a quick bit of mushy info
Mood:  amorous
A quick bit of advice to anyone who's got a relationship that has long-distance parts to it (for example we are together during the school year but ridiculously far apart during the breaks): Try your best not to have any kind of important conversation on AIM. My girlfriend and I just finally got things back to normal after a particularly bad couple of days that all resulted from having the conversation on AIM.

Even with the cute lil smilies it's very hard to tell what someone means without the proper intonation. Particularly hard to detect are sarcasm and jokes. Especially because sometimes jokes rely on your saying the opposite of what you mean. (Ironically, I should have had a post on this already, but I had to save the draft because my father needed the computer and I never got back to it...)

So yeah, for your relationship's sake, try to do these types of things in person and, worse case scenario, do it on the phone. Let AIM be for small talk and cutesy things, not for important decisions.

Consider yourselves warned!

Hebrews Chapter 11
Mood:  rushed
Usual disclaimer: If this isn't your bag, no worries. Most of my posts have nothing to do with this so check those out or wait for my next post
HOWEVER, this particular one doesn't really have too much to do with the Bible at all, so feel free to read it and see what I mean
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So I've skipped a few chapters. Basically what happened is that I would put the computer away and then remember that I wanted to post about what I felt and what I thought each chapter meant. We'll just skip those. At any rate, today's chapter is a very famous and well quoted one.

I'm not going to go verse-by-verse through the whole chapter The stories recounted are very well-known and anyone who ever went to church a half-dozen times knows them.

Basically, the entire chapter is about the power of faith. "Faith is the evidence of things unseen" our authoer tells us. It seems a bit circuitous doesn't it? This chair exists because I believe that it exists. What evidence do I have that it exists? If it didn't exist I wouldn't have the faith to say that it did. I'm sure that I'm slightly botching this up, but I think that you get my point.

One, almost cliche, example often given involves the wind. Wind is completely invisible yet there is no one who would deny its existence. Flags wave, trees sway and sometimes even destruction can occur from this force that we are unable to see. In the same way, the fact that we can't see God should not be reason for an automatic negation of His existence. If you have some logical proof for His non-existence, then that's a different story. However, simply saying that you cannot see God is not sufficient in any logical arguement to say that He is not real.

What does faith mean to me? Well, in a sense faith allows one to take risks knowing that the end result will be ok. I'm not just talking about religious faith, but faith in anything. I'll return to a non-religous example momentarily, but allow me to consider a religious one. By faith I may take the action of trying to save an old lady from a burning building. I may use faith to reason that since no one else wants to help her (I'm assuming there are no firemen around nor will they be arriving soon) that it must be God's will for someone to save her. Therefore, I would go in and try to save her without fear of dying. However, many people may call this irrational. They say that faith is just a comfort blanket for acting wildly. I think that my non-religious example will prove helpful in dispelling this fact.

I borrow this anecdote from the famous Tony Robbins: I claim that driving requires an act of faith. Why is that? When one drives, what guarantee does he have that the cars in the oncoming lane will remain in their lane and not cross into his? What assurances are there that the cars in front of him will not suddenly begin to go backwards? There are absolutely no assurances. Yes, there are rules, but we all know that people break rules; sometimes it's intentional and sometimes it's not. However, as you drive you have no guarantees. Therefore, in order to drive without it being a mentally taxing effort or causing one to have a breakdown, one must have faith that all of the other cars on the road will follow the rules. Without this faith it is impossible to drive.

Another example, just walking around the city. You have faith that the police presence and the consequences of their actions will keep others from asaulting you, robbing you, or otherwise incringing upon your rights. Without this faith you become nurotic. In fact, there's even a term for these people, agorophobics. They can't be outside (for a variety of reasons) and sometimes the reason is that they believe they will be assaulted.

Basically all of life is an exercise in faith. Those who can't have enough faith in a particular domain of their life then have fears or phobias in that area.

That is what faith means. It doesn't have some mystical religious overtone or anything. We just don't speak of faith too often outside of church.

I really don't have much else to say. While the purpose of the chapter was to give example of faith in an attempt to get the reader to understand it, I think that I've done it in an updated way. At any rate, as I said, the people they mention are the "stars" of the Bible anyway - Noah, Abraham, and Moses, to name a few. If you're insanely curious about it, just pick up a Bible. They're everywhere and often there are people willing to give them away.

The gideons used to pass them out sometimes as we left high school back all those (3) years ago. But that's a story for another post.

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Post script: If anything is horribly misspelled, grammatically incorrect or incoherent, I apologize, but if you note the time of day when I made the post, I think you can forgive me, right? q:o)

#164
Aw man, I messed up and I missed a day so now I have to start all over again with my attempt to have a whole slew of posts without any gaps in between. Well, here we go again. Hopefully I'll have more luck this time. At least until school starts up again I'd like to have a post each day.

Hybrid Hype
Mood:  don't ask
Today my parents decided to take a detour while we were all trapped in the car after church. My brother's turning 16 soon so he may be getting a car if I take mine away from home; thus we went to the car dealership. He gets to choose between a Honda Civic (my car) or a Toyota Corolla (my brother's car). Our first stop was the Honda dealership.

While we were there we decided to check out the hybrid Civic. This is its second year in production so the price wasn't too far from the gas only Civics. Since I'd been wanting to test drive one since they first came out, I got to test drive it. The main thing I wanted to test was the pickup because everyone always says that there's no way that a car like that can have the same pickup as a gas car. What's the verdict?

Basically, there are 3 things I didn't like about the car. I'll go from least important to most important, IMHO. First, there's less trunk space. Where did it go? To hold the HUGE battery that powers the car. Fortunately, Civics have huge trunks to begin with so the loss isn't so bad. Still, for someone like me who's even had to lower the seats to carry my DJ equipment, the loss is huge. Second, there's the fact that for some strange reason you can't hear or feel the gears change. I don't know enough about cars to know why this is the case, but yeah it's very weird to drive an automatic car where you don't hear the VROOOOM bam VROOOOM bam of the gears changing. (Perhaps bam isn't the right noise, but it something like that. Anyone who pays attention knows that I mean) Additionally, you can't feel the gears changing. That really throws off my driving. Finally, it didn't have any pickup. I mean, I was stepping on it to drive on the highway and I worried whether I'd get up to highway speed. Basically, hybrid cars really aren't ready to compete with their gasoline brethren. Not if the drivers want to have power and pickup. But, that's just my humble opinion.

A full day....
Today I woke up just seconds before my girlfriend called my cellphone. I was about to call her back on my house phone because we have free long distance when I got two back to back calls for my brothers who were still asleep. After fielding them and getting back to my girlfriend, my dad informed me that we'd be going to best buy to get his DVD player. He's been wanting to get one with component outputs and dolby connections.

So after I got off the phone with her we went to have lunch and then best buy. We spent about an hour there. We also picked up a DVD-Audio of Santana. If you don't know what that is, it's a brand new format: 1 of 2 that will replace CDs. In addition to songs that are in Dolby 5.1, they have lyrics, music videos and other special video features.

Then we spent the next 4 hours setting up the DVD player to properly connect to the receiver. It was a pain because the instructions weren't explicit. Therefore, we had to play with every single setting until it worked. At one point, we could hear everything except dialogue. But we finally got it to work.

Then we spent a few hours testing it with various movies.

Then I had to cook for the family since my mom's still only got one operational arm and I'm the only one that can cook.

That's why I couldn't work on the Ranma stuff or read.

I did it all for the wookie
For a fun little parody video check this out:
http://download.theforce.net/theater/wookie/wookie.mov

#160
So, I didn't write anything of substance yet because I'm only up due to insomnia. Trust me, you don't want me writing the fanfiction now.

So, I've noticed that whenever I'm on break I completely lose track of all sense of time. I think that my life is so structured and scheduled while I'm at the University that being here with nothing in particular due by any certain day completely throws me off. For example, New Year's Eve completely threw me off. I know that it comes 7 days after Christmas, but Christmas already seems like it's a millenium away. Wow, it really was only a week ago! And now it's 2004. Last semester was only a few weeks ago and it seems like forever since I took one. Same with my girlfriend, it'll only be two weeks until we go back to school, but I feel like we've been apart forever.

It's not just dates, but also days. I have to constantly ask people what day of the week it is. The fact that tomorrow is Friday thouroughly shocked me. I was like...did we just go through an entire week? What have I done? Surprisingly little. I mean, I *did* grow my city to 121k in sim city. We *do* have a 1/4 of a million people in the region now. But other than starting a couple of books that I haven't finished yet, what the heck have I been doing?

On the one hand, I don't care. This is what a true vacation is all about. It's supposed to be a release from schedules and assignments and everything that brings stress into my life. But dang it, I had goals for break! I wanted to read all of my books and write about them in the blog.

Well, I guess that I did meet one of my goals. I have blogged daily since break started. That's pretty neat. Still!

Well, maybe tomorrow I'll get some of it done. Also, I have to finally watch LOTR 2 so that I can go see 3 with my family. But that's 3 freakin' hours! Do I want to sit for 3 hours for something I'm not really into? I mean, 3 hours of matrix, ok! But 3 hours of LOTR?!? To then allow me to see another 3 hours! I don't know about that...Maybe I'll wait to see it with my girlfriend because she's already seen it so we can talk during the boring parts.

I usually don't do that during a movie at all, but I'm not really into the fantasy genre. I'm just seeing it so that I can be part of the LOTR pop culture movement. It's kinda the same reason why I saw Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. Just because they're movies that you have to see if you live in the US. Casablance turned out to be pretty decent. Gone with the wind was so boring that I chatted on AIM through a good portion of it.

Hmm....well, now that I've gotten that out of my system, perhaps I can get to bed.

ok...ok....just one more day
I hope that the first day of 2004 went well for everyone.

Well, I had to spend part of the day cleaning for guests and the other part of the day with them. Therefore, not only did nothing worth writing about happen, I wasn't able to write anything like the next Ranma episode. I hope to be able to remedy that tomorrow. My brothers should be off to the beach leaving my father and I here alone. My dad will probably go read one of his books and that'll give me ample time to write. At least, that's the plan. We'll see what goes down tomorrow.

Upcoming Posts
Finally, the second ep to the Ranma fanfic

Why am I not on the most recently updated list when I've had several posts every day for the past 2 wks

And just maybe the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

(Sleep procrastination again....I have absolutely no idea why I do it)

Hebrews Chap 4-6
Mood:  bright
The usual disclaimer: if this doesn't float your boat, just read the other stuff or wait for another post
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Chapter 4
The big point here is that the only way to reach a true state of rest (and I think they mean something deeper than mere physical rest) is through God. Basically, we're unable to do it otherwise because that's how we were designed. It's as if completing a puzzle and, as we all know, only once piece fits correctly into the right slot.

The second part which overlaps with Chapter 5 is about how, by becoming Jesus, God is able to know what it's like to be tempted. There were times when his body wanted to be a glutton or have extra-marital sex or anything else like that. So it's not like he doesn't know what we're going through. On the contrary, this is practically the whole reason for the incarnation.

Chapter 5
Chapter 5 merely completes the picture with an analogy. Look at the High Priests. In Hebrew society this was like a bishop in the Catholic church today. I mean, this is no small potatoes job. But they were chosen from amongst the lower rabbis and they were to be the role models. They had the unique ability to be able to forgive someone for acting foolishly because they themselves being only human might sin too.

This argument can be used today against people with "Holier Than Thou" syndrome. These are the ones who people love to see fall because they act as if they were better than all. Yet, they should rather help to teach others to improve without being arrogant so that when they mess up, instead of cheering for them to fall, others will help them get back up.

Back to the High Priest analogy, it applies to Jesus in that he is also a chosen one and he knows what it feels like to be human.

The chapter ends with an insult at the Hebrews who are apparently not doing well in their spiritual growth.

Chapter 6
This continues the insults from chapter 5. Additionally, it talk a little bit about Abraham. This is a forshadowing of the talk of faith that will come in chapter 11 and begins with Abraham. So since there's nothing big here, I won't make a big deal of it.