the beach and camp.

"what filthy piles of sand our lives make, if we just sit beside the shore and never change."
anyone who has not listened to mike mains and the branches yet should give them a try. they're wonderful, and they're christians(not a christian band; a band where the people in it are christians but their music doesn't fall into the christian genre), and they're poor so you should buy them.
anyways. they wrote that line up there. i was listening to their album for the 14th time(i don't know the exact number but that's probably about right) and heard that, and i thought of how you can never walk on the same beach twice because the sand gets washed around and moved away.
i then started thinking of all the people not coming back to camp next year and a lightbulb went on.
camp is so much like the beach.
i call both the most beautiful place in the world.
they are both my favorite places to be.
both are full of God-metaphors.
and both are always changing.
neither has ever been exactly the same when i've revisited them.
but unlike the beach, i complain all the live long day about this fact about camp. sometimes i want to never go back because of this.
i tried to reason that this is stupid. if it doesn't bother me about the beach, it shouldn't matter at camp either.
but camp is not the beach, and people that i grow to love over two months are not bits of sand.
i've never worked in the same staff twice. no one ever will. it's just a part of camp. instead of getting easier every year, it gets harder. everyone leaves a piece of themselves at camp when they leave it. the ghosts build up a lot over four years.
i've worked with 107 different people. 91 were full-time staff, 14 worked a week or two, and 2 were there for a day and a half. 28 follow me around like laverne from scrubs in that one horrible episode after she dies.
this was the summer that i made more real friends than ever. (usually i make a ton of great just-in-the-summer friends, but it's their camp selves, not their real selves, that i'm friends with. and if we never work together again, we lose each other) even though i know they'll still be in my life a long time, most of them aren't coming back to camp. i've never had this much notice for how sad the beginning of a summer will be; i don't know if that'll make it easier or harder. we'll see.
i still want to go back, and God still wants me there, so this isn't keeping me away. it'll just be harder than ever right at first.

our own breed.

(anytime i look at my stats and see pageviews today: 0, pageviews yesterday, 0, i have the most overwhelming urge to write something.
but i usually can't think of anything.
i can today.)
there are some things that can only be understood by camp staffers. things only we laugh at, things only we cry about.
sometimes just spilling out camp stories to anyone who will listen is enough to make the missing-ness go away, but then sometimes you just HAVE to see or talk to someone who went through it with you. the phrase "you had to be there" is such an understatement.
being part of something special makes you special; 
for instance: we use the same kind of cups at school that we do at camp. just like the ones at camp, they are VERY difficult to pull apart when you stack them. but unlike at camp, no one tells anyone to not stack them; they actually store them stacked up in a big basket. anyways, whenever someone sends a big stack of cups into the dishpit when i'm working, i always want to make some kind of comment on what flory would say if she had to unstack all those, but of course no one i work with would understand.
i love and hate camp for the same reason: it's mine. it's separate from all my friends at home. love it because that makes it special, hate it because i'm so rarely around the people who i shared it with.
a few days ago, hope and kathleen and jenna all started flooding my facebook with links from summercampconfessions.tumblr.com. i hadn't meant to come home until thanksgiving break, but i had to check it out and ciu blocked tumblr, so i caved. i've been on it for an hour copying pictures from it and it is the best blog i have ever read.
through it i found two other blogs(also on tumblr. seriously ciu! 99% of us are NOT using it for porn, stop making us suffer!) like it. and i forget that there are other camps out there. they are also full of people who love what they do, and those people also miss it.
i feel so crazy for missing my camp so much all the time, hate how attached i am, complain about how i wish i was one of those "normal" counselors who goes to camp, loves their time there, then leaves and goes about with life just fine until the next summer.
but now i see that for us, thinking of camp everywhere IS normal. it's a relief to see i'm not the only one. =]

camp confessions!

top 5 funniest/most ridiculous la vida moments of all time.

all time meaning, of course, from june 2008 to now.

5. "we have a problem in cabin 10...it's regarding the tooth fairy."
4. when we watched a walk to remember, and cindy cried.
3. the time that a mother came to la vida, wanting to pick up her child who was actually over at white oak.
2. the squirrel in cabin 9.
1. me and jenna and brittany and my bed...