My friends Jen and Bryan complain that I haven’t written as much recently for their workday entertainment.  So I present three possible xanga topics:

1. People who love to be proven wrong vs. people who hate it


2. Ending poverty, homelessness, and the energy crisis via exercise bikes


3. Experiments with caramel pomegranite sauce

Any preferences?  Voting ends at noon; winning topic gets an essay!

Cellphone Interruptus

After months of deliberating, I bought a Samsung i500.  While my phone number gets transfered from Verizon to Sprint (hold the incredulous looks, please) I won’t have cell phone service.  They said it might take a few days.  So if you need to get a hold of me, try email instead.

Update: 3PM

I had left a message on my old Verizon voicemail saying my cell phone would be out of service for a while.  Now when I call the number, I get a stock Verizon message from James Earl Jones that the number is not in service.

Update: 5:30PM

I can get phone calls now.  The switchover took less time than the Sprint guy said!

December is filling up

I was going to write “I’m out of town this weekend” but realized my whole month is getting pretty packed.

1: Saved! at 3rd
2: late-night “workout” at Chez Che
3: Host Highrock Friday fellowship
4: IKEA New Haven, then to ellhwang’s 30th bday in NJ
5: Visit Queenswest, cephasung
6: Host Highrock Board of Ministry Leaders
7: late-night meeting with daYi
8: Host Trowbridge dinner
9: “workout”
10: Phobia bday dinner
11: Host chef dinner
12: Co-captain Soul Food, Trinidad missions service auction and meeting
13: SJM dinner
14: daYi
16: “workout”
20-25: NorCal with Cali friends
25-29: SoCal with relatives
30: ntduke
31: New Year’s at efoo

It Takes Two to Gossip

Maybe I should have been a lawyer.  I tend to think of wrongdoing in a systematic manner and assign measurable degrees of blame.  Criminal punishment theory.  For example, the severity of a crime might be modulated by intent, premeditation, accomplices and objects used, and the victim.  That’s why premeditated murder is more severe than accidental manslaughter.  The whole thing about MADD a few decades ago was to make drunk driving a worse offense.  Their argument was that if you choose to drink and drive (increasing the risk to yourself, your passengers, and other motorists), you’ve made a premeditated decision.  Welcome to your new jail cell.

I’ve always thought of gossip in the same way.  The seriousness of the crime depends on various factors:

- Damage -  Example: telling your parents about a fellow churchgoer’s past drug addiction vs. telling his fiancee’s parents.

- Intent -  Example: telling his fiancee’s parents because of jealousy vs. concern for the fiancee.  (Yeah, that’s arguable.)

- Premeditation -  Example: rehearsing the story to make him look as bad as possible.  “He borrowed money from me, spent it on drugs, and never paid me back!”

- Victim -  Example: he never had the drug habit; you were making up the whole thing.

So let’s say I was jealous of him and wanted to screw up his relationship by carrying out this nefarious plan.  After I tell the parents, they are predictably upset and run off to lecture the daughter, resulting in a big fight.  Who’s to blame?

Naturally, I am.  But some of the blame rests with the listener!  In the example above, the parents should have stopped me during my story and asked if I’d tried to resolve it with him or brought him up before a pastor.  If I said no, they should have refused to listen.  It would have saved them a lot of grief.  Instead, their blind acceptance of an unsubstantiated accusation validated my approach and rewarded my crime.

We are too quick to believe and too slow to confront each other to stop gossip at its root.  I’ve been guilty of that many times myself; my approach to conflict resolution has been to hear out the two sides separately and then negotiate an agreement or compromise.  Now I believe that only allows people to vent without encouraging them to do the real work of resolving the dispute themselves.  You can’t help people by doing their homework.

Do Korean women have the best sense of smell?

From http://www.somethingyoushouldknow.net/transcript09_14_04.htm

Korean Americans have a better ability to smell than White who are better than Black who are better than Japanese. As you get older your sense of smell drops down about half of those over the age of sixty-five and three quarters of those over the age of eighty have a reduced ability to smell. Women have a better ability to smell than men. And when you are hungry your sense of smell is better than when you are full. And the first thing in the morning your sense of smell is best.

So I wonder how can they go to the Super88 market in Allston.  It reeks!  It knocks my nose for a loop and makes me not want to cook.   If I had a super sense of smell like a Korean woman’s, I could never go there.  My friend David says it’s a matter of value judgment.  Just because they can detect the smell better doesn’t mean they object to it more.  Thoughts?

I wonder if you can put whole potatoes in the dishwasher to wash and cook them at the same time.

Star(TAC) Wars: The Attack of the Phones

Once again I’m tempted to go over to the Dark Side (Sprint) because of the unmatched Samsung i500, which is only available on their network.  It’s the size and flip-style of my current and ancient StarTAC, which I love.  I tried a Treo600 last week, and while it fits in the pocket nicely (even better than my Palm m500), it feels big and clunky next to my face.  Like I’m using it to deflect blaster shots rather than call Tattoine.  Also, I did a speed test on the keyboard.  I thought I’d be able to thumb-type like a Jedi Teenager on the Treo’s ladybug-sized keys, but in reality I can Graffiti about 30% faster.  Maybe with training I could catch up, but the upside potential doesn’t seem great.

I was last tempted back in May, but I’m looking again.  So far all the googled online reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, citing only the nonexpandable memory (16MB) and high price as downsides.  Any more comments, especially recommendations on where to buy a Sprint phone (Sprint store, Radio Shack, Best Buy, etc…)?  I heard some places offer amazing protection/replacement plans.

P.S. Yes, I’ve been playing Knights of The Old Republic on my Xbox.

Just Watched

Bridget Jones is the female Austin Powers.  You can be as insecure, bumbling, dorky, and unattractive as you want, but men and women will still throw themselves at you.  Great adolescent fun!

Objectification

On Sunday daveswaim preached on lust.  One of his points was that it objectifies people, making them objects of our lust.  We look at them in a two-dimensional way, ignoring their full humanity and moreso God’s image stamped onto them.  This incidentally is the theme of The Stepford Wives: a group of men in a small community conspire to kill their wives and replace them with soul-less, will-less — but cute and perky — robots.  Too bad neither version of the movie examines the theme very deeply, using it only as a springboard for a standard horror/comedy.

It’s not just men that objectify the opposite sex.  Plenty of women want tall, handsome, successful Ken-dolls to marry and sire children. 

There is plenty to say against objectification.  At heart, it denies our humanity, making us valuable only for the services we can provide for others.  It is the root of not only prostitution and pornography, but also racism, slavery, unbridled capitalism, rape, abortion, murder, hate, genocide, torture… actually, we have a word that covers it all: inhumane.

On the other hand, not all objectification is bad.  I think of sports and competition.  There’s something pure and good and joyful about seeing your buddy not as a full person, but only a quarterback you can blitz and bring to the ground.  I have friends I care about as people, but I love to get together, deny our humanity, and all become game-playing machines.  Abstracted to a Starcraft race or a Puerto Rico island.  Even without competition, there is a time and place for objectification.  Recently I had a chance to talk with… uh… pickledave.  Now I’d heard he had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, which is nearly as good as Berkeley in the field.  So I gave him a research problem I’m working on, and enjoyed watching the smoke while he cranked on it.  I wasn’t relating to him as a person; I was relating to a problem-solving machine.  I could have had just as much fun posing the question to Spock or Data.  Maybe I’m weird that way (wired that way?).  But I bet most of us (especially men) could find ways we enjoy interacting with each other as objects.  If that’s a bad thing, then I have some major thinking to do.  Excuse me while I locate my morality module…

Commune

Has anyone ever lived in a commune or co-op situation before?  I’m curious what it’s like.

This weekend I’m going to be out of touch: no xanga, email, cell phone, PDA, money, or credit cards.  I’ll be on an Urban Plunge — weekend missions trip to Dorchester with 10 other Highrockers and Mako and Ming.  They live in a commune / co-op situation as a ministry to the inner city, or so I hear.

Update: some googling turned up real Christian communes.  I’ve also heard that some Campus Crusade staff workers run a house on Mass Ave. near Harvard Square — I forgot the name of it, though.

See y’all at Highrock on Sunday night!