When I was a high school student, I had a subscription to the Boston Globe newspaper. I think it did a great job for my English comprehension, in addition to learning about a whole new world outside of my little suburban town outside of Boston.

With those rosy-colored glasses on, I returned to Boston 11 years later and made a point to subscribe to the Boston Globe. Well, I can honestly say, what the hell has happened with newspapers today? Is it my youthful naivete or has my newspaper really gone downhill? A similar phenomenon happened when I had a subscription to the Raleigh News and Observer; back then I attributed it to a different writing style, but now I think all newspapers have gone down the toilet. The articles I see on the front page makes me feel like I'm reading a tabloid.

Does anyone else still read the newspaper? Does anyone feel the same way I do? I am thinking of canceling my subscription to the Boston Globe and reading the New York Times. I figure the way things are going, this equation holds true:

2009 NY Times = 1996 Boston Globe
2009 Boston Globe = 1996 People Magazine
2009 People Magazine = ?

Since running the Chicago marathon in mid-October, I have tapered off on working out for the past few months. It also doesn't help that I've been sick since Thanksgiving (30+ days!) with a cold / sinus infection. With the 2 major eating holidays past, I've gone from 169 lbs to 175 lbs. At 5'9", even when I was 169 lbs (right before the marathon, when I was at the pinnacle of my health) the BMI calculator puts me at 25, or mildly overweight, even though I couldn't imagine being any thinner.

At 175 lbs, my BMI only shifts to 25.8 - while 6 pounds doesn't seem like a lot of weight, my body feels it. The past week I've finally felt good enough to start running again on the treadmill. Even at a slow pace of 10:00 / mile for 3-4 miles, I am having horrible shin splints and leg pains. It'll be a slow recovery back to running at a pace I'm used to (08:00 / mile), but I intend to lose these 6 pounds. I hesitate to call it a New Year's Resolution (aside: I hate New Year's Resolutions), but it just happens to fall this time of year.

In other news, we worked last night and then went into the city for dinner. We intended to stay for First Night, but by 22:20 the wind and weather in Boston made it feel like -14 F, so we called it quits and watched the Ball drop from home. It was nice and quiet, which was good because we'd been traveling a lot the past few weeks.

I hope everyone has a wonderful 2009!

I receive a weekly ePistle from the Episcopal church I attended while in Raleigh, NC, called St. Michael's Episcopal Church. I thought it was a good article, and I am reprinting it here. I have always enjoyed Rev. Greg as a preacher.

I hope everyone is well. I've written up a post about the Chicago Marathon 3 weeks ago, but I haven't published it. Maybe I'll git'er'done this weekend.

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Episcopalians share a common "book" of prayer, worship and wisdom with Christians of every age and place. This common book is not the Prayer book. It's not the English language. It's not even the Western literary canon. No, of course it's the Bible - which forms the common sacred library of all who follow Christ. But, in a Christianity so global and diverse, we Episcopalians need to be able to understand for ourselves, and explain to others who inquire, "What do we think the Bible is, and how do we engage it?"

I believe that most Episcopalians would agree with the notion that just as God has called forth the Church to exist as the Body of Christ, inextricably bound with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures are likewise inextricably bound to the Church. We do not understand what the Bible is apart from its being woven up from and into the fabric of the Church, nor can we interpret it apart from a location within the life and activity of the Church. That being said, what guidelines can be found to clarify things a bit? Well, I think the Diocese of New York teaching document Let the Reader Understand is excellent, and from it, I think the following seven points should be taught across the whole Episcopal Church.

7 Principles of Biblical Interpretation

1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are "the Word of God" and "contain all things necessary to salvation." They are called the Word of God by the household of faith, not because God dictated the biblical text, but because the Church believes that God inspired its human authors through the Holy Spirit and because by means of the inspired text, read within the sacramental communion of the Church, the Spirit of God continues the timely enlightenment and instruction of the faithful.

2. The Holy Scriptures are the primary constitutional text of the Church. They provide the basis and guiding principles for our common life with God, and they do so through narrative, law, prophecy, poetry, and other forms of expression. Indeed, the Scriptures are themselves an instrument of the Church's shared communion with Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, who uses them to constitute the Church as a Body of many diverse members, participating together in his own word, wisdom, and life.

3. The Scriptures, as "God's Word Written," bear witness to, and their proper interpretation depends upon, the paschal mystery of God's Word incarnate, crucified and risen. Although the Scriptures are a manifestly diverse collection of documents representing a variety of authors, times, aims, and forms, the Church received and collected them, and from the beginning has interpreted them for their witness to an underlying and unifying theme: the unfolding economy of salvation, as brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

4. The Scriptures both document and narrate not only God's saving acts but also the manifold human responses to them, revealing that God's unchanging purpose to redeem is fulfilled, not by means of a coercive, deterministic system, but through a divine plan compassionately respectful of human freedom, adapted to changing historical circumstances, cultural situations, and individual experience and need. In reading the diverse texts of Holy Scripture, the Church seeks an ever-growing comprehension of this plan and of the precepts and practices whereby believers may respond more faithfully to it, walking in the way of Christ.

5. The New Testament itself interprets and applies the texts of the Old Testament as pointing to and revealing the Christ. Thus, the revelation of God in Christ is the key to the Church's understanding of the Scriptures as a whole.

6. Individual texts must not, therefore, be isolated and made to mean something at odds with the tenor or trajectory of the divine plan underlying the whole of Scripture.

7. Faithful interpretation requires the Church to use the gifts of "memory, reason, and skill" to find the sense of the scriptural text and to locate it in its time and place. The Church must then seek the text's present significance in light of the whole economy of salvation. Chief among the guiding principles by which the Church interprets the sacred texts is the congruence of its interpretation with Christ's Summary of the Law and the New Commandment, and the creeds.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones

Well, my car has either been towed or broken into, because it's no longer where I parked it. I better track down the towing company and pray that it's the former and not the latter.

Finding a job is a full-time job. Officially, I am unemployed since June 1 since my graduate advisor has been paying me until May 31, but unofficially I have been unemployed since May 2. I know it normally takes 3+ months for someone with my educational background to find employment, and it has only been 5 weeks of looking for a full-time position, but I am depressed at the bleak situation. I have sent close to 50 cover letters and resumes to companies in the Boston area, but have heard back from only 2 or 3 companies. I am not sure if that ratio is average, but a 5-8% success rate of getting a phone call (not even a site interview) seems terrible to me.

I do have a few prospects now, but who knows what will happen? The optimist in me wants to suspend writing additional cover letters until I find out if I get interviews / offers from these prospects, while the pessimist in my says I should keep plugging along with the cover letters. Does anyone have any sage advice? Also, what is the normal time from applying for a job to being contacted by an interested employer? It's been a week since I've applied to some positions I think I'm qualified for, and I think that I would have heard something back from them already.

Anyway, that has consumed the last 5 weeks of my life ever since I returned to Boston. In other news, I am playing volleyball and am on a friend's softball team, so that gets me out of the house. I go to the gym on a daily basis to work out, and I keep running to train for the Chicago marathon in October. Once a week I'll go to the Boston Public Library so I don't get stir-crazy at home, and I am trying to brush up on my Cantonese.

In other news, I am headed to Raleigh this weekend for a conference. I will get to see a few people, but most of the time I will be consumed with conference things (sorry LJ folks from NC). The Boston pride parade is this weekend so I will miss out, but I'm not dying to attend.

That's my update.

I am, as Guster says, "back in Massachusetts." I had written a travel log of my 12-hour drive from Raleigh to Boston. I will transcribe it to LJ sometime in the future. It's been just over 2 weeks, and I am still trying to transition to living in Boston. Having a job would help too. At this point I may start volunteering a few hours a week just to get me out of the house or gym.

I hope everyone in LJ-land is doing well.

It's done, I passed. 2.25 grueling hours of presentation and question and answers. I'm ready for my nap.

My friend is in MBA school at Rutgers and is requesting people to fill out a short survey (< 5 min). If you can help out, that would be wonderful. Thank you in advance.
Online Survey

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We are a group of students in the MBA Team Consulting Program at Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University, conducting a survey for the benefit of First Orion Corporation. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact the team leader, Peter Leddy, at pleddy@gmail.com If you have any questions about the MBA Team Consulting Program, please contact the Director, Paul Belliveau, at 973-353-1126 or belliveayu@business.rutgers.edu. This information will not be used outside of the survey and no personally identifiable information will be collected or used. The survey should take no more than 5 minutes. This survey is part of a Research Project for my MBA at Rutgers Business School to support a market analysis. You could additionally help me by forwarding along this email to any friends, families or coworkers. Our goal is to gain a wide demographic of responses so any individuals in other states across the country would be really helpful. You can fill out the survey by clicking the link below:
Online Survey

Thanks in Advance
Dina E. Agrapides
Rutgers University Graduate School of Business

Since I've been working out at Peak Fitness last week and this weekend (NC State is on Spring Break), I have noticed one glaring problem: Networks need to fire their closed-caption writers and hire ones that can spell. Well, at least on ESPN, they're horrific! I run on the treadmill or use the elliptical machine for the past 7 days, and every other sentence is almost guaranteed to have a spelling error. Okay, my rant is done.


Twelve more days until my written dissertation is due to my committee members! I'm starting to freak out a little. Of course, I still have time to play Guitar Hero III and work on my fantasy baseball pre-draft rankings. Oh, and Friday night I had 3 cans of PBR and touched titties on a screen with my dodgeball team (one of those "what's different between these 2 photos" games. Not surprisingly, I did fairly well because I wasn't focused on the female's breasts like the other guys.).

Saturday morning was the WakeMed Distance Festival 5K/10K run. I finished the 10K race in 51:00, but the "official" time for the 10K run was 25:39 minutes - I ran an additional 0.2 miles! I had my headphones on listening to my iPod shuffle, and at 3.2 miles into the race, there was a police officer pointing runners for the 5K and 10K portion. Well, he was directing traffic for a van crossing by, and I heard him mutter a few words, but it was incomprehensible because my headphones were on.

Well, I kept running straight (following the 5K runners) instead of turning left, ran the additional 0.1 miles to where my friend Charles was (he ran the 5K portion). I stopped when I saw the finish line, but everyone ushered me into the chute. When I crossed the line, the announcer said "The 10K winner finished in 25 minutes, an amazing time!" and I realized I had made a big mistake. I immediately turned around and ran back to where I was supposed to turn, and completed the other 3.1 miles.

The second time I crossed the finish mat, people who had recognized me from the first time cheered me on, and I threw up my hands in appreciation.

Technically, had I completed the race without the SNAFU, I would have finished just shy of 50:00, which is the pace I had wanted for the race (~8:00/mile). Overall, I'm happy I ran the race (although I didn't know that Cary in French also means "rolling hills"), and now I have a funny story to go along with it.

Once I crossed the finish line the first time, my chip was deactivated. There was no way for them to score me the second time around, so instead of placing me in first place in the 10K run, they scored me in the 5K portion (47/133 runners). Hypothetically speaking, if they scored me in the 10K race, I would have been 29/101 runners, or 8/15 in my age group (20-29 male).

Wait a minute, in the 5K I scored 3rd place in my age division! Shoot, that meant I got a medal! Actually, had I just run the 5K race, I would have taken 2nd place! Damn it! I better e-mail Inside-Out sports to see if I can get my medal ...