more thoughts on new york

- there are no fat people in new york! did anyone else notice that?

- ummmm new york is cool.

anyway, i've been hanging out with my cousin in jersey for the past few days with my brother, and my cousin's got these two adorable kids. rachel is 4 years old, and she's probably the smartest most energetic person in the world. what's awesome about her is that she still likes me even though i do absolutely no fun stuff with her. then there's caleb, who is about to turn 2 but is almost the same size as rachel. i think he's going to be a professional athlete or body builder. he's super cute too, and he does everything rachel does. sometimes i want to tell him - no, be your own person, caleb! but then he's at the age where he actually understands what people say, so i don't want to confuse him. caleb is the cutest boy in the world.

aside from playing with the kids, i've been spending time with my bro lately. sometimes hanging out with him is more than i can handle, but it's been really cool seeing him these past few days. first of all, and most selfishly, he's great with kids so he deflects attention away from me and my awkwardness when the little ones are around. but also it's been fun spending time with him before he goes to africa for a year.

one thing he likes to do when we hang out is tell me about how much i suck. talking to my brother is like taking painful medicine sometimes. actually, it's more like taking painful medicine all the time, whether you're healthy or sick. or rather, it's like being prescribed painful medicine by a doctor who is convinced that you're sick all the time, when really that couldn't be true because you're just as healthy as everyone else and they don't take medicine and they're still alive. but anyway, i was a little bit sick, and i've been doing some moderately painful introspection lately. i'm resolved to at least get on the path of healthy selflessness, away from the black-hole syndrome that pops up now and again.

i'm excited to see staf and pdave when i go out to cali. and then i'll be living with mom and dad all year. my goal for that is to not be such a baby, and for me to be able to hold an articulate conversation with my dad without getting frustrated that he doesn't understand me. i guess those two goals are all one goal, to just grow up.

speaking of not being a baby... john apparently told mom that i'm really awkward around babies. to which she replied, "Chris Himself is a baby!" :*(

anyway i should sleep soon. because rachel and caleb will surely be trying to wake john and me up tomorrow early in the morning. -_________-

edit:
omg... i completely forgot about my rwc experience. it was mostly okay but... also very weird. i got there a little late, so the worship time was almost ending. i sat between my friends, mike and dave (this detail is important), and then the main pastor introduced the guest speaker for the day. the guest pastor talked about how his favorite hobby was making out with his wife and that we should all look at his wife because his wife is hot. later in his sermon, he said "i would not slit my son's jugular for any of you. i mean, look at him. he's hot." his son is 18 months old. [out of context... but still, weird in any case]

he would go on to preach a good, normal sermon, but before that he did something out of the ordinary, and pretty much out of the blue. he asked us to pray after he read the bible passage while putting our hand on our neighbor's chest. now, some pastors will instruct the congregates to hold hands or put a hand on each others' shoulders if we feel comfortable. but this was ridiculous! everyone started giggling, and he said, "oh, not for anyone of the opposite gender of course." but even if two girls sat next to each other.... isn't that still really inappropriate?

but to end this long story, i was sitting in between two guys so i just crossed my arms and put both my hands on my chest. i didn't want them squeezing my little moobies during a sacred time of prayer. but i did have my eyes closed - i wonder what everyone else did, especially the girls. i mean. i don't actually wonder what they did. but it does make one wonder what the heck that pastor was thinking.

thoughts on new york

i've been in new york for the past few days, and i have a few thoughts and observations that are probably more self-revealing than relevant to the actual city. but here we go:

- everything is expensive, especially apartments. my friend is living in a room about the size of a folded out futon. i know it's the size of a futon because when we folded out his futon, there was literally no space left for anything.

- people need to make money because everything is expensive. i wonder how christians live in the city, since you pretty much have to worship money in order to live here. seriously, if your priorities are not on your job and making money, i can't imagine surviving here for very long.

- i am totally a tourist. taking the subway is such an experience for me. and everywhere i go, i need to know what part of town i'm in and what kind of people hang out there and such. i guess this is an observation about myself, and not the city. oh well.

- a more specific observation - when i was taking the bus here from philly, i saw a bunch of pidgins eating some stuff on the sidewalk. and i looked closer, and next to the mob was a dead pidgin, with its guts everywhere. but his fellow pidgins were too busy surviving to care. and i thought - that is totally what new york is like!! obviously the city still scares me.

- getting around in the northeast is so simple. trains, planes and automobiles. except, not planes, and buses instead of automobiles.

- one out of every thousand or so people is crazy, and you probably see about 5000 people a day. all of these numbers are made up.

- one out of every ten tourists talks about the above "fact". i know this because a couple sat down across from me and my friend at a diner and had the same exact conversation about the crazies in new york, with the same exact statistics.

- the chances of seeing someone you know if you're walking around is 100%, especially people you haven't talked to in a million years.

- this list is getting really boring and stupid.

i totally understand why new york is such a lonely place. there are so many people here, to the point where everybody is nobody. people live their own lives, which here is so demanding already. but given all this, new york is still a million times better than anywhere in the south. what little 5 is in atlanta is blocks of hipster living in new york. in fact, every little spot in atlanta doesn't compare to their counterparts in new york.

but then again, nobody in atlanta pays 900 bucks for a closet.

redemption gone wrong

staf told me that my blog should be more lighthearted. so as a birthday present to her, here is a lighthearted entry!

i think one of the most painful things to experience is when christians try to redeem a part of secular culture, but fail miserably. christian rock is the first thing that comes to mind, what with CCM and koo chung and youth group praise teams. but i'm not going to talk about worship bands, even though a lot of them try very hard to sound like U2. then there's stuff like sports, and the countless examples of youth group basketball tournaments turning into a bedlam of 5'6" korean gangsters, 6'4" white/black ringers and a few on-the-court death threats. music and sports are great topics, but i want to look at more subtle areas of culture and society. so i'll start with humor.

i was in an officers meeting in my youth group, which were held in my pastor's small office. we were waiting for him to come, so one of us poked around his bookshelf and found a small white book called "the christian book of clean jokes". we all burst out laughing as he walked in, and my pastor got really pissed and the whole meeting was awkward cuz of that.

anyway, there are better examples of how christians fail to redeem comedy. here are some horrible xian jokes:

Q: what books of the bible do you read for direction?
A: Luke! Obadaiah!

Q: what book of the bible serves as an endorsement?
A: Habakuk (pronounced, in a thick korean accent, "have a coke")

i can't think of any other ones. which is surprising since i watched a whole dvd of christian comedians a few months ago with my family group. i must have blocked it out of my memory.

anyway, related to humor, the song and dance is an aspect of secular entertainment that christians desperately try to redeem. but the examples of failed redemption are endless. one blatant example is when, at my youth group's retreat, we would have a song and dance that would describe the rules. each year got exponentially more ridiculous, to the point where they had to stop the tradition. that year, a group of girls, all wearing low-cut white shirts, pranced around singing modified lyrics to an N'Sync song. all i remember was their "band's" name - N'Chink. needless to say, that was a failure of redemption at its worst.

but i will go on. in college, i found that the most painful thing to sit through a body-worship or christian dance routine that, from the start, was destined to fail. i wish i had footage from this past AMI revolution but these soldiers will have to do. i know everyone is well-intentioned and that probably a few people in the congregation are blessed by their awkward movements or muscle-strained smiles. but usually it's more like watching a child's piano recital. you're just so nervous that they're going to mess up, that you can't enjoy a thing. i have to look away and think about something else. and to be fair, it's mostly because the people that are watching don't know what to do with themselves. it's awkward when the performers' energy level is a few stratospheres higher than everyone else. so there's no hootin' and hollering. just blank stares. except for me - i'm usually looking down, or trying to make eye contact with someone else who looks like they're in pain.

i used to think that redemption was the way to go, and i still think that redeeming society and culture can do a lot for the Kingdom. but over the years, i've seen so many failed attempts. it's sad when events are geared towards performance, events that hinge on the redemption of the secular, end up looking like a clumsy attempt at preaching salvation. is it trying to do too much with too little - too little creativity, talent, understanding of society... or is it that we're so tethered by an orthodoxy that everything has to have a cheezy jesus spin when we know we can say something more meaningful in a more creative way?

that link was a joke. habajoke. but if you are a church leader and you're reading this, take heed - redemption gone wrong is more painful than just letting it be. conceding a few things to the secular world isn't so bad. let's pick our battles wisely.

a new me

aside from the xanga import below, this new blog represents the new me. that is, the post-undergrad, post-atlanta me. now, i am to be a stranger in a strange land, learning the new cali-style life, trying not to get frustrated that i have no friends and no life. i will have to remember that wise adage: "mind the tree. mind the stone. 2 many mind." so, as i move on from xanga, i will move on from the tree, the stone and all else that gets me in my way of... of something. jesus i guess.

but really, i forgot my xanga password and i can't log in anymore. so here's my new blog. please enjoy.

my teenage feelings

i'd like to share with the world a song that is awesome. it's called that teenage feeling by neko case:

if you haven't given it a listen, or read the lyrics, the song is about someone who can't help but be jaded after a series of short-lived relationships. she admires her friend who can be content chasing teenage feelings while knowing that the love will never last. that leaves the woman confused, doubting whether she can ever make a relationship work, especially now that there's been so many past lovers and past lives she's lived.

i remember liking girls in high school but never having the balls to do anything about it. so, in a completely unhealthy way, i was able to sit safely in the confines of my teenage hopes and feelings, letting them incubate into something perfect. when girls did come, they were short lived. there was the girl who liked me, who danced with me close at homecoming. and then the nice girl i liked who lived far away. they weren't relationships by any means, but they gave me moments that hinted at that teenage feeling. so now, i feel like i have this intuitive understanding of love, but it's mostly just the outcome of years of emotional masturbation and guesswork. and even though i've gone through enough now to know not to believe my feelings, i still do sometimes. so go figure.

but what's the point of this. i guess when i heard this song, i remembered driving by those telephone poles on the way home from school. i remembered the changing seasons, from the harsh winter colds to the dying green weeds. me and my expectations, suffocating under the pressure of my teenage feelings. now, as i'm going through another series of realizations about how imperfect relationships are, i think about how useless those vague warnings that people passed off as advice have become. they would offer their past experiences with phrases like "take it slow" or "no touching". it's frustrating to think that the person who's helped me understand what i'm going through is a woman who doesn't know me at all. and while i'm thankful that she did it in just two minutes and forty two seconds, i'm still annoyed that she did it after the fact.

but how could i blame anyone? maybe it's just hard to really describe what goes on when someone comes of age. after all, that's how the song ends. all she can say is that it's hard. maybe in all the teenage delusions of love, the only thing that it might just be is hard.


************

but really, the awesomeness of this song came to me when i heard the song 1234 by the talented leslie feist. yeah, it's a cool song and it has a cute video. but her writing pales in comparison to neko case. 1234 is about a brokenhearted girl whose teenage hopes of true love failed her, leaving her somewhat bitter. it's a cute song but the only purpose it serves is to be compared to "that teenage feeling", and also to give an excuse to beat someone up, particularly anyone who tries to do the stupid dance whenever it's played.