I'm really glad no one can see me right now; I'm sitting in front of the computer with two plugs of toilet paper in my nose. I have one of those horrible runny-nose colds where the snot just runs and runs and you can't do anything about it except tip your head back. For the computer, I need to have my head at a slightly downward angle. To protect the keyboard and my lap, I have invented a rudimentary nose plug.

I was tired and dragged out, but somehow, sitting down in front of an awesome computer like this one (my laptop :)) makes me happy again. It's unbelievable how fast it is in comparison with the old clunkers I've been attempting to use all summer. My sister's just gotten a new laptop as well, a Sony VIAO, of which I am quite jealous (face it, the person who buys a computer five minutes after you do will have a better model, let alone a year and a half), but I can't say I'm unhappy with this bad boy, even after all that time.

(Random thought: Ton-A-Wandah was on David Letterman on Friday night! Did anybody see it? That's my camp!)

I even made a list of things I wanted to write about, since I kept forgetting them. So here I go, taking a page out of mimi smartypants' book:

1. Praise whoever invented the full-length mirror. After not seeing more of myself than my face for six weeks, it's nice to be able to see my whole body in the mirror. Sun-bleached hair and all. (It's really bad - at first, Mom and Dad thought I had streaked it!) But I have a nice tan and I lost five more pounds, so who cares about my hair?

2. Speaking of hair, one of the nurses in the infirmary said something cool to me when I went up to her for some cold medicine. "You know, I didn't even know your name before just now, but I always pick you out of the crowd, even from way across the dining hall. Know why? Because you are the only girl in the whole camp with short hair! I saw you and said to myself, 'that girl has some self-esteem!'" I had to laugh. There are of course others with short hair, and still more with short-ish hair, but very few in comparison to all the long-haired chicas, that's true.

3. I have a cold and it MUST be gone by Saturday. This is the last time I will see Martin until Christmas and I refuse to kick off the three weeks by being sick. The relentless sinus pressure from Monday and Tuesday is gone, but the congestion and runny nose remain. Anybody got any miracle cures? Besides 6000% of my daily value of vitamin C? (No, that was not one of my harebrained ideas. The same nurse who complimented my hair gave me, along with the Advil Cold & Sinus, four tablets of vitamin C. After swallowing them, I picked up the bottle and saw that just one tablet contained 1666% of your daily value. You need, of course, 100%. And she gave me four of these! I knew it wouldn't really do anything harmful, but still. All she had to say was a casual, "If you get diarrhea, let me know.")

4. I have successfully implanted the seeds of destruction of "Little Cabin in the Woods" into the August session. Yay for me. "Little Cabin in the Woods" is the one song which I would happily tear out of the camp songbooks and burn. It goes as follows:

Little cabin in the woods
Little man by the window stood
Saw a rabbit hopping by
Knocking at my door
Help me, help me, help! he said
Or the hunter will shoot me dead. Bang!
Little rabbit, come inside
Safely to abide.

Add appropriate intonation and hand gestures, as with every camp song. Anyway, as if it weren't bad enough as it is, we then go through it a second time, replacing the first line with humming, then picking up the second line with words. And then a third time, this time humming the first two lines. And then a fourth and a fifth and it goes on and on and on until the ninth time, by which time you are so incredibly brainwashed that you often find yourself numbly mouthing and humming along, even if you really don't want to. I have managed to start a chain of destruction by replacing 'Safely to abide' with 'Rabbit stew tonight.' (This was popular in the July session, but no one thought to carry it over to August except for yours truly. I will get that song destroyed!) The first time we went through the song, in the first week of camp, I remained silent except to warble, "Rab-bit stew to-niiiiiight!" in chorus with the last line. My table of girls, all old campers who knew the song by heart, looked at me in surprise, then in hilarity. They all sang along on the next round, and pretty soon, it spread to our whole section. We haven't sung the song again since. :)

5. Things that are cool at camp are not cool anywhere else. Cutting the sides of your shirt and tying knots to give yourself a fringe is not stylish anywhere except at Camp Ton-A-Wandah, I feel certain. Asking someone how many Nalgenes they've drunk that day is pure camp lingo. 'Buoy swims' and 'tribe meetings' and 'double-blobbing' are phrases only used in the summer. T-shirts with quotes and slogans from camp are not understood once September arrives and we're back in our day-to-day lives. It really is its own little world.

6. I wanted to mention this one camper of mine, whom I won't mention by name in case I have a wider reader base than I thought. She and her brother were adopted by their mom and dad. Another Ton-A-Wandah girl, not in my cabin, was born to her mom and dad, along with her sister. The two families didn't know each other until the moms met while playing tennis, became friends, and eventually realized they were lesbians. Both couples divorced. The dads eventually remarried and had more kids while the moms began a relationship as well, living in a big house in Rhode Island with the four kids they already had. This camper of mine has gone through a lot of emotional anguish because of this situation; she has the most confusing family situation I know of (birth parents and a half-brother, then the two moms and three brothers and sisters, and then all the people in the dads' families), and because of it, she's lost friends, been called gay herself, even turned suicidal at one point. ("I tried once, but the dog chewed a hole in the bag," she mentioned.)

I don't know exactly what I hope to accomplish by writing this, but I hate the fact that my camper is judged by what her moms do and not who she herself is as a person. I hate the fact that her dad's family denies that the other mother's children are my camper's sisters, while she herself could never see them as anything else. And I reallyhate the fact that the world is so $#%^@&% homophobic that the girls can't feel comfortable explaining their family situation to anyone, not even the other girls in their respective cabins. Yet I also have to admire the fact that the two moms took a stand like that and passed on the message to their kids that you have to be who you are, whoever you are. So I guess I just wrote all this because I really don't know how to react to it.

Or maybe I'm just tired. Which I am. Goodnight. For real this time.