In particular, I hope ideas like this allow for greater freedom for the right-brained people who tend to get lost or squashed in the system as it has historically evolved. And I hope that recovering left-brain myopians like myself can recognize the beauty and life available outside of our frameworks, especially when it comes to the people who just don’t make sense to us. But enough of me; watch the video, and let me know your reactions!

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.

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?

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

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?

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?

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.

• 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?

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!

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.

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.