My perceptions on the whole "girls mature faster than guys" argument has been forever shattered by my experiences this summer working at the conference desk. To explain how it's been shattered, you'll need to understand some facts of life that I have observed.
Firstly, when observing adolescents to determine their true nature, you must examine the specimens in question in an environment outside parental supervision. When teenagers are around their parents, they behave differently for the same reason a dog doesn't jump on the couch when it's owner's home: namely, they don't want to be swatted with a rolled up copy of Taste of Home magazine. Secondarily, the environment must be one in which there are many other specimens all without parental supervision, and thus acting in their true colors as well. This creates the perfect environment for observing the adolescent condition. Thus, I have determined that summer camps are actually the perfect place to observe and draw conclusions about the developing man or woman.
Secondly, you must understand the basis for my previous acceptance of the assumption that women develop maturity earlier than men. I have found in my studies that the best indicator of a given adolescent's maturity is what I like to call the "Camp Creeper Factor." (CCF) This is defined as such: The amount of time measured in minutes that a given camper spends awkwardly hitting on the opposite gender multiplied by the either the number of hairs in their failstache or the number of hours you estimate it took them to apply the copious amounts of facial makeup around their eyes will always = the number of years until that individual is actually ready to function outside of summer camp.
Previously, my experience at camp had always led me to believe that CCFs for male individuals was exponentially higher than the CCFs for female campers in the same age group. It's common practice for male campers to spend their entire summer camp trying desperately and lamely to attract the attention of the female campers. This phenomenon is painful to watch and is often accompanied by copious failstache hair, thus leading to a very high CCF. Meanwhile the female campers seem to have zero interest in flirting with the notable exception of any female camper with blonde highlights. Thus, any non-highlighted female will generally have a 0 CCF since 0 x whatever their makeup earns them is still 0. However, what I've learned this summer has led me to take another look at the CCF of females.
What I have discovered will I am sure rock the substantial scientific community studying adolescent creepiness. Girls don't flirt with guy campers, they stalk guy STAFFERS. This is a revolutionary discovery! Since the CCF on the males they have available in their age group is so high, they naturally gravitate to the nearest available non-camper males, who have long since outgrown the attraction that 62 gallons of green sparkly makeup has for the camper males. This has resulted on my being stalked by no less than 5 different groups of middle and high school girls who for some reason mistake "being trapped behind a desk and obligated to be friendly" for "approving of the awkward crush you seem to have on me."
Think of the repercussions! Now, instead of having 0 CCF, they have an even higher CCF than male campers, who at least stick to girls their age. Thus I have determined that each minute spent awkwardly hitting on someone older than you must be accompanied by another integer for every year older than you the subject is. For example, a 15 year old hitting on a 19 year old for 10 minutes would actually result in a CCF of 50 times the makeup factor.
All that to say: Guys mature faster because at least they stick to what is theoretically acheivable.
Other than revolutionizing scientific discoveries, working at the Conference Desk this summer has afforded me quite the opportunity to get acquainted with the men and women who work every day to make Covenant function. Names I see in e-mails all the time, like Rodney Miller, Leda Goodman, and Angie Nail actually have faces to attach to them and overall, getting to know Covenant's staff has been a great experience. They're awesome and if you don't know the people filling up your inbox each year you should make the effort to stop people with coffee mugs around campus and find out who they are.
We're now most of the way through all of the camps coming to covenant this summer. After another two weeks of Student Life camps, we're done, and I'll be working for facilities in between RA training and getting ready for the semester to start. Next week I'm actually heading to upstate NY to meet my family at my uncle's lake house there for a weekend before returning to Covenant WITH A CAR!!!!
I've also noticed I have a bad habit of burning myself recently. Whether I'm sunburning myself, lighting my thumb on fire trying to grill something, accidentally touching hot oil, or just straight up dropping flaming branches on my foot, my subconscious seems set on self-immolation. Have to watch that.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Ghandi with a 'Zooka!
I thought this blog was dead. It hadn't shown any life signs in six months, it hadn't even entered my mind. I was well past the third stage of mourning for it when it suddenly gasped, punched it's fist through the coffin and clawed it's way back to the surface of the Earth. It returned to me, and demanded I update it.
So, now at the behest of a (possibly undead) internet journal, I return to chronicle my life once again. The past semester went by surprisingly quickly due to the fact that it was shortened by a week at either end. The first week of classes was canceled due to massive snowstorms and finals week was canceled due to massive twisty-winds-of-doom storms that knocked out power and water to campus for a week and caused insane amounts of damage to the surrounding community.
Other developments include learning to run a sound board while helping with the college's production of Doubt, wearing a fake mustache for And Then There Were None, dying my hair black during a speech tournament and shocking my poor mother, and learning that a whole week of nothing but rice to eat is not something to repeat.I also applied for and got a position as an RA next year. I'll be working and living down in the student apartments next year with my co-apartments RA (since both men and women live down there) Stephanie Ammons. I'm really excited and look forward to the opportunity to live in the more independent apartments. I'll miss dorm life, sure, but I'm going to have to learn to shop and cook for myself eventually, and better sooner than later.
Toward the end of the semester I signed up to take a may term class in Jordan, which was good fun, very eye-opening, exhausting, and ultimately awesome. I made a separate blog with my journals from the trip, so I'm not going to re-tell the tale here. If you do want to read about it, you can find the whole thing here: http://hummusandmintlemonade.blogspot.com/
After getting off my flight from Atlanta and catching a shuttle to Chattanooga, I was given a ride back to campus by Ila Davidson, who was picking up Sara Schaaf and Hannah Sluis and had an extra seat in her car. Grateful to return to American normality, I grabbed my bags and walked into my apartment for the summer, where I was greeted by Jimmy Gildard, and Tim VanVliet, who along with Brandon Flynn were to be my roommates. I unpacked and showered, and then my mom and Emily arrived with the rest of my things, having graciously driven down to drop them off for me. They then treated me, Tim ,and Jimmy to Mellow Mushroom pizza (since Brandon was gone for the weekend.)
We enjoyed the time to catch up and eat good food, then returned to the apartment and I collapsed in an exhausted heap on my bed and slept for a very long time. The next day I started work at my summer job, which is manning the Conference Desk in Carter Lobby for all the camps and conferences that come through Covenant in the summertime. My coworker for that shift was Ila Davidson, who along with being totally nutty is a very fun person to work a shift with. Since it was a night shift and there wasn't anybody around, we ended up spending most of the time in between things to do on Facebook and Stumbleupon, occasionally pausing to drive the golf cart around campus to make sure no alarms were going off, no fires were being started, and that no one was watching South Park in Andreas Lobby illicitly.
I have to say that this summer's job is really nice. I like my coworkers, the job's not stressful, and since it's full time I'm able to work far more hours than any of my other job options would have allowed. We have a good deal of fun behind the desk too. We have a serious log of events that happen during the day (ex: Fuse blown in Carter, student leaders lost keys, etc.) and also the "Daily Snews" which contains all the humorous events which happen during the day. For example, yesterday's Snews contains this entry: "9:30PM: Campers approach the desk with a look of terror. 'I locked both bathroom doors. Now we can't get into the bathroom.' They then marched down with me to Andreas as if going to their own execution. Both doors were, in fact, locked. No one died."
Apart from working, life at Covenant over the summer is pretty relaxed. Student workers get together to cook, eat, watch movies, play games, and generally enjoy the season and the nice weather. The pool at Covenant is open, and the weather is surprisingly hotter than it was in Jordan, which makes the pool a very attractive option.
By way of more specific events, two days ago Drew Moriarty, Brianna Pearch, Waverly McMahon, and Kaddy Hall got together with me and ate breakfast for dinner that Drew and Brianna had made and watched the A-Team movie, which is one of the best underrated movies of ever. While watching a part of the movie where a character quotes Ghandi on violence, we started theorizing about Ghandi in a fight, which led to the conclusion that due to lack of body mass he'd have to resort to a bazooka. This led to me drawing a picture of Ghandi, on a zipline, with a bazooka. I'm actually quite proud of the drawing, since you can actually tell who the picture is supposed to be and what he's doing, which is very rare among my drawings.
So for now I'm sitting at the desk during a lull, watching a technician install internet cable in the ceiling and working my way through captioning the 960 photos I took in Jordan to submit as a Global Trends project.
Hoping that I'll keep this up this time and not have to come up with another lame excuse for not updating,
Ciao.
So, now at the behest of a (possibly undead) internet journal, I return to chronicle my life once again. The past semester went by surprisingly quickly due to the fact that it was shortened by a week at either end. The first week of classes was canceled due to massive snowstorms and finals week was canceled due to massive twisty-winds-of-doom storms that knocked out power and water to campus for a week and caused insane amounts of damage to the surrounding community.
Other developments include learning to run a sound board while helping with the college's production of Doubt, wearing a fake mustache for And Then There Were None, dying my hair black during a speech tournament and shocking my poor mother, and learning that a whole week of nothing but rice to eat is not something to repeat.I also applied for and got a position as an RA next year. I'll be working and living down in the student apartments next year with my co-apartments RA (since both men and women live down there) Stephanie Ammons. I'm really excited and look forward to the opportunity to live in the more independent apartments. I'll miss dorm life, sure, but I'm going to have to learn to shop and cook for myself eventually, and better sooner than later.
Toward the end of the semester I signed up to take a may term class in Jordan, which was good fun, very eye-opening, exhausting, and ultimately awesome. I made a separate blog with my journals from the trip, so I'm not going to re-tell the tale here. If you do want to read about it, you can find the whole thing here: http://hummusandmintlemonade.blogspot.com/
After getting off my flight from Atlanta and catching a shuttle to Chattanooga, I was given a ride back to campus by Ila Davidson, who was picking up Sara Schaaf and Hannah Sluis and had an extra seat in her car. Grateful to return to American normality, I grabbed my bags and walked into my apartment for the summer, where I was greeted by Jimmy Gildard, and Tim VanVliet, who along with Brandon Flynn were to be my roommates. I unpacked and showered, and then my mom and Emily arrived with the rest of my things, having graciously driven down to drop them off for me. They then treated me, Tim ,and Jimmy to Mellow Mushroom pizza (since Brandon was gone for the weekend.)
We enjoyed the time to catch up and eat good food, then returned to the apartment and I collapsed in an exhausted heap on my bed and slept for a very long time. The next day I started work at my summer job, which is manning the Conference Desk in Carter Lobby for all the camps and conferences that come through Covenant in the summertime. My coworker for that shift was Ila Davidson, who along with being totally nutty is a very fun person to work a shift with. Since it was a night shift and there wasn't anybody around, we ended up spending most of the time in between things to do on Facebook and Stumbleupon, occasionally pausing to drive the golf cart around campus to make sure no alarms were going off, no fires were being started, and that no one was watching South Park in Andreas Lobby illicitly.
I have to say that this summer's job is really nice. I like my coworkers, the job's not stressful, and since it's full time I'm able to work far more hours than any of my other job options would have allowed. We have a good deal of fun behind the desk too. We have a serious log of events that happen during the day (ex: Fuse blown in Carter, student leaders lost keys, etc.) and also the "Daily Snews" which contains all the humorous events which happen during the day. For example, yesterday's Snews contains this entry: "9:30PM: Campers approach the desk with a look of terror. 'I locked both bathroom doors. Now we can't get into the bathroom.' They then marched down with me to Andreas as if going to their own execution. Both doors were, in fact, locked. No one died."
Apart from working, life at Covenant over the summer is pretty relaxed. Student workers get together to cook, eat, watch movies, play games, and generally enjoy the season and the nice weather. The pool at Covenant is open, and the weather is surprisingly hotter than it was in Jordan, which makes the pool a very attractive option.
By way of more specific events, two days ago Drew Moriarty, Brianna Pearch, Waverly McMahon, and Kaddy Hall got together with me and ate breakfast for dinner that Drew and Brianna had made and watched the A-Team movie, which is one of the best underrated movies of ever. While watching a part of the movie where a character quotes Ghandi on violence, we started theorizing about Ghandi in a fight, which led to the conclusion that due to lack of body mass he'd have to resort to a bazooka. This led to me drawing a picture of Ghandi, on a zipline, with a bazooka. I'm actually quite proud of the drawing, since you can actually tell who the picture is supposed to be and what he's doing, which is very rare among my drawings.
So for now I'm sitting at the desk during a lull, watching a technician install internet cable in the ceiling and working my way through captioning the 960 photos I took in Jordan to submit as a Global Trends project.
Hoping that I'll keep this up this time and not have to come up with another lame excuse for not updating,
Ciao.
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