You could come back next year as, like, a completely normal person.
Internets, I went to summer camp. Three times, a week each, over three successive summers (after 6th, 7th, and 8th grades) because I DON’T LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES. It was a YMCA yute camp, with all the usual activities and swimming and campfires and shit. I went because I had latched on to the idea of camp as something kickass, via, I’m sure, some of the YA novels I used to read, and but primarily because the week always concluded with a dance on Friday night. With boys. Who did not know me from school. They would only know the Invented Me, the New Jan Brady, who totally always wore cool clothes and Designer Impostors fragrance and knew who Depeche Mode was and was not overshadowed by her pretty, popular younger sister or rock star older brother. You see where this is all going? Yeah, it’s on the express train to Sucktown, no stopping except briefly at Crapville and Dirtburgh to take on more freight. So, less talk, more blog:
Things That Sucked About Camp
It was hot. No surprise – North Central Texas, July. But at home I got to go to my cousins’ pool all day, and hide out at my grandmothers’ houses and drink root beer floats (with Blue Bell ice cream) in sweet, sweet air conditioning. These fools made me be OUT. SIDE. in that shit. Christ was it hot.
There was singing. A lot of it. Sing-a-long, my least favorite kind of singing, after Earnest Teevee Singing.
There were a million bitchy Metroplex girls there. All of whom were cuter than me and had actual boyfriends and knew how to use makeup and talked about their periods all the time (which I was flat not willing to do).
There was a pond. And I had to fucking turn over a canoe in it. On purpose, as part of the lesson in canoeing.
I was homesick as fuck, from minute one till I could see the place in the rearview mirror of my mom’s car on Saturday. Crippling, devastating homesickness, 24/7.
The food tasted like something expressed from a large dog’s anal glands, but they kept us so fucking busy all the damn time that we were hungry enough to eat it up and ask for seconds.
Wildlife. Eight-legged hairy Shatner, y’all – bees, spiders, wasps, hornets, snakes, fire ants, cicadas (which sound cool but have you ever put your hand down next to one of their vacated shells? O god!), all manner of flying nasty beasts and bugs, and the cabins were not shelter enough from the plague.
I only got to ride a horse once, and it took a dump during the trail ride.
The lame, annoying dances didn’t last long enough.
Labels: balls o'clock a.m., clean livin, first-world problems, things that sound great but really aren’t once you think about them, way too old for this kind of shit anymore
posted by Gleemonex at 12:50 PM
5 Comments:
This post made me laugh so hard that the dessicated admin sitting outside my office got up and closed my door.
Thanks, Glee, for helping me remember my time as a reluctant Girl Scout camper in central PA. I campaigned for "Horse Camp 1," got sent to "Camp Bump in the Night."
One night a bazillionpede fell off the tent ceiling into the open mouth of the girl sleeping opposite me. It was awesome (she was a twat), but then I noticed the bazilionpedes clinging to the tent ceiling above me too. Yerrg-pleh, still not over that one.
Oh honey, *I'M* traumatized by the bazillion-pede! GAAAAAAHHHH!!!
Hee.
The bazillionpede story sounds like my worst 12 year old camp nightmare come true, except mine involved a walking stick. Not an actual stick, but the bug called a walking stick... It looked like a small stick that could walk. And sting! And they would lurch on the underside of the front porch roof of every camp cabin. And sometimes you would see them humping eachother. We got to sing songs about God that are still engraved in my head to this day and I was always too scared to do the ropes course or rappel down the 15 foot wall. And then one year, they started splitting us up into Alpha and Omega “teams” and all hell broke loose. One time I had really bad rhea at camp but was too ashamed to tell my counselor so I just said my stomach hurt. She mistook it to mean that I had cramps and I was even more embarrassed!
I always liked camp. Well, after the first year. The first year I went to a crappy camp that ran out of dessert on Wednesday and we ate banana pudding the rest of the week. I hate banana pudding. And, I too, like Lurlene got rhea after drinking too much water, which probably came from the lake, and for boys, well, rhea at summer camp is like the plague or worse. You can't even blame it on cramps. To top it all off, I got chiggers in the most unholy of places which my mother then painted on nail polish to smother the little fuckers. Yeah, good times!
Fortunately the next year, I went to a different camp and every summer after that was really very good. I had a great time at camp, except that first year.
This post is hysterical! Especially the "invented me" bit. I have to say though, camp was the highlight of the summer for me – whether it was sports camp, church camp, or camp fire girls, I loved all the activities and being away from home and meeting new people.
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