Yesterday, while clearing files off my old computer, I came across a poem I wrote. It is a love poem and I feel like I am destroying my reputation. But alas, got to keep it real. Enjoy and tell me what you think about it.

To me

To me
You are a little bird singing in the morning
That awakens the heart with purpose
And enjoins with my soul in praising its maker

To me
You are the desert flower in heat of day
That calls the passing traveler
To pause and say a prayer for his beloved

Aye, that you might see your own beauty
Reflected in the oasis pond
Dressed in the finest of garments

-Kwasi
2007

This week has been awesome. I am smoothly settling into my new place. I am getting along well with my roomies though I barely see them at home. For instance, I see Cory more often elsewhere than at home. I had coffee with Soji again but this time my car didn't get stolen. Instead, we discussed his Phd research with is very similar to a project I am working on. Praise God for dropping him into my lap. In the midst of our technical talks, he told me about a sermon he heard at MPPC about Ash wednesday, which is today by the way. Ash wednesday is especially celebrated in the catholic church as a day of atonement. It also coincides with the first day Jesus went into the desert for 40 days to be tempted by the Devil. When the priest uses the ashes to make a cross on your head, he intones "From dust you were made, from dust you will return". As I was telling Leah T. the other day, in a 100 years from now, or for sure a 1000 years, everything we do or accomplish will have turned to dust. Very little we do on earth is really more than ashes in the long run. Even our righteousness (if its self-righteousness) will be worth nothing. Ash wednesday reminds me not to take my life too seriously because all turns to dust at the end. But it does remind me to take God very seriously. This is why the day is set aside for atonement. As I get older, I see more and more how messed up I really am. Even worse, I realise that due to the selfishness in this world, Its hard to be truly loving without being prepared to lose everything. He is showing me that without Him, I really don't have any hope. I thought I was a good person because I didn't chase money, women or drugs. I thought I was good because I didnt cheat (except in games ;), steal or intentionally harm others. I thought my good church boy behavior will get me into heaven. But now I realise just how bad I am. The things I used to look up to; education, church community (I thought the world of church people), people's approval, my sense of righteousness, were all idols and are now ashes in my mouth. All of them have brought me so much pain and trouble because they blocked me from the true source of all happiness which is God. My trust in Education lead me to become prideful and a workaholic and made me feel like a failure when i burnt out. My belief in the lie that church people were or should be perfect prevented me from truly connecting with people at point of their need. My need to make others happy lead me to me neglecting to take care of myself. And my pursuit of righteousness led to self righteousness which made it difficult for me to authentic and to forgive others.
In short, I aspired to good things and those good things became bad. All I really have left is my relationship with God. Everything else I have is suspect. I have no idea whether it will turn to good or bad. But this i know for sure, it will turn into ashes. Oh Lord, I give you my everything, please ransform it for eternal purposes. Happy Ash wednesday everyone!

This week was crazy hectic, fun and challenging. I do not remember a more seesaw week in my life. The trip to Tahoe last week was off the hook. It was incredible getting to know YAF people better. It was awesome getting to spend time with loving people. I also went downhill skiing for the first time in my life. It was a blast. I definitely plan on skiing on the regular. If only Tahoe wasn't so far away. Sigh. After averaging 5 hours of sleep a night, I was very tired during the week. I barely did any work on the color filter project. However, I found out that Soji did is thesis on EM waves and has the expertise I need to pull of the project. Praise God, I am so glad I met him. I moved in with Cory and co. on wednesday. As much I liked living in sunnyvale, it feels good to move. I feel much freer now. We also had incredible developments at work. While not everything is official, I believe we are much closer to our goal of fully developing our technology. I then spent this past weekend in Monterey with Cory, Kristen, Hung-Tzu, Alex, Annie and Kim. We had a great time celebrating Kristen's birthday. We ate great food and had a great dance party and explored tide pools.

So one might wonder, why was this such a seesaw week? I think its probably due to the lingering effects of Asemia's death. It has made me extra sensitive to people. I feel my emotions much more strongly. My empathetic ability has also shot through the roof. I almost literally feel the emotion others are feeling when I am talking to them. This leads to being either super elated or downright negative depending on the person I am talking to. For instance, the ski trip was intense because everyone was excited and that excitment almost wiped me out. Cory and Kristen were very happy and I couldnt help but share in their joy. Chuck and Keith were quite relieved by the good news and again it calmed me down. However I also felt a negative aspect of human behavior - competition. Competion is the desire to beat someone else in one aspect or the other. This can be great in games and things that dont matter. On the hand, it can pretty destructive when applied in daily life. People tend two have these two views in life. One view holds that we are here on earth to succeed together in life. Our goal is to all defeat the challenges that the world presents. People who hold this view love to help others achieve their goals and defeat life's obstacles. The second view measures success by how much better one is, compared to their peers. Everyone sort of falls between these two schools of thought. When Asemia died, I lost my desire to compare myself to others. I asked myself; when I die, how will it matter whether I was better or worse than anyone? When I leave, I will leave alone. How much wealth or knowledge I gained wont matter. What others thought of me wont matter. The only thing that will matter is what God thinks of me. This leads me to truly focus on enjoying life. And the way I do this is by overcoming my challenges and helping others overcome theirs. Its by encouraging others when they falter and letting God's love to humanity flow through me, knowing that I will be refreshed by that love as it makes its way through and out of me. To bring home the point, God open my eyes to see how competitive or cooperative others were. The insecurity I saw in competitive people was sad. The joy I saw in cooperative folks was awesome.

I am competitive. I definitely want to succeed in life. But my opponents are not my fellow humans. My fight is against systems of sin and oppression in our world. My fight is against injustice, disease and hatred. These are much worthier opponents and together we can take them down. But if we compete with each other, we will all lose to these forces. As it is said, united we stand, divided we fall.

Visions of Mortality

I am grieving. Two days ago, my Dad sent me a text. My cousin Asemia had just died, in his sleep. He was only 24 years old. My heart broke. How could he die so young? My mind started wandering; no more playdates with Asemia; no more will I hear his laughter and see his ridiculous antics; no more will I be able to guide, love and cherish him. Arghh!
I am so sad. My heart is so sorrowful. I spent the last few days in denial but I anger is setting in. I dont believe in fairness in life so I doubt I will remain angry for long.

However, there is beauty in grieving. I find myself cherishing people more. Moving ahead in life is no longer as important as cherishing the people that I have. I called all my siblings the morning i heard the news. I believe I have treated everyone I met with more attention and love than usual.

When you come face to face with mortality, you can't help but put more value on the important things in life; God, family and friends. Without them, life is empty.
Grief also leads me to reexamine my life and evaluate it according to what is truly important to me as opposed to what society expects. As I was crying out to God this morning, He showed me a number of things.

First, He showed me that by holding on to society's standards of love and righteousness, I was blocking His ability to pour out His Love and Righteousness to the world through me. Its not that I have to stop being loving and righteous. What He was saying was that I had to let go of my own standards of love and righteousness and trust that He will take over that area of responsibility and that He will do a better job than me.

He also showed me how due to my childhood upbringing, I had become a perfectionist. You see, my mum had an interesting technique of raising us. She never believed we, the children, had done enough unless we were the best. If I went to her and said "hey mom, check this out, I was second in my class", her response will be "why were you not first, you should study more". Tiger mom for sure. While this always made me strive for more, it had a very dark side to it. What my mom was projecting unto me, was the idea that if you weren't the best, then you wouldn't make it in life. She herself is trapped in that same mentality. A mentality that developed because she was raised by a mean stepmother who always tried to put her down and make her believe she was never good enough. So even though my mom loved us kids, she still made us believe we weren't good enough because she never believed she was good enough. My father did a much healthier job of encouraging us to do better but my mum always found it hard to consider our results as excellent. Looking back, our academic results where excellent. Our extra-curricular activities where stellar. Our behavior was exemplary but we never heard these words from our mother. Her response was, this isn't perfect. Hence I am now a perfectionist and God is trying to help me see that I can't be perfect. He is perfect. I can be below average, average, above average or excellent and He will still love me.
With an awareness of his love, I can dial down my personal expections from perfect to excellent. Then to good. Dial it down further to average. Continue to do this until it reaches zero, the perfect spot. Because, when I am nothing, then God is everything. Its going to be a long journey I definitely need His grace. By dying to myself everyday and taking up my cross, I can achieve this. Zero is perfection because in Zero, all that is left is God. Amen

My life is definitely getting more and more interesting by the day due to more car drama. I might be able to write a book about my car troubles if they continue at this rate. First of all though, let me recount the day's events.
I woke up way too early today at 7:45am with only 5.5 hrs of sleep. Conrad gave me a ride to work this morning. Liam woke up just before I left home and he looked so miserable, poor kid is in a lot of pain. Yay for vicodine though! I went into the cleanroom to assist the morning team but their work was so boring to me that I had to leave. I spent the rest of the morning looking up dance songs for a party I planning to throw. I really hope my boss doesn't read this blog. But just in case, "boss, I really had nothing else to do :p" Keith dropped me off at the Avis to pick up my rental car. Which I promptly crashed. Actually it was both I and the parking attendant that crashed it. It is really hard to say since noone was in the car when we released the brakes. Well since, the attendant released it, i will say that he crashed the car. Fortunately, the manager agreed with me and they gave me a chevy impala instead. God be praised! I met Paul Taylor for lunch and we had a great discussion about YAF. I found out that we have the same personality type ENFP as well as a strong T trait. No wonder I thought he was so cool :). I went back to work and came home and had dinner with Donna and Liam. Donna brought food for us since she heard Liam had accident and she is awesome like that. I went to a book discussion of Every man's battle at PBC. There was some really good sharing there. I learnt a lot. One thing in particular was that we men are always searching for intimacy. We tend to look to women and sex for it. However only God can provide that intimacy we need. That was profound. I always thought my wife will provide the intimacy that I needed but apparently not. I have therefore decided that I will look to God to provide me the most intimacy. Its kind of wierd for us men to think of Jesus as our bridegroom. May God help me with that. Afterwards, I, along with Ken and Andrea helped Jen assemble her Ikea furniture. I am so tired now. My bed calleth. I hope tomorrow is less adventurous :).
Kwasi

Yesterday was my first day at work after my vacation. Liam let me borrow his car since he was working from home today. He broke his collarbone and his on vicodine. As such he can't drive, so we are now both dependent on each other. I need a car and he needs a driver :). Nice how God works these things out. Anyways, I took his turbo-charged subaru to work and it was a fun drive.

It was good to see my boss and coworkers again. Luckily, it was a nice relaxing day with little work so I spent most of the day chatting. On a high note, I had a faith conversation with my boss. I think his faith is growing. Its awesome since I have been praying for it on and off for so long. Hopefully he will become a great christian CEO. He did share on cool thing with me though. He told me the definition of great faith is to regard something as good as done. That really encouraged me hold on to certain promises of God better. I should not doubt, I should assume that those promises are as good as done and develop an attitude based on those beliefs. Keith, my coworker bought me both lunch and dinner. He is one of the most generous people I know. Its quite amazing how much he cares for people. On the flip side, he can passionately dislike you if you mistreat him. I think he might be an ESFJ personality type which is very rare in men.

I went to the foundation experiment afterwards and Pastor Danielle gave a great exposition on the diversity of the early church. It was made up of hebraic Jews, Greco-roman jews and gentiles from many nations. What a mess? I wonder how they stayed together. She also explain to me that while we can be assured that the only way to know God the Father was through Jesus Christ, we shouldnt assume that only Christians go to heaven. She said the text strongly implies that fact but it doesn't say it explicitly. For all we know, God gives every sinner a chance to join him in paradise after they die. I pray that God in His great mercy will give everyone a great chance to share in the awesomeness of His love. That said, there is nothing like the sweet fellowship of God in this earthly life. I won't trade anything for it as I am sure that nothing satisfies except for God.

This means that perhaps we could evangelise to non-christians by saying that "hey look, we dont know if you are going to heaven or hell, that is for God to decide. But if you want to have the abundant and fulfilling life on earth, Jesus Christ is the way." As the apostle Paul said "Nothing we obtain in this world compares to the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ".

After the study, I went to play basketball at 24 hr fitness. There was a team there that had 2 6-6 guys that could dunk like crazy. I couldn't wait for the opportunity to guard one of them in a game. When i got the opportunity, I was able to make his life quite difficult :). His team still won but I was quite happy i was able to take away a lot of his shots. He still got the dunks in though :(.

I am now trying very hard to sleep but I can't due to all the endorphins i got from basketball, and I have to wake up in 5 hours, sigh!

W00T!If feels good to write again. Life
got really busy the past few years so I stopped processing things in writing.
Anyways, yesterday was one of the most eventful days of my life! Whew, it was
quite epic! The day started normally. I woke up and first thing I did was
to check if City Team needed me to help wash their vans. While volunteer work is
not the first thing I think about when I wake up, it happened that my friends
were signed up to wash vans there that morning. Naturally, I wanted to join them
but alas, I wasn't needed. Cindy J then called me and told me she was going to
stop tutoring and become a full time interior designer. That totally made my day
since I am sure she will become quite wealthy knowing how good she is. If life
becomes hard one day, my plan is to move back in with Dan and Cindy J (fingers
crossed) :). After talking to Cindy for a while, I decided to drive over to her
house to hang out there. Mellissa joined us later and we started talking about
having boundaries and being able to take care of yourself. Cindy explained it to
me using an analogy. She said, your physical/emotional/spiritual self is like a
garden with a gate. You have to always tend your garden before you tend others
otherwise your garden will die. You also have to man your gate to a prevent
others from coming in to mess up your garden. You only allow good things in so
that your garden remains great. This is awesome because from now on i dont
plan on allowing anyone to mess with my garden. I am so excited about this.
Later that evening, Dan came home and we all went out for eat ethiopian food.
Yum yum! After dinner, I met up with Soji for coffee in East San Jose. I yelped
for a good coffee place and cafe 288 came out on top. We met up there only to
realise that it was not a typical cafe. Anyway it was still a lot of fun getting
to hear Soji's experiences in the US. I left the cafe close to midnight only to
realise that my car was gone. I was in total disbelief! I immediately called the
towing hotline to see if my car had been accidentally towed. Apparently not,
they told me it had been stolen. In fact, the even asked me if I had a 1993
honda accord before i told them the type of car I had. Apparently, thieves love
the 93 Accords :(. Soji and I waited till 1:00am before the cops showed up to
take a stolen car report. The cop was a fun guy though so it was easy to make
light of the situation and have a good conversation about stealing cars.
Apparently, you can use a fork to start my car. Go figure! Soji dropped me off
at home and I had a good night sleep.

Quite a day I must say. It started badly. I woke up already
late for church, sat behind my computer and had no energy to start the day.
Ended up procrastinating till church was almost over. It was at that time
though that God decided to meet me at my desk and taught me that the reason why
life had been so hard was because I had been fighting with my own strength.
Indeed I had been putting a tremendous effort into straightening out my life
but I don’t have the luxury of doing
this. I fight a constant spiritual battle against forces much greater than me.
But by relying on God’s strength I can overcome these troubles.
I there and
then decided to lean on God and lo and behold I was able to start moving. I
didn’t make church but I joined fellow believers for lunch. Had good
conversations and met a cute half black, half Indian girl from Virginia. Need
to find out from Alex what her status is. Or not. We shall see. I had hoped
Simon wood will be there so I could give him some money for his surgery. I will
see him on Friday.
Basketball was off the hook. I
planned to try to emulate Brook Lopez and block everyone on the court by
concentrating on my timing. However as soon as I got the first block in the guy
I was marking stopped taking contested shots. So no block party for me. I did
get a great amount of steals though. It was great. Apparently steals are all
about timing too. A lot of my steals were off the screen steals. When ur man
goes to screen for someone then obstruct the view of that person of you making
it easy to come in for the steal. Many good baskets too. Did not lose a single
game. Came back and watched Stanford rally back and beat no 3. UCLA. What a
great game. Totally made my day. Came back home, made and ate dinner. Wasted time
playing Civ and overbrowsing. Not good. I therefore decided to delete Civ. Cant
rely on civ, right? Need to lean on God.

Yesterday was great
but also tiring. I woke up around 12 after another late night session of doing
nothing useful. Still being tired, i took me about 2 hours to recharge my
batteries to start the day. i had three main agendas, barbecue at dan tam's,
work and dinner. However, because i was so tired i couldn't work and now i am
scared of going to work since i left the place a mess and did not finish my
project. The barbecue was very interesting cause i met a lot of new people.
Most notably was this guy called Simon who was chinese american who grew up in
Logan, Utah. His Dad came from China after being converted to Mormonism only to
get disillusioned with reality. As such Simon seemed quite disillusioned with
religion himself. It showed me the danger in the Mormon and Christian church,
where some missionaries walk 15 miles to gain a convert and put a huge burden
on him without lifting a finger to help him. Words are cheap but actions speak
louder. When evangelizing, it is very easy(sometimes) to present Christianity
in the best light, (it is a phenomenal faith, dont get me wrong here) but when
the convert comes to the church and sees Christians (especially immature
ones) in their everyday life, it is
quite possible for the devil to lure them away. As such i believe that a church
must balance its evangelical efforts with preparing the church to receive and
protect incoming believers. I pray that God will send these incoming believers
into church communities that are ready to recieve them. Perhaps Churches should
have a way of incorporating new believers into the community in a way that will
show the freedom and grace we have in Christ Jesus.
I rested a bit until
Hanna Kim showed up to help me make dinner. Making dinner was tiring but
Hanna's presence made the whole event very enjoyable. She was very easy to talk
to and thus led to many good conversations. The most important topic was had to
do with homosexuality and how one could accept homosexuals while believing that
homosexuality was immoral. I believe that one can accept and love a gay person
even if one thinks their lifestyle is not in God's will. In my opinion, one can
still be close to another without accepting things important to that person. I
for instance, consider God and Christianity to be the most important things in
my life. In fact they are important to me than my temporary life on earth. Yet,
my best friend is not a Christian. He used to be but he became agnostic. I
could have held up Christianity has a friendship seive and claimed that unless
one accepted Christianity, one could not be my friend. A lot of gays do this
with their sexual orientation. They firmly believe that unless one accepted
their gayness, one could not accept them. But this not necessarily true. Jesus
Christ taught that acceptance of a person into one's life is not include
acceptance of one's character or habit. I can have a wife who does not like
soccer or does not share my love for dogs but that would not be a big deal
unless a choose to make it one. The difficulty in this argument comes when one
is trying to change something about you that you hold dear. If I had a friend
that was trying to derail me from the Christian path, I would show him the door
as soon as he started gaining some success. I admit that it would be hard to be
close to one who was unreasonably antagonistic towards God. A homosexual might
make the same point, that most Christians are trying to get them to give up
their homosexuality and as such must be shown the door. In fact, most sinners
including christians themselves face this dilemna when another Christian is
getting them to change a bad habit that they feel good about. In such cases, the
Christian doing the correcting must demonstrate that they do indeed love the
the correctee and have enough wisdom to avoid giving harmful advice. As such
Christians must learn to show love to gays while preaching against
homosexuality. We must have programs that will help people out of their
dependence on having a love affair. Hopefully we can meet the need for love
that a homosexual will have when he gives up his partner so as to be right with
God. Perhaps it would be good to have opposite sex mentors and supporters for
celibate homosexuals who can show them affection without being uncomfortable. I
for instance, can show a lot of love and support for a lesbian though it would
be very challenging to do the same for a gay guy (unless he is masculine and
does not show too much touchy feely affection).
Christians can indeed get along quite well with homosexuals while
preaching against it. This i believe is God's will.
Hanna told me a funny story about
Martins that I will have to talk about later.

Today was on the
whole not a bad day. I woke up late again for church hitting the snooze button
about 6 times. Took a quick shower and went to church. The sermon was good and
talked about making sure u understand that God deserves all the glory. So in order
for one to be used greatly by God, one must learn that we are earthenware
vessels with treasure that God has put in us.
All throughout today
it has been becoming clearer and clearer that leadership is what God is
preparing me for. I do not think i yet possess good leadership skills and am
very content to remain a follower now but I believe that God has given me the
qualities/capacity to become a leader. For instance, i seem to be able to
easily gain the confidence and liking of groups of people that i have been
meeting recently. I understand that this is nothing of my own doing and is
absolutely a gift from God. I have decided that i will make a concerted effort
to develop leadership skills in order to become a good leader. I believe that i
must first learn the role of a servant because the only kind of leader I and
God want me to be is a servant leader be in business, politics or christian
community. I will also volunteer for more leadership oppurtunities in real
world testimonial group.
During soccer today,
i had the oppurtunity to start practicing leadership skills. I ended up with a
team that had a very little individual or team skills. Rami's team tore us up
badly. I tried to direct my team but their skills were too weak too follow
those directions. I was tempted to do two things, one was to keep telling them
what to do specifically which would put more pressure on them and risk making
it less fun for them. The second was to keep quiet about it and just play my
game. I felt neither choice was right. The first one was a selfish manuever and
what i would be doing was to sacrifice everyone else's happiness for my desire
to win the game. The second was less selfish but would leave the team without a
leader which would reduce their fun. The choice I finally made was to keep
encouraging and to keep giving out pointers. This required a lot of patience
and i had to work hard not to show my frustration. In the end though, God
totally rewarded my efforts. First the defence really came together and Matt
had some amazing stops. The offence was also clicking to some extent. I think
on the whole everyone had a lot of fun. I did too. Seeing the whole team come
together and all these newbies really picking up their game made me feel so
proud of them. Marcello's incredible dribbling skills made me relearn some of
my defensive techniques of not going to close to a dribbler. Leadership requires
incredible patience. That is what I learnt today

Aha, another chance to look at my day in retrospect, to judge my actions and critique my life, and last but not the least, spread some more poetry. I went to class this morning after a long internal debate. It was pretty useful so i was glad i went. I did some work in the afternoon but did very little work in the evening cos i gave in to temptation and played warcraft and watched "West Wing". I hope it does not happen again. Went to Bible study. The passage was kind of long so I had a lot to say but no time to say it. So frustrating, I wish there was a bible club i could join where people could afford to go deep into the bible and be controversial. Oh yes, i know where i can find that; Catalina. Hippee. Cant wait to get there. I have been feeling quite mischevious today. My roomate has had to take the brunt of my mood. I played 2 tricks on him and a trick on another. I spoke to my brother today who urged me to call my parents more. I am terrible when it comes to keeping in touch with people i cant see. I guess i am more of "out of sight, out of mind person". We took Staff photos for the freshman facebook today. My dorm did the 'Seven deadly sins', I portrayed wrath. I really hope i dont scare my freshmen away. I might have to damage control the first week. Below is one my favorite poems. "The river merchant's wife" by Li Po. It was translated by Ezra Pound.

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

I wasted the whole day. I did absolutely no work today. I spent all the time playing games and hanging out. But I don’t feel bad about it at all. I guess I probably needed a weekend like this. I would probably regret this during the week but as at now I feel good. Church was pretty good. Its amazing how many people come to Christ at Abundant life. Toda, pastor Paul spoke about which direction he wants the church to go and how we should give more money to support the church. Even though it was not an evangelical message, about 5 people came to Christ. I truly believe that this church is blessed. If I leave the bay area, I think I will miss that more than anything. I found Pastor Zac Poonen’s website and I am listening to his sermons on Genesis right now. I really like Pastor Zac, almost more than Pastor Paul. Spoke to my sister and a friend about relationships earlier. They are so confusing, relationships I mean. Especially when you want a relationship, there is nothing more confusing than that. If it was not hardwired into our DNA, I think we would all give up on relationships. But as Kahlil Gibran said, sorrow and happiness are different sides of the same coin. Without the difficulties in relationships, we might not cherish them as much as they need to be. I think I will end here and go to bed. I don’t want to feel wretched tomorrow morning. Let me end with a haiku

Freedom, a mirror
For in it is where we see
Who we truly are

Woke up too early this morning. It was like 9;25am which was a good 20 minutes before my usual wake up time. Too make things worse, Ryan decisively won the Catan game i organized (he sitting next to me and made me write this). No one apart from me seemed to realise how dangerous he was (except for Greg). Well he won and thats that, but lets say, its not gonna happen again. Ryan and the other guys are trying to convince me to play for money in catan, but I dont think its gonna happen, unless its an official catan tournament where you have to win more than one game. I found some poetry that i wrote last year, brought back some good memories. In keeping with tradition, i will post one of the poems which i titled the busy bee.

The busy bee finds a flower
Red, embroided, a lover's gift
He doves for the nectar.
Sweet and nutritious
His motions, disturbs the pollen
they fall, unto the stigma
Life continues

The busy bee find his home
he does a dance
He goes in, makes his food
Honey, sweet and rich
Saves it for harder times
the sweet honey, attacts a bear
it eats, satisfied

Nature is beautiful
But ever stopped to ask?
Why the bear takes the honey?
It did not make it
Did not pay for it
But the bee can't complain much
maybe a sting or two
Just that, makes more honey.

Man i feel terrible. I have this flu for 3 days now and it doesn't seem like it wants to go away. It all started friday night when i went to see Troy. I guess it was because i had a hard week and the stress probably supressed my immune system. All the heavy physical activities i did on saturday didn't help either. Talking about saturday, that was a good day. Woke up on the wrong side of bed at 8:30 and got to dig up a sand box. Now the last time i did something like this was in high school when we woke up early on certain saturday mornings to do community service projects. The similarity was uncanny and took me to the land of nostalgia. I played soccer in the afternoon which we won despite the fact that we had no subs. Playing the whole game was definetely bad for me, so i struggled back to my room and promptly collapsed into bed. I woke up for church this morning but i chose to be in bad mood the whole day(I did wake up in the evening and eat some food before going to bed at 12). It was kind of fun, i have not been so negative in a long while. The best part was i could blame it all on the flu. I do plan on going to see 50 first dates tonight with Ashni and maybe John, and then collapsing into bed. I will go to Vaden tomorrow. I will end with a quote from 'The prophet: On work'

"And I say that Life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is in vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love, you bind yourself to yourself,
and to one another, and to God."

I was going to end here but i feel its better if i had some more

"And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn for your heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a houe with affection,
even as if your bleoved were to dwell in thta house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,
even as if your beloved were to eat the furit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching."

Kahlil Gibran

Thank God for his redeeming mercy and faithfulness. Today, i heard an awesome talk at IV. Great message. I guess it made me realise that in a lot of ways I was too image concious, especially concerning my faith. I realised that I was too concerned about doing the right thing or the christian thing so as not to cause others to question my faith. This limited the freedom that i had in Christ and also made me defensive about Christianity. Today's message made me realise that it was ok to be a "foolish Christian". I decided to stop shaping my behavior and trust God to do that. So if you see me behaving wierder than usual, no that i am just being myself and not holding back. I must say that if feels great to be free. I am so excited about RAing next year. I will go beserk. Yay for Cardenal. I will end with a quote from the "Prophet"(my favorite poem) by Kahlil Gibran.

"But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears."

wow, what a social day. Woke up at 10:50. Went for my last RA interview which was the flomo field day. It was simply awesome. Had so much fun. Made me really reconsider east flo. I just might put it on top of my list. But i must pray first and make sure that I am doing it for the right reasons. I then went for a picnic with my house till 5. Took a quick nap. Went for Africa dinner at 8 (I went 30 min late but i had to wait for another 15 min, thats african time for you). Went to Jungeun's birthday and helped blow ballons for the prank that was going to be played on her. There were so many peeps blowing ballons(even profros). Makes me wonder what she did to generate so much enminity. I went back to Africa night for the party which sucked. Terrible DJ. I got to catch up with friends though so it was cool. I am not going to bed. By the way, i have to give props to Erin Hsu for giving me a TI-89. I feel so blessed. God is good. My bed calls to me now.

So my popular request (by me, myself and I), I will continue my post. You didn't think you will get rid of me that easily, did you? Let me tell you all about Saturday morning. I woke up at an unholy hour for my Frosoco interview. It was at 9:30am. I am sure i left the hammarskjold at like 8:30 but somehow i was still late. Phew, it was far. When we (the interviewees) were waiting for the interview to start, we started talking. The others were all friendly and laughing and having a good time, while i was still recovering from my journey. I even realised the CDs (RFs) were looking at me with some concern. I began to get worried that i was not being friendly enough. I mean i was trying, but those people were so friendly, I was beginning to get wierded out. Later on, i found out that they were all Frosoco peeps so they knew each other. No wonder, I felt much better after that armed with the knowlegde that i was amongst normal people. The rest of the interview went well. I had brunch at lag with some friends and went to my Vehicle Dynamics lab. That lab was awesome. We had to drive a mercedes that was rigged with sensors, and use it to do some fast double lane changes. It was in an empty parking lot with cones marking the lanes. I did 17mph first and did some smooth turning without clipping a single cone. Before i could even begin to congratulate myself, the TA was like "No, no, no that was bad, it was too smooth. You have make 90 degree turns only, you have to jerk people around". So i threw away all my safe driver instincts and went like 20mph, turn the wheel like a madman. It was great; the tires were screeching, the TA and my lab partners were being thrown around like rag dolls, but i only clipped one cone. I did it like 3 more times. I am glad i am an ME major. At 4, i went to church and it was packed. I did not even get a seat in the overflow room. After that the day got boring. Well i am off now. Leave a honk if you love Jesus. Shalom

Whew, what a week. Thank God its over for now. I was so busy that I had no energy left for blogging. I struggled to finish my 3 homeworks due by W,Th,F, respectively and also had 5 RA interviews at Flomo East, The Row, Frosoco, Cedro and Soto. I liked the Flomo and Frosoco ones the most. I am beginning to think that Frosoco might not be so far away after all. That place is nice. You know peaceful, quiet, lots of plants and trees; just like the countryside. It's like the California of Stanford. But then its very far. I am afraid that if i live there, I might get disconnected from my friends. I can just imagine it.
Kwasi: "Long time no see, come visit me sometime."
Friend: Yeah sure, how about dinner tomorrow, tell me where you live.
Kwasi: "Oh, in frosoco, we have some good food at Ricker dining."
Friend: "Oh man, i am sorry, i just remembered that I have a mandatory section".

My most interesting day was Friday. I had an ME140 group meeting after class, and i was supposed to have done some programming before. As an hour before the meeting, i had done nothing. I really didn't want to be the only one who had not done his work, so i skipped class and finished it in an hour. Ironically, I showed up at the meeting only to realise that I was the only one who had completed his part. That was a good feeling. For the first time in like forever, I was on top of things, the leader of the pack, the bastion order, the defender of the faithful, the last hope, the foundation, the trailblazer, THE ONE. Man, that I was walking tall. Opps, must have gotten carried away. Lets get back. So i picked up the slack and completed more parts of the project till 2pm, went to Math class, then to lab. Played basketball, took a 2 minute shower, went to the Cedro interview. Made dinner, went to the Soto interview.... I dont remember the rest cos i was too tired. Well this post is too long, so i will stop here. Ciao

I stayed up late again doing my RA applications. Went to bed at 4:30 and woke up at 9:50 for my 10:00 class. Was late to class as usual. Came back home, had some lunch, went back to work on my RA application. Finished it and turned it in at 1pm. Yay!! Hurray!!! no more staying up late(yeah right). But truly I am glad I am done with the written part of the application. It was quite demanding. When I was done i felt the adrenaline flow out of my body while the effects of 10 hours of sleep debt kicked in. Not a very good feeling. I still had to go for my math class though and come back to work on a group project. I was so tired, thus it was not surprising that we couldn't do the homework. Went to wine and cheese and then to the bulgarian party. Played Catan with John, Amit, Wilson and Maleche. Maleche won and pretended to be all cool about it, pretending to be casual but i could sense the elation in him since he would stop talking about how he came back from behind to win. Anyway its bedtime for me now. But wait, I am kind of hungry so i will go down to the kitchen and get some food (the joy of an open kitchen). Cheers amigos.

So i woke up late for my ME 227 class as usual. Quickly rushed to class and learnt some cool stuff about steering cars around curves. Problem was i did not understand any of the technical stuff the teacher was saying. That scared the heck out of me and made me form a study group immediately. Went swimming in the afternoon which was a lot of fun. My teacher is the coach of the men's water polo team so he is pretty good I believe that i will be doing laps pretty soon. Went to Math 52. Took a nap, had dinner, went IV, came back home and worked on my RA application. Dude that stuff is just too long. I wish i was done. Anyway enough of this boring stuff. Did some interesting things today like scare someone witless with a green giant statue. i also called my sister and sang her happy birthday. Man, i still sound boring, well i will try to make my next entry more interesting. But for now, I have to finish those RA applications. Cheers.