OK, so I see this pass-it-along-questionnaire thing on church people's blogs...and then I get tagged by...Alicia?? Wow, these things travel fast/are very ubiquitous (my word of the month, for some reason I've been using it more than usual) ...
Four jobs I've had: (and have been paid for!)<--Is this part of the original survey or a Leach addition?? You know it makes it a lot harder to come up with four...
1) Tutoring (= chatting, finding out what's happening at PLC, revisiting Cambridge Latin course)
Umm, errrr...Ok, struggling like Pun did on this one...quite sad really....Oh wait...
2) PSYC 1611
3) 1st year pharmacy
4) Studying 1st year + completing pharmacy degree
LOL, just as sad really...
Four movies I can watch over and over:
1) I don't like watching movies over and over...
2)
3)
4)
Four places I’ve lived:
1) Hong Kong
2) Summer Hill, Sydney
3) Strathfield, Sydney
4) In God's grace (A very good answer by Leach, so had to steal it =P)
Four TV shows I love to watch:
OK, I don't watch a lot of TV, but anyway...
1) Winter Olympics figure skating (it only comes on every 4 years in Oz....and it's so pretty!)
2) Getaway/The Great Outdoors type travel shows (see the world from your living room)
3) Brainiac (not on anymore, hilarious British scientific investigations...)
4) Um, dunno...Beyond Tomorrow or Clever....I've only watched like one episode of each, but I like the science stuff, as you can tell...oh yeah, RPA is pretty good too, gotta love surgery.
Four places I’ve been:
1) Houston (we go there like people go to Hong Kong...almost =P)
2) Las Vegas
3) San Francisco
4) UK
Four favourite dishes:
1) Um...
2) Um...
3) Um...
4) Rice!
Four sites I visit daily:
1) google.com
2) mail.yahoo.com
3) WebCT (when I start uni)
4) dictionary.com (not daily, but more frequently than rarely =p)
Four favourite drinks:
1) Water
2) Tea/Coffee
3) Milk
4) Max Brenner's dark choc frappe....
Four places I would rather be:
1) Non-existence (occasionally)
2) the new creation
3) the Garden of Eden (pre-sin)
4) Um, better put something you can actually get to now....Houston! (sigh...for the family)
Transport: (what kind of a question is this? Don't remember seeing this one on the other version)
1) Walking
2) Bus (go the 480!)
3) Train
4) Metaphysical journey into the realm of dreams (bwahahaha)
Four people I’m tagging:
Arrgh, who am I meant to tag who won't get tagged by someone else??
1) Argonaut
2) Liz (I know you're out there...you can post as a comment)
3) Wes (ditto...ditto)
4) Alex[andra] =p If someone doesn't get to her first!
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
A Short Film
This is taken from Dan's blog...
Yellow Fever
Goes for about 15 min.....soooo funny =)
(Oh and if you're wondering what his T-shirt says, it's "white people don't see/understand"....rofl)
Yellow Fever
Goes for about 15 min.....soooo funny =)
(Oh and if you're wondering what his T-shirt says, it's "white people don't see/understand"....rofl)
Monday, February 13, 2006
Love is pain
They say that we might be too young
To truly know the meaning of love
But you can't be too young to know of pain
And perhaps somehow it's all the same
I've been told I should update my blog... *sniff* I bet you once uni starts I'll be blogging far more often than I do now in the holidays, when I actually have spare time to do stuff like blog...funny that...
Anyway...
People have always said love hurts, and I guess that's true, though I have decided to categorise them into two sorts:
One is the self-inflicted torture kind of love (or "love", or *love*, or l.o.v.e., or any other sort of love that gratuitously incorporates punctuation). This is the sort of love that gets sung about in songs on the radio; the boy-likes-girl-but-girl-thinks-boy-is-a-twit sort of love, the I-know-you've-left-me-but-I'll-keep-on-stalking-you sort of love, or even the I-love-my-guitar-so-much-I'm-gonna-play-it-till-my-fingers-bleed sort of love (although that last one is a bit tangential and would probably be in a spin-off category on it's own).
This is sort of love, while exerting a heavy emotional burden on the subject's consciousness, is in a way, completely and utterly useless, because it is focused on either the future or the past; it has no real relevance to the person's present existence (other than exerting a large gravitational force on the shoulders of one's soul, if indeed a soul could be said to have shoulders). So an example of Self-Inflicted Torture Love grounded in the future would be the person who wishfully hopes the object of their love would some day reciprocate their feelings, that all their dreams would be fulfilled...and an example of this sort of love grounded in the past would be someone pining after last season's relationship that went out of fashion in the worst way possible, wishing time would rewind to that wonderful place in history.
The second sort of love that hurts is self-sacrificing love. This sort of love, while absent of gratuitous punctuation, is in fact the sort of Love that deserves to be capitalised (if you're the sort of person who can be bothered to capitalise things). Self-Sacrificing Love is not trendy, sexy, cool or marketable (unless you are from Hillsong). I would say that it is patient, kind, does not envy, does not boast and is not proud, but that would be ripping off some dude called Paul. It is the sort of Love that makes a new mother get up several times a night to feed her child, the Love that sees you talking to a loner when you would rather be doing something else, it is the sort of Love that tells someone they've done something wrong even though they might hate you for it. Love serves others. Love is what nailed Jesus to a cross, to reconcile to God the people He Loves.
Love is not lost in memories of the past or dreams of the future, though it can look back and forward to these things. But Love is to be lived now, both in your mind and amongst other people now, otherwise there would be no future to long for and no past to cherish.
Love is not to be wrapped up in protective layers, as if it were a fragile moment in time, hanging on a wisp of silence, afraid to be broken in the way a gaze can be broken. Love cannot be afraid, because it seeks to speak to people's fears.**
While the first sort of love is not like the second sort of love, both are felt, and both hurt. So I guess both can be learned from, because pain, I believe, is what they call character-building stuff.
~Um, end of sermon....~
Sooooo....it's probably not all as simple as all that, I am only "young" after all....yes, disagree with whatever you like, there's probably more holes in there than in a piece of Swiss cheese.
**For more on love, layers and fears, see Encouragement: The Key to Caring, by Dr. Larry Crabb and Dr. Dan Allender, a book which has spread through a certain sub-sect of WS over the past few months faster than you can say "plague, without the negative connotations".
To truly know the meaning of love
But you can't be too young to know of pain
And perhaps somehow it's all the same
I've been told I should update my blog... *sniff* I bet you once uni starts I'll be blogging far more often than I do now in the holidays, when I actually have spare time to do stuff like blog...funny that...
Anyway...
People have always said love hurts, and I guess that's true, though I have decided to categorise them into two sorts:
One is the self-inflicted torture kind of love (or "love", or *love*, or l.o.v.e., or any other sort of love that gratuitously incorporates punctuation). This is the sort of love that gets sung about in songs on the radio; the boy-likes-girl-but-girl-thinks-boy-is-a-twit sort of love, the I-know-you've-left-me-but-I'll-keep-on-stalking-you sort of love, or even the I-love-my-guitar-so-much-I'm-gonna-play-it-till-my-fingers-bleed sort of love (although that last one is a bit tangential and would probably be in a spin-off category on it's own).
This is sort of love, while exerting a heavy emotional burden on the subject's consciousness, is in a way, completely and utterly useless, because it is focused on either the future or the past; it has no real relevance to the person's present existence (other than exerting a large gravitational force on the shoulders of one's soul, if indeed a soul could be said to have shoulders). So an example of Self-Inflicted Torture Love grounded in the future would be the person who wishfully hopes the object of their love would some day reciprocate their feelings, that all their dreams would be fulfilled...and an example of this sort of love grounded in the past would be someone pining after last season's relationship that went out of fashion in the worst way possible, wishing time would rewind to that wonderful place in history.
The second sort of love that hurts is self-sacrificing love. This sort of love, while absent of gratuitous punctuation, is in fact the sort of Love that deserves to be capitalised (if you're the sort of person who can be bothered to capitalise things). Self-Sacrificing Love is not trendy, sexy, cool or marketable (unless you are from Hillsong). I would say that it is patient, kind, does not envy, does not boast and is not proud, but that would be ripping off some dude called Paul. It is the sort of Love that makes a new mother get up several times a night to feed her child, the Love that sees you talking to a loner when you would rather be doing something else, it is the sort of Love that tells someone they've done something wrong even though they might hate you for it. Love serves others. Love is what nailed Jesus to a cross, to reconcile to God the people He Loves.
Love is not lost in memories of the past or dreams of the future, though it can look back and forward to these things. But Love is to be lived now, both in your mind and amongst other people now, otherwise there would be no future to long for and no past to cherish.
Love is not to be wrapped up in protective layers, as if it were a fragile moment in time, hanging on a wisp of silence, afraid to be broken in the way a gaze can be broken. Love cannot be afraid, because it seeks to speak to people's fears.**
While the first sort of love is not like the second sort of love, both are felt, and both hurt. So I guess both can be learned from, because pain, I believe, is what they call character-building stuff.
~Um, end of sermon....~
Sooooo....it's probably not all as simple as all that, I am only "young" after all....yes, disagree with whatever you like, there's probably more holes in there than in a piece of Swiss cheese.
**For more on love, layers and fears, see Encouragement: The Key to Caring, by Dr. Larry Crabb and Dr. Dan Allender, a book which has spread through a certain sub-sect of WS over the past few months faster than you can say "plague, without the negative connotations".
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
A long post about last week, this week, and other stuff
So I gather people have had enough of my *works of art* and it is time for a new post.
What have I been up to?...Well, I will actually be off to my church's Leaders' Retreat in a few hours. Wow, has it already been a whole week since KYLC ended?
Yesterday: saw Memoirs of a Geisha, and the Australia Day fireworks. I like the Australia Day ones because they are so close, you can smell the sulfur and it feels like a few of the stray sparks are going to fall on you. As it was happening I thought about how glorious it was and how when Jesus returns it will be a thousand times better. I've never really grasped how magnificent Jesus' return will be like, there's nothing you can really compare it with, so for now I'll think of it as a really really really good fireworks display.
Geisha was alright, they experienced *technical difficulties* halfway through the movie, the only way to describe how the movie stopped playing was that it was like someone burning a hole in the middle of a picture, and the white hole gradually spread to the edges of the screen, and then it went all black, accompanied by a noise that sounded like a cassette tape getting stuffed up. So we had to sit there for a few minutes while they fixed it. That was interesting, never had that happen to me before.
Last Saturday: Woke up late, went to Glue leaders' meeting, went to see Symphony in the Domain (Gershwin's World), with Pun, Angi and Loz. They opened with Rhapsody in Blue, and closed with An American in Paris, and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture (which is obviously not Gershwin, but I suppose it was a good excuse to incorporate fireworks into the performance). (Yay for fireworks!) We should definitely go again next year, with more people.
Last Monday-Friday: Katoomba Youth Leaders' Convention. If I could post everything we learnt about, I would, but that would take way too long. Overall, for me anyway, it was a week of lack of sleep, learning to play texas hold'em (and actually winning a few times), learning the meaning of the word "safe" (don't ask), going though biblical theology and trying to write a Bible study on Amos 5:18-27, and lots of challenging talks and workshops.
The thing that challenged me most was whether or not we are living consistently in our day to day lives as well as in church on Sundays. The speaker, Al Stewart, described it as "the carpark miracle" - the church carpark is where miracles can happen, in terms of people's behaviour - as soon as you step outside your car, you transform yourself into a perfect Christian, and no one has to know what you get up to during the week.
And also I was challenged by how you can be involved in religious activity, but have your heart far away from God.
I came home with my messy notes, and as usual after these camps, felt like there was so much you learnt and were challenged by, and so much you have to change in your life or in your attitude towards things....but then time passes, and you kinda forget about how fired up you were, and then never get around to it.
So then I thought I might try to write a song about the stuff I had been taught, because I find that songs are a good way to remember a bunch of words you wouldn't otherwise remember (hence the Glue mission statement song, and the one with Colossians 1:28 as the chorus, for those of you who know what I'm talking about). So I went through my notes on the talks and wrote down all the points that had jumped out at me, and then tried to force some structure into it and make it rhyme, etc, etc...and a lot of experimenting and D/F# chords later....a song! (which sounds like all my other ones, but oh well, I know I'm doomed to being boring and unoriginal.)
After I had finished it, felt pretty satisfied, played it a few times, tried it out on piano...but the weird thing was, the more I worked on it, the less sincere I felt, and at one point I thought that by writing it maybe I was contradicting what I was actually writing about. It's kinda hard to explain. Trying not to be a hypocrite but feeling hypocritical about it.
Some of the words are either directly from the speaker's notes, or my notes...so it might not ever make complete sense to other people...but it makes sense to me, I guess. My KYLC in a package, you could call it.
When You Return
I’m sorry Lord when I fill my life with empty words
And sometimes when I sing, an empty song is all that’s heard
I’m sorry when I break the promises I’ve made
And when You see my heart drifting further and further away
I’m sorry Lord when I strive to fill my life with things of this world
And when I forget I need to be changed by Your Word
I’m sorry I forget You always keep the promises You’ve made
And the pain it causes You when we turn away
Sometimes this world feels like a tragedy
And we wonder if You’re there
But it’s Your severe mercy
That shows how much You care
And if it wasn’t for the power of the cross
I wouldn’t see Your salvation on the other side of Judgement Day
I want You to see me living more like You each day, till when You return
I want to enter Your kingdom with the humble heart that You’ve set me free to have
And know You are with us as we share Your love
Till when You return again
What have I been up to?...Well, I will actually be off to my church's Leaders' Retreat in a few hours. Wow, has it already been a whole week since KYLC ended?
Yesterday: saw Memoirs of a Geisha, and the Australia Day fireworks. I like the Australia Day ones because they are so close, you can smell the sulfur and it feels like a few of the stray sparks are going to fall on you. As it was happening I thought about how glorious it was and how when Jesus returns it will be a thousand times better. I've never really grasped how magnificent Jesus' return will be like, there's nothing you can really compare it with, so for now I'll think of it as a really really really good fireworks display.
Geisha was alright, they experienced *technical difficulties* halfway through the movie, the only way to describe how the movie stopped playing was that it was like someone burning a hole in the middle of a picture, and the white hole gradually spread to the edges of the screen, and then it went all black, accompanied by a noise that sounded like a cassette tape getting stuffed up. So we had to sit there for a few minutes while they fixed it. That was interesting, never had that happen to me before.
Last Saturday: Woke up late, went to Glue leaders' meeting, went to see Symphony in the Domain (Gershwin's World), with Pun, Angi and Loz. They opened with Rhapsody in Blue, and closed with An American in Paris, and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture (which is obviously not Gershwin, but I suppose it was a good excuse to incorporate fireworks into the performance). (Yay for fireworks!) We should definitely go again next year, with more people.
Last Monday-Friday: Katoomba Youth Leaders' Convention. If I could post everything we learnt about, I would, but that would take way too long. Overall, for me anyway, it was a week of lack of sleep, learning to play texas hold'em (and actually winning a few times), learning the meaning of the word "safe" (don't ask), going though biblical theology and trying to write a Bible study on Amos 5:18-27, and lots of challenging talks and workshops.
The thing that challenged me most was whether or not we are living consistently in our day to day lives as well as in church on Sundays. The speaker, Al Stewart, described it as "the carpark miracle" - the church carpark is where miracles can happen, in terms of people's behaviour - as soon as you step outside your car, you transform yourself into a perfect Christian, and no one has to know what you get up to during the week.
And also I was challenged by how you can be involved in religious activity, but have your heart far away from God.
I came home with my messy notes, and as usual after these camps, felt like there was so much you learnt and were challenged by, and so much you have to change in your life or in your attitude towards things....but then time passes, and you kinda forget about how fired up you were, and then never get around to it.
So then I thought I might try to write a song about the stuff I had been taught, because I find that songs are a good way to remember a bunch of words you wouldn't otherwise remember (hence the Glue mission statement song, and the one with Colossians 1:28 as the chorus, for those of you who know what I'm talking about). So I went through my notes on the talks and wrote down all the points that had jumped out at me, and then tried to force some structure into it and make it rhyme, etc, etc...and a lot of experimenting and D/F# chords later....a song! (which sounds like all my other ones, but oh well, I know I'm doomed to being boring and unoriginal.)
After I had finished it, felt pretty satisfied, played it a few times, tried it out on piano...but the weird thing was, the more I worked on it, the less sincere I felt, and at one point I thought that by writing it maybe I was contradicting what I was actually writing about. It's kinda hard to explain. Trying not to be a hypocrite but feeling hypocritical about it.
Some of the words are either directly from the speaker's notes, or my notes...so it might not ever make complete sense to other people...but it makes sense to me, I guess. My KYLC in a package, you could call it.
When You Return
I’m sorry Lord when I fill my life with empty words
And sometimes when I sing, an empty song is all that’s heard
I’m sorry when I break the promises I’ve made
And when You see my heart drifting further and further away
I’m sorry Lord when I strive to fill my life with things of this world
And when I forget I need to be changed by Your Word
I’m sorry I forget You always keep the promises You’ve made
And the pain it causes You when we turn away
Sometimes this world feels like a tragedy
And we wonder if You’re there
But it’s Your severe mercy
That shows how much You care
And if it wasn’t for the power of the cross
I wouldn’t see Your salvation on the other side of Judgement Day
I want You to see me living more like You each day, till when You return
I want to enter Your kingdom with the humble heart that You’ve set me free to have
And know You are with us as we share Your love
Till when You return again
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