I'll show you stream-of-consciousness.

I’ve been having a really hard time finding time to write, so I decided I would try cutting out different parts of the writing process to expedite my work. Planning and preparation were never really part of my process, so that wasn’t an option.  I decided I could live without editing or careful use of punctuation; or clear transitionsThis post is about random things in my life (that I hope you enjoy) hearing about.

When I started out this semester music theory began to suck out my soul.  What should’ve been happy and easy “I’m-studying-for-class-with-music-*excitement*” time instead became horrible horrible “Oh my lord it’s 3 am and I’m only half-way through this workbook assignment filled with things that I only have a vague perception of how to do” time.

I was not a happy camper. (Which is a paradox because ALL CAMPERS ARE HAPPY. Or at least that’s what I’d tell them when they weren’t smiling enough. The campers I mean. Although I didn’t actually do that. I promise. I wanted to put an exclamation mark (on the ALL CAMPERS ARE HAPPY) but it wasn’t quite necessary. What was necessary was a very emphatic period. 

Back to music and my struggling with intense workbook stuff.

Luckily things got somewhat easier later on, although my music ear-training class is still very frustrating, especially for everyone who’s nearby when I study. (I loop obnoxious simple classical melodies and play them loudly, I’m constantly singing nonsense syllables like le or re, and sometimes I spend 20 minutes droning on in a monotone, saying something like “tatatatata,tatata,tatata,tatatatatata,tataata,tataataaa,taaaa,tatatatatatatatatatatatata,tatataa, tatataa,tataatataatataaa, tataataaataataatata,tatatatatatata,tataaaa,taaatatataaa,taatataataa.”     

 (Those sixteenth notes with ties will get you if you’re not careful)

It gets pretty bad.

I was super excited when I started my English class this semester too.  My teacher is one of those quirky old guys who speak Old English fluently (not as simple as it sounds [AND IT SOUNDS SO COOL]) and he has really bad vision so he has to look at everyone with crazy eyes.  When I walk into the room slightly late he stops and stares at me and his face scrunches and his eyes get so big that all the characters from the Canterbury Tales could go for a swim together in them. It comes off really intimidating but he’s only trying to see me.

My Creative Writing class is nice because one way or another it stirs my creative juices.  Even if I’m not paying the least attention in class, I’ll be staring down other people in class and getting inspired by their confused and scared looks. I’ll write down all kinds of random thoughts and ideas, from a question about why humans feel the need to endlessly judge and categorize their fellow man to a tirade against my fellow classmate’s vocabulary choices. (THE WORD YOU WANT IS DIALECT, NOT VERNACULAR!!!)

I’m also taking news writing, which is weird because every day I write about dead people and felons that don’t really exist.

 I’ve learned a lot in that class though. For example, without my News Writing class I would never know that all criminals come from Mebane. And that people being hit by trains make for great news. Especially when they fly through the air.  

Another plus is that now I’ve memorized the names of all of the law enforcement officials and attorneys in key positions in Orange County. I also know by heart the street address of every large funeral home in the area. Slightly morbid, but useful nonetheless.

New life philosophy = There’ll be plenty of time to punctuate correctly when I’m dead. (parallel: No one ever laid on their deathbed saying “I wish I had been more careful with my syntax”) 

Full comprehension and clear communication are my only ideals. (That’s a lie.) (And I think they mean the same thing.)

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the right kind of mood to be writing right now, but then I stop thinking.

I don’t hear the word “punctuate” used very often.  That’s a cool verb.  Let us explore its uses.

“Let us be careful to punctuate our briefs meticulously, we don’t want the readers’ experience to be punctuated with brief bouts of confusion. I’d like to be brief but I can’t punctuate that enough. It might upset the reader to the point that they would briefly wish to punctuate our shins with brief periodical kicks or punctuate our briefs with sharp objects.” (I was reaching a little bit for a few of those. That last one was probably supposed to be “puncture”) 

I’m also taking a class on the Old Testament of the Bible. (But the term “Old Testament” is ethnocentric and biased just like “New World” or “prehistory” or “world religion” or “paganism” or “immigrant” or “possession, demonic or otherwise, is a primitive and irrational concept incompatible with modern bases of knowledge.”) Got a little bit off topic there. Sorry.

So instead we call it the Hebrew Bible. It sounds like a really cool class, but there’s a few flaws.  First of all there’s a lot of repetition in the Hebrew Bible. The Prophets, which sound at first like they’re going to be crazy and awesome and you’re going to find an ancient Israelite prediction of the world ending in 2012. (I’m going to start calling 2012 the Mayan Apocalypse. Because that makes it kind of funny to me.) Oh I’m terribly sorry – that last non-parenthetical sentence did not contain a single independent clause.  

 The Prophets sound interesting, but it turns out that (for the most part) they’re just pages upon pages of metaphors and parables explaining how Israel has behaved really really badly and they really really deserve everything they’re getting.

Disclaimer: It’s actually really interesting to me. But not exactly what I expected

.

The main problem with the class is that the teacher is very concerned with organizing things and thinking about thinking about things. We spend the majority of each lecture talking about how the lecture is going to be organized and about how we are going to look at the things he has organized.  Then if we have any time left and no one has any questions, we sometimes spend some time looking at the material. 

He is also not very blunt. He doesn’t want us to take notes because the powerpoints are on his website and he wants us to listen to his words, but he tells us this in a very ineffective wishy-washy way. He also very ineffectively told us that we don’t need to do the readings or prepare for tests very much or put any real amount of effort into journals, but I don’t really understand why. (Although the readings *are* humongous.) (And the tests *are* incredibly easy) (And the journals *are* a joke of a weekly assignment) 

Disclaimer: These things I speak are true but I enjoy the class nonetheless.

Now I’m going to try to do some more music homework before my computer dies. Tell me how the lack of punctuation or any sort of practical mental filter worked out.  

I WENT CAMPING OVER FALL BREAK.

Details and beautiful pictures coming soon.

It's Been About a Month, and What Do I Have To Show For It? Well I Certainly Haven't Memorized The Rules For Capitalizing Titles Yet. CAMPINGCAMPINGCAMPING

If my blog is a friend of mine who I can only communicate with using the interweb, then I have horribly neglected him/her – Wait, it’s been a year and I haven’t settled on a gender identity for my blog? WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING!?

If my blog requires an identity of its own, it will be a male dachshund.  Mixed with a golden retriever.  A neutered one.  

This reminds me of what I've been doing in my religion class studying the Hebrew Bible.  We've been talking about how the ancient Israelites perceived identity.  How would they have felt about my impotent mutt of a blog?  That's a great question.  Food for thought.

Now that that’s over with, let us move on.

So what have I been doing with my life for the last month?  Well in case I haven’t mentioned it enough, I’m back at UNC!  So of course my life has necessarily included some work.   There are two pieces of this work that I’d like to highlight here.  As I’m currently feeling conventional, I’ll begin with the first one.

A little bit of my life has been figured out.  A puzzle piece of insight has been found beneath the colorful yet stained and flimsy card table of my current reality and added to the sporadically decorated and oddly colored billion piece jigsaw puzzle that is my future.  In the puzzle so far I’ve put together some people and piles of paper and what looks like a labradoodle that tripped and fell into a vat of tie-dye.  I would have the border pieces figured out already but the puzzle appears to create no coherent shape that I ever learned about in Geometry and the box includes no picture; it is covered in heckles and taunts and all it contains is what appears to be a treasure map covered in hieroglyphs.  At this moment in time it is unclear whether or not the treasure map is in fact related to the puzzle itself or if the pieces have just been randomly scattered and the map is only another taunt. 

Proverbial.  I feel like that word fits in there somehow but I don’t want to go back and see where.  Edit it in with your eyes please. Also I’m pretty sure I had a solid reason for using the passive voice at the beginning of that last paragraph, but I got lost.  So did it.

Implied subtextual life-plan in that rambling abstract illustration of a paragraph: I want to write words and pick words and fix words and read words.  And hopefully get paid.

My second piece of work: Some very indepth independent research I’ve been doing into a very significant and pertinent subject.  That will not be revealed until the time that my next blog post is written and revealed.

I'M GOING CAMPING! TOMORROW!  This seemed more important than sharing my first class scientific research. I will be spending several days out in the beautiful wilderness of nature. Once I have returned I shall tell of my experience.  It shall be glorious.

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.

I Wonder What This Post Is Gonna Be About? I'm Riveted in Curiosity. With Curiosity? Huh. Curious.

I originally planned to write a blog post for each week of this summer spent at camp.  As you can tell, however, I didn’t.  This proved infeasible and time-consuming.  Instead, I have decided just to write several blogs on the subject without specific attention to particular subdivisions of the summer.  In other words, I’m going to just write a couple of posts that will cover the events of the summer, but the topic for each will probably span the entire summer.  In other words, I’m just going to ramble about camp on my blog until I get tired of talking about it.  In other words, my writing style is not going to change in the least from its regularly discursive and long-winded manner.  ‘Discursive’ as it was just used there isn’t really necessary or significant, but it sounded cool.

So I still have a week and three days before I leave camp and return to reality.  Three or four days after that I will return to the unreal and non-rational but simultaneously extremely rational non-reality that is life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  I’m starting to look at my three homes like separate but metaphysically religiously philosophically related theoretical relative dimensions (That is far too many adverbs.  I apologize; bear with me).  Camp Agape is the *non-real* world, my ‘Home’ home in Raleigh is the *real* world, and UNC is the *really real* world.  If you’re confused, don’t worry.  Those adjectives don’t mean much of anything, besides that I’ve been reading a lot of dense stuff that I don’t really understand.

My point…  My point has been sidetracked.  My point was going to be that I am very much adjusted to life at Camp Agape.  Life at Camp Agape as a counselor is radically different from life at home in Raleigh, which in turn is rather different from life at UNC.  Camp Agape and Chapel Hill are different in very different ways, however, which is why I kind of set them as opposite poles in the previous outlandish paragraph. 

The point I am attempting to make with all of these haphazardly explained points is that within one week of time I will be forced to adjust from one reality to the next and on to the next.  However, I’m not worried about having a mental breakdown or being overwhelmed or suddenly losing my identity or coming down with a really weird, mental version of the bends.  What I’m concerned about is acting extremely and unexpectedly unusual.  Although when I put it that way I feel silly about actually being concerned.  It may be a year too late if I don’t want to be seen as *unusual* at UNC.  Then again *unusual* is a pretty common thing there, so what does normal really mean?  But that’s neither here nor there.  (Experiment: I’m going to paraphrase that cliché.  Data: “But that’s not here nor there.”  “But that is not situated in this location or in that location.”  Conclusion: It will always sound silly).

Of course, the point I just made with that last paragraph is only the introductory expositional point of this post.  Now allow me to get to the real point.  I’d like to outline and briefly describe life as it is at camp, or at least a few of the weird ways that I have necessarily adjusted to life at camp.  The contrasts with life in the real world (and the really real) will be obvious.  Or I will unnecessarily go into detail about those too.  We shall see.

At camp…

• I get up every morning before 7:30 to wake up kids and convince them to take showers.  Now my internal clock wakes me up at 7:15 every morning, even if that means I’ve only been asleep for four hours.  This is not going to fly when I get back to UNC.  My circadian rhythm will require a stern talking to and an attitude adjustment. 

• I am responsible for a group of 4-8 kids everywhere I go.  I do headcounts every four minutes.  Then I have to repeat the last kid’s name until he stops hiding in the bathroom and gets his shoes on.  My friends may object to me suddenly becoming the punctual mother goose of the group. (Does that mean I tell nursery rhymes too?)

• Spending all day in the hot and humid North Carolina weather and being eaten up by bugs are facts of life.  Everyone has grown accustomed to being sweaty, smelly, and itchy and to being around other sweaty, smelly, and itchy people.  We pretend not to notice when we see someone wearing the same shirt three or four times a week.  These habits will need to change quickly.  I should be able to count on my family to correct me here. 

• Humongous amounts of spontaneous energy are required of me.  I get up tired and cranky and must quickly adjust my attitude.  I drink one cup of coffee every morning and then rely on the huge amounts of calories I eat to burn up and keep me at the same level as the children.  I talk and run and yell and dance at breakneck speed for hours. Then I sleep hard.  This excess energy may be disruptive in an academic setting, or in any setting which isn’t filled with crazy young children.  It’ll be interesting to see what breaks first: My excessive caloric intake or my gratuitous calorie consumption. 

• I do all kinds of silly and ridiculous things.  I embody campiness.  Now the most random things trigger silly connections in my brain, making me sing silly songs about infant primates, German school-children, and yodeling.  This could become a problem.  I imagine it will go something like this:
• Scenario #1: 
• “Hey Michael, look at that cool butterfly!”
• “BU-BU-BU-BUTTTTERFLY!!!  FLAP YOUR FLAPPY WINGS!!!”
• “Michael?”

•  Scenario #2:
• “Hey Michael, check out this cute video of a polar bear!”
• “NARWHALES!!! THEY ARE NARWHALES!!!”
• “I don’t understand.”

• Scenario #3:
• “Surprise Michael! I got you a cake, not a pie.”
• “DOO DOO DOO, OCTOPUS!!!”
• “Michael, you've changed.”

Potentially problematic.

Eh I’m not worried.  I don’t think many people will notice the difference. They'll just wonder why I smell bad and mumble at three times my normal speed.

The Day I Jumped Out of a Plane *or* The Day I Really Got to Know Gravity on a Personal Level *or* My Extreme Encounter with Physics

My spectacular day of high-flying adventure began just like any other, except that I had to get up unbearably early and then drive to Durham to pick up a friend of mine. So it began in a very unique manner. (I apologize; sometimes those clichés don’t work out as well as you want them too.)  I waited outside my friend Sheena’s house in Durham for 10 minutes longer than I expected to, and then decided to give up on her.  She wasn’t answering her phone and I had no idea which house was hers.  Her loss.  Then I began the drive back to Raleigh, eagerly racking my brain for as many Japanese and/or women jokes as could be made to apply.  (Which are her ethnicity and gender respectively.)

I arrived at my Cousin Meredith’s house and proceeded to awkwardly putter around her yard, uncertain that it was in fact her house, and discomforted by the unfamiliar old people on the lawn.  It was her birthday, and we were going to go jump out of a plane to celebrate, which sounds a little unorthodox now that I think about it that way.   I uncomfortably walked back and forth to my car a couple of times, anxiously debating with myself about just sitting in the car and texting Meredith, but that seemed silly so I slowly made my way up to the house.  I wanted to make contact with someone in the family I knew before I became acquainted with the strangers on the grass, so I continued to walk back and forth glancing around and working my way up to the door, like a hiker working his way up through switchback after switchback, keeping an eye out for bears and anxiously waiting to get to the top of the mountain so he’ll stop feeling so uncomfortable and finally get a pee break.

Right before I arrived at the door, my cousin and her entire family burst out onto the front porch at once.  I breathed a sigh of relief and struggled to quickly rebuild my composure with whatever dignity I had left over and disguise the awkward impression the day had left on me thus far.  I discovered that the unfamiliar people on the lawn were relatives who were here to celebrate Meredith’s birthday by watching her fall out of the sky.  Also unorthodox, and almost a little morbid.  Fortunately they hadn’t taken much notice of me and my awkward advances on the street and towards the house, and if they had they were willing to forget about them. 

By then it was time to go, so we loaded into several cars.  I was riding with Meredith, my other cousins Kevin and Christopher, and Meredith’s friend Zach.  After some miscommunication about transportation and a subsequent brief detour chasing Zach to Wendy’s, we were ready to get on the road to Louisburg.  We mostly slept, listened to weird music, and talked about flipping out of planes. 

We arrived at Triangle Skydiving, excitedly apprehensive about the day to come.  The energy level stayed high after our arrival, as we jumped feet first into preparation for our bigger jump.  This is sarcastic but I didn’t manage to communicate that very well.  We eagerly and enthusiastically received our piles of paperwork and listened attentively as they told us to sign everything that looked like a line.  While we were filling every available blank space on these pages with our signatures, the staff played an instructional video for us.  The video consisted of a timid-looking man sitting behind a desk and talking at us.  He wore a suit and sported an impressive and unnaturally homeless-looking scraggly beard.  He told us that we were to jump out of an airplane, that jumping out of airplanes is fun, and that jumping out of moving aerial vehicles 2.5 miles above the Earth’s surface comes with a few risks. 

Once we had completed this unusual orientation, we were allowed to go sit and wait.  We did a little sunbathing, watched people fall out of the sky, went to Bojangles, discussed the various Asian countries Zach has trips planned to, ate Bojangles, discussed the philosophical value of Forrest Gump, examined Kevin’s critique of aphoristic analogies regarding life and sometimes chocolate, watched more people fall out of the sky, drank Mountain Dew, threw a Frisbee around, and evaluated Christopher’s unusual hair style.  When it was finally time for us to strap up and file into a plane, however, a cloud suddenly appeared above our heads and our flight was postponed, because apparently they prefer to be able to see the ground when they’re falling towards it at speeds upwards of 130 mph.

We didn’t know when they’d let us go, but we were next, so they went ahead and got us suited up.  We each met the professional who was going to be tied uncomfortably close to us for the jump, and it almost felt like we were kids from troubled homes being paired up with big street-wise adults who were to be role models for us, but I think that was because of my particular instructor/parachute-puller/professional skydiver/designated keep-Michael-alive-er.  I hope that made sense. 

Deep breath.  Now come up with a title for the person who jumps with you.  Got it Michael? Good.

My survival assistant was a huge, intimidating, very nice man named David.  It was a weird way to meet someone though, because you’re constantly thinking: “THIS MAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MY LIFE.”  So to drown out the voice in my head I had to shout my way through our get-to-know-you conversation, which by the way, was awkwardly carried on while he guided me through all the numerous switches, latches, locks, Velcro straps, flaps, bells, and whistles that were built to keep me attached to him and him attached to a bag and the bag attached to a parachute.  It was a lot.  Then he told me everything I needed to know about how to jump out of a plane and how to fall and how to pilot the parachute.  Then he told me I could unclench my teeth and relax, because it was fine if I didn’t remember all of it. 

Then it started raining, which is also frowned upon when you’re jumping out of a plane it seems.  So we hung out in the crowded hangar and ate cold Bojangles while we waited.

About an hour later, the rain rain went away, probably to come again another day, and the beautiful bright sun returned. (Did you know Breaking Benjamin have a song called Rain inspired by nursery rhymes?  That’s ridiculous.)

Once the weather had cleared, we were called back to meet up with our survival assistants again.  They tightened about 20 different straps I didn’t know we had, went back over how we’re actually supposed to jump, and then brought us to the plane.   We had to duck down and file in, sitting in awkward rows on two benches that led up to the door.    There were about 8-10 pairs and then a few people just sitting by the door.  These few kept making crazy eyes at David and I, so I was unsure of their sanity.  Once plenty of inside jokes and taunts had been tossed around, the plane started moving.  There were 5 of our group actually jumping: Meredith, Kevin, Zach, Meredith’s dad Dave, and me.  Zach didn’t have a survival assistant though, because apparently jumping out of a plane is routine for him.  The rest of us came up with some kind of order of who would go when, and then we were allowed to sit there for the rest of the flight.

Now it takes a little while to climb all the way up to 13,500 feet, especially in a small plane like that, so we had quite some time to contemplate our existence and just how freakin’ high up in the air we were.  And I spent quite some time doing just that.  I hadn’t felt nervous all day until then.  I looked out the window: “OMG WE’RE SO HIGH, HOW HIGH ARE WE? *glance at height-ometer thing on wrist* hey David, my thingy-macalit-altitude-describer is broken, it says we’re only 1,500 feet up.  Oh that’s right? Hm. Oh no I’m fine, but if you smell anything funny now or while we’re jumping, it’s probably just the birds.”

That said, I didn’t really get too nervous about the actual jump.  Obviously I’d never jumped out of a plane before, so I couldn’t even imagine the actual jumping we were about to do.  Without knowing how to imagine it, I couldn’t very well freak out about it.  The only part I was nervous about was the sliding towards the front of the plane, positioning myself at the door with one foot halfway over the edge, and rolling out.  That I could imagine very well, and so I freaked out about it, but only in my head.  I put on a very calm face for David and my fellow jumpers.  Most of what was happening at this point was adrenaline.  Neither fight nor flight seemed like a good idea, so my survival instinct just hid in the corner of my brain and whimpered.  Maybe it surrendered to my superior thrill-seeking instinct?  Interesting.  So the freaking-out anxiety transmuted itself into anxious excitement.

Around 6,000 feet the crazy people at the front pulled open the shockingly simple, flimsy door, and jumped out with creepy grins on their faces.   I looked around anxiously to find out if they were supposed to do that.  Either that was planned and expected, or everyone else was accustomed to their unpredictable insanity.

Then finally the time came.  We had arrived at our stop, at 13,500 feet, and now it was time for us to depart.  The entire day of waiting had built up to this.  We had spent so long on the ground and now so long just sitting in the plane and watching other people jump, that the idea that I was actually going to edge up to the front and jump off with David on my back (which, literally speaking, is a physical impossibility) was simply implausible.  I watched Zach and the pairs in front of us jump. 

 I didn’t feel like I was about to jump out of a plane.  Although I don’t know what that feels like so it’s hard to tell.  Then Meredith jumped.  Whoa Meredith just jumped out of a plane.  Then I was being told it was my turn.  This was already so surreal that I didn’t really feel present or conscious.  David and I got up and awkwardly waddle-edged our way to the front of the plane like two penguins conjoined at the back and belly respectively, making their way out of a crowded cavern with a low ceiling so they can jump out of a moving plane at 2.5 miles above the ground.  (I must’ve fallen off the metaphor train.)

We got to the front, and David again walked me through the instructions.  Unfortunately I don’t remember all of them now because I wasn’t there at the time. We positioned our feet – I took a quick glance over the edge – and I leaned back.  Then we leaned forward and rolled out of the plane heads first in one fluid motion. 

Suddenly, unexpectedly, we’re falling. I am lying face down, looking at the Earth.  I concentrate on breathing for a moment.  I lift my legs up. It’s cold out here.  I lift my head up and look at the horizon.  I try to understand what exactly it is that I’m doing right now.  I look at the clouds.  I hear other people screaming.  I scream because I remember that’s probably what I’m supposed to do.  I hear David’s voice in my ear but it’s so far away.  He’s trying some of those turns and spins he talked about earlier.  I don’t remember what to do.  I try to move my hands around and imitate him.  We spin.  I scream again so he knows I’m having fun and not unconscious.  He asks me how high we are.  I look at my altimeter and tell him about 7000 feet.  He probably doesn’t hear me.  He has his own.  I have no idea how long we’ve been falling.  Twenty minutes and twenty seconds are equally plausible.  Neither is probably correct. I spend some more time looking at the horizon.  I try to find some birds.

Something with a ton of force pulls hard and fast on my stomach, and I am no longer horizontal.  I am standing straight up.  There is a parachute floating above my head.  It is effectively holding me up by my crotch.  I am not comfortable.  I stand on David’s feet and he adjusts the ties.  I look around at the sky again, trying to imagine what floating down through it with a parachute must feel like.  I see other people falling too.  Then David and I do spins and fast turns in the parachute.  It’s fun.  We get close to the ground and we pull hard on the parachute rope-tie-handle-things.  Suddenly we slow down a heck of a lot. 

We land.  He unlatch-tie-velcros me.  I’m not thinking very clearly.  I walk back to the rest of the family celebrating Meredith’s birthday.  I have to concentrate to find a way around a small muddy spot.  When I get there they ask how it was.  I stutter some kind of short, lame response.  They understand.  Other people get there.  We take pictures.  I take off my gear.  David grades my jump.  I do well.  Meredith schedules another jump.  I sit idly waiting, a little dazed, probably still shaking. 

We load into the car.  I sit in the back with my eyes closed for 45 minutes patiently waiting for sleep, but it does not come.  Then I start texting people.  Before long we are back in Raleigh.

I probably spent about 60 seconds in freefall, reaching a maximum speed of about 138 mph.  Then I spent around 5 or 6 minutes floating down in a parachute.  Altogether I spent about 3.5 hours in a heightened surreal dream state of maximum adrenaline.

One of those dots is me.

My First Two Weeks Extracted From the Routines of Everyday Civilized and Modern Living

Now I'm spending most of the summer away from civilization, so I'm a little behind on the things I need to talk about.  Bear with me.

The two weeks from the 28th of May to the 11th of June were very eventful ones indeed.  I began and completed my training as a camp counselor, became intimately acquainted with the scent of rotting cabbage mingling with the odor of profusive sweat, and rolled out of a plane 13,500 feet above the Earth’s surface.  Guess which one I want to talk about first?  That’s right: it’s the cabbage.

Now the cabbage wasn’t exactly part of our training, as surprising as that might be.  It was more of a break, as weird as that sounds.  What we did is called “gleaning”, which is a new term for me, so I’m going to arrogantly assume it is for you as well.  It means that a farmer permits you to drive onto his land, pick nearly over-ripe cabbage, throw said cabbage all over the place, sing loud obnoxious camp songs, and somehow eventually get the cabbage onto a truck. 

The other remarkable part of this adventure was the ride there and back.  There are about 30 of us, and we had to get up frighteningly early to go all the way to Youngsville for this cabbage encounter.  We were split among 5 mini-vans, and there was a walkie talkie in each car.  Our cars also have code names, so the drive was epic.  My car was code-named "Holy Grail" and we followed closely behind "Donald". (Not all code-names are created equal.)  It was like a very car chase-heavy super spy movie, kind of like The Italian Job, except with more vegetables.  And no gold.  And all the guns and bombs were replaced by goofy ridiculous songs that involve lots of random dancing.  And instead of weaving through congested inner-city traffic in mini-coopers, we drove in an organized line of mini-vans in primary colors, patiently keeping at or around the speed limit for the majority of the ride.  But that’s just nitpicking; the vegetables were the real distinguishing characteristic. 

The rest of training was also awesome.  You could make a movie about the epic and feel-good way the 30 of us came together as a happy community.  You would also want to include all of the many hiccups and tragic setbacks and dramatic confrontations that slowed us down but inevitably couldn’t prevent us from bonding as a strong family, and instead only served to create an even more beautiful culmination of our friendships into secure communal ties.  (If only every conflict in the world was followed with a huge group hug between all those involved, I am convinced that there would be no ill will.  It helps if at least one of the people in the circle is soaking wet and or teary.  They should probably be at the center of the hug for maximum effect.)  I don’t think it has the potential to make a very successful movie – or even a  very good one – but I am still fairly sure that it *could* be made into a movie.  Like for real.

Training also helped to dispel some of the misconceptions I had about camp life.  I was under the delusion that somehow camp counselors had lots of spare time to write music, draft a couple novels, study Paradise Lost, sketch flowers, fill notebooks with poetic musings and wistful lyrics about birds, and finger-paint, but it turns out that this is a falsehood.  I am tempted to curse Henry David Thoreau and joke about how Walden gave me the wrong idea about living in a cabin surrounded by nature, buttttt I am not familiar with Thoreau’s work, so that would be false and unfair to Thoreau's legacy.  I have only myself to blame. 

It turns out that camp counselors have very little spare time.  That doesn’t mean that their time isn’t filled with awesome goofiness and fun kids and music and ridiculous skits and laughter, but it does mean there is not a wealth of alone time with which to contemplate life, the universe and everything. (new idea: try to sneak in as many Douglas Adams’ book titles in one post as possible) In fact, you are tempted to use all of the spare time that *could* be used to broaden your literary horizons to just hang out with your fellow counselors or simply prepare for campers/SLEEP.  That’s the other thing: when you get to your spare time, you’re usually far too exhausted to read more than a couple lines of Georges Bataille’s fascinating if a little dense and obviously insane metaphysical rambling on the subject of religious theory before you lapse into a deep and restful slumber, riddled with surreal hallucination/dreams about being turned into a goat and sacrificed to temporarily free your owners from the world of the discontinuous and allow them into the world of spirits. (Much like coffee and Taco Bell, Bataille is not recommended when you are preparing for bed.)  So much of your energy is expended during the busy day that at the end of the night you are drowsy, lazy, delusional, and mostly harmless. (Abort. It seems Douglas Adams wrote an inordinate amount of books.)

Another revelation I had during training was that all the counselors here are awesome.  Like fantastic.  And hilarious.  Every day is filled with laughter and really weird but insightful humor.  Everyone has their own unique talents and quirks, and I look forward to a lot of time on the weekend relaxing and hanging out with them.  Here’s a couple of the things I’m especially looking forward to:

• Late night talks about morality and evil in the world, because those are fun.
• Back massages,  because they’re awesome.
• Jamming with the Agape band, because-there-are-so-many-people-with-so-many-instruments-and-I-love-it-asjdlkjfkdl;
• Forming a step team, because it seems like a fun thing to do.

Oh right, I should probably talk about rolling out of a plane...   Next time!

News Flash: It Turns out I've Been Defying Grammar Conventions Since the Third Grade. (I've been ahead of my time for yeeaaars!) (That's why I'm outside the box now; I misplaced it when I was nine.)

So it’s a little weird to be writing two blog entries in one week, especially when the first one was a monstrous three-post-in-one literary creation of epic proportions, but a lot of stuff has been happening, and there are extenuating circumstances which behoove me to write more.  These will be explained shortly. 

First of all, I’m going skydiving in two days.  Saturday.  In two days. On Saturday.  I will jump out of a plane.  A plane.  On Saturday.  In the sky.  Jumping.  My mind is wheeling so fast that these are the longest sentences I can manage.  I don’t know if wheeling is a word that fits there like I want it to, but I’m going to assume it is.  Oh, the sentences are back! 

I will definitely be writing about that actual experience eventually, but I might not get to it immediately, as I’m going to camp on Sunday.  I am working as a counselor in an awesome camp in the woods.   I will be cut off from cell phone towers, Facebook, and blogging.  I might end up starting a primitive version of the blog on a random bulletin board if I can find one.   I don’t know how I’ll survive if I can’t do that.

Because I’m about to spend most of the summer away from home, I figured I should do a little bit of organizational work at home.  As I lived away from home for the entire year already, my room has slowly accumulated everything of mine from around the rest of the house.  Then it was twisted to appear clean by stuffing all the stuff into different cabinets and corners.  It has become a pile of junk, souvenirs, personal keepsakes, and hidden important papers, all with a thin veneer of hygienic livability stretched over it and tucked in around the edges.

So my time has been devoted to cleaning and organizing.  Which means that my time has been devoted to laying around and doing very little except for stressing about cleaning and organizing. Wiiiiith occasional sporadic bursts of productivity.  Which in retrospect is essentially how my life was this last year, although with different stresses (Dang it why won’t MS Word just accept that I’m going to start sentences with ‘which’? Stop complaining, it makes you look silly Microsoft.  Like when you try to correct foreign leaders’ names. {“’Angela Merckel’? Are you sure you don’t mean ‘Merced’?” “’Pratibha Devisingh Patil’? We’re pretty sure you mean ‘pretibial devising patio’} Microsoft, Merced is clearly less of a name than Merckel, and what’s more, I’m never taking you anywhere.  You would be nothing but embarrassing in sophisticated social situations.)End parenthesis? I think? The main skill I'm practicing in my writing this blog is knowing when to cut off and end my rambling side-thoughts

So I’ve spent quite a large amount of time digging through old papers and books in my room in the last week.  I found plenty of creepy books I didn’t know existed, probably left by my brothers in the room before me, and I found a couple of acoustic guitars I forgot I had, but the most interesting things I found were relics from my past.  I found two “notebooks” of mine from third grade, and they have a good bit of analyzable material in there.  (Wow, analyzable does not look like it should be a word; it’s spelled so weeeeeird.  This carries a different meaning than “weird”)

The first “notebook” is much less of an actual “notebook” than the second one.  It’s actually a small autograph book from Walt Disney World.  There are pictures of all the famous characters on the front, and it has an abundance of pages for autographs.  I started out rather excited.  Maybe I’d find friends’ names from 3^rd grade! That’d be interesting!  Or maybe… *gasp* maybe I’ll find autographs from Mickey Mouse or Goofy!  The truth was much cuter, depressing, and a little creepy.  In that order.  The first two pages start off great.  The first is signed by my mom, and is just a cute and motherly praise of my virtues.  The second one was filled out by my dad.  Just as cute and fatherly.  This is what he said: “I hope this book helps keep memories of good times and people you meet fresh throughout your life.”  Perfectly cool right?  After this is where it gets ironic. 

The rest of the book is blank.  Apparently my brothers couldn’t even be bothered to sign it.  I guess it was during the summer, so it’s not like I could’ve just brought it to school, as weird as that would be.  I don’t know if it’s more ironic or depressing that the rest is empty.  It kind of makes it a monument to parental love and eternal optimism.  “I’m sure you’ll find someone to sign your book son, just persevere! Maybe try that guy in a Pluto suit over there!  Oh look, Bryan’s out of the bathroom, go try him!”

That wasn’t the worst part though.  The rest of the book was not *totally* empty.  At the very back of the book, when it’s not actually a real page anymore, I found more writing. My reaction: There’s hope! I managed to find someone to sign my book besides my ol’ mum and paw!  Oh wait, it’s just a creepy little schizophrenic note of encouragement.

I signed my own autograph book apparently.  I even wrote in cursive:

ThankS    PS  Youre the best!   I love you to!  Love, Michael Dickson     

Of course the last exclamation point is huge and cartoony.

So take what you will from that.  I wonder how I felt about that at the time though…  I’m sure I probably forgot about the autograph book not long after I got it, but why did I feel inspired to sign it myself?  Was that after I failed to get anyone to sign it?  Or did I do that immediately?  I guess I’ll never know.  Or alternately I'll explore that memory more with a doctor when I have my next anxious-psycho-lonely-breakdown. 

The second notebook was actually a notebook.  It’s much more conventional in other ways too actually, as it was just a notebook for me to do school assignments in.  Sadly those journals never get really filled up with writing like they should.  That’s especially unfortunate because it leaves less for me to get a kick out of now.  Also I don’t know if we were required to draw as well, but 3rd grade Michael took that initiative regardless.  Here’s a selected few of the “journal entries” and their titles.

10-23-00 My seven favorite ice cream flavors

1)Mint and Chip

2) Vanilla

3) chocoalate peanut butter

4) coffee

5) rainbow sherbet

6) chocolate fudge brownie

7) oranbubble gum bubble gum

[I was still picky in third grade, which explains the “Vanilla” choice, but if 3rd grade Michael was anything like college Michael then all I did was pick my favorite ice cream and then rack my brain to somehow come up with six other ice cream flavors (I don’t work well under pressure)].

1-162-01

(Dates are confusing when it’s all numbers.  I never know what order to put them in, you know dd-mm-yy or mm-dd-yy or yy-mm-dd or md-mpg-yt)  ( There is no actual title for this one, but it’s short so I’m just going to give it to you)

I would give away my LEGO gungan sub because I built it and it took awhile.  I really like it.  I think they would like it too.  

(Then there’s some cute squiggles and doodles which I assume construct a cohesive illustration of a LEGO gungan sub. )

(who is "they", and why are we giving them our stuff?)

(Is it weird that small funny looking LEGO aliens are more nostalgic for me than fishing and Santa Claus?)

1-18-0[lowercase o with a 1 in it; it looks like an apple]

If I could desighn a school cafetaeria it would look about how it was now, though I would have the TV on with Toonami showing and I would serve mashed potatoes, potatoes, hot dogs cheese and bread sticks.  It would also have pizza with sauce and some with no sause.  I would have computers with all games for people that were done.  there were food fights daily.  it would also have red curtains I would have McFlurrys and milkshakes.

 (It should also be noted that the final random nonsensical run-on sentence fragment was being written awkwardly around the side of a huge, very detailed but yet very crude drawing and “milkshakes” is written at a 70 degree angle away from the horizontal lines on the page.  I hope that means what I want it to mean. I don’t speak math.)

 (I'm glad to see that 3rd grade Michael also had problems with randomly switching tenses.  At least it is not a new thing.)

(The drawing shows all the pizza, computers, and a bunch of tables, but there's only one person in the entire cafetaeria[sic].  He’s sitting at a random table alone and yelling “Food Fight” in a horribly oblong shaped word bubble.)

1-[odd combination of 2 and 9]9-01   If we had no lightbulbs….

(It seems I always started writing the date before I actually knew what it was)

I would have several candles of my own to use, and every night we would light a fire.  We would use candles for supperr and everything during the night. 

(Very good Michael, that is a reasonable assumption to make.  If we had no lightbulbs we would use other sources of light.  Thanks for the insight.  This factoid will prove invaluable for college Michael)

2-26-01

My flower is called a la cocoa its stem and leaves are made of cocoa.  it smells like coffee.  its petals taste like Earl Grey hot tea with half and half and sugar in it.  The middle tastes like ginger ale.  it is endangered because its been eaten a lot

 

(I’m proud of myself.  I obviously knew what I liked.  But ginger ale? No idea where that came from.)  

(There’s also a picture beneath it which appears to be a flower with a lot of lines coming off of it.)

4-2-01 citys

1.Orlando,Florida

2.Garner, North Carolina

3.greensborough

4.San Francisco, California

5.Austin, texas

(There’s a couple of odd things going on here.  First off, what am I ranking?  Is this random assortment of cities the first ones that popped  into my head when I thought "cities"?  Three big cities and two random small ones in North Carolina.  It amuses me that greensborough[sic] is neither capitalized nor spelled correctly.)

I don’t know about you, but this has been incredibly insightful for me.  I wonder if I can detect the beginnings of my current writing style in these old manuscripts…   It’s definitely cool to see how far I’ve come.  If I had my way, however, this notebook would’ve been filled to the brim with every single thing I wrote as a kid so that I’d be able to look back at it now.  it would also have red curtains I would have McFlurrys and milkshakes.

If I find a good scanner sometime soon, I promise I will scan these pages in and put them up here.  Believe you me, my drawings are fantastic.  

I figure reminding you constantly that I *don't* have illustrations is basically equivalent to *actually having* illustrations.