It's weird that, for everyone else in the world, this is a normal day.
For me, I feel sad, sick, nervous, excited, confused...I keep obsessing over what time I'm supposed to be at the airport to leave for Japan, what time the meeting is tonight, if I've packed everything I need. I keep looking at the clock and thinking I'm late or I missed the plane and I'm going to be fired. Hey, last week, I thought I completely forgot about my birthday, and my friends had a party without me, somehow forgetting to call and remind me.
Now that it's down to the final countdown, I keep thinking, "This is the last Triscuit I'll eat for a year!" "This is the last time I'll see that carpet commercial for a year!" "This is the last 1:01 PM I'll have in America!"
I'm trying to pet Scamp all I can, and he's even being nicer than usual. He knows what suitcases mean, so he can tell that something's afoot -- or a-paw, as he likes to say. What a joker!
I've been trying to tie up all my loose ends, letting my hairdresser know I'm leaving, my CPA, the Wendy's drive-thru guy. I've let all my credit cards know that I am not an identity thief of myself, and I am the one using my cards in Japan. I've packed all my bags so that I get rid of all the heavy, cumbersome stuff at the gate, and I can keep my suit, laptop, and Harry Potter easily accessible on a 10-hour flight.
I haven't eaten a home-cooked meal in almost 3 weeks because I've either been out doing errands or meeting with friends.
Well, assuming I bring all the necessary cables, I should be posting next from my apartment in Japan, or maybe even in the hotel in Tokyo. Yay!
And now, off to the pre-departure meeting. It doesn't start for 2 hours, but sitting in the parking lot with my new DS sure beats having a heart attack every 10 minutes when I think I've forgotten about it.
During one of my rare moments of freedom a few weeks ago, I sat down to breakfast with my friend Kameron. We talked of my upcoming employment, how our families were doing, updates on our cats, the usual. She mentioned that her grandfather had recently retired from the workforce...for the third time.
"I guess he just liked all the retirement parties," she said. "If he tries to start it up again and retire a fourth time, I think they're just going to give him a fake address for the retirement party so he gets the hint."
I can totally relate. Ever since May, it seems like life has been one big retirement party. My closed captioning coworkers took me out for sushi during my last week there, and it was just really flattering. I mean, I enjoyed working at the company, but when they said what a good job I had done and how much they would miss me, I was like, "Wait, you know who I am, right? The one who sat quietly at her desk for weeks, only ever speaking to shout out expletives at how frigging fast they talk in 'Gilmore Girls.' Yeah, THAT'S me."
I had always thought of my job as autonomous, and each person anonymously carried their own weight. So it was very touching to have a heartfelt goodbye from them.
Then when I got to theater camp literally the day after I quit, the director announced to everyone that, despite my saying it every year since I left college, this would REALLY be my last year, as it would be a hell of a commute from Japan to Pennsylvania.
At camp, I had what you may call "assistants" and what I call an "entourage." Yes, I'm exaggerating, but I have literally 13 years of experience doing this job, and for those of you playing at home, that's 1/2 of my life. So when someone says, "Gee, Lauren, how do you juggle getting coffee, babysitting campers on break, buying lunch, washing dishes, stage managing, AND being yelled at by the directors?" I just shoot them the ol' hand-pistol...and run off to a corner to cry.
No, it just takes some thick skin and a hell of a lot of post-it notes to do my job. But, yes, it was very flattering to hear that they will miss me next year. I will miss them all as well, and to anyone who takes my position next year, I have this advice: Stick to your guns. When someone screams in your face, scream right back. You will have your comeuppance when the fire alarm goes off. :) God, I love being right.
Well, enough with passive-aggressive inside jokes. I usually go through Post-Camp Withdrawal, and this year I suspect it will be particularly bad. From being surrounded by 100 adoring little kids to living alone in a country where I can't speak the language...let's say that I'm aware of impending breakdowns that may occur at any moment.
My last few days in Pittsburgh were spent trying to take camcorder footage of the city, both for me to remember and to show Japanese children where I grew up. I also spent some time with my neighbors, which is always fun. Until they whipped out the karaoke machine "to prepare me" for the year to come. I thought my neighbor's daughter was going to die of embarrassment, so I stepped up to the mic and showed the world why Elton John was chosen to sing "Your Song" instead of me.
I've only been back in California for a few days, but the countdown is ever looming, so I'm trying to cherish all my time spent with my friends. I haven't eaten one meal in my own house, so that's a pretty good sign.
But, yes, I can see why Kameron's grandfather wanted to retire three times. If you never leave your place of security, it's true that you won't miss all the fun that would be happening without you, but you also might not realize how much your friends care about you.
I am the Queen of fearing change and not being able to let go of things -- Hello, I stayed with theater camp 9 years after I graduated from being an actual camper. But to follow this dream of mine to work in Japan, I will have to give up some of my social comforts.
So I apologize for how egotistical this whole post sounds, but I'm just feeling good about knowing how much people care. And I hope I can buy them enough presents and send enough postcards to show them how much I care about them back.
I cried in front of an entire audience last Thursday.
It was the first round of camp plays, and I was already feeling sick to my stomach because children are oftentimes not much more than cute disease vectors. I was also feeling sick because I was stage managing, and one of the plays had so many elaborate scene changes that I was in charge of, my backstage notes looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Then one of the batons (the really frigging heavy bar that holds up backdrops) slipped off its track and got "stuck" in the down position, which would have ruined all the plays. The baton was holding up a fake basketball hoop, and I'm pretty sure there were no basketball hoops hovering from the sky in Scotland in the 1800s, NOR are they often centerpieces of a frog's living room.
So before the play, I was pretty stressed out about all the potential disasters, and I suddenly realized that I had not been informed of the Alumni Number, a recent tradition where graduates can come back and sing and stall for time while I set up the scenery.
I had been told that it was some older alumni that I couldn't remember, but I didn't know if I needed to cue the pianist, open the curtain, hand him a mic, anything. Then I stepped into the twilight zone.
Calvin, my underaged partner-in-nerdery pulled me aside and started talking to me about life. Campers Kenny and Justin, who I don't really know as well, joined him in some of the worst stalling I have ever seen in my life. I felt like I was being punk'd.
See, one of the most important lessons learned in camp is How to Tell When You Should Not Bother Someone. Throughout the 10 years that children are eligible to attend camp, important life lessons are drilled into their heads. For example, when the director is helpfully informing an entire group that their play is an embarrassment and he/she is glad that the children will be on stage instead of him/her, is that the time to sneak up behind the director and ask if it's time to have a snack break yet? Or when the lovely stage manager is carrying a 1-ton papier-mache tree all by herself across the stage, should you then choose to ask her if she's seen your pack of YuGiOh cards?
So you can see that when I'm freaking out about setting up for a play and knowing nothing about the Alumni Number, it was strange to have Calvin, Kenny, and Justin decide to talk to me about their spandex shorts or how many years I've been at camp.
Then my mom runs up to me and says that the director needs me on stage. By this time, I figured something was up, since I knew the director was ON stage, and they only call me on stage in my nightmares where something has gone wrong and it's my fault and they need to humiliate me.
So I walk out in front of a full-house audience, looking a little confused, and suddenly the spotlight hits my brother, walking towards me. I hadn't seen him since Christmas and figured I wasn't going to see him again for a couple years, since I'm going to Japan and he's going to Afghanistan a little after that.
He gets up to the stage, and I hear Nina, the camp's musical genius, play the opening chords to the saddest song ever written, "Fathers and Sons" from the musical "Working."
I was already crying when I saw him walking to the stage, and this just kept me going. The song has a large vocal range, but he did a great job and made a lot of other people cry.
It turns out that the whole camp was in on it. How they got 2nd graders to keep a secret from me, I'll never know, but everyone had fun with their little surprise. I had needed to cry all day from stress, and here I was doing it in front of an audience of people, suddenly not thinking that the play was going to go so badly.
The play actually DID go well, even the quick-change one with the basketball hoops. The second play is this Friday and, like every year, it feels both like it flew by AND like this was the longest month of the year. And I'll be glad when it's over and miss it terribly for the next few months to come.