note to self: save engrish.com photos from aug 18 and aug 7... go look at them readers... they made me die... aug 7 ESPECIALLY made my brother die too...

2 events that happened this weekend... wesley senior nite occurred, and chris liu came back... i plan on giving wes the .mp3 of the song i made when i return to davis and get high-speed internet going again... a buncha good ol fun-n-games, as well as a few goof-off blunders about wes' gifts(i still can't believe someone said "make out room" not "make up room" should be appropriate for a door sign)... as for chris liu, it was awesome to see him back... he gave a great sermon on sunday... not often we see a powerpoint sermon... it could be because our church is so bright inside(that could be something we could consider pouring money into; curtains that we could lower to darken the building during the day if necessary)... anyways, more or less the sermon emphasized that God's all that we need, and he showed us 5 gods we often put before him:

1)popularity; it doesn't even have to be getting everyone's attention; just how do you want people to react to you?
2)success; self-explanatory; society puts a HUGE emphasis on this, and i just wish i personally wouldn't succumb to it as much
3)entertainment; anything we do to give us a feel-good feeling goes under here, even eating and sleeping; probably my weak spot; in that i'm a sucker for fighting games, and sometimes, i can devote a lotta time to this online journal; i should remind myself that i don't HAVE to write down every single aspect of my life here...
4)relationships; some ppl have this more than others, but yeah...
5)god-service; this one's interesting; do you serve for unwarranted motives? i know i have to struggle with this everytime i'm onstage sunday

(on a side note, it was funny seeing the powerpoint blunder of "Chris Jesus my Lord"... i think everyone saw that)

so phil's back... and gone... since the last time i wrote this... hot pot city is actually a pretty nice eatery... too bad it's so far away... i pretty much stained a large portion of my "KG4MVP" t-shirt(!!! i wish i had brought a dark t-shirt! i had no idea you'd get stained fairly easily) diving into korean BBQ ribs all night... spending time with phil's just awesome... it's really too bad that he has so little time to spend with me nowadays... makes me really wish it was still in the 90s just so i could reexperience the times i spent in the summer with phil... but the interesting thing is i'm seeing how maybe God really did intend that i go to UCD... as opposed to somewhere else... it seems that the med school that phil goes to tends to send him to the UCs to do med work to where of all places? davis! now i just gotta see why else God intended for me to go to Davis over someplace else... oh yeah he recorded a song on my cpu using my recording equipment too :D i'll need to mix it so that it sounds good :D phil also gave me a KG bobblehead; you won't know how much this thing cracks me up til you see me play w/it in my room! and the last thing: spending time w/phil makes me really wanna reconsider learning low-post moves; he convinced me i'm more suited for it than i think... i'll give it a try sometime soon, but of course i also wanna learn to get the spin move down; there's a reason i wear a green headband :D

i remember coming across this in the psalms; seems that sean hall was influenced by psalm 63 when he wrote "water":
1.O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
3.Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.
(i wish i could be influenced by the psalms in writing a new song, but seems i just don't seem to have anything click; i should go back a reread the psalms carefully; maybe i'll find something)

after coming through job, it seems that the psalms(as i'm almost done with the book) are more out-of-place in the bible than i first imagined! there's so much cursing on your enemies! i have to remember though, that these psalms expressed AGONY; this was how the psalmists felt when they were writing these poems in times of hardships; it's just like job in the midst of his 3 friends; he was yelling out things, but he was just being a lot more vocal about how he felt; a lot of us don't say the same things in our troubles, but we feel the same way inside. another thing is that this was written before jesus came and offered forgiveness, and that they in essence paved the way for it. also, the thing about old testament writers was that they had a REALLY vague idea of the afterlife; your relationship with God CAN continue or end permanently in the afterlife; because they had no idea that this could occur, they expected justice to occur NOW

btw, i came across something that confirmed what i remembered a jewish classmate when i was in 6th grade said; the israelites crossed the Sea of Reeds, or the Reed Sea, NOT the Red Sea; if you look upon a map, you'll see the Reed Sea blocking the path northward from Egypt; i think the Red Sea is somewhere off. at first i didn't see how the bible confirmed this, but then i noticed a footnote in the NIV bible which pointed this out; so praise God; his words' still intact and precise; our bible is no different than the jewish-accepted old testament... we just need to read the footnotes a bit more occasionally

i'm out; i've already written too much: my agenda for tonight/tomorrow morning?(ignore this you readers; one of my personal notes again)
songwriting, finish psalms, steven seagal, denzo software