Myung asked me to run and keep track on an iPhone app to encourage him to run and keep him accountable. I told him that I would be willing to walk. So I started walking home from work. It's a long way, but it's pleasant as long as the weather is pleasant. During one of these walks I took some pictures and messed around with them on a photography app.

When Joey and Harry mentioned having an outing at the beach, I was not unreasonably skeptical. It sounded like just another one of Joey's the-lady-at-my-dry-cleaners-told-me-about-this-church-with-twelve-single-girls plans. Those usually turn into sixteen, then fifty, then a puff of smoke.

But they proved me wrong. Yesterday was a touch over eighty degrees, sunny with a slight cool breeze, the lake water warm from a summer of boiling, and altogether just absolutely perfect. We had bratwurst, spicy pork, buns, mustard, soda, water, a football, a frisbee, and the most relaxing and fun Bethel outing that I can remember.

If that wasn't enough, I had a chance to talk to Anson for a bit about how things were going for him. Initially I thought it might have been a bad idea because it was clear that it was still very painful for him. Of course, why wouldn't it be? But he was honest and open and soon enough the other guys had strolled over and we were joking around about various schemes to bring girls to church.

Near day's end I was standing at the water's edge watching a group of Bethel people splashing out in the deep. The waves lapped at my legs and I thought about my church family, each one flawed, fighting the current that pulls us back, weighed down by our mistakes, but leaning back, letting go, and floating out to where heaven meets earth.

There seems to be a problem with writing Koreans. I just finished the second pleasure read of my research years, Super Sad True Love Story, which was not particularly super, I guess sad in a way (namely the parts that were true) and somewhat lurvely, but absolutely, positively not a porn star. I mean, a communist.

I mean, it was about a late-thirties Russian Jewish man looking for love from a physically and emotionally abused early-twenties Korean-American woman (at least about as much as The Great Gatsby was about a dirty nouveau-riche/pure old flame looking for love from a delicate fleur, only minus the unnecessary pseudo-French and written in Cerulean Satire crayon). Besides the annoying decision to narrate the story in alternating diary/e-mail/IM pattern without actually committing the effort to live by the limitations and idiosyncrasies of those formats, my main problem was that the female love interest was Korean-American. It's difficult to write Korean-American well. He does what he can, and it felt like it came from a combination of personal experience and Korean-American assistance (not really a good idea), which helped to at least make it sound authentic. The problem is that authentic Korean-American sounds like some horrific collaboration between a white (whiter?) Black Eyed Peas featuring Justin Timberlake and Michael W. Smith circa 1990 (or for Floridians, 2001), backmasking 2 Live Crew (How old am I? Why do you ask?). And, I guess Confucius. Personally, I think he should have gone with a South Asian love interest, but I suppose he should write what he knows.

Then there is the problem with writing Koreans. Here and there I've been reading Grantland, Bill Simmons and gang's sports/entertainment writing venture, and I've noticed at least one Korean-American among the mostly lackluster bunch (if I see one more post breaking down a YouTube clip or assigning a point system to the lowest common denominator without actual good writing in it, I swear). I don't like disparaging the work of a fellow brother, but I've found most of his writing to be fairly derivative, which, on that site, means that he's writing(/living) like a white man. American dream, you go. Except I'm not writing about any of them. So I looked him up. He is a Korean-American fiction writer who received an M.F.A. from Columbia, is currently living in San Francisco, made his name writing about his gambling addiction, and has written his first novel about a frustrated young writer with an M.F.A. who wanders through the plots of San Francisco. I'm not going to read this.

What I should do, especially now that I have more time, is put my six-figure debt where my mouth is and write something myself. I'm thinking maybe something about a black man studying architecture in Panama. It will give me the chance to write what I don't know, center the plot twist around a palindrome, and throw my writing at the mercy of the adoring public. My pseudonym, of course, will be Ben Caspian Dover.