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jchan985
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Name: Jesse
Birthday: 9/1/1985
Gender: Male
Interests: practically everything related to music, God, my friends, tennis, etc...haha keep in mind i kinda suck at all of these
Expertise: you mean what am i good at? dang...that's hard..
Occupation: Student
Industry: Art
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
7/9/2003
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| this is the loneliest year I have ever gone through in my life, but I can't seem to find it in me to change my situation.
more later
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| a quick update on lifeIn the spirit of Sam and Henry updating, I'll update too. The last couple weeks have been really busy - MCing for LNY was a blast, and I don't think I'll forget it very soon. Battle of the Bands was fun too (congrats to the Social Insects!), but squeezing that in with an overnight visit to UT Austin was a bit hectic (it was a fun visit, not including the two speeding tickets). But now that all those events are over, I'm finding life is a lot more free again.
As of now, I'm on Spring Break and it's pretty relaxed. I'm enjoying time with family back home in Cali right now. My cousin's getting married soon, and I got to meet her fiance for the first time. He's a cool guy, and he hung out with all the young (under 30) ABC cousins in my mom's side of the family.
I've been reading pretty voraciously in the last couple of days, and it's much more enjoyable this time around (as opposed to during Winter Break - see last post). I brought a couple books to read, but since my brother is working at a Hollister outlet in a mall, I just started going to the nearby Barnes and Nobles and reading a whole bunch of stuff. It's pretty interesting - I started skimming/reading a variety of different perspectives; from Victor Stenger to Christopher Hitchens (atheist), Marcus Borg and John S Spong (non-Orthodox liberal Christian), NT Wright (some form of more traditional Christianity), and traditional stuff, like Strobel and Lewis and D'Souza (I'm getting to Brian McLaren and the emergent church people slowly...). I spent most of my time reading one book by Marcus Borg about redefining Jesus as he was historically, and it was very different from what I expected - it felt kind of New-Age-ish, which didn't seem to fit, considering this was a skeptical scholar of the Bible. It was interesting to me that his main emphasis was on the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus/God as well, considering that he is firmly against the conservative evangelical group that seems to extol the same exact idea (with a few theological details differing between the two, of course...like the idea that Jesus was God, etc). Sorry, i don't have a particular point to this paragraph - it was mostly just observations from what I read.
I also started reading more math. This time, though, I decided I'd take a book I actually liked, so I brought along "Numerical Linear Algebra" by Lloyd Trefethen and David Bau. It's pretty sweet...this is the first time I've really enjoyed a math text. I can see where Dr Embree gets his style from now. I particularly liked one part I just read - the authors wrote out a derivation of orthogonal Legendre polynomials using the monomial basis and Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization, and then related what a "QR factorization" of a monomial basis matrix would look like (how the projector QQ* now acts as a neat little map from a function space to itself). I recommend this book to anyone that likes matrices. It has one of the best descriptions of the SVD I've seen, and devotes a full 2 chapters just to the theory and different interpretations of the SVD.
Sorry this post is a bit dense. I'm working on another one, called "what Christians can learn from fanboys and navel-gazers", inspired by internet, emo, and gamer culture. It should be fun, with some serious overtones =P. until then, hope you guys are all well. thanks for reading this far!
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| misledtime for a more serious post. it's a long one, sorry.
I've withdrawn a lot these past 2 semesters. I know I've disappeared from the lives of many of my friends and stopped catching up with many people I had previously committed to, and I'm sorry. I'm really thankful for most all of my friends who've stuck with me through it and still try to keep up with me. I suppose I'll chart where I've been and how I feel now.
Looking back, I can see how my way of viewing Christianity throughout college has led me to this recent chain of events which all started about a year ago. I'd always focused on doing things right, or at least playing it safe most of the time, not trusting my own wisdom but usually asking others' advice, especially from Christian mentors. And so it went; serving wherever I could, being a leader, being welcoming and outgoing, building relationships (as best I could), etc. In retrospect, I was trying to "do the right thing" as a Christian. It was hard...I always wondered why I never felt I could succeed, why I always felt as if I was doing my best and yet not really making any difference.
And then I started dating. I don't think I'd ever tried so hard to "do the right thing" and not screw up as when I was in that relationship. I don't think I'd ever cared so much about anything else before ("lovestruck" or infatuated could be a good way to put it). And yet, I almost wonder if because of that intense focus on doing things right, because of that fear of failure, I played it safe and didn't let the relationship progress naturally. I never really connected, and eventually I lost that relationship.
I still wonder if things would have been different had I connected better, if I knew what I do now. Strangely enough, a lot of what I consider important now has absolutely nothing to do with any of the lessons I learned from Christian books and teachers, and has more to do with letting the relationship be more natural. It's like I never learned the basics of relationships before diving into the Christian advice on them.
And so that was hard. The breakup was the start of an incredibly difficult time (see previous posts). After the rest of the year and the summer, I definitely wasn't feeling as motivated and passionate about the Christian life as I came into the 2007-08 year. It was a strange feeling. And then, for the first time in a long time, I had my beliefs severely challenged. Ask an Atheist 2007 pushed me into a world outside of my family and friends and church, and basically challenged all that I trusted. To make a long story short, I spent much of my time after that reading. School occupied some time, fine. Then winter break hit, and I just sat and read article after article online about faith, science, religion, anti-religion, etc...for about 5 hours a day (I swear my parents thought I was nuts...they're agnostic).
It didn't get much better, and in the middle of January, there was a week where I just kept thinking, "I'm going to become an atheist. inevitably". I just couldn't see an intelligent and intellectually honest way to remain Christian. Granted, I don't think that's entirely true now, given life stories and the biographies of many people I respect. However, I don't have a solution for myself as of yet. This has been an experience I feel like I really needed though; for once, I'm actually driven to explore the deeper questions honestly in life, and to think through what I do and why I do it.
However, things have changed. I find it difficult to study the Bible at all anymore. I find it hard to do the typical "Christian" things I used to do; pray, disciple someone, do Bible studies and all, etc. And this is where I think I struck onto something - I've been feeling misled all my life.
After the breakup, I was highly critical of dating books. I still am. After my wrestling with faith issues too, I now feel highly critical of many Christian books and teachings, and (unfortunately) people. Me. Feel highly critical. Feeling angry, distrusting, betrayed. Yeah, weird, eh?
I read a comic recently about a survivor of an atomic blast who is saved by Superman. He ends up dedicating his life to preaching this self-invented "Gospel of Superman" (literally a "Church of Superman") where he considers himself a special priest, saved by Superman from the blast because he was chosen to spread his message. When Superman kindly tells him otherwise, he goes nuts. As all comic books must go, the now-insane priest of Superman gains powers (why must the crazy ones always be so powerful) and swears to make Superman pay for misleading and lying to him. He goes back in time, and on every day, he kills a Superman.
And suddenly, I wonder if this is how I am. I built my life on these sayings and this advice. I trusted people and teachings naively. And when these sayings and this advice led to the breakup, the challenge to my worldview, I reacted very similarly. I hated them, I believed I was misled, believed I had wasted all my effort and time and energy on lies. How dare they make fools of me! I thought that if I did things right, things would go alright. And when they didn't, I got angry - at the ideas, at them, and at people who thought like them.
And now, I wonder. I wonder how to fix this mentality, this situation I'm in. Yes, I may have ignored the fact that there is no reward promised for doing the right thing, but I expected on nonetheless. Yes, I overlooked the flaws inherent in even the best people on earth, and yes, it may be much of my own fault that I felt so misled in the end. I don't want to take responsibility for it. It's still a situation where I reason "if this had never happened" or "if i had never heard this misleading advice", then I'd be fine. I would much rather blame others right now - my church, Christian books, advice, etc.
Even so, I must admit that while they may not be completely at fault, our pastors, the books we love to read and our favorite respect authors, even the friends we trust most - they are all fallible. What's the lesson here? The grand story? I don't know. It's just another dimension to life that has been revealed to me. Occam's razor is a lie. Life is far deeper and less simple than you think.
It's funny. My all-time favorite book series "The Prydain Chronicles" has a main character Taran, an Assistant Pig-Keeper on a small farm in a country called Prydain. He begins as a very passionate naive young boy who longs to be a hero and warrior, and is given his chance. Over the course of these books, he changes - his experiences sober him, try him. Comrades and friends die, he sacrifices and fails, and he goes from being a loud inexperienced brat with dreams of grandeur to being a much deeper, wiser and somber leader. In the end, when their villain is finally defeated, he refuses to leave the country with his comrades as they go to their paradise. Burdened by his ties to the people of the land and the promises he made, he stays behind in Prydain to fix it, and is, to his surprise, crowned High King of all the land in fulfillment of a prophecy made a long time ago about him. The funny thing is, he understands through his journey that "a crown is a pitiless master...[weighing] down, beyond the strength of any man to wear it lightly" - he was happy as a pig-keeper; as he finally learned more about leadership, he came to understand that the title of King is a burden that he finally agrees to bear, becoming the greatest king in all of Prydain history.
I've always wanted to relate, to be like Taran (I realize I'm projecting myself onto the story, but humor me for a bit). After getting more of a feel as to what that's actually like, though - going from naive young freshman to a more somber and reflective senior - I am finding it's far less glamorous than I thought it would be. I also haven't had half the victories and glories that he has =P.
I hope this catches everyone up to what's happened in my life recently, the way I feel, the things I've been thinking about. If you have any thoughts, any advice, I would love to hear them. Even if I don't blindly trust it, I value each of your thoughts.
Thanks for reading
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| I was going to do a serious entry...but not it appears I'm going to first post funny stuff I found on the web =P. Here are remakes of the famous "Dinosaur Comics" by Japanese students studying english. Here is a sample.
Why, yes, I'm win.
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im too lazy to write stuff myself
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