Camp Activities, Graded
Camp. For so many of us, the word brings up all sorts of associations. Maybe you had a great time. Maybe you had a shitty time. Maybe you’re still in it and you’re in some sort of *weird* state of arrested development. In any case, camp wasn’t uniformly one way or another in my experience: Certain aspects and activities were worth every minute I spent with them, others not so much. So I thought I’d take a little time to grade some of the camp activities that I and probably some of you partook in. A while back I graded camp songs, and I’ve only done about six of these things, which should give you some idea about how much I think about summer camp (probably too much). So, as I listen to the amazingly crap sounds of the local high school jazz band playing in the Barnes & Noble I’m now sitting in, I bring you…
CAMP ACTIVITIES, GRADED. Suckaz.
P.S. I just found my camera (yay!), and couldn’t resist taking pictures of me making funny faces instead of including the plucked-from-the-internet photos I usually do.
You look at a ropes course, and it glares right back at you. Nothing at camp-except for maybe the riflery range-looks nearly as much like punishment as a ropes course, as though one could be sentenced to the low-ropes for a minor infraction (starting a food fight) and the high-ropes for a serious camp offense (mowing over frisbee players on a go-kart). When I’m up there, I feel, rather bluntly, like I am going to die. Either that or I’ll fall off the rope and the harness between my legs will grab onto my bits and let me hang in the air in an unthinkably painful manner until someone has the good sense to lower me and my unfortunate bits down to the ground. Death, please.
Grade: D-
Swimming is sort of a camp staple, despite the fact that it’s a home staple too, by which I mean that you don’t really need to go to camp to do it. But that’s not really the point; swimming at camp is essentially flirting, but in the water instead of on land. What was nice about this is that it provided the lubricant (so to speak) for this sort of action; all I’d need to do was splash someone I thought was cute with a little water and wa-zing! (This, it should be noted, is purely theoretical: If recollection serves, splashing a cute girl with water only got me a splash back.) Whereas on land, I wouldn’t, and didn’t, know what the hell to do. So to recap: Flirting is hard, flirting in water is slightly less hard, and I sucked at both. Incidentally, after racking my brain for hours, the pool is the ONLY place I can think of that one can flirt while voiding at the same time, not that I would ever do that.
Grade: C
Notwithstanding a profoundly stupid name (and shouldn’t it be “Ga-Ga-Ga” for its three bounces before you can hit the ball?), Ga-Ga is fun, and all the more so because you won’t find this anywhere but at camp. What looks like a pig-pen laden with dirt and mud and a couple bendy straws is transformed into a ricocheting, lightning-quick, fight-to-the-death bonanza. Okay, so the movements people make-crouching, jumping, crouch-jumping-are difficult to execute gracefully and sort of make your back hurt, but I don’t think that stopped anyone, and I can’t remember a time in which I simply played a game of Ga-Ga before waddling over to Arts & Crafts. Just didn’t happen. And if it did, I wouldn’t tell you, because boys just didn’t do arts & crafts unless in unfortunate circumstances (more on that later).
Grade: A-
The Dead Texan has a song called “Girth Rides a Horse,” so consider me “Girth.” Wow, that didn’t go over well. Whatever, horseback riding has got to be directly proportional to how skilled you are at it. Ride a horse well and you’ll never want to get off its back. Ride it poorly and it will be an interminably bumpy trawl through a dusty, ass-breaking hell. Interestingly, I found myself somewhere in the middle; I started out as a beginner, obviously, and eventually progressed to the point of a pretty swift gallop. Becoming skilled enough with my horse allowed me to enjoy the scenery-something that’s lost if you aren’t a good enough rider-and direct that little bugger wherever I wanted him to go. We would go at a quick clip, savor the wind in our hair and beat the flies at their own little flying game, reclaiming the land for us. And then I fell off.
Grade: B
Sweet! What isn’t there to love about a sooty, rumbling Go-Kart just waiting for you to kick it into gear? Even if you’re only going some 10 miles per hour, you feel like you’re tearing up the road in hell-raising style. Plus, you get to wear a helmet. WHY WOULD YOU NEED TO WEAR A HELMET IF WHAT YOU WERE DOING WEREN’T COMPLETELY BADASS!!! Whew! I imagine the novelty wears off considerably once you’re old enough to drive a car, but campers don’t drive cars, silly, so until then, Go-Karts get a
Grade: A
from me.
See that face I’m making up there? That’s approximately the face I’d make when I saw someone I didn’t like courting someone I wanted to kiss behind the canoe shed. Despite the fact that kids were often left to their own devices during the day, camp dances seemingly provided the perfect venue for hormones to wiggle themselves free from their tissue cages and splatter on the object of one’s affection. Knowing the pomposity with which I just now described infatuation, you can probably guess how my camp dance experiences turned out. Fortunately, at camp, everyone’s an awkward dancer; the girls can sort of eke out a sway-type dance that varies only according to tempo, and the boys can’t dance at all. Things haven’t changed much since then, really.
Grade: B-
I’m not being sexist: In my camp experience, arts & crafts was strictly for girls and boys who had been injured in some kind of extreme camp sport and were therefore restricted to activities that only involved their fingers. It wasn’t that boys weren’t good artists-quite the contrary-but arts & crafts seemed to have left out the “art” part in favor of "crafts," which boys avoided like they were diseased. Some things you could "craft": popsicle stick birdhouses, popsicle stick picture frames, tiny little popsicle stick people. But you couldn’t leave the arts & crafts tables without being forced to try your hand at a lanyard-a frustrating little trinket that I could never make properly and ended up looking like something a cat hurled. The almighty lanyard is one of those things that no matter how much money I make, how successful I am at my profession, how much good I do in the world or how hot my future wife is, it will always beat me.
Grade: C
If the bullets we shot out of our .22 caliber rifles in riflery moved toward their targets like *boom!*, the arrows we fired from ye olde archery bows moved toward their targets like *woooo-wah-aw-wawawawa-awwwwww-walalalalalalala*. Which is to say that the arrow almost never went where you wanted it to go. Your aim could be dead on-hell, you weren’t terribly far from the target when you lined up to take your shot-and the arrow might end up in the uncovered part of the haystack or over the camp fence where a cow would eat it. But archery is one of those activities in which, logically, I should have abandoned it the first time the arrow went with the wind or of its own accord, and yet it became a favorite of mine. I suspect I’m not alone. Like some other special activities (I’m thinking of Ga-Ga in particular), archery was camp: You really couldn’t do it anywhere else-certainly not at home where Fluffy could very well become shish kebab-and it got you to give it your best shot even if the arrow would end up in a far different place than you imagined. That’s my stab at a summer camp metaphor; take it or leave it. If nothing else, camp smelled like you were on a 24-hour hayride, and archery involved A LOT of hay.
Grade: B+
CAMP ACTIVITIES, GRADED. Suckaz.
P.S. I just found my camera (yay!), and couldn’t resist taking pictures of me making funny faces instead of including the plucked-from-the-internet photos I usually do.
You look at a ropes course, and it glares right back at you. Nothing at camp-except for maybe the riflery range-looks nearly as much like punishment as a ropes course, as though one could be sentenced to the low-ropes for a minor infraction (starting a food fight) and the high-ropes for a serious camp offense (mowing over frisbee players on a go-kart). When I’m up there, I feel, rather bluntly, like I am going to die. Either that or I’ll fall off the rope and the harness between my legs will grab onto my bits and let me hang in the air in an unthinkably painful manner until someone has the good sense to lower me and my unfortunate bits down to the ground. Death, please.
Grade: D-
Swimming is sort of a camp staple, despite the fact that it’s a home staple too, by which I mean that you don’t really need to go to camp to do it. But that’s not really the point; swimming at camp is essentially flirting, but in the water instead of on land. What was nice about this is that it provided the lubricant (so to speak) for this sort of action; all I’d need to do was splash someone I thought was cute with a little water and wa-zing! (This, it should be noted, is purely theoretical: If recollection serves, splashing a cute girl with water only got me a splash back.) Whereas on land, I wouldn’t, and didn’t, know what the hell to do. So to recap: Flirting is hard, flirting in water is slightly less hard, and I sucked at both. Incidentally, after racking my brain for hours, the pool is the ONLY place I can think of that one can flirt while voiding at the same time, not that I would ever do that.
Grade: C
Notwithstanding a profoundly stupid name (and shouldn’t it be “Ga-Ga-Ga” for its three bounces before you can hit the ball?), Ga-Ga is fun, and all the more so because you won’t find this anywhere but at camp. What looks like a pig-pen laden with dirt and mud and a couple bendy straws is transformed into a ricocheting, lightning-quick, fight-to-the-death bonanza. Okay, so the movements people make-crouching, jumping, crouch-jumping-are difficult to execute gracefully and sort of make your back hurt, but I don’t think that stopped anyone, and I can’t remember a time in which I simply played a game of Ga-Ga before waddling over to Arts & Crafts. Just didn’t happen. And if it did, I wouldn’t tell you, because boys just didn’t do arts & crafts unless in unfortunate circumstances (more on that later).
Grade: A-
The Dead Texan has a song called “Girth Rides a Horse,” so consider me “Girth.” Wow, that didn’t go over well. Whatever, horseback riding has got to be directly proportional to how skilled you are at it. Ride a horse well and you’ll never want to get off its back. Ride it poorly and it will be an interminably bumpy trawl through a dusty, ass-breaking hell. Interestingly, I found myself somewhere in the middle; I started out as a beginner, obviously, and eventually progressed to the point of a pretty swift gallop. Becoming skilled enough with my horse allowed me to enjoy the scenery-something that’s lost if you aren’t a good enough rider-and direct that little bugger wherever I wanted him to go. We would go at a quick clip, savor the wind in our hair and beat the flies at their own little flying game, reclaiming the land for us. And then I fell off.
Grade: B
Sweet! What isn’t there to love about a sooty, rumbling Go-Kart just waiting for you to kick it into gear? Even if you’re only going some 10 miles per hour, you feel like you’re tearing up the road in hell-raising style. Plus, you get to wear a helmet. WHY WOULD YOU NEED TO WEAR A HELMET IF WHAT YOU WERE DOING WEREN’T COMPLETELY BADASS!!! Whew! I imagine the novelty wears off considerably once you’re old enough to drive a car, but campers don’t drive cars, silly, so until then, Go-Karts get a
Grade: A
from me.
See that face I’m making up there? That’s approximately the face I’d make when I saw someone I didn’t like courting someone I wanted to kiss behind the canoe shed. Despite the fact that kids were often left to their own devices during the day, camp dances seemingly provided the perfect venue for hormones to wiggle themselves free from their tissue cages and splatter on the object of one’s affection. Knowing the pomposity with which I just now described infatuation, you can probably guess how my camp dance experiences turned out. Fortunately, at camp, everyone’s an awkward dancer; the girls can sort of eke out a sway-type dance that varies only according to tempo, and the boys can’t dance at all. Things haven’t changed much since then, really.
Grade: B-
I’m not being sexist: In my camp experience, arts & crafts was strictly for girls and boys who had been injured in some kind of extreme camp sport and were therefore restricted to activities that only involved their fingers. It wasn’t that boys weren’t good artists-quite the contrary-but arts & crafts seemed to have left out the “art” part in favor of "crafts," which boys avoided like they were diseased. Some things you could "craft": popsicle stick birdhouses, popsicle stick picture frames, tiny little popsicle stick people. But you couldn’t leave the arts & crafts tables without being forced to try your hand at a lanyard-a frustrating little trinket that I could never make properly and ended up looking like something a cat hurled. The almighty lanyard is one of those things that no matter how much money I make, how successful I am at my profession, how much good I do in the world or how hot my future wife is, it will always beat me.
Grade: C
If the bullets we shot out of our .22 caliber rifles in riflery moved toward their targets like *boom!*, the arrows we fired from ye olde archery bows moved toward their targets like *woooo-wah-aw-wawawawa-awwwwww-walalalalalalala*. Which is to say that the arrow almost never went where you wanted it to go. Your aim could be dead on-hell, you weren’t terribly far from the target when you lined up to take your shot-and the arrow might end up in the uncovered part of the haystack or over the camp fence where a cow would eat it. But archery is one of those activities in which, logically, I should have abandoned it the first time the arrow went with the wind or of its own accord, and yet it became a favorite of mine. I suspect I’m not alone. Like some other special activities (I’m thinking of Ga-Ga in particular), archery was camp: You really couldn’t do it anywhere else-certainly not at home where Fluffy could very well become shish kebab-and it got you to give it your best shot even if the arrow would end up in a far different place than you imagined. That’s my stab at a summer camp metaphor; take it or leave it. If nothing else, camp smelled like you were on a 24-hour hayride, and archery involved A LOT of hay.
Grade: B+