Tonight Jessica and I got coffee at The Mill, and then dropped in on Union's film class. Her dad teaches it, so that was okay. They were showing Tony Gilmore and Ryan Seale's documentary about the Korean comfort women--Behind Forgotten Eyes. I had heard so much about this film and the stories behind it in from them in Korea, but watching it was something else. I couldn't take my eyes away from it. It made me miss Korea, watching all the halmonees talk, hearing their accents and intonations, watching them sit, eat, and work; but it also made me ache for their history, and the history of women all over the world.

During WWII, the Japanese military took part in sexual slavery in "comfort stations" where women from all over Asia, but predominantly Korea, had been tricked to come or forcibly brought to "serve" the soldiers. These girls, for most of them were young girls, disappeared from their homes and families to be raped several times a day for years, as long as the war lasted.One of the women said, "This all happened to me because I was born a woman. I think of these things all the time."

The government of Japan has never formally acknowledged, apologized to, or compensated these women.

I realized how much there is that I don't know about the world, how much it enriches me to learn, even when the facts are atrocious, and how responsible I am to get involved. Sure, I just started helping support a child in Honduras, and I'm going to visit the Benton Harbor church to see if I can help out there. But I keep myself relatively sheltered from harsh reality, watching fun movies, reading fantasy novels, ignoring news on NPR to listen to trashy country songs. It's ironic, because I'm the "news editor" of the Student Movement, but I pay less attention to the news than I do to the gossip around the lunch table in the English Department.

So Jessica and I, as young single women, have decided to stop (well, not stop, but decrease) the flow of trash into our brains, and increase the flow of information that enables us to take action on something that matters.

Starting right after Desperate Housewives . . .

So today when I was gathering my laundry, I could only find one of the socks I wore yesterday. This didn't bother me too much; I figured it would get washed sometime. I threw my clothes in the washer, put my coat on, and headed over to Nethery.

On my way back to my car, I spied a sock in the parking lot, looking suspiciously like my sock, but filthy, like it had been driven over a few times. There was this yellow-haired old lady walking behind me, so I tried to check out the sock without looking like I was looking at it. But she saw me and chuckled. "Is that your sock?" she asked. "Oh, ha ha! No!" I tittered awkwardly. "Well, it's lost its mate!" she chirped out. I grimaced, got in my car, and drove away.

Later I came back to get the sock when no one was looking. It was mine after all.

I also bought a pair of plastic $1 shoes at Big Lots today--I think this is what rock bottom feels like.

When I'm driving long-distance, nothing keeps me awake like country music. I like to be interacting with what I'm listening to, i.e. singing along, but not bored by cds I've played a thousand times. Country music is a perfect fit--I can listen to a brand-new song, and still sing along with it. The words are always so predictable. I always thought country music was the final bastion of highly popular, readily understandable, completely asinine lyrics. Until Saturday night . . .

On Saturday night, a group of us went to Elkhart to hear Bebo Norman and Caedmon's Call perform. However, the first acts were bad enough to make me want to leave without hearing the main attractions. Geoff Moore, formerly of Geoff Moore and the Distance, began the show. He's this big guy who told loud, unfunny jokes, and sang in a loud, unfunny voice. At the end of his bit, John leaned over and said, "I know what we don't want Moore of."

Following him was a greasy-haired power-chorder whose main message was that "It's good to be alive." Well, yes, when you consider the alternative. Another one of his songs claimed, "If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then I am beholding true beauty." Is that supposed to be a compliment?

The third guy had one thing going for him--he was hot, but his one impressive song was a re-vamping of an old hymn. They were the only intelligent lyrics in his music; everything else rhymed "fears" with "tears," and "love" with "above": i.e., "You came from up above / and saved me with your precious love." It made me think of Precious Moments; the only things we apply that adjective to nowadays are puppies, babies, and (puzzlingly) Jesus.

This brings me to my main beef about contemporary Christian music today. First of all, only Christians listen to it. It has nothing to say to non-Christians. Why is that? Because we insist on using archaic language and imagery that doesn't resonate with mainstream society. Honestly, when is the last time, outside of a church setting, have you used the words "Lord," "Saviour," or "Master"? When is the last time you got excited about a "spotless lamb"? When was the last time you were giving props to a friend and called them "omnipotent"? And yet we sing repeated choruses praising God for being, basically, someone who is meaningless in our daily lives.

What's worse, we're dishonest. Songs like "My Saviour is Always There for Me" make God sound like a big teddy bear who we can cry to, or a journal we write all our secrets in. Where's the acknowledgement of the fact that even Christians feel lost, confused, and hurt a lot of the time?

Which is exactly why I love Caedmon's Call and Bebo Norman. They're honest, intellectual, and committed to making truly good music. When they finally came on stage together, after the abysmal opening acts, they made my heart skip a few beats. They started with Paul Simon's "Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes." Immediately I was smiling away all the pain caused by Geoff Moore and his cohorts. The rest of the music made that smile indelible, as they blended Biblical messages and social gospel with beats and instrumentals from across the world.

Caedmon's and Bebo's current tour highlights Compassion, International, an organization that assists poverty-stricken children in third-world countries. Compassion feeds and educates these kids, using local churches as outreach posts. It only costs $32 a month to sponsor a child. In the middle of the concert, Caedmon's Call and Bebo talked about the mission of Compassion and gave everyone a chance to sign up.

Maybe the most lasting part of the concert, aside from the CD I bought, was that John and I decided to sponsor a child. Her name is Yuri, and she's from Honduras.

My little sister Julie just called a guy up and asked him to hang out. She met him at the library this past week--he's four years older than she is and about to graduate from college. She said, "I thought, hey, what've I got to lose?" He said he'd call her back.

It kind of blows my mind that an eighteen-year-old girl who is supposedly an introvert would do that. Heck, I didn't ask my first guy out until I was a senior in college, and the first time I did, he said no. Said he didn't watch movies in the theaters, not even "Winged Migration." I didn't take the hint. I only gave up after I found out that he also didn't drink coffee. Loser.

But after that, I hit a two- or three-month winning streak. It was nice, feeling confident enough to ask someone out if I was interested in them, or even if I wasn't, just to prove that I could--just to take advantage of my singlehood and freedom of choice.

There's this book called The Rules. It basically advocates that men are born to chase, and if a man (introvert or not) isn't piqued enough by you to introduce himself and ask for your number, the relationship isn't going anywhere--not even if he says yes when you ask him. It tells women to be happy and busy; men will be interested if you are.

I mostly agree, but I also think there's something good about getting outside of your comfort zone and asking someone out, even if it only benefits your self-esteem. Julie said that a friend advised her to call this guy, but warned her that she'd "feel like an idiot afterwards." Well, she does. And I told her to get used to it--we spend much of our adult lives feeling like huge asses. We might as well get comfortable in our own skins now.

There's a Hole in my back yard--about a foot in diameter, and maybe three feet deep, sides slightly caving in as grass makes its slow-motion dive for the bottom. It seems to serve no purpose. When I first got here, The Hole was covered with a white bucket, which I thought was oh-so-tacky, but practical nonetheless. We wouldn't want someone to lose a leg, after all. But sometime in the course of this winter, the bucket disappeared. Maybe it melted.

I asked John to go dump a bowl of suspicious fruit salad in The Hole about a week ago. When he came back, he said that there was water in the bottom.

I dreamed a couple of weeks ago that I was out walking, and suddenly there was The Hole in front of me. In it was a small, half-used bottle of hair product. In my dream, I thought this was great and took the hair product--to use later, I suppose.

Today frost lays on the ground thick as a wool blanket, but more sparkly, and The Hole is steaming. I don't think it's part of our septic system--that's about fifteen feet away. Is it the fruit salad decomposing? Or does something live down there? Is it missing its hair product?