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.

Dance Marathon 2011: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was awesome, fun and incredible, it was painful, exhausting, and miserable; I was delirious, ecstatic and fidgety, every inch of my body was sore and I was living in a perpetual state of constant daydream, neither asleep nor awake. (open mic night subject will be continued eventually)

Have you ever actually read (the first two pages) of Tale of Two Cities?  That’s how Dickens actually does it; he makes his entire first page and a half into one long and painful paragraph/mega-sentence(IT’S THE AUSTRALIA OF SENTENCES/PARAGRAPHS)  /jumble of punctuated clauses.  (This is called anaphora!) (Not to mention hyperbole…)

(Australia is both a continent and a nation. This sentence was both a sentence and a paragraph. I apologize for any confusion.)

Imagine if my entire blog post consisted of four paragraphs with 120 words each, but each paragraph was just one sentence? (No, no, FIGHT THE URGE MICHAEL)  Maybe another time.   

Back to the “Australia of sentences/paragraphs” idea. (It merits a closer look) So Charles Dickens wrote the “Australia of sentences/paragraphs," but you could reverse it and say that Australia is the “Charles Dickens’ writing” of countries/continents.  What else does this imply? Is Charles Dickens’ writing made up of former British murderers, marginalized native people, and koala bears? (possibly.) Is Australia fueled by alcohol, vivid hallucinations, and raging anti-Semitism? (probably.) I think I might be making stuff up about Dickens. Luckily he’s not alive to press charges.

I don't remember any koala bears, but I've been wrong before.

  (Secondary thought about Dickens’ grammar: Charles was constantly fighting his English teachers as a child, pushing the limits of grammar and being shoved back down.  They said “Noooo, that doesn’t work”, “It can’t be done; those should be separate sentences”, “That’s not syntax, that’s horse$*!*”,etc. [Some of his teachers were more vulgar than others.] But Lil’ Charlie wouldn’t have it, he thought outside the box and couldn’t stand the teachers stifling him.  So Chuck won out in the end, and now the teachers have to teach HIS grammar to their new kids.  Let THEM make up terms to explain away Chuckie Dickens’ ridiculous contiguous run-on semicolon tirade) (These parentheses got a little extensive; figured I’d make them their own paragraph [Doesn’t that mean they shouldn’t even be in parentheses?])   (Maybe I should talk about Dance Marathon; goodbye for now Chaz.)

So if you don’t know what (UNC) Dance Marathon is, it’s essentially a huge fundraiser for the UNC Children’s Hospital that people raise money for throughout the school year, and it culminates with this huge dance marathon.  More than a thousand people stuff themselves into a couple of gymnasiums, and they refuse to sit down for 24 hours.  This includes hours and hours of dancing, many performances by random bands and acapella groups, an incredible glowstick rave, a few trips outside, and a lot of exhaustion.  This is the background information required to understand whatever I say after this. 

I've never felt more confused and lonely than I did in that huge crowd of people at 8 in the morning.

The general principle agreed upon by regular dancers at Dance Marathon(by which I mean me) is that one’s mood during the marathon gravitates towards one of two extremes.  You’re super excited and loopy and enjoying yourself dancing crazily, or you are tragically miserable and sore and you hate life.

The ‘hating-life’ extreme is a little more interesting to examine.  

It’s a weird experience, standing up for 24 hours, because you constantly have to battle your instincts.  Every time you enter a different room or go somewhere else, you immediately decide you want to sit down.  If you’re lucky, you catch yourself and remember that that’s not right.  If you don’t catch yourself, you get viciously attacked by the hundreds of other dancers. (people get rabid at 5 in the morning when they haven’t eaten since 1 and when the coffee people apparently had to go all the way to Colombia to find an open coffee shop [BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T JUST BUY BEANS IN BULK AND BREW IT HERE??])

We even danced when we were outside.

It would be especially unusual for anyone that stumbled upon us and didn’t know exactly what was going on. (People do the weirdest things to give their legs some relief. It's probably incredibly depressing to watch.)  I saw people sleeping face first on tables, attempting to crab-sit-in-place (like crab-walk but stationary), and I saw a huge number of people regularly leaning heavily on walls.  Sitting on your ankles was a common practice, and I even tried posting myself on a wall (in a sitting position against the wall even though there’s nothing beneath me) and holding a nearby table to give me extra support.

This is me being creative; I combined sitting on my ankles and crab-sitting-in-place.
If you look closely you'll notice that I have a baby mullet.

The most interesting part for me was near the end of the 24 hours.  This is when I’m literally delirious and fidgety and stuck in a half-conscious, half-dead state.  I would fall asleep standing up and topple over if I stood in one place for more than a minute.  I had to play it off as a random trust fall a couple times.  Some people are wandering around, some are watching the basketball game, some are dancing, and everyone is incapable of having a rational thought.

All in all: A traumatic and scarring experience.  I’d do it again.