owen is coming

Yesterday my grandparents and my father were all out of town so Lauren, Mom and I had a quintessential girl day. We got haircuts, went to costco, visited a particularly uncaring, alcoholic relative who knows right around nothing about us besides our birthdays and rewarded ourselves with ice cream for doing the right thing and stopping rather than speeding away from town, shopped at costco and bought a table picnic for ourselves, and then watched all five hours of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, which was greatly adored by all. Yes, Mark Darcy is the knight in shining armor for women of all ages and it is no mistake. Raise your hand if you are in love with Mark Darcy. yes, i see you back there, the lady with no teeth and the ten year old in the front, i see you too.

so i got a new haircut. it looks vaguely like my other haircuts, but edgier, since I am finally in america where i trust hairdressers to try and make a style of my own design and trust that they will not interpret that their own way by making it into a mullet or shaving it into some flyaway ostrich hair atrocity that looks intentionally like you have a head full of split ends when you walk out the door.

yesterday morning, before we started our adventures I put in two new job applications and submitted an essay for the iris chang memorial scholarship. i have a lot more thoughts about the rape of nanjing than i knew before i wrote the essay. anyway, having to relive the gruesome atrocities of the japanese against the chinese was an interesting lesson. that kind of incident, which frankly you should not be able to say the name of without a measure of wincing or pain, much like the Nazi holocaust, makes me understand why forgiveness is so hard and how we can have these national tensions that go back hundreds of years and which, by the constant cycle of vengeance have more and more hurts contantly heaped upon their backs. if you ever have a friend who likes horror, have them read the book Rape of Nanking by iris chang. it's not only historical, it chronicles the extent of the evil and cruelty humans can inflict upon each other. a major downer though. teh author ended up killing herslef later on. i don't really know why, i think the paper said she had suffered from depression and i said, indeed, if i had no faith or hope in redemption and had delved into researching basically the worst evil humans can do to each other, i would probably kill myself too. i mean, how do you repeair those kinds of atrocities. what is a sufficient apology? what is the correct payment for a life digraced?
yeah, there are two spellings for nanjing. she uses nanking. i use nanjing because of my unswerving devotion to pinyin.

i have been reading Eugene Peterson's updated translation of the Bible entitled The Message and I like it quite a lot. It reads like a novel in most places. Of course his idea of vernacular and my idea of vernacular are not exactly the same, but it's infinitely better than most translations, like the KJV which can be lovely and poetic, but as far as deep inspiration, most people can't get their heads past the language, so the point is moot. And then of course there are the versions that use patriarchal phrasing and force me incessantly to remind myself that when it says him it means "them" and brothers it means "brothers and sisters" so I can apply teachings to myself. this is remedied in the NRSV which i generally use. yesterday at the montana costco they had a bunch of new stylish Bibles. hysterical. very small and with adorable carrying cases. I didn't buy one b/c I have enough Bibles lying around, really. still, way to move with the times, marketing people of the NIV. if it had been the TNIV I would have bought it, though.

the right wing slant of the book selection at costco was a bit disturbing. there was some ann coulter book, and an anti hillary clinton book endorsed by rush limbaugh. it scares me that people read that kind of crap on both sides of the political spectrum, frankly. it dehumanizes people and makes them into symbols for ideas, when they are only flesh and blood. suddenly a person becomes evil and you find the sweetest people in the world, who sacrifice for their families and take care of the elderly, turning into barking, ignorant lunatics when it comes to politics. terribly unfortunate.

corinne and owen arrive today for a week stay. i am very excited to see owen take in the natural wonder of monatana. he has never seen forests and mountains and lawns this big in his little life! i wonder if we can take him up to see a snow field. it's his first ride on a plane and from the report of the first half of the flight, he did very well, no crying. i think corinne's natural optimism has probably already affected him. she can make almost anything fun, and her lack of worry probably sets him at ease.

the other day my whole family mowed the lawn together. it was hysterical. i was trying to do it to help my father who wanted to do it to help my grandparents but got bogged down by work and a presentation he had to make to a bunch of CPAs. snooze. when he taught me, then my mom came out to help and so did lauren. i won't lie and say it was perfect, it's a lot like vacuuming and we had a lot of little mohawk parts of the lawn we had to go over, so the pattern was a little suspect. It was however, great fun and hilarious to pass each line over to another person.
corinne is here. owen is here! must go.