nyc
tired
o brave new world
audrey. kermitinlove.jpg
I can’t do justice to one of the weirdest camp stories I know. My friend tells it so well, and I can offer only a pale shadow of his story.
Last summer, he was working with one of the younger units comprised of ten year old boys. They had spent the night camping on another beach and were just readying themselves to depart. “Make sure you have all your things!” called my friend. “Don’t leave anything behind!”
One small boy came up, dragging a massive tangle of decomposing seaweed behind him. “But… what about me boy?” he asked, lip trembling.
“…what is ‘me boy’?”
The child held up the stinking wad of bull kelp. “This is him. This is Me Boy.”
“Me Boy is not coming back with us,” said his counselor. “You’re going to leave Me Boy behind on the beach where he belongs.”
The campers loudly mourned the loss of Me Boy. They insisted on giving him a Viking burial at sea, which just consisted of pushing him solemnly off the back of the rowboat into the water and watching him drift away in the surf.
That was only the beginning. Me Boy would be back.
The campers, in true camp fashion, possessed some kind of cultic hive-mind and a predisposition for bizarre memes. Me Boy would not be forgotten. They started telling each other stories about Me Boy and how he would one day rise again. There were warring factions with contradicting dogmas about Me Boy. Only when the gardener allowed them to take home a zucchini she had harvested did they find their god, born anew.
Me Boy, The Zucchini That Was A God, became the whole unit’s mascot. The kids would bicker over who got to carry him. They built nests and carriers for Me Boy and brought him to different activities, fiercely defending him from those that would do him harm. One child appointed himself the Voice of Me Boy and would translate the zucchini’s divine wishes into human speech.
It got out of hand. Me Boy had become a distraction, a fixation, a violent controversy. Something had to be done.
My friend, their counselor, took it upon himself to kill Me Boy. The children wailed in despair as he chopped their God into refreshing slices. With this sudden turn of fortune, followers of Me Boy turned to theophagy. “We must eat him to preserve his power!” they cried. Boys who would otherwise never have touched a vegetable ate greedily of this sacrament, eager to let Me Boy live on within them.
For a time, it seemed that peace and order had been restored, and the religion had already faded into its silver age. But only for a time.
In the last few days of camp, the religion of Me Boy splintered into several denominations. Every meal yielded new vegetable matter said to be a reincarnation of Me Boy, only for opposing groups to dismiss these as false prophets. Some believed that Me Boy was gone. Others believed his spirit lived on, intangible, omnipresent. Some believed he had found a new vessel inside a carrot, a pear, a slice of cantaloupe… even inside a child. There was chaos, and strife, and heartbreak without the guidance of Me Boy.
The tags on this post are very polarized. Half of them are “#I’m glad I never went to camp” and “#reasons why I never want kids”, the other half are “#BOY I LOVE CHILDREN CAMP IS SO GOOD AMIRIGHT?”
today @ lunch i was sitting w/ a bunch of my kindergarteners and they started to discuss what each other’s “deepest fears” were. one said “being killed” and the other said “loving people.” i was like y'all…….you didn’t have to be that honest
there are these like.. “poli sci bros” if u know the type.. who sit in front of me in philosophy.. anyhow today the professor said something like “u wonder how marx ever had the time to write all these texts” and the guy in front of me immediately opened google and typed “karl marx virgin”
i was talking to my cousin yesterday and he was talking about an accidental mistake he was dealing with, and proceeded to describe it as, “i picked a whole fuckin’ bouquet of whoopsie-daisies” and tbh i’m still thinking about it
in other news today i found out that eddie redmayne has a degree in art history and for his diploma he wrote a 12k words analysis of a picture that’s basically a blue square on a black background; the thing was it was a very unique shade of blue, actually used there for the first time ever; however, being colorblind, i quote, he had no idea what the colour was but well, it looked very pretty to him
and somehow i find this very uplifting i mean if you can pull sth like that off, write a 12k words thesis on a colour you don’t even recognize properly, anything is possible and this is the story of how eddie redmayne officially became my saint patron of high level academic bullshitting
ok so there was this post talking about how boys love flowers too and no one ever gets them any or like cares,,
SO we were doing awkward icebreakers in class and i decided to ask the guy next to me what his favorite flower was (half expecting him to say wut idk??) and he looked at me with a huge smile and said sunflowers and i think we should all just raise awareness that boys like flowers too
facts about my mom:
- she is a forester
- she has a habit of pointing out plants while driving
- one of her favorite road rage swears is “dickweed”
facts about me:
- i thought dickweeds were real plants for a longass time
in my preschool class we’re holding “class president of the day” elections this week. we already elected our first female president on monday, even though one of the boy’s campaign promises was to “bring jewels” to the classroom.
tuesday: we talked about the real election happening today. one child says she hopes hillary clinton wins and all of her classmates chime in with sober agreements. one boy says voting for the drumpf “would not be a very good idea.”
they elected the other female candidate today in our mock election, so she won over the jewels boy and the other boy, who said he would make bracelets for the entire class. my students are surprisingly practical, seeing as they voted for the candidate who would clean the school and help them with their work.
once president, she did do those things, but also punched one of her constituents into the sandbox, so, i mean … she’s sort of a typical politician i guess
wednesday: the children announced tensely to me that trump won the real election. one boy said, “i still don’t like him, but we can’t say we hate him, because then we would be saying we hate the president.”
i said that was true, and that saying we hate him sounds a lot like something trump would say. they nodded and continued to help the toddler class students get their snack plates to the table without dropping their apple slices.
they elected one of the girls again, so she served her second term by helping her friends button their art smocks before we made our galaxy paintings. (because if you think i’m gonna create an art lesson plan to focus any more attention on this shitshow of an election, you are wrong.)
neither of the boy candidates have stood much of a chance in this race so far. one of them came to me and said he was rethinking his campaign promises, and could he make a new poster
he got a paper and wrote a huge list of ways that he would help keep all the children safe, including reminding them to use walking feet and not to touch broken glass. then he volunteered to work in the toddler room and cleaned up all of their messes, and moved all the shelves in my room so he could clean behind them.
i’m feeling so hopeless right now, but these children remind me that there is a future and they. are. it.
thursday: today i was very pleased. our president today is the little boy who made changes to his campaign promises. he also wore tyrannosaurus rex foot slippers. when the voters were shaking his hand to congratulate him on his victory, one said, “good job, and thank you for having monster feet”
he watched everyone like a hawk to make sure they were being safe, and then spent the morning writing in his journal about how much he loves all of us and his bicycle.
“I just pitched my first full softball game in our office league! We lost by one run. I was nervous the entire time but I made it all the way through. I thought we had one inning left but we didn’t. So we lost. But don’t say ‘lost.’ That sounds bad. Say that we ‘almost won.’ Say that we ‘almost won against the best team in the league.’ I want to thank the captain Chip for believing in me and letting me pitch. I didn’t think he’d let me pitch because we lost 18-2 the last time I pitched. But he let me pitch because Dan was on vacation. Chip is so great. And I want to thank Cindy for cheering me on. Every time I missed the plate she’d say: ‘Great job, Rosemary! Keep confusing them!’ I love Cindy so much. And Elvin and Jo and Kyle. I couldn’t have ‘almost won’ without them. It’s so fun to be part of a team. I love them so much.”
she guessed my favorite color first try..
but between me and u……. i didnt even have a favorite color until she yelled out yellow!! she was hella excited n smiling like a little kid. so i told her she was right and i havent seen yellow the same since, its in everything. i could probably live in it now.
I don’t think I’ve ever written this down before. This is the story of the first time I played a shofar (as I remember it, not as it happened).
So it’s the mid 90s and I’m in primary school (‘elementary’, my dear yanks). We were doing Religious Education and learning about Judaism, I think for the first time. The teacher didn’t really know anything about Judaism that wasn’t written in the book, so he kept asking me, since I was the Only Jewish Kid In The Class (only jewish kid in the school in fact, except my sister). I wasn’t very religious, but I was doing my best to make up reasonable sounding answers. Anyway, the school had somehow got hold of a shofar. (If anyone’s religious education wasn’t up to the stellar standards of mine, the shofar is the ram’s horn that’s blown like a trumpet as part of the ceremony of certain jewish holy days). The shofar was passed around the class, and of course, hygene be damned, everyone tried to play it. But it’s not an easy instrument to play, there’s more to it than just blowing. So everyone is puffing and wheezing and red in the face, and the best anyone can get out of this thing is a pitiful squeak. But we’ve all just seen the guy on the VHS tape with the hat and odd hairstyle blowing it, and we heard the tooting noise come out of the tinny little speakers of the TV on the wheely cart, so we know this isn’t right. Is our shofar broken or something? Is it blocked up?
Finally the shofar gets around to me, and I am psyched all the way up. I haven’t played a shofar before, but I’m determined to get some kind of noise out of this damn thing, because my heritage is looking silly right now. The burden of upholding the dignity of Judaism itself falls upon my narrow shoulders. So, I take the biggest breath I possibly can, and put the shofar to my lips. Everyone’s looking at me, because I’m The Only Jewish Kid In The Class. And the thing that nobody in the room (including me) is thinking about, is the fact that I’m also The Only Trumpet-Player Kid In The Class. I only know one way to blow into an instrument. It happens to be the right way. And I do it, just as hard as I possibly can.
If you haven’t heard a shofar played properly in person, it’s not easy to describe. Recordings don’t capture it at all. Maybe it’s just because you usually hear it in a context of fasting and extreme reverence, but nonetheless a shofar blast (and that’s what they call it, a “blast”) is an amazing sound. The shofar sounds like raw naked power, it sounds like righteous fury. It sounds like more noise than a single human could ever make, yet it has a property like a human voice, like a bellow, a howl, like a newly bereaved mother splitting her lungs with blood and thunder. It’s a BIG sound, in the sense that it’s very loud, but also in the sense that it seems to fill whatever space it’s in, to come from all directions at once. It makes sense that the ancients gave it religious significance. When you hear the shofar’s call, the story of the Walls of Jerico tumbling down doesn’t seem that crazy.
So, it’s not possible to play a shofar quietly, and I’m giving the thing everything I’ve got in a little red brick classroom in southeast london. I can feel the room resonate and shake, hear the single-glazed windows rattle in their frames. I’m having a great time - this is the loudest noise I’ve ever made in my short life! And it’s in school! And I’m allowed to do it! So I keep going as hard as I can until my little lungs give out. I remember surfacing, out of breath and grinning, and listening as the antique cast-iron pipes throughout the building slowly stopped reverberating over the slack-jawed silence of the room.
The kids of course have seen enough TV to know exactly what happened. The Shofar knew I was Jewish. Obviously it’s not going to unleash that kind of unearthly sonic firepower for just anyone. Shofars only work for Jews. And the teacher is like “…That doesn’t sound right… but I don’t know enough about Judaism to dispute it?”. I didn’t offer any other explanations, because why would you demystify your Mystic Jew Powers?
And I’m writing this because I just realised that there were perhaps 30 kids in that class, and there just aren’t very many jews in southeast london to set them right, so it’s quite possible that there’s at least one 25 year old adult out there who still believes that the Shofar is a Holy Sacred Artefact which will Sound its Mighty Voice for none other than God’s Own Chosen People. And that cracks me up.
