Filed under: Church
I survived the youth retreat.I don’t think I really thought I would say it that way… I mean I really liked youth retreats when I was a teenager. But for this one survival is the most appropriate word. Because this time I was one of the ones in charge. Which is an entirely different story. Playing the part of the one who keeps 5 teenage girls in their rooms instead of traipsing off in the middle of the night is a much different role than being one of the ones hanging out who just so happens to go to bed when asked. And my observation for the day about this whole thing is that for some reason teenagers assume that adults (meaning anyone more than 4 years older than they are) are fundamentally stupid. For some reason they seem to be under the assumption that within 4 years they will have had every brain cell sucked out of them. I spent a weekend thinking … Did you really think I was going to buy that line that you just fed me? And then in the same breath thinking….did I try this too when I was at the youth retreats I remember loving?I have to say though that I really like these guys…the whole lot of them even the talkative girls….they are amazing to watch grow and have loads of potential and are enormously hilarious. I love them and will miss them when we leave Vicenza. So the real aftermath of the youth retreat was that I’ll miss them …. and I got sick. I’ve definetly decided that having a fever while at a retreat with 20 teenagers is a bad plan and I don’t recomend it.
In the next week we are doing three different and rather (us) labor intensive things with the church here in Vicenza. It’s kind of like our last BIG hurrah before we go home (there will be lots of little hurrahs afterward I’m sure). There is a women’s day, a conference and last but not least a youth retreat.
What’s occupying my attention at the moment is the youth retreat. My job is come up with the games and intro icebreakers. The theme is love so we (matt and I) kind of decided coporately that the icebreaker was going to be literary analysis of pop songs that talk about the subject so as to discuss healthy and godly approaches to love vs. unhealthy and ungodly ones….. though I am not for the life of me going to come near saying the words literary or analysis at the retreat, that would be swift and unmerciful suicide. Without those two words added in though I’m kind of hoping it will go over alright. In order to do it though I am having to do research into the current popular songs in Italy.
AGGGGGG!
Ok so to do my research I figured the best way would be to watch All Music, the Italian Mtv alternative.
This morning…..found lots of infomercials …… and they were all the same infomercial! I don’t know if they have them in the US right now but apparently the only infomercial on Italian television right now is the wiggly butt infomercial. Seriously the whole time the infomercial is going the screen is full of butts, old people butts, female model butts, male model butts, the salesmens butt and they are all wiggling, constantly! The machine is supposed to be a exercise thingy I think but, what it seems to do most effectively is make one do a very exagerated maybe fastforwarded version of the twist or something that makes every fat molecule that you have jiggle kind of softly but, rapidly.
After getting far to ingrossed in butt jiggling I finally managed to resist my morbid fascination and change the channel…ok so now I have All Music I think… but wait …. is this really a music video? A four minute music video completely made up of bad camcorder footage of a guys studio focusing most frequently on the number of nobs are on his sound boards! Next video…now I’m watching guy that dances like my husband when he’s making fun of people who can’t dance and this guy is doing it in all seriousness and he can’t even seem to clap to the beat of his own song!
So about this point I give up on the television at least for the morning and go to computer to look up the top ten list in Italy to see if there are any Italian language songs or even English songs of the simple kind that do not have metaphor or double entendre I would have to explain for the kids to know what it means… (for that reason I’m sorry but, I can’t use “Shut up and Drive”? … just learned of the songs existence today by the way… because who really wants to explain the metaphor of a car for a women’s body to a bunch of teenagers …. don’t want to go there. As an aside: this is a major problem. The other day we went to one of the 8 year old girls from the churches ballet recital, she and her class of all 7 and 8 year old girls pranced around to the tune of “I’m a Barbie Girl in a Barbie World”. I’m sorry but there is just a multitude of wrongness there. Who really wants to explain to their parents what it really means.)
Ok so I got back to the search to discover…… Number One on the charts…… Eros Ramozzotti “Non Siamo Soli” or We’re Not Alone and guess who got onto the video? None other than Ricky Martin! He somehow managed to come back from pop star death to feature prominently in a top charting Italian song. By this time I’m really doubting my capacity to continue the search. But I will trudge forward through the multitude of 80s bands (including the Pooh, which I swear were all wearing tupeés at there concert though I guess the video could have been playing with the light) to find the perfect songs.
