It is What it Is

I'd Really Like To Get Down Now Please

In all of my musings about Camp McDowell, I can’t believe that I forgot to mention the most perilous part of the entire weekend – the high dive. (It’s interesting to me that I wrote about both my terrible swimming lessons and Camp McDowell last week, but completely forgot to mention it. Subconsciously, it must have been floating around up there somewhere, but I guess I never put it together.)

We covered that I’m not the  greatest swimmer. (I do love the water though, I’m just more of a lazy river/"let’s float this one out with a cocktail" kind of gal.) Well, I also happen to have a little trouble with heights. I think it began when I broke both of my arms falling out of a tree house, but with the anxiety in this brain of mine, it’s entirely possible the phobia would have come about regardless.  

(Technically speaking, I think I have what is known as obsessive bad thoughts rather than a phobia. I can be in high spaces – I didn’t miss out on the top of the Hancock building when I spent the summer in Chicago, but all I think about when I’m too far off the ground is falling. It’s pretty much the only notion/image that runs through my head once I’m more than 10 feet off the ground. Once I saw Clueless, even the third floor of the mall could make me a little sick to my stomach. Am I the only person in America traumatized by Clueless for reasons other than the fact that Alecia Silverstone’s love interest ends up being her former step-brother? Probably.)

But, you know, I’ve done a lot of work to understand myself better in the past few months. I turned 30. I have a prescription for Xanax. Surely, I thought, I can handle the high dive now.

Four Camp Memories* and a Wedding

There are plenty of places I've been that I thought I would never see again. Camp McDowell in Navou, Alabama was definitely one of them. Despite the fact that Camp McDowell is the Episcopal camp in Alabama, and I am, in fact, an Episcopalian from Alabama, one week back in the summer of 1993 was more than enough for me.

There are only three things that I can remember about that week (and the name of my pictured cabin counselor is not one of them, Dawn?):

1. A boy with a mullet had a crush on my friend Leah. He came over to me at the swimming pool one day and asked me if she liked him back. I had to turn him down for her. The next day, we saw the same mullet-ed boy making out with another girl in the pool. It wasn't so much the betrayal that shocked me as much as the seeming lack of hygiene and supervision. All I can remember thinking is, "All of these people in one body of water, and now those two are tonguing each other in the middle of it. This can't be sanitary," plus, "Why doesn't the lifeguard care?"

In Which Laurel Refuses to Leave the Baby Pool

I was not a child who wanted to learn how to swim.

In the first swimming classes my mother ever took me to, every time they made us put our heads under the water, I would go under for about a second, immediately raise my head back up, climb out of the pool and rush towards the nearest dry towel to wipe all of the water off of my face.

(If I had grown up in a time like today when they toss two-year-olds into the pool assuming their natural instincts will take over and cause them to swim or at least dog paddle, I probably would have sunk, at best, and drowned, at worst. Nothing about me was interested in swimming.)

This isn't to say that I didn't like the pool. I just preferred the baby pool, water wings, floaties and any other space in which my feet could be placed firmly on the ground while my head remained free to breathe as much oxygen as I pleased.

Truthfully, I didn't even like the ball pit at Showbiz because I was always a little afraid I might be able to drown in that, too. (What if I became trapped under all those colorful balls and no one could hear my cries for help?) I would walk the perimeter of the ball pit to get to the slide rather than going straight through. On the day I did finally fall in, there were a few minutes of flailing until I realized that I could touch the bottom of that space, too. I calmed down and eventually started to act like something of a normal kid in that token and ticket extravaganza. (You can only imagine what a growing up moment that was for me.)

Nothing my parents could say would get me in the big pool.

A Horse is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course

I think most little girls go through a phase when they're obsessed with horses. I'm not sure what it is about horses that's so fascinating when you have two X chromosomes and are under the age of 10, but there you have it.

At five, my favorite show to watch after school was Black Beauty. (At least, I think that's what it was called. There was a horse. It was black. It may or may not have been the main character, but it came on after Today's Special, and that's what I called it.) I had many My Little Ponies in addition to a score of off-brand plastic horses that I also liked to gallop across the living room floor. I even did my own horse impersonation that involved neighing. (I can only imagine now how annoying that must have been.)

A few years later, my horse obsession still strong but no longer My-Little-Pony-focused, I was a dedicated viewer or Mr. Ed on Nick at Nite. I watched that crazy talking horse every single night, and every single night, I hoped for Wilbur's sake that someone else would just hear that horse talk. Oh, that wily Mr. Ed -- he was a stinker.

Wrong Number, Lady

Back in the day, when I was a young, naive 18-year-old, I couldn't wait to establish my first "adult" residence, the representation of all freedom, lawlessness (aka, lack of a curfew) and grown-up-ness there could be -- the college dorm room. (The underlying question? Can you be in an "adult" residence when your parents are shelling out $15,000/semester?)

 

As far as I was concerned, there were three very important tasks that came with establishing my sophisticated, mature digs:

No More Canteen of Pink Wine for Me

I can't tell you how many times I've complained that a full-sized bottle of wine wouldn't fit in my purse. Or that a magnum of Yellow Tail didn't look classy enough on the dance floor. And the times I've worried about a broken wine bottle at the hot tub? Too many to count. (Actually, one and three could be true.) Thank God Beringer has considered my needs with their new advertising campaign for minis -- "Go Anywhere: Hiking, Poolside, Dancing" with an incredible "four unbreakable bottles."

via www.laurelfain.com

Where To Go From Here?

I remember applying to colleges as one of the most stressful periods of my life. It seemed like so much -- my future career, earning potential and even life mate -- hung on the decision I made then. Not to mention the fact that I had tied my self-worth directly to the U.S. News & World Report ranking of the school(s) that accepted me.

Seven days before one round of applications was due, I had an emergency root canal (one the endodontist called the worst he'd seen "in ten years" of oral surgery). Full of painkillers and Valium (I do not do well around the sound of a dentist's drill), I called my best friend and insisted that she drive me to my closed-for-the-Christmas-holidays school, so that I could use the typewriter in the library to put some finishing touches on the common application. 

I was a little obsessed.

What I Won't Do For $100

I have worked a rather wide variety of jobs in my years on this planet. Some out of convenience (they worked around my class schedule), some out of necessity (unemployment benefits only go so far, after all) and some because I like being paid in cash (just kidding IRS!).

At the first magazine I worked for, after beginning yet another story with, “When I was working at x …,” one of my co-workers finally said, “How many jobs have you had, Laurel?”

Here’s the pre-college list: I started babysitting at 10 for a little girl who lived across the street and built up quite a client list by the time I left for college. I took my first $5.00/hour, I-have-to-pay-taxes job at a small produce market the summer I was 16. The next summer, I worked at a card store where they forgot I was an employee due to some sort of management change after I went on a 10-day school-sponsored summer program. (I was ridiculously relieved because that place was way too tense for a vendor of Precious Moments figurines and soothing nature sounds CDs.) My senior year of high school, I worked behind the front desk of a gym, so I would have money for a trip to Italy that Spring Break, and that summer I taught at a daycare.

Unsolicited Advice

I am not a fan of unsolicited advice. At 30, I still have a lot in common with a three-year-old -- the fastest way to get me to do something is to tell me that you think I should do the opposite. Tell me new houses are so much more trouble- and maintenance-free? I'll have purchased a 1928 bungalow "full of character and charm" by the end of the day. Suggest the blue top? I'll buy red. "Tell me" to do anything from changing the oil in my car every 3,000 miles to putting more acai berry in my diet? I think not.

When I'm talking, I usually just want to talk. And if I'm not talking, I don't have anything to say. Rarely, unless specifically stated, do I ever want advice/help/aid on what to do next. Unless there's an open manhole involved, I have to find it out for myself.

That being said, of the wisdom given to me by others, these tidbits have been, by far, the most helpful: