I write this as a member of the Rice University Class of 2011. =)

Merry Christmas! After moving my blog to bluehost, courtesy of my brother Daniel, I’m now in the process of upgrading this WordPress installation to the latest stable release. This has been stuck in 1.5.x “land” for far too long. You will probably experience hiccups somewhere, and the layout in particular may (will) suffer, so I’ll be working on fixing those problems too. I don’t plan on creating a new layout immediately, but that will be taken care of as soon as possible.

Also, comments have been off since yesterday to prevent getting comment spam during the whole process since my spam filters are necessarily off. This will hopefully be remedied by using 2. 0.x and thus being able to use Akismet. See you in a bit!

UPDATE (2:26 PM CST): I think the transition is complete. The next goal is a new, simple layout written from the ground up, but I should probably fix my desktop computer first.

Church is great. JFL is great. Nonetheless, somehow it all feels different. But why?

Let’s think about it. Chinese school had always been a major part of my life, but I’m the only one left from my old class who’s actively involved in JFL now. Others have moved on to college or are simply unable to make it to JFL things, whether it’s extreme senior year busy-ness, transportation issues, or a combination of both. I remember when a nice percentage of JFL was our actual class. Now, in JFL I spend time with people I didn’t really grow up with— although there are some exceptions to this, but even so, none of them were in my Chinese class for years. (Please note that this doesn’t mean that I’m unhappy with the people active now. It’s just that I don’t happen to know them as well, although I am certainly trying my best to do so.) And so, I miss these people.

I believe George once talked about how SHINE, ye olde youth group at MSHJ, gradually disappeared as all its members moved on, since there was no one to fill in the gap in generations before JFL and even WAC were organized. He said that it was only natural that eventually JFL would, one day, meet the same fate. Is this what I’m seeing here? Am I feeling this way because the twelfth grade (or maybe even with the eleventh grade) at church is the final, dying flicker of the candle flame of our generation there? I think this is possible.

But at the same time, although my generation at church may be dying out, JFL itself may not be, at least for now. I think we currently have enough people to keep it going. We may not have all grown up together in the same way as it used to be for me, and so we may just have to work harder towards unity. This needs to be done, but it’s not impossible. However, whether or not JFL will survive its upcoming trials, as the whole original generation of JFL completely fades out, is still to be seen. I definitely pray and hope that it will indeed successfully survive.

Wannie also suggested another explanation for everything being different. Maybe it was moving to a new church building in a completely different area (to some extent) without a Wendy’s right next to it, nor a Lollicup or Taiwan Café. We used to always walk to Wendy’s after CCD and before Chinese school. Always. Well, sometimes we walked for around ten minutes to Lollicup and ate there instead. But in any case, the old church in itself was a source of unity. Many of us had grown up going there every week since we were very little. And, again, there was Chinese school, which was likewise jostled around as a result of moving to a new location. Sources of unity that used to be commonly present have become nonexistent for us, other than residing nostalgically in our memories. Add to this that students as well as— I almost forgot— awesome adult leaders have gotten older and can no longer be with us or devote all their time to guide us like they used to.

Thus, it’s become hard for JFL to keep moving on, yet we keep trying.

On a related note, it’s been a little awkward as senior at church because I still remember when I would listen and learn from the first JFL officer meetings, years ago, and now, suddenly I’m up here, and that’s me, and I need to do the same good job…

Ah, well, I need to wake up early tomorrow morning to go to church as I always do, and so I need to sleep. Good night. =)

This somewhat philosophical thought occurred to me not-so-recently, and I’ve finally felt like writing about it. Have you ever thought that, even though people have the same physical processes for sensing and perceiving things, people may perceive things differently on an extraphysical level? That is, although someone may perceive black or white as different colors with their own attributes which others could similarly apply, maybe black and white look different on the level of consciousness for different people. In this case, the black I see may be the white another sees, although our eyes and physical minds may process the information similarly, and both of us would still describe black as “the darkest color” or white as “the lightest color,” and so on.

I suggested this to a friend who implied that maybe this could apply to all of the senses, including hearing, something which I had previously never thought of. This concept can indeed be interestingly applied to all of the senses. Let’s take music as an example. However, music with lyrics that affect whether or not one likes the piece of music must be excluded, since the rhythms and shades of words in languages are agreed upon to mean certain things and are not really open to interpretation in an extraphysical sense. So then, taking a Chopin piece, two people could theoretically hear it completely differently, even to the extent of the second person hearing that piece as the first would hear a Schubert piece of “comparable” complexity.

The friend also suggested that maybe if something like the previous example were true, then it would be possible that two people (or more— or even all people, by extension) to have the same taste on that extraphysical level, yet prefer completely different types of music, which would be what we normally use to distinguish taste (on the physical level). Who has similar or contrasting taste with anyone else becomes, perhaps, impossible to determine.

However, I’d like to add with some emphasis that I have no reason to believe that this concept of perception is true. Although it’s interesting to think about (for me, at least), and it has many interesting corollaries, I see no way to either prove or disprove this. It does assume, however, that there is something beyond the biological, physical processes of the human brain, which is also empirically impossible to prove. Thus, I’ve shelved this concept away, but I’ve decided to write about it because it’s something to think about.