Well, I've shaken off the jet lag, caught up on those two months worth of sleep, and the green tie-dye on my fingernails is finally starting to fade.
A month ago I was a camp counsellor in Maine. I'm amazed at how quickly I got back into the monotony of the real world and began to feel as though it was all just some kind of hazy dream.
There's no excuse for abandoning you all for so long again without a post. True, my first four days back on UK soil were dedicated purely to sleeping with short intervals of napping (and a brief pause for pizza on the fourth day), but since then I've had ample opportunity to sit down with my laptop a write about my experiences in the USA. The only thing that's been stopping me is...well,
where do I even begin? How do I organise two months worth of memories (99% of which now seem totally bizarre when I look back on them) into a blog post?
Well, I'm going to give it my best shot.
For those of you who don't already know, my agency paired me with an
all boys' sports camp. Yes, yours truly, collector of high heels and avid lip-gloss enthusiast, was went to work in an all boys' sports camp. Have I ever given any indication to anyone that I am good at or have any interest in sports? (Aside from cheerleading, of course, but
come on! Half the fun of that is the sparkly bows!)
No, I don't do sports.
But all the same I ended up in an all boys' sports camp with only three other girls to keep me
sane company. Naturally everyone else there was a sports enthusiast. It didn't take long before I was exposed as the freak who couldn't so much as kick a ball.
At some point during the first few days of orientation, we were sent to meet the basketball coach for a talk. Alarm bells started ringing as soon as I realised the 'talk' was taking place in the basketball gym. By the time we got to the gym and the coach told us all the line up at the edge of the court,
I had by-passed panic and had simply resigned myself to the fact that humiliation was imminent.
"Ok, I want you all to sprint up to the free-throw line and back."
Wait! What? Why are you making me run? I didn't know this job would involve compulsory sprints! I don't run. I fall!
But, above all that, was another concern. I put up my hand.
"Ok, it's just...which one is....I don't know...which line is that exactly?"
The coach looked at me like I was a Martian (which was actually pretty accurate in this instance) and said, "You do know you're in sports camp, right?"
"Yes."
As if I could forget!
"Wait, which sport are you coaching?"
"...Arts and crafts."
And just like that my secret was out. But at least from that moment on we were all on the same page. Don't ask me any sport-related questions. Don't throw any balls my way. Don't expect me to care about the difference between Michael Jordan and Lebron James.
That's not to say I managed to avoid sports for the rest of the summer. After all, it was a sports camp!
There was the afternoon I was scheduled to coach tennis. I'm not entirely sure why, when there were two professional tennis coaches, they had to bring in the arts and crafts director who hadn't so much as picked up a racquet in over ten years. I quickly got demoted from teacher to student...and was by far the worst student on the court.
It's very demoralising when the nine-year-olds you're meant to be teaching are significantly better than you.
Then there were football games I was asked to referee ("I'm sorry, I have no idea what the offside rule is so you'll probably need to find someone else"), stray balls I was asked to throw back to their owners, the afternoon the ice rink was opened up for free-skate. As much as I tried, there really was no way around it. I had managed to avoid sports for the first 23 years of my life, but suddenly there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
All I could do was try my best and hope I didn't get hit in the head with a ball.
And maybe all that compulsory sport did me some good after all. I mean, by the end of the summer I could actually catch a ball and, for the first time in my life,
I could do a respectable push-up!
But even so, I think I'm going to be taking a break from sports for a while. You know, like the next 30 to 40 years.
