typical

Mooooooom,

It’s been a very emotional few days, and none of my reasons are legitimate.  Most recently I found myself crying after biting into the second half of a pepper after naively assuming I was capable of coping with spicy red things.  Like an overconfident nacho enthusiast, tears streamed down my face for fifteenish minutes while I downed an embarrassing amount of water and shoveled enough tasteless rice down my throat to feed the House of Representatives on Cinco de Mayo.  

I also remember tearing up at some point while watching Homeward Bound on VHS last night, which is unacceptable under any circumstances.  My only semi-justified instance of crying in the past 48 hours was when I had to say goodbye to my favorite camper that I've had thus far (and probably forever), Eric, a witty little shit capable of knocking me off my feet in a single look.  The fact that I'll never see that kid again is making me tear up even now, as I wolf down 400 calories of Hersheys bars on a multicolored couch that wreaks of hamster bedding.  Eric and I spent most of the past two weeks shootin the shit, from making up pick-up lines while brushing our teeth, to brainstorming which celebrities we would marry if we had the chance (he beautifully mis-stated Morgan Freeman in place of Megan Fox, causing me to choke on milk).  I had more fun blowing bubbles in the cabin with that goob than I've had all summer.  At one point I was struggling to breathe between laugh-honks while failing to remind myself that I was technically an adult.  From our short time together as Black Bears (our group name thing), I learned everything about his two rad moms, his hopes and dreams of becoming an inventor, and our mutually shared love of Will Ferrell.  I'm gonna miss his habit of styling his hair in the reflection of other people's sunglasses, his respectable talent of sneaking 80+ selfies onto my phone, and his incredible ability to see right through me.  Fuck. I didn't realize I would ever get this attached to my campers.  Just, awful.

My last session of campers certainly weren't perfect (our picky eater fell into hysterics when asked to eat a spoonful of salsa at dinner, and another grabbed both of my breasts without hesitation during a handsy game of Ninja), but I had so much more fun with those hormone-plagued yuppies than I did with the younger kids the weeks before.  The older boys liked me better than my co-counselor Scott, which was a weird and uncomfortable change of pace, but it felt good to feel like I was somewhat useful.  They were fixated on asking me about my age and who I was dating, so obviously I told them that I was 69 years old with 3 children and 69 grandchildren, to which one of my campers responded, "Your kids need a new hobby".  I was also sure to mention that I'm happily married to Jay Z, and that his "marriage" to Beyonce is simply a publicity stunt.  Of course, good ol' Steve was kind enough to point out that the only one of my campers to believe that spiel literally had brain damage (looking back, I realize I probably shouldn't grossly lie to victims of in-the-womb drug abuse).  Even so, it was better to share a poorly-planned fib than to tell them I'd spent the past few years collecting dust in my bajingo.

But my fondest memories of the boys are undoubtedly from our five day backpacking trip through Routt National Forest.  I had a stupid good time, mostly because I was focused on having a stupid good time.  Backpacking is tough, and if you're not constantly thinking of ways to inject conversations about pizza into the day, shit can get miserable fast. The highlights:

1. Leave it to my idiot self to get so excited when faced with a quarter pound of hot chocolate all to myself after a few days of mild hunger, that I would join my campers in drinking a concentrated bowl of what we called "chocolate soup", and within a half hour, throw up, and then shit everything else into a hole dug by the river, lazily hidden by a mossy rock the size of my left ass.

2.  For a reason I can't remember, I let the kids draw all over me with pen with only one rule - Don't Draw a Penis. What ended up on me was a mustache that looked suspiciously like a penis, “I Love My Chest Hairs” scribbled on my left arm, "Avid 4" beside another penis (transformed into a rocket ship by my request) on my right arm, another penis beneath my left armpit, and some sort of target on the center of my throat.  They really respect me!!

3.  After a relentless nosebleed from three to six in the morning, Jacob agreed to shove a tampon up his nose as he lay in the dirt waiting for a clotting miracle.  Unfortunately, the tampon expanded as it absorbed his blood (why we didn't see this coming i'll never know), so we had to pry it out using a syringe and scissors while the poor kid sobbed from the pain of having his nostril stretched to an unreal diameter.  It wasn't nearly as funny at the time as it was a day later, when Jacob referenced the incident as his "nose's first menstrual cycle".

4.  To keep the swarming mosquitos away from clogging our body's holes (eyes, mouth, etc.), we wore full rain gear and ski masks in 80something degree weather.  Yet I still managed to get 15-20 bug bites solely on my ass (despite the fact that my bum was covered by multiple layers the entire time - aside from the few instances where I was violently shitting bowls of hot chocolate).  To prevent this hell from ever repeating itself, any one of the boys living in Silver Spruce could confirm that the day I returned to camp, I placed 45 pairs of bug pants in my REI online checkout cart. $563.21.

All in all, I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I'm halfway through summer.  It's been the best couple of months of my life, and there's clearly no light at the end of the funnest tunnel ever- just school (Columbia) - a dank, piss-scented cave with sky scrapers and philosophy books.  All I can do is savor the moments that make this summer great - such as tonight, when I found myself grooming my downstairs in a moldy shower stall while 3rd grade campers were teaching each other how to fishtail braid no more than eight feet away.

Sweet dreams,
Kay

P.S. Graham is our Trip Coordinator here at CMC and he's a blessing to us all.  Here are a couple quotes from the past week to prove it:
"I've made myself throw up before.  Mostly at bar mitzfahs."

In response to a camper saying, "Chocolate is like beer for kids", he stated: "I don't think you know what chocolate or beer is from that statement."