bowling and books.

Latest WTF moment: I went bowling with my parents this afternoon, and it was a strange experience. For one thing, I got 55 points on the first game. I think this is the worst I've ever done at bowling. For another thing, the machine that replaced the pins was acting up. One person would finish, a new set of pins would come down, but some of the pins would be missing and bowling alley workers would have to come and push a button several times to get a full set of pins. Then one of the workers decided to clean our lane while we were playing. He didn't say anything, but he rolled a cleaning machine out in front of our lane while my dad was in the middle of a frame. He didn't really pay attention to us at all, actually. Then, when he sent the machine down the lane to clean it, he moved the machine to the next lane, but left the power cord stretched across our runway until another employee came over and moved it. Before that, he was walking between our lane and the lane next to us. He was wearing socks, but his socks were leaving a white powder on everything, so there were white footprints everywhere he went, and we walked on our lane and left footprints there. (Incidentally, this employee started bowling a little bit later, and he was pretty amazing. He would swing the bowling ball back almost completely vertical, then bowl it, and when he bowled the ball, it was incredibly fast and incredibly smooth). Right after this, another employee came over and, without saying anything to us, turned off our computer screen.

Anyway, here's my list of the ten best (as in favorite) fiction books I read this year, as promised. Tim (and I think this is the first time I've directly addressed a person while writing here), I'm sorry that you already know about at least most of these, but thats the way the milk curdles.


Top Ten Fiction
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
City of Saints and Madmen - Jeff Vandermeer
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
Saturday - Ian McEwan
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
A Personal Affair - Kenzaburo Oe
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami


Those are in no particular order. I had enough trouble figuring out what would be on my top 10 (it became pretty arbitrary at the end). There were a lot of good books I read that weren't on the list. I'm a little surprised that Saturday and The Road made it on, because I didn't think that much of them when I read them. Looking back though, they seem better. And...I don't really want to do a list of best non-fiction, so I won't.

So below here is a pretty complete list of what I read over the year. This doesn't take into account most of the poetry, any of the Bible, or some of the plays and articles and whatever else I read. It's basically just books that I read and finished this year, along with a few plays and epics.

A quick analysis of this list: about 60% of what I read was fiction. That means about 40% was non-fiction. I read authors from USA, Japan, Russia, Greece, Italy, Haiti, South Africa, France, Algeria, Germany, Holland, India, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Denmark. Next year, I'd like to get more Latin American and Spanish writers in (and I really want to read Jose Saramago, who is from Portugal).

Telling Secrets - Frederick Buechner
Remains of the Day- Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Theology as Big as the City - Ray Bakke
The Iliad - Homer
The Aeneid - Virgil
The Republic - Plato
Nichomachean Ethics - Aristotle
History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
Masters of the Dew - Jacques Roumain
Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon
Poetry Handbook - Mary Oliver
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
Elements of Narrative - H. Porter Abbott
Foe - J.M. Coetzee
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Walking on Water - Madeleine L'engle
Confessions - Augustine
Discourse on Free Will - Luther/Erasmus
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
The Rule of St Benedict - Benedict
The Inferno - Dante
Paradise Lost -John Milton
History of the English Language - Albert C. Baugh
The Irresistible Revolution - Shane Claiborne
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
Aristotle's Children - Richard Rubenstein
City of Saints and Madmen - Jeff Vandermeer
East, West - Salman Rushdie
Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
Urban Tribes - Ethan Watters
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
The Moor's Last Sigh - Salman Rushdie
Language in Thought and Action - S.I. Hayakawa
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
Saturday - Ian McEwan
Freakonomics - Stephen Levitt
Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot
Silence - Shusaku Endo
Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Fires - Raymond Carver
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Large Catechism - Martin Luther
Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard
The Divine Conspiracy - Dallas Willard
The White Castle - Orhan Pamuk
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
A Personal Affair - Kenzaburo Oe
A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Beowulf
The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata
The Wounded Healer - Henri Nouwen

strange events today

1. Playing Backgammon with Mom

Yesterday my Mom and I played backgammon with each other for the first time. She beat me 2/3 games. Today, we got it out again. On the first game, I was doing very well. Somehow, it got to the point where I had one piece left, and she had two. It was my turn, and I looked at the board and said, "There's only one thing I can roll to not win, a 1 and 2." So I rolled, and the dice were 1 and 2. WTF. I had a 17/18 chance to win on that roll. That is a 94% chance to win, and I got the only possible losing roll.

2. Sneezing Cat

I was hanging out in my room, probably reading, when I noticed that the cat was sneezing. He wasn't just sneezing though, it was an unusual type of cat sneeze that I can't really explain. So I told my mom that the cat was sneezing a whole bunch, and she came in. I noticed from a distance that there was something dark, it looked black, on the cat's nose. I thought it might be some snot. So I said something, and my mom noticed that it was a piece of grass, maybe a centimeter long, stuck in the cat's nose. She tried to take it out but the cat was too feisty and wouldn't keep still enough. I went over and held the cat's head and she pulled a blade of grass out of its nose that was several inches long. WTF.

3. Books

I realized today that the author(s) I've read the most in my life is probably Jerry Jenkins and Tim Lahaye, authors of the Left Behind books. Most as in the highest number of individual books. Perhaps Frank Peretti. This is strange to me because a) I didn't realize it and b) I probably won't ever read something by either of them again. But, if we went by volume of works, and amount that I've reread, I think the author I've read the most would either be Robert Jordan, Brian Jacques, or Stephen Donaldson.

How did I realize this? I started to compile a list of every book that I've read in my life. Actually, there were several years where I was keeping track of everything I read, then I stopped because I felt like I was trying to set some sort of record rather than reading for its own sake. Then I started again and today I decided to make a list of all books. I'm at about 400 right now, and it surprises me that it's not more. What bugs me is the kids books. I don't want to try to figure out all the Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children books that I've read, and I won't. But those serial kids books would probably add a couple more hundred to the list. There are a lot of books that aren't on the list yet, but it surprises me that even with all the kids books and ones I've forgotten, and probably all the re-reads, I've read less than 1000 books in my life. What does this mean? It means I need to be freaking careful about what I read. No time for bad books.

Coming soon: my top ten reads of 2007, and some statistics for my years reading.

Babel

A few days ago I borrowed the movie Babel from some friends. This was a bootleg copy, and apparently whoever designed the cover for the bootleg version was either pulling up reviews at random off the internet, or really didn't like Babel. Here's what some of the critical reviews on the cover were: "A dissappointment for two performances that should have stood out. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett stand out, but only too briefly. Four story lines that interlink only slightly, with one not needed at all" - Steven Chupnick. And, "The world spanning story has intriguing elements...But, the overall study falls short of the individual stories" - Robin Clifford.

Hmmm. It was also funny that the cover listed it as PG-13 for "some sex-related material" when in reality it was rated R for "violence, some graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use."

Anyway, after watching the movie last night, it seems that Chupnick missed the whole point of the movie if he's complaining that Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett didn't stand out enough. This was not a movie about Americans, or Mexicans, or Japanese, or Moroccans, for any of them to "stand out". It was about how different lives--mostly of strangers--affect each other, how people are connected. Something like that.

So, after 3 days my face is still swollen from wisdom tooth removal. This has never happened to me before.

Absurd story from my life: Last night I went with my family to eat a Christmas dinner at one of the nicest hotels/resorts in Chiang Rai. Many of my friends were there with their families as well. It was an outside dinner, and there was a band playing on a stage at one end of the lawn. Anyway, when I was finished eating, two of my friends came up to me and said they were going to play a few songs up on the stage, and asked if I wanted to play bass with them up there. So we went to this stage, and the musicians let us use their instruments, and we played a few Christmas songs. It was pretty sweet.

a few questions

How concerned was Jesus, really, with sin? What did Jesus mean when he talked about sin? What did Jesus want to save people from? If Jesus' death was necessary for the forgiveness of sins, then how was it that he was already forgiving people of their sins prior to his death?

Jesus seems to spend less time telling people that they're sick than he does actually healing them, and less time telling people they're sinful than he does telling them how to find life.

I don't ever want to try to convince someone that they are a sinner, that they are messed up, and that they need Jesus. This seems like something that people are either intuitively aware of or else will not be convinced of by arguing with them.

Lately, I've had a lot of problems with the word 'ministry'. Well, maybe not a lot of problems, I've just been skeptical of it. I think what I don't like is talking about other people as my ministry or someone else's ministry. It seems too impersonal, or dehumanizing. And I know that's not the intent of people who use the word, but I also know that I would feel very uncomfortable telling someone that they were my ministry. Perhaps a part of it is that its too professional, and maintains unequal relationships of minister and ministree. Anyway, perhaps more on this later.

music dog knowledge

I read this yesterday in Yukio Mishima's Temple of the Golden Pavilion:

"Music is like a dream. At the same time it is, on the contrary, like a more distinct form
of consciousness than that of our normal waking hours."

That is also a good description of some of my favorite books, like Snow, or authors, like Murakami.

Anyway, dogs make me feel guilty. One of our dogs, when I come home on the motorbike and am driving down our long driveway, always runs in front of me, and she's so friendly, and I never play with her, and I always feel bad about this. I feel guilty because the dogs are so friendly and want to play, but I don't play with them.

I feel very curious and interested in tourists. Tonight, I was thinking about this, and thought that maybe it's because when they're here, they're in a place that they don't belong, and when people are in places they don't belong, there's an interesting story for why they're there and where they're from. I used to make fun of tourists a lot, but I don't feel the same level of scorn that I used to. When I feel scornful is when I'm around tourists who start talking about things in Thailand like they know what they're talking about, or when they got it out of a travel book.

I feel power over people when I know where they acquired a certain piece of knowledge or advice, or a certain idea from. In the same vein, I feel embarrassed when I express something that isn't my own when there's people around who know where I got it from. Some times.

Sex and sexual attraction are closely connected in my mind to knowledge and intelligence. I know it's really weird when people talk about what's sexy to them, but what the hell.

crucifixion

The death of Jesus confuses me. The traditional explanation seems to be that Jesus was sacrificed to atone for the sins of humanity, this seems to be found in the Bible also. What I don't know is whether or not this explanation of Jesus as sacrifice is a metaphor to get at a part of what happened at Jesus' death or whether that is the end of it, whether that is it in its entirety.

Here's another thing that confuses me: I feel that Jesus' death was necessary, but I'm not sure why. Why did Jesus have to die to atone for sin? Is this because "the wages of sin is death"? Maybe. What I don't understand is why death is necessary for God's plan to be carried out. Saying that Jesus' death was necessary to satisfy God's wrath creates an image of a vengeful God who just needs to kill something to be happy. So I don't if it's Jesus' death that was necessary or the symbol of his death that was necessary. In other words, maybe what was important about his death wasn't his actual death but the symbol it created of making things right with God, a symbol that would have been impossible without his actual death. In the end, it seems strange to me that death, any death, whether a bull or a goat or God on earth as Jesus, could appease God.

Also, I wonder if the resurrection of Jesus is maybe more important than his death. Maybe it shows that things don't end at death, the end is life and making things new.

Ikkyu

I came across this poem by Ikkyu, a 15th century Zen priest, yesterday, and thought it was intriguing and decided to share it.

For ten days in this temple my mind's been in turmoil.
My feet are entangled in endless red strings.
If some day you get around to looking for me,
Try the fish shop, the wine parlour, or the brothel.

That's it. (As a note, the priests were forbidden to eat meat or drink wine, and presumably to frequent brothels.)

Here's a statistic I came across tonight in Time magazine: 32,155 Japanese people committed suicide in 2006, a 1.2 % drop from 2005. That shocked me. That's about 1 suicide every 16 minutes. And, that's only Japanese people, not total suicides in the world in a year.

The times that I want to die the most are the times when I feel tired. Not tired as in, "Wow, I need to go to sleep because I can't keep my eyes open" tired, but an incredible weariness of life, and wanting that to be over. Not suffering itself, but weariness from the presence of suffering.

asexually reproductive blankets

I had a dream last night that my blankets were asexually reproducing. This was quite a bother because in my dream I was trying to move out of my room, but when my stuff began to multiply that made things stressful.

Anyway, things get dirty very fast here, like shoes. My shoes are probably dirtier after a few days here than they would have been after months of wear in the States.

I have an appointment to remove my final wisdom tooth on the 22nd. This is annoying, but it would probably be more annoying to leave it in, and I'll do it after I take part in energetic activities this year like a football game and a school dance, that way I won't get headaches.

For better and worse, Chiang Rai feels the same as it always did. This is nice in some ways, but it also is frustrating. I'd like to make things new here, at least for my own experience, but I'm not sure how to do that.

Finished reading A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami. Thoughts? It was good, as in enjoyable, but as usual with Murakami, I don't get it. It also felt more all over the place than his other novels that I've read. Also, Murakami likes to write about weird things that are living inside of people.

Anywayz, reading The Brothers Karamazov now, and it's pretty sweet so far.

chiang rai

Well, I'm home. I've been awake for about 21 hours and I think I'll try to stay up another hour or so. The weird thing about traveling this way, from America to Thailand, is that I had a really long night followed by a really long day. I had about 18 hours of darkness. It's weird to sleep for 6 or 7 hours and wake up in the dark, and to not have it get light for another 4 hours. It's also loopy when you don't have a way to tell time, so it's like no time has passed when you wake up. Another weird thing is when you wake up and the man sitting next to you on the plane has no shirt on.

So I read two books while traveling: The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk and A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe. I enjoyed them both but I don't really have much to say about them. Castle felt like a sort of parable, and Oe felt like he was the father of Murakami.

I think that 4 people on my last flight were raptured. I was sitting on an aisle seat on one side of the plane, and the whole middle row of people disappeared, as in they were not there at the end of the flight. I definitely remember them being there, too, because I looked over at one guy's watch to see what time it was. On that same flight, Thai airways gave out pens and magnetic bookmarks to everyone on the flight in celebration of the king's 80th birthday, which was december 5.

I think I'm getting a little loopy because I'm tired. Sometimes when I talk my words don't come out right.

It ended up that I did six Sudoku on my travels. Here's where I did them: SeaTac Gate S 15, Somewhere Above the Olympic Peninsula, Somewhere Above Alaska, Above Japan (more like above oceans very near Alaska and Japan), in Taipei, and in Bangkok.

Anyway, rest well my honey bunches of oats.

Seattle ----> Taipei

Well, I was weak. My flight left Seattle at about 1:30 in the morning, and I meant to stay up until 7:00 in the morning, so that when I went to sleep I would be going to bed around 9:00 at night Thai time. I didn't last. I went to bed sometime between 3:00 and 4:00, then woke up around midnight Thai time. Oops.

I did do 3 Sudoku puzzles, though, and I read a book, and I listened to what I think was Chinese pop music (best song I heard: "I love you, Bubong"). And I ate some food.

I think the worst part of the flight for me is after they bring food, and I eat whatever I'm going to eat, then I have to sit there and wait for them to pick up my tray. I think at the second meal today there was about an hour long wait after they gave us food until they cleaned it up. I hate feeling trapped by a dumb tray of food.

Anyway, off to Bangkok soon.

new

Tonight, while praying with a friend of mine, I felt very strongly that God is making things right. God is ahead of me working to make things good in the broken relationships and in the hard places and in the suffering. It wasn't just about me, or even primarily about me, though, it had more to do with something at the core of who God is (I think) and that I'm a part of that, and seeing that clearly. New creation.

My prayers this quarter have changed. They've changed from requesting God's involvement in something to realizing that God already is involved, and moving from that fact.

Other thought of the day: beginning a relationship of any sort with another human being means that they become a part of you and you become a part of them. When does that begin? Names. I think the exchange of names shows a willingness to become a part of someone else's life and to enter into their life, to give them a name rather than leaving them as something without identity. That is why meeting people can be exhausting.

Christmas Reading List

On the shelf in front of me, there is a stack of books. These are the books that I'm planning to read over Christmas break. I'm thinking of this stack as the carrot hanging in front of me that keeps me moving.

Here's what I have on that list:

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The White Castle - Orhan Pamuk
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata
A Personal Matter - Kenzaburo Oe
The Makioka Sisters - Junchiro Tanizaki
A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
The Master of Petersburg - J.M. Coetzee

Eight books. That's a lot of books. I don't know if I'll get through them all, but I'm going to try. I think I'll try to read the Pamuk book on the flight over to Thailand, but we'll see how that works out. I tend to not get much read on flights, but I will be by myself this time.

Side note: I wrote a poem for class recently about a dream about monkeys. One person in my class said it was like "a banned children's cartoon." I thought that was pretty sweet.

Anyway, it' s time to get the cart moving.

music

This is my 100th post on here. Yep.

When people ask me what kind of music I listen to, I feel a little ridiculous. I don't listen to music much, because I don't have a stereo and I don't like listening to music on headphones with my computer all the time. Or, when I'm on my computer I can't listen to music because I'm trying to concentrate on writing.

I don't keep up with music. I almost never buy it or acquire new music, so I'm basically stuck in the early 2000s. And, I don't listen to enough music to say I properly listen to any genre.

That's why I feel ridiculous.

But I have seen a lot of live music this quarter. And I'm listening to some right now.