us, and we all hung out with the band beforehand. they’re thinking of coming to san francisco to play a show or two, and i hope they do.

i’m still waiting to hear on a job i applied for a week ago. it’s a web design job for a medical lab at stanford. i think the news on the job will be the deciding factor of whether i stay in california over the summer or not. surprisingly, i’m entirely ambivalent. being home made me realize what i would be missing out on if i never went back to florida over the summer. balance this with the cool prospect of living on my own in an apartment in california, and you can see why i wouldn’t care either way.

i’m at work now, so i should probably procrastinate by doing something more productive, like reading some of the 250 pages of kant i have left. if you’ve never read kant….well, pity me anyway.

disc on spin: music for the morning after | pete yorn

i’m leaving for home in a few hours. my brother is graduating high school. i’m there through memorial day, and it will be a good break from school.

until later, this is uncle caveman, signing off.

song on spin: “you” | switchfoot

i saw the new star wars movie at 12:01am wednesday night–the first showing on the west coast. it was at one of those mega-plex 45-theatre compound things, so the lines were amazing. one of our group had been there since 2pm, however, braving the crowds, so we walked right to the front of the line at 10:15pm, carrying in ’n out burgers for our diehard compatriots. it was an event–a lot of dressed up people as you’d expect, and we were even interviewed the stanford daily newspaper, and made it in two days later (our whole ancient greek class was there, so it was a novelty).

i really liked the movie. with star wars i am very willing to lay down any high-minded notion of filmmaking and just sit in childlike awe of pretty colors, flashy scenes, and cool spaceships. so it was a bonus for me that episode 2 was so much better than that–a deepening, brooding, and more mysterious plot beginning to surface, a cheesy yet honest and sincere love story, sweet battle scenes, and of course yoda kicking ass. i was also happy of the knowledge that ep2 added to the ’expanded universe'.

i went and saw it again thursday night, because one of my friends who had a ticket couldn’t go and he gave it to me for free.

friday i skipped all my classes because i was sick and couldn’t talk more than a whisper (something to do with my throat i guess). i read berkeley’s principles of human something-or-other. a good read, but sleepy after 20 pages. dan left friday for yosemite, to go climbing all weekend, so i had the room to myself. i played computer games, did homework, and watched half of blackhawk down.

saturday i did something new–i woke up early (11:45am) and went to the IM fields to play softball for our crusade softball team. i’d never played before, but it was quite fun. i actually batted 1000 and scored a number of runs. if you’d asked me before, i would have sworn i hated the game. but i guess that’s what happens when i judge something before i experience it. that night a bunch of people went into the city to watch our friend serena play her first live gig in the city, at a cafe/art gallery. it was a neat place, cool atmosphere, and she did a great job. then everyone dragged me (and some other guys) to a swing club, where we capped the night looking like fools on a waxed wood floor amidst a bunch of hardcore swingers.

today it rained, and i felt like it looked outside–grey and monotone. i can’t even remember what i did after church. i went and saw orange county at flicks–it’s a movie about a kid from o.c. who wants to get into stanford but doesn’t, because of his retarded college counselor’s mix-up, and he goes to stanford to try to get in. it was funny because nothing was ever filmed at stanford. so all the scenes at “stanford” were shot at night at some other college, which looked very little like stanford. i wonder how many people will end up thinking that actually was stanford. the story itself was not too bad, and it was humorous at times. but not really worth noting, all told.

i’m going home on wednesday for memorial weekend. i can’t wait to see my friends and family.

virtual disc on spin: my spacecoaster | my spacecoaster

unfortunately all the sun, while it gave me a nice tan, also gave me a few cold sores, especially since there was no grape juice to be had all weekend. cold sores always bring out the masochistic side of me. no more on that.

in other news, su.market has found me a buyer for my old computer system and some other things i was selling. i heart su.market. also, i beat jedi knight 2. a very excellent computer game on all accounts. what else is going on….our bible study is having a date night sometime soon so i need to think of a girl to ask.

also, i’m going to see star wars episode 2 tomorrow night at 12:01am–opening show at the very large cinema complex in san jose. it should be awesome–there will be a ton of superfans there, and i will bring a little light-up lightsaber keychain i have in order to fit in.

jars of clay is playing right now, roughly 10 minutes from where i’m sitting, but i can’t go because i’m working. ah well. c’est la vie and all that crap, but i don’t feel like going into it.

virtual disc on spin: i break chairs | damien jurado

sadly, it’s not. and my summer doesn’t start until, for them, it starts coming to a close.

that’s another reason i wanted to stay at stanford over the summer–that long month and a half from the middle of august through september, when everyone else is back at school and i’m at home, working, or sitting around being lonely.

maybe i shouldn’t be lonely (after all, i’ve got family, and not everyone has left town), or maybe i shouldn’t want to run from it.

unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like i won’t have the opportunity to make that moral, character-building decision for myself. unless i find a job soon, my housing opportunity will be gone, and i’ll be going home to florida for the summer.

now don’t get me wrong–i love orlando. i love it to death. i love my friends and family. and it would be a great sacrifice to stay here at stanford, and miss out on all that. i also love the florida weather, the warm, breezy nights devoid of that irritating chill so prevalent in northern california. i love the beaches, the sunrise over the atlantic, the tropical feel…

all the same, i want an adventure. i want to live on my own. i want to burn my own frozen pizza in my own stove. i want to be able to invite a girl over to my place: my small, crappy, overpriced apartment. i don’t want to be babied by the university, or charged exorbitant fees for their definition of fine cuisine.

i also wanted to apply for and get a job on my own–because of my own credentials, and not because my parents worked at the place. i wanted to make it, with god’s grace. i don’t want to be lonely or alone–wherever i am in the next few months, i plan on hanging out with people daily and building relationships to the best of my poor ability. i just wanted to be truly self-sufficient (in terms of housing and food) for the first time in 19.5 years.

but maybe i’m not ready anyway.

two main reasons: 1) i didn’t get the summer job i applied for. 2) another >1300 draw number. what kills me is my friend whose draw numbers for both the last years add up to less than 50. i hate this screwball university for more than its dining plans.

the funny thing was, neither of these setbacks really bothered me, nor did i even consider them setbacks. so i didn’t get the job–either i’d get another one or i’d go home for the summer. what does it matter? and i’m used to sucky draw numbers, so that should have been irrelevant. i guess my human nature shuffles around sometime, randomly bestowing upon me those characteristics which i thought myself better than: anger, disappointment, disillusionment, and the rest. ah well i’m better now.

what was good is that i did a lot of work last night, and got moderately caught up. now i’m only moderately behind!

right now i’m looking at 1,920,000 pixels. that’s a lot of pixels (i got a new monitor). in other news i broke my hiatus from the wall and cranked tonight. it felt good. now i just need to get running again. maybe tomorrow.

in other news, i’m going on crusade’s spring retreat this weekend, until sunday. it’s up in berkeley, so ick. but i hear the place has a hot tub. yeah i know what i’ll be doing. rock.

do you know what it’s all about? if you stop and think about it, it’s simple. LIFE, and LOVE, and WHY.

virtual disc on spin: big blue sky | bebo norman

my family stayed with our friends, the morrises. we’ve known the morrises since when i was in elementary school in texas. we used to get together on friday nights and watch movies together, and go out to tia’s / benavides / rosa’s after church on sundays. they have two girls, emily and ellen. emily is my age/grade, and ellen is rachel’s.

i lived in texas for 10 years. i didn’t realize it so much when i lived there, but 10 years is a long time. i’ve never lived anywhere even a quarter as long. so as the two families were sitting around on saturday night, enjoying each other’s company and talking far into the night, it hit me what a truly marvelous thing it is to have friends that know you, that you grew up with, and that remain friends irregardless of how often you talk and how often you see them.

the short of it is, it felt like i never left. and it was a beautiful time. emily’s getting married in a month, and ellen is now off to college, but with all the millions of destructive changes that could have occurred, they, and my siblings and i, came away feeling as if our friendship had grown, not faded. i believe this is indicative of a very special bond, hard to come by in these days of isolation, which i have somehow been given in so many friendships. i can only praise god for it.

i visited a few of my favorite places, like cd warehouse, where i bought new albums by stairwell, radiohead, the gloria record, and damien jurado. we also drove by the high school and our old houses. i withdrew into myself and dwelled for a while on the sweet times the lord blessed me with in texas. but while i felt that sharp stab of nostalgia, i wasn’t sad–i wouldn’t trade anything for the way things have worked out, with orlando and stanford.

i flew back on sunday, tired from not having slept all weekend, and from doing hours of put-off homework on the plane. yesterday i skipped class for the first time and went to fry’s and bought a computer. i need a new computer at least every two years, and it’s been approaching that time, so i thought i’d better get it. for those of you who care, it’s a sony vaio 1.6ghz 512mb 80gb 64geforce4. a sweet machine on all accounts. the downside is that it takes a while for stanford to set up my internet to work on the new computer, so i haven’t been able to send or receive e-mail [easily] since i went to texas, or get on IM (i know, it’s weird not to be on IM 24-7).

i also did something very bad–i bought myself a new computer game to play on my new computer: jedi knight ii. not only is it the coolest game i have ever played in my life, i’m sure it’s the best game of all time. i won’t waste time explaining why–let’s just say that if you’ve ever dreamed about being luke skywalker or the young obi-wan kenobi, replete with force powers and flips and aerial lightsaber attacks and any other sweet move in existence, this is the game for you.

in other news i’m still awaiting word on the job i applied for at academic computing.

and….i think that’s about it. i’m thinking of flying back to texas in early june for emily’s wedding, since my brother will be in town and maybe my parents, and i was reminded this weekend that she’s a really good friend, maybe the most like a sister of any of my friends.

[come soon], sweet summer. [come soon], sweet slumber.

disc on spin: i break chairs | damien jurado

i’ll be gone until sunday night late – take care.

at least being aware of it i’m able to laugh at it to its face, and so suffer only irritation instead of falling into major error. not that i don’t fall into major error, and sometimes intentionally so, but i find that being cynical about myself a little more acceptable than being ignorantly self-centred. now for the next step..

i’m going to dallas on friday, for my aunt’s wedding. so i have a ton of work to do before then. that’s kind of annoying.

in other news, i HAVEN’T SKIPPED A CLASS THIS QUARTER. its amazing, it really is. someone buy me a CD.

also, i’m writing a paper on descartes which is due before the end of tomorrow. it’s hard to think of things no one has said about descartes. sucky. if you want to offer moral support, feel free.

let’s see anything else going on….i’ll be getting a new computer soon, wahoo….the new pringles flavor “sweet mesquite bbq” is nice…did a presentation on the mayan language today in spanish…i ate too many mike and ikes because there’s a box sitting on my desk…i need to go to bed…draw deadline is this weekend, and draw is crazy as always. praying for a sweet number. please oh please.

virtual disc on spin: jealous sound | the jealous sound

1. i ran a lot

2. i did schoolwork occasionally

3. i worked at my job

4. i went climbing some

5. dan and i had a great night of conversation with our friend shannon

6. i did no work this last weekend

7. i went to santa cruz with dan and marie to watch our ultimate teams kick butt…such a sweet game.

8. i watched romeo must die on friday and vanilla sky yesterday at flicks.

9. i’ve been doing my devotions in spanish, to change things up a little

10. i made a resume so i can apply for jobs here this summer

11. i wrote a song

12. i played lots of computer games and helped dan play computer games

13. i decided to form an underground rebellion against the dining hall. we’re going to bomb the place.

and that’s what i can remember. don’t worry, i won’t go into any boring details. lunch time!

this last weekend was admit weekend, and oddly enough, i got an e-mail from my second cousin (my grandma’s sister’s daughter), who was at stanford with her husband and daughter, who’s been accepted here. i met them and ate dinner and told them my thoughts on stanford. they seem like a nice family, and i hope she goes here–it’d be cool to have a relative on campus, even a distant relative.

i’ve been running quite a bit. i did 4 miles saturday, i think i ran on sunday, 3 miles monday, and this morning i got up at 7am and ran 8 miles. the farthest i’ve ever run before is 5, so 8 is an accomplishment. the only downside is that i ran it really slow…averaging a 9-minute mile. normally that wouldn’t be cause for disappointment, but everyone at this school is so freaking athletic…even an 8-mile run is weak at 9:00/mi. whatever. the best part is that about 5-6 miles, i totally felt like i was just floating along…my breathing steadied out and i felt like i could run forever.

the most annoying thing for me right now is writing vocals. i have 4 or 5 songs that i have music for, and i think they’re great songs…but i can’t think up any good vocal lines. i can think of tons of vocal lines–don’t get me wrong–but none that really draw me in. and i hate boring/sucky vocal lines. this is always my curse.

school is going well. i have two big projects due at the end of next week, and that’s about it, apart from the tri-weekly intensely hard greek reading homework, and the negligible readings for spanish.

yesterday i felt myself slipping into mediocrity and blandness, so i took a walk to the quad and laid in a quiet mosaic of shade and sun in front of mem chu, watching the leaves above me rustle in the breeze. it was the most beautiful day of the quarter thus far, with the perfect combination of temperature, sky-blueness, breeze, and lazy ambient noise. i closed my eyes and prayed that i wouldn’t slip into old boring patterns of laziness, indifference, running from god, and having meaningless thoughts.

then i took off my sandals and walked around, savoring my few minutes of meditation and hoping they had effected some change.

in other news, i have been accepted to the co-term program in philosophy, so i’ll be here for two more years! i’m excited about the opportunity, even though it might mean i will have to take more units. some more thoughts about the recent future: i’m probably going to be at stanford over the summer, working. don’t know exactly what yet, or where i’ll stay, but i just wanted to stay out here and get a good job if i could. i’m also now planning on applying to go overseas next spring to oxford, if i can manage the classes.

i’ve been hanging out with people a lot more this quarter than i have historically. dan and i decided that we should put more time into hanging out with people and doing stuff that has more lasting value than problem sets. so if you ever want to hang out, just give me a call.

listening to: “affectionately yours,” | jonathan lipps

tuesday dan and i decided that our room sucked and that we needed a futon to sit on. to do homework on….to let other people sit on when they visit us, etc… so i fired up su.market and lo and behold, someone was selling a futon for $65. dan and i drove to roble, checked the thing out, offered the guy $55 for it, he met us halfway at $60 and it was a deal.

it took dan’s engineering skills to fit the futon in his civic, but fit it we did, doing our best to keep the mattress getting too wet in the semi-pouring rain. it took my interior decorating skills to rearrange the room to make sufficient space for a new object. for those of you who have never visited my room….it’s hard to explain how much stuff we have…appliances, giant mackie speakers, guitars, sound equipment, beds, desks, wardrobes, boxes of food and drink, trash cans, boxes of old clothes….it took a lot of work to fit a 15sq. foot futon in amidst all the clutter. but fit it we did, with some rearranging.

it’s also hard to explain what a difference a futon makes. it’s absolutely beautiful to be able to sit somewhere besides a hard wooden desk chair. and my bed is lofted so high sitting on my bed is out of the question.

wednesday was also an interesting day…i made it to all my classes with a far amount of work done for each. then, i got word that i was invited to dinner at 4:30 at il fornaio’s, a nice italian restaurant in palo alto. see, i was on a team with campus crusade that put together a lecture by dr. henry schaefer (scheduled for last night). i personally did stuff like design the flyer, and give general wise advice (this last task was self-appointed, obviously). so, the whole team was invited to dinner with the doctor before the lecture. it was pretty cool to eat with a world-renowned chemical physicist. i asked him questions about stuff, like, what the heck is quantum chemistry.

he learned that i was a philosophy major, and because of that i later got mention in his lecture….(“now here’s some philosophy, which may be a little strange in this talk, but i’m sure a young fellow i ate dinner with this evening is very glad we’re talking about some philosophy..”) that sort of thing.

the talk was good–he had wonderful presentation. my only disappointment was that he seemed to not track with some of the questions that people asked. i know that he knew the answers, but more often than not he answered a question that wasn’t precisely what had been asked. oh well. you know those smart science nerd types…

i just pray that it will generate discussion about god and spiritual things!

after the talk i went back to my room to work on modal logic, and then realized that i didn’t know how to do any of the problems in the problem set. so i sat back and did some metaclass thinking, and came to the conclusion that my foundation for logic, which was only barely there in 160a (due to skipping 159), was too weak to sustain me with anything more than a b- in modal logic. i figured that there was no outstanding reason why i’d want to punish myself in this way, and decided that i should drop the class.

i’ll take 159 in the fall, and then get back to modal logic next year sometime, hopefully. if not, it doesn’t even matter…i mean, it could be that i’m just not as interested in logic as i thought i was.

in any case i now have only 12 units–the bare minimum–and three of them are pass/fail. which means that my quarter should be significantly easier, and allow more time for lots of fun and productive activities.

in celebration of this i slept until lunch today, and i’m now at work reading lysias. life is good!

minidisc on spin: control | pedro the lion

yesterday i went to church, tried to think about god and not all the pretty girls (which was successful, in my opinion), then ate lunch. i lazed around thinking that i should do work for awhile, but didn’t have the heart. so i put on my running shoes and went out for a run around campus drive, to see if i could beat my previous record. at first i thought i wouldn’t be able to, because there was a very strong wind (we’re talking 20-30mph fairly sustained). but, i just ran faster…about 3.5 miles in, i started to flag. at that point i thought to myself, you know, you’re such a wuss, you always stop if it hurts to much. remember that 5k you did last year? you had to walk for a few seconds…and that’s weak. keep running…what’s the worst that could happen? it’s all mental…so i kept saying these things and i finished. not strong, i don’t think, but i finished, and i ended up beating my previous record by exactly a minute. which is 15 seconds per mile for 4 miles faster…not horrible.

then i went to santa cruz with alex polk, ryan moore, and chris haughey. i thought it would be as hot at the beach as at stanford (felt like about 200 degrees while i was running), but boy was i wrong. as soon as we crossed the mountains, there was continuous cloud cover, gale-force winds, and sub-60 degree temperatures. i had to borrow one of ryan’s shirts so i wouldn’t die. i snapped some pretty cool photos of the shoreline cliffs, though, so it was worth it. we also went to this little bakery in an old town and got fresh, hot artichoke french bread. mmmm. then we went to another beach, where there was a supposed ‘secret cove’. we started walking along the cliffs to where there was this supposed ‘rope’ that we could climb down the cliffs with to the cove.

on the way we looked down to the beach, and there was a naked man. he was walking around the beach…now standing by the water, now walking back and forth. he didn’t seemed ashamed of the fact that he was naked, even with other people and families on the beach.

walking along the cliffline in the gusty wind was a little scary but fun, and soon we came to the rope, which we climbed down, and got to a rocky cove where the water came in with crashes and whirlpools. we jumped from rock to rock and stood on ancient ground jutting out…barely part of the continent. still, it was cold, and after exploring around, we made the long trek back to the car. we drove 15 or 20 minutes into santa cruz and got a bite to eat before going to santa cruz bible church for a sunday evening college service. the worship there was excellent, and i found myself singing freely as it’s so hard to do sometimes…but i confess that the talk annoyed me. i don’t even remember what it was now…i think i put it out of my mind.

sadly, it was 10 before we even left the church, and i’d put off all my work since the previous thursday. it hung like an oppressive pall of mirk over my soul…i had so much to do by today there was no way i’d ever get it done, after the hour drive back. i was becoming fragmented and blurred…simultaneously distressed and ambivalent….distressed enough to worry and fret, but ambivalent enough to procrastinate. and that’s what i did. eventually i got a little bit of my greek done–maybe 15% of the work required for today. i didn’t do any of my spanish or philosophy. i was just too pathetically unmotivated. still, i did something until 2am, but it wasn’t work.

today was pretty bad…i was completely unprepared for my greek, had a rotten and unhealthy lunch doing a spanish essay that wasn’t even due (and of course something else was that i hadn’t done), and finally i fell completely asleep in the back row of phil 102. then i went home and slept some more, until 5, when i was supposed to have section for modal logic. i got on my bike and went to west campus, and realized i didn’t even know where the building was that i was trying to find. who has section at CSLI anyway…so i rode around, remembering that i’d seen it on my run yesterday. i ended up passing it without knowing it, riding for about 15 minutes, then actually finding it half an hour after section started. i was so fed up with the whole business (and the strong winds which made it a herculean task to bicycle around), i went home.

bible study was at 6:45 and i wasn’t excited about it at all. i felt like i’d had a pathetic day and gotten nothing done, and the last thing i needed to do was spend more time being ‘unproductive’. of course, i knew that going to bible study was, especially considering my feelings, the most productive thing i could do…i just didn’t want to admit it. but i went and decided that i really hadn’t been letting the spirit into my life at all recently…and i needed to give up my plans and my control (which i could see, based on today, were ultra-sucky). i came back at 9pm encouraged.

i spent the rest of the night cleaning and reorganizing my room. it was really a mess–the floor was horribly covered with popcorn kernels, jelly beans, crushed chex mix, bottles, weights, guitars, overflowing trash cans, backpacks, climbing gear, sound equipment, and whatever else…i felt suffocated. but the suffocation was worse than that–the insides of my desk were also dirty…each drawer sloppy and disarrayed.

i think that i am closely tied to the state of my room, because, after spending a few hours cleaning out my desk i felt as if it were my soul that had just received a good scrubbing. and i felt that, when i rigged up a cardboard platform suspended by strips of leather cut from an old belt upon which i placed a set of 4 speakers to make more room on my desk, it was my spirits that were lifted. finally, i carted the full load of dirty clothes off to the laundry, and while they were churning happily i vacuumed the room. immediately afterwards i felt such a sense of peace i knew everything would be ok. the day may have sucked, school may be going down the drain, but at least my room is clean and my soul is in order!

now it’s 2:30 am and dan is asleep. i’m waiting for my clothes to finish their cycle in the dryer so that i can put them away and go to bed. i didn’t actually do any work today either, and i know it will catch up to me soon. but i feel more prepared to deal with it now.

listening to: my long-windedness

so let’s get the dumb obligatory i’m-in-college school news out of the way: i did my first modal logic problem set, and it was a much different experience than predicate logic…lots more little drawings and figures, which i tend to like better. class on thursday taxed me seriously, though–we’re talking about the complexity of a given task in the modal language, measured in P, NP, PSPACE, NPSPACE, EXP, etc… it’s all very weird and i think the next homework might kick my butt unless i do the whole take it by the horns and jump on it and hit its butt thing again.

what else have i done in the past few days? wednesday was crusade, then i studied at the copo until late, and cv was there a while. thursday i worked and went climbing and started on my paper, “the enaselvai language”. see, today i went to a “conference” (in quotes) for people who make constructed languages (conlangs). i thought on thursday, if i’m going to go to this conference, i’d better have something written down about enaselvai, or it won’t be very interesting and we might just sit around wondering what to talk about. so i spent a lot of time thursday writing the history of the language, and even some preliminary grammar.

friday i spent a lot of time on it…much more than i meant to. only half-way through the project did i realize what a daunting task it actually was to set down all the grammatical / syntactical / phonological / morphological features of even an extremely basic, invented language. but, i’d already started it, and i didn’t want to not finish it by saturday, so i stayed up until 3am working on it. i took a break for a few hours to go watch life is beautiful at the history corner with a bunch of cornerstone people. i hadn’t ever seen the movie before, and i thought it was great! intelligent writing, humorous yet sympathetic, pretty yet not shallow, and saddening and thought-provoking. i usually don’t like movies in its general genre, but i was very happy that i saw it!

today is/was saturday. i woke up at 10 and printed out a few copies of my paper to take to the conference, and then i hopped on my bike to catch the 11:30 caltrain to san francisco.

may i just say that the trains sucked today. i rode like the fashion police was after me (my trendy nalgene bottle dangling from my backpack only barely keeping them from devouring me), because i thought i was going to be late. i pulled into the station just in time, and waited….and waited…and waited. the freaking train was half an hour late. these kinds of delays are not good, because i had to switch to two completely different train systems to get to berkeley, and i was supposed to be there at 1:30.

my original plan was to leave palo alto caltrain at 11:30, putting me into sf at 12:30. i figured 30 minutes to take the MUNI to the BART at embarcadero, and then another 30 from there to berkeley. that made it right at 1:30, not to mention however long it took me to walk after that.

the caltrain being late put me into sf at 1:10. i got on a MUNI right away, but in the course of our journey we stopped and our driver had lunch (he said we were ’early’). maybe he was early but i sure wasn’t. i didn’t even get on a train to berkeley until after 1:30. the short of it is that i was an hour and a half late. stupid trains.

it turned out there were only two other people there–the guy hosting it and his friend (who, oddly enough, i had met on the internet in junior high / early high school, and not talked to since then. and here he shows up in person). so we walked to an outdoors cafe and sat and baked in the sun and talked about invented languages. the guys were pretty cool–not nearly as dorky as i thought they would be, and both big radiohead fans. we went through enaselvai, and they seemed impressed by the presentation, if not the language itself. they’re both linguistics majors, so i learned a lot of new terminology and concepts. lastly, we went to a classroom and used the chalkboard to make up a new language together. we made up a phonology, case system (involving a new invention of mine–the “attitude” system), verb tenses, etc… it was a VOS ergative-absolutive language, and it was the weirdest thing any of us had ever created. but it was fun.

i left berkeley at 6:30, and due to more train stupidity, arrived back at stanford at 9:30. more out of habit than hope, i went to the mailbox to check for control, the new pedro the lion album that i have been looking for in the mail [extremely impatiently] for a week now. you have to understand, there is absolutely nothing like a new pedro album. i don’t think i’ve ever looked forward to an album this much, period. so i let out a whoop of joy and utter delight when i saw, crammed unassumingly in my mailbox, a manilla package from jadetree.com.

i held it over my head and said the incantation: “GENTLEMEN, I HAVE ACHIEVED CONTROL. YOU MAY PROCEED WITH THE PLAN.” well, not really, but i thought about saying it.

back in the room dan and i invited serena and shannon over again and we hung out for a while and watched a bit of monty python. then the girls left so we shut off the movie and dan and i had a control listening party (dan bought the cd too). i layed on the floor and let the album soak in, playing it nonstop from beginning to end. it’s amazing. you can’t hold pedro back–he just goes to the edge (and sometimes over it in terms of what is socially acceptable…but i love it because it’s done so well).

now i need to sleep so i can go to church tomorrow, and then down to santa cruz for some beach time. somewhere i’ll have to fit in some homework.

virtual disc on spin: ok computer | radiohead

verbatim. so everyone turns to me expectantly, and more than a bit curiously. dan of course is referring to hanging out with serena, but no one else knows that. i try to forestall visions of illicit goings-on, but it’s too late.

at least it was funny.

i went to all of my classes yesterday, and actually enjoyed it. i enjoyed the feeling of not wondering if i was behind or missing something important. i also enjoyed the feeling of doing work in my room, and knowing that i was making some sort of progress on a definable scale. i haven’t felt that in a long time (mostly because of the not doing work thing).

i was part of a psychology study for .5 hrs yesterday, for $7. i do them every once in a while, because it’s easy quick money and i get a kick out of trying to outsmart the study and screw with the results.

on top of school and all that, i had a small victory at the wall last night–i finally conquered the 6 i’ve been working on for a month or so…the first 6 i’ve done! it was great to feel strong, and to feel like i’d improved. now for the next plateau…

in other news, i’ve decided to kick modal logic’s butt. i let first-order logic rule me, but no more of that pacifist crap–i’m taking this class by the horns and…what, then, i don’t know…maybe doing that cowboy trick of flipping over the horns and landing backwards on the beast then slapping its butt to make it go. first problem set due thursday, so i’d better start on it.

to continue with school updates, we’ve started reading lysias’ orationes III in greek. in the class, and the language, i mean. ancient greek is really hard, i realized, after going back to taking a conversational spanish class. spanish is so easy–you can many times translate word-for-word and have it make sense. translating greek is like finding pieces of a puzzle all over a paragraph, linking up different words that are in no spatial relation to each other, using different obscure rules and constructions to equate these to dramatically different constructions in english, then trying to make sense of each phrase with respect to the others around it.

now to read 40 more pages of objections and replies to descartes’ mediations on first philosophy. if you’ve never read it, you really should. the mediations themselves can’t be more than 40-50 pages, and they more or less defined the problems in philosophy that we’re still thinking about today.

virtual disc on spin: when the world sings | fine china

it was a long week, but good. i’m going to end up taking all the classes i signed up for.

on friday i played at stanford’s art affair. it was quite a big production this year: two big stages, one open-air and one in a tent. every artist only had 15 minutes to play, there were so many performers. i played in the tent stage at 4:25, after hanging around and listening to friends and other random people play their sets.

maybe this is bad, but i’ll be honest: i don’t like most of the music we have at stanford. i love the fact that we have music, and i’m always supportive of people playing at art affair, or the coho, or whatever. but i don’t like the music. there are exceptions–i have some friends that play occasionally, and i think they have talent and potential (i include myself in this group since i’m the arbiter of my own opinions). but anyway, that’s my opinion.

i felt my show went well–i played solitary spaces (with a cool new surprise intro simply because the song is my most repetitive and overplayed), a pixelated life, and my new song rainfall: monologue. as i was playing some people came in from outside the tent to listen to me, and that made me feel pretty cool. more importantly, tons of my friends came out to see me, and gave support, which always makes me feel like a rockstar.

i hung around art affair for the rest of the evening (after an interesting time where i was locked out of my room) and soaked in the atmosphere, which was very … joyful… and a little reminiscent of a music fest. i sat around and talked to friends and just hung out, which i haven’t really been in the habit of doing at stanford. it was a nice change, and i plan on hanging out with friends much more often.

i stayed up late playing empire earth with eric, kicking some assyrian ass (that’s a joke). empire earth’s a computer game where you control lots of little fighting guys and make buildings and walls and stuff, and try to destroy the bad guy. and we destroyed him with elephants and archers and catapults and lots of horseys.

saturday dan and i woke up about midday, ate, and then drove up to castle rock. it’s about an hour drive. we spent the entire day climbing rock routes in a place known as the underworld in castle rock state park. first we set up an anchor on a slopey 5.8 route. climbing routes are rated 5.1-5.14c, i think. dan’s a climbing master, so he did it really fast, and i followed a little slower. then we met up with some other climbers who were working on a rock called ’the gods’. there i cranked out my first 5.10a and 5.10b. it felt really good to know that i’d improved since the last time i was out there.

if you only go to climbing gyms or fake walls, you never really get the feel of real rock underneath your hands. it’s completely different. at first i thought i would never like it. i thought i would prefer the certainty of the wall–easily defined holds on a rational grid of bolt holes. but i found that i really liked the feel of the rock, the various holds you could get in a few square inches, and the way the shoes can stick to virtually anything.

on our way back from castle rock we passed REI, so we stopped and i succumbed to the trend and bought one of those indestructible nalgene water bottles. i will now fit in if i ever go up to an oregon college campus.

dan and i thought it would be a good idea to hang out with some girls saturday night, since we’d never really done that here. sadly, we were at a complete loss of who we could even hang out with (we’re pretty new at it, you see). eventually we called serena and shannon, friends from cornerstone. shannon was gone but serena came over and we hung out in our room and talked and played guitar and spilled popcorn over the floor and made fun of www.getsigned.com. and we didn’t watch a movie – a rarity among college students, i’m sure. all in all, a fun if at-times-weird night.

today i slept through church due to the time change and tiredness, then spent all afternoon recording pedro the lion covers. i’m working on a 5-song pedro the lion cover cd. i recorded and mixed and mastered three of the songs today, which was quite phenomenal, since it’s a lot of work. i’ll put the mp3s up here sooner or later for download.

now i’m on my way to a passover seder that cornerstone is having….if you’re paying attention you’ll notice that this will be my second one of the year. strange, yes, but free food is good, and there’s no reason i can’t take some more time to think about the meaning of passover and all that.

i just hope the upcoming week doesn’t suck! i forgot to do all my homework this weekend. uh oh.

virtual disc on spin: when we were small | rosie thomas

one day of classes is done. a billion more to go. i think i’ll like them–the classes–they seem fun. especially my conversational spanish class. i can’t wait to regain some lost skills in that area.

i’m a little too lazy to give the play-by-play for the day, so we’ll just say that it was a day of errands. running here and there, buying this, paying off that bill, going to this class, etc…crusade was switched to wednesday, so we had that tonight, followed by root beer floats and beav’s apartment. now i’m sitting at with my desk, wondering what to do for the rest of the night. here are the options:

1. try and do some make up work for my class tomorrow (i missed the first day yesterday)

2. play empire earth with eric

3. start reading ‘a brief history of time’ which i got tonight.

4. sleep

(1) & (4) are probably the wisest, but i don’t even know how to do (1), and (4) is wussy. i know what i’ll do–all of them. no reason i can’t.

take a look at my dates list–it’s pretty full! didn’t realize spring quarter would be so busy.

also take a look at my CD wishlist. you can feel free to get me those CDs at any time.

virtual disc on spin: relocation | plankeye

THE LAST AND FINAL EPISODE.

(the continuation of part IV)

though it was painful, i did get up in time for church on sunday. my grandma was in town, as you know, and my aunt linda (my dad’s sister) and her new fiance had driven up from west palm the day before. so with the three of them my family went to the 9:30am service. the message was fantastic–it was the first time i’d heard a pastor attempt an apologetic approach to an easter sermon that a) made any sense and b) didn’t leave my philosophical nature unsatisfied or questioning or accusing. my level of respect for my pastor rose accordingly.

then the traditions: half an hour (read: an eternity) of trying to take family pictures in our nice clothes. in florida, this just means pants other than jeans and a shirt with some kind of buttons on it. after pictures, lunch: the toast to the pre-newlyweds, the toast to our grandmother, the toast to family, and the toast to god for uncountably many blessings. then the roast beast, marvelously prepared, with the appropriate side entrees, followed by key lime pie. we had a good lunch, and a long lunch, since it was family time and nobody was rushing anywhere.

after the meal and the talking, we went our separate ways for the evening. i dubbed lord of the rings from divx to vhs for my family. i cleaned pine needles out of the gutter. i got a call from emily. it was shortly after the extended family had left for home in west palm, and shortly before the pine needles. talking to her was both good and bad–or should i say, both good and unpleasant. good because i know it’s good to keep communication open and in place. unpleasant because it’s the first time we’ve really talked since breaking up a few days ago, and she’s still hurt by my decision, and i’m not sensitive or wise enough to know what to say or how to act. a recipe for tension and awkwardness, certainly. but a step in the direction of keeping a friendship, more importantly.

i went running with david again. this time we did 2.5 miles in about 16.5 minutes. that’s averaging about a 6:50 mile–and for me, running even one mile under 7:00 is great! i’m just hoping that i’ll keep up running two or three times a week at school. i can see it being really good for me in both the short and long runs.

i ended the evening watching ’the saint’, the one with val kilmer, with my family. it’s a pretty good movie.

i fell out of bed before noon today, which was quite nice. i did some work on the computer, took a shower, and ate breakfast before going to pick up my sister from school at 2:10. they start school at 7:45 and get out at 2:10. can you believe that? i remember high school as being from 7:50-2:50. they have 35 minutes less per day than i did! if you go to school 180 days out of the year, that’s 6300 minutes!! equals 105 hours equals 4.4 days! it’s like an extra spring break. no fair. anyway i took rach to panera to hang out for a bit, since i didn’t get to see her too much when i was home. mark was working and he hooked us up with some extra free food, cool right. so rachel and i talked a bit, then went to target to take back my luggage, which had broken on the trip to england. they wouldn’t let me, but i reasoned with the manager and finally they let me just take a new set home.

i got home between 4 and 5 and started working on a poster design for the dr. henry schaefer lecture that campus crusade at stanford is sponsoring. he’s a world-renowned quantum chemist sort of guy, apparently very famous and even a nobel prize nominee. he will talk about stephen hawking and the big bang and god: sciency stuff. i’m definitely looking forward to it. i drafted up a couple of poster designs and sent them off to be reviewed. i also worked on the blog design a bit, and did a little javascript programming to produce a random image which appears to the right. i got 45 pictures taken mostly by myself, and a few friends, to form a pool from which one is randomly selected every time someone views the page. it was fun to figure out, and i was proud of myself for actually making the script on my own instead of just copying someone else’s (the idea of course isn’t novel). hopefully it’ll make it a bit more interesting to visit, as well!

then dave and i got mark from his apartment and he drove us to aiguille, the climbing gym. we were there from about 7-10pm again. the second time around was slightly better than the first–i was able to re-nail all the routes i’d gotten previously, and even finish a few more difficult ones. i noticed that the style of routes that they tended to set up was quite different from the ones that they have at the stanford gym. can’t quite put my finger on a reason, but they felt different. the design of the holds themselves was not the same, for one thing.

on the way back, about 10:20pm, mark got word from his roommates via my brother’s cell that some girl friends of theirs had played a prank on them and stuck oreo cookies to their doors, along with large men’s underwear and powdered sugar which they leaf-blowed under doors and into rooms (incidentally, this set off the fire alarm). needless to say, mark and his roommates were suitably pissed. he vowed that he would get them back, and so asked me if i could help plan something.

i would rarely play a prank on someone, but if i am tricked or toilet papered or my property is messed up in any way, i’m more than willing to hit back harder. i felt this vicariously through mark, so i was happy to help. the girls were still at the apartment hanging out (thinking that they’d had the last trick, and one of them was mark’s roommate’s girlfriend). knowing this, we came up with the idea of going to the visitor parking lot, jacking up the girls’ cars, and taking one tire from each and hiding them. then we’d make them clean up the oreo/sugar mess they’d made before getting their tires back. as a little whipped cream, we’d get those big round pool floaty things and put them as mock tires in the place of the old ones.

so we stopped at publix and winn dixie to look for the necessary gear. publix was closed and winn dixie didn’t have pool flotation devices. oh well, so we wouldn’t have fake tires–the plan would still work. we went to the apartment complex and found their cars in the visitor lot. using a jack we lifted one car up a bit, and tried to take off the hubcap. and the stupid thing wouldn’t come off–no matter how hard we pulled and no matter what we hit, it didn’t come off. it was a very weird hubcap. no matter, we thought, there’s still one car left. so we moved to the next vehicle, and, lo and behold, mark’s tire wrench was the wrong size for the lugnuts. two strikes and we were out.

until i came up with another idea–the girls were still in the apartment, right? like girls, they would never keep keys or change or anything in pockets, close at hand. no, things like keys would be in purses or bags, which would be lying around the apartment, or on the table or something. i figured we could palm their keys as long as their attention was sufficiently diverted. then dave and i would say we had to go, and mark would come out with us to say goodbye. we’d bid the ladies and mark’s roommates adieu, and be off to the visitor lot and the girls’ cars. we could move them to some other obscure place in the lot where the girls would never look, and, to be extra crafty, pop open the hoods and take one of the battery leads off. if you didn’t guess, this would render the cars safely (and easily fixably) inoperable and unstartable.

so, the girls would come out, have half a heart attack when they saw that their cars were missing, run frantically around until they spotted a glimmer of a blue shine from the other end of the lot, and exult in the discovery of their ‘stolen’ vehicles! wondering why/how they were moved, but thankful that they were found at least, they would take their keys (which mark upon returning would have reinserted stealthily into their purses) and try to start the cars. but no, they would only hear a sputter and maybe a whine as nothing happened. and then (at least this is one way we envisioned it) mark et al would tell them the price for fixing the cars–cleaning up the mess they’d made of their apartment! the girls would have no choice but to bow before the superiority of the guys’ april fools’ counter-prank. muhahaha.

a grand scheme, and everything went according to plan, though diverting their attention and sorting through purses quietly and invisibly while the girls were in the same room proved to be a challenge. one which we overcame, and so out to the parking lot. we moved the cars easily enough, lifted the hood, and…crap. the leads are connected with nuts, and all we have are our bare hands. how could we possibly get the battery unhooked? i came up with the idea of calling dave, one of mark’s roommates, and giving him the following story: our car was having trouble and could he possibly bring out a toolbox so that we could bang around a bit and maybe get it started? dave was in on it, obviously, but the story worked great for explaining to the girls why he was walking out the door at 12am with a toolbox. with the required tools, we unhooked the batteries, tested to see that the cars really didn’t work, shut the hoods, and gave the keys to mark. dave and i dropped dave and mark back off at the apartment for the last part of the mission, and wished them good luck.

at this point i can only speculate as to how exactly the whole thing turned out, and if it worked exactly as planned. i’m at home now and it’s been an hour and a half. the fireworks, if there were any, have already happened.

anyway, it was a fun little diversion, and an interesting capstone to the break. in a little over 12 hours (most of which will be sleep, of course) i’ll be going to the airport for the flight to LAX, and then a quick hop up to SJC. hopefully someone will be able to pick me up. if you’d like to volunteer, feel free to e-mail me and let me know!

i don’t know if i’m looking forward to school, but ready or not, it’s starting again, so i’d better get prepared. thank you god for a week off, even if it was more interesting than i really wanted it to be, and maybe a little bit less relaxing. and i pray this next quarter will be better than the last!

(the continuation of part III)

the next few days had that peculiar quality some days have – agonizingly slow and boring and yet somehow able to fly by quickly. on tuesday i worked 8-5 at the wycliffe bible translators headquarters, which is where my parents work. i was a temporary employee of the MIS (some abstruse abbreviation for “all things technological”) department. i ran around the office building setting up computers, fixing problems, answering the computer help desk phone (“did you reboot?….oh..it works now?…good…you’re welcome….bye”), and writing blog entries.

it wasn’t the most exciting job, but it was more exciting than a host of other jobs i could have had, and it was perfect for a three-day stint.

that day after work our family celebrated passover. we had a quasi-authentic passover seder at our house, with a few other families (and mark) in attendance. i say quasi because while we followed the general format of the jewish passover, it was very christian, and recognized jesus as the messiah who has already come. so we had no pretentions of being jewish, but felt that it was a good way to commemorate and remember god’s goodness to his people, and see how the promises of the passover were fulfilled in christ.

later on dave and i watched the new planet of the apes. i hadn’t ever seen the original or heard anything about the movie, so it was kind of a shock to see that the whole movie was actually part of a propagandic agenda. it was fun to keep a tally of all the holes in the analogy. in the end i decided that the story related so little to the reverse scenario it was trying to caricature that the film was what we call in philosophy a ‘straw man’ argument. it was fun to watch apes fly around though.

the next day i was up before 7am again (i hate day jobs), and was at work until 5. i hung around the house that night. i think maybe i even took a nap. sweet. i ended up just sitting in the hot tub late into the evening, doing some “light reading” (a not-for-school philosophy book). my mom was an angel and showed me how to make a good smoothie to drink in the spa. eventually my dad and my brother even joined me, and we shared a cohiba, a nice cuban cigar my dad had. i think i don’t remember anything after that because i’d reached that point of relaxation where even my membranes (the things in your head that remember stuff) were too relaxed to do anything.

i was half an hour late to work on thursday because of traffic. my boss didn’t seem to care too much. last day for me, after all. a guy named shawn peterson, who’s the youth pastor at my church came to have lunch with me at the office. he wanted to see the new building, and talk to me about maybe doing some work with the youth group during the summer. he had some pretty exciting ideas about how i could get involved and help the high school kids grow, through worship and even some philosophical [apologetic] teaching/training. i feel like that would be a pretty fun thing to do, on top of being a good focus for extra time and energy.

after work i felt like i hadn’t done anything all day, so i went running. i did 2 miles in about 17 minutes. which isn’t bad, but not great compared to a lot of my friends. i think my roommate could run 4 miles in that amount of time. then dave and i went over to mark’s apartment and sat around and did nothing. mark’s roommate dave ahrens had a cs problem he wanted help on, but all the ways i could think of to do it involved boolean functions or pointers, neither of which he knew anything about. so i told him good luck and let him be.then mark fell asleep and dave (my brother this time) watched rush hour 2. it wasn’t horrible.

friday, being good friday, i had off work. i woke up late, bummed around a bit, then went shopping. first i went to panera for lunch, and ran into mark, who i was hoping could hook me up with free food. his manager was right there so he couldn’t, but he gave me a free drink. then i ran into a girl who works for my mom, that i went to honduras with last summer on a mission trip. she invited me to eat with her and her friend, and we had a nice lunch talking almost entirely in spanish. it felt good to use some of those spanish muscles that have been a little atrophied.

i got some random junk at target, some sandals at a shoe place, and a dvd for my dad at best buy. i deposited some checks at the bank, and then i was home. dave and i went running together, and did 2.5 miles in 17.5 minutes. i had improved since the previous day, and i felt good about that.

friday night was sweet–dave and rach and i called a bunch of friends over to have a time of worship. this is something we tend to do when a lot of the college folk are back in town, and it’s always really good. it was supposed to start at 9, so of course everyone showed up around 11, and we got started. i played and sang my heart out to god until 2 am. jason killingsworth played along. everyone sang, or prayed, or walked around, or just sat there, or even fell asleep. the last hour or so was just jason and nyffy and i, with a couple people who had fallen asleep on the couches and were dreaming peacefully. now that’s what i call awesome – worshiping to the point of exhaustion and sleep.

saturday we went to the beach. me, dave, jordan peterson, nate akers, hannah roberts & family, and hannah’s friend thais, who’s from brazil.

i’ll have you know, i love the beach. i love the sand, the sun (or the clouds or rain, whichever is there), the wind, the sound of the water, the bass of the surf in my stomach. oddly enough i don’t like being in the water very much–the undulating and the salt water which i inevitably drink too much of make me sick. but i love the beach.

we had a great time sitting around, boogie-boarding, playing sand soccer, and whatever else. and we enjoyed nice conversation on the car rides to and fro–most of which centered around cultural discussions with thais, since it’s not every day you get to hang out with someone who’s from another country. well, i suppose it happens all the time at stanford, but you know what i mean.

we drove 80mph with the windows down, the sun crashing through the windshield, making us all look cool, as if we were in a movie. it was good for my soul.

everyone got home more or less at 6. i wandered around the house for a bit, then prepared for “masculinity in togetherness–togetherness in masculinity” night. (that’s just the name i made up for it now, it’s not like it was premeditated or anything. geez). dave and i drove to pick up chris. then all three of us drove to albertsons to pick up some nice stogies. we went to the killingsworth’s. jason was there, and so was trey. other dudes showed up and left as the night wore on. we smoked cloves, stogies, pipes, and [that’s really it but i’m going to add this for effect and for samuel] any other carcinogen-bearing object that existed, exists, or will exist. we tried to sit in their hot tub but there was no propane. so we gathered around and let our testosterone carry us on, soothing tired feet and healing mud-stained hearts.

we watched bottle rocket. it was an excellent movie, and on my “movies to see to be cool” list. double bonus.

and that was it. jason started the drive to gainesville, and dave and i wearily drove home, daring ourselves to wake up in the requisite 6 hours for easter sunday church.

for me, awake in the midnight watch hours, it already was easter. i stood in the shower and thanked god that jesus did not rot in the grave, but was made alive. and i thanked god for the promise that i am, with jesus, an heir to that life. happy easter.

(the continuation of part II)

the drive home from gainesville was nice and easy–i just stopped once for gas on the turnpike. i made it home before 10. my parents and sister and grandma (who’s in town for a few weeks) were already winding down and getting ready for bed, but my body was so confused by the highly erratic sleep schedule i’d been leading it on, that i wasn’t tired. i heated up some cold leftover dinner and sat down to watch a movie brainlessly. i watched ’the last castle’, which, while not spectacularly philosophical or artistic, was fun and had that cool ingenuity-and-trickiness-in-planning-for-fighting aspect.

sooner or later i stumbled into my bed, and got up at 8. the family went out to breakfast at toojay’s for some together time before church. mostly we just talked about colleges (david and rachel are graduating soon), cars, and plans for the future. the hostess kept staring at me, and it was a little uncomfortable. i couldn’t tell whether it was a “you’re cute” stare or a “you’re funny looking” stare. but we got out soon and made our way to church. our pastor’s a pretty awesome guy–smart, interesting to listen to, has solid and engaging perspectives…so i’d say that it’s only because i was falling asleep due to heat and tiredness that i forgot what the sermon was.

dave and i drove home in the vette and went immediately to bed. more naps to screw with my system. my dad woke me up around 3 and informed me that i needed to wash the jeep, since it had gotten dirty on the trip to gainesville. i didn’t argue too much about it, which was a rarity. emily had called so i called her back and we decided that we should talk the next day, since we hadn’t for a while, and since i had a lot of stuff on my mind. so i washed the jeep, then mark rogers came over and dave and i ate a quick dinner and hopped in mark’s car. we drove downtown to “the social”, formerly “the sapphire”, formerly “the sapphire supper club”. doors opened there at 6 for a denison marrs / twothirtyeight show. we got in relatively near to the front and grabbed one of the few tables. the show started punctually (another rarity) at 7 with the opening act–sound the alarm. all right, a little like my hotel year…too pop punk to be enjoyable for long.

i’d brought my minidisc player and new sony ecm-ms957 mic to try and record the show, and see if i could get a decent recording at all. i tested it out on sound the alarm, and, satisfied, i kept everything hidden nicely in my bag which was sitting (nonchalantly) half-open on the table. 238 was on next, and put on a very tight show with super-clean guitarwork and some tricky lead guitar duets. denison marrs rocked the house with their hard/space/emo/80s set, and once again impressed me very much.

we were out of the club and in the car by 9pm–virtually unheard of for a show. must be new management at the social. i listened to the recording in the car on the way back, and was blown away by the quality–it sounded better than it did live! mostly because live, my ears were ringing so much that it was hard to distinguish different sounds. mark dropped dave and i off at our house, and i spent the rest of the night e-mailing and blogging. i don’t remember when i finally went to bed.

but i remember when i woke up–noon, 3.25. or maybe it was 1. i ate breakfast, showered, and did my daily devotions. i prayed about my phone call to emily, because i didn’t know what would happen. i knew i had to tell her what i’d been thinking about our relationship, and what the posse and i had discussed, and i knew i had to trust that god would let us make the right decision. i just prayed that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be just one of us making the decision.

i called her around two. and everything fell out. everything that i’d been thinking about, praying about, wondering about, confused about–it all fell in a gnarled mess from my mouth, between nose-blowings (i was still sick, remember) and involuntary silences wherein i tried not to cry. i told her where i thought we were, where i thought god had led us, and why i thought it couldn’t continue in the way it had been. then i did cry, and i cried a lot. for memories and deflated hopes and an unknown future. also for relief–for the doing of something that had been a long time in coming, but invisibly and painfully so. she sat there and wondered why she’d ever trusted me with her feelings, her deep thoughts, and her heart. even though i know she could see it coming. and i’d given her ample opportunity to get out, but she’d stuck by me faithfully and loyally. now she wishes she hadn’t.

i felt like the lowliest jerk in the world, like i’d just stabbed my best friend in the back. we both cried and she said things, and i took them and didn’t deny them, and hoped that we could stay friends. i think we can. then i prayed for us, and thanked god for the relationship that we had shared, and the encouragement and love that was there. and i prayed that we could still have that without the romantic aspect of the relationship. then we hung up, and i prayed for my friend, because i knew she was hurt.

11 months was a long time. i learned a lot, messed up a lot, and hopefully did some good things every once in a while. and now it’s over. but i wouldn’t have traded it for anything else! it’s sad, but in a way i get excited about the sudden unknown–who knows where god will lead us now. wherever it is, i’m sure it will rock. and emily, thank you.

i didn’t have too much time to think about it then, though, because i had to detail the inside of my grandma’s car in 3 hours. this includes: vacuuming carpets, spraying carpets, scrubbing carpets/mats, letting them dry, vacuuming them again, vacuuming seats, washing seats, cleaning seats, leather-sealing seats, washing vinyl, cleaning vinyl, armor-all sealing vinyl, and washing windows. i had to do it because i’d promised to do it that day, and i’d also promised to go rock climbing with dave at 6. so i worked fast, and hard, and did a good job (another rarity for me where cleaning cars is concerned). but i was getting paid, so i obviously had some incentive.

i finished the car, inhaled some dinner, and hopped in the vette with dave. we drove half an hour northwest to longwood, where aiguille, orlando’s climbing gym, is located. it’s a sweet gym, huge, with lots of routes. as we discovered, most of the routes are really hard. apparently they’d just had a national bouldering competition or something, so there weren’t a lot of easy problems to set. we took a few hours, though, and worked on some stuff that we thought we could handle, and it was a lot of fun. i’m glad i brought my climbing gear home.

the gym closed at 10 and we drove home. i got to bed reasonably early (since i was scheduled to work 8-5 the next day at my parents’ office) but couldn’t go to sleep. maybe it was because i’d slept so late, or maybe my mind just wouldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with emily, and the huge change that it had made in my life.

we’ll see where i go from there.

to be continued…

(the continuation of part I)

we left the story as i was beginning the drive to gainesville. man, i flew. normally a two-hour drive, i made it in just under 1:40. 84mph while eating tacos. i got to josh’s apartment a little before 9, and he was there, which was nice. we got back in my car and drove to UF to go to the crusade meeting. arriving over half an hour late, we casually walked in and sat in the back as the speaker taught. the message was standard–not too phenomenal–but the time of worship was real and sweet. and by sweet i mean totally awesome. by that time nate akers had come in too, even later than us, so it was good to have him there as well. we hung out after the meeting until late, probably 10:15 or so. then nate and josh and i went back to josh’s apartment to hang out. jason, josh’s brother, was back, and it was good to see him too. we sat in their room and played guitar for what seemed like hours.

then chris nyffeler and his girlfriend anne showed up, to my delight. more hang out time. josh’s girlfriend meghan came over too, rounding it off and completing the rocking party which we then had. but, rock wasn’t enough–we needed food. anne had to go home, but the rest of us sans jason (who was flirting with a girl on IM and so could not come) piled in my jeep and we were off. we stopped at checkers for food, and then–stogies. chris and i bought a punch (i.e. puncharello) cigar and some cloves to share, and josh and nate did the same. we dropped meghan off at her dorm, and then back to the apartment patio for stogie night.

stogie night was fantastically magical. surrounded by the quality guys that i was, the pleasant odor of burning leaf, and the sweet sounds of wise and sober words was like water to my thirsty soul. now i will quote from chris’ blog, because i feel it’s very accurate: “with stogies we figure out the world. and our world is girls.”

and this is exactly what we did. we talked and discussed and compared and felt and listened and understood. until 5am. then i fell asleep, glad in the company of brothers.

i awoke shortly after noon to a very weird comedy central show on tv. and to the blessed question, “do you want to go eat?”. josh, chris, paul copenhaver (who had come over), and i went to the gainesville alehouse. this is a standard hangout place for UF folks, but it was my first time there. more importantly, i lost my big red virginity, as josh and i shared one of the big spicy-chicken-and-ranch sandwiches. more than the sandwich, though, josh and i share the love of the sandwich, first expressed with the Chili’s chicken and ranch, and now in the big red. a beautiful time. we sat out on the patio and lit up some cloves after eating breakfast and dessert. paul and i argued about whether the simpson’s was a symbol of american greatness or not. we both agreed that if it was, america would be a sad place.

it was a beautiful day.

back to the apartment, and we donned swimsuits and went to the pool at In the Pines (the apartment complex). i read the bible and tried to get a tan on my chest and back, and dreamed about when it would be that sunny and gorgeous at stanford.

then it was time to go–josh, chris, and nate had a bible study leaders’ retreat to go to at a camp half an hour east, with crusade. i decided to tag along, hoping that the people who were running it wouldn’t mind that i didn’t actually go to UF. we picked up mike graham on the way, loaded our bellies with crappy mcdonalds fakeness, and shouted along with various tunes on chris’ compilation minidisc as we drove.

we got to the place, called something i’m now forgetting, and i met a good number of people before the retreat actually got underway. that night the speakers just gave a little background, and reasonings and motivations behind having bible discussion groups and whatnot. it went until about 10, and then everyone just hung out and played cards. i played euchre, and my partner lana and i lost badly to nate and a girl named kelly. sooner or later everyone drifted out, to the cabins where we were supposed to stay.

however, josh, chris, nate, and i didn’t leave–we hadn’t brought sleeping bags or pillows or anything, so we decided to just camp out in the meeting room. nate and chris settled down to talk, and josh and i took a walk to a basketball court, where we sat and talked and puffed on cheap cigars. well, mostly i talked. about emily, and all the stuff i’ve been thinking about her. see, josh had fallen asleep on stogie night so he hadn’t heard a lot of what we had been talking about concerning our girls.

we got back to the meeting room (the “fireside hall”–i bet every camp in the world has a “fireside hall”) and nate and chris were still awake. by this time it was at least 2am. and so we decided to make a fort. a secret fort, with battle plans and codenames and guns and mines and booby traps and barracks and swords. and smokestacks and food carts and pianos for scoring chicks. we made the fort. we played our parts as mr. hobble the disabled guard, junior mint, the ninja plumber, and falcor the librarian. we slept in the fort. and we froze our butts off, not realizing that the AC was on and all we had to do was turn it off.

we woke up at 7, tired and cold, and snuck into this place where there were lots of highschoolers, and stole hot chocolate from them. then the crusade folks came back for the day’s sessions, confused and a little bewildered by our fort. the rest of the day was a little hazy, because of the fatigue and the lack of being able to concentrate, but i remember that the talks were informative and interesting. i even took a group picture with everyone, and i’m sure they were like, “who is this guy?”

3pm, saturday, 3.23 came slowly, but come it did, and so 5 of us piled back into my car and drove back to gainesville, rocking along to hip-hop, john mayer, and cake. we stopped at chris’ dorm and watched a taped simpsons episode because we were too lethargic to do anything else. i said my goodbyes to chris and nate there, and josh and i drove back to his apartment alone. we shut the blinds in his room and fell asleep, he in his bed and i in jason’s, listening to a mandy moore cover of a switchfoot song.

i woke up at 6:30, groggy and hazy. i took my contacts out finally, and it felt like i was ripping my cornea off because they’d been stuck there by time, sleep, and eye boogers. josh cooked me up some nathan’s hot dogs, and then it was time to go. i had to go home, and he had a girlfriend to attend to. he hadn’t seen her in a little over a day, you remember! so i gathered my personal belongings and stumbled out to the car, trying to zone myself into a wakefulness fit for driving 2 hours. i waved goodbye to josh and left. when i made it to I-4 the clock read 7:30 and chris carabba was singing, “the moon is down, and heaven is waiting for us to find her in our sights”.

i looked, and the moon was still there, suspended and glowing, but small and far away.

to be continued…

not too long after my last post, i talked to emily on IM. apparently my attitude in the post was disappointing to her, because she thought i’d been doing better. i felt bad, but also defensive–i didn’t think that i was leading her on, or lying, or being false in any way. it was a rough conversation, and a bad way to start a trip, but i had to leave right after for the airport. truth be told, however, i certainly can’t lay any blame on emily for anything, and especially bad conversations. i’ve given her more than my fair share of hurt in the past few months, and i admire her perseverance. also, as she poignantly told me, i really just need to “get [my] act together”. she’s no doubt sick of the wavering, the unsureness, my ‘weird’ feelings, and whatever else. i’m sick of them too. and i wholeheartedly agreed then, and now, that i need to get my act together. thus, getting my act together is the theme of spring break. because, as emily and i both know, for me to ever make a decision about our relationship, it needs to be in a vacuum of other life doubts and problems, or i would forever wonder if it wasn’t one of them that needed to be fixed instead. we’ll find out if this is possible.

back to the story: right on time, at 11pm, my plane left san jose for chicago. i tried to sleep, but i started feeling a little too sick, with a little too much of the runny nose to sleep comfortably. i’m sure that it was staying up all night studying for my greek final which killed my immune system, and planes are notorious for spreading sickness. anyway, we got into o’hare at 4am local time. i was tired but couldn’t go to sleep for fear of being robbed in the airport. so, i walked around zombie-like until 5am, when mcdonald’s finally opened for breakfast. dying, i ate a ham/egg/cheese bagel thinking it was completely wonderful. i still think it is–those things are good.

then i walked to my gate and settled down to wait the 2+ hours until boarding. as it turned out, though, the plane was overbooked, and the gate agent called for volunteers who would be willing to fly on a flight 3 hours later. the reward for successfully volunteering: $500 in travel vouchers. i jumped up and made sure they put me on the list. when it was time for the plane to leave, they finalized the list and i was given the $500 voucher and a boarding pass for the flight at 10am.

tired but more than happy to have $500 for my troubles, i changed gates and settled down to wait another 3 hours in chicago. reading and listening to music helped pass the time. once again, my flight was overbooked, and they asked for volunteers, but i was feeling sicker and more tired by the minute, so i figured that at $500 i could safely call it a day and i boarded the plane. we got into orlando at 1pm and i was met by my mom and dad, who were coming home from work early.

i got home and unpacked my portable hard drive first thing, connecting it to my dad’s computer. then i opened up my last logic problem set, and spent a few hours finishing that (i wasn’t able to get it done before i left). i e-mailed it off to achyut and said goodbye to phil160a forever. my brother dave and i worked out for a while, then played thief (a unique sort of computer game). of course, we had to load it first. (hehe). to cap off the night, we watched the mummy returns. it was pretty stupid, but with one funny line and good effects. this brought the clock to about 1:30am, 3.21.2002. meaning, more or less, that i’d been awake for 51 of the past 58 hours. surprisingly, i wasn’t tired, and i couldn’t sleep. i’d say i knocked off around 2:30.

then comes the good part: i slept for 13 hours. i woke up, and was still tired, but my sony minidisc mic had come from UPS and rachel had brought it to my room, so the fun of new electronics brought me groggily to my feet. i played around with it for a while, recording my new song for kicks, and then drove to panera to see mark. i was thinking maybe he could get me some free food, since i hadn’t eaten in close to 20 hours and was hungry. he had just got off work, but i did see karen heine, which was cool. i left panera for mark’s apartment and chilled there for a while. josh killingsworth was on IM and he was talking to mark, so i said what’s up and he asked if i wanted to come up to gainesville that night. i was still feeling sick and a little tired, but i figured that was just from waking up so i said sure.

the clock at this point is about 5:30, and he wants me to be there by 8:30 so i can go to his campus crusade for christ meeting with him, and surprise nate and chris with being there. i call my mom and dad, they say it’s fine…only i have to check the oil and all the fluids before i take the jeep. a done deal, i say, and rush back home to pack and ready the car. i pull out of my driveway at 6:30, make a stop at taco bell / pizza hut combo restaurant and order my $2.94 usual–2 tacos and an order of breadsticks and sauce. gassed up, food sitting wonderfully close in the passenger seat, and my pedro minidisc winding up, i enter the 408 at 7:05pm.

to be continued…

playing: “options” | pedro the lion

which is where i still am – i have no clue what i’m supposed to be doing with her, and i don’t have the capacity to deal with the mess of feelings. sometimes [lately] i surprise myself by how angry, hateful, spiteful, and ugly i can be inside my own head. and i’m not normally that way. something’s obviously wrong, but i don’t know what or how it can be fixed.

we’ll find out in a week or two whether i defeated my classes or whether they defeated me.

as for my inner life…i guess i just wish it was excited enough about doing what is good and right and true to actually do it. right now it’s seeking gratification, not god.

i guess that’s it, in conclusion. that’s this quarter. not a lot of really important bright spots come to mind. i can remember isolated talks with friends, isolated moments of victory, and isolated moments of true behavior, but these were wavering lights amidst a great dark. more, light.

how did i get my little boat this far out? where did the sun go? i suppose there’s nothing to do but bail out water and wait for help. no use paddling in circles. but it’s so cold and lonely and dark. when is morning?

goodbye, winter quarter 2002, and good riddance.

virtual disc on spin: delicate fade | common children

if only caffeine had an impact on me

glad that’s over with!

1 down, 2 to go.

on the plus side i did talk to nate and chris, friends from home, for a while today. there’s not a whole lot of better things i could have done.

virtual disc on spin: speakeasy | stavesacre

sadly, i’ve got three major hurdles left to go: the philosophy 184 paper rewrite (i got back a c+ on the first draft: major ouch), the logic problem set (we’ve already got most of it done, which is good), and the greek final (which will be hard as butt).

but, major though those hurdles may be, they will be over by 12pm tuesday, 3.19.2002. and that will be a beautiful day.

i spent some time today acquiring a few new toys which i’ve been looking around for for some time now. i bought both at fry’s, which happened to have super great deals going today.

first, since i don’t have a printer, and i need one for school, i bought one. in fact, i bought a laser printer….for $100. yeah, it’s a good deal.

and i also bought an 80gb external firewire hard drive, to use for storing music, video, and document files. it’s pretty tight.

the capstone of the day, however, was a time of prayer and worship with some campus crusade folks….we met in the bottom of the history corner, and had two solid hours of praying with each other and praising god in song. it’s good to be in community…

especially for me, since one of my biggest character flaws is my insistence that i don’t need people. but i’m human, obviously, and whether i like it or not i need community and intimacy. so it was good tonight.

sounds: the pleasant hum of new electronic devices

chris himself sounds more and more like a whiny guy with a british accent in his songs, but i guess we can’t hold that against him; the music’s awesome. and any man that can sing actual notes at that pitch can be forgiven for mutating a few vowel sounds, right?

three other bands played: the legend of rodeo, ben kweller, and the anniversary. all of them pretty decent.

which brings us to now. i’m asleep. and what do you think of the new design?

disc on spin: summers kiss ep | dashboard confessional

and emily is a quiet, peaceful village. or was, before being besieged by the extremes of my temperament. now the peace is gone, the villagers have locked themselves inside, and the crops are dying.

and oh, how i wish i wasn’t a storm. but however much i wish i wasn’t, i’m full of blinding lightning and cracking thunder. powerful in wrath, and weak and sick of it. arrogance is anvil heads towering miles high, and the higher they go, the lower my soul lies.

driven by a vacuum, a huge low-pressure area: an unexplainable lack that twists and claws the ground.

i wish i wasn’t all these things, but like a storm it feels like i have no control over my nature. i’m stuck as i am until something more powerful comes along and assimilates or dissipates me.

it might be cool to be a storm over the painted desert, but it is sad to be a storm over a quiet, peaceful little village. and right now, that’s what i am.

---

on spin: “hallelujah” | jason killingsworth

for any conlanger (person who makes constructed languages), it’s a traditional thing to translate the babel text into his or her language. it’s sort of symbolic…in fact, one webring (“scattered tongues”) of conlangers refers to the text, and there’s a whole archive (the babel text archive) of the passage in different constructed languages. so, i thought i had better get around to it, and i did.

there are two files that you can look at if you’re interested (these are links):
enaselvai-english verse by verse
enaselvai-english word by word with grammatical help

make sure to make your browser big enough for the second one to ensure that you don’t cause line wraps.

let me know what you think!

the font idea slowly fizzling, i decided to translate into my language the one text which every conlanger translates: genesis 11:1-9, the babel text. it’s become a symbol for many conlangers, since it tells the story of the original derivation of many languages from one language. so, i’m still working on it, and will post it when i’m done. it’s actually quite a bit of work, because i’m having to make up words and grammar as i go along, and make sure that everything fits.

that was my weekend. and you might wonder, why then the previous post? i’ll tell you–because it was necessary.

today itself has been great too. i went to class, did some work, did some language stuff, went to the climbing wall for an hour and a half, ran a little over two miles, and went to small group. i’m now pleasantly sore, pleasantly tired, and pleasantly ready to be done with this quarter. my contacts, however, are not pleasant–they suck (you might notice this being a recurring theme).

in other news, pending a notice from the financial aid office, i’ll be applying to co-term in philosophy for the next year to two years. this is a pretty big decision for me, but i feel like it’s a smooth, logical, and good step to take. i’m praying that by getting in or not getting in, god would show me what to do! and if i don’t get in, no bother–i’m only a sophomore after all and i’ve got another year yet to do virtually the exact same thing and end at the exact same time.

more news: this server was down yesterday for quite a while, and i apologize. my new web host is not treating me very nicely, and it pains me to say this but i might be thinking of moving again. sorry! of course, you probably wouldn’t notice because the site address would not change this time.

thanks for the recent comments. karin, the funny script at the top is a script i have developed for a language i’m currently creating, called enaselvai. a word of the day appears whenever i update it to the right!

virtual disc on spin: the faithful anchor | unwed sailor

yet there is something that i am bound to give, which i am not. to sin because of grace is the worst rationalization of man. to say, “it will not hurt me, and i will be forgiven in any case”, is not only false, it is hurt to my forgiver.

what a backwards and despicable and ensnaring and insidious lie.

nai télfu stavéma, náwo

listening to: the silence of my own finitude.

of course, i didn’t actually have to write the c++ program–but i accidentally started on it, and i couldn’t rest until it was done, so i had to keep working on it until its completion.

by the way, the program is in 3 parts in the last entry, and can be viewed simply by clicking on the names. same with the philosophy of knowledge paper. the program, if you’re wondering, takes as input a data file which is a log of all accesses to every file that exists on my website. and it organizes the data and outputs it to a file that i can read and understand.

anyway, the week was cathartic–i finally feel like i’m actually getting things done and not being a slacker. so i feel completely justified in having a fun weekend doing whatever i want to do. that release is so beautiful…i’ve been living with tunnel vision the last few days, focused completely on my work, and it’s good to get out of that.

just about one more week to go, then i’m flying home. that will rock. now to dinner and then freedom! movies, computer games, any other form of indulgent media call my name! maybe i’ll write a song this weekend. that would be nice.

virtual disc on spin: i might be wrong: live recordings | radiohead

• main.cpp
• stats.h
• stats.cpp

and

• philosophy of knowledge paper

between that, class, work, eat, sleep, and logic, i have done nothing else.

i’m tired. goodnight.

(why can’t i fall below the tide)

virtual disc on spin: heartstrings | my spacecoaster

i had a very eventful day, filled with unordinary things. first, i had greek, which was not unordinary. but, while i was in class i did still a cherry yogurt and an apple pastry, mmm.

then i went to the middle of the quad and read for an hour. what did i read? the proofs for the soundness and completeness of first-order logic. it’s completely insane. i’ve never done either of these things before, so they count as unordinary.

after that i attended a lecture by dr. john perry (prof i’ve had) on the existence of god and evil. i found out about the talk late last night. it wasn’t a bad talk by half, but as perry doesn’t believe in god, the focus was obviously on why evil hurts the idea of god’s existence. all the same it was well-given, if not particularly new, and i asked some questions that he seemed to think were intelligent. all that was unordinary.

from then [lunch] until 5pm, i worked on my philosophy of knowledge paper. it’s a paper on why gettier counterexamples are invalid. if you care to know what that means, you should talk to me, because very few people do. the paper is frustrating, because at times, i feel like i’ve really got something important to say that no one’s really said before, and at other times i feel like my main point could actually be completely wrong. it’s not a good feeling.

so at 5 i took all that frustration for a run. i ran the campus loop, plus a little extra, which is 4.5 miles. i’ve not run that much nonstop for close to 2 years! in fact i didn’t think i would be able to make the whole loop, but i just kept running and it all worked out fine. i did it in just under 40 minutes, which i felt was a great pace for me. this was very unordinary.

so, a quick dinner, a little more paper work, and then i was off to the last veritas lecture. it was given by os guinness, great great grandson of the guinness who founded guiness breweries. in fact, both the catholic priest who introduced him and he himself began with guinness beer jokes. heh. irish.

the talk itself was on truth and modern culture, and i found it fascinating. i love it when smart christians say smart things and can think on their feet.

to end the day, i came back to the room and worked a few more hours on the paper. still not being able to decide if the topic is worth pursuing or not. drat. then around midnight i decided to write a computer program, so i broke out the old c++ studio and started trying to remember my rusty coding skills. they’re starting to come back, so i’ll have fun working on this project. it’s a webpage statistics log analyzer for my website. sort of like those web stat things you can get added to your webpage, only i’m making one from scratch. stupid, eh?

so the day was full of lots of things. now i’m exhausted, but i think i’ll do a little working out, take a shower, and then hit the sack. over and out.

virtual disc on spin: supernova | the echoing green

here was the set list:

1. solitary spaces

2. affectionately yours

3. almost there [pedro the lion cover, with special modifications…also the theme song behind this blog. so in some ways it was a little disheartening that no one who reads this blog regularly was at the show tonight. or if he/she was, it’s slipped my mind.]

4. i win again

5. a pixellated life

6. a veiled hope

7. the tension of grey

i was able to set a mic up and minidisc the entire show, and since there weren’t a lot of people there i didn’t get too much crowd noise. i’ll make mp3s of the songs soon, and make them available for download. that way if you missed the show you can still hear how it sounded!

after the show dan and i went out to the quad for a nice little hangout time. we smoked our pipes and talked about music and girls. well mostly i talked and rambled on to infinity about this, that, and the other, and he interjected with helpful comments now and then. all in all, a relaxing night. and of course we brought IBCs. so smooth and refreshing.

sadly, what with practicing for the show, going to a veritas lecture (veritas is a lecture series at stanford every other year on truth, from a christian perspective. i heard dallas willard speak today on science and religion. he’s quite a solid philosopher. i was impressed), and whatever else, i didn’t get a smidgeon of work done. sad yet true. soon the bell will toll for me, i can hear it already.

but what i hear right now is the relaxing sound of falling water that is the shower, calling my name. it being 2:30am, i am OUT.

disc on spin: none

after the domain switch, however, i will have a true domain and will not be hosting my site on stanford’s servers anymore. when that happens i will put a link to the new page on this blog. the blog will then continue at the other site, and not this one. so stay tuned!

and come see me at the CoHo tonight @ 11.

david was in top form….as witty as i’ve ever seen him. as humble, as endearing, as huggable (yes, someone asked him for a hug and he hopped down from the stage and gave the guy a hug after the show), as independent, as worshipful, as cussword-happy as ever.

he usually asks “are there any questions?” in between songs, to make sure the audience feels involved. although, he did say that he told himself that after control came out, he would cease this habit. because of that, i screwed up my nerve and asked him the last question of the night. (i asked him why he changed the lyrics to rapture [millionaire] and second best) so, if pedro follows through with his resolve not to do any more question-answering after 4.16, there’s a good chance that i will have been the last person who asked him a question like that in a show.

that was yesterday.

today was a challenge. morning classes after a pedro show are not a good idea, so i skipped two of them. then i worked some more on my new song (i’ve changed the lyrics and music substantially since the last entry), and went to the wall for an hour, since i won’t be able to climb again until tuesday probably.

emily and i had another long and heart rending discussion. hopefully the last. no gory details for your hungry little ears, but the upshot is that we thought about breaking up (kinda), but in the end decided to ask each other out again. however, this was quite a long process (4-5 hours), so i’m emotionally and physically drained. seems to be a common theme these days.

also, i had lots cool and interesting things to put in my blog, but forgot them all.

in other news, i am thinking of making jonathan lipps t-shirts. soon i’ll be making a sort of fake pre-order page where you can see the design and tell me if it’d be worth buying. then i can decide whether they’d be worth making. stay tuned.

in other rather important news, i think i’ll be changing internet hosting servers here, so there may be a day or two where jonathanlipps.com is down. if you find that it is, you can access this site directly by going to http://www.stanford.edu/~jon832/almostthere/ . that way you won’t lose any bloggy goodness. or suckiness.

we had one vote for a cover song, which in fact i think i will not do. in fact i don’t think i’m going to do any of the ones i listed. if you want to hear what i am going to do…you’ll have to come to the show. 11:00pm at the coffee house! please come!

now i’m off to grove to watch a movie with some people. i was originally planning on going to sleep, but decided that human interaction might make me a better person. fitter, happier, even.

summary: gamma level overload. beta level deficiency. delta levels good. omega level clear.

virtual disc on spin: relocation | plankeye

today was a good day, but it was a day that i felt connected to me very loosely; as though if i didn’t put all my energy into not falling off, i would spiral down into nothingness.

what the nothingness is exactly is sort of troubling, but as you would guess, it’s mostly just that–nothing. no good, no bad. smooth, without a wrinkle of life.

in the end, though, i did hang on. a few times my link to reality fuzzed in and out, but i’m still here. i’m still here, waiting for something to happen. eating a pop-tart.

i taught a course on scanning and ocr software today to three middle-aged women. i also slept through one class and 40 minutes of another. i also wrote a song, tentatively entitled ‘grey’. after having writer’s block for so long, it was a clean breath of sea-salty air to be working on a song, not just imagining one. it’s almost done, and i hope to play it on saturday at the show. since i haven’t written much lately, i’ll go ahead and append the lyrics to this entry, as cheesy as that is. i figure as long as it’s mine it’s ok. feel free to comment.

also, if you care, you should vote on which cover i will do on saturday. the choices so far are:

“everything” | lifehouse

“true love waits” | radiohead

“don’t be there” | switchfoot (i don’t know this one yet)

“april 6, 2039” | pedro the lion

or if you have suggestions, feel free. now, the so-called lyrics to my new song:

_when i sing it feels better
_ _standing looking out the window
_ _hand out to catch the rain
_ drip down slow crystal moving

_the grey is more than monotone
_ _now that I can pierce it through
_ _i don’t have to see the blue behind it
_ i know it’s there for me

_shadows fade and bleed,
_ _please, deny that they are real
_ _strange how they see me
_ strange that they run

_taking words, stringing them together
_ _i hope i’m making sense
_ _clarity is the goal
_ drip down the meaning shows

_shifting shades lose their opacity
_ _the power to conceal is gone
_ _what is beyond is so incredible
_ it’s a shame i didn’t see it before

_turn on the light that’s in my mind to flood the world with colors
_ _let your eyes see what’s really there stop looking at the canvas
_ _put down your brush dumb ignorance for you don’t have the talent
_ to represent the way things are with your soul-numbing grey

alpha through epsilon levels: check.

theta through omega levels: clear.

virtual disc on spin: mezzamorphis | delirious?

today rocked pretty hard. i’d even give it a rock and a half, for kicks. mostly boring usual stuff you don’t care about.

i did go to the wall finally, after 2 weeks. i was pretty weak, but they had some new routes up and i had fun trying to crack a few.

i did talk to emily a lot, i did hang out with my friend chris for a while.

i did not do all of my greek homework.

you see, my problem here is one of priority. my alpha levels were taken care of throughout the day, but certain delta and epsilon level activities got in the way of me finishing all of my beta levels. and when push came to shove, i decided that gamma levels were more important. in a sense, they are. but now i’m paying for it.

at least i stayed clear of omega level. omega level prime even.

singing in my head: “sweetness” | jimmy eat world

how did i end up here?, i asked myself. i used the last of my energy to turn around and look at my footsteps. they trailed off west, as far as my cracked and sun-blinded eyes could see. no sign of the City. no blue lakes and tall white buildings. no gleam from adamantine roads or piercing towers. nothing but sand and heat.

it’s too late anyway, i thought. if i can’t go five feet forward, it makes no difference if the City is ten feet behind or a million. i’m done here.

why did i leave? i knew there was nothing but desert out here. what was i going to do? walk across it? to where? and now my foolishness mocks me. i’m going to die here.

and then–the sound of silver. not the metal; the color. with an odd feeling of recognition i look up, and remember no more except going blind.

---

thirst. my only thought is for water. i don’t even realize that i’m alive, but i thirst. i open my eyes, but everything is fuzzy. i grope around, hoping to find some vessel of liquid.

“patience. you just died. or close enough. your body is so dehydrated you can’t have anything to drink yet. i’m giving you the appropriate fluids as you have need. rest, and soon you will be able to drink. and be thankful that you are alive”

then i slept.

---

i don’t know why i left. i don’t know where i thought i was going. to some imaginary better place, maybe, beyond the dunes. no one ever finds anything there but death. but i know who rescued me from it, and it is good to see him again. it’s been far too long.

soon now i will be able to eat, to get up and walk around. what a sweet thought! there is no lack of water, here, either, to run strength through my body. and, as soon as i am able, i’m anxious to get back to the City. there are people there that i have missed, and they will be glad to know that i’m alive. i’m alive, and i hate the desert for its death.

i don’t ever want to go out there again.

just to think that people live where it’s snowing right now…

song on spin: dancing days | led zeppelin

on spin: song b | pedro the lion

this is what i am yelling in my head, though you can’t hear it and don’t know what it means. it is because i need jesus (who does know what it means). and the magnitude of that need never ceases to amaze me. as jaded and blasé as i am–as disinterested and bored as i could ever become, i will never be able to get over that. and how much greater than the need is the fulfilling? infinitely so. therefore i pray–shock me with infinity, god.

et seumadeíma árel thanódla

i guess it could bug me for two reasons:

1. there is something wrong-headed about that mindset

2. i have one of those lame blogs and i just don’t like that someone would call it lame.

i’ll leave it up to you to decide if (2) is true. it very well could be, but i’m not going to let myself make a decision on that point. i think that the cynic’s thought grated on me because i don’t like his standard of a “good” blog. i suppose that he is allowed to have his opinion, but as for me i have no problem letting “lame” blogs exist and letting them have the same rights as other blogs. if you think something’s lame, don’t read it. don’t write about it either, lame-o.

in recent news, school has ruled my life for the past four days. i haven’t had a spare moment to myself since i got back from england…i guess that’s what i get for gallivanting around the world. anyways, in particular logic has kicked my butt, since a problem set was due today (in fact, if you want to see what i spend so much time working on and have microsoft word, i uploaded the answers to my recent problem set part 1). everyone rejoice with me that i at least attempted part 2 this time. i don’t think i actually got any of it right, but at least i had time to look at it. maybe next time i will progress even further.

also, my parents are in town (actually down staying in santa cruz) for the weekend, since it’s Parent’s Weekend here at stanford. they came to the dorm around 4 this afternoon, and watched our dorm talent show. i was in it and played the song a pixellated life to kick it off. then my parents took me out to CPK for a wonderful dinner.

emily and i had a long discussion about what art is tonight. it was pretty interesting. i like art. i wish i was good at some kind of studio art, but i guess i should stick to music.

i’ve been trying to write some music lately, and i think i actually have 4 or 5 or 6 viable new song ideas. i just don’t really have the lyrics to go along, and so i’ve been at a bottleneck here for quite a while. it’s so aggravating. as i’m asking, “will my pen some day just stop producing ink?” i hope not. what do you think chris cross. i’m certainly not going to throw in my mic or my towel just to quit.

in other more important news, i have two mp3s from the upcoming pedro the lion album control. i can’t wait till the whole thing comes out. you’ll also notice by looking at the sidebar that i’m going to see pedro on thurs. in SF. this will be quite sweet.

now my contacts have achieved that wonderfully disgusting state of gooey, slow, solidness with pointy edges. i am going to go remove them and read in bed until i fall asleep.

virtual disc on spin: pedro the lion | progress

yesterday was a standard day–logic, greek, lunch, work, guitar, dinner, logic, sleep. i went over to storey after dinner to work on the logic problem set with achyut and matt…we worked on it for 3 hours or so and got almost halfway done with part 1. i guess we’re doing the rest tonight, and i have to try part 2 tomorrow afternoon. i hope i get it done this time.

i’m not particularly looking forward to today, since thursdays are my most busy days…i have a meeting with spud, class, lunch, work (teaching a workshop today, that’s extra stress. but it’s only on powerpoint so it should be easy), then crusade. back to back 10am-9pm. ick. and after that there’s still logic and an entire unit of greek.

in other, better news, tomorrow my parents arrive for parents weekend! i’ll be playing in a dorm talent show that we’re having for the parents. my mom and dad have never heard me perform, so it will be an interesting experience.

oh yeah, i got on the net with netscape communicator yesterday at work, and looked at my blog–yuck. it looks really stupid in netscape. i advise you all to use internet explorer 5 or higher.

and now off to piece together a coherent thesis for my knowledge paper…

disc on spin: the sounds of the early morning.

there, aren’t you glad i bothered to write that.

heathrow int’l airport - standing around

warwick castle - view of the castle from the front

• the back gate of the castle from the inside
• emily and i standing on a tower
• emily and i in front of the castle
• bob the american tourist

oxford - view of an oxford college

• landscape looking the other direction
• emily in red telephone booth at night

london - emily in trafalgar square

• the national gallery (art museum)
• family in front of westminster abbey
• emily and i in front of westminster abbey
• big ben
• parliament house
• tate museum of modern art
• installation art exhibit (top floor) in museum
• harrod’s at night

stonehenge, bath, and the cotswolds - stonehenge

• cathedral in bath
• ancient roman bath
• ancient roman underground heating system
• emily and i sitting on a bridge
• view from that same bridge

hope you enjoy.