Wednesday, August 30, 2006

My Camp Boyfriend

I loved summer camp. A lot. I was totally into the singing and campfires and banana boats.

Sidenote: If you’ve never had a banana boat, you are really missing out. They are the best things in the whole world. And they are really easy to make too. All you do is cut a banana down the center to form a long groove and then you stuff marshmallows and chocolate into the groove. Then you wrap the banana in tin foil and put it in the fire (I guess the oven would suffice for those of us who aren’t living in Africa, the 19th century, or at camp). Then after about fifteen minutes, you take the banana out and eat it. It’s amazing.

Anyway, I loved camp. But my favorite part of camp was the camp dance which was held on the basketball court every Thursday night after dinner. The fact that it was on Thursday is very important, because that gave us enough time to find a camp boyfriend—that special someone to help you with archery, plot (but never carry out) elaborate schemes to sneak out after lights out, and most importantly to hold you at arms length and rock back and forth on the basketball court to the gentle strains of whatever totally PC music happened to be popular that summer.


Well, I was honestly never all that good at the camp relationship thing. I wasn’t like those camp sluts that rolled their wind shorts up to their asses and had to wear t-shirts when they went swimming because their swimsuits were too skimpy. I wasn’t about to throw away my kissing virginity on some pimply twelve-year old. (Also, I was insanely shy and socially inept as a kid.) But then came the year that I met Wholly Boy (I’m calling him that because these days he’s apparently decided to turn himself into a human colander through body piercing). Now Wholly Boy wasn’t wholly at the time. He seemed like a nice (maybe slightly overweight) boy. And, he was an intellectual.


My camp relationship with Wholly Boy began innocently enough with flirtation at the picnic tables and long-lingering glances across the dining hall at meals. We’d have long intellectual conversations that mostly consisted of him pontificating about things that he knew absolutely nothing about. I look back on it now and realize that he was full of shit, but at the time I was really impressed. I distinctly remember a conversation where he was explaining to me why I didn’t like to swim or canoe, but did like to ride horses which are much more dangerous. He told me that it was because I can’t control water, but I can control the horse. “Water has an untamed essence. No one can control water. It simply is and cannot be changed or controlled by anyone.” He actually said that. Later, he sent me a note via another boy in his cabin, asking me to the dance. Of course I said yes.


Well, Thursday rolled around and the all hell broke loose in the cabin as girls ran around fixing their hair and throwing clothes around looking for the perfect outfit for the night which could well be the most important night of their lives. I, of course, did the same thing. And after having tried on every item of clothing that I had packed, I finally decided on my denim skirt and a pink polo shirt. (OK, I have suddenly realized that my sense of style has not changed since childhood).


My cabin walked to the basketball court and we all scattered to find our dates. Well, the music started and people started to dance. I looked at Wholly Boy expectantly. And then he started to dance. Oh God, did he start to dance. I still look back on this moment with incredulity. I have never seen someone fail at dancing so badly. He wiggled and jiggled and his belly fat bounced to the music. And his pants crept ever so slowly down his hips until every deep-knee bend (Yes, there were deep knee bends. Many of them.) exposed his rather large plumber’s crack. In the space of a song, he had lost my respect. That intellectual façade he had created crumbled and I realized that he was just a fourteen year old boy with an amazingly large ego.


We broke up during the dance, because after having seen his performance, I suddenly lost my desire to dance and tried to get him to sit with me on the benches around the basketball court. He apparently thought that I was being controlling, so he broke up with me with the line “I’m not ready for a serious relationship.” Needless to say, I wasn’t upset.

Monday, August 28, 2006

He was a skater boy

I like to think of dating as making successive approximations toward my ideal partner. With each guy I date, I am able to find new qualities which I will seek or avoid in future partners. Each time I date a new person, I am closer to having found the right one. I have a better idea each time around of what characteristics I want, and of those, which are the most important. Ergo, my last boyfriend was closer to what I want than the one before him, who was closer than the one before him, and so on down the chain. Following this logic, boyfriend zero would be the one who is least like the person I would like to end up with.

It was spring of 1996, the year when the grunge era was coming to a close and the skater trend was in full swing. This was before the time when skaters had blue hair and were outcasts in high school. Before Avril Lavigne-ish girls wearing tank tops with ties. Before skaters became a elitist clique of the least elite people imaginable. No, this was the time when it was actually cool to wear over-sized elephant-esque clothing from Pacific Sunwear (yes, this was even before it became Pac-Sun).

I, however, was not cool. I did not wear baggy clothes from PS, or have hemp jewelry, a skateboard or a wallet on a chain. I was 12 years old, and had a mother who did not let me dress like a derelict. I wore clothes that were not especially trendy, and fit me well. This didn't bother me much though because, I was in all GT classes, and none of the other nerds in my classes were particularly cool either.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when the cool new skater kid who was the object of desire of every girl in the school started passing notes to me in home economics (this is totally like 2nd base or something). Boyfriend Zero was too cool for school. He was in remedial classes, yet thought he was smarter than everyone around him (which I guess may have been the case with the crowd he hung with), he had an entire wardrobe from PS, and he used new slang words which I to this day, can not figure out. His friends would skateboard to Taco Bell and buy a small soda, then get like 20 refills (what rebels), and he was allowed to watch MTV. He was unlike the nerds that I had been around before. He put his own coolness above having any sort of real goals. He didn't participate in sports or other after school activities like I did. His after school activities consisted of skateboarding, Taco Bell, and hanging out. He was totally righteous, dude!

Things progressed in the typical middle school fashion, and pretty soon, we were dating. This meant that we went to the mall with four other friends (who were dating each other too), held hands a few times, passed notes to each other, bragged about dating each other to everyone in school, and he gave me daffodils which he picked out of his neighbor's yard on the way to the bus stop (I still am not sure if I find this to be endearing enough to over-look the fact that he destroyed someone's meticulously groomed garden). We were the most enviable middle school couple of the time.

Of course, these things don't last forever, and we had our falling out a few weeks later when I did not want to kiss him. I wasn't one of those middle school sluts who ran around kissing people. I had morals, dammit! Things ended. So, I went back to my schoolwork, ballet and equestrian lessons. He moved on to the class whore, because, she was willing to make out with him (I heard that she ended up getting pregnant in high school) also, she had a brother who was two years older and a skater. Who wouldn't want an in with such an awesome dude? Unfortunately, my older sister was about as cool as I was, so I guess I never had that advantage. We didn't really have any mutual friends, as our collective group of friends broke up over our break-up (it was middle school). I saw him around school a little bit, but we didn't talk much. He moved away the next year and went to a different middle school. After that, I lost track of him entirely.

That is, until the miracle of the internet let me take one last look at him. I stumbled across (ok, I searched his name on Stalkerati and found) his MySpace page. First of all, who my age has a MySpace page? Totally righteous dudes, duh! The information on there was surprising to read because, well, it is not surprising at all. It was as if he had written it 10 years ago (perhaps his new school did not offer English classes). His picture showed him in all his skater glory. He is still in his Pac Sun clothes, hemp necklace, and Vans. He has no real hobbies worth mentioning, other than skateboarding and hanging out with his friends. He still has no drive to do the things which are important to people like me (like getting a job).

I guess the point of all this is that I wouldn't kiss Boyfriend Zero ten years ago, and I sure as hell wouldn't kiss him now.