At first, I was thinking to just scrap the ol’ blog, but then I figured that I might give it one last try. But instead of duplicating what’s already happening on the social networking sites, I am simplifying philomyth.us back down to the basics of blogging. I still haven’t decided what I’ll be posting, but I am leaning towards more long-form open-to-the-public articles that need a home.

Design-wise, I went with Yoko, an HTML5 theme which is more adaptable to different screen presentations (monitor, mobile or tablet). I got rid of most of the extra social widgets. But I included some social links in case people wanted to use them.

Over this period of time, WordPress has also been updated to version 3.3 with greater usability on the front and back-end.

Here’s hoping that this cleaned up direction will lead to some more actual blogging in the year to come.

As in everything that the internet touches, both good and bad, it makes the “worlds colliding”  feeling accelerate quickly into the unmanageable. I think that whatever we put on the internet is inherently public, but with so much content out there it used to be virtually trivial. However, with the increasing ubiquity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, connecting web content to real life identities has become a bit too obvious.

Facebook does a decent job of controlling the visibility of personal content. But twitter by design does not. So in an effort to establish my social networking boundaries, I have made the first step of protecting my twitter updates. This has the primary effect of privatizing my tweets (through which I have started to announce different blog posts) so that I am not publicly visible on twitter, and thus shutting it down as a public conduit to my web content.

However, Facebook is not off the hook. After having lived on Facebook for a couple of years now, I am reviewing how I want to use it in managing my personal connections. I am moving towards being more conservative with the people that I connect with through Facebook. I also like the idea of keeping work connections on a separate site like LinkedIn, but it does take extra effort, which may be worthwhile once it is all setup.

This issue of social networking boundaries is an evolving one, and more than likely, this post will be irrelevant or at least outdated in the very near future. But, I just wanted to get my thoughts down so that it gets me to act on them, and gives me the opportunity to review them down the line.

P.S. In a further blurring of boundaries, I tried to integrate the comments on this blog with Facebook, but haven’t been able to get it to work, which may or not be a good thing.

I was reading Bruce Sterling’s The Zenith Angle and at the very end came upon this quote that totally blew me away:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. [wikiquote]

This quote came from a book titled Disturbing the Peace written by the last President of Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel. The quote comes specifically from the chapter “The Politics of Hope”.

At first I struggled with what the quote was saying exactly. I grasped the first part about what hope was not, but where it said “the certainty that something makes sense”, I would try to substitute “the certainty that what I am doing is right”. This was definitely my own mind twisting the quote to meet my own personal assertions. After I realized and acknowledged my mistake, Havel’s intended meaning began to settle in my mind.

It is rather comforting to me that hope is based on rationality, since I am all about things making sense. The flip side that hope is not optimism is equally true and reassuring. Hope is not limited to the outcome but based on the certainty of reason.

While thinking about hope, I remembered a verse in the Bible at the beginning of “The Faith Chapter”:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. [Hebrews 11:1]

This verse makes the connection between faith and hope. At first it seems kind of circular in its certainty. But I guess this brings up the ultimate question as to what exactly am I placing my hope in. If hope is “the certainty that somethings makes sense”, then that something better be something that is going to last and that is worth living and dying for.

I am going to have to read Havel’s book to find out more of what he meant.

In the past year, I’ve noticed that I have become increasingly less aware of what new movies have come out, even the supposedly good ones that win awards. And I think what I am experiencing is a disconnect with mass marketing channels which primarily try to catch our attention through television commercials and now even through pre-showing commercials in movie theaters (I hate those).

This first started after we got our Tivo a few years back and we got in the habit of skipping through commercials. It got to a point where I didn’t even know what the new shows were on the tube, and had to hear about it through friends or via online news feeds. It seems kind of ironic that by taking control of what I am watching, I became disconnected with knowing what was actually available.

In trying to find an image to visualize this post, I came across this diagram from Ogilvy (a big advertising company, go figure, I guess I’m not the only one thinking about this) talking about “Personal Circuits”:

The way that we consume media has changed significantly from the time where we were all glued in front of the television set, to the present where we have all these different “personal circuits” from which to be fed with music, videos, pictures, etc. I guess it shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise that I feel out of the mainstream, when the mainstream itself is splintering into multiple channels.

I can see how this disconnect is going to become greater until mass media companies figure out how to breakdown their messages into meaningful channels that people want to watch. Especially now that I am barely even using Tivo, now that most shows can be downloaded. And who wants to go to movie theaters nowadays with all those commercials taking up the first 30 minutes and the hassle of it all. Then again, maybe media really does want to be free and we don’t have to rely on the big media companies to tell us what to watch.

Until this all gets sorted out, or some new way of aggregating, sorting and identifying media that I am personally interested in comes along, I’ll just have to keep my eyes and ears open for those stray pieces that catch my interest.

Last year, I was talking to a friend of mine whom I’ve known since elementary school about my oldest daughter, Juliette. At the time she was in kindergarten, and I was mentioning to my friend how Juliette was one of only two Asians in her class. The parallel was that when my friend and I were in elementary school way back when, we were the only two Asians in our class. A couple of months later, my friend dug up this old class picture where you can see the two of us amongst our classmates.

And here is a picture of Juliette’s kindergarten class (just the girls) where you can see Juliette and her other Asian classmate. They are actually best friends and even though, this year, they are not in the same first grade class, they play with each other during every break they get.

While I was growing up, nearly all of my school classmates were non-Asians, which was in direct contrast to my friends at church which were practically all Chinese. Juliette is in a similar situation now except that our church is a little bit more diversified being predominantly Asian American.

I don’t know that I have anything specific to say other than observations and pointing out the parallels. My thought is that diversity is best accomplished as an ongoing process of person to person interactions. It is when we describe or assume in generalities that we take peoples as a whole for granted.

My friend and I actually have two other classmates from elementary school whom we still keep in touch with after all these years. It’s encouraging to see that Juliette is friends with lots of her other classmates as well. One of my hopes for my girls is that they will be able to enjoy as long a friendship with all of their friends as long as I have with mine.

After returning from Asia, I have been slowly catching up on my shows. Heroes is one of the few shows that Rebecca and I watch together, but I told her that she could go ahead and watch it while I was on my business trip. After watching them myself last night, I now see why she couldn’t wait for me. Those episodes (Unexpected, Company Man, Parasite) are some of the best television that I have seen in a long while.

In the last episode Parasite, there were some great quotes. The classic one for coffee lovers:

Sylar: “You’ve given me hope.”
Mohinder: “Hope is great. What we need is caffeine.”

The one quote that really stuck out was the one by Mr. Linderman to Nathan (and the fact that Linderman is played by Malcolm McDowell makes it even more awesome):

“…You see I think there comes a time when a man has to ask himself, whether he wants a life of happiness, or a life of meaning…. Two very different paths. To be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present. No thought of what’s gone before and no thought of what lies ahead. But, a life of meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past and obsess about the future.”

Granted, the requirement to decide between happiness and meaning is too simplistic and binary and avoids the issue of ethics and morality. The day after I watched the episode, my Bible reading was from 1 Peter 3:8-12 which provided a good counterpoint:

10″Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech.
11He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it.
12For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

What struck me more about Linderman’s quote was the description of how one achieves a life of happiness or meaning. For most of my life, I have found myself living much more in the immediate, which I believe is different from the present, since I was not spending the focus to actually relish the moment. My focus was more about identifying problems, finding a solution and moving onto the next. This approach also did not leave much room to dwell on the past or contemplate very far into the future. So, in this sense, I was achieving neither happiness or meaning.

It is only recently that I have been seeking to experience more of the present, as well as spending time reflecting on the past which by its nature forces me to dream of the future. Not coincidentally, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to appreciate the “stickiness” or “messiness” of life and relationships, acknowledging that conflict and struggle make up the majority of life and that solutions are only markers or milestones of what has passed.

Ok, I totally missed the one year anniversary for philomyth.us since my first post was on December 21 and we are just now into January. At the beginning of December, I had already planned to write something, but I figured I had plenty of time and now I’ve slipped right past it. I guess I could blame it on the fact that these past few weeks have been very busy with the holidays and everything, but anyways, here goes some reflection and review:

Reviewing
Now that I have gotten a decent posting rhythm, the next thing to practice is going back on a regular basis to review what I have written so that I can actually learn from the past and not merely throw it up and forget about it. I will try and do this on a quarterly basis and maybe post progress reports from ongoing and/or open topics.

Post Topics
Here is a snapshot of the current tags (captured from archives):

asia biography birthday blogs books bugs christianity church clothes comics crafts design digital economics email family fantasy firefox food friends gaming gear gifts government holidays home jazz life lessons missions movie multimedia music pda prayer seminar shopping themes travel vacation web wine wordpress work

I feel that there is a good mix of different topics which I feel are important to me. I know that some would complain that there’s too much geekspeak on some of the posts, but I guess it’s just part of who I am. I think that I would also like to do more reflection on the events that happen in my life and not simply make journalistic entries, but I am not sure how to best do that since this is still for the most part a public forum…

More Reflection
I feel that I still haven’t figured out how best to use this site to not just show my outward expression but to also help me to gather my thoughts about myself and what is happening around me. It’s very easy for me to slip into just talking about the easy stuff and not digging deeper to look at the “heart issues” (as we are always saying in my men’s group). More than likely this will be an ongoing process of learning, and I guess it would be even limiting to assume this blog to be my sole expression of personal reflection. Conversations are not limited to what I write and read here, but this site is only a scattered representation of my life of which I need to do more to experience in the present (certainly one topic to ponder and work on). And maybe I’ll even write some of it down here.

Feedback & Suggestions
Since part of this blogging exercise is for me to not merely post in a vacuum but to open myself to conversations which are a result of me sharing my thoughts, I really would value comments from those of you that have been reading along, especially from those of you that have already been commenting. What are things that you have found interesting and valuable and what are those which I could have done better.

Quite a few friends and even my Microeconomics professor recommended that I read this book. It turned out to be an easy and fairly quick read considering how long I take on some other books. The main thing that I really gained was a better understanding of what economics is all about and how it can be observed and even used in daily life:

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives…. An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation…. There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

The majority of the book is observations that the author uses to bring out the reality of economics in our daily lives. Through this, he identifies certain key points in which economics can actually help us to understand the world around us.

One point that he brought out and is particularly relevant to the Information Age we live in today:

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.

And the effect of the Internet:

The Internet has accomplished what no consumer advocate could: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.

Of course, the one illustration that the book is most famous for is the one about the decrease in crime being correlated to the legalization of abortion. The author does qualify his observation with a nod towards one of my favorite authors:

To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G.K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads…. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

The author ends the book with an epilogue in which he repeats his assertion that economics is the observation of the real world, whereas morality is a representation of the ideal. As a personal reflection then, in learning to observe the real world, I am learning to reconcile those morals that I hold to be true with the actuality of how I act in, within and upon the real world.

I found a couple of online resources in order to follow along in the authors’ continuing development of his ideas:

• New York Times Magazine: Freakonomics Column
• Freakonomics Blog

Then last night, one of my friends told me that he was fasting dinners and also from listening to the radio when in the car. I was thinking, “Ok, so now God has told me this twice”, so if I don’t act on it, I’ll be like young Samuel who heard God’s voice, but didn’t realize it until the third time.

So this morning, as I started my incredibly long 15 minute commute to work, I tried turning off the radio, and realized how quiet it was, without the constant stream of information flowing into my ears, it was like, I had to actually think on my own. I reflected briefly on how this is really like what I was saying in my last post, that I need to create space to reflect and process life. Then after 5 minutes of that, my mind started to get flooded with work, and I figured that I would rather hold off those thoughts and the stress that come with them for a little while until I actually got into the office.

My plan now, we’ll see how long it lasts, is to start off each morning’s commute with the radio turned off so that I can reflect, process and pray for 5 minutes (or at least until I get onto the freeway, whichever comes first). Then on my way back home from work, I will turn off the radio once I get off the freeway for another 5 minutes so that I can start processing my day before I get back home. Hopefully, this will help me to create a buffer between work and home in which I can consciously make the transition in between without simply allowing it to happen.

Oh yeah, as to the title of this post, when I went to turn off my radio, I saw that my radio doesn’t actually turn off when I press the power button, it just mutes with the following symbol displayed:

I noticed this before, but didn’t really make an impression on me at the time, since I so rarely turn off my radio. Anyways, I just thought it was an interesting metaphor on our lives today where we are constantly bombarded with information from all channels of our lives to the point where we can’t shut it off, and all we can do is just try and mute some of it so that we can hear ourselves think.

Even in writing this post and taking a quick recap of this past summer, I realized I wrote a similar post just as the summer hectic-ness was ramping up. It shouldn’t be all that surprising for me to find myself repeating and having to re-learn lessons that God knows I need. I guess this is the whole point of this blog, for me to keep a written history of my thoughts so that I realize how many times I recursively go through life lessons without actually learning and making them truly a part of my personal growth. And hopefully, the lesson will finally set in.

If I am to have any real personal and spiritual growth in my life, I know that I have to make the space and priority for those activities (or lack of activity) in my life which will allow that growth to occur. I know that I have been using mountain biking as an emotional and physical release valve from my daily stresses, but it is not enough to simply fill my time with mindless activity (not that mountain biking doesn’t require it’s own kind of mental concentration and physical stress).

When I took a Silence & Solitude retreat (just half-day) with my men’s group at the beginning of the year, we were encouraged to be actively passive. I definitely need more of that. The irony is that I realize now that I have been exactly the opposite, much more passively active, allowing my busy-ness and activity to just carry me along. Hopefully, it won’t be another three months before I am writing another ‘stuck’ post, then again, at least now I have a record of my folly, and not just blindly cycling through the same realization over and over again.