i am still alive! i've been busy and exhausted and thus somewhat incognito -- my apologies. perhaps my real problem is that i'm not very good about writing here, even when i'm not busy. it's hard to know what to say when your audicence is so ill-defined. it's also hard because i'm so self-conscious of chronicling my own life.

so to get over my inhibitions, i've decided rather than post infrequent, insightful things, i will air more on the side of frequent mundanities. after all, that's more what my life is really like. and i want to involve you in it, from wherever you are (<-- when i'm corny, i like to note that it's intentional).

brief update: i'm in hong kong now, and will be here for another two weeks exactly. outside of work and sleep, i've been visiting with people, and spending a lot of good time with CT. last night we went shopping, and i was confronted again with my lack of style. i used to think that i could just rock the aerodynamic t-shirts and jeans that i found in a park forever, but i haven't found anything lately and my speedskating is life t-shirt (R.I.P) that lasted me from 4th grade - freshman fall has gone missing (actually, I think my mom confiscated it). so it might be the end of that era, but it's hard to know where to go from there . . . i'm open to your style recommendations. a few things that i've been thinking about

1) i don't like living by myself. i thought that it might just have been that my tokyo apartment recalled a carpeted sanitarium, but i think it's mostly my personality and not my environment at play. i'm more extroverted than i thought.

2) i've been thinking about where we come from. actually, i've been wondering a bit how i'd gotten this far not having thought about it more. while he probably trivializes the distinctiveness of intelligent design from darwinism, this article got me thinking. i don't know anything more than high school biology, but it seems important to work out an idea of human origins before you even start talking about philosophy, etc. In particular, for an idea of individual uniqueness ("God made you special") or of specific design ("God knows every hair on your head"), which we use a lot to talk about reconciliation, it seems like we need a theology of a creator God. So I don't know, but I want to hear what you know (or think).

3) I've been thinking about gender roles, partly because CT asked me "are there gender roles?" in one of our social theory-accountability-Christianity conversations, and I didn't know what I thought. I want to hear what you think. More on this another time.

4) I've been thinking about the Presbyterian Church's (PCUSA) threats to divest from companies that support the Israeli military. While I'm encouraged by their political activism and their challenge to Israeli militarism, this seems like the worst possible timing unless their divestment can some how cement the Israeli military's withdrawawal. PCUSA in itself is an interesting phenomenon as it encompasses just about every possible stripe of political and theological perspective, with a lot of bickering between then, and is almost entirely white and Korean (in mostly separate churches).

5) Mostly I've been thinking about how excited I am to see people. Jeanette is coming to Hong Kong next Wednesday, and I've never ached so much to see someone. Suggest to me whatever Hong Kong excitement you know of for us to do / eat / go to. I'm also looking forward to being back in Pittsburgh for a bit. I feel like I've been away to long.

I'm going to run because I'm starving. For now, I leave you with a picture of my office home of the last 5 weeks. It is not a little bit phallic.