Hearing his story makes me realize how clinically I talk about depression and heartsickness; that emptiness is unfathomable to me. The failure of my own imagination scares me - never mind that it’s a blessing of sorts.

From “waxbanks” (via)

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.

CS Lewis - Mere Christianity

I get notified whenever the CS164 course website (Compilers for all you not in the know) is updated, so I noticed that grades were put up for Project 1. I log in to look up my grades and discover I got a 0.

Cue mass hysteria, panic, "OMG DID I FORGET TO SUBMIT?!". I email the professor and the course staff to figure out what was going on. 4:40 in the morning, a GSI responds saying my code had made their interpreter puke due to the use of "non-standard assignment syntax".

I want to share the code snippet that set this off, because in my remarkable foresight, I actually commented on that:

In my defense, destructuring assignment (the rest of the world calls it parallel assignment) is part of the JavaScript 1.7 spec, and we were not told what version of JavaScript to target...

I recently discovered I've pretty much stopped signing on to AIM. I think I stopped for much the same reason I stopped watching anime or playing games.

I haven't stopped altogether, but if you made a histogram, one could certainly describe its form as "trending downward". I can't say that its this easy to stop doing anything, but as a general trend, I stop doing things when I just get too lazy or busy to do it anymore.

I stopped signing onto AIM because I reformatted my computers and turned off auto login. And then I guess I just kind of assumed no one was talking to me and as long as I didn't need to talk to anyone, I didn't realize I wasn't online.

I weaned myself off AIM because I assumed I had no friends. So. Sad.

I'm reading through Mere Christianity with Daniel so we have something less boring to discuss than school in our weekly prayer-partner-meetings.

Honestly, I haven't been reading even when I promised, which is bad. (I put it off for a week, and just started today). When I started reading I suddenly felt... good. There was just a sudden sense of "oh, this is how things truly should be".

Religion is a funny thing, it drives people to extreme depths of passion, be the depths monk-y or bellicose. But, to me, religion (with a small r), is when I curl up on a couch, and read the Bible, and notice something that I hadn't before, or when I'm walking through Berkeley, and I could almost swear God is just walking alongside me, whispering quietly, pointing out the beauty of all the things that I would otherwise push past in my hurry to get to class.

(Incidentally, the majority of the time I imagine God speaking in a quiet voice, not because He is small, but because when you are God, do you really need to shout all that much? It seems so... gauche.)