A Whole New Me (and Friends)

Currently Playing With Virtual Makeover 2003 by Cosmopolitan

Taking votes on the next makeover victim…

Inspired Sandwich

I’m going to do it.  This Sunday, I’m going to try to make the sandwich I had at Darwin’s last week.  Except we’re making 240 of them for Soul Food.  I’m hoping that for many people, this will be the best meal they’ve had all week, and hopefully one of the best sandwiches they’ve ever had.

In my trial runs, I learned a few things:

• In a sandwich, the differences between brands of Brie are indistinguishable.  Any double-creme brand (60% butterfat excluding water weight) is fine.  I’m not a fan of the triple-cremes for most cooking purposes — too buttery.
  
• When you buy a few lettuce leaves (mesculin salad mix) at Shaw’s, the weight might register as zero, and the cashier might not charge you for it at all.
  
• A while back, I wrote that using the right amount of salt is one of the top-3 important rules to cook well.  For sandwiches, that rule applies to condiments — especially Dijon mustard.  Too little, and you can’t taste it.  Too much, and it’s like sucking straight from the bottle.

I was also thinking it would be cool to dress up as the Lord of the Rings characters, but it’s not going to happen.  Takes too much time, and even the real costumes don’t look very impressive in real life (I saw them at the Museum of Science).  That’s the subject for another post…  Also, I was having nightmares of kids running around and tripping on my sword.  Yikes!

Real Live Preacher

I found this site through my brother’s xanga.  This guy is a Baptist minister, but read some of this stuff he writes.  Whoa, baby — this guy’s the real thing.  He’s my HERO.

When told the “Noah and the Ark” story in Sunday School, I quickly figured out that two of every kind of animal would not fit on one boat. No one else seemed to be doing the math. I could no more believe the ark story than I could believe the sky was green. I wanted to believe. Believing seemed nice, but I couldn’t. I COULD NOT.
…

My dad said his kinder, gentler equivalent of “fuck it” and became a smuggler on the spot. He and the others made numerous trips across the border that day in different cars with blankets, food, and jackets crammed under the seats and hidden in the trunks.

 

My dad felt that one’s calling to serve God was higher than one’s calling to obey the law. For Christ’s sake, he and his friends couldn’t let children freeze.

 

“For Christ’s sake” packs a punch when you mean it literally.
…

I believed then and still believe that many Christians use manipulative techniques in order to gain converts. Converts are counted and boasted about. I shit you not. They wouldn’t call it boasting, but that’s what it is. Retch!

…

I believed then and still believe that many Christians have created a sub-culture with it’s own language, customs, and myths. Ministers even have their own dialect and hairdos. Weird. This sub-culture is really more about worshipping America than God, more about achieving than receiving, more about competition than grace. The problem with a religious sub-culture is no one else “gets it”, and you are isolated from the world you are called to SERVE.

…

I learned that it doesn’t matter in the least that I be convinced of God’s existence. Whether or not God exists is none of my business, really. What do I know of existence? I don’t even know how the VCR works.

 

What does matter is whether or not I am faithful. I think faithful is a hell of a good word. It still has some of its original shine. It still calls us to action.

– from The Preacher’s Story in 4 Parts

One Last Update: And this — this reached straight through my brain, into my heart, up my throat, and gave voice to something I didn’t know I had.  Ok, pray and sleep time.  So much for my to-do list tonight.

Shopputting

I have another shoplifting story.  Well, this is the opposite of shoplifting, so I will call it shopputting.  Even though it will probably never become an Olympic event.  Shopputting is when you have merchandise you don’t want but cannot return it through the normal channels.  For example, if you don’t have the receipt.  So you secretly leave it at the shop.

My story is a little more complex.  I had bought a cool-looking round ceiling light which I installed in my old bedroom (now lcshih’s room).  But the color of the light was awful; the round fluorescent tube made skin look sickly green.  Imagine Claudia Schiffer.  Now imagine Zombie Claudia Schiffer in Return of the Dead.  Not what you want to see in your bedroom, right?

So I went to Home Depot and bought a warm-white (3500K) fluorescent tube of the same size; I changed the bulb and the new color was fine.  But what to do with the old bulb?  Fluorescent tubes last a long time, so I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, even though it was totally useless to me.  But I couldn’t return the bulb either, because I didn’t buy one of that color.  So I packed it into the warm-white box and then wrote “Utility Light” in big black letters across it.  Then I went to Home Depot and just dropped it off with the others.  Hopefully someone will buy it, someone who will use it as a Utility Light and not be concerned about the greenish color cast.  Not everyone is as zombiephobic as me.

The Accidental Shoplifter

Sometimes I am a real space cadet.  Last week I was shopping at the mall and accidentally walked out of a store with a new shirt.  Because there was no anti-theft tag, and because the store was nearly empty, no one stopped me as I walked out.  In fact, I was nearly at the building exit when I realized I was holding it.  Then I thought, “Don’t I look conspicuous holding this shirt that’s not in a shopping bag?”  But one advantage of growing older is learning that not everyone is watching you all the time. 

This is why older people wear sweats in public.

Anyway, I was late to a meeting, so I figured it wouldn’t be any more wrong to walk out of the building with my purloined property.  When I went back to the store to pay for it a few days later, I walked in carrying the shirt (no bag).  It wasn’t any harder than walking out with it.  Weird.

How could I be so absent-minded as to walk out with a shirt?  Well, I was carrying another shopping bag in my right hand, and I added the shirt (packed in a clear plastic wrap) to that hand as I was using my left hand to examine other merchandise.  Shopping for clothes takes all of my brainpower as I try to factor in color, style, feel, fit, ease-of-care, price, etc…  So I totally forgot about the shirt in my right hand (that was also holding the other bag) while mentally working through some equations for a silk/cashmere pullover.  (I don’t actually assign numbers and do math in my head; it’s more intuitive and hard to explain.)  The equation came out to: “Mull over it for a while” and I left the store thinking about when I would come back to the mall.  Because clothes shopping is a pretty rare event for me.  Not as rare as clothes shoplifting, though.

Moral of the story: I am quick to forgive forgetfulness in other people because I am so absent-minded myself.  I have lots of stories like this one!  Too bad I can’t remember half of them…

Java Election2000 Results

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2000/

Why is there so much red in the map?  It shows that people who live in less-populated regions primarily voted Republican.  Is that because:

1. people in the rural areas vote for the guy they can relate to?  C-average Bush in a fishing jacket, not Mr. Smarty-pants Gore?


2. the Democrats primarily target the academic elite in populated areas?


3. Bush had more relatives as governors of swing states?  (haha, that’s a F911 joke)

It’s hard to decide where to cast my vote.  Republican and Democrat don’t mean anything anymore; both parties are just different shades of centrist.  I’ll probably do what I did in school: cram the night before.

VSTM: Very Short Term Missions

Last summer on a missions trip in Trinidad, a few of us were talking about what a great experience it was, and how we wished that more people could be part of it.  But a lot of people can’t take a few weeks off for a full-blown missions trip.  Then we came up with the idea of a VSTM, just a weekend trip for people to get away and serve.  Kind of like a weekend retreat, but with an emphasis on service and community.

So this year I’m psyched that Highrock is organizing such a trip to Dorchester.  No cell phones, no credit cards, just entering and engaging the city directly.  We will join Ming and Mako Nagasawa for an Urban Plunge to:

• Learn about the history of Boston, and how we can pursue justice in our city.
  
• Observe the inner-city first-hand by walking through the neighborhoods.
  
• Volunteer to serve alongside Christian ministers committed to the urban poor.
  
• Engage God in the city — grow in knowledge of who He is and what He is doing.

Dates: 11/12 – 11/14 (only a weekend, and back in time for Highrock’s worship service)
Cost: $30 (a tiny fraction of an overseas missions trip)
Contact: me, or Helena Park (Highrock’s Director of Social Justice Ministry)

Better than [...]

Taste is subjective, but today I had one of the top-3 sandwiches of my entire life.  It was one of the specials at Darwin’s on the edge of Harvard Square.  How good was it?  To paraphrase Chandler (Raymond, not “Friends”), it was a sandwich to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.  If Natalie Portman asked me for the half I hadn’t bitten into, she’d get directions instead.

Ingredients (I think):

a very light but chewy baguette roll (with big holes like swiss cheese)
a tiny bit of mayo?
a bit of honey dijon mustard
thinly-sliced ham
brie
mesculin greens
cinnamon apple slices

I want to make it for Soul Food, but I don’t know if I can find bread to do it justice.  And if I can find brie within our budget.  And how to cook cinnamon apple slices in such a short amount of time.

Life or Lifeless?

Last night I heard a sermon where one of the main points was: “Christians should be the life of the party, but instead we’re often lifeless.”  Also in the sermon: “As Christians, we should not get used to the plight of the poor and needy.”  Those two concepts don’t blend well in my mind — they keep separating like oil and wine, and the mix needs constant rah-rah shaking to be palatable.

When I think “life of the party,” I think of someone immensely happy, spilling out carefree laughter to everyone else around.  Not someone who’s thinking of the poor bathing in sewer water in Calcutta.

How can someone possibly hold both concepts in their mind: to be fully happy while being fully aware of someone else’s suffering?  I can come up with only a few explanations:

• Monastic
  Separate yourself from the world and interact only with other monks.  I think the majority of church-goers lives this way.


• Salesman
  I don’t know what goes on in the mind of a salesman, but I get the sense of talking to plastic.  Hard to see the real person, or his heart, if there is one.


• Lunatic
  Maybe the result of too much cognitive dissonance.  The volume of their shouting is never enough to drown out the quiet whispers inside.


• Servant
  This quiet joy is not what most would call “life of the party.”  But it’s the only way I can reconcile full joy and full awareness.