August 23, 2005

• Recently, I was skimming through one of those girly teeny bopper magazines when I came across a bright pink column which showed pictures of celebrities with speech bubbles.  Above the pictures read the caption “If I Was Lost on a Deserted Island…I Wouldn’t Be Able to Survive Without My…”  And then, the celebrities, with their speech bubbles, would finish the sentence off.  Lindsey Lohan couldn’t manage without her strawberry flavored pink lip-gloss by Chanel.  Hilary Duff would instantly drop dead if it weren’t for her turbo power flat iron.  And Mary-Kate Olsen, being the extra-down-to-earth-hippie-chick that she is…said her plain old Burt’s Bee’s lip balm.  I mean, way to think big, Mary Kate.  A tropical storm comes and thrashes your limbs to pieces.  A ravenous cheetah is about to swallow you whole.  You’re drowning.  But that’s okay.  Because, whatever, you look damn good. 

  
  

   

  
  

  I later came to the realization that the hot pink color of that article went quite well with the brightly colored broken bottles and chewed up pieces of food that it would eventually rest with in the local city dump.  

  
  

   

  
  

  Cosmo Girl may be pretty.  It may contain pretty pictures of pretty people and pretty new clothes and makeup and television shows.  But if you look just a tad bit closer, if you pay a little more attention, you may come to the realization that it’s just trash waiting to be thrown away.  It’s just a record of everything there is that truly doesn’t matter.  Because contrary to popular belief, strawberry flavored lip gloss is not the force that binds the world together.  It doesn’t save lives, it doesn’t understand you, it doesn’t make you feel like you belong in the world.  And for god’s sake, it makes every glass you take a sip out of turn into a sticky mess. 

  
  

   

  
  

  So eat that, Olsen twin.  Or, you know, throw it away to avoid the extra calories.

  
  

   

  
  

  The real world sucks, to be quite frank.  I arrive home, head up to my room, I feel like I never left. I sit there on my bed listening to the radio.  I look outside the window and see cars, streets, houses, boundaries.  I get up again and my feet don’t get dirty because the floor is carpeted.  I walk out of the room just in time to hear the obnoxious speed talker on the radio announce that you can save fifteen percent or more on car insurance by switching to Geico.  Fuming, I open the front door to my house and fall onto the dying grass.  I look up at the sky in hope of seeking some sort of comfort and understanding.  Instead, my eyes fasten on the blankness of a dead man’s gaze.  A hazy, yellowed black sky.  Not a single reassuring star, not a single hint of life winking back at me.  Reluctantly, I go back inside and sign online, only to be greeted by an entire buddy list of equally helpless souls.

  
  

   

  
  

  It’s the best, really.  Leaving paradise only to arrive at one of the world’s largest man-made shit holes. 

  
  

   

  
  

  Just a week ago, I didn’t need Cosmo Girl to be entertained.  I didn’t need computers or electricity.  I didn’t even need my music.  Life was slower six days ago.  Time went by faster six days ago.  I freaking wolfed down seven rice-krispies without feeling an ounce of guilt six days ago.  Six days ago, when I was living happily at Camp Fernwood, that’s all I was doing.  Living.  Stripped of pretty much everything else, all I had left to do there was experience life at its purest and appreciate it for what it offered.  And here I am once again; reunited with the loved and equally hated computer screen I’ve stared at for so many wasted hours, telling you how my summer went.  It went great, it went awesome, it went swell.  But it was also indescribable.  Behind each experience there, each campfire, trip, fight, laugh, song, a lesson was waiting to be learned.  And although I doubt I stumbled across every last word of life advice my camp had to offer, I nonetheless heard some very significant ones.  Needless to say, I grew a lot this summer.  Both in spirit and in excess fat.  The lessons I learned may not help me get into college, they may not contribute to my goal of speaking fluently in six different languages by the time I’m thirty.  But they will make life ten times more worthwhile.

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  Only Freaks Put Titles in the Middle of Their Blog Entries

  
  

  (and other cathartic realizations)

  
  

   

  
  

  Lesson 1:

  
  

  Friends are just great, right?  I mean, you can take them anywhere.  You can talk to them, they talk back.  They walk with you in the hallway so you feel like you’re popular.  They laugh at the funny things you say. They call your cell, like, always.  They put you under the “BFF” category on their buddy lists.  They come over when you call them.  They shop, they text message, sometimes they tap dance, oh, and guess what? Batteries, like, not included.

  
  

   

  
  

  High school: A time to laugh, a time to cry, a time to realize that ‘friend’ is not a synonym for ‘Diva Starz’.

  
  

   

  
  

  You want to have real friends?  People who care about you and know you and love you?  Do everyone a favor.  Don’t look for it in the amount of times she ims you in the course of one day, in how long she walked in the hallway with you, what you talked about.  The fact that she let Sally see your grade but wouldn’t tell you what it was.  That time when she waved to you…but then said “HEY!” all enthusiastically to the person behind you. Friendship’s not about that.  It’s not a contest that determines who can be the better friend, the better person.  It’s not about who’s been more dedicated and loyal, who’s more deserving of the other’s love.  It shouldn’t be a constant burden.

  
  

   

  
  

  With your real friends, you pick up where you left off.  Whether it has been five days, months, years since you last saw them, you can somehow always go back to being yourself once you finally reunite.  Impressing them is unnecessary.  Plastering a smile over your worried eyes won’t fool them for a second.  You’re both pulling at this sort of invisible rope that ties the two (…or three or four and so on) of you together.  You both depend on each other to stand up.  If one lets go, the other falls.  However, unlike what many people assume, it’s not a tug of war.  There may be hard times when one person’s pulling a tad bit harder, but no relationship is ever really perfect.  Simply enjoy the bond that is being shared. Friendship, when true, is easy, constant and boundless.   It’s once you can understand that that you’ll realize who your real friends are.  You may also notice that your hallway acquaintances, your loyal text messagers, your frequent “heysupnmusamelolers” are pretty much all incompetent ‘buddies’ you will probably forget about within the next ten years. 

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  Or maybe twenty.  Considering how freaking huge her feet are.

  
  

   

  
  

  Lesson #2:

  
  

   

  
  

  In the beginning of the summer, my friend Hilary and I went on a three day canoeing trip with a bunch of whining eighth graders.  Strangely, my most painful memories of that trip did not take place on water, but on land.  Portage, to be more specific. According to our counselors, portage meant that we would all have to carry ‘about six canoes and all our stuff’ for ‘about a quarter mile’ on an ‘easy trail’.

  
  

   

  
  

  During portage, Hilary and I met its real definition:

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  “Hey, fuck you,” the definition said in his thick Mainer accent, “Hope you shits die of all yer goddamn canoes crushing yer stupid skulls durin’ the next five fucking hours on the fucking App’lachian trail.  Hey, wifey, pass me a fucking cold one.”

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  By the end of portage, Hilary and I were on all fours crawling in the woods in search of a drop of water.  We were also making strange barking noises for no apparent reason.  Our exhausted counselors found us a little while later, only greeting us with an insincere “what the hell?”

  
  

   

  
  

  It may seem that the only lesson that could possibly be learned here is that even definitions are insecure and express their feelings by using profane language and imagery to gain sympathy from others.  However, there is one other thing.  You see, after that portage experience, after we were stripped of pretty much everything including some of the basic necessities of life such as food and water, after we found ourselves on all fours in the middle of the woods, Hilary and I came across a fact so obvious, so well known, that its been overlooked for years.  The fact that despite our computers, our phones, our makeup, our cars, our money, our forms of entertainment...we are all animals.  All you need to do is take away everything that puts us under the category of ‘civilized human beings’.  We have clothes for every occasion.  We have jobs.  We cook.  But when it all comes down to it, no matter how superior we are, we still need water to survive in this world…just like your pet dog, cat, just like every other being on this planet.  We are humans, we need oxygen, we need food, we need water, we need shelter, and once we take away the fancy potpourri we have in our bathrooms, maybe we’ll eventually realize that our shit does, in fact, stink.

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  Lesson #3:

  
  

   

  
  

          “So, do you have any kids?” my friend Ari asked.

  
  

          “Yeah,” he said, wiping some crumbs off his beard, “As a matter of fact I do.”

  
  

          “Oh really?  How old are they?” asked Hilary.

  
  

          “Nine and ten,” he said proudly.

  
  

  We were quiet for a moment.

  
  

          “Wanna see a picture?”

  
  

          “Sure,” we said.

  
  

  Then he left, leaving the three of us to exchange glances of excitement.  You see, this was a big moment for us.  Not because we were always craving to see pictures of Fluffy’s kids, but because we were actually speaking to him, actually learning more about him in general.  Because out of all our years at Fernwood, hardly any camper had even said hi to Fluffy, let alone carry out a conversation with him.  Some say this was because he drove a truck. Then again, it could have also been because, oh, I don’t know…he had false teeth, his real name was Leslie Millet, he’s been the head of our camp’s maintenance for the past thirty years, he randomly hits inanimate objects with shovels and threatens to do the same to our heads, he likes being called Fluffy, he skinny dips for charity.  I don’t know.  One of those.  All that matters is that we were the first campers in a really long time that had gathered up the courage to speak to him face to face.  And in the end, it was worth it.  He ended up being the drunken, slightly bloated father we never had.  Sometimes you just have to go out of your way to meet people you wouldn’t normally relate to.  The world’s busting at the seams with people of all kinds. Befriending them, or at least hearing their stories is practically the closest you can get to walking in their shoes.  That would be next to actually taking up maintenance for thirty years at an all girls’ camp in Maine.

  
  

   

  
  

  Eventually, Fluffy came back with the photograph of his beloved children.  Handing it to us, he said, “The one on the left is Midnight…the smaller one is Striper.”

  
  

   

  
  

  Choking back a laugh for fear that he might furiously whack our heads off with a chainsaw, we handed him back the picture of two rather scrawny looking cats and stuffed a few handfuls of M&M’s into our mouths. 

  
  

   

  
  

  Lesson # 4:

  
  

   

  
  

  Never let nine year olds get away with giving you an atomic wedgie.  Fight back with a tub of ice and believable death threats.

  
  

   

  
  

  Lesson #5:

  
  

   

  
  

  To be rather blatant about it, most of our problems are fairly miniscule.  Oh, no I don’t have plans for Friday night.  Crap, I’m grounded. Darn, there’s nothing on. And oh shucks, I had a quarrel with God and now he’s resurrecting Hitler from the dead so that he can start his incompetent master race, continue making half-assed paintings of ugly still-lifes, make Paris Hilton his co-leader and inevitably cause the apocalypse. But who cares, really?

  
  

   

  
  

  Basically, no matter what your problem is, there is always a bigger one.  World hunger, world poverty, endangered species, terminal illnesses.  You name it, McDonald’s has probably started a charity for it.  However, since only one of us will end up being Miss America this year, the thought of trying to prevent every last one of these issues is very overwhelming.  You’re not a bad person if you are currently more pissed off because of summer reading than you are about the fact that thousands of children are starving in Ethiopia.  Most of us can get pretty wrapped up in our own lives.  And it may sound cheesy, but I found that merely looking up at the sky can make you forget about all your little problems.  The sky – the incomprehensibly endless mass of stars and meteors and clouds and maybe even other worlds. It’s larger than any problem on earth, larger than life in general. 

  
  

   

  
  

  What I’m really just trying to say is…go stargazing.  And if you live in New Jersey, I’ve found that the airplane lights that travel through all the palpable pollution in the air kind of resemble comets if you squint hard enough and use your imagination. 

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  After writing this, I kind of feel like one of those nagging mothers that think they know everything and waste their lives answering all the questions on Jeopardy.  I’m really just a smart-ass fifteen year old that still has trouble following my own morals.  However, I do enjoy preaching to people.  It makes me feel like I have the some semblance of authority.  Although, even as I write this, my mom is screaming that it’s at least three hours past my bedtime and that I’m going to be a cranky bitch in the morning.  But, ah, whatever.  I’ll learn from my mistakes.

  • 2:52 am
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