Sitting in coordination is great. It’s always exciting to see the schedule for Kick-off Week, and it’s even more exciting to see so many students actively involved! I wish I could participate in all the activities, but alas, I have certain responsibilities to attend to. Booooo. I hope someone brings a camcorder and gets everything on film again, especially for the Amazing Race (Berkeley/Oakland edition). Sadly, I’ve yet to edit and put together the video raws from last year’s Kick-off. I love how the Amazing Race this year is advertised as a journey that will not only take you through land, but also fire, water, and air. I guess I’ll just have to experience it vicariously through the students’ stories, FB photos, and hopefully someone’s video feed.

What else? Today, I also managed to get myself to Off the Grid. It’s located in North Berkeley around Shattuck and Rose, right across from Safeway. I’ve seen it for about a month or so now, but every single time, I could only drive past, staring longingly at all the wonderful food trucks. But today…aha!…today, I finally found time to go. And man, was that little section of a blocked off street hopping. I reveled in the energy and excitement that was in the atmosphere, as people sat around chowing down with friends or waited in line to get their hands on mouth-watering foods. And though the lines seemed pretty long, it actually only took me about 20 or so minutes to get my food, which isn’t too bad a wait. The entire time I was there, I had a huge grin plastered on my face. Being there at Off the Grid was definitely a happy thing. But because I wanted to make the aforementioned coordination, I had to leave as soon as I got my food, which is a pity, because a huge part of the experience is just eating there in the midst of all that hustle and bustle. Well, next time. And yes, there will be a next time, because I aim to try something from every single food truck.

Things I want to incorporate into my schedule:

• Wake up at 6:20am and run for 40 minutes, Monday through Friday
• Sleep before midnight (so that I can do the above)
• Go climbing more often or play ball in Peoples’ Park (possibly I can slate this for Saturdays)
• Read or listen to more of the Bible/ministry on my BART commutes

Obviously, I’ve been lacking in exercise…and…mmm…in sleep. Until I can nail down the second bullet of getting to bed on time, I don’t know how likely it will be for the first item to ever be realized (actually I do know: highly unlikely). It’d be pretty awesome if I could put in some running every morning before getting ready for work, but that’s going to take a sheer amount of the exercise of my will to choose it. Brutal. At least if I start in the summer, it should be a little easier to get going, since the cold winter mornings provide quite a bit of counter-incentive to remain under the warm, warm covers.

If nothing else, the third and fourth bullets are very doable. But again, it’s also back to the matter of choosing. When I get on the BART on the way back from work, instead of flipping through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov on iBooks or breeding more species on Pocket Frogs, I could switch one app over to my iSilo and read the Epistle to the Hebrews or Authority and Submission. (As a side note, it’s quite sad to find that it’s taken me a whole month to merely reach Part II of The Brothers Karamazov. Especially for someone who used to tear through through three books per week in high school, I feel like I fail at reading now. Lame. Again, too many competing options available.)

So yeah, choosing. A lot of things in life boil down to that. Most can agree on what things are beneficial, and some may even want it, but in the end, the catalyst in the conversion from airy dreams to reality lies in the choices we make.

As I get older and older, it gets harder and harder to blog in a consistent way. Seems like the opportunity costs are greater than before; for any one thing I choose to do, there’s a multitude more of things that I won’t be able to do. And that trend will probably continue as more years pass by. <– What an understatement.

The logical solution would be to prioritize what’s important and squeeze the value out of every single minute so that you could do as many things as possible. But here’s the rub — when you do end up having a huge chunks of free time to spare, like I did this past weekend, you find yourself feeling apathetic to everything. The sick irony of it all. At least some productivity somehow finagled it’s way in to help me redeem my time. I cleared some clutter in my room, making space for the boxes I moved up from SoCal that were sitting in the living room (discovering my photo albums along the way–is that how I looked two weeks old?), took my car to the wash, and even got some exercise, compliments of the tennis courts across the street. By golly, the weather on the Lord’s day sure was perfect for that.

Also….(at this point, I would like to warn you that the following thoughts have only a very tenuous connection with the thoughts before, even though I use a conjunction to begin this sentence), is it just me or do the news these days just have a knack of annoying the heck out of its readers? The more and more I read about the wranglings over the debt ceiling, the more and more upset I get; it makes me want to go do some sense-slapping-around on Capitol Hill. Yes, it’s more than likely that I don’t see the full picture and the details of all that’s taking place behind the scenes, but it just seems like our government is run by stubborn, petulant two-year olds (no offense to any two-year olds out there) who’ve never heard the story of the two goats trying to cross the bridge at the same time.

And here’s the tenuous linking thread–with all the time our Congressmen spend in their partisan bickering, they could have made some real progress in addressing the multivarious problems our nation is facing. Or maybe that’s just naivete and wishful thinking. Here’s a quote from one of the news articles: “‘Nobody can bring themselves to believe that these people in Washington are that dumb. But the scary thought is maybe they are,’ said George Feiger, CEO of Contango Capital Advisors in San Francisco. ‘If there is no deal, there will be a huge move up in long-term bond yields.'”

On a positive note, the uncertainty related to the debt ceiling caused the stock market to tank today, allowing me to get a decent buy on an index fund.

Today, I had an interview down in Fremont. So in the morning, I take the usual glance out the window to get a feel for how the weather may be.  And since the sky was completely blue, I figured I’d have no problem being in a nice suit without carrying an umbrella. Lo and behold, by the time I come out of the Fremont BART station an hour or so later, I find myself welcomed by a steady downpour of rain. At the moment, I felt like a noob, because I should have known better. Never trust a blue sky when the previous day included downpours and light hail, especially since the Bay Area weather has dissociative identity disorder.

Trying to be resourceful, I look around maybe for some sort of plastic bag, but the only bags I see are those being used by the homeless people in the corner. I settle instead for grabbing a BART brochure, which I then attempt to use as a flimsy covering as I scurry my way across the parking lot to the business complex three minutes next door. It’s quite fascinating how much water you can pick up in three minutes.

Since I usually give myself some extra cushion to arrive before an interview, I had the time to get some paper towels from the restroom and pat myself dry. Good thing that it was also a nicer office building, so they had a pleasantly warm heating system going in the restroom, which definitely helped in the drying off.

I made a mental note to myself to get a mini-umbrella that could be hung from the side of my laptop bag. That mental note is now filed alongside other mental notes, including ones like remembering to get a mini-vacuum for my car, to re-organize my music files, to exercise more, etc.

You know you’re getting old when college students starting calling you “sir.”

So today’s the first day of classes at Berkeley, and as we’ve always done, we go out on campus to pass out gospel tracts en masse. And so I’m out there handing out these tracts, getting the usual “no, thank you’s,” cold shoulders, or even the look-at-you-in-horror-as-if-you’re-holding-a-dead-skunk-and-then-try-to-awkwardly-dodge-you-moves. Then all of a sudden I hear someone say, “No, thank you, sir.”

Wait. What? Sir? Me? Wow.

And get this, it doesn’t just happen once. A little while later, again–“No, thank you, sir.” At this point, I pretty much figure that if two different people are thinking that you’re a “sir,” then you really can’t consider yourself to be that young anymore no matter how youthful you think you are in your own head.

…it’s Thursday! Which means Alpha House is just around the corner! Super exciting.

To be honest, during my first year in Berkeley, I was initially a bit skeptical about the retreat. Whenever people asked me if I was going to Alpha House, I was like, “Ummm…iunnos.” In my head, I was thinking probably not. I mean, c’mon, you have to come back like a weekend early before the semester begins. I know, shocking huh.

But through heavy peer pressure, I was eventually convinced to sign-up. And I am so glad I went. It was such an awesome retreat; nothing like I’ve ever been at before. It’s kind of like a big sleepover, with all your peers bunked up in this cozy house, everyone just hanging out and having a good time together. And for the meetings, I don’t remember exactly what was covered, but I do remember that there were some things that really touched me, especially concerning the campus work.

Since my freshmen year, I think I might have made every single one (although I might have missed one, I’m not too sure), which would bring the count up to 8, and now this weekend would be number 9. Yes, the Berkeley Winter Retreat is just that awesome. You wouldn’t want to miss it.