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“The Good News for me is that anyone can become stronger with nothing more than diligence.” - Stanley Lee, 1.20.10 I've been on a Kanye West craze recently. If you've been hanging around with me recently, you might have noticed that. I've been trying to figure out why I love his music so much. For one thing, I think he is the second-best rapper of all time (behind Jay-Z, of course). His lyricism is unparalleled, and his flow is rivaled only by (maybe) Eminem. But that's not the main reason. I think I really started listening to Kanye after I realized that his musical content only consists of two subjects: The carnal gratification of sexual desire through the objectification of women, and the constant desire to be the best. I'm intrigued and impressed by his seamless incorporation of both subjects into his songs. I believe the first one is tragic but necessary in his music, but what I'm most drawn to is the second subject; his never-satisfied desire to succeed;...

There are certain physical manifestations of emotional occurrences that are common to all of humanity. Insomnia is characteristic of overwhelming anticipation; who can sleep the night before Christmas morning? Indigestion is often associated with stress, as well as high blood pressure especially if the stress is chronic. What are the physical manifestations of intense longing? Perhaps insomnia, diminished pleasure in other activities, the inability to focus on anything else, or anyone else. As the villain in the movie Hitch said, “Colors are dull, food has lost its taste…” When you want something (or someone) more badly than anything else in the world or out, your body reacts by suddenly losing its desire for other things, including things necessary for survival. You’re not hungry, you can’t sleep, and you can’t take your mind off of the object of your affection. David wrote Psalm 63 in the Judean Wilderness while he was running from King Saul. Inside the rain-shadow of Israel, the are...

The Jews have always had privileged access to the words and commands of God. Ever since they became a nation, the God has spoken to his chosen people through a number of different ways. He spoke to Moses as a burning bush and chose him to be Israel's leader and his spokesperson and through him, he gave them his written commands, which they were to bind on the tablets of their hearts. After Moses came his understudy, Joshua, followed by the Judges. There were, of course, numbers of prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel. He spoke through David with the Psalms; he used a draft-dodger by the name of Jonah. He used a talking donkey to speak some sense into Balaam; during the days of Moses he even manifested his divine presence as a pillar of fire or a spiraling cloud in order to provide protection for his people. Then one day, after the prophet Malachi spoke his last word, came silence. For four hundred years, God's people heard not a single peep from their Lord. Kingdoms rose...

Been thinking about momentum in the context of sports. Momentum is an illusion, even in physics. In physics, momentum is the product of an object's mass and velocity. An object's momentum is an arbitrary equation; it's a number constructed out of two other numbers that are real quantifiable measurements. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't want to go down this slippery slope because if I call momentum an illusion, then I have to call all other physical measurements such as velocity and vectors illusions. The only real measurements of any object is its mass, volume, and position in time. And even then, illusions though they're not, they are still arbitrary. Alright, that's a thought for another day. At any rate, momentum is certainly an unquantifiable element in a sporting competition. You often hear color commentators report about it based on highly unscientific factors, like "which team needs the win more" "which team scored more in a r...

Lately I’ve tried to stay away from saying anything too disagreeable when I get on my soapbox. I didn’t feel like getting into any debates online and I was too lazy to properly research my position, so for the most part I’ve been keeping my opinions to myself. However, I think I’m ready to subject some of my thoughts to peer review. The topic is “intonation as a measure of musical quality”. Go ahead and tear into it, you vicious, liberal... The progression of music through history, like any progression of art through history, can be charted by its stages of rule-breaking. Music establishes its boundaries, visionary artists transcend those boundaries, and then music establishes new boundaries. Throughout history, almost every element of music, from rhythm to dynamics, from melody to meter, has had rules broken by some class of music, ranging from high-brow classical to low-brow popular. While this is not an exact science, trends of music culture can be identified. Before Beethoven, few ...

Speaking of works-based righteousness : I think our congregation still struggles with this deeply. It’s part of our set Asian-American, bi-cultural neuroses. It’s packaged in with the things we’ve been taught at home, by our parents, by the performance-driven culture around us. My parents are the best parents in the world; they give me more than I ever deserved and support me more, so much more than the parents of a lot of my friends. They never pressure me except not to waste my potential. Yet I still feel it because I grew up saturated in it. That constant guilt during my waking hours, like the feeling of coldness during sleeping hours (if you’ve ever tried to sleep without adequate blankets, you know what I mean) is always there, pushing me onwards to perform. I’ve talked about the difference between chasing after something and going after something because you are being chased from behind. Works-based guilt is a cause for the latter. The thinking I am speaking of exists by the pres...

“I’m a war of head verses heart, it’s always this way My head is weak, my heart always speaks before I know what it will say” - Crooked Teeth, Death Cab for Cutie Talking about the distinction between soul and body is dangerous. It’s facetious. There is NO clear line between soul and body, mind and matter, reason and emotion. They are heuristic categories. We human beings love to multiply distinctions. We do it because it makes the world simpler, easier to understand, and more manageable. We love to categorize, to dissect, and to label. And it’s not wrong. We can’t have it any other way. But to do so is to risk losing sight of the fact that we are WHOLE. There is a human being. There is no digestive system, circulatory system. There isn’t a sex drive and an appetite. There is a human being. You were wrong, Clive Staples Lewis, when you said “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body”. What we are is a human being. What you are doing is creating all sort of religious, phil...