Awake

Saw a trailer for a new TV series called ‘Awake’ and it really peaked my interest. The story is a man gets into a car accident with his wife and son and from that accident his understanding of reality gets split in two. In one reality his wife survives and his son dies. In the other his son survives and his wife dies. The twist is that he doesn’t know which reality is real and which reality is a dream. It’s an interesting parallel because in each reality he sees a psychiatrist and they both try and convince him that he’s dreaming up this other world and that in their ongoing sessions he is in fact awake. Anyways here is the trailer if I’m not making any sense.



This is interesting on a couple of levels. One is, how do we know for sure that we are awake or dreaming? And two, to what extent are we willing to go so that we don’t have to deal with the reality of our sometimes grief-stricken lives?

I’ve always found dreams to be very fascinating because I dream so often. And the idea that we can be “awake” mentally and not know that we are in fact dreaming. Under normal circumstances our dreams should be easily perceivable as lacking rationality. For instance, I always have reoccurring dreams where I’m back to living in previous homes I used to live in. If I just thought for a moment I should be able to figure out that I’m obviously no longer living there and conclude that it is a dream. Yet this, a lot of times, escapes me and I go on believing that it is reality.

I also wonder if there's more to our dreams. Does God speak to us through them now as he sometimes did in Biblical times?

Linsanity

Well yesterday Jeremy Lin continued to amaze the sports world by hitting the game-winning 3 to lift the Knicks to an improbable (Linprobable?) 6th straight victory. Now I must admit I am following this Linderella story like white on rice (too much?) and it definitely helps that he's Asian-American which makes me like him even more (AND he's Christian which basically means I have a man-crush on him). But even so I didn't even want to bring in the whole race issue until Mr. Floyd Mayweather decide to tweet

"Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the same praise."

In response to this tweet I would say he does have one good point. That it certainly helps now that he's been doing really well that he's Asian. The fact that Knicks games are now showing more in Asia is a testament to the market that Jeremy Lin can add. BUT, and this is a big fat bootylicious BUT, being Asian doesn't give him any sort of undue attention to his story. As if he's all hype. It's his incredible play on the court that's giving him this hype. He's scored 136 pts in his first 5 starts which is the most since the ABA NBA merger. Yes Russell Westbrook had similar stats last week as Lin but he's already a proven All-Star. Lin didn't even have a guaranteed contract a couple of weeks ago.

But this does bring up an interesting discussion on race. Does race have anything to do with it at all? Well if you know American culture then YES. In fact I would go far as to being Asian actually has a slight negative effect on Jeremy Lin's path to the NBA. Americans do really good in terms of boxing certain cultures into a tightly and easy to understand stereotype. For an Asian-American your not thought of as an athlete, but more of an engineer or doctor type. That or go into the dry-cleaning business. Actually as Asian-Americans we do a good enough job not promoting the athletics, or anything besides business or the sciences. It's engineer/doctor or bust.

What's my point? I'm just glad to see a fellow Asian-American doing a great job leading an NBA team to WINS. We need more Asian-American leaders.

AACF Staff retreat

Well the staff retreat was actually last weekend but just getting to blog about it just now. More updates later as well!

Anyways it was good to go down to sunny southern California and see some old friends from AACF Staff. A lot of staffers weren't there but it was a blessing to gather at The Oaks. Great facilities. It was also interesting to note that the last time I'd been to the staff retreat I'd just found out about being accepted into Hillsong International Leadership College and that I'd decide to take a leave of absence from staff to pursue studies there.

One thing I'm hoping to help change in AACF is the need to improve on our PR/Media side. Obviously the website is dated and it's functionality is very limited.

Well Happy February!