The Last Three Months

The last three months have been busy, but not busy in the way that I can write about as easily as with travel. I spent April and May working at a science camp on the Oregon coast. It was the best season of camp I’ve had, full of strong and beautiful women (and a few men). Then came phase two of following my destiny, which brought me here. Actually, I guess I should backtrack some to that whole ‘following my destiny’ business. November of last year I was riding a bus from NYC to Baltimore and got to talking to someone who I not only had a mutual acquaintance with, but that mutual acquaintance had invited her to come work at my previous summer job at summer camp. She had politely refused because of the job she already had, which she happily told me all about. ‘It’s at a retreat center on a really beautiful island off the coast of New Hampshire, and everyone there is so fun and friendly and I love it! You should work there!’ ‘That’s nice,’ I thought. ‘Too bad the combined words of ‘retreat center’ make me lead to the even worse combination of ‘customer service.’ I told her I would check it out and looked at the website before remembering my staunch promise to myself to never work customer service again.
Fast forward two months later, where I’m on the ranch in Mexico and Janine and I start talking about summer jobs and she tells me about where she had worked at, ‘a retreat center on a really beautiful island off the coast of New Hampshire, and everyone there is so fun and friendly and I love it! You should work there!’ at which point I said ‘Well. Okay.’

This place only employs 120 people and I ran into two of them and they both told me to go work there? Of course I will. Part of this kind of lifestyle is when things like that happen, I have to listen. So I scrapped my original plans of working spring and summer at a farm camp and decided to work spring at the coast and then summer out here. Part A of this plan went swimmingly. Part B is…well.
It’s beautiful out here. The people are fun! Friendly! Nice to look at! But I’ve spent the last three weeks in constant frustration with the amount of alcohol consumption as well as the fact that it feels like I’m in the middle of my freshmen year of college, rampant with people partying late, hooking up freely and then spending the rest of the time talking about those two things. Last night I drank a lot and then wandered around between my room and the floor bathroom in my underclothes. (yes, I know I have a history of this.) ‘Everyone else does it’ I thought. ‘Maybe if I do it I will understand the secret pleasure that comes out of this. Maybe I will also understand the secret pleasures of getting drunk, which I seem to have forgotten.’ Apparently not.
I’m not loving myself or the people around me in the way I’d like. Huge amounts of alcohol isn’t conducive to this. Nor is it to building the lasting kind of friendships I aim for in my interactions with people.
So when one of the few good friends that I’ve made here approached me to tell me she was thinking of quitting I said “Yes and When?”. This was half an hour ago. And now I’m giddy as all get out to be getting back on the road again. The tentative plan is to put in our two weeks this Sunday and ship out mid July. I’m not sure where I’ll be headed to, I’d like to see the Midwest and the SouthWest some more? I don’t know! What do you think?