Reflections in the Holy City

A note of introduction: on May 10th I began a tour of Israel both to see the historical and holy sites as well as to perform with a group of friends, brothers, and sisters in honor and support of the nation and people of Israel.

One of the things I didn't think to bring on my trip to Israel was a notebook, and I only realized now, on the 7th day of the trip, that I could have been blogging this whole time. Ah well better than never.

I think I have reached the point where words cease to be capable of describing what it is like to be here. As someone who has grown up hearing and studying the history of Israel and the life of Jesus, it's overwhelming to be here.

These are a few of the things I have been able to experience.
The Galilee
I had a short boat ride on the sea and was able to sing praise to Him on the water.
I dipped my feet in the water and my heart was filled as I looked out over the sea.
I watched the sun rise over the sea and the hymn sprang to my mind: "Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee: how great Thou art!"

I will continue this soon, since so far the tour has included the dead sea, Masada, the last holdout of the Jews who rebelled against the Romans, and many sites in Jerusalem, the City of David.

so sadly neglected

Well my poor wittle blog here has been waiting well over a year for another post. Poor sad thing.

Okay enough time in the pity puddle. Yes, I decided to coin a new phrase. "Pity party" is an oxymoron anyway. Although pity puddle sounds like a little kid's way of talking about pee. Sigh. You can't win.

So lately I've been doing stuff. It's been really exciting, and I just love it. Some days I get up at like 8am (something I haven't done since college!) to do stuff! It's really great.

Vagaries aside, this past year has come with some ups and downs, but mostly gentle hillocks and small dimpled vales, with the occasional meandering stream or grand vista. I'm still engaging in the manipulation of sound(s) with complex multi-textured objects that people usually call instruments.
In fact, I've been taking some collections of sounds called songs that other people have created and that tend to be well liked, and have been arranging them for myself to play on these objects and make pleasing sounds with my throat in order to recreate the song in a style that *I* like. Once I actually save the sounds that I produce with these arrangements and spread them out on this communication and entertainment device called the internet, I will see if other people will like my song styles too.

I have also been doing a lot of things with bushes and plants and trees, mainly chopping them up into very small pieces in a variety of ways using other complex objects that could easily cut or shred one or more of my appendages if I'm not careful. It's very fun work. Also I have been fighting this one kind of bush that will give you an itchy rash that lasts for a couple weeks if you let it touch you. Or if you touch something that it has touched. So far the war has had about equal casualties on both sides, and a temporary ceasefire has been called. However a new advance is currently being planned (on my side, of course, because the bushes themselves are rather stationary) and new equipment and training and so on, and I WILL BE VICTORIOUS AGAINST THE EVIL HOARDS OF THE MALICIOUS OAKS OF POISON!!!!

You know, I think the style of this blog post is heavily influenced by the fact that I just read a bunch of comics at theoatmeal.com. Be warned, that site is NOT rated G. Strong Language and some sexual references are common.

Ok well, that about sums up my life right now. I think. Yeah.

losing things

I should lose things more often.

I know, that's a funny thing to say. Losing something is never good. However, looking for something can actually have some benefits - like a tidier room.

You see, I'm the type of person who, while being preponderously messy, 99% of the time, knows where everything is in the giant mess of things I call my room. And yes, I did just make up the word "preponderously."

So today, I happened to have lost and started looking for my violin mute, which I found, after clearing my desk of about 50% of the clutter that was on it. Thus, my opening statement - I should lose things more often because I think if I did, I might actually take the time to tidy things up a bit more. Generally tidiness is considered a good thing.

But, having been blessed with good visual and spatial memory, I don't lose things. So unless I have some other motivation to keep tidy, like moving (again) or not being single (no sign of that happening in the near future), my room will probably stay at its current level of messiness.

But at least, for now, my desk has 50% less clutter, and I'm using my mute, and, well - life goes on.

Febrewary, life, and what makes me tick.

A lot of people don't realize that they're pronouncing the name of the month wrong. It is, as my title indicates, FEB-Roo-Ary, with an R: Not FEB-You-Ary.

Speaking of which, I noticed that it's also a neat little pun: Fe-BREW-ary. That could be just because I'm hankering for a beer right now.


There's nothing in particular I wanted to blog about. I just realized I haven't posted in a month. So.... hence some random updates and thoughts. Also, it's raining right now, which is awesome. We desperately need rain and snow here in California. And I still want a beer. But... I'm kinda broke right now. Gotta have that money stuff.


So life. Life is interesting. I'm renting (sub-letting, technically) a room in a house with a number of other "friendly strangers," as I've decided to call them. I've met all of them, had short conversations with a couple. They're mostly busy people. I'm at home the most often, along with the guy who is renting the house.

The rest of my time I'm teaching/assisting at Harmony, the after school program teaching violin and choir to kids for free, hanging out with friends, playing the occasional jam or show or event or whatever.

These last few weeks I've remembered that I like math. Odd, I know, and I didn't discover this fact until my first year of college, when, somehow, Algebra finally clicked.
 This new resurgence is thanks to the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.com), which has this neato little dashboard thingy which allows you to "master" all the math skills. I am now on a mission to master ALL THE SKILLZ. So far I've got 35% of 593 skills mastered. w00t!
Sadly, they're pretty much all just arithmetic. Oddly enough, the skills proceed in a mostly sequential manner. Who woulda thunk.
HOWever, I am getting to refresh some of my trig skills and, since it's been like 4 years since I've done any calculus, I will be pretty much relearning it too.

On a deeper level, my mission right now is to kind of figure out what makes me tick. What I mean by that is, how I can tap into the focus, energy, and motivation that I think I have, but has been mostly lacking over the last 3-4 years. Part of that is sleep. Part of that is what & how I eat. Part of that is exercise (haven't quite gotten there yet) and part of that is also the mind game of the I-don't-want-to's, which in my case have always been heavyweights in my decision-making.

One of the things I've really been trying to develop more is just having space in my day. For instance, when I get up, having a drink of water. And just sitting there. Not checking email or facebook, not even turning my computer on.

It's harder than you'd expect.

But I've discovered something. When I give myself space to think, it gives me energy. It gives me the willpower I need to make more decisions instead of waiting for time and procrastination to make decisions for me.
If I stop the flow of 99.9%-unnecessary information into my brain, it allows my brain to direct its own flow.

I'm not a very driven person. Well, I haven't been. What I'm starting to wonder now is if I really am more driven than I thought. But most of the time I have this weight or anxiety because I like so much to do things perfectly - yes, a definite perfectionist - that I'm afraid to do them at all. It takes too much energy to try to do things because I know I'll fail. I make the choice of not doing, instead of doing and failing, and doing again, and succeeding.

I remember when I was 13 or 14, thinking about making a commitment to do something every day. I thought, "Well that's pointless, I know I'm going to eventually break that commitment. Why make it in the first place?"
What I didn't realize then about commitments like this was that, as the saying goes, I wasn't seeing the forest for the trees. Although I still think making a commitment to do something every day in and of itself is kind of silly, there is a much more important idea behind it. In order to build the habit of doing something every day, or twice a day, or every other day, or how and whenever it is to be done, a commitment MUST be made. That commitment is to Keep On Trying until the habit is established. The commitment is to Keep On Going no matter how many times failure happens.

There have been some things I've been wanting to do every day for a while. Right now, I'm not doing them every day. Sometimes I'm not even doing them every other day. But every week, I keep trying. I think about what is hindering and helping me meet my goal. I have days that suck. I have days that are kind of almost there. I wish I could say that I have days that are awesome and that happen exactly how I plan and want them to. But I'm going to keep on working, because I know I will have those days. I know I will reach the ideal I'm working towards.

I also know that it's ok that I'm nowhere near it right now.

I'm learning how to be committed.

Still, every day, there's part of me that holds back. Morning and evening, sometimes in the middle of the day too. But the more time and space I give myself, away from information, distraction, internet, TV, facebook, etc. etc. etc., the more that fades away, and the part of me that wants to do things like practice and work on math and write a blog and read a book, takes over and can begin to experience the joy and freedom of forward motion, learning, and success.

Revolutions & Resolutions

So here it is, the next year in the ever continuing succession of earth's revolutions around the sun.

My sister and I were discussing how the holidays had seemed different in recent years, somehow not as significant and monumental as they once were.

When it comes to celebrating the new year, however, I have never really taken stock in the whole "resolutions" idea. The true resolutions are the ones you make when you realize you need to change something in your life and proceed to do so - slowly, inconsistently, at first, but then improving.
Many people also take it as a time to reflect on the past year, going in hand of course with the making of resolutions for the new year.

It has been a while since I wrote a blog post and I wanted to do one for the end of the year. I didn't particularly want to write a reflective post talking about the year past - I don't know what I could possibly reflect about that would be any more than a bunch of random wandering and mostly pointless thoughts.
And today, I realized that I already do that throughout the rest of the year - reflect on my life. And my resolutions, I make, as I believe true resolutions are made, at points along my life when I need to change something, whether that's the middle of the winter or the middle of the summer.

So when it comes to honoring the new year, I eat food, drink drinks, play games, spend time with people I like, and yell loudly and make noise and maybe light some fireworks when the clock hits midnight.

Happy 2014!

an UN-typical day in the life of Shawn

Today I went to San Francisco. This in itself is cool but not particularly noteworthy. I've been to SF four or five times over the past couple months for various reasons, and one of those reasons culminated in what I did today.

The story actually begins sometime this summer. I was listening to KDFC, the bay area classical station, and heard about this project called the Crissy Broadcast. It was a giant music collaboration with music written by an active, current composer, Lisa Bielawa. Finding out that the event was open to volunteer musicians, I checked it out and notified my friend Dana who, being very much into contemporary and current classical music, jumped on the opportunity. I joined as well, and long story short, drove over this morning to SF.

The event happened on Crissy field. There were upwards of 500, 600-something music makers together. A wonderful variety of groups were in volved: high school orchestras, bands, a drum corps, choirs, amateurs, professionals, young, old, and everything inbetween.  What happened was each group got music that was split into sections of musical phrases. Given the wide variety of ensembles there were many different portions of music. A few groups had much of the same music, but the timing and order was often different.
Between sections, many of the groups would move to a different location on the field. All groups started in the middle, but gradually expanded and moved around the field, often crossing paths.
There were call and response sections, alternating themes, competitions, exclamations, moans, wails shrieks... you get the idea. One band formed a diagonal line across the field, passing a phrase down the line with each person playing it once. There was a "chase" where one group played a section of music, and two or three other groups walked over and joined in, only to have the first group leave and move to a different location, only to be chased again. This happened 3-4 times at the end of the piece.

Overall it was a fun experience. The music was simple, but put together in an interesting way. There were friends and family in the field, following along as they could, and of course there were also many other people walking through and around, asking questions, and listening. I'm glad I did it.
Hooray for music and people and San Francisco!

remember when

I thought I had a post already entitled "Remember when" or something like it, but apparently not. But I'd like to have some sort of series of nostalgic posts. I guess this will have to be the first then.

Some moments ago I was looking through my twitter feed and something a friend posted about emailing reminded me of when I used to write emails to people. Of course, I still write emails, but now they are very perfunctory - serving whatever communicative need I happen to have.

It didn't use to be that way. When I was still in highschool, at home most every day because of home studies, I would write emails to my friends just to talk to them. Kind of like letter writing back in the day before internet. Or texting now. You see something funny, you have an idea, you're upset about something, you tell a friend.

But sometimes I would send random emails to people. I would come up with whatever sort of random stories or ideas popped into my head when I was writing, put them into a couple of paragraphs, maybe do a little "stream of consciousness" (which half of my blog posts end up doing in some way) and then hit "send."

I thought they were pretty funny, and at least if they didn't make my friends laugh, would hopefully lighten their day a little.

It's probably been over 6 or 7 years since I did that. It was such a fun idea. What happened?
I know part of it is that now I have more people who I see face to face and with whom I can share my life and thoughts. But then I realize I'm just not as random and goofy as I used to be.

Sometimes I don't like getting older.