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Last month’s emotional bloodletting was musical. Here is this month’s: a paragraph that wants to be a poem when it grows up. 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.

I went to the UK last week with my family, as we wanted to go and see my sister when she got off from her semester at Capernwray hall, and accompany her home for Christmas. We had a wonderful time wandering around the lake district of England, randomly went to a Delirious concert in Liverpool (my mom is friends with the keyboardist), and then hung out a few days in Wales, hiking up mountains and seeing castles and such. ...

In physics, there is what is known as the “wave-particle duality” of photons. Sometimes, light behaves like a particle, and sometimes it behaves like a wave. It seems occasionally to simultaneously follow the rules for particles and waves! This confounds physicists (and me). 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. ...

As a gift for all of our friends and family this Christmas, my brother David and I (who comprise Splendour Hyaline) recorded a 3-song Christmas EP, inexplicably called “Christmas”. Here it is for download in MP3 format (make sure to right-click and Save Target As): (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) ...

Sigh.

Among the billion other things I felt thankful for last week was this sunset (featuring a brilliant Venus which the photo only barely captures): (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)

Over a year ago, I set out on a quest to rate all the songs in my iTunes library. Don’t ask me why–I’m a sucker for data, so I had dreams of all the cool scripts I could write and patterns I could find if each song in my library were categorized according to how much I liked it. 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. ...

Two weeks ago in Orlando, amidst a balmy 75-degree sunset, I saw workers at a hotel near Disney putting up a huge, white-lit frame with intricate designs around one huge shiny word: “ICE”. Clearly this very ironic sign was not descriptive of any nearby location or state. Unless they were advertising the effectiveness of their hallway machines. 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. ...

Given that I’ve been feeling the way I described in my last entry, I decided that I needed to write music. For me, writing and recording music is one of the only healthy ways I have to deal with frustration of various kinds. So last night around 1am, I sat down with my keyboard and decided to write and record a song. What happened next was amazing–I composed and played something which, more than any other song at the moment I wrote it, mirrored my thoughts and feelings with infinitely better accuracy than any number of words. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this song, in terms of how it describes my emotional state, is worth a million.

I’m in something of a bad state right now, and I’m not sure exactly how I got here or what to do about it. I’m not even going to attempt my typical philosophical analysis, partly because of apathy and partly because I’m pretty sure it won’t help. Instead, I’m going to use over-dramatic words to deliver a sense of what I am feeling. You may want to stop reading now.