visiting home

 

 

road movie to berlin

 The first time I heard They Might Be Giants was at the summer day camp I went to that had two vans. The red van did not have a working stereo. The WHITE VAN had a cd player/ cassette player and the two cool guy counselors who drove the white van would play the album Flood by They Might Be Giants on it and you got to listen to songs like Particle Man, Birdhouse in Your Soul, and Istanbul (not Constantinople). It was a huge deal to be in the white van and get to listen to the crazy songs and I remember the time me and my friend got on what was ordinarily the big kid van. 

At some point after that or around that time there was also an animated music video to Particle Man on Tiny Toon Adventures.

My next memory of the album is my dad buying it and my sister and I and my dad listening to the album all the way through on the way home and stopping in the driveway and until it finished. I remember my dad saying that he liked that it was a bunch of short catchy songs.

Recently I was driving a group of campers and put on Flood again. It's the same CD that my dad bought at least 20 years ago. For a while my favorite song from the album has been the closing track, Road Movie to Berlin. It's a song about mortality and accepting life for the finite one-way journey that it is.

My favorite verse goes:

We were once so close to heaven

Peter came out and gave us medals,

declaring us the nicest of the damned.

And then there's this really long pronounced silence

Time won't find the lost

it'll sweep up our skeleton bones

so take the wheel and I will take the pedals.

I just think those are such good lines. Time won't find the lost, it'll sweep up our skeleton bones. Like, the passage of time won't uncover anything or bring anything back. It will only brush things into oblivion. That good good existential finality. But then the last line is sweet because there's a sense of camaraderie and togetherness as we go forwards in the only direction we can go. Right? Two or more people driving in a car together. It's a great example of choosing your attitude. Like the facts are gonna be what they are, time goes on and we aren't getting to heaven, but gosh darn it we're together and we're gonna be nice about it. 

That's that on that. 

end of summer pics

 

what made this summer my favorite ever

 #1- Poplar. We did something new that was a big success and added a new dimension to camp. It was scary going into it and there was a lot of uncertainty but we got through it and everyone walked away with a great experience. It was a dream come true and something I'm really really proud of.

#2- We had the best team we've ever had during my time. We added two amazing counselors and brought back nearly everyone else and I think it elevated the entire camp. The staff that I've known since they were campers are excellent people who I feel really lucky to know and they keep getting better. I saw new levels of professionalism and confidence and caring that made my heart feel like it was going to explode from joy.

#3- I think I did a good job. My big goal for the summer was to handle situations calmly without raising my voice and I wouldn't say I was perfect but I'd definitely say it was my best summer on record. I think I also continued to come up with new ideas and add to the culture.

(also related to #2 and #3 is consistency. consistency and familiar faces is so so huge. this is the longest I've ever been at a single job and the consistent team we've built makes us really effective. I just remembered how at other jobs when there's turnover you end up fighting a lot of the same battles over and over and making the same mistakes and relearning the same lessons and it's pretty incredible that we've largely avoided that.) 

#4- Connections to campers. Maybe the most important metric of success is the number of campers we make a connection with and an impact on. We did a lot of great work this summer to make our camp a place where any kid of any age can have a great time and feel part of the community. One of my biggest strengths is I think I can do a good job of engaging with the youngest girls and the oldest boys and every group in between and we have a team of versatile counselors who can do that as well. 

There are things to improve and strive towards but we done did good.

one thing I like about myself is all of my good qualities

and one thing I dislike about myself is all of my bad qualities

but one thing I like about myself is not disliking myself for my faults

also one thing I like about myself is that the little guy that sits in the command chair of my brain that is in charge of executive function and the part of me that is the parent/adult of myself...thing...that guy does a good job. so, good job being functional, me.

unexpected moments of intimacy

I was stopped at the light on Ridge and Grady on my way back from the grocery store with my window half down when a women pulled up next to me in an on Miata convertible with the top down. It was red with an antique plate and patches of paint missing from the bumper. She was slightly ahead of me so I could only see the back of her head as she turned on her radio and "Ooh La La" by the Faces started playing. I turned off my radio and saw her look down and gently bob her head to the music.

I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger

Her light turned green and she drove off. There wasn't really anything remarkable about the encounter except how close we happened to be in that moment. We could've had a conversation without even raising our voices. Like we weren't in these weird domed space ships that zip around and it's easy to imagine that other humans don't even exist.

And then I thought, as I often do, about how I drive in the vehicles that my grandparents owned and I put up the blanket over the back seat that my dad and I put up the first day I got the car. 

And then I was frustrated, as I often am, by how weird it is, particularly for guys, to talk about things like intimacy and feeling close to someone. Shout out the lady in the red Miata. 

it's all moves in a game

 going to camp is playing a big game called 'camp' that is made up of a bunch of different smaller games. and everything you say and do is a move that tries to establish the game you're playing.

For example yesterday I was at a park where kids get picked up in town and a boy asked if he could go to the bathroom which was on the other side of a baseball field from the parking lot we were waiting in. I have to say 'yes' and immediately he takes all the other kids from the van except one with him to the bathroom which I was immediately skeptical of. I didn't want to leave the one girl alone in the van so I watched from afar and after a few minutes I'd realized that they'd gone over to play on the playground that was next to the bathhouse. So then I had to play the "You did something wrong" game and in a big voice say "NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!" and carry on about how they had broken trust and were out of supervision and lied to me. And that boy had played some version of the "I'm going to see what I can get away with" game. I mean, I kinda get it. The playground is right next to the bathroom and they are a group of children but when we're in a public space that is outside of camp, I want eyes and ears on everyone at all times. That's the "you did something wrong" game.

Then there's the "larger than life" game. Where you take the regular occurrences of camp and treat them like the momentous historical events. A lot of the time for me this looks like commentating on games that people are playing. I was watching a kickball game with a group of kids on Thursday and we were in the commentator booth providing play-by-play coverage. 

Another game I love to play is the "spirit of camp" game. This is mostly with counselors and it's where I assess how closely you are adhering to the "spirit of camp". What it usually looks like is either praising or griping about various actions. One move I was fond of this year was commenting on whether the counselors took a route into camp that goes by the pool that the campers aren't allowed to take or took a longer path through the woods that the campers use. It's also a lot of assessing how engaged a counselor looks at any given moment. More broadly you could call this game "test of faith".

Another really popular game is "get it?" It's another way of saying 'inside joke' but it doesn't have to be pre-established. It's just saying something that on the surface level doesn't mean much but there's a second layer that you want people to recognize and pick up on. 

Getting a group's attention and explaining rules or steps to follow is playing "I'm in charge". And that's where you do moves to show that you know what you're talking about and people should listen to you. Most of "I'm in charge" is getting people to stop talking. It also has a lot to do with presence and attitude. 

"In Cahoots" is a really powerful game. That's where you set a premise or a mission and convince the group around you that you are united and an in-group. This is a popular one at meals. I started something called the "clean plate club" this summer where you just lick your plate clean and then we take a group photo with everyone's clean plates. 

"Role Reversal" is a game where the person in authority acts like an exaggerated version of the group they have authority over. That's one I really like. It could be considered a variation of "get it?"

"One of Us"is using attention and praise to establish someone as part of the in-group. It's establishing rapport and making someone feel seen and heard. 

Most of these have to do with building a sense of group and community and establishing the norms and values of that group. It's a lot of "do you like what I like? do you laugh at what I laugh at? do you value what I value?" I don't know if it's helpful to write this out or if it's just a bunch of navel-gazing but I'd argue it's useful to breakdown something big and amorphous like camp and how to act in a complex social situation into discrete parts in some way.

Other games include "you're my special" which is where you latch onto one person and make them the be-all end-all of your life at camp. And there's "nobody loves me" which usually looks like throwing a fit because you don't feel seen or heard. "Hideaway" is where you go off and make your self inaccessible with one or more people. 

 

I've been driving a shuttle van into town from camp this week

 And I had them all go around and do Rose-Bud-Thorn and they all had such great answers and it was really sweet. I love reflection and recaps so much. And I also hate ending a day or an experience without doing them. They make me so happy. 

The unexamined life is not worth living!

Also we had a discussion today about which plants would win in a fight.

Growth is the greatest weapon of all!

a field camp bedtime story

 Once upon a time there was a camp in a field and one day a man came to that camp and his name was Shmanderson but they just called him Andy. And he was part of the camp and went on many adventures. He touched the bear on top of Gertie's Country Store. He saw the vulture that lived in the abandoned mill. He had the cops called on him at the reservoir. He saw a British ghost while looking for a crashed airplane at Mint Springs. He got lost at the Rockfish Gap community center. He went to the Dolly Sods and climbed the highest mountain and squelched in the sphagnum bog. He went to Costa Rica and drove a van. He went to Florida (twice) and also drove a van. He hiked from Blue Ridge to Camp Albemarle through the river. He went to all the 7-11's in town in one day. He went into the Glade Spring cave and got stuck in the mud. He hiked the entirety of the Rivanna Trail and almost the entire Rivanna River. He had many more adventures too but the real adventure was the people he met and the people they grew up to be. And Shmanderson said, "Well I guess I did alright" and took a nap for 8 months straight.

the mission remains lifting people up emotionally and socially

 right? what does that mean?

giving people an elevated experience. you know it when you see it. it's when someone seems energized. bold. silly. engaged. immersed. open to the new. a state of plasticity! where new connections are formed.

that is the mission that is always the mission.

looking forward to the off season

The time outside of camp is for making a better version of myself to come back to camp. I wrote out some goals for the year and I'm excited because for the first time in my adult life they don't include running a lot of miles every day. Which is something I've loved doing for a really long time but it just takes a lot of energy and time and inevitably I would have to drop other stuff to make hitting mileage possible. I'm still going to focus on sprinting and climbing, so being active, but I'm going to hopefully schedule it in a way where the workouts are only 30 to 40 minutes and not overly tiring. The hope is that that also frees up time to whittle and learn the melodica!

We'll see

thought of the day

if you want to seem interesting, be interested

they told me it was a mugshot

 

day of the immense sun, and action and ambition and laughter

Great is youth, and equally great is old age . . . . great are the day and night;

Great is wealth and great is poverty . . . . great is expression and great is silence.

Youth large lusty and loving . . . . youth full of grace and force and fascination,

Do you know that old age may come after you with equal grace and force and  

 fascination?

Day fullblown and splendid . . . . day of the immense sun, and action and ambition  

 and laughter,

The night follows close, with millions of suns, and sleep and restoring darkness.

I think Walt Whitman is taking in everything as it is and basking in its totality. The default way of thinking is to pick and choose, right? Being young is better than being old. Wealth is better than poverty. But he's saying everything that exists exists with the same level of force and fullness. Nothing that is real is any less real than anything else. The only illusion is the illusion of difference. That's why he repeats 'great' that's why he repeats "grace and force and fascination".

Do you accept the totality? Do you?! I guess so