More Movies

For those of you in NY, you've probably heard of the Asian Film Festival that's starting this Friday.  Last year's festival had a heavy emphasis on Korean flicks, but this year, it seems the majority are Japanese movies.  I wrote in a post a few weeks back that I was going to give up movies, but I've kind of downgraded that to just R-rated movies.  Basically, I'm just sick of seeing breasts.  I've seen too many breasts in my life (onscreen).  Fortunately, all these movies are umm... unrated.  Haha.  Anyway, these are the ones I'm gonna watch.  Should be fun:

Legend of the Evil Lake on Friday,
Drive on Tuesday,
When the Last Sword is Drawn on Thursday,
Like Asura and Azumi next Friday, and
Please Teach Me English next Sunday.

Y'all should get out there and watch some, too... 

Living with the 'Rents

So I have today and tomorrow off and was hoping to use the time to just relax a bit, change my wardrobe over to summer wear, and maybe get some writing done.  But my dad's home and he's got this big exam on Monday and every time I walk into the living room, there he is poring over Greek declensions.  I try to get him to go to the library and study where it's much nicer but he doesn't want to look like one of those old people who stay there all day cuz they have nothing better to do.  It's not like he's bothering me, but I can't really listen to music too loud or watch TV in the living room and whenever I'm home with him, he tries to cook for me, which is nice, but I don't like his cooking and for heaven's sake, I'm 32, I can make my own meals.  I live with my folks basically cuz they need me to right now, and it's really not that bad, but most of the time I'm dying for freedom.  For those of you that don't know me, I pride myself on being self-sufficient.  I can cook, I love to do laundry, I mend my own clothing, heck, I even cut my own hair.  And freedom is not just about control, but about expression.  In a sense, I can't be exactly who I want to be.  So I dream about having my own place, decorating it the way I want, eating what I want, when I want, all these little freedoms that are compromised right now.

And therein lies the problem.  I was thinking today, hmm... what if I had all the freedom that I wanted?  What if I could live exactly as I pleased?  Well, I'm sure it would be great.  I'm sure it would make me happy and I would be thrilled at being able to completely express myself in every decision and lifestyle choice.  Except there's this one hitch: a silly little thing called marriage.  If I were planning to stay single all my life then there would be no dilemma.  But most probably, I will get married at some point (Oh God, WHEN???) and then this whole darn compromise thing starts all over again.  Sharing everything, making decisions together, all those wonderful little freedoms restricted again.  And still further in the future, when I have kids, even less freedom.  So although it's not all that much fun for me personally right now to live with my folks, in the long run, I think it'll be easier on my wife and my marriage cuz I won't have gotten too used to having my own way.  And maybe there's a life lesson in there too.  Maybe complete freedom isn't such a great thing to have.  "No man is an island..."  So for all you single guys and gals out there, when you meet a nice somebody and they're still living with their folks, think of it as a good thing, cuz if you do get married to them, hopefully they'll be easier to live with.  Unless of course, he's a mama's boy or whatever the female equivalent of that is.  Mama's boys are bad news...

Hiking Story

 

I set out one Friday to find some peace and traveled into the wood.  I took a familiar path, a place I knew well.  Suddenly the trail split in two in front of me and I, I took the one that I thought was the other one.  I became lost and cooled myself by a stream.

 

 

The water beckoned to me.

 

 

I went in.  But found myself drowning.  A family of geese took pity on me,

 

 

and saved me.  I kept on walking and soon came to a bridge,

 

 

but I dared not cross for I knew not what was on the other side.  A tap on my shoulder and I turned to face a smiling mountain ogre.

 

 

He took me to his castle.

 

 

And fed me Bambi.

 

 

But he was lonely.  Too lonely.  And I had to run from him.  I met a beautiful girl who helped me escape.  But she turned into a dragonfly and teased me from her perch.

 

 

I kept on walking.  And came to a place where the sun made its home in the lake.

 

 

I had found my paradise,

 

 

and in the reflection of the water, I saw... myself.

My Rant of the Week:  Obesity

So my issue of TIME this week devotes a full 32 pages of news and analysis to the crisis of obesity in America.  Food is a big issue in my family as I usually get on my dad's case to lose weight, he and my mom get on my brother's case to lose weight, and my mom gets on my case to gain weight.  Nobody has a problem with my mom's weight.  Go figure.  Anyway, the magazine tries to tackle the problem from all these different angles, and produces a bunch of reasons why America is so fat, from biological, evolutionary, social and economical reasons.  They're good at laying the blame around, but I think they're kind of missing the big picture, cuz isn't it plainly obvious that the issue is about self-control?  And our society as a whole has a serious lack of self-control in a bunch of areas like spending, drinking, sex, etc.  In so many ways, capitalism encourages and profits from a lack of self-control and I wrote a little digression below* on one example of beating the system.  But the problems of no control aren't just limited to our country.  I confess that I don't have as much sympathy for the HIV crisis in Africa as I would if people were dying of starvation, or war or plague, because well, it's just so damn avoidable.  I mean c'mon, the vast majority of people who contract HIV from unprotected sex aren't getting raped.  Yes, yes, it's a matter of education, blah, blah, blah... but y'know, it goes deeper than that.  It's a matter of philosophy, of re-wiring how you view life, yourself, others, and yes, God.  We live in a world now where anything and everything is available to us at our fingertips.  You can have anything you want.  Fine.  Now, get over it.  Deal with it.  God's blessed us so much we can't handle it.  Find something other than yourself to live for.  "Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."  Matt. 16:24  Let's get back to denial, people.  Deny the self and live to glorify God and please him, instead of making him sad and embarassed that he even created the stupid human race (this is bad theology.  Don't quote me on this).  Cuz from here on in, it just gets worse.  More freedom, more convenience, more of anything you want.  Do I sound like a fruitcake?  Well, maybe.  But I'm telling you, we live in a different world now, and it's all about self-control, baby...

p.s.  I have half-day Fridays and I'm working from home tomorrow, so anybody wanna go hiking tomorrow afternoon?  There's this great trail in upstate NY right above the NJ border where you hike up for an hour or hour and a half and you get to this lake at the top of the mountain.  It's oh-so-pretty.  Almost proposed there...

 

* Since I have great credit, Delta/AMEX sent me a credit card in November with no annual fee for the first year and 17,500 miles right off the bat.  They did this in the hopes that I'll run up a huge balance and be paying them lots in interest as I pay off the balance.  Well, I pay my balance in full every month, and I've accrued 45,000 miles so far in the past 7 months, and I'll easily have 50,000 miles before I have to pay a cent to AMEX.  A round-trip ticket to Alaska is 25,000 miles (normally about $600), so if I use those miles to buy two tix which I'm planning to do, I'll have made the equivalent of $1,200 off of Delta/AMEX all because they took a bet on me that I wouldn't have any self-control.  I guess this is how people make money: exploit inefficiencies in the system...

Weekend

Ok, I just realized that I have too many Heidelbergs on my front page, so lemme post about highlights from my busy weekend:

Friday:  Had a blind date set-up by a friend who I hadn't seen or spoken to in two and a half years.  She e-mailed me out of the blue and said she really wanted me to meet this girl.  Exactly the kind of utterly random occurrence that makes you think, well dammit, this must be from God.  My date went to Harvard undergrad, Georgetown Law, and on paper seemed clearly smarter than me (which is rare), but that I can handle.  However, if she were smarter than me and hot, well, that would not make me feel good.  Haha, just kidding.  I don't think anyone's smarter than me.  Anyway, we meet and she turns out to be way too liberal for me.  How liberal?  Guess where she was during Bush's inauguration?  In front of him.  Protesting.  'Nuff said.  In another time and place, she would have made a great communist.  After the date, I was so depressed I went home and had a beer, even though I gave up alcohol just last week.

Saturday:  Went to go meet up with Blind date #2 (I don't usually schedule like this.  It just happened that way).  This was more of an informal set-up by Maria, Charles's wife, and fortunately it wasn't one-on-one.  About five of us went on a little picnic at the park, and it was really great weather.  She's a teacher from Philly, and she was nice, but no sparks or anything, certainly not enough momentum to contact her afterwards.  She left after about two hours to go pick up her niece and nephew in Jersey or something.  Perfect timing, because Blind date #3 arrived about an hour later.  Technically dates #2 & 3 weren't exactly blind because I had seen them before at Charles's wedding, but I didn't remember what they looked like.  This one was unscheduled and happened to be Maria's sister, who drove in from med school at Dartmouth.  Maria didn't tell me she was coming until I got there, but she had offered me her sister a few times in the past, and since she was coming down for the weekend anyway, I guess Maria just threw her in there as a bonus.  Again, it was cool, because we did group stuff, stayed at the park a while, then went back to Charles's where we watched School of Rock (great movie) and played Clue, which is a deceptively complicated game.  Kyu won on a technicality, but boasted that he had superior notes and would have won anyway.  He's a moron.  Not too much going on with Maria's sister, and that was just fine with me.

Sunday:  My brother and his wife were coming up for Edmund's wedding and I had agreed to babysit his kids, so I went down to the wedding, picked up the kids and brought them back home.  Eden will be seven years old this month, and Jordan is two and a half.  Luckily, Eden knew the kids from the family downstairs, so we all went to a playground about three blocks from my house and they started running around.  Pretty soon, though, Jordan grabbed his crotch and told me he had to "shi-shi", which in baby language means he's gotta pee.  So I start to take him back to the house, but he still got his hands on his crotch and he's not moving too fast and I'm worried that he's just gonna go at any minute so I pick him up in order to get there quicker, all the while being hypersensitive to any sensations of warm liquid running along my arms.  We get home and thankfully my mom comes over and takes him to the bathroom.  I think my job's done and I sit and relax, until I hear screams of "Go away!  Go away!" coming from the bathroom.  Jordan, who's apparently already keen on the differences between boys and girls, won't let my mom help him pee.  Great.  I head in there, not knowing exactly what I'm supposed to do.  He's standing there, looking at me expecting something, so I pull down his pants and grab his little pecker and aim it at the middle of the bowl.  He pees almost before I'm done aiming, but luckily everything come out in one smooth stream and there's no mess.  Hopefully the first and last time I have to touch anyone else's weenie.  I'm reminded of Joon's classic post about wiping Daniel's butt, and I'd redirect you to it, but I can't find it.  Later on in the evening, when my brother and his wife come back from the wedding, I head out to go meet some friends at a Fort Lee noraebang around 11 PM.  We sing until about 1 PM and then we're outside discussing what we should do next, and the options come down to go to Flushing and meet up with some hot young guy friends of this girl, Heidi, who's getting married next month, or go home.  For some strange reason, it's basically my decision.  If I agree to go with them to Flushing, we'll hang out late into the night.  If I decide to go home, then everybody goes home (except Heidi, who's already promised to go meet her hot young guy friends).  I feel powerful.  After basking in my omnipotence for a while, I make my decision:  I'm going home.  So everybody goes home.  But c'mon, why would I want to go hang out with Heidi's hot young guy friends in Flushing and I don't even drink anymore.  No-brainer.

Monday: I get up, eat breakfast, take my mom and Eden to the supermarket, take a nap, get up, play Poison Cow with Eden and Jordan, eat lunch, watch Looney Tunes: Back in Action, take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese (that place is nuts), come back, eat dinner, play Canasta with my dad and brother, wave goodbye to my brother's family as they leave, then watch the Lakers beat up the Timberwolves at my friend's house.  Monday's activities weren't quite as entertaining, but I had to throw it in just to be complete.  I'm into closure.

Spider

This haunts me:

Adult ants, praying mantises, guppies, rats, and apes occasionally eat their young, their siblings, or adults of the opposite sex. Some spiders, however, practice a rarer form of cannibalism: the young may eat their mother. Amaurobius ferox, a half-inch-long spider common in European woodlands, practices matriphagy. Within a week after the young hatch, according to entomologists Kil-Won Kim and Andre Horel, at Universite Henri Poincare in Nancy, France, the mother spider actively solicits them to kill and devour her. For three weeks in late spring and early summer, the mother spider sits in close contact with her egg sac until eighty to a hundred spiderlings emerge. She then lays a second batch of eggs, on which the young immediately feed. Three to four days later, the spiderlings molt. The next day, the mother increases her activity, drumming with her legs, jumping around, and pressing intermittently against the clustered brood. Within half an hour, they swarm over her body and begin to feed. Mothers never attempt to escape or fend off the fatal attacks. ("Matriphagy in the spider Amaurobius ferox: an example of mother-offspring interactions," Ethology 104, 1998)

- Natural History Magazine, April 1999

I first saw this in a PBS documentary on sex and reproduction in nature, but I was reminded of it again a few weeks ago while watching another show.  It boggles my mind in a number of ways:

First, the sheer efficiency of it.  The babies come from the mother, and at first she provides sustenance for them in the form of more eggs and so they happily eat up their potential brothers and sisters.  Then, presumably because she runs out of eggs, she actively encourages them to eat her alive.  So they eat her, and she physically becomes a part of them even though they originally came from her in the first place.  It's almost like this spider clones herself.  She doesn't exactly die as much as split herself up into hundreds of little pieces.  It's just nuts.

Second, the mindset of the mother spider.  Fine, she doesn't have a fraction of the brain size we do, but obviously she's acting deliberately and God's kind of programmed her to do this, so she must think this is normal, right?  This is all she knows and it's what her mother and her mother's mother and all the past generations of her family has done.  So she has no reason to think otherwise.  She might even think that this is how all creatures raise their young, that this ultimate sacrifice is what all mothers do.  But it's not.  It's the most extraordinary act of "love" I can imagine.  What does she think about as they're eating her alive?

Third, so what does this say about the relationship of the individual to the collective?  Sure we know of all kinds of animals and creatures that go to extreme measures to insure the survival of their young.  But this?  This is crazy.  This little spider is making the statement that her individual life means nothing, absolutely nothing.  The only thing that matters is that the future generations survive.  That her species continues.  For her, a few weeks or months of spinning some webs, eating some flies, that's really nice and all that, but when it comes time, she gives her life to her kids, just like that. 

How does that relate to us?  We live in a time when individuality is king.  It's the only thing we can see, it's the only thing we live for.  Self-fulfillment.  Happiness.  Comfort.  But we're here for just a short time, and then we're gone, too.  Can there be a bigger picture here?  Can we see our lives in the context of the entire human race?  This goes in spiritual terms too.  We live our Christian lives and it's great, we're loved by God and all that, but eventually we'll be leaving here and what will be our legacy?  What is the point of our individual spiritual lives if we don't produce spiritual offspring?  Even a cursory reading of the Bible ought to make us see that it's not really about individuals but about God's relationship to whole of humankind.  God chose to come down and make himself known to us.  Whatever else we do, and whatever else happens, God's relationship to the human race must go on...  Have a good weekend everybody!

p.s.  I really have to start my own cult soon...

Tuesday Night Deep Thought

     "I told you once that I loved you because you were... well, hot.  But that changes today.  Because today, in front of all these people, I've made a promise to God.  And God calls me to love you in a manner I could never conceive of, a way I've never attempted.  It's what I was meant to do, what he created me for.  This love of mine changes today.  It reaches beyond its human origins to become something only God could generate.  Today, and every day from now on, it doesn't matter if you look good or bad, if you're sick or healthy, for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse, for every day we both shall live, I will take your hand in mine and we will walk together through this life."

So It Begins Again...

This is my series on weddings I’ve attended this year.  This wedding was on May 22:

Wedding #3 – New York Presbyterian Church, LIC, NY

The skinny: Ok, ok, I know you're thinking, Wedding # 3??  What happened to Wedding #1 & 2?  Well, Wedding #1 was Cindy and Albert's wedding, and really, there wasn't anything exciting to report on that one except that I gave Albert this nice black leather thong underwear during Cindy's bridal shower.  I think Albert would secretly like to wear it (he's artsy), but I don't think Cindy will let him.  She can be really conservative that way.  But I think he'd look sexy in it.  Also, the only way you can clean it is to dry clean it, so maybe they're worried about that, too.  Wedding # 2 was Bobby & Moona's wedding earlier this day, but Moona read some of my wedding posts from last year and she expressly forbid me to review her wedding on my Xanga.  So all I'm gonna say about their wedding is, Moona looked hot.  Bobby's a lucky man. 

Ok, onto the main course, Wedding #3.  This momentous wedding was between Sharon Lee and this dude from Paraguay.  Sharon is Daughter # 2 of Pastor Young-Hee Lee, a.ka., the Godfather.  I wrote this little story about the Godfather last year.  I wasn't exactly invited to this wedding, but my parents were and so was my brother, and I had to drive my mother there anyway, so I figured I might as well go.  Plus, Pastor Lee is the kind of man that just might decide your future someday, and you wouldn't want him remembering that you just happened to miss his first daughter's wedding.  It was a little surreal.  They had set out seating for 1000 people, but according to the people at the desk, only about 600-700 people showed up.  Some new punk pastor must be cutting in on the Godfather's territory.  Such disrespect would never have occurred say, 5 years ago.  The groom was dressed all in white, almost like the kind of thing you'd wear to your funeral.  My friends and I left after the slide show and I heard it just turned into noraebang night after that with everyone singing to each other.

On a scale of 1 to 10 -

Food:  6.5.  Well, it was typical Korean buffet, not too bad, but the great part about it was, y'know how usually right after the ceremony, you can't go get food cuz you have to stay behind and take pictures with the newlyweds and the rest of the "friends" ?  Well, I'm like 8 years older than Sharon, so technically I'm not really her "friend".  I got first crack at the food, which almost never happens.  And if someone gave me flack about it I'd just say, "I'm not her friend.  I'm just here with my parents."

Female talent:  2.  Problem #1 with the girls at this wedding was that many of them were either directly or indirectly students of mine when they were in high school.  Looking at your former students as more or less full grown women makes you feel kinda icky.  Problem #2 was that a lot of these girls showed up with their moms, so not only do you see them at this current stage of life, but you also see what they'll probably end up looking like in 30 years, which kinda messes up the whole illusion of beauty that I've worked so hard to maintain.

Fun: 3.  Well, there was no music to speak of.  And since this was a church wedding and my dad's an elder and my mom's a kwonsa, I had to bow and smile to anyone who came up to me and said, "Oh, you're Mr. and Mrs. Choi's second son..."  I hate that.  They stare too hard and I feel like a monkey.

Projected forecast:  Are you kidding me?  When you marry into the Godfather's family, you marry for life, baby... 

Fatal Flaw

So maybe like a year or two ago I signed up for this free trial on ChristianCafe.com, met some people through it, and went on some really horrific dates.  After that, I closed out my account and archived it, making it unsearchable.  But I've been getting these stupid e-mails from them offering a free week to come back on and check it out, blah, blah, blah... so I'm bored at work and I sign back on, unarchive my account, poke around a bit, and then let my free week's time expire.  Unfortunately, I forgot to re-archive my account, meaning people could find me on it.  Of course, a few days later after my free trial expired, I get mail from someone, and you have to log in to the stupid thing to see who e-mailed you and now to get back on you have to pay their monthly fee.  But I don't take the bait, and just leave it alone. 

But then I get another e-mail from someone.  And this curiosity gnaws at me: what kind of girls would be interested in me enough to make the first move and send an e-mail?  Without doubt, a question that would best be left unanswered.  But no, for the sake of enriching my ever expanding understanding of the depths of human pathos, I shell out $27 (yeah, I paid for xanga premium too) just to see what exactly is attracted to me.  Mistake.  I'm not going into details.  But I figure if I'm not going to write back to them, it's better not to even read their e-mail, right?  Cuz on this thing, you can see if the person you sent your e-mail to has read it yet or not.  If they're gonna get rejected anyway, better for them to think it's because of some technicality like I wasn't able to open their e-mail or something.  Cuz if I open it and read it, and they know I've opened it and read it and I don't reply, then that just makes it worse, no?  Ugh.  More needless dilemmas.  Christiancafe.com is the devil.

Movement

I got inspired while preparing Bible study yesterday.  I think I'm gonna stop drinking (again) and I may even give up movies (again).  Both activities have the potential for compromise and you know what?  I'm just tired of risking it every time.  Two days ago, my co-worker (who's Jewish) and I were both leaving the building around lunchtime and he asked me if I had eaten lunch yet.  I replied that I fast every Tuesday, and he gave me this quizzical look and asked me "You're fasting?  Why the heck are you fasting?"  I didn't have time to explain it to him then, but I will.  And it felt good.  It felt good that for one second, my life looked different to someone.  After all, aren't we called to be the salt and the light?  Aren't our lives supposed to look different?  I don't know whether it's because we're in this city, or because we're so dang well-educated or maybe it's just what post-modern Christianity is, but it just seems like our lives are so very indistinguishable from everyone else's.  And I'm not trying to promote legalism or superficial outward piety, but all of a sudden, I want to be an example.  I want to be the person I've always wanted to look up to.  And maybe, just maybe, God will use me more through it.  Of course, it's more than just cutting out certain things, and I'm gonna have to change a lot of my behavior and words (right, Naomi?), but it should be a fascinating and edifying experiment.  What happens when you begin to truly live your life for the Lord, not just as a vague, general theme, but trying to walk in the Spirit in every single moment and decision?  I wanna find out...