Girl's Camp...

If you like drama--and not the fun acting type--then you would love girl's camp. It's basically a week in the wilderness with a whole bunch of cliquey girls. And if you, like me, are a bit of an oddball, who'd rather read a good book or sing dramatically than gossip about how cute that guy in geometry is, then you will suffer beyond any previous comprehension you ever had of suffering.

The fourth year hike was fun, I'm not going to lie about that. My tent partner was one of the coolest people I've ever met in my life and she, like me, loves to sing dramatically at random moments. (Like, on the edge of the cliff by our tent while the sun set over the Grand Canyon.) We saw some pretty awesome stuff too. While we were at Pipe Springs, there was a nest of baby Say's Phoebes and they were adorable. The Grand Canyon was amazing--I'll have to post some pictures once I find my stupid camera cord that seems to get lost every time I need it.

But the next morning was brutal. My awesome tent partner and I woke up at around six in the morning with a wasp buzzing around our faces. Eventually, it landed on the wall of the tent and I carefully crawled out of the tent, sprinted around it and chucked a rock at where the wasp had been. It flew out and we both lived. (Which is pretty awesome.)

But once we got to the actual camp--a few miles past the Jacob Lake lodge--I ended up getting stuck in a tent with the three girls in this world that I could kill and feel only a giddy sense of vengeance afterward. (If I was Madame Defarge, I'd knit them into a shawl or something.) Girl #1 and her mom have hated me for, well, ever since I've known them which is pretty much my whole life. I don't know how she's popular either. She's not funny, she's not smart, she's not pretty and she's a total b****. Girl #2 is sometimes funny and sort of pretty and in dance, so I can tell why she's popular. I guess Girl #1 is only popular because of Girl #2. But anyway, all Girl #2 does is complain. Her hair is greasy? She grips about it; never mind that everyone else has greasy, nasty camp hair too. She has one tiny zit on her forehead? She gripes about it; never mind that my entire face is a mess of zits. She's cold? She gripes about it; never mind that my only jacket got soaked during the rain storm earlier. Girl #3 is more or less the slave of Girls #1 and #2. She doesn't talk much, but when she does, it's always a reference to an inside joke between the three of them. She has an okay singing voice, but she's the one who gets complimented about it by Girl #1 or #2 when they overhear one of us singing. (Never mind that I'm the one who has been told to sing the hard line of our song because the leaders know that I have a powerful and beautiful voice and she's stuck singing the easy line because they know she doesn't.) And then, three of the sweetest girls in the world are in another tent, but it's too small to fit me in, too. I should have known that things would only go downhill from there.

By Thursday night, I was so completely miserable that I even refused to participate in the skit. I love acting, and I love improv, so all the leaders were confused as to why I refused. Last year in drama, I had four leading roles in the class play, and I could come up with an improv skit on the spot and it would have everyone laughing so hard they'd cry, so I wasn't exactly surprised when my YW president came and asked me why I wasn't going to participate. I began to tell her about the memories of camps in years past that I had tried to forget. I started with my first year skit, where I was given--because I'm not 'cool' enough to be allowed to pick my own part of help with ideas--the part of "holding the 'storybook' so the narrator can read it". A part that had no use whatsoever, but because I refused to brown nose Girl #1 and her clique, that's what I got. My second year at girl's camp, I had to tie a rainbow boa around my waste and throw pinecones at people and act like a total retard. Again, a part that had no purpose other than to put me in the skit and make me look like an idiot. My third year at girl's camp, I was forced to act like a false stereotype of a nerd while Girl #2 sang the song "White and Nerdy" horribly. They told me I had to be a wuss and cry and act like a bad dancer, and that was where I drew the line. My best friends and I are nerds and we A: don't cry over stupid stuff like that and B: dance really well.

The next day was the only good day other than the fourth year hike. My tent partner from there and my friend from the fourth ward and I got to go on the first year hike together and we all caught up with each other. Afterward, we sat around watching for lighting and talking about friends, love and a few other things that are extremely personal between the three of us.

After we had to go back to our camps, my tent partner came back to my camp to find me and the two of us went out into the meadow to watch the storm. We were halfway down a hill and situated in between a piece of metal, a pond and the forest at a distance that made where we were the safest place to be during an electrical storm. It was the best lightning I've ever seen in my life. It lit up the whole sky, and branched across the entire horizon in front of us. The thunder was deafening and barely a second after the lightning flashed.

But, in keeping with the theme, this couldn't last for long. The two of us were sitting out there, enjoying God's fireworks, when the stake leaders walked by (they were carrying watermelons across the meadow for some activity later, which the two of us had managed to screw up by picking a piece of paper out from under the metal mill part) and they yelled at us, telling us we were in the most dangerous place because we were the tallest things around. (Which I don't know how they figured this since we were halfway down a hill and there were trees about thirty feet to the left of us.) So they tried to make us go back to camp--the holier-than-thou camp director calling me an idiot for saying it wasn't safe to stand in the midst of a whole bunch of trees with all the lightning which made me wonder if she'd failed every science class she'd ever taken. We didn't go until it started to rain. Then, we ran. We were both soaked though and I had to sit in my tent listening to Girls 1, 2 and 3 gripe about the rain.

But at least before that, there was a little bit of a nice interlude where I got to sing "On my Own" as I walked back to the tent. I had to go alone because the director lady--I keep wanting to call her 'fuhrer'--tried to drive my friend back to her camp. (I say tried because not only does she fail at science, she fails at finding the camp right next to her own and ended up dropping my friend off a long way away from it.)

Needless to say, I was so freaking happy to go home yesterday morning that I can't even express it in words.