How I Spent My Summer Vacation...Being Awesome

Growing up, I participated in lots of random enrichment programs. For two years I was in year round school, so we'd have vacation in February, and because there's nothing fun to do in February, my mom put us in this field trip group. We'd go to the most awful places, like a tour of our school district's food processing plant. All I remember is vinyl bags filled with chili product. It was gross.

One summer in elementary school, I went to Science Day Camp at the Jewish Community Center. How much will you laugh at me when I say that I disliked camp because I thought the other kids were too nerdy? Yeah, it never occurred to me that any ten-year-old who's all, "Science Camp???? SIGN ME UP!" is a nerd by definition, myself included. We did all sorts of nerdy kid things, like a trip to NASA, where we got to pretend we were the scientists coordinating some sort of lunar landing. I didn't understand the objective for some reason, and I felt way stupid compared to the other nerds who somehow needed no instruction in operating a FAKE ROCKET SHIP LANDING, so I kept pretending I had to go to the bathroom in order to prevent my idiocy from compromising the whole mission. If that wasn't cool enough, the Channel 2 weatherman came to visit us! All I remember about him was that he offered to sign autographs for all of us, but only if we assured him we were regular viewers of his weather report. I lied to get the autograph. I didn't feel bad about that, because he seemed like sort of a needy jerk. Did he really care if ten-year-olds watched his weather report? Was he on the brink of being fired, and the station manager was like, "Hey, you are losing viewers in the under 12 market. Please! Entice them ANY WAY YOU CAN or it's CURTAINS FOR YOU." One kid had the balls to say, "No I watch channel 11." The weatherman refused to sign the kid's science notebook until he promised to start watching channel 2. The kid agreed, but I always hoped that he was just telling him what he wanted to hear. I'd like to think that as summer camp nerds, we weren't as susceptible to coercion as say, the kids in soccer camp. You really have to take a stand of individualism to declare that you want to hunt for fake dinosaur bones all summer as opposed to go out and socialize and play sports in the outdoors.

The next summer, I think I was in regular day camp, probably because I far exceeded all that the Jewish community could teach me in regards to science. In regular camp, they had a list of activities we got to pick from--dance, art, gardening--and had to do that for the remainder of the summer. I picked puppeteering, and it may not surprise you to know that that program was cancelled due to lack of overall interest. I MIGHT have been the only one who signed up, which I'm kind of still bitter about, because to this day I think my life is significantly less enriched due to lack of puppeteering. Instead, I was placed on the camp newspaper, which was more like a collection of stories and only had one issue. I wrote a story about the history of the Jewish Community Center, which involved no accurate reporting whatsoever. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that I falsified the entire story. It ended up not mattering at all, because our camp counselor actually REWROTE ALL OUR STORIES and added her name to all the bylines. I was pretty pissed. It was the first time I realized that maybe being a writer is sort of sucky. That hasn't stopped me for pursuing it as career, though it's probably just a way to get back at her by being successful and showing her--LOOK! I CAN WRITE MY OWN FAKE NEWS STORIES WITHOUT YOU HAVING TO FIX THEM AND MAKE THEM "ACCURATE." Jerk!