I've got a campy attitude and a college-y schedule *or* I am far too silly and energetic for higher education *or* I've been back for a month and I'm already falling asleep in public places *or* It feels good to use contractions again *or* I may or may not have added a title to this post every time I attempted to write it *or* Randomly quirky yet altogether insightful thought about college life that piques your interest and makes you lean in towards the computer screen

Please bear with me, I’m still getting used to writing regularly and long-windedly again (Which is one of the key things you can blame for not seeing a post in the past onetwothreefourmany weeks)

I haven’t decided what I prefer yet: the constant stress of having eight kids I’m legally responsible for following me around everywhere I go, or the constant stress of having a huge pile of homework that seemingly never shrinks or disappears, no matter how hard I attack it.  They are very different types of strain. 

That part’s already hard to get used to, but what’s even weirder is that I’m still waking up smiling and energetic several hours earlier than I mean to be up.  This has its perks, but I really don’t want to wake up at 9 on Saturday morning.  I haven’t been able to communicate that to my circadian rhythm yet.  Of course another possible explanation for this is that our blinds spontaneously exploded last week, so I’ve had the sun shining brightly in through our huge windows every morning.  Essentially the sun is screaming at me to wake up. 

Now I’m going to abandon all segues and pretense and just talk about stuff I remember from camp. 

• ·         I remember during the first week of camp, my cabin’s name was “The Big Bad BUG SPRAY (blow torch) BARBARIANS”. I was lucky that I had kids who shared my undying love of alliteration.  I would say “TEEHEE ON THREE – ONE TWO THREE” and then all five of my middle school guys would giggle like preteen girls.

• ·         I carried around a koala bear puppet almost everywhere I went, at least for a few weeks.  His name was Koaly, and he was mine.  I had all of the kids and probably a few of the fellow counselors concerned for my mental stability.

• ·         I asked some campers what their favorite animals were, and these were their responses, in order of ascending ridiculosity: tiger, griffin, phoenix, and Ganondorf.  What followed was a week of competitive mythical animal/pokemon/video game villain one-upmanship.  All I had to do was award them a few hundred experience points every once in a while and they couldn’t possibly be happier. 

• ·         My campers and I were walking along a trail during nature camp week when I heard a scream and then buzzing filled my ears.  I looked down to see a swarm of yellow jackets.  Everywhere.  Mir, our resident nature expert, took control of the situation like a more limber, more coherent, more female Gandalf, and the rest of us ran.

• ·         I went on several day camps throughout the summer.  This means that every now and then I would spend a week away from the camp itself.  I would go with a small team of counselors to a church somewhere in North Carolina and live there for a week.  We would have camp from 9 to 3 every day, but the rest of the time we had free.  The most exciting thing about day camps was how exciting and unexpected they were; Each was a unique adventure unto itself. 

I’m abandoning the bullets.  It’s for your own good.

Early on in the summer, I went to Greensboro for a week to do a day camp there.  My three fellow Agape staff and I got to stay at the house of this really cute nice old couple.  They made us the most delicious food and kept offering us coffee and pie and soda and lemonade every five minutes while we were there and it was amazing. 

I was given their teenage boy’s old room, which of course meant that it was a huge basement covered in music posters and profanity.  One of my teammates, however, was given another big bedroom elsewhere in the house.  Shortly after we moved into our rooms, she came running down to the basement exclaiming, “MICHAEL I HAVE SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU!”

We quickly made our way back up to her room, and she brought me to the walk-in closet.  All over the closet were wonderful looking hand-made musical instruments.  Most of them were lap dulcimers, which look funny and sound cool.   I freaked out and subsequently lucked out because I got to play Amazing Grace on a beautiful mountain dulcimer like a wise old hillbilly mountain man who lives outside the stereotypes and acts like Gandalf except he’s more timid, more musical, and more redneck.  Not to mention he looks more like a goat.

One of the funniest things about staying with a family during a day camp is that they feel like they have to do way more than they really need to.  I’ll explain.  After spending 6 full hours running around and screaming and being super crazy hyper jumpy energetic with eight 9 year-old-kids, I am ready to lay down and read a line or two of Paradise Lost to lull my brain to sleep (my body follows suit rather quickly).  The rest of my teammates agree.  Host families, however, take it upon themselves to provide us with hours of entertainment and activity, when all we want is television and couches. 

Rapid fire story: We were going to go see a movie because supposedly it was really cheap.  The movie theatre was real sketch and in the middle of the woods and there was black tape covering up most of the sign.  There was a morbidly obese handicapped man doing donuts in his electric wheelchair in the parking lot.

While we were in line, a random man in jeans and a white t-shirt came by and took keys from the cashier.  Then the power went out while we were buying tickets.  The cashier shrugged and informed us that the electricity had in fact just disappeared from the building, but that it was alright because he was still getting paid.  Then a car of people drove up outside and some of the movie theatre employees went out and cursed at them.  Then they all came inside to sit around in the unpowered movie theatre.  That’s when we decided to leave.  Luckily the man outside the theatre still had electricity; otherwise his ability to continue doing donuts would have been greatly decreased.

I just spent weeks procrastinating the crap out of this blog. That's probably not the correct way to use those words, but I'm not particularly bothered by that.  I might overcompensate for this by being a little bit more unusual and flowy stream-of-consciousy than usual for a few weeks, but we shall see.  Ohhhhhh blogging.



One more thing that I must share with you.  There's this guy in Caribou Coffee right now who looks oh so cool.  He's got one of the those huge gray mustaches that covers up half of his unusually square face.  His beard is also impressive. It looks like he's drinking out of a hand-smelted stone coffee mug and he has a mac.  He's like Gandalf but more troll-like, more technology-proficient, and more hipsterish.