At least it's not LA

After work today, it took me about 40 minutes to drive 7.5 miles on highway 237 from San Jose to Mountain View (it usually takes me 10-13). I basically left it in idle the entire time and rolled all the way back. Taking the train back from work would be about a 25 minute ride and a 10 minute walk from the station on a regular basis, so I usually drive only when I want to "save time" or I need to drive elsewhere. Probably shouldn't have left work at 6:20 pm (237's "primetime"), but as we rolled through the misty rain, I wondered whether this is what it would be like to live and work in, say, LA... and then realized that down there, we wouldn't even be rolling at all.

The extra time wasted sitting in traffic doesn't bother me nearly as much as the thought of all that gas being burned and all those waste gases being ejected into the atmosphere for no real reason at all. Alternative-energy-source personal transportation can't get here fast enough!

Glimpses

Some verses, lyrics, and quotes that have come to mind in the last day or so...

So hey baby, can you shed some light on the problem maybe? / 'Cause we're all tired and we'd like to know / If we should pack our tents, shut down the show / Yes, we should like to see a burning bush-type sign / But anything would be fine -- "Anything", Sixpence None The Richer

Do not eat the food of a stingy man, do not crave his delicacies; for he is the kind of man who is always thinking about the cost. -- Proverbs 23:6-7a

There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. -- Proverbs 23:18

Listen to your father, who gave you life, and do not despise your mother when she is old. -- Proverbs 23:22

By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures. A wise man has great power, and a man of knowledge increases strength; for waging war you need guidance, and for victory many advisers. -- Proverbs 24:3-6

Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul; if you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. -- Proverbs 24:14

I would leave each of you with the hope that as you make your own choices over time, you will choose in such a way that allows your drive for achievement to be balanced by an equal commitment to love and to play, to family, to friends and community. I hope... that when you are "old and gray and full of sleep," as the poet William Butler Yeats once wrote, that you can say that your goal in life was not the perfection of work alone but the perfection of a life. -- Doris Kearns, Dartmouth Commencement Address, 1998-06-14

Short takes...

Spring
This morning as I was brushing my teeth, I heard a bird singing through the window for the first time this year. The days are getting longer, and next Sunday we gain an extra hour of daylight. Spring is definitely here... even if we only had something like 6 days of sun the entire month of March.

Upset
I'm not much for college hoops, but watching the last 5 minutes of George Mason's upset of #1 seed UConn was surprisingly exciting. Did you know that the term "upset" comes from an old racehorse beating Man'O'War? I learned something new this week.

Weekend church happenings
Last Friday night, the youth guys put on an Appreciation Night for the youth girls. They did a pretty nice job... got all dressed up and hosted a pleasant night with skits, sharing, and food. The planning reminded me of the old college days where a bunch of the guys would get together at someone's apartment to brainstorm ideas... I'm going to have to see if I can dig up any that they can use in future years.

On Sunday, we had the chance to catch up over a potluck with Crystal, who was back from her overseas missions work for a short while. The kids (Lucas, Jacob, and Sarah) stole the show as usual. Lucas learned how to play foosball and swing a baseball bat, as well as charming the socks off all the young adult women by flexing and dancing on demand. He's going to be such the ladies man when he gets older.

24
The past two seasons of 24, I found myself growing increasingly dissatisfied with the increasingly bludgeoning nature of the show's plotlines. Threats ever-increasing in magnitude, the lack of genuine mysteries... I found that I had to basically begin turning off my brain more and more and just enjoy the production aspects of the show (which are admittedly some of the best on TV).

I found this quote that summarizes my feelings on good plot writing (mouse over since it contains some spoilers on previous seasons):
Thank you for bringing up such writers as Agatha Christie. A part of Christie's brilliance was the introduction of clues in the midst of the commonplace so that the clue is there, not hidden - but you've failed to notice it.

At the end of season 1, were you really saying to yourself: "I should have known that Nina was a mole because of the way she acted in episode xx"?

Shock writing produces a "I can't believe that" response. Great writing produces a "How did I miss that?" response. Here's a simple exercise: watch the previous seasons on DVD (I have). Knowing how it turns out, look for clues to the outcomes in the early hours. Are there meaningful clues that were present, but you missed them the first time around?

In an Agatha Christie novel, something innocent like a comb lying in the wrong place on page 45 is later revealed to be the key to the murder. We don't get enough of that on 24.

Fortunately, this season seems to be bringing back more complex plots and interesting characters. It's no longer the Jack Bauer show, as cool as he is... the supporting characters are more fleshed out and can stand on their own. This is probably the best season since season 1.

Oh, and "The Sentinel" movie? Might as well call it 24: The Movie, with Michael Douglas playing the old-mentor Henderson role to Kiefer's Jack.

Prayer
Check out this week's Operation World to see and pray for China. I find it helpful to include the Operation World website in my daily group of bookmarks to make sure I spend some time expanding my vision beyond my own little world.

Fidelity

About three weeks ago, the former-pop-star wife of Utah Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko made the startling declaration in an ESPN the Magazine interview that since he spends so much time travelling for his job, the temptation of infidelity is so great that she gives him an "allowance" of one night per year with another woman. She put it this way:

"What's forbidden is always desirable. And athletes, particularly men, are susceptible to all the things they are offered. It's the same way raising children - if I tell my child, 'No pizza, no pizza, no pizza,' what does he want more than anything? Pizza... If I know about it, it's not cheating."

Not surprisingly, this sent shockwaves through the sporting world. Multiple columns, papers, message board posts were all hailing Mrs. Kirilenko as the "best wife ever" and Andrei as the luckiest man alive. A column on Fox Sports had this to say:

"This, we feel, is perhaps the perfect marriage. If all marriages operated like this, divorce attorneys would be as uncommon as mad cow disease, and Dr. Phil would be installing satellite dishes and sweating his mortgage. In other words, life would be better in so many ways..."

I found this to be yet another interesting counterpoint to the Biblical value of marital faithfulness, which is something that Jesus, Paul, and other writers all taught about. Why should a husband love and be with only one wife, and vice versa? In general, it seems that the values of the world (or at least, Western culture) in this arena seem to gravitate to the very capitalist "more is better" mode of thinking. For example, we jokingly refer to marriage with prison references like "the ol' ball-and-chain", and many people now take the attitude that Biblical teaching on marital infidelity, as well as many other "sins", is in fact just an arbitrary rule guilting people into staying away from something "good". In other words, commitment = imprisonment.

Nick Collison, a power forward on the Seattle SuperSonics, made an insightful response to the first quote above from Kirilenko's wife: "If you give a kid pizza, he might want a different kind of pizza. It might get worse."

I think this sums it up nicely. The Bible's teachings on holiness are not intended to be arbitrary rules to keep us imprisoned from the good things in life. Rather, they're intended to teach the discipline that one might teach a child. If you gave a kid pizza every time he wanted one, this will have undesirable outcomes for him - physical malnutrition and perhaps obesity, and perhaps a psychological sense of entitlement.

It's when we've learned how to be disciplined in mind, body, and spirit, that we can identify those things in life that are truly good and have lasting meaning and value. One of those can be a healthy, faithful, loving, and servant-like relationship with a spouse where each can find completion in the other. The perfect marriage isn't one where each side gives the other the supposed "freedom" to break a special commitment at will - rather, I think that a perfect marriage will find that each partner has developed such love for one another that they'd have no desire to turn elsewhere.

Weekend lessons and Corte Madera

This past Saturday, participated in Canaan's Community Group Scavenger Hunt (see here for pictures), ate a few times with the fam since my bro was back for spring break, met up with Sam for disicpleship (went through the chapter on "Prayer" in Celebration of Discipilne by Richard Foster), and had some friends over to hang out, where somehow the primary discussion topic seemed to become the hypothesized effectiveness of having a "wingwoman" - i.e., a female friend accompanying a guy on his way to introducing himself to a gal, in order to make him seem less intimidating to the new person. Does this really work?

Oh, and Dr. Andy idly wondered (alluding to the stereotypical Asian shyness), "How in the world did Asians date each other before email?"

Sunday's service covered the Biblical principle from God's covenant with Abram/Abraham that we are blessed spiritually, materially, and personally, in order to be a blessing to others. The thing is, in a rich society like the Silicon Valley, it's so easy to compare myself to a richer person in any of those dimensions, and thus conclude that I am not that blessed - when the very nature of my circumstances shows that I'm probably among the top 0.5% blessed people in the world. That's both a great privilege to be enjoyed, and a heavy responsibility to perform.

In Sunday School, John and Sandra have been teaching an excellent series on Biblical principles of communication. This week, the primary admonition was to use our words wisely - knowing that we are called to bless rather than curse (Gal 3:14), that there is an unexpected power in the words we say both horizontally (to people) and vertically (to God), and realizing that we need to watch both what we say (blessings or curses of commission) or don't say (omission). The lesson reminded me of a friend back in college who gently let me know that my unrefined attempts at sarcasm and wit were instead coming across as bludgeoning words that were in fact breaking people down bit by bit. Ever since then, I've tried to rein my tongue in a little bit more, and I think I've been able to mature in this area. Clearly an example of how a wound from a friend can be trusted.

Sunday afternoon, God held back the rain long enough for us to get out to the courts and play for the first time in about a month. Couldn't make any shots, and my timing was all messed up (my brain would say, "Cut to the hoop now!" or "Guard the reversal!" yet my feet would say, "Nuh-uh, we're not going anywhere"). Most recent sign of aging: my quads were still sore today. Felt good to run around again though.

Monday, I took the day off from work and we had a family outing up north past SF to Corte Madera for some hiking. Here are a few pics I took off my dad's new camera:

It was unusually nice weather, despite warnings of rain coming in:


Golden Gate:


San Francisco downtown:


On the hike, we encountered plenty of wet patches that we had to slog through, but came across the occasional stream:


Dad cresting a hill next to an odd rock formation:



Shots of SF and the coastline:

White as snow

The past few days, my soul's been somewhat troubled. I've been somewhat spiritually out of sync and out of rhythm, in need of forgiveness and purification. So, this morning, I tried to get myself re-centered on God - meditating on David's Psalm 51 (specifically, verse 12: "Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me"), playing and singing "Create In Me" and "Refiner's Fire," and holding onto the image in my mind's eye of the Biblical description of the blood of Jesus cleansing the repentant as white as snow.

On the way to work, with the odd NorCal weather we've been having lately, I came over a crest on the freeway and saw this scene off in the distance (picture courtesy of the Mercury News):


White as snow indeed.

'Twas a timely reminder that when I lift my eyes to the hills, I realize that my help comes from the Lord, maker of Heaven and Earth.

The mountains/hills ringing Silicon Valley have served as inspiration in the past. Click here and here to read these stories from my life.

Observations

Some things I've noticed recently...

Observation: Internet privacy
Seems like it wasn't that long ago when people tended to guard their privacy on the Web much more closely. I distinctly remember re-publishing my blog to remove everyone's last name in links or posts, just in case people were sensitive about being Googled. People who posted their real pictures on, say, Friendster were admonished for not being discreet - I mean, people you don't know could find out what you look like!

So, at some point, this reticence seems to have just about disappeared. Almost everywhere you look, you can see people posting tons of pictures of themselves and their friends. There are even video-hosting websites so that you can hear people's latest attempts at singing karaoke, how cute their baby is, or the latest fun event.

I've never been overly shy about my online dealings, so this newfound vulnerability is kind of neat when catching up on my friends' blogs. Still, it's kind of interesting to observe. Are people just not as shy as they used to be?

Observation: Technology may be making us dumber
Not long from now, people will no longer have to memorize addresses or directions, due to personal navigation systems. Similarly to how the phone number memory storage on cell phones has obviated the need to remember digits, the day is coming soon where we'll be able to get into a car or other vehicle and just say where we want to go (Beam me up, Scotty!). This past weekend in LA, the nav system was highly useful for getting around with nary a Google Maps printout needed (Tru dat! Double tru!). I wonder what's the next area where technology will replace brain cells?

I, for one, look forward to the day when we have vehicles that can go on autopilot and take us to where we want to go without needing to drive. Perhaps 1-2 lanes on the road can be devoted to auto-driving and the other two can be given over to the guys who don't want to relinquish control of their vehicles.

Observation: The online attention span is shortening even more
I'm a firm believer in Socrates' creed that "the unexamined life is not worth living," and I've tried to reflect that by trying to regularly process my life, often in this very space. Thing is, with the recent flood of photos and videos easily available online, it's becoming a lot more tempting to ditch the introspection and just post lots of cool videos. Why invest time in thinking through ideas, fleshing out relevant examples and analogies, structuring writing, and proofreading, when it's so much easier to post those screencap/links to Youtube.com, or photos on people's smugmugs?

Anyway, the latest in fun videos:

Got this video of a live-action re-creation of the "Simpsons" intro from both Drew W and Alex. Those crazy Britishers. Best part is that they replicated the twins, Sherri and Terri, with actual twins.

The latest Jordan commercial has been getting a lot of buzz among sports fans as one of the top basketball commercials of recent years. From this ESPN article describing the making of the commercial (where kids from around the world imitate, down to the smallest detail, Jordan's moves and mannerisms), I picked up this interesting tidbit: "While one might think that the kids were shown the specific Jordan moves before they were performed, W+K execs maintain that was not the case. The kids did what they remembered as art director Jesse Coulter fine-tuned to make sure the moves were as technically accurate as possible." Check out this video to see the commercial and the original moves side by side to see just how accurate the kids' memories were.

That reminded me of one of my other favorite Jordan commercials, where the older, post-baseball version of MJ plays the young, taking-the-league-by-storm version in a game of one-on-one. No musical soundtrack, just the squeak of shoes on hardwood, the bounce of the ball, the ripple of the net, the thunder of an attacked rim, and the incessant trash talk between the old MJ and the young MJ. I think the thing that appeals to me most about the commercial is that it really does illuminate some of the nuance in savvy veteran basketball skills (pump fakes, bumping, leverage) compared to raw athleticism. Plus, it's not hard to imagine the ultra-competitive MJ engaging in that exact sort of trash talk against his opponents.

Oh, and for the fans of Yellow Fever from Wong Fu Productions out of UCSD, the bloopers are now available. Considering the over-the-top nature of most of those scenes, it must have been super hard to keep a straight face.

Observation: Coming down to hoops crunchtime
While the Spurs remain my favorite team, the Warriors have become unwatchable, and both the Pistons and the Suns may be more fun to watch than either. However, while I enjoy the basketball the Pistons play on both sides of the floor, I finally pinpointed the thing that bugs me about their team - the Pistons never believe that a foul called against them is legitimate. They react violently to more calls than any other team I watch, and this annoys me.

In the college ranks, here's proof that Berkeley students are diabolically clever.

LA Memories

This past weekend, a bunch of us went down to LA for a wedding (see Maria's, Joy's, and Karen's recaps). Coupla memories:

- quote of the weekend, from the reception, by Dr. Andy: "I don't understand the point of dancing. How do you win?"
- if at all possible, remember not to ask a woman about cramps (see Joy's recap above)
- finally, in the last 3 months, two women have thrown up in a car that I was driving. I am the human ipecac. I make women barf!

No adrenaline junkie

A lot of people get their kicks out of the adrenaline rush, whether from speed, danger, pushing the envelope, etc. That's why cars have lots of horsepower, go bungee jumping, or strap on pieces of plastic to their feet to go down a snow-filled slope really fast. Check out Clement catching some air (picture courtesy of JT):



One thing I learned this past weekend at our annual ski trip is that I am not one of those people. I accelerate slowly in my car. I won't be jumping off any buildings any time soon. And, I don't typically have a whole lot of fun barrelling down a mountain at insane speeds, with the slipstream buffeting my face. I actually enjoy myself more when I improve my overall control and technique at moderate speeds.

While this meant that I pretty much spent the entire day way behind the rest of my group (George, Shally, JT, Clement, and Dan), I was still able to get better at my turns on all the blue runs (my first-ever ski trip with no greens), and even attempted to navigate my first black diamonds ever (result: crashing and burning on the mogul-filled section, and sloooooowly making my way down the flat, steep slope on the second). Thankfully, no one got seriously hurt... although my coworker, a beginner snowboarder, did amuse us greatly by telling a story of how he opted to plaster himself against a tree rather than go careening off the path. Ouch.

One of the benefits of taking things more slowly is that you get to appreciate little views along the way, like George's shot of Lake Tahoe on a perfectly sunny, cool day (yet still with decent snow):



Even though I wasn't originally planning to ski, I'm glad that I hit the slopes. Didn't tear anything, got to spend time with cool people, exercised some, and thoroughly enjoyed the outdoors. Great trip all-around.