Friday, May 25, 2012

The Service Patch


"The discussion also reinforced a thought I’ve had in many other contexts: that community service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service, figuring that if you are doing the sort of work that Bono celebrates then you must be a good person, such as how can I most productively apply my talents to the problems of the world? It’s about resource allocation.
People are less good at using the vocabulary of moral evaluation, which is less about what sort of career path you choose than what sort of person you are.
In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests.
When I read the Stanford discussion thread, I saw young people with deep moral yearnings. But they tended to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions; questions about how to be into questions about what to do.
It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job."
-David Brooks, The New York Times

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Radical Gospel

“The modern-day gospel says, 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Therefore, follow these steps, and you can be saved.' Meanwhile, the biblical gospel says, 'You are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, & in your present state of rebellion, you are not even able to see that you need life, much less to cause yourself to come to life. Therefore, you are radically dependent on God to do something in your life that you could never do.” 

 David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

Monday, May 14, 2012

Motivation

Sometimes it just seems that I get these sporadic bursts of energy and motivation that last until I make that first excuse for myself. As soon as that excuse appears in my mind, it preys upon me and gives me all kinds of leeway that causes me to easily give up on whatever it is I'm doing. It's in everything, from sports, to friendships, to classes. Am I so easy, so little of heart to just be someone who gives up and leaves it to a pathetic excuse like that?

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Crazy Dreams

just had the WEIRDEST DREAM. i was at this fake school that i've dreamed myself into before, very Rice-ish, and i was working for Dumbledore, whose team for some reason also included in its masses Legolas and Gimli, but one day when Voldemort extended me an offer, for some reason i took it and began working undercover for Voldemort. and Hawkeye from Avengers was on his team too. but during one of our meetings the press barged in and began taking pictures and i covered my face and RAN. we were in a made-up mall i've dreamed about too, and i just ran throughout the mall, and finally made it out of the mall. they called in a team of chinese investigators, so that if i used my Chinese, they could immediately tell how good it was or what region my parents were from, so i refrained from using Chinese at all. And then slowed to a walk while walking through them to act like an ordinary shopper exiting the mall. Ran into two friends from Rice too, Belicia Ding and Kurt Ko. 

When i got back to my dorm, there were huge lines waiting to get inside the dorm because for some reason everyone was taking the backside like i normally do. When i went up, the others went ahead, but i made Hudson wait behind and we went into my room. And told him that I was the one the press were searching for. and people kept pasting these stars and notes on my door, sympathetic, some hurtful, and they came more and more as they began finding out that i was the betrayer, the one working for Voldemort. 
crazy right?

another crazy dream I had on the plane ride back to Haiti was there was this festival at Rice. And Wendy was performing in some sort of karate hip-hop show/demonstration. And as the crowd began gathering more, I was with Zephan and for some reason, on top of the karate pyramid was Andrew Hsu, who was wearing like a samurai kimono type thing with a skirt thing instead of pants. So then Zephan yelled, 
"Those are the most hairless legs I've ever seen!" 

And everyone could NOT stop laughing. I was scandalized, but laughing because no one could stop. The end. 

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

"...he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlessness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility, and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin."
                                                                       -Salmaan Rushdee (The Enchantress of Florence)