Ok. So after getting used to my giant, sweaty, yellowed eye gauze with an actual black eye patch over it (to keep out the light), I started to go back to my usual self. Falling down stairs because of my lack of depth perception, almost falling off ladders because I REFUSE to let people help me.... You know - being adventurous and not thinking things through. It's what I do. Haters gonna hate.
At this camp that I worked at, we would have different night-time activities during the week. Usually there were a few evening campfires, which would take place at Bennington Point. For convenience, I have decided to include a map of camp.
Bennington Point..... on the southwest point of the island.
We would prepare skits, musical numbers, activities, and the like for the campers. I have some AWESOME stories about that. (Hint: celebrity jeopardy where I played the bad-ass velociraptor from Jurrasic Park.) Other nights, we would play risk, or tag, or soccer.
And then, there was my FAVORITE activity.
CAPTURE. THE. FLAG.
For all those who didn't spend their childhoods PINING for the opportunity to play this game, I included a short video explaining the basics.
Yeah. Majestic, right?
Well, if you've ever met me, you would know - I can get PRETTY competitive.
So one wednesday evening, it was capture the flag night. As usual, we got two gallon jugs of washable, non-toxic paint in red and blue to mark the teams. (I include those details to show that Camp Abnaki is awesome at fun AND safety.) The campers would line up in two long, unwashed, slightly smelly lines to get painted. Two counselors (Ian Boyajian and Eric something) were assigned to mark them. They decided to dip their hands in bowls of paint and basically facepalm each camper. So I helped supervise the lines, making sure the campers didn't get in any savage fights, and then I went up to the red team to get my handprint.
The conversation went something like this:
Ian: "Hey Princess." (That was my nickname)
Me: "Hey". *Sticks out my face to be facepalmed*
Ian: "Um, seriously?"
Me: "What? I want to be on the red team. Like the communists."
Ian: "You're not playing."
Me: "Why not??"
Ian: "Remember how you fell down the stairs yesterday, because your depth perception is off?"
Me: "Whatever. I do what I want."
I then dipped my hand into the paint and face palmed myself.
(Side note: That paint was non -toxic and washable, but smelled terrible and was SO ITCHY.)
After some formalities, the game began.
Now, they were being pretty permissive with me, letting me play. I think everyone assumed that I would play capture the flag exactly like I played risk or basketball... hide behind someone and pretend I'm available. NOPE. I'm a freaking CHAMPION at capture the flag.
So after the ichty self-facepalming, I joined my team. They created a strategy which, unsurprisingly, did not include me. They don't even know, I thought. I'll show them!
Okay. Now fast forward about 45 minutes. Our team desperately needs to score. And although most of my existence that summer was ALWAYS in the spotlight (one of three women on a boy's summer camp..... yeah, let's just say I was constantly aware of my gender), this was the one circumstance in which I was overlooked because of my dos equis. Most of the time I was looked over. If you understand the distinction. Mae West did.
I was totally overlooked! So I didn't even have to sneak as I approached their flags, took one, and began walking nonchalantly away. Eventually one of the younger kids noticed..... and I TOOK OFF running.
So there I was, running full out towards the median line, in athletic shorts and a bright pink T-shirt, braided pigtails flying, a pack of sweaty boys in hot pursuit. My lack of sight in one eye was the last thing on my mind.
You know what was my first?
VICTORY.
The sweet mistress of glory. She would crown me, "princess", the QUEEN of capture the flag. True, my cover would be blown, and never again would I be overlooked, but the street cred I would get? Totes worth it.
As I sprinted toward the line, I could hear the chariots of fire theme song playing in my head. I pictured myself looking something like this:
But I'm pretty sure I looked more like this:
I was so close.
And then, all of a sudden, I was tumbling down the hill sideways, with a sharp pain in my knee.
What the heck had happened?
As I lay at the bottom, the bitter taste of failure in my mouth (or was that dirt?), I pondered that question.
Basically, what had happened is this. A counselor decided my victory must be thwarted. So he charged me at full speed. From my right side.
The side where I had no vision.
And in doing so, he had hit me hard enough to sprain my knee. Badly.
So after a quick trip to the hospital on the bigger island nearby, I came back to camp.
With, basically, a peg leg. (immobilizer and crutches.)
This is one of the few pictures from that summer. That's me. In the middle.
I was banned from woodshop for the rest of the summer. Nobody wants to work with an arts and crafts director with a hook.
When I was 19, I met this girl named Maureen. We worked at "Veg Prep" together, an awful job that started at 6am and consisted mainly of washing and chopping fruits and vegetables for the on-campus restaurants. We would make 40 pounds of fruit salad, de-stem 50 pounds of grapes, and if you were ESPECIALLY lucky, you got to slice the 96 pounds of tomatoes that Subway used every day. This was the most dreaded task, mostly because the slicers were dull and sometimes you'd get one of those grenade-like tomatoes that would explode on contact. And getting slimed by tomato snot is not my favorite past-time.
Anyway, I met this girl named Maureen. And if there's one thing people should know about me, it's that I'm not a morning person. I'm NOT. A. MORNING. PERSON. And I don't feel bad for it. And I'm uninterested in being converted to the infernal belief that the morning is a great or even acceptable time to be awake or making sound. So you can imagine how pleasant I was at this job. However, much to my liking, people were mostly silent through my 6-10 am shift.
Except Maureen.
She'd ask questions, and talk, and laugh, and listen to ruckus music. ("Ruckus", if you're wondering, is music I would usually like, but in the morning, it sounds like putting a brick in a clothes dryer.)
Even though she was awful in the morning, the rest of the day, Maureen was nice and fun. And she was from Vermont. Which was new. Through the few conversations I could carry on in the morning (because carrying on a conversation is hard, when all you can think about is ripping out someone's trachea) (I warned you! I hate the morning!), I learned that Maureen worked on a summer camp in North Hero, Vermont. Every summer.
Do want.
So, I applied for the job, and although I was MASSIVELY underqualified for the position of Arts and Crafts Director, I was hired. (In my defense, they should have screened me more. They barely even ASKED about my artsy fartsy skills). I flew to vermont, moved into a cabin infested with wolf spiders, and began that summer.
There are so many stories I plan to tell you about this period in my life, but the first is about the crazy injuries I sustained.
So I was the arts and crafts director, right? And this was an all boys summer camp. So we had to mix normal arts and crafts activities such as "candle making", "clay sculpting", and "hemp necklaces" with other, more bad-ass alternatives such as "fire", "building a kiln", and "making a whip that Indiana Jones would jones for". In one such activity, which included building an epic fire, heating up pots of water in it, then melting cans of colored wax in the water, was fire-candle-making. I was doing my best to help 11 and 12 year old boys have fun dipping wicks into the wax and then a bucket of cold water, all while keeping the fire burning and making sure that they didn't burn themselves in a way I could get in trouble for. During all this, the water in one of the double boiler pots boiled out, and some wax from my giant aluminum cans leaked into the pot.
Well, if you know anything about wax, water, and hot fires, you can probably guess what happened next.
But, for the rest of us, who didn't know how lethal those three could be, I'll tell you.
I leaned over the fire to make sure one of the particularly savage campers didn't hurt himself while poking an extremely dry stick into the embers of the fire. At this precise moment, the three unknowingly lethal substances combined into one tiny fireball from hell, which spat up from the fire and landed directly on MY EYE.
I think I was impressively collected for about the next 5 minutes. I continued being awesome and making candles with unwashed pre-teens.
Then, I realized I couldn't open my eye without it stinging. And I'm not talking about some pansy "open your eyes under seawater" sting. I'm talking about if someone pried your eye open and actively salted it. Yeah. That kind of stinging. The kind that makes you yell out the Lord's name, but not in vain. Because you are genuinely pleading for help. So after a few momets of "DEAR GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE" and "WHY!!!!! WHY!!!!", we began to actually search for a solution. (To the everlasting credit of those pre-teens, not even ONE of them laughed at me right then. Good boys.)
So, basically, we found the camp nurse, Shelley, and the next thing I knew, I was laying on a table in an office building that probably once was a greasy diner, being examined by a man wearing a hawaiian shirt.
(NOTE to everyone who wants to be a doctor: unless you're in the caribbean, wearing a hawaiian print shirt while examining a patient does NOT inspire confidence.)
After an overly long visit, during which I had begun to regard my doctor as a harmless but inept bird pecking around me and making odd squaking sounds, he numbed my eye, glued it shut, and gave my giant gauze pads and athletic tape to cover up my eye so light couldn't get it.
Well, if you know anything about Vermont (which, if you don't, it's cool. It's tiny and the only good thing about it is epic maple syrup), you know that it is HUMID. Like, sit around under someone's tongue for a while humid. And my gauze pads were white. So combine those two with an almost camping - like atmostphere, and you have....
A 19 year old insecure girl wearing a crudely cut and taped eye patch that is yellowed with sweat and curling up instead of sticking to the skin, once again because of SWEAT.
NOT what I looked like. But I'm not confident enough to post what I actually looked like.
What's funny is that I had a boyfriend then, and not now. Go figure.
Up Next: How I became a legitimate pirate. Or at least looked like one. Not on purpose.
In fact, I have almost attacked people who have said those very things. Not believing in the fundamentals of the theory of evolution is like not believing the fundamentals of gravity: if you jump off a building, you're still going to fall.
Go ahead! Jump!
Anyway. I digress.
In my job, I encounter many different people. MANY. And every week, I like to compile a list of people who evolution should remove from the gene pool. And by list I mean I like to think about it. Who has paper anymore anyway?
This week, I've decided that human evolution has failed because there are people who:
1) Don't know their own phone number. WHO the HELL doesn't know their own cell phone number? There are only a few viable excuses for this, which include advanced Alzheimer's and a strange fear of 7 or 10 digit numbers. But even then, just put the 1 in front of it, and it's 11 numbers! PROBLEM SOLVED! What if Matt Damon asked you for your phone number? What then?
Imagine this man...
Asking THIS question.
2) Have their zumba instructor/clandestine lover/5 year old child write letters of reference for them. That is suspicious. There's NO ONE ELSE who would recommend you? The only people who think you're a swell enough person to write something nice about are someone you interact with only when sweating, when cheating, or someone completely dependent on you for life? How about I have my dog write my letter of reference. She thinks I'm awesome.
3) Spend 20 minutes telling me about every detail of their lives in order to come to the conclusion that: "I need to set up an appointment with someone to clean my teeth". I don't need to know about your last bowel movement, when and where you contracted the clap, and that you heard that dog's saliva is more sanitary than human saliva. Just tell me what you want.
I feel like this sometimes.
4) Have no concept of how awful they are. These are the people that always assign blame to someone else, and assume that nothing they do or say is wrong, ever. Usually I want to tell those people that they come from *enter city name, USA*, not Mount Olympus, that they are eating McDonalds, not manna that has been rained upon them from the heavens, and that no, they do not in fact shart unicorns.
Really? Cause I'm pretty sure you're 5. And that makes you better than no one.
If you are guilty of any of these, please - tell me why I'm insensitive in the comments. Also, if you would like to tell me how science is all malarky trying to make us stray from the path of God, post it in the comments. If you think I'm right, feel free to counteract the negative comments from the first two groups of people and redeem my self esteem. In the comments.
Also, today I had to get shots. So while they were stabbing me, I pictured myself riding a pegacorn, eating bacon.
The past 2 weeks or so, I have optimistically set my alarms (there are 3 of them, that go off at a time ending in "3", and then 7 minutes later, and then 3 minutes after that. So I give myself 10 minutes to wake up) to an early enough time to get up, get ready, and ride my bike to work.
So far, I have failed. Either the outside is too cold, or rainy, or my bed is too warm or my house doens't smell NEARLY enough like bacon for me to get out of bed.
See that cereal right there? NOT GOING TO CUT IT.
Well, Monday of this week, I left my house at the usual time, and got to work 10 minutes late. BOO. Traffic.
Yesterday, I left my house 20 minutes early, and got to work 10 minutes late. BOO! TRAFFIC!!!
So as I was sitting in my little carlet yesterday,
Isn't he cute? I need to make mine look as nice as this one. Also, almost every purple 2001 Hyundai Accent I could find was almost unrecognizable because it had been tricked out by someone. Really? On a car with a 4 cylinder engine that sounds more like a sewing machine than a motor vehicle?
So this morning, when I woke up, instead of rolling over and snuggling deeper into my comforter, I rolled out of bed and got to work. I threw some leggings on under my dress and a slip in my purse for when I got to work, and headed off.
Things I noticed on my way to work that I didn't know about that particular route before:
1) There is a house that sells fresh eggs. I want some.
2) There are exactly 11 llamas on the llama farm I pass. And when you make chubacca noises at them, they all look up with the same quizzical expression on their face. I could just imagine them as a greek chorus, speaking in unison: "HARK! What foul mouthed gliding beast is this?"
3) There are cows in one of the fields I pass. Like, cows I never noticed before. Cows are big. How did I overlook cows?
4) The organics food stand is quaint and I want to buy breakfast there. Except they're not open yet. BOO.
5) When you bike past people who drove past you 10 minutes ago, everyone gets agitated. Like that moment in Office Space when an old woman with a walker passes you and you're in your car....
When I was in Armenia, I got sick. Like, SICK. So very, very sick. It was like I had been unknowingly accosted by some acid demon from hell. One that took up spiky residence in my stomach, and simultaneously shoved acid spears up my esophagus and down my intestines. And every time its acid spears would find some untouched bit of flesh, something not charred by its infernal torture, it would jump up, latch on, and slowly rip up the flesh.
This is remotely what I picture:
Anyway, that's what was happening on the inside. And on the outside, I alternated three distinct states of being.
1) Curled in a ball somewhere dark and secret, silently chewing on the inside of my mouth to try and distract my mind from the pain. I figured target confusion would work. I was wrong.
2) Expelling food and drink items from one of my orifices in randomly digested states
3) Traipsing around outside being angry at everyone and everything.
So after a few weeks of this, came The Night. The most DRAMATIC NIGHT OF MY LIFE. Yeah. I said it. And getting that status isn't something easy, let me tell you. I've had some DRAMA FILLED NIGHTS. But this...... this takes the proverbial cake.
Which cake is a whirling mass of bile and hatred.
But anyway, let me tell you how it went.
After a long day spent in state #3, me and my current companion came home for the evening. We had a few things to do before we went to bed. This was my participation, roughly, in the evening's activities:
1) Call the district leader and tell him about our day. The conversation went something like this: "We raged around and taught people crap and Sister Smith didn't let me talk. Cool?" I'm exceptionally pleasant when ill. :)
2) Planned. I contributed little tidbits such as "why don't we change that one tiny detail you let me have control over, while all the really important decisions are made by you. Goody! You even want control over which snack I bring! Joy!"
3) Nightly prayers. I think I said something along the lines of "If you want to kill me tonight, that's cool. But let it be something where Sister Smith feels bad about it." Yeah, we didn't get along.
Then, I went to sleep.
My dreams in Armenia were always haunted with happy things. I say haunted because I was so unhappy and ill, that happy seemed to taunt me. Like food does when you're hungry. Bah. Jerk brain, taunting me with happy memories.
I woke up at around 11:30, and proceeded to state #2. After about an hour of that, I proceeded to state #1. I collapsed like some sort of twitching, gray unicorn on the couch, and began tearing at it with my fingernails. I eventually rolled, as dramatically as possible, onto the floor, trying to make as loud a thump as possible. (I wanted Sister Smith to see me miserable, and to lose some sleep so she would be miserable too). I pulled all the couch cushions on top of me, and twitched in a pile for a while. It felt like a long time, but it could have been like 5 minutes. Who knows, really.
This pain was so intense! It was like I had swallowed a stegosaurus, and as it struggled, its spiny back was tearing me up from the inside out. I was positive I was dying.
Slowly, I became aware of a pathetic, almost frankenstein-ish moan coming from somewhere in the apartment. I remember feeling totally taken aback - how DARE she moan, when I am in so much pain! Then I realized.... I was the one moaning. And I continued to do so. Making my brain focus on making the moaning louder was distracting it from the pain. I've heard people say "searing pain"... but this was like a struggling, wet, acid pain. Something cold and dangerous. Like face planting into a pool of someone else's bile.
Eventually, she woke up. I think she was afraid - the sounds I was making were more like a partially butchered hippo, rather than a human. But when she came out, I think she was frozen by the sight. A mass of olive green, corduroy pillows, at the center of which was a sweaty, half-dressed mass of exhausted pain and fury. I was probably something straight from her nightmares.
We called the doctor assigned to us, who happened to live in Ukraine. Jerk doctor, living thousands of miles away, telling me to get to a hospital. You can't even see me, I thought. You don't know! At this point, I stopped feeling so tragic. My brain had been given a task: locate a medical facility! OF COURSE! Why didn't I think of that?
We started gathering the things we thought were important for an emergency trip to a hospital in the semi-rural, isolated north of a third world country. Sister Smith thought of shoes, the cell phone, extra socks, and carby food items. As she logically filled her bag with the essentials, I decided a can of peas was absolutely necessary. Along with a bucket. And a slip. I'm useless in disaster situations.
We staggered outside and I remember being WAY too loud. Sister Smith kept trying to shush me and I was like "YOU DON'T KNOW ME! LEAVE ME ALONE!" I felt completely indignant towards her trying to help me walk to a taxi. We asked the driver to take us to a hivandanots - a hospital. He looked at me, and I think I was so moany and helpless by this point, he complied.
We drove to a relatively nice part of town, to a building that reminded me of Dick Tracy. I don't know why. We went inside, and a few nurses poked and prodded me and stuck a thermometer into my armpit. They proceeded to tell me that I had "mrselled". Basically, that my feet had gotten too cold, so now I was sick. I immediately saw these nurses as uneducated enemies, and I started flailing and yelling 'Mrsel goiutiun chuni!" Over and over again. "Mrsel doesn't exist!" They decided I needed to go the surgery hospital. I wanted nothing more to do with them, and I think they wanted even less to do with me, so they stuffed me into the back of a white hearse, whose walls were coated with a thick layer of visible infection. Sister Smith tried to talk to the driver about the gospel. I hated her so much in that moment.
We drove up to a crumbling, stinking, cement edifice that seemed scream "COMMUNISM!!! I AM THE SOLUTION TO ALL OF SOCIETY'S PROBLEMS!!! LOOK HOW UNATTRACTIVE AND STURDY I AM!!!!" We went inside, and I was laid on a rough cement slab jutting out from the wall. There was one light in the whole building, it seemed. And it shined directly on the face of an older armenian woman with too much eyeliner and not enough skin. She ran to get the doctor. I saw a few glowing specks coming toward me in the dark. As soon as they stepped into the light, I thought of Beauty and the Beast. The moment where she seems him for the first time. (Skip to 1:10) (It's in cantonese, PS).
Terrified, speechless, horrified by these men who were so obviously not doctors, but claimed to be. Belle sees the beast as the mangy, shadowy, awful incarnation of what once a man.
And that's how I saw the doctors.
They poked me through my clothes, then tried to lift my shirt. I screamed and pulled it down. I would not be defiled by these pretend doctors. They would not examine me. I faced the wall and curled into a ball. I think I started to cry.
They told us to follow them to a room.
We followed them up dark, sick smelling hallways and staircases, past the room that they called the "bathroom". Yup. There was only one. For the whole hospital. It reeked so profoundly of human waste old cigarettes, I got dizzy.
Around one more corner, down one more hallway. They asked us a question. I didn't understand.
"What?" I asked.
"They asked if we brought bedding."
I groaned. The "doctors" opened a door. The immediate smell of unwashed human flesh filled my nostrils. A room with 6 beds. Five of them already filled.
I turned to Sister Smith. "Hell. No." I was almost whispering in my determination. If I entered that room, I would probably get the plague. And bedbugs and herpes. And ..... so many other things.
After much protesting from me, we were taken down the hall, to talk to the hospital boss. That is his only title, considering that he was a fake doctor and probably a fake hospital director.
I refused to let them touch me. Sister Smith said I was hurting their feelings. I told her I didn't care. I wasn't going to stay there.
After a 3am phone call to the Mission President, I found myself in a taxi on my way to Yerevan, the capitol city. There was an actual hospital there with actual doctors. By this point, I was so stressed that I made myself worse.
It was blizzarding outside. And every 10 minutes, I had to stop the taxi to relieve myself on the side of the road. One end or the other. It just kept coming out. My own bile seemed to mock me. No real vomit came up - just the thin lining of my stomach. It seemed to say "HAHA! You can't even keep your own fluids inside of you! SUCK ON THAT!"
After a few more episodes of this, we decided to make use of my bucket.
I wedged it behind the driver's seat, and passed blood and bile into it for the rest of that night. 3 hours in that taxi. Vomiting and excreting the only fluids left inside of me.
When we arrived a president's house, which was a veritable mansion wedged in between two other mansions, probably inhabited by mafia members, we got out of the car. I stumbled up to the door, rang it, and waited. When President opened the door, I stood straight up, moaned "President, can you kill me with your priesthood?" and fainted.
And every winter, when it stops having color, when everything turns to shades of black and gray, we break up.
And it's a BAD break up. Like, we can't even deal with each other for months. That's how bad it is.
Well I'm here to announce.... the world and I are BACK in a relationship! It's warm, and sunny, and great outside.
I just spent an hour of quality time with the sun. Because love is really spelled T-I-M-E. And I LOOOOOOVE the sun. So I guess I spell it T-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-M-E.
So I'm sure you all remember this post, about the top 10 things I should be sorry about, but I'm not.
Since I seem to love lists so much, I thought I'd do a new list. A more reflective list.
Top 10 things I shouldn't be sorry about, but I am.
10) Buying hair extensions. I had them for almost 3 months, and they were great at the time, but that was amost $300. And I haven't used them since. And they're such a hassle, I don't know if I ever will. They're super heavy, and really hard to style (because the texture of the hair was so different from my own), and they gave me headaches. Looked fantastic though!
9) My summer job at Camp Abnaki. It was a great time, but it stressed me out to a level I had never been stressed before. I also acted really immature towards the end, and I regret that. Oh well. Live and learn right?
8) Not continuing Russian. I know, I speak Spanish and Armenian, but I still want to learn Russian. I wish I had kept going with it. It was one of the few classes I ever took that I actually enjoyed.
7) Getting restless with work. I like to be busy. And so when I'm not kept busy, I have a hard time. Always been an issue for me. I guess I shouldn't be sorry, because how many people have that problem? But yet I am. I feel guilty for even getting paid when my time isn't filled.
6) Not pleasing everyone. I went through phases of trying to make everyone happy. Turns out that makes you miserable. So now I live my life by the motto "I do what I want". And this is my theme song.
But I still struggle with it every day. I want everyone to like me and be proud of me. So it's hard when they're not. Or even worse, when people want me to do opposite things. BAH.
5) Not maintaining certain friendships. Yeah. People that don't appreciate me as much as I do them. I still wish I had worked harder with them. Even if it was mostly one-sided. I liked them. And my indignance has ended the relationship. Sigh. Everyone told me that was me "preserving my self-worth". Only recently have I figured out that my self-worth has nothing to do with anyone else.
4) Attending BYU. Most people seem to have a great time there. They "finally fit in" and "love being around people with their same standards". These people "finally fit in" because they're weird, according to the world's standards. I like people. I like people that don't believe the same things. They challenge me.
3) Being a jack (or jane?) of all trades, master of none. I can do a LOT of things. I can bellydance, tap dance, play the accordion, knit, crochet, speak spanish, swim, wakeboard, do the splits, sew, give public speeches, cook, bake, and do all kinds of other things. But I'm not EXCELLENT at any of these things. I wish I had stuck with certain hobbies and gotten really good at them. Like the violin. And swimming.
2)Letting people friend zone me. ALL. THE. TIME. I'm attractive. I'm engaging. I'm fun to be with. But mostly I let people friend zone me before there's even a chance of anything happening. I hate awkwardness. So rather than suffer through the awkward stuff to get to the good stuff, I just let people push me into the "friend zone abyss" before we get to that part. Worst part? I can't stop.
1) Coming home from Armenia. This is a decision that most people will never understand. And the few that do, understand why it was necessary. This is one of the MAJOR things I'm still sorry about. But I shouldn't be. Because of that decision, I learned Spanish. And it turns out, Spanish is taking me all sorts of new places.
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