CryStal_ChopStix's Xanga

Friday, July 18, 2008

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:01:12 GMT

Singapore = love.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Thu, 22 May 2008 18:51:00 GMT

If you truly know Ruth, you would know that I LOVE Hillsong, and that they're my favorite Christian band ever. So here's my AHHH FRUSTRATING story of the summer...

My cousin Sean goes to university in Sydney, Australia, which is where Hillsong is from, and this July, there's going to be a huge Hillsong conference in Sydney. My cousin said that he would buy me tickets to the conference if I could make it down to Aussie-land from Singapore (I'll be Singapore in July anyway for vacation). I want to go sooo bad because I could see my cousin, see Australia (I've never been before), AND get to see Hillsong. But alas, plane tickets are close to $900, and my bank account does not support such spending.

So I was bummed. As I'm poking around the Hillsong myspace page, I see that the band will be at the New Creation Church in Singapore (which is the church I'll be going to when I'm on vacation there) and I get all excited again until I see the date - May 24, 2008. I won't get to Singapore until July!

THEN I scroll down the page some more and find out that Hillsong is coming to the States! So I check their tour schedule, and find out that they will have a conference (conferences are even better than concerts!) in HOUSTON. But once again, I look at the date, August 22 and 23rd, and by that time I'll be back in the StL. GoshDARNit.

So my only hope is when Hillsong goes to Chicago on August 31st. Chi-town is a 3, 4 hour drive from StL, but I think Hillsong is worth it. At first I thought I couldn't go since the concert is at 8 PM on August 31st (which is a Sunday) and I have 8 AM class on Monday, but then Kara reminded me that Sept 1st is Labor day, and there's no classes on Labor day. God's way of telling me I should go perhaps?

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:31:01 GMT

Sometimes I really wish I went to a bigger school. Going from Plano to Stlcop is like going from the big ocean to a shot glass.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:28:05 GMT

This weekend was wonderful in new ways.

"Savior, he can move the mountains
My God is mighty to save, he is mighty to save
Forever, author of salvation
He rose and conquered the grave, Jesus conquered the grave."

- Hillsong United

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:57:23 GMT

Warning: this entry contains a not-so-nice word.

Maddie says: "Kennedy got assassinated."
Ruth hears: "Kennedy got his ass eliminated."

Monday, December 17, 2007

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:52:18 GMT

Aaditya comes home tomorrow!
Vincent and Bonnie are visiting on Wednesday!
Most UT kids will be home sometime this week!

YAYYYYYY!

I still wish Lise, Big Z, and Kare were here though.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 14:44:13 GMT

Home.

It's the only thing that keeps me going.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:09:13 GMT

According to Newsweek's "Best High Schools in the U.S." list for 2007, the best high school in America is the School for the Talented and Gifted (aka TAG Magnet) in Dallas, Texas. TAG won this year and last year, but what I find amusing (and slightly ironic) is that the school is located in Oak Cliff. Maybe all the brain power forms a cocoon of protection around the school... or maybe the school is just very far away from the notoriously shady South Oak Cliff.

Another thing I find amusing is that Plano Senior was ranked #364 and Plano East was #452 out of 1351 schools. Plano West didn't even make it on the list.

GOSH DARN! ok so tim chiu has corrected me. Plano West is on the list, it's ranked #186. Plano Senior is #364, and Plano East is #452. oh, and TAMS isn't on the list because it was only a list of the top public high schools. TAMS is semi-private I guess?

Monday, November 05, 2007

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:18:34 GMT

who cares what you get when you add Sia2BH-THF, peroxide, and a base to an alkene?

WHAT IS THE POINT OF ORGANIC CHEMISTRY?!

i really want to go home. yay thanksgiving!

Friday, October 19, 2007

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:30:42 GMT

I was watching an interview with Dinesh D'Souza today, and he was talking about Christianity being under attack. He made a couple of comments that I really liked, and I posted them here.

"But you can also think about which groups in our society its ok to offend, and which groups its not. The Muslims clearly come in the 'scary don’t offend them or you’ll have to watch out' category. But you also have groups like African-Americans, gay rights groups, Hispanics, and so on. If you were to mock these groups, there would be a tremendous outrage, free speech would never come up, the only debate would be about racism and insensitivity. By contrast when you attack Christians, the idea is 'Why don’t you sit back and take it? Haven’t you heard of the first amendment?' So there’s definitely a double standard in our culture, and that’s something that Christians need to be alert to."

Mr. D'Souza also said, "I think Christians have become, in a sense, too complacent. They have been abandoning the public square and practicing their faith in private, hoping that the public square will remain a neutral space. But now, somewhat to their surprise, the atheists have come galloping in, they have taken over the public square, and they want to de-legitimize Christianity." The reporter interviewing him also made a good point saying, "Really, the culprit in this whole battle isn't necessarily the atheists, but the apathetic Christians, who just expect Christianity to stay there even though they are doing nothing to keep it there."

Finally, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, Mr. D'Souza blogged the following:

"The atheist writer Richard Dawkins has observed that according to the findings of modern science, the universe has all the properties of a system that is utterly devoid of meaning. The main characteristic of the universe is pitiless indifference. Dawkins further argues that we human beings are simply agglomerations of molecules, assembled into functional units over millennia of natural selection, and as for the soul--well, that's an illusion!

To no one's surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way--molecules acting upon molecules.

"If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science."