A few weeks ago I started to realize that I have been unable to focus. I mentioned it to my coworkers, and they said "you're burnt out". They know about what's happened with my house and everything.

This week, I think I'm approaching 100% burnt out. I really can't focus on anything at all. I think I need a vacation. Every day I work, then I go home and work until I go to bed.

Christmas has the remainder of my vacation days this year. I'll be spending Christmas with family. It will be great, but will I be able to recharge?

What do I need? How can I help this?

I don't know. I think if I just push a little more; just another month or so, to the point where all our junk is in our house, then I will begin to be able to find some spare time. A lot of my daily after-work effort goes to unpacking our storage unit. Fill up the car, empty the car, find a place in our house for the stuff I just got.

Right now, the baby's bed time is 10pm, which is crazy, because there's a list of stuff we have to do each night after he goes to bed (such as cleaning bottles and preparing ourselves for bed). I want to roll that back to 9pm. I don't know what's better: immediately pushing it back to 9pm, or waiting until we stabilize and then slowly walking it back. Probably the latter.

"We speak with Heaven's accent, the angelic dialect"

Packing my bag for the trip this weekend to get Chowon.

Looks like we may not get much help with the last stage in this ordeal... but when mankind is deceitful and stingy, everyone suffers.

Lies and greed.

So, the online world is getting more and more cool all the time... It's too bad it's online.

We had some Chinese workers at our factory today. We ate lunch with them, and they took pictures everywhere we went. They even took pictures of the sky -- like, it's just going to be a blue photo, because we don't have clouds here that often, and there were none today.

In my highlighting project, I'm going to do the 10 commandments tomorrow. I'm kinda nervous and excited about it! I'm finally getting into the law, and this is such a special and important chapter. What a treasure! What a privilege, to be given liberty to mark up the very words of God, so precious in the eyes of all of God's great nation. God, who speaks and the universe transitions from nothingness to chaos, and from chaos to order, and from order to conscious awareness. God who encapsulates all of life's mysteries, all wisdom, all love, all goodness, in just a few words. God who strikes terror into the heart of all Hell itself by simply quoting his own words, "Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only." Those words, God wrote on a page, and invited us to study them, know him through them, and utilize all the power that comes with being a representative of God by sharing them with one another. God, mighty. God, just. God, merciful.

I've read the histories. I know that God's people have suffered much worse on earth than I will ever suffer. I'm stressed, but I know that God will provide. Even if I do suffer, I know that God is able to make it bearable; to give peace in our hearts; and to protect us from compromising our integrity.

Take James, for example, the brother of Jesus. He was known by the Jews as "James the Just" because of the time he spent on his knees in the temple, praying for God to have mercy on Jerusalem before the foretold and imminent Day of the Lord (though we know how hard the punishment on Jerusalem ended up being -- the recorded histories of it are extremely graphic), and some ancient records have him nicknamed "leather-knees" due to the callouses on his knees from all that time keeling to pray. All this he did while Christians in his own town were being killed on a regular basis just for being Christian. In spite of his excellent reputation and his well-known hopes for the betterment of Israel, and the harmlessness of his behaviors, when the Jews were satisfied with their certainty that James would not forsake worshiping and serving his half-brother Jesus, he was dragged out of the temple and beaten for it. Seeing that he would not give up his faith even when beaten, he was brought to the top of the temple and thrown off, and then seeing that he survived in a state of physical brokenness, he was beaten again until he died. No amount of righteousness on earth will shield a Christian man from earthly suffering. But this we know about James: he did not give up his conscience. He died with integrity, and he lives in Heaven with our God in eternal, blissful fellowship with his Redeemer.

Whatever happens, I know that God will enable me to complete the race, and I pray all the time that God would provide and enable me to provide, and that things would not be difficult for my family.

"Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die."

Blogging on my phone tonight... I'm too tired to stay awake,  and too awake to go to sleep.  I'm sure that tomorrow will be another very tired day,  and I am not sure there's anything I can do to help myself.

Right now I'm experiencing a mood that I've experienced a few distinct times in my life,  and it's distressing.

I feel like I'm in love with every person who has ever lived,  and I am totally helpless to rescue them all.... because I need to be rescued,  too. I mean,  really.  It's a crazy feeling. It's like a revolving door of panic and longing, and I can't seem to step out. I can't stop thinking about,  and sympathizing with,  the real suffering I've seen or learned about.

When,  oh God,  will you finish your work? How long will humans harm other humans? How long will there be homelessness and poverty? How long will we subject ourselves to human governors: equals ruling over equals with capricious imposition!

Yesterday slavery was ok,  today its wrong. Yesterday murder was wrong,  today it's a "choice" and therefore(?) a right.  Today a man may govern his business according to his conscience,  tomorrow he may not.  If a man thinks he's two men, or an animal, then  it's a sickness, because he rejects empirical reality.  If he thinks he's a woman,  though,  then nobody better say anything to disagree with him. We all have to play along, because we wouldn't want to hurt his feelings. Yesterday,  colonialism.  Tomorrow,  gentrification. Is the space of two or three generations really that long of a time?

Four hours north,  brothels are legal. Eight hours south,  human trafficking is a significant problem. Everywhere else in America,  prostitution is illegal... unless it's on the internet,  or in a strip club. What about the feelings of those exploited women, now lobbying for their right to kill their children. Why do people even on TV act ashamed if they're chaste? It's as if we think a woman who guards herself with modesty is devaluing her body by not showing it to every interested man.  As if making something easy to access causes it to be more valuable somehow. As if it's shameful for a woman to want a guy to work hard to earn the right to access her body,  and to commit himself to her first. Isn't the life long commitment, which proves to everyone that his love for her is nor contingent on her fleeting beauty, so much more precious than relatively cheap dating relationships?

And the wealth gap! Don't get me wrong,  I'm not in favor of hiring thugs to steal from the rich and give to the poor (I mean,  the IRS). The problem isn't taxes, and it isn't capitalism, and history demonstrates that raising the minimum wage won't solve the problem -- the problem is greed. I can't change anyone's heart, and two wrongs don't make a right.  I see the homeless people on the street,  and I know how easy it is to lose everything. And worse yet in my mind is when I see women panhandling -- every man who drives by, including me,  should feel ashamed that a woman lives in our midst without providence! Men,  be men! Only, what can I do? I know the danger lurking in my heart. I can't have her in my house for an extended time, because I'm a married man.  No,  the Bible gives the answer: churches should be banding together to help these women. I'm ashamed that I am not leading that march.

I could go on endlessly,  and that's just outside my door! Go a little further, see the exploitation of young men and women in Asia. See the violence left behind by atrocities in Africa. See the hatred in the middle east. See the senseless poverty in North Korea and China. See the empty churches in Europe.

See me, worried about paint, not doing anything with eternal value, self pitying, and worse for mentioning it about myself.

I must do something. I must take action.

I'm going to stop by the local food bank tomorrow. A few people in my church have expressed an interest in volunteering. I'll take the first step.

"But dead people do weep."

Listening to this song right now:

Thinking about causality and reading about Hume recently has got me thinking a bit differently about the mind/body distinction. I think it's worth noting that Hume was a genius, and he knew it, and he seems to have made a point of writing about how well he knew it. I think pride inhibits a person's ability to introspect.

In any case, what I'm about to say about mind/body is not what Hume advocated. Hume just got me thinking along these lines.

I'm thinking that thoughts are an experiential phenomena.Thoughts are only noticeable as thoughts because they are changing. If I was observing the conscious mind of another being, I wouldn't be able to tell whether or not that being was thinking unless those thoughts changed with time. Likewise, I can't tell if I'm thinking or not, except by virtue of the constant changes in my thoughts. So self-awareness is arguably an experiential phenomena; empirical.

I don't know the implications of that kind of thinking; I need to consider it more.

"I see my whole life just pass by. When did I die?"

My car has pretty good speakers in it for bass. I listened to this song in it, and it sent shivers down my spine when the beat dropped the first time:

Also, that dude's facepaint is kinda awesome.

I fell asleep last night thinking about relativity. The concept frustrates me, because I find the thought of a disorderly universe offensive, and yet online people are always explaining it in ways that make it more confusing -- "it's simultaneously true that the light is on and off", and, "time slows down when you speed up".

Now, disclaimer, I might be about to make a fool of myself by talking about my rationalizations for things I don't understand....... I think that the way that humans rationalize their environments is fascinating on its own.

As I lay in bed, certain things I've heard suddenly seemed to make sense to me, considering that causality moves at about the constant speed (conventionally?) associated with the speed of light, that time would seem to slow for a person who approaches the speed of causality. It's just like how sound has to keep up with you when you move, and then fails when you reach the speed of sound, causality has to keep up with you and fails when you reach the speed of light. So the causal relationships between all of our constituent particles in space is what "propels us forward in time" (so to speak), and they simply become unable to affect one another if we are moving faster than their relationships permit. So then, time doesn't exist on its own, but is rather simply the experience of change.

It's not that the light is simultaneously on and off, then, but rather it is that one party subjectively experienced a longer time (less change) before they observed the light changing state.... right? What am I not getting here? It frustrates me the way that pop media gives partial explanations in order to make science more interesting, by making it more mysterious, and making it impossible for their readers to accurately represent what they've presented. I've seen it over and over in my own field of study; I wonder if relativity is only inaccessible because it hasn't been explained to me well.

Also, I don't understand why we're saying light (of all things) has to move at the speed of causality, unless the speed of causality also changes with temperature, field, and medium, in which case, I am of the opinion that we should be more clear when we teach our young students about time and motion. Rather than explaining things in terms that are technically wrong, but easy to grasp, we should rather explain things in terms that are technically right, but take special effort to deliver them in small and easy-to-grasp bites.

If we're really convinced of this, then we should be straight-forward with people and tell them that time doesn't exist but is rather conventional, and physicists should teach us to treat the time associated with each object as a series of independent causalities rather than some axis upon which the whole universe is progressing at uniform pace. If causality is a spatially limited phenomena, rippling across some experiential medium, then I wish we would explain it better so that people would stop making science fiction about time travel, and rather sink their imaginations into producing fiction which is more bound-up in the actual limitations on time and space.

But then again, I suppose I don't really know what I'm talking about.

"It's vinegar."

I have some work to do for my company tonight, but it's not time sensitive, and today was busy and hard, so right now it's time for me to blog.

I've gotten my epistemological argument into the hands of a person who appears to be much more well read than I am on the topic which I'm arguing, and he says he'll help me to strengthen and fortify my argument, to improve the presentation of it, and to correct some errors I've made. Very much looking forward to his input.

I was listening to Igorrr today, and it got me feeling really angry and angsty and maybe a little depressed... but it also got me energized, so I finished a hard day well lol. Igorrr is one of my favorite bands. It made me realize that I usually post chill music on my blog, but many of my favorite bands aren't all that chill. So, today I wanted to go ahead and make a list of my (current) favorite bands, and put up some of my favorite videos from their music. The list is just what was on the top of my head -- I might come back and amend this blog if I think of other artists later.

I'm going to try to put these down in order, from most to least favorite band, and I'll put up a song that I like from each band. You should know, as you listen to some of these, that some bands I like for the mood, some for the tune, some for the lyrics, and some for the technicality and genius that they bring to their art (I mean, they don't each have all of those qualities). Here's the list:

1. Rivers and Robots. Starting with the best. I think this is my all time favorite band.

2. I.V. Connerly. His lyrics are really really good, and I can't argue with his flow either.

3. Flying Lotus. Some of their stuff is just garbage, but some of it is really really amazing. I guess it's all a matter of opinion, right? Maybe that's the way they want it.

4. The Chariot. These guys get me pumped every time.

5. Band of Horses. Didn't like them the first time I heard them, but then I couldn't get them out of my head. Now I keep them around.

6. Chopin. Is that old dog tray?

7. Chon. These guys do a great job with the essentials -- Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen.

8. Jars of Clay. Their self-titled album was really good. Where is more music like that?

9. Igorrr. Sometimes I get in the mood for this kind of stuff. Also, I think they might be geniuses.

10. Logic. He's really good, and I'm sold on the mission. (btw: this one is explicit)

11 (or some other prime number). Dillinger Escape Plan. I almost joined a mosh pit at a concert for these guys, but it wasn't what I expected. There were a few dudes in there just waving their arms around, but not hitting each other. If they were really hitting each other, I might have joined (that was my excuse anyway, and I stick with it to this day), but as it was I would have just been walking into a spinning fan (the puns though). I don't have enough angst to just wave my arms around like that if I'm not in a fight.

12. Renard Queenston (& friends?)..... guilty.

13. Covet. Yvette Young is really good at her instrument. Also she has a pretty good band behind her.

I'm sure I'll think of others later, and maybe rearrange some of these. I almost wish I didn't say I was gonna put them in order, because some of these numbers I'm really not sure about. I only really did that so that I could put Rivers&Robots on top -- I like them THAT much.

Alright. I think that's enough to chew on.

"In terms of the time it takes to comprehend and master a subject, it can be said of many books that they would have been much shorter if they hadn't been so short."

Today was very busy. When I got home, I just ate dinner and cleaned up the guest bathroom toilet (still nasty from before the work on the house was done. So nasty). I think I did a pretty good job. Nobody's gonna know how nasty it was except the rebuilders who had to handle it (sheesh).

Today I had this machine I was supposed to run some tests on. It's a big machine -- we've been planning the tests for like a month. I spent the whole day trying to figure out an unexpected problem with an ancillary sensor on the machine, because that stupid sensor kept causing the whole thing to reset. Every time it reset, I had to wait 30 minutes for things to spin back up, and it reset over and over again. I tried testing between resets, but it was messing up my results, so I spent all day trying to fix it. Finally I got around it and I was able to run one single iteration of the test before my time ran out. The numbers came in really smoothly, so I have very good reason to believe that the results of that last test were reliable, but they aren't the results I was hoping for. If I had more time I might have been able to compensate for the results and figure out a solid solution to the problem which necessitated this test in the first place. All I could write on my report was "more testing needed" and a couple speculative solutions.

On the way home, I stopped at Walmart and picked up some ramen, but now I wish I also picked up hot sauce, because it was pretty bland. Salty and bland. I mixed in eggs and tuna to make it better, but I'm like 90% certain that I ate a big chunk of my paper bowl. Lucky me, I double-bowled it.

Then I ate too much nutella.

God is good to me, though. There's a good storm happening outside. And, during my lunch break, I was able to cobble together this outline of my epistemological argument. I haven't really developed the content much since my last exposition on blogger, but I've cleaned up the delivery quite a bit, and I've tried to be more careful about some of the wording. Here's the link.

...man, I want to spend time with my son.

I hope Isaac grows up with an appreciation for history, philosophy, art, rigorous thought, and the power of carefully articulated ideas. I hope he someday looks at paintings and asks the person next to him, "what do you think the artist is trying to tell us?", and means that question with sincere curiosity. I hope he reads a poem that brings tears to his eyes, not because he relates to it in sadness necessarily, but simply because of the lucid depth of the prose. I hope he hears music that makes his young knees fail beneath him for beauty. I hope he reads a book that makes him rightly mourn for the deception infecting so much of the world. I hope he doesn't just hear and dissect Scipio's argument, but expounds upon it. I hope that his knees grow calloused by frequent prayer for justice. I hope his wife compels him to perpetual readiness to give himself up for her as Christ on the cross, if only by means of her unflinching loveliness in his eyes.

I hope that the light of his soul isn't crushed by bitter and disillusioned elementary and high school teachers, fenced-in by the standardized tests and curriculums, recapturing some semblance of unfulfilling joy by letting themselves get caught up in trendy buzz-facts, like all that garbage out there relating to the near-intelligent nature of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence doesn't exist yet, everybody. We aren't even close. We still have no idea how the brain works, really. Give it another 50-100 years and then maybe. I hope that his teachers are passionate about their subjects, and that they act on a rigorous commitment to justifiable truth. I hope he finds a well-paying job that he likes, succeeds by the grace of God in it, and gives that success right back to God in glory.

I hope I don't push him too much to be like myself. I know that if I let him explore his own God-given disposition, while carefully instructing him in good and moral religiosity, he may become a much better man than I. I can't wait to see who he will become!

"If everybody eats, it's a good night."

Today I spent the whole day working on my kitchen -- something I wish I could have done on Saturday, but I managed to get it done today. We have Chowon's tickets to come home in two weeks. I'm going out to get her, because last time she flew alone with the baby, she had a terrible experience, and she doesn't want to fly alone again. I think it makes sense for her to want that.

I'm having the plumber check on the way the MBR toilet flushes with less force than the guest bathroom. He said he'd come on Monday, and the diagnostics would be free; he said he'd only charge me if he had to auger. I only have a general idea of what that means, tbh. I suppose I'll research it before he comes over.

I was tidying up tonight after my work on the kitchen, and I noticed I have these Bible Highlighters sitting on the table. And don't get me wrong: they're not just "highlighters for my Bible"; they're "Bible Highlighters". I got them from Barnes and Noble when I bought this Bible that I'm highlighting these days. I spent some time that day looking around the store for other highlighters, but "Bible Highlighters" were the only kind they had. What's more, they had a label on them that said in big text, "Bible Highlighters".

Now, I hated that label. Why should a highlighter be for any specific purpose? Why couldn't they just be called "highlighters?" I mean, I don't have "letter paperclips" to keep separate from my "invoice paperclips". Every time I went out to study the Bible in public with these things, I was embarrassed, because they seem like a gimmick to me! (Now, I know they have some unique properties which make them suited to highlighting the typically thin and translucent pages of a Bible, but still).

So, today I peeled the label off the case for the highlighters. I could have just transplanted them to another case, I guess, but I quite like the case they're in.

As I was peeling off the label, I was thinking about why I was peeling it off; my justification for it. It's so obvious that it's a gimmick for Christians. I didn't want to seem like a dumb Christian who would buy any "cross" and "Jesus" labeled thing marketed to me. But then it got me thinking... is there anything I would be ok with buying that had a gimmick? Well, certainly I wouldn't mind having a piece of apparel that says "Christofascist" on it, but honestly I can't imagine an article of clothing that could have that on it which I would actually wear -- I almost exclusively dress business casual., and I don't like wearing hats. So, the clothing thing doesn't really count because I wouldn't wear it, and it isn't that gimmicky because clothing is a socially accepted media for statements of belief.

What would make me ok with wielding a gimmick? What if it were something I was proud of?

So, that got me thinking: what am I proud of? Would I be ok with "Engineering Highlighters"? No, I wouldn't. I actually get pretty uncomfortable around people who are too boastful about their titles or certificates. "Poet highlighters"? No way. What about "Doing Housework Highlighters"; I suppose I wouldn't mind so much, but it still feels just really dumb to limit highlighters to one thing like that, so I wouldn't buy them.

But then it hit me: "Married Man Highlighters", or "Married to Chowon Highlighters". I am so proud of being a husband, I would definitely buy those highlighters. Heck, I would buy them and then tape the case to my forehead so that I could wear the label around. I would exhibit any gimmicky or silly piece of marriage-related memorabilia with excessive enthusiasm. I love my wife; I am proud to love her; and I'm honored and dignified beyond my class to have been given the honor of such a marriage. Marriage is what I'm most proud of. I want my wife to feel the same way about me.

It was at the moment of that realization that I found myself pulling the last torn piece of that label off. Marriage is a gift from God, intended to teach us about his relationship to us and his love for us; intended to teach us about how he feels about us, and how he wants us to feel about him. I instantly regretted pulling the label off, but it was in tiny pieces and it couldn't be put back. I want to be just as proud of being a Christian as I am of being a husband. I have no reason not to be!

And then I noticed, having removed the label, that I had exposed the midsection of the highlighters themselves in the clear case. Each highlighter has written on it in bold lettering, "Bible Highlighter".

And so I've turned all the highlighters in their case, showing the gimmick not just in one place on the front of the box, but now in ten places. These are my Bible Highlighters, and I'll prop them up proudly in the coffee shop, because I'm a Christian, and I love my Lord and King.

I guess it sounds silly to be ashamed, now expressing myself in such a small way as if it were bold, but so often I see Christianity ridiculed in public space. I feel like I'm conditioned to be ashamed of it. Let's not be that way.

"This is my name forever."

Taking a dinner break. I listened to this song recently:

Just for fun, you know.

I'm in the middle of doing the kitchen cabinets. It's harder on my back than I expected -- I guess I'm getting old. 

...

I didn't want to type with pizza hands, so I didn't write anything; just ate. I've got these microwave pizzas I've been into lately. Pizza and Gatorade.

...

Ok, back to work.

"Who would say to his enemy, 'you have a bad flesh toward me', rather than 'you have a bad spirit toward me'?"