Weekly Coffee #2
October 22, 2024

It’s crazy to think that a week has passed since I wrote the last one of these. It has been interesting to decide what to write about, considering Weekly Coffee is only going out to four people, who all know me very well. I decided ultimately to write as if it was going to a larger number of people who didn’t know me personally, in order to preserve the tone and purpose I envisioned for this writing, which is to help me to process my week and take ownership of my thoughts and actions, with the intentionality of knowing that someone may actually read this.

When I first read my Portland friend’s newsletter, I was really surprised at how entertaining I found it, to the point that I now eagerly wait to get it every week. It’s funny to think that I find the average daily life of my friend so entertaining. It reminds me of what Walter Isaacson writes about the first ever blog, Justin’s Links from the Underground. He describes it as being characterized by “mischievous intimacy” and being “weirdly beguiling”, taking “a medium that had been conceived as a repository for scholarship and scale[ing] it down to a personal size”. Starting a newsletter today certainly isn’t anything new, but something about it feels just as relevant, novel, and important now in 2024 as it was in 1994.

I am hoping to cultivate something close to that, but we’ll see how far I get. Without further ado...

Whats Been Up:

• My girlfriend Jenny came down to San Diego from SLO for the weekend. We visited Point Loma university, which was absolutely gorgeous. Being on campus made me really miss college in San Luis Obispo. Starting work has been an important step in adulthood and maturity, but there is something really special about that era of my life when my primary responsibility was to learn about everything I was passionate about.
• I went surfing again this week, and felt like I was getting a bit better. I also towel changed for the first time in my life, right on the side of the road. It was a harrowing experience, but I feel that I have grown through it.
• Last week, I decided to pursue a programming project in my free time. I feel that it is important to be more intentional about cultivating my passion for computers, now that I am working with computers 9 hours a day as part of my job. For the project, I am going to attempt to implement a programming language interpreter from scratch. Written language is such an innately human concept, it is really interesting to develop a language that is meant to be shared between computers and humans. It needs to resemble human language on the surface, for people to innately understand how to read and write it, but it must lack any human nuance or subtext for it to be structured and accurate enough for a computer to run. But artificial intelligence is starting to blur these lines even further, as computers seemingly are becoming more adept at understanding and creating nuance. More to come in future weeks on this project.
  
  

What I've Been Reading/Listening To/Watching:

• The Normal Christian Life - Watchman Nee
  • Admittedly, it has been a couple weeks since I have picked this up, but it is such an amazing book, it deserves a mention. This book does an incredible job decisively answering the question, “What does it mean to live as a Christian, when the expectation set for us by Christ on how to live is absolutely unattainable”. This was a question I struggled with for a very long time in my journey.
  • Watchman Nee is an incredibly guy even outside writing this book. He was largely responsible for the house church movement in China, really growing the body there, for which he spent the last 20 years of his life in prison.
• Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers - Jordan Peterson
  • I have actually listened to Jordan Peterson’s old testament series a couple times now, but I recently re-listened to this particular episode, and really felt like I got a lot out of it.
  • I think in some ways it can be dangerous to listen to an agnostic (or maybe theist?) like Jordan Peterson teach on scripture, but I find that he generally is very respectful, and does an exceptional job fleshing out the important cultural and historical significance of scripture, while also communicating some of the rich meaning and imagery that often goes over my head in my own readings. He just misses the main point, which is Christ.
    
    

Song of the Week
Dragon Warrior, Prince of Eden

Photo of the Week
At Point Loma, Jenny and I got to visit with a friend of hers, who has a painting that Jenny did a couple years back. I really think it is one of the most remarkably paintings I have seen in my life. The amount of creativity it would take to compose a painting this varied in style and rich in meaning absolutely blows my mind. I’ll see you guys next week!