Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Drive-by shootings and slasher films with singing

On Thursday I went to East Palo Alto for this new program at Bayshore Christian Ministries, a study hall for high school students with tutors. It was just me, the coordinator Buddy, and two kids who are going to extension school so that they can start going to a regular high school again.

Let's just say I've got to learn. The three of them seemed to speak a different language from me, all of them having grown up in EPA, and to top it off, when Buddy gave me a ride home and the kids were in the back, one of them got a call from a friend saying that someone named Jig had just gotten shot. We passed by the scene of the shooting, where there was broken glass everywhere. The three of them were calling all over the place to find out what Jig's real name was (apparently everyone knew him as Jig or Hooker), and then I was really thankful that Buddy had offered to drive me home.

Anyways, oddly enough, I suppose I should think drive-by shootings are just as sick as serial throat-slittings, since they, too, involve innocent people getting killed and lots of blood everywhere, but drive-by shootings just don't elicit the same reaction as the movie Sweeney Todd, which my sister lured me into watching with her and her PWR class in the Shoreline theater yesterday. Ugh! Music was good, cinematography was good, acting was good... but do we really have to see all the ways that human relationships can go horribly and murderously wrong? Well, I suppose once in a while. It was raining when we drove back, too, and it made me happy that even if everyone's evil at Stanford too, we're more motivated to hide it under career-driven hard work, socialization, and a modest level of sanity.