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."

surprise surprise

SO,

Since I have neither the time nor patience to write anything worthwhile (that’s a joke! I don’t do that anyway!), I’m just gonna jot down a few thoughts I’ve collected over the past weekish:

 1.  Somehow I’ve convinced the girls in my cabin to call me “Professor Awesome”, "Jay Z's Mistress", and "Bobathon"

2.  Little girls have a lot of feelings, but most tear-loaded episodes are quickly resolved with a lazy quiz about their favorite cheeses before I zip their knobby knees and tangled braids back into their sleeping bags.

3.  Children will ALWAYS find an opportunity to whine – whether they’re hiking a mile along a beautiful deer-riddled dirt trail, or wading knee-deep in Legos and chocolate, wearing velvet crowns and holding fistfuls of gold, someone will ALWAYS complain about the number of Lays in their sack lunch

4.  If you’re backpacking in Leadville for three days with nothing other than bread, cheese, and m&ms for sustenance with seven children, the gluten and dairy free kid will have no choice but to eat rice cakes with seaweed from home to keep from dying.  He'll look like shit anyway.

5.  If you let your starving campers eat all the chocolate chip cookies your grandmother sent you in the sweetest care package of all time, rather than thanking you, they’ll moan when there’s “no dessert” after breakfast the next day while you pinch the skin on your palm to keep from screamin words they've never dreamed.

6.  Days off are glorious. I had one! Saturday afternoon, my buds and I biked over to Lake Wellington, laid out in the sun, drank warm beer, and bounced across a slack-line in the sand.  It’s amazing what a few hours without children throwing sticks at your eyes can do for your health. 

7. Thai food restaurants located directly off the highway are mediocre! They’re also stocked with characters that belong in an Adult Swim cartoon.  The loudest of which was a bald muscular man in a tie-dye tank top tucked beneath beige coveralls at the bar. 

8.  If you pay a cashier with sopping wet money, he won’t bother hiding his disgust with you throughout the remainder of the transaction.  It was clear he wanted nothing to do with me or my reasoning for the soggy cash by his refusal to make eye contact with me for the next and last minute of my visit.

9.  It’s worth skipping a couple of hours of sleep to bushwhack up the side of a mountain thing to sit on the closest thing in Real Life to pride rock (god rest Mufasa’s soul), and watch the lake below glitter like an asshole.  I've never seen a more confident body of water in my life.  Due to this and other self-assured landscapes, mocking me and my mediocre looks on a daily basis, I spend more of my time these days scheming ways to take pictures of pretty views than how to become offensively famous through hot dog competitions, which is a DRASTIC lifestyle change from four weeks ago.

10.  Turns out, I have no reason to worry about my future here at Avid 4 Adventure, as my boss volunteered to spit water in my face during a campfire skit a couple days back.  Rest assured, I’m making my way up the corporate ladder.

11.  And lastly, there’s nothin better than a few days of flirting in the moonlight, making up fake constellations, and tossing some moose sheets over two twin-sized mattresses pushed together on the floor of an empty cabin for a night of camper-free sleep in my birthday suit

Before I go sneak off to the kitchen to load up on Captain Crunch before clawing my way to bed, I wanted to mention that I am very well aware of the fact that during the first session of the summer, I was blessed with seven perfect boys, all of which got along seamlessly and were equally adorable.  Since their goodbyes (figurative goodbyes, only two of those angel-faced wangs bothered to hug or wave at me as their parents swept them away to their obnoxiously clean Lexus), I’ve been in mourning of my first little camp family.  I have since gotten a new handful of freckled kiddos (five incoming seventh graders), so here's a brief introduction of my newest boys:

a. Jake: a “too cool for school” dude taller than half the staff, who’s told me an unacceptable number of times that he has a girlfriend going into the 9^th grade (the best response so far belongs to my buddy Steve, the rock climbing instructor, who replied with a straightfaced, “no way?! me too!!”)

b. Kingston: insists on sitting next to me all the time so that i can watch him make unnecessary faces; he doesn’t understand the concept of personal space, and is afraid of most things alive and not (I should mention he literally has mild brain damage, so I really can’t be too upset by any of this)

c. Jonathon: a frail dude with a stutter, with the voice of an unsure chipmunk mumbling from 40 feet away; he prefers to be alone and interact with nobody, and refuses to eat anything other than bread or cheese

d.  Eric: a normal (thank you god) hyperactive funny kid who watches Family Guy religiously and can recite the lyrics to every song ever played on the radio (we had a bubble-blowing bonding session today and we laughed until we cried - he isn't my favorite i definitely would never pick a favorite that would be WRONG)

e. Jacob: a nice kid I haven’t spent enough time with whoops

If Scott and I weren’t awesome, it’d be a group management nightmare.

BUT IT'S THE FOURTH OF JULY AND I THINK WE'RE DOING A BBQ I LOVE BBQ GO AMERICA

AMERICA,

Kay

P.S. A consistent lack of sleep makes you tired!! Learning!!

christ

Dude,

I haven’t showered in three days, no matter how much chapstick I apply, my lips are still comparable to an elephant’s asshole, and I’m completely and irrevocably in love with 9:30 PM ("lights out").

Being a camp counselor is rough, man. It’s also fun and mildly flirty, but show one moment of weakness, and those little fuckers will have you crying under your bug shit-dusted covers by day one.  I have maybe five minutes to myself a day, a clingy camper who won’t stop asking me if I like her outfits, and a consistently questionable selection of meats at the dining hall (corndogs, meat who’s texture resembles cottage cheese, etc.).  Since the start of camp, I've aged several decades and made up like, 18 behavior-related rules (never thought I'd use the phrase, "Let's please change the conversation from painting bears against their will, Cole").

I should admit though, it gets easier every day. I’m no longer miserable, just exhausted.  Because of my nose ring and the Christmas lights above my bed, the 10 year-old girls in my cabin think I’m mysterious and cool (they want to spend time with me??), and I’m slowly figuring out ways to cope with everything (1. eat 2. Hershey’s 3. in 4. bathroom 5. stalls).

When I was first assigned 4^th and 5^th graders as my campers, I didn’t realize just how young they were until one of them ATE the medal I made for him out of paper and hemp after winning “Best Glamour Girl” in our makeshift arm wrestling competition (his stage cross while holding the “Round 2” sign was d r i p p i n g with sass).  Luckily, I caught him just in time for him to spit the chewed-up ball of twine into my cupped hands, saving us, but most importantly me, a trip to the chatty and butterfly-minded nurse, who, within a half hour of meeting her, had detailed her husband’s 1997 foot fungus episode, called herself a “fat woman on all sides”, and asked me zero questions myself.

For the first two weeks, my co-counselor Scott and I are responsible for seven boys: Carson, Cole, Cooper, Kyle, Ryan, Ari, and Joe.  They like Scott better than me, but that’s alright.  I like Scott better than me, too.  Scott's awesome.  He knows stuff about starting fires, carving bowls out of fallen bark, and fixing bike helmets he’s never seen before.  He’s like a kid-friendly Liam Neeson in three-quarter length pants.

For a while, I’m not sure my boys knew what to make of me.  After all, my only selling points were that I could recite Beyonce's "Flawless" word-for-word and that I was capable of walking from my childhood bedroom to the Chipotle at the mall with my eyes closed, which did little good in kayak or archery instruction. But I eventually earned the respect of a few rugrats during rock climbing day.  Carson, the most critical of the bunch, was inexplicably wowed by my bouldering skills, which are just slightly better than his own, and he called me “practically professional”, which immediately melted me into a flattered soup of candy hearts and glitter glue.

I remained in a state of compliment-induced bliss until lunch, when the shitheads ruined everything by moaning about the gluten-free kid getting a different type of bread on his sandwich.  Each and every one of them complained that he “always gets better food” while double-fisting brownies and churros. These assholes desperately plead for medically-required dietary restrictions on a daily basis, just to get their grubby little hands on puffy fake muffins.

But their whining and refusal to clean up after themselves aside, they're the cutest little dick-kickers, so I guess I'll just have to continue on being their second-favorite counselor, tweezing out their splinters, facilitating slap jack battles beneath their bunk beds, and asking them to spit the sticks out of their mouths because I care.  I might even love them, for no reason other than the fact that I’ve helped keep them not-dead for the past week. 

I hope I’m good at this soon.

Please send whiskey to Avid 4 Adventure CMC, P.O. Box 741, Bailey, CO 80421,

Kay

P.S. These kids are o b s e s s e d with asking about the time and schedule.  You would think that 9 and 10 year olds would spend at least 20% of the time thinking about cartoons and superheroes, but they actually spend 100% of the time asking any of the following questions:

Are we there yet?

What time is it?

How many more minutes?

How many more miles?

What do we do tomorrow?

What time is dinner?

When's breakfast tomorrow?

Why do you have your nose pierced?

They’re constantly begging for information that I don’t know. I don’t know.

P.S.S. OH OH ALSO I got reaccepted to Columbia, which is kind of a big deal.  I've been waiting 9ish months for this, which means I'm officially returning to school in the fall. I'll be accepting any and all kisses and gifts (pizza) thnk u~

FINE

Fine. OK?! FINE. YOU GOT ME.  Camp is perfect, my anxiety was for nothing, Windy Peak is a dream, and my co-counselors are all cooler, better looking, and more interesting than me.  I have a crush on each and every one of them.  

Being happy is like, the loveliest punch in the gut.  At any moment I could throw up a blanket of butterflies and feather boas.  I don’t know why I was given this job, but I feel like the luckiest little suburban bean to be here, huddled in the corner of my cabin with smelly socks and scuzzy teeth.  This place is actually the coolest, and these losers already feel like family.  Isn't that obnoxious?

This week was staff training.  Seven flawless days of camp for grown ups.  I literally spent the entire week getting paid to sing campfire songs and wolf down brownies.  Each day was dedicated to going over and practicing everything we’d be teaching about our core sports, with the occasional light-hearted Don't Sexually Abuse The Children chat sprinkled in the arts and crafts room. We make bracelets! Don't touch kids! At the week’s end, I still wouldn’t say that I know as much about hugging rocks and kissing soil as the other counselors, who were seemingly all raised by trees and L.L.Bean, but I’m prepared enough to teach these little slime-monsters what they’ll want to learn.

However perf this week was, lapping up sunscreen and crumping my way through icebreakers, I still managed to fuck up royally on more than one occasion.  I managed not to bring soap or chapstick, turning my lips into a dirt-dusted blood bath, and my right arm (ONLY my right arm) is riddled with bug bites.  If I weren't already a perfect 10, I'd be a 9.5.

But the real fun was Monday night, the second day of training, when the entire staff camped out along the shore of Lake Wellington.  Being from California, I wasn’t aware that Rocky Mountain nights were less hospitable to human life than a gutted chicken in a freezer locker.  Within two hours of falling asleep, I woke up shivering violently, with no feeling in my face.  Of course my pathetic sleeping bag and jeans + tee combo wasn’t enough to keep me warm while lying like an idiot log on the wet grass with only a tarp in between.  For a very long and dramatic twenty minutes that I was sure were my last, I dressed myself in every piece of clothing I could fit onto my body while squatting in a nylon tent hovering over three other counselors, managing to squeeze on two pairs of shoes (water shoes inside hiking boots thank you very much) while waking no one.  I then dragged what was left of myself into one of the camp’s official 15 passenger vans, where I rocked back and forth in the fetal position for an hour just to feel again.  

Obviously I survived through the night. And thank god I did, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the chance to, just two nights later, have a sex dream featuring one of my coworkers while we all slept together, the chef, nurse, bosses and all, in one room.  Obviously I woke up terrified that I had said his name, or anything at all, in my sleep.  And although nobody ever hinted that anything had happened, I still don’t feel safe.  I’m almost 100% certain that every single one of those bastards is in on a joke at my expense. I should leave.

Goofs aside, it’s spooky how quickly I've adjusted to the whole “always running around in the sun” thing. I didn’t expect that by the third day, when given an hour of free time, that after just three minutes of sitting on my bed scrolling through Facebook, I would become so incredibly bored and uninterested in the screen in front of me, that I'd spitefully toss my phone beneath my pile of granola bars and go to the bike tent to practice changing tires. If you think THAT'S dumb, imagine how stupid I felt when I found myself wishing for a 5:30 AM wake-up call so I could get outside early enough to catch a picture of the morning mist coming off the mountains. Where do I get off acting like such an asshole?

Camp starts tomorrow morning, which means I'll actually have to like, keep a group of eight 4th and 5th grade children alive and entertained for the next two weeks.  I feel nothing.

Good God,

Kay

P.S. I’m so drunk on sunshine I'm not even mad about the gel-like meat grease coating all of our dinner plates.  If you haven’t yet tried day-old lamb fat infused oranges, I highly recommend it before you brush your teeth HAPPY FATHER'S DAY