So, for those of you that don’t know, this summer I am working at a camp for people with disabilities. Everyday, my fellow counselors and I wake up around 6:30 AM and work until 10 PM – without breaks – doing everything you can imagine a person might need done … feeding them, changing them, brushing their teeth, etc. I’ve nearly thrown my back out several times trying to lift a 200 lb camper into bed. The words “diaper” and “bowel movement” have become a regular part of my vocabulary. I’ve seen half a dozen seizures in the past month and also fed a camper through a tube in her stomach. During this past week, I had an unusually violent camper that tried to kill me on more than one occasion. But it’s basically gotten to the point where these things don’t even startle me anymore. I could go on and on about all of the crazy things I have had to do, but I feel like that would be kind of boring.
Needless to say, this job is absolutely exhausting. Once I get off work at night, I can only think about two things – ice cream and sleep. I get internet only once or twice a week and it’s extremely difficult for me to maintain contact with people from home, so I figured I better write at least one blog post to prove I am alive and well. I hope you all are doing well too.
Then I started thinking, what the heck am I going to write about? Should I write about the time a camper started cackling with laughter and speaking gibberish at 1 AM, scaring my co-counselor and I half to death? Or about the time I was sitting with my campers outside when a young boy came up, whipped off his pants, and started peeing everywhere?
Then, like most do, my idea came to me (literally). As I lay in my bed at 10:30 pm, trying to decide what to write, I heard the window behind me start to shake. Before I even had time to react, a bird came flying through the window, inches from my head, and started frantically flying around my room. Of course, three of my roommates were not home and one was in the shower, so I was left alone to scream, cry, and well, panic. (Some background information … I live in an unrenovated house built in 1899 (It’s a national landmark!) with about 20 other girls, only 3 showers, and no air conditioning. Our house has about 15 creepy closets and secret doors and the rumor is that it is haunted. Five girls live in my room; only one is a psycho who leaves her stuff everywhere, likes to walk around naked, and complain about her “boyfriend”. Basically, our living conditions are comically bad.)
I eventually found one girl in my house who was significantly less afraid of birds than I. While I cowered in fear in the corner (I took pictures, coming soon!), she employed various techniques to coax the bird back out the window. We tried whistling, chasing, clapping our hands, turning off the lights … we even tried to use the fan in our room to create a wind tunnel that led directly to the open window. Nothing worked. My other roommate, who was in the shower when this all happened, eventually returned to the room in her towel – but she was also useless because she (like me) was afraid of catching Avian Bird Flu. It took approximately 35 minutes to capture the wild bird. We eventually used the blanket of our psycho roommate (LOL) as a net to smother the little birdie. While the event was extremely traumatizing, it was equally hilarious. Once we got the creature out of the room and things finally settled down, I crawled up to my bed on the top bunk to return to writing my blog post and hopefully fall asleep. That’s when I saw it. Right smack in the middle of my rainbow-striped pillow, inches from my iPod. Bird poop.
According to my roommate, I calmly said “is that s#*%?!” before screaming “OH MY GOD. THAT’S $#!T ON MY PILLOW!” I then proceeded to throw all my bedding on the floor of our room and started pacing back and forth. The bird had been in our room for over half an hour. He/she/it had landed on every single one of our beds. And the ONE place it chose to poop is on MY bed? Awesome. Eventually I ended up sleeping on my towels, with no pillow, because I was too traumatized and tired to do anything else. I had a nightmare about birds.
The bird fiasco basically sums up my experience at my new summer job thus far. Right when you think things are starting to calm down, you find that a bird $#!T on your pillow (It’s a metaphor, get it?). I cannot tell you the number of times I have thought I had everything under control this summer, only to find out that I did something totally wrong and have to re-do it. This summer has definitely been a “you have to be here to understand it” kind of experience. It’s grueling, but it’s also amazing. And it’s made for one heck of a story so far.
