5 not awkward things that I feel awkward doing:
- being the only person obviously window shopping in a store
- speaking at an audible level and intelligible pace to cashiers and servers
- standing close enough to signal eventual intent to order but far enough to let others cut in front while I think
- asking for “just water” at a restaurant that charges more than $1 for a soft-drink
- checking the change handed to me after purchasing something
Everyone’s gone home for Chinese New Year (happy year of the legendary demon serpents to you, by the way) except me. I had too much work to take care of to be able to properly enjoy any leisure time back home to justify the travel time, so I decided to just stick around in Waterloo. I figured I would make good use of the silence and solitude to solve IMPORTANT AND PRESSING CONCERNS (ie: assignments for school).
As a result, this weekend I’ve managed to
- finish my Calculus assignment (with one or two… fuzzy proofs/leaps of faith here and there)
- start on my Group Theory assignment (due in a week from tomorrow)
- not even look at the Complex Analysis assignment (due this Friday… !!!)
- learn myself some basic LaTeX (for doing my Math assignments on, going forward)
- convert my copy of Muse @ Glastonbury 2010 from a 9+ GB, laggy .ts file to a 2 GB, awesome .m4v file (a feat that took a whooping 5 hours of background processing)
- start on Final Fantasy XIII (lent to me courtesy of Sharon)
…so far.
I’m actually not entirely sure how this term is supposed to work out, because I’m already finding the workload to be a bit killer. The last time I took this many Math courses at once I was in first year, and back then I had two distinct advantages, the first being that I knew most of the material from IB Math, and the second being that none of those courses were Pure Math courses. However, this is a perfectly good opportunity (is there any bad one?) to walk by faith and not by sight.
On that note, today I had a sudden epiphany regarding what I think ought to be the proper Christian attitude towards… well, just about everything in life I think. The thought was brought about by a singular line in a song that was part of a worship set at church. It went simply enough:
I am redeemed.
I am redeemed.
I am redeemed.
On the face of it, yes that is probably factually correct, and yet I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing, something important. I think this is a problem with a subset of modern worship music, stemming from a broader problem with our culture in general. It’s got to do with how we view the world around, or more specifically, how we do not, because our gaze is so completely blotted out by our selves. If ever we couldn’t see the forest through the trees, it would be now (or something like that; I’m not too good with idioms).
If we saw the world not as we do, but as we ought, those lines might go something more like this:
God redeemed me from Himself.
God redeemed me to Himself.
God redeemed me for Himself.
This does the actual situation, our circumstance, quite a bit more justice than the original lines. The new version specifies exactly Who is acting on divine initiative to rescue me from Whose just wrath, to enter into Whose holy fellowship, and for Whose ultimate pleasure. And that’s what it’s all about, always.