The Saga of How I Became a Pirate: Part One

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.