August 30, 1999.

I'm back from the wilderness.

It was a good weekend, although it would've been better with closer friends. In retrospect, it was a good idea to go up on Friday night, if only because Saturday was the only warm sunny day of the weekend. I went canoeing & swimming & burnt my back that day. At night we roasted marshmallows and tried to drink ourselves into oblivion around the campfire. I felt a lot closer to these people than I had at camp, and it was a lot more fun than I'd anticipated (even though Rex couldn't be there). On the way back we sang Backstreet Boys songs in two-part harmony with so much good-natured irony that I didn't even feel self-conscious...that's how fun it was.

But I still missed hanging out with people who wouldn't turn off Jon Spenser in the middle of "Chicken Dog." And I missed being with girls who didn't own three bikinis & trim perfect waists. Then again, I was a lot thinner at that age myself. But most of all, I missed the Boy...we haven't spent much time together since last week & I don't like it one bit.

I'm reasonably excited that the summer's over. On one hand, I feel like I missed the season altogether with studying & working & weddings...but on the other, I'll be glad to get back to some kind of university course. A small reminder that I'm not as static as I appear to myself.

On a related tangent, I need to go dancing something awful. I haven't gotten dressed up for the Garden since the spring, and I miss the performative aspect of climbing into scary black clothes & flirting with guys covered in tattoos. You just don't get a lot of that in summer camp. Temping either.

(I'm thinking of beginning a Bruce McCullough-style narrative poem titled "The Year I was a Temp," full of bitterness & wry observation. The problem is making answering phones funny.)