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I went and saw Sin City last week with Nick and Justin, and the various stories of grotesque evil followed by equally-grotesque vigilante justice sparked a rather deep conversation about the concept of justice with respect to God (our particularly [orthodox] Christian view, that is), and how this relates to the justice actually (or propagandistically, as the case may be) being done in the world, including everything from incarceration to the death penalty to the invasion of Iraq to World War II. ...

In the last month I’ve spent some time every now and then working on a little Mac app project. The time has come to unveil it, along with its new website! Go there now: iRateTunes. 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. ...

I ended up in Gainesville, FL this weekend to hang out with my brother Dav. We hadn’t recorded anything in a long time, so we decided to do a little project with a song I’ve been working on for an upcoming concept album. It doesn’t really have a title, but I figure it’ll probably be the second part of a story, so we’re calling it Chapter II. 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. ...

In years past, i.e., the last two, I’ve done something creative as my act of commemorating the significance of Easter Sunday. Last year, I wrote a song, and two years ago I wrote two stories (published betterly here). This year, I did not have it in me to do anything so wonderful. Instead, I rode up to Russian Ridge with a group of friends and saw the sunrise atop a green wind-blasted hill, where we could survey the whole bay below. From that height, the peninsula looked clean and fresh and sinless, full of hope and potential. The Dumbarton bridge appeared ghostly and beautiful, a thin testament to the humble works of man–much different than the overbearing, ugly, crowded aspect it has up close during the day. ...

The “Fellowship” of the Believers 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.

You may recall from a few entries ago that, due to a number of circumstances which ended up with me back at Stanford for a few weeks, I have been thinking of moving back to California to start and help lead a new faith-community with a bunch of my friends and former schoolmates. Well, since life is short and action seemed to be required, I went ahead and made the decision to head back out west! ...

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?) ...

I felt like going for a long run yesterday, since I’d rested a few days since my last run, and since I’d been running pretty consistently before that. The runs I’d been doing were about 4 miles each, and I’d been focusing more on speed than distance, trying to hit the magic 7:00 average per-mile pace which I’m always after for that distance. 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… ...

(…and a tiny bit of 2005) 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. ...

I returned from TCS in mid-July, fully exhausted from the long days of the seminars. Our team was given a bit of vacation, which I didn’t use since I was going to take the following week off in order to unpack my things, perform various moving actions like changing my license plate and so forth, and drive to my old roommate Jonathan Parr’s wedding in South Carolina. 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. ...