Addressing a future in passing :

Life, where are you going to take me? We seem to be at a stoplight again.

On love and war :

Last night, I heard someone speak on the topic of change, emphasizing that in order to instigate change, there must be genuine desire to change.

As my day progressed, I realized that I desire a healthy way to approach, discuss, and deal with conflict.

By living in the present tense, it means that I live in the now and will continue to live on through the future; I am separate from my past, because it is behind me, and I can be different. I can choose to change.

From this point on, I choose to approach all future conflict with these things in mind:

1. Approach conflict with an an attitude of kindness, compassion, and humility, seeking to keep actions and words Christ-centered, life-giving, and glorifying to Him
2. Keep conflict between me and the other individual (i.e. no gossiping to others, allowing others to gossip to me)
3. Refrain from yelling, raising voice, talking loudly, or exercising any other form of counter-productive tone
4. If a moment needs to be taken to to calm down, verbally express the desire to leave the room and return ten minutes from that point
5. Agree to disagree with other individual while maintaining mutual respect
6. If any of these boundaries are disrespected by others, reserve the right to remove self from said situation
7. LOVE

I may not be able to change others, but I can change myself and abide by the list above. I will not attempt or try to do these things, but will do these things. I may sometimes fail, but I will not let that failure define me or who I am, but will instead allow it to motivate me to continue to change and persevere.

The change process starts:

Now.

When only blinking will suffice :

More and more people are telling me - telling me - that it is impossible for me to love those that I don't know or have never met.

...

The next time this occurs, I think I will probably just reintroduce myself, because if someone is going to insist upon imposing such a limitation upon me - especially regarding my love for others - I don't think we've truly met.

Coming from a kind [of] stranger [sort of man] :

"Hey, I wanted to let you know that I'm praying for you!"
"Thank you. Your kind words mean more than you think. I appreciate it."
"Of course!"
"Seriously, I don't even know you and you're praying for me. I hope you find the right guy for you."

A random, if not unexpected well-wishing.

I'll take.

The art of inadequacy :

I frequent my local Barnes & Noble quite often, especially in the hours of night. On my drive over there tonight, I prayed aloud, telling God that I hoped I was "doing a good enough job", whatever the hell that means.

While I was meandering up and down my much-visited philosophy aisle looking for the writings of Leo Tolstoy, an awkward man in his late twenties approached me. He stood there, hunched a bit, his frizzy long brown hair waving wildly about his face and his wide, bright black eyes met mine with genuine glee. He wore an outdated pale grey sweatsuit and a friendly, expectant smile upon his face and inquired what I was looking for. Before I could reply, he told me that he had originally intended to purchase one book, but looked down, offering me a view of the array of books that sat haphazardly collected in his arms.

"I must have gotten caught up in all of this", he said. "There's just so much I want to know."

He proceeded to tell me his story, that he was once in the military when 9/11 came 'round, and his job was to jump, or skydive, from heights as high as 30,000 feet. He told me that he used to be extremely religious, telling others that they were going to hell, pointing and waving his accusatory finger at them, condemning them to their eternal fate. He said he was always the religious one in school, that he was a missionary kid as his dad was a pastor up and down South America. He couldn't go to dances, he couldn't get girls. They were not only scared of him, but the Bible that he so self-righteously held tight to his chest and had glued into the grips of his hands.

"They say there's never an atheist in a foxhole, but there I was, jumping out of planes at incredible heights, and I was praying for the fear to go away, but it wouldn't, yet when I stopped praying, it would," he nostalgically mused. 

As he pondered the thought, he stood still a moment, blinking. He swayed a bit, then began the hesitant yet quietly confident process of admitting, confessing, explaining, confiding - whatever the verb - his own silent sin to me.

He started, pensively, calculating his words carefully, only to conclude that he realized he doubted. He didn't know all the answers, and he had nothing to say. He was fearful, even though he prayed. He was supposed to be the religious one in his troop - I mean, look at him, he was the guy telling everyone they were going to hell - but yet it was he who was scared, his heart thundering, racing, the night before every jump. He tried to meditate, he tried to breathe, but he could never contain the overwhelming, paralyzing fear that consumed his body before he took the dive into the unknown, the atmosphere that always seemed to bring him back down back to Earth. He was humbled.

"I prayed, but yet I was always scared, still scared. I've tried everything. People say, 'Oh, well, you'll find your faith again' or 'it'll come back to you one day', but I don't know. I don't know if it ever will."

I listened. To every thought, to every pause, to every thing he told me, to the information overload from this stranger I couldn't quite read.

But then I realized: this is a man. He is a human. He is me - now what to say?

I told him that praying, to me, sometimes looks like talking aloud while lying in the darkness of my room or lashing out while I'm driving or thinking inside my head. And sometimes, while I pray for God to help give me rest and peace, I still remain fearful or restless. But while I do not have peace as often as I'd like, I realize that it is okay to have fear, and I find ultimate comfort in the words that relinquish me of responsibility of being religious or legalistic, the simple phrase we know to be:

"I don't know."

He thought for a moment, and said that he had never heard anyone describe faith like that before, and that I gave him words that helped him to better understand where he stood - in the fog of the unknowing. Before I left, I said, "you are not and do not have to be who you were yesterday, but can become who you are and want to be now - remember that".

We exchanged faint goodbyes. We departed. We left.

In the words of Leo Tolstoy,

"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”

And as I sit here, muddling about my own thoughts, I realize that I don't know anything. I doubt this makes me any wiser, but only confirms that I believe and hope and love and have faith. But despite the fear, the unrest, and the unknowing, I am assured of this: I, like this man of 'little faith', am already and will always be 'good enough' for He who loves us both best.

The loving, the loving, we can only say :

Sometimes, there is not a single word in the English language - any language - that can describe the kind of love you feel towards someone or something or a word, a phrase, a sound, a feeling, a season, a sight, a meaning, a verse, a touch, a kiss, a slight of the hand, but yet you know exactly what it is, you can identify the love, you feel it trickling down your face, you feel it flooding into your soul and spirit, you feel it pouring over your head, you feel it surging through your bones and veins, you can see it in the raindrops falling outside or imagine it in the ongoings of countries far away or can have that look of longing, but it is only the knowing, the feeling, that ineffable internal experience that will ever have the slightest idea of you mean when you try, when you try damn hard and well, to talk about love.

I have a happy realization :

I have a few quirks, you see:

• I love people
• I've taken mostly humanities classes, both on and not on purpose
• I took Honors and AP English in high school, not for college purposes, but because I wanted to; I loved the material, the challenge, the writing
• I have a soft spot for semi-colons
• I often ask for furniture for Christmas, mostly bookshelves or things that have shelves that could be used as bookshelves
• My bookshelves are full to the brim of books, both fiction and nonfiction
• I am addicted to buying, or in other words, collecting books
• I often like to read books
• Coffee shops are pleasant places for reading books
• I like spending my time in coffee shops
• I am familiar with coffee shops, seeing as I've worked at two, and currently work at one
• I spend most of my time in coffee shops
• I receive employee discounts when purchasing coffee 
• Ergo, my coffee habit is affordable and my reading nooks are abundant
• I spell 'theatre' the British way (it's also aesthetically pleasing)
• I am saving all my earnings (with the exception of the dollars I spend on books, coffee, and gas) to study abroad in Oxford, England next Spring
• The courses offered for the study abroad program are humanities courses, mostly English
• I aspire to go to UCLA
• UCLA HAS GORGEOUS LIBRARIES
• I write a lot, including blog entries, papers, letters, notes, emails, more notes, more papers, etc.
• I often use my Dictionary.com application that is readily available at my fingertips, thanks to my Android phone
• I preferred to use the Oxford comma before I knew that it had a name
• I refuse to buy or support Nooks, Kindles, or Ereaders
• I notice the overwhelming changes to Barnes & Noble to eradicate books
• I have kept all of my college textbooks
• I will keep all of my college textbooks (with the exception of statistics)
• I have continued to list excessively because I just realized:

The quirks of my past and present will be quite useful in my future.

I have officially declared myself as an English major.

I have no idea why I didn't choose it in the first place. I do know, however, that I needed to endure my past to arrive to this logic today.

I'm off to enjoy my rainy afternoon with a book and a few cups of chai now.

Good day to you!

恭喜發財

Happy Chinese New Year!

"Rain is a novelty in California."

Oh, the sayings of San Diego folk.

An English major's guide to quieting cravings :

Sometimes, you just really need to eat a cake pop or two without thinking about it too much.

Am I right?*

* this is an example of a rhetorical question

You need this book :

And this book needs you.

Remembering how not to forget :

I find that the more I exist, the more I recognize my need for the documentation of life, not necessarily on a grand scale, but living moment by moment. It is the necessary practice of not only remembering the little things, but experiencing them as they happen - to merely be, to affirm that we are being, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but as I am writing this, as you are reading this. It is taking the time to realize that what we are doing, thinking, and experiencing now is what makes our lives continue to come and go from those points and places. Where you have been is what has brought you to now, and where you are now will bring you to where you will be. The thought process seems simplistic, but once pondered, reminds me to pause, to cease existing for what was or is to come, but for what merely is.

Making note of each individual effort, grasping at fleeting thoughts before they disappear, capturing a memory in my mind's eye, preserving people as I perceive them, and being reminded that each breath I breathe is, in itself, an epic of my existence.

These are my words as far as, I'm concerned. If I choose to borrow some, it will be noted.

In the words of  someone very dear to me, a student and teacher of equal parts life and death, however borrowed they may be:

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.