Rant of the Exiles

A friend at church and I were talking about dating. She met her current boyfriend on the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. She observed there were a significant number of church members who had met each other on the app but had not previously met or gotten know one another through our church. She said: Men don’t initiate. Men are stupid.  I don’t think men are stupid. I don’t think people are stupid. I think people, for the most part, behave rationally. Let’s take a food analogy. Before processed food, people had to spend time making and preparing a roast beef sandwich for lunch. They needed fresh meat, bread, and condiments. And then they had to assemble and eat it the same day. Today, people eat a tremendous amount of processed food. For example, Lunchables are easy, convenient, and last forever. You don’t have to make them, you don’t have to package them, and they taste good. By many metrics, Lunchables are nutritious. However, it’s becoming increasingly apparent tha...

I posted something two years ago about dating an emotionally repressed Asian guy and recently received two correspondences regarding the comment . Here’s an email from a young woman: "My boyfriend is Korean-American, born to immigrant parents and raised in New Jersey in a heavily Korean area. All of his friends from home are Korean. We met in college and were friends for about a year before we started dating. Since the beginning of the relationship I knew that he was always reluctant to share his feelings, but I know that he has them deep inside him and that they are just shown in different ways. I accepted early on that he has different love languages than me. Everything in our relationship was going well for about a year, but towards the one year mark he started to say no to many activities I wanted to do, or outings I wanted to go on, saying that he was busy with school or projects or just tired. I thought we were just going through a busy time and that he would soon be...

Update: the charts ARE working correctly. Imagine the United States is the shape of a rectangle. And all the dots from the article are smeared together by a person who is left-handed and cannot color. How there can be simultaneously more single men than women and more single women than men in the SAME city San Jose long ago earned the moniker "Man Jose" because of the imbalanced gender ratio. This is likely due to the prevalence of men in tech-dominated Silicon Valley. Anecdotally, it's always been a running joke there are more single men here than women.  The news gets worse for the West Coast and now there's data to back this up. According to this article , it should also be "Man Francisco" and "Man Diego". There are roughly 50,000 more single men than single women in San Diego (due to the military presence?) and 20,000 more single men than women in San Francisco (likely a similar tech-effect with San Jose). Note: the unmarried populati...

Here's the  link  to the best Christian response I've found to the Supreme Court's 5-4 vote to legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states.   The Background:  I first heard about about the decision through Facebook. A number of my friends and youth in our church celebrated the ruling through social media posting, with the most popular expression being rainbow-filtered profile pics.   The conservative Christian response could not provide a starker contrast. There's a sense of loss and tragedy. There's a sense of hiding out and starting a commune. There's a sense of panic and consternation. There's a lot of fear, especially for our children. A friend of mine half-jokingly said we should move our families run off to a European country where laws follow traditional Christian sexual ethics. Like many in this camp, I too was initially saddened when I heard about the court decision. But here's my conundrum: I have ...