Imagine a camp for intellectually intense teenagers, but run by hipppies out in the country. No grades, no academic competition, no internet service. Just adolescent brains running on bad coffee and hormones. Running barefoot, under the apple trees, all day and all night.
I went to that camp for two summers, a long long time ago. The subject matter and the sex always got intertwined.
When last I Googled my first ex, the good guy, it was a litttle shocking to see that his area of specialization was something we'd both first learned about during the lecture where we managed to first hold hands— a lecture from which I can remember only the title.
The camp just held a reunion. Complete with Nobel-winning alumni speakers and a tofu-free banquet. (Lots of radically underemployed grads showed up too—he job market crunch of the early 90's was real.) But, this reunion was one of few places on earth where my job at Granolan was seen as a perfectly reasonable thing, or perhaps even an ideal outcome, rather than a falling off of the research track my training set me on.
Two ex-es showed up. The good guy, and the bad guy.
The good guy? The first, for a long-ish while the only, the ambitious one with a subversive streak? Radically underemployed and sort of boring. (We never did talk much, now that I think about it.) He looks much, much better with a haircut, though.
The bad guy? The one I cheated on the good guy with, the one who had girls falling all over him wherever he went and was never serious enough about anything? Married 13 years now, four kids. About to start a great job in a great city in a great country. Bad teeth, a few poorly placed extra pounds, and his smile is a little goofy. But he did as wonderful a job of making nice to Miss T. as he used to do to all the girls, back in the day.
P.S. How did I deal with meeting ex-es while still carrying 15 extra pounds and nursing on demand? I wore a tight tank top, latched on the baby as needed, and smiled.
Good for you. It sounds like you handled it just right.
Posted by: MoMo | Thursday, July 27, 2006 at 04:06 PM
I'm so curious about this. This was a CAMP? They have camps like this? You got to hear lectures when you were a teenager? I'm a new reader to your blog and don't have the right to ask for elaboration but I am very interested to know about this camp. And what the lecture was about!
Posted by: ozma | Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 07:34 AM