So here it is, Christmas day, and I’ve got a few thoughts running through my head, keeping me from sleep.

Next week is my last week at the intern job I’ve had over the summer/fall, and a week after that I’ll be starting up another semester of school. Only two semesters left… I had so many plans for this summer, and almost none of them happened.

Today I realized more concretely, while planning the moving-back-to-school, that I was almost done here, and starting school will once again cut me off from my friends here. And as I thought more on this, I felt more and more alone. I’ll be living in an apartment with a friend, and I’ll still see most of these friends about the same amount, but during the semester I always feel so cut off and distanced. Probably because of the distance.

But general friendships aren’t why I’m still awake at 2am, it’s a very specific relationship.

And a real fear that I’ll lose the friendship by the cold forces of time and distance.

But when I say “lose”, I don’t mean how it’s normally meant. I mean that, by time and distance, and the inevitable changes about to occur in some of my circles of friends, that the relationship will be… Well, I guess maybe “lost” is the best word.

Set aside and forgotten.

Displaced with other interests.

“It’s a sad thing to lose a friend”, he said.

[Every year, around my birthday, I reflect on who I am, where I've come from, and where I'm going, and then I pour out my heart in this blog. This year is no different.]

Can you remember when you were six? Some people can, especially if they are still six, but my memory slips in and out and I can only remember bits and phrases. One piece goes like this:

My fathers friend, who was also my friend, died when I was rather young, and I remember going to the funeral. This man was a friend to many, and he brought happiness into many people’s lives, so there were many people there, and lots of them were crying.

I didn’t cry then.

As far back as my memory goes, I don’t recall ever being a person who cries easily. I felt pain, I was incredibly sad many times, but I’ve always been good at putting away my sadness, hiding my sorrow behind a stone wall. A barricade to keep people out.

“Good fences make good neighbors”

Only a short number of years ago, I met someone who I thought for sure I would marry “a promise in time, shadows of memories…” When that relationship didn’t work out, I was overcome with grief, but I did not cry much. I was silent for days, my heart was heavy in me while a called out to God, “save me or I perish”, but I did not weep.

Do you remember when you were six? Do you remember what made you cry then?

When I was younger, probably ten or twelve, I was learning math (Algebra) and it was so difficult that it made me cry. But even at that age I could see the golden treasure behind the veil, and I persevered, and now (years later) I’m wrapping up a degree in engineering.

But I didn’t want to talk about “perseverance”, I wanted to say that I wasn’t six then, I was much older.

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” (Mark 10:14)

Why does Jesus say this, that the kingdom of God “belongs to such as these”?

When I was six years old, I hardly knew how to read, if I recall correctly. The world was becoming a strange and dark place to me, I was becoming aware of what pain was, of why people cry, of right and wrong, of love, and of death.

A child hears everything you say, and is thinking about it more than you realize. Parents know this when the thing they said several days ago comes out of the mouth of their five year old, sometimes with comedic results.

I recently watched a movie where a young child is told that the sun is going to get bigger and bigger, eventually burning up the earth and the entire solar system, and it didn’t matter to the child that it would be billions of years down the road. What mattered is that, quite suddenly, the child realized a bigger truth, that everything and everyone around you will someday die.

Probably by now you are wondering what this is all about, because it sure seems like I’m going somewhere. And you are right, but I don’t think I can summarize in a nice simple paragraph.

You see, some things can’t be summarized into bumper-sticker slogans, or nice paragraph summaries. Some things in life are so deep, and so meaningful that to even try to put it in words seems to trivialize the very thing you are trying to say. But I will try to say it here:

The love of God is greater than tongue or pen can tell. If I were to fill the ocean with ink, and write all that ink onto paper, describing the love of God, I would drain the ocean dry and still be on the first chapter.

I did not go to culinary school. In fact, it’s my personal opinion that culinary school is mostly a waste of time (more on that later). Instead I worked for several years as a lower chef, and passively gained experience until I moved up the proverbial ladder.

Working in food service was fun but tiring, as a chef you’ll always be on your feet. Be prepared to have a tired back for quite some time, until the muscles get conditioned to the 12 hour standing up routine. The enjoyable part of food service to me was twofold:

1) You get to make things! Depending on what you specialize in and where you work, you get to make more or less interesting things. For example, if you work as a salad chef on a buffet line, you probably won’t get to make those cool plates and awesome cakes, but you can add a little personal flair by carving flowers and things out of tomatoes and radishes.

2) You get to spend time with people, in a very unique environment. It’s sometimes high stress, but a lot of “boring” time spent together, talking about any old thing. Don’t let this frighten you if you aren’t really a people person, you can also be pretty quiet if you want, but after you spend some time in the kitchen you’ll open up. It really is a blast.

The correlations are true:

1) If you don’t enjoy making simple creative things, food service probably won’t be something you enjoy.

2) If you work somewhere with un-friendly people, you will get burnt out really quickly.

Anyway … I loved making food (still do, actually), and I loved running the kitchen even more. I loved it enough to start putting a business plan together to start my own restaurant.

However, the one issue with food service is that it takes a lot of time, and is higher stress than an office job. From what I can tell, through experience and visiting other kitchens, this is true from the lowly fast-food shop to the high dollar restaurant extraordinaire. Food service is always a hurry-hurry-hurry, wait-wait-wait kind of job, so it’s not always high stress, but the peaks of stress can be pretty high sometimes.

In the end, I realized I could make a career using the intellect God has blessed me with, and realized I would rather do that than continue down the path I was on.

I suppose it was part of my “growing up” years, because I also realized I had gotten into food service passively. What I mean is that I didn’t actively pursue personal education of food stuffs, of how to run restaurants, but I had taken this career path because it was easier.

And that’s another thing: Food service doesn’t really give you much money per hour, so it’s really hard to justify spending 2-4 years at culinary school in the hope that you get a better job. Unless you are prepared to really go at it, culinary school is a high cost, low return investment.

Not that it wouldn’t be fun, because I’m pretty sure it would be, but you’d better count your fun-per-dollar and see if it’s worth it. I’d say 90% of the time it’s not.

When I was a child, I acted as a child. I still do, actually. But as I grow older, I put away childish things.

Years ago I read a book that changed my thinking, and greatly shaped several years of my life. The book was a story about a man who meets a child, and the child changes the mans life. The child reminds the man of the innocence of youth, and how as adults we grow out of that innocence and become adults.

Become more jaded.

More cynical of life.

As we get older we realize that people don’t always mean what they say, and even our friends will lie to us. We start to notice that there are a lot of people who don’t care about us, and they’ll deceive us to make a few more dollars, and they’ll hurt us inside, where we thought we could be safe.

There comes a point in our lives that we realize there are things that can’t be deflected by our pillow forts and can’t be stopped by a blanket. Someone says something that hurts us so deep, and even the kisses of someone we love cannot drive away the pain and the sorrow, and that pain and sorrow we will have to carry alone for the rest of our lives.

When I was a child, I thought friends would never hurt their friends. When I was a child, my best friend told her friends that I was a nobody. That’s when I first realized that people could hurt other people on purpose. That a person can say they are a friend, but still hurt you.

Many times people will say wistfully that they wish they could have the innocence of youth, that they could be free from the cares and worry of life. To be free of the hurry and bustle of life. To have the intense joy of something as simple as someone giving you an ice cream cone.

When I was a child, I acted as a child.

I hurt people deeply, and I continued doing it because the end result was enjoyable for me. I didn’t understand that I could hurt someone so deeply, and affect their life so negatively, and even though I knew the thing that I did was wrong, I did it anyway. This is the way of a child.

In the innocence children, there is pain much deeper. Where there is no worry, there is no care for others. As a child, love is only selfishness.

The spring blossom of youth soon fades, but not to be jaded by the harshness of life. The innocence of youth is lost to the realization that we humans are cruel and mean. We hurt each other, and we usually do it on purpose. But it is not enough just to see that other people hurt you. This does not make you an adult.

As I grow older, I put away childish things.

Wanting to return to the innocence of childhood is to cause others pain. As children we were ignorant of the pain we caused others, and we were ignorant of how our actions would hurt people. But as we grow older, we put away the selfishness of childish things.

There’s a lot on my heart tonight: I’ve finally reached a point where I can see the end of school and I have a reasonably good job mostly lined up for when I’m done, so I’ve been thinking of how the next “stage of life” will be starting shortly. Here is what I’ve been thinking about mostly:

Some people say men are afraid of relationships, afraid of commitments. One lady told me that, but at the time I didn’t realize that what I was afraid of was being vulnerable. It’s not the decisiveness of a commitment that I was afraid of, it was the vulnerability that the commitment required.

When I was younger I quit my job because I wanted to know what it would be like to have all the time I wanted to finally read books. (I haven’t always been a planner, as you can tell.) Another time I left a job that would have turned into me owning a restaurant, so I could volunteer for a couple years at some camp. Then when I left the camp, only a few years ago, I abandoned a solid career to go to school and try to get into an industry I knew nothing about.

I never wanted to make a serious commitment to a job or a place or even, sadly, to friends.

But over the past three or four years I have been having a change of heart. A change of focus. I guess that’s part of “growing up”, that now I am making plans for a hundred years from now. My carefree spirit has changed quite a bit. Now I have commitments.

I’m not complaining: I have been blessed with an opportunity that I would never have dreamed possible, and blessed with many good close friends. I guess I’m just getting impatient to be done with school so I can move onto what I can see waiting right in front of me.

Many years ago a friend told me what love is, but I forgot what was said–at the time it was very meaningful to me, but now I don’t think it would satisfy.

These days I think love is more about being vulnerable to someone. Caring about someone enough to drop the veil that guards your face when you normally talk to people. Dropping the veil because it makes it harder to see the other person.

I guess what I really want is to be vulnerable again.

I’ve been listening to “Phoenix” lately, a techno-ish sort of music that is easy to listen to. In one of the songs he asks “do you remember when 21 years was old”, which I thought was an interesting question.

So I asked it on Facebook. To my friends.

Many replies later, I got to wondering: What was I doing when I was 21? It was a few years ago, but thankfully, I was able to peruse my journals and remember.

When I was 21 I was in love with a girl. Cowardice and immaturity were (are?) my strong suits, so here I am. Alone.

And when I thought of that relationship, I got stuck in thought: Why do women say men are “afraid of commitment”?

One time I was working with an older lady who had been divorced, and she asked me that. “Why are men so afraid to commit?” It took me a while to think of what she said, but I realized: Men aren’t afraid of commitment, but rather of rejection and failure.

Freud often took his personal analysis and extrapolated it to say that everyone felt just like he did. I guess I’m going to be guilty of the same thing, but I’m going to say it anyway: Men lower their goals because they don’t want to fail at meeting those self-imposed goals.

It’s silly, in a way, but basically we think “I’ll never reach goal A, so I’ll set my goal lower to make sure I achieve it.” If a man lowers this goal to “nothing in particular”, they’ll be the lazy couch sitters that this culture is so familiar with.

And men also don’t want to be rejected. I have a hard time deciding if this is pure pride, or a different topic, but I lean toward the latter.

I think I didn’t want to commit to that relationship because of fear of failing at developing a real and lasting relationship.

I’m still learning, I guess.

Thesis: Modern music is dead.

Evidence: Lyrical depth is limited to “Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah), Fun, fun, fun, fun, Lookin’ forward to the weekend.”

• Rebecca Black: Friday
• Abby Victor: Crush on You
• Alana Lee: Butterflies
• Britt Rutter: Without Your Love
• Ariana Dvornik: Fly Away
• CJ Fam: Ordinary Pop Star

Some of you may argue that I am really just linking to “singers” that are products of the ARK Factory (Wikipedia), an establishment that is comparable to the “Song Poem” days of music. You may hold these types of musicians as the minority in modern music, so I will present more evidence:

• Stefani Germanotta: Poker Face
• Cee Lo Green: F**k You
• Katy Perry and Kanye West: E.T.
• Bruno Mars: Grenade

And yes, I am basically just running down the Billboard top 100 chart.

First, a short back-story:

At school I often go to the student union building to eat. It has a little Chinese restaurant, the couple who run the place are very friendly and know me by name.

“How are your studies?”, they ask me. “Always busy!”, I respond.

While I sit and eat I usually study, and when I study I don’t usually listen to music. And so, while I sit and study, I find myself listening in on other people’s conversations.

Now, I’ll tell you what I hear:

Everyone wants to talk, but no one wants to listen.

As I sit and listen, a couple sits close by and this conversation goes on:

Person 1: “Today my teacher was so annoying, he just went on and on and on.”

Person 2: “My bicycle has a flat tire, and so I had to walk today.”

Person 1: “It was like this droning, it just kept going!”

Person 2: “I had to take a bus, and this guy smelled bad.”

This is a made-up conversation, but it is a typical exchange, and I hear conversations like this very frequently. Neither person is listening to the other, neither one shows a concern for the other.

I used to write a lot, but the last few years I’ve become more frustrated with the amount of noise and the lack of listening, so I don’t write as much because I don’t want to be just another noise. Even now I struggle, trying to decide if this is worth telling you.

Listening to other people is an art.

People say that all the time, and I don’t want to say it’s not true, but I’m going to anyway: It’s not really true.

At least, it’s not a really helpful statement.

Let me tell you what I think, please take this to heart: Listening is about caring.

Placing another persons cares above your own.

Caring about another person above your own cares and concerns.

Sometimes I want to interrupt these people who are talking-but-not-listening and ask them whether they really care about the other person.

I don’t think they do, at least not in a meaningful way, and it makes me sad.

Hello everyone, in keeping with my public planning mood, I thought I would write up my plans for the winter break. The summers plans were a little too much, but I think this one I planned out about right. (Not in order of importance)

• Finish WordPress “Sermon Posts” plugin and make project public
• Finish WordPress Product Management plugin
• Some work for my church, mostly moving the sermons over to the new plugin
• I have a couple web clients to finish work for, and a few to propose working for
• I bought a trailer in preparation for moving this summer, so I need to move all my junk lying around in the house into the trailer, which also needs a few repairs
• Belated fall cleaning of the house
• Quite a few clothes need mending, thankfully I am good with a needle and thread
• Get some quality time in on my cello
• Get some consistent quality time in on my Chinese language (中文) practice
• Lots of planning to do for next year: Class schedule, daily schedule, fitness/health/workout, meal planning, relationships, spiritual, reading, etcetera.
• I also plan to get back on the Religious Politic blog
• Spend some quality time with William, maybe do a little jam session
• Head out to Colorado to visit some friends

Some of this stuff is already pretty much done, thankfully.

My friends: It comes to my attention that the Department of Homeland Security has begun shutting down websites based on whether they believe they can get away with it.

The situation is complex, but absolutely critical. Essentially the decision that stands before us is whether or not the internet should be directly controlled by the government, thereby regulating the freedom of press. Such a statement is certainly simplification, but in my study of the issue, I am certain this simplification is an accurate one.

My aim is not a political one, I don’t speak as a Republican, a Democrat, a Conservative, a Liberal, an Anarchist, or any other type. I only speak this as a warning to those who cherish free speech: If this movement by the Homeland Security is not both stopped and overthrown, it will signify the final loss of freedom of press in America, and I do not feel that I am exaggerating in the least.

I have yet to find a way to combat this egregious violation by the HSA, but letters and emails and phone calls to your representative are always something useful, even if they provide little result.

For freedom.