I love a rainy night

It's raining cats and dogs out there - it's running down the streets in rivers, soaking your hair even with an umbrella. I saw some students camped out on the main lawn of the campus with tents. None of them seemed to be in the tents, though, most were standing next to them holding umbrellas. A student with a bandana in her hair was videotaping the event for posterity, or the news, while two other students held up umbrellas over her camera.

It reminded me of the night our campus Habitat for Humanity group slept outside in cardboard boxes to raise awareness for sub-standard housing. We got all these cardboard boxes, and slept out near the fountain in the middle of campus. I had a major music history test the next day, and I was trying to study by flashlight, though it wasn't terribly effective. At around 2 am I gave up and tried to sleep. However, at 3 am, it started raining REALLY hard. Within minutes, our refrigerator boxes soaked through and collapsed on us, and we had to go back to our dorms.

Just a random memory. I wish I would have been active in more political causes in college, even though Habitat for Humanity was a great cause. I'm starting to see how advocating for the poor through politics can be as helpful as helping them build their house. I hope these kids, whatever the cause was that moved them to sleep out in the rain, don't become corporate slaves like the rest of us.

From hate to righteous anger

Today I went to worship with the college kiddies, and practiced to do some singing with my roommate Jessica accompanying. It was fun, and so was the service. My friend Paul delivered an excellent sermon, and the music was good too.

At the end of every service, the minister asks for people to share their "joys and concerns." Many of the kids share; they talk about sick relatives, stories on the news, tests they passed or failed, something beautiful they saw on the way to work, anything that has recently touched or troubled them.

I wanted to share a concern about the recent alleged rape at Duke University (Remember as you read this, that no trial has taken place yet, and the story may prove to be false). It's all over the news; people are talking about the culture of college sports, and how it may breed frightening behavior (they sited the fact that campus tours are often given to prospective athletes by attractive young women, with the undertone - "all this will be yours") I don't know if that's true, or not, but the news report suggested that rape by college and professional athletes is becoming more and more commonplace.

What bothered me most, though, were the details of this crime. In this particularly grisly situation, an exotic dancer was allegedly raped by three men at a party for a lacrosse team.

I couldn't help but think that such a party has become a popular fantasy for young men in our culture. In rap videos, scantily clad dancers entertain the rich rappers, calling themselves "pimps". It's become so pervasive that people make fun of it, though I still say that a "pimp and ho" party is NOT funny. Prostitution and the people who use it to prey on others should not be glorified or laughed at. (Are we having plantation owner and slave parties? No we are not. Nazi and Holocaust victim parties? Call oppression what it is.)Creepiest of all, there is a LOT of so-called "gang bang" porn out there on the internet. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people fantasize about sex with more than one person. But why do so many men like to watch the simulated brutalization of one woman by many men?

All the thoughts I had were just so hopeless and angry, as I thought about the state of our world, and hopelessness is one thing the kids at the group never express. "My friend Sally committed suicide last week. I ask for your prayers for her family, that they might come to some kind of healing." It's that kind of heart-wrenching, light-coming-through-tiniest-of-spaces hope that fills everything they say. I struggled for a way to phrase my concern in a way that would honor the kind of positive community these kids have built.

Then I remembered the very end of the news story. The police will have more evidence in a few days, when the results of a DNA test come back. A DNA test means that this young woman went to the police shortly after her ordeal.

Even though she was at the party as an exotic dancer, and may have thought no one would believe her, she stepped forward.

In one of my favorite movies, Thelma and Louise go on the run from the law because they don't think anyone will believe that Thelma was raped before Louise shot the man. Louise says to her, "Do you think anyone is going to believe you? Everybody in there saw you dancing with him all night! Do you think we live in that kind of a world, Thelma?"

The kind of world we live in is changing; in some ways, for the better.

more old-ass movies you should see

Being poor, I rent movies from the public library. My recent finds:

The Festival in Cannes - I love Anouk Aimee. She's so subtle - she turned a part that could have been so straightforward and sad into something multi-textured and real. She's also amazing in a small part in "Ready to Wear", an Altman movie. Speaking of Altman, see "The Company" immediately (yes, Neve Campbell is in it. Rent it anyway, especially if you like dance.)

Bowling for Columbine - Michael Moore is an ass. An ass with a point. The look on the 2 Columbine kids' faces when they got K-Mart to stop selling bullets is priceless. Another high point - Moore interviews Charlton Heston, and asks him why there is so much gun violence in America. He says, "well, there's so many different ethnicities...." Moore goes on to piss him off so bad that he leaves. I'm not sure why he felt the need though - Heston was hanging himself as it was. (Yeah, I know everybody already saw this movie.)

Tales of a Half-Hearted War Protester

Yesterday I went to an anti-war protest downtown. It was supposed to culminate in a silent walk to a congressman’s office to give him a petition against continuing the war. That sounded good to me, but when I got there, and read over the petition, I couldn’t sign it. I just sat there, holding it, reading it, while the lady who was passing me around waited. Finally I just gave it back to her. It said something like, “We ask the congressman to use his power to stop the war, by voting against all war funding.” Maybe that’s the best way to voice dissent – if congress doesn’t vote for its funding, how can a war continue? Still, it was a lot to ask of him, politically and personally. I can imagine the congressman wrestling with his conscience – denying adequate supplies to the troops on the field might seem a poor way to make a point.

A folk singer offered a few anti-war songs, one of which had a refrain in which the crowd would respond, “It was a lie! It wasn’t true!”

Yeah, it was a lie. It wasn’t true. But now we’re there, in a huge way. There’s an enormous, complicated mess, and we’re involved in it on every level. If we pull out, it could predicate an enormous civil war, complete with ethnic cleansing. The same thing could happen if we stay. I agree with Jessica Mathews, on Charlie Rose’s extremely informative show about the war ( you can watch in online: http://www.charlierose.com/index.shtm.)
who believes that no matter what we choose the outcome will be more or less tragic. Does that mean we try to leave now? Does it mean we make a long-term commitment to the Iraquis, and continue to ignore our commitment to the poor here at home (a la Katrina)? How do we find that “less tragic” outcome, and how do we know we’ve had success, when we already know that success will be limited, at best?

The problem is, no matter what action is taken, we know it will be taken by a hawkish administration that has trouble learning from the past, even a past full of its own mistakes. And we’ve got several more years with those folks in charge.

I don’t want to stand up and yell. I want to sit down and cry.

I’m not angry, I’m scared. I’m more scared about security, peace and freedom in the world than I was right after 9-11. I know I can’t sit on my hands and pretend it isn’t happening, but I don’t want to march around downtown with people whose “not one more day” mantra sounds just as simplistic as “stay the course”.

I do, however, want to find a way to wage peace. I’m less concerned with the exact day we plan to leave, but that we plan to do so. I’m less concerned as to how many posts we have in Iraq, as I am that they inflict as little violence upon the people as possible.
Before the war began, we anti-war folk said it would become a Vietnam-like quagmire, which would destabilize the region, fire up ethnic tensions, and make terrorism more likely to spread. We said it would sap our defenses from areas where they are more desperately needed.

We were right, and it sucks. I don’t feel like gloating for a second.

Now the case for stopping the war is much less clean-cut than it was, full of moral dilemmas. But I think the case is still there. Most importantly, we have to find a way to have hope, but we cannot hope that we’ll leave this region better off than it was. I think that is completely and hopelessly delusional. Maybe someday the Iraquis will build a peaceful democratic nation, but I expect a great deal of chaos to ensue before that happens. And I think it might lessen the chaos if the U.S. was not such a huge presence, trying to make things happen according to our interests, not necessarily theirs.

THAT is the message I want to impart, not just "Bush stinks" (even though I think he does).

I’m not sure how we can fix Iraq. I do know that we have to vote for thoughtful leaders who can dive into this mess and find some solutions.

"You are not what you own"

...is the graffitti message written on the railroad bridge across the Iowa River. Maybe because it was 6:30 am, maybe because I was in a contemplative mood, maybe because the constant motion of the river seemed to echo the sentiment, but it seemed to me the most profound sentence I'd seen in a long time. I've looked it up on the internet, and so far, all I can find is that it's a quote that was written on a popular T-shirt for the band Fugazi. But to me it was more than a statement against popular materialist culture , it was a call to look at what's really important. It was about more than letting go of dependence on material goods, but "things" of all sorts - job titles, accomplishments, how many friends you have, how many dates you've been on, anything that could be attached to your name.

Because in the end, all we are is the dark brown earth along the riverbank. Not just metaphorically, but literally, we turn into dirt. I don’t mean that to sound depressing, because I don’t think it is – the earth feeds the life that grows all around the river. But the earth doesn’t own anything, and neither do we.

torn

I'm very torn between two sets of values:

I want to get a lame-ass day job that I don't care about to pay my bills and generally take care of my needs, so I can work on my more creative stuff freely. However, this seems to cause me to pick jobs that i don't care about very much, so that I can slack off while I'm there, to save energy for my creative work, which I believe is deeply important. However, I also believe that if you are hired to do a job, you should try to do well, because you affect so many people around you. If you dont' do your work well, if affects customers, co-workers, etc. If you do the best possible job you can, even if it's not what you truly love and feel you need to do, you can provide an valuable contribution to the world. For many people, this is all they need to do.

For me, it isn't. I have to be doing something extraordinary, as a friend put it. But doing something extraordinary does not pay. How can I give my all to two pursuits? Jesus said that a man cannot serve two masters. The job I have right now is very conducive to my creative pursuits - I can slack off much of the day, and have a lot of energy to work at night. But the work itself is so boring, and I do it so badly, that I feel I'm not doing anybody any good by being there. I figure someone is going to eventually yell at me for surfing the internet, or doing sloppy work, and I'll feel awful. I do NOT like to fail.

So I'm starting a new job, but who knows what kind of path it will take me down? I'll have to learn the ropes, and that means energy and concentration, energy taken away from my more "important" pursuits. Also I get this creepy Republican vibe from the people I work with, and I gotta say, I really hate working with conservatives. I mean, they often run an efficient workplace (my current job seems to employ a lot of liberal academic types, which I enjoy, but it's soooo frustratingly inefficient). The last time I worked with people like that, who made racist or sexist jokes, I felt so uncomfortable that I wanted to quit every morning.

Oh well. If I don't like it I can quit. I wish I had enough money saved that I could say that in bold or italics.

God bless teachers

I had this half-assed idea recently that I was going to try to enter the Baltimore teaching residency, and get my teaching certificate by teaching in an inner-city school. The website made it sound really cool - you're making a difference in the world while furthering your career, yada yada yada. I realized that first-hand (non-program-subsidized) opinions from actual teachers might be a little less rosy, so I checked out some blogs written by some Teach for America teachers in Baltimore and other urban areas. Here's a few of them:

http://profeclark.blogspot.com/

http://mccantsium.blogspot.com/

http://paralysisthroughanalysis.blogspot.com/

and if you want to read a more depressing one from someone who's completely given up:

http://solidarityinmediocrity.blogspot.com/


Wow. I was so humbled by reading these teachers' experiences. I mean, I complain about trying to find a church with the perfect service, and find the perfect job, and here are some people with some real problems (finding real solutions!!). I was also a little envious - they're seriously doing some of the most real, world-changing work you could do. Not so envious that I signed up, though.

Dreamin

I went to bed at around 8 last night, which caused me to dream for hours. I dreamed that I had a new choir director job, where I worked with a larger choir than I had before. I wasn't prepared for the rehearsal at all, and tried to fake it, but after a while it became obvious that I hadn't even decided on which pieces we were going to do. Most of the ones I had in front of me were for Christmas, but I needed several "general use" anthems for the next weeks coming up. The worst part of the dream was that my mom was in the choir, and she kept making "helpful" suggestions while I was trying to go through the music quickly and decide what we were going to do next. Have you ever read the Vonnegut short story, "Harrison Bergeron"? It's set in a grim future where the government has reduced everyone to the same low level, to promote equality (is Vonnegut a libertarian? Sounds like a libertarian theme, doesn't it). Anyway, the one character is very smart, so he has to wear a pair of earphones that blast loud noises in his ears every few minutes, so that he can't ever put together a coherant thought. That was what the mother-suggestions were like - every time I started to get a plan together in my head, she was like, "honey, shouldn't you suggest something soon? The choir members are getting antsy."

This is one of my pet peeves, this intrusion upon the thinking process - I went to a dance class once, where I was slowly but surely putting together a concept of the dance, even though I was screwing up a lot, when the instructor noticed the problems I was having and came over to stand beside me and help. I was so mortified because then everybody began staring at me (since they were watching the instructor), and I couldn't concentrate a whit. If he left me alone, I would have danced horribly for another hour, but later been able to do the dance in my sleep. It's just how I am. Sometimes I feel like I operate in a totally different way than most people, like I'm swimming in this molasses-slow, deep comprehension mode, while everyone else is moving quickly across the surface. When I start thinking about how I look to people, which is generally pretty strange, I totally lose track of what I'm doing and start to screw up royally. That's one reason I'm scared of working in a larger church (or a church at all); I'm scared to be judged, since it's such a public role. I'm afraid people will look at me and say, "that skirt's too short for a church choir director", or "she hasn't organized things well enough this year, she's so loopy!" It's not so much that I care what other people think, it's that the observation is so distracting that it causes me to trip up. It's also the reason I hate to live with other people, they see the unfinished product, the halfway-point of my process. I tend to watch tv or get on the computer for 2 hours, then suddenly attack my current project with ferocity, and get it done well and quickly. It's what people with ADD call "hyperfocusing". The problem, of course, is that sometimes I never get to the work part at all, so not everybody believes that I really need to do things this way.

Awarded:

Best random unrelated line in a song since "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio" in "Mrs. Robinson":

"That fake Jamacian took every last dime with that scam" - in "Float On" by Modest Mouse
(I assume they refer to Miss Cleo?)

I believe in a better way...

About the only thing keeping me going this morning is having Ben Harper's newest, "I believe in a better way" running through my head. The bass line alone could keep a frail heart beating.