At church today, I was pleasantly surprised to see Lloyd and Joseph. Now I am intrigued with what Lloyd blogged:

The sermon was about being in exile, and being a chosen people. The former condition is one I'm very familiar with; as for being "chosen," I dunno... something about that notion feels disharmonious to me with actual reality and history. But I'm just an ant on the almost infinite scale of the universe, so what do I really know of the whole picture?

I'm still not sure what I heard, or what really happened, but am now beginning to have a vaguely troubling attack of the guilts.

The rhetoric of exile has certainly been strongly sounded deeply at FPCB and also "chosen people" -- but not in any sense of "oh, how special and privileged we are" but more "how much we have to live up to given how much God has given us in His love and mercy".

I walked away wanting to ponder the text of the sermon at greater length (1 Peter 2:1-10) for applications to my own life. I've not been terribly successful at deeply integrating what I've been learning at church with the rest of my life. Maybe I'll do better this week.

Because I'm planning to see some of the 30 or so films of Yasujiro Ozu that the PacificFilmArchives will be showing in November and December, I decided to see at least one ahead of time to judge how excited to get by the upcoming retrospective (this year is the centenary of Ozu's birth).

Last night, I rented and started to watch what many consider Ozu's greatest film, Tokyo Story. I found it really slow-going and, in fact, fell asleep in the middle of the film. I didn't take that as a negative sign of Ozu's artistry (but more of my fatigue). I watched the rest of Tokyo Story this afternoon and found the film a very satisfying experience. Maybe I'm struggling very much with how I as an adult son thousands of miles away from my parents am or am living as a good son -- but the movie speaks right to the heart of my family situation.

I've been doing a lot of writing on my wiki over the last week but not much on my personal weblog. I would like to shift the balance back to incorporate more blogging. Writing on my wiki this week has been a freeing and very productive experience. The way that I've been blogging has been a tad more rigorous than what I was able to comfortably sustain over a longer stretch of time. But I miss writing blog entries too. On MyMainPublicWiki, I feel free to brainstorm, to dash off lists, to drop in phrases without providing sufficient context for folks to understand the pieces as stand-alone items. In contrast, on my this personal weblog, I want my readers to understand more of the context -- and hence I've striven to be reasonably coherent in my blog entries. (Whether I've succeeded is another matter.)

At any rate, I want some more rigor in my writing as a whole and getting myself back into regular blogging should help.

I'm considering the following workshop:

Norman Mealy Hymn Workshop
Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: the Makings of Christian Music

Frank Burch Brown, Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological
Seminary, Indianapolis, will challenge us to explore different style of music
for worship at the Norman Mealy Hymn Workshop on Saturday, November 8 (9 to
12:30) at St. Mark's Church.

Registration fee: $12 ($8 student/senior) or 4 for $44. Lunch (by reservation):
$8. Checks payable to St.Mark's Mealy Memorial can be sent to St.Mark's Church,
2300 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704.

I've not blogged the last couple of days, not because I'm terribly sad (which was the case several weeks ago) but because I've been pondering and running and dancing around and singing. Sometimes it's only been in my own mind; at other moments, when my guard is down, the stuff leaks out. I'm learning to be less embarrassed about. "Excuse me," I say. "I didn't mean to emote all over you." Then I move on.

I have some excellent teachers around me to free me. May I be a good student.

Oh, the crypticity

A six year old girl is teaching me about telling stories.

Lynn wrote:

Raymond, given the apparent dearth of children's books about the North American Chinese experience, you may have found a creative outlet for yourself.  And maybe Laura would illustrate it!  But don't miss Grace Lin's other book, The Ugly Vegetables, whose title captivated me at the library once. Although the protagonist is a girl, so what?

What a great idea! I've not yet seen The Ugly Vegetables. I'm really enjoying Grace Lin's books myself -- and the two little girls who live in my household love them too. You're right -- there's nothing wrong with the fact that the protagonist is a girl -- that's certainly great. A topic for another time -- but I feel that Asian males are tad under/mis-represented in our culture -- and hence, I'd love to supplement the books I found so far with ones that feature boys.

It's 11pm and the jackhammering on the main thoroughfare a couple of blocks aways goes unabated. My housemate tells me that this is not unusual -- better to dig up a major road when there is little traffic than at rush hour. I hope the noise stops soon however. This little camper needs his beauty rest.

i spent some time this afternoon at the Berkeley Public Library searching for children's books that involve Chinese-American or Chinese-Canadian characters and themes. (What I found is summarized in my Wiki entry ChineseNorthAmericanChildrensBooks.) Two major reasons motivated my search. First of all, I'm an uncle now; my sister Janice recently had a baby boy! Second, as I have alluded in past entries, I myself could stand to do a lot more reading. I actually think that reading children's books is a good way for me to get started. Not only do they assume less background on the part of the reader than adult books (naturally!), but they are really deeply multi-senory experiences that touch deeply the child in me who needs to get a bit more educated.

I'll continue my search, updating my wiki along the way. I didn't realize how much I'm enjoying spending more time in the children's sections of my local bookstores and libraries!

Some days, I really don't know what to blog. That doesn't mean that I don't have anything to write. For good or bad, I've gotten to a point where I want my blog entries to be reasonably well-crafted. And often, I don't have quite enough energy to write such entries.

That's where my wiki comes in. I don't feel the same high standards for entries there and therefore feel freer to do braindumps there. Ocassionally if I write something of particular interest in my wiki, I'll draw attention to it on my blog. Should you care, you can find out what's new on my wiki by going to the RecentChanges page, where you can see that I wrote recently about BachAndJazz and that my former housemate Christian Stimming has been posting information about his upcoming wedding to Anne. (Congratulations, Christian!)