Off the Top of My Head Online (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} otmh) wrote,@ 2006-07-24 16:59:00 |
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July 25, 2006 - Twenty Years Ago (Part III: "The Federation")
So there we were, three against the world.
Well, not exactly, but that was the way it felt at the time. The two friends I made at the first evening's dinner mixer were to be the only two I had in the whole "summer camp for smart kids" experience, not counting one instructor and a couple of sympathetic but largely ineffectual residence counselors. That's not to say that the rest of the students at the camp were our enemies, exactly - but some of them certainly were. It didn't take the more macho students long to realize that, while they might have been the downtrodden intellectual minority back home, here at the College of the Atlantic what physical attributes they had made them the tough guys.
A pattern quickly emerged in the daily routine of the program. Mornings were usually pretty low-key. Most people were just shuffling through the motions at the start of the day. Plus, I tended to sleep in and skip breakfast, so I was doing my own morning routine after most of the other students, which avoided most of the crowding in the dorm bathroom. Then there was the morning class period. John, Kelly and I were on different course tracks. I was in the classes that focused on literature and classic film, while they were in something to do with engineering.
Following morning classes came the rendezvous in the dining hall, wherein the three of us would gloomily survey the day's selection of fine seaweeds and who-the-hell-knows in search of something edible, then collect a bunch of rolls and fake butter and retire sadly to a corner table.
As an aside, I have to say here that, for all that he would develop a largely-unearned reputation for clumsiness later in life, John was a ninja acrobat compared to Kelly White. On the first or second day of the program, Kelly managed to misstep walking down a hill so that he effectively kicked himself in the crotch, a feat that John has never, to my knowledge, equaled. Also, during lunch on the first full day of classes, he mistook the mirrored wall of the dining hall for more seating space and barged straight into it, sending his tray, his rolls, and himself crashing to the floor in a surprised and messy heap. While I can understand mistaking a mirror for more room - that's the illusion it's there to convey, after all - I would, to paraphrase George Carlin, have thought that he'd at least try to avoid the other Kelly.
Anyway, after an unsatisfying lunch, it was time for more classes, then some free time in the afternoon. That was usually when the trouble started. John and Kelly had a double room near the end of one hall, and I usually retreated there when the rumbling started. I can't remember now if my roommates in the center triple were actually part of the marauding clique or not, but I suspect they were - or they were at least willing to let them come in and hassle me.
I'm sure compared to what goes on in college fraternities, labor unions, and other such law-of-the-jungle operations, the hazing at the Johns Hopkins CTY session at the College of the Atlantic that year was pretty mild. All the same, it was my first real experience with having my personal space invaded, my stuff rifled, and my habits mocked, and I didn't take kindly to it. In my memory today, the group of guys who were doing all this sort of blend together into one sneering, buzzcut blond guy who looks kind of like Captain Nazi from the old Whiz Comics, though I'm sure they were really much more mundane sorts of people.
Eventually, it'd be dinnertime, which was a repeat of lunch, and then there was usually some kind of goofy planned activity for the evening. Following that were another couple hours of free time - read, time for the mini-frat to roam the building causing trouble and stress - before lights-out.
As I mentioned earlier, we had a pair of residence counselors in the boys' dorm. One was a tall, sandy-haired, mild-mannered sort of guy named Phil, who for some reason immediately got nicknamed "Landphil"; the other was a chunky, wild-haired kind of guy - in my memory, he looks a bit like Tom Ford from Fifth Gear - named Eddie, almost as immediately tagged "Eddie the Umber Hulk" after the confusion-inducing monster from Dungeons & Dragons. They both seemed to mean well and were friendly enough, but they didn't display much of a clue when it came to actually managing a building full of junior-high poindexters cut loose from home for the first time, some of them crazy from the heat. Did I mention it was, as is surprisingly common in Maine, gaspingly hot and humid that July?
Maybe Landphil and Eddie were just genuinely clueless. Maybe they thought the whole thing was just harmless fun that would blow over in a day or so. Maybe they even thought that it was a good thing, that dealing with a little law-of-the-jungle stupidity would toughen us up and prepare us for Life in the Real World. I don't know. What I do know is that they didn't do anything to prevent the formation of the goon patrol, nor did they take any visible steps to deal with its reign of terror.
By the third day of classes - day four of the program itself - I'd had all I wanted. I admit it, I did the whole stereotypical nerd-at-summer-camp freakout. Packed my stuff, called my parents and demanded that they collect me at once, told the residence counselors that under no circumstances would I consider going back upstairs into the maw of the moron elite again, the whole shmeer. There were tears and dire threats. It was just like that scene in Real Genius. Eventually, we worked out a compromise. My roommates moved into the double room down the hall, and John and Kelly moved into the triple with me.
Admittedly, this just concentrated the goon patrol's favorite targets in a single room, but what the hell, we usually were anyway. I remember one afternoon, sitting on the edge of John's bed in the double while he sat up by the head - there wasn't anywhere else to sit - when a kid who was kind of the geeky mascot of the goon patrol poked his head in and then ran gleefully to inform his masters that "they're in bed together!" Neanderthal hilarity followed. At least in a triple we had space.
Matters proceeded in this fashion. On the weekend in the middle of the two-week program, a few of the goons went to town; when they returned, they'd acquired new weapons in their war on everybody else's peace of mind, in the form of what was at the time the state of the art in personal water delivery systems, the motorized squirt gun. Fortunately, the Super Soaker revolution had not yet changed the landscape of the squirt gun world, but even the battery-powered water machineguns of the day were bad enough. Soon the halls of the boys' dorm were a free-fire zone, a place where the goons didn't even have to catch you to make your day miserable any longer.
John, Kelly and I grew weaker by the day, our powers fading as the wretched food and our disinclination to eat most of it cut further and further into our reserves. I had a mild headache most of the time after about day five, which decreased even further my willingness to deal with the goon patrol. Classes became a blur. The three of us in the center room spent most of our free time conserving our energy and talking about the sorts of things overly intellectual eighth-graders talk about, when we weren't talking about how much we hated the goons.
Eventually we decided, for reasons that show a certain lack of logic but an admirable sense of solidarity, that the only thing to do was to charter an organization to combat the moronic excesses of the pseudo-jocks. For some reason, the urge to create mock organizations and "official documents" has historically been strong in both John and me, so perhaps it was only natural. With the kind of zeal we imagined had possessed the framers of the Constitution, we drew up the charter for The Federation of Lawful Humanoids, instantly identifying ourselves as both Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons geeks and generally making our overall situation much worse. Not that we recognized that at the time.
The residence counselors didn't get it, that was for sure. Immediately after the announcement that the Federation wasn't going to put up with the goon patrol hassling its members any more, the patrol gang-rushed our room. We literally had to barricade ourselves in with the furniture, just like in the movies, to keep them from coming in and doing God knows what. There was a lot of shouting along the general theme of "You're dead," along with loud speculation as to what we were doing in there we didn't want anyone to come in and see. Eventually, after what in my memory stands out as far too long a time, Landphil and Eddie came along and broke up the mob, then asked if they could come in.
Once we'd dismantled the barricade and let them into the nerve center, both of them came to the room to explain how we were responsible for the whole situation. Rather than take the possibly-valid tack that the whole Federation thing was kind of ridiculous and really wasn't a good way for us to try and be taken seriously by these idiots, they took the line that the whole problem the Federation was supposed to address was our fault in the first place - that by banding together we were being "elitists" and "excluding" our poor, misunderstood fellow students. Apparently Landphil and Eddie - especially Eddie, who was kind of a fratboy himself - figured we had the goons pegged all wrong, that they wanted to be our pals and we just weren't letting them. That was hurting their feelings, he reasoned, and so they lashed out. It was all perfectly understandable.
I'm a pretty mild-mannered guy. I don't get in authority figures' faces much, and I certainly didn't at the age of thirteen. That day, though, after that week and a half, I'd had enough. My head hurt, I hadn't had a decent meal in ten days, and I'd just spent an hour trying to keep a bunch of knuckle-dragging cretins from busting into my room and beating up me and my only two friends on Earth, as it felt at the time. I wasn't going to have any of Eddie's fratboy pop psychology on top of all that.
"We're being elitists?!" I demanded, almost at the top of my lungs. "They're a clique!"
It fell to someone else to attempt a more coherent explanation of what we felt the problem was. In any event, it didn't really make much of an impression. The counselors left convinced that we were the root of the problem - which I still dispute - and that by resisting the way we did, we were making it worse on ourselves - which in retrospect was probably true. Still, it's not as though we had a wide range of alternatives.
If things petered out after that point, and it seems to me they did, it had more to do with the impending end of the program than anything we or the counselors did to defuse the situation. For all that I remember them as cruel cave-dwellers, the kids who made up the goon patrol were still high-level students, they still had classes to attend, and those classes ramped up in intensity as the end of the program neared. Eventually they just got too busy to do anything more than sporadic token harassment, just to show everyone they were still in charge. There was no rapprochement that I recall, but there were also no further sieges of our room.
Next week: Was it all worth it?
So there we were, three against the world.
Well, not exactly, but that was the way it felt at the time. The two friends I made at the first evening's dinner mixer were to be the only two I had in the whole "summer camp for smart kids" experience, not counting one instructor and a couple of sympathetic but largely ineffectual residence counselors. That's not to say that the rest of the students at the camp were our enemies, exactly - but some of them certainly were. It didn't take the more macho students long to realize that, while they might have been the downtrodden intellectual minority back home, here at the College of the Atlantic what physical attributes they had made them the tough guys.
A pattern quickly emerged in the daily routine of the program. Mornings were usually pretty low-key. Most people were just shuffling through the motions at the start of the day. Plus, I tended to sleep in and skip breakfast, so I was doing my own morning routine after most of the other students, which avoided most of the crowding in the dorm bathroom. Then there was the morning class period. John, Kelly and I were on different course tracks. I was in the classes that focused on literature and classic film, while they were in something to do with engineering.
Following morning classes came the rendezvous in the dining hall, wherein the three of us would gloomily survey the day's selection of fine seaweeds and who-the-hell-knows in search of something edible, then collect a bunch of rolls and fake butter and retire sadly to a corner table.
As an aside, I have to say here that, for all that he would develop a largely-unearned reputation for clumsiness later in life, John was a ninja acrobat compared to Kelly White. On the first or second day of the program, Kelly managed to misstep walking down a hill so that he effectively kicked himself in the crotch, a feat that John has never, to my knowledge, equaled. Also, during lunch on the first full day of classes, he mistook the mirrored wall of the dining hall for more seating space and barged straight into it, sending his tray, his rolls, and himself crashing to the floor in a surprised and messy heap. While I can understand mistaking a mirror for more room - that's the illusion it's there to convey, after all - I would, to paraphrase George Carlin, have thought that he'd at least try to avoid the other Kelly.
Anyway, after an unsatisfying lunch, it was time for more classes, then some free time in the afternoon. That was usually when the trouble started. John and Kelly had a double room near the end of one hall, and I usually retreated there when the rumbling started. I can't remember now if my roommates in the center triple were actually part of the marauding clique or not, but I suspect they were - or they were at least willing to let them come in and hassle me.
I'm sure compared to what goes on in college fraternities, labor unions, and other such law-of-the-jungle operations, the hazing at the Johns Hopkins CTY session at the College of the Atlantic that year was pretty mild. All the same, it was my first real experience with having my personal space invaded, my stuff rifled, and my habits mocked, and I didn't take kindly to it. In my memory today, the group of guys who were doing all this sort of blend together into one sneering, buzzcut blond guy who looks kind of like Captain Nazi from the old Whiz Comics, though I'm sure they were really much more mundane sorts of people.
Eventually, it'd be dinnertime, which was a repeat of lunch, and then there was usually some kind of goofy planned activity for the evening. Following that were another couple hours of free time - read, time for the mini-frat to roam the building causing trouble and stress - before lights-out.
As I mentioned earlier, we had a pair of residence counselors in the boys' dorm. One was a tall, sandy-haired, mild-mannered sort of guy named Phil, who for some reason immediately got nicknamed "Landphil"; the other was a chunky, wild-haired kind of guy - in my memory, he looks a bit like Tom Ford from Fifth Gear - named Eddie, almost as immediately tagged "Eddie the Umber Hulk" after the confusion-inducing monster from Dungeons & Dragons. They both seemed to mean well and were friendly enough, but they didn't display much of a clue when it came to actually managing a building full of junior-high poindexters cut loose from home for the first time, some of them crazy from the heat. Did I mention it was, as is surprisingly common in Maine, gaspingly hot and humid that July?
Maybe Landphil and Eddie were just genuinely clueless. Maybe they thought the whole thing was just harmless fun that would blow over in a day or so. Maybe they even thought that it was a good thing, that dealing with a little law-of-the-jungle stupidity would toughen us up and prepare us for Life in the Real World. I don't know. What I do know is that they didn't do anything to prevent the formation of the goon patrol, nor did they take any visible steps to deal with its reign of terror.
By the third day of classes - day four of the program itself - I'd had all I wanted. I admit it, I did the whole stereotypical nerd-at-summer-camp freakout. Packed my stuff, called my parents and demanded that they collect me at once, told the residence counselors that under no circumstances would I consider going back upstairs into the maw of the moron elite again, the whole shmeer. There were tears and dire threats. It was just like that scene in Real Genius. Eventually, we worked out a compromise. My roommates moved into the double room down the hall, and John and Kelly moved into the triple with me.
Admittedly, this just concentrated the goon patrol's favorite targets in a single room, but what the hell, we usually were anyway. I remember one afternoon, sitting on the edge of John's bed in the double while he sat up by the head - there wasn't anywhere else to sit - when a kid who was kind of the geeky mascot of the goon patrol poked his head in and then ran gleefully to inform his masters that "they're in bed together!" Neanderthal hilarity followed. At least in a triple we had space.
Matters proceeded in this fashion. On the weekend in the middle of the two-week program, a few of the goons went to town; when they returned, they'd acquired new weapons in their war on everybody else's peace of mind, in the form of what was at the time the state of the art in personal water delivery systems, the motorized squirt gun. Fortunately, the Super Soaker revolution had not yet changed the landscape of the squirt gun world, but even the battery-powered water machineguns of the day were bad enough. Soon the halls of the boys' dorm were a free-fire zone, a place where the goons didn't even have to catch you to make your day miserable any longer.
John, Kelly and I grew weaker by the day, our powers fading as the wretched food and our disinclination to eat most of it cut further and further into our reserves. I had a mild headache most of the time after about day five, which decreased even further my willingness to deal with the goon patrol. Classes became a blur. The three of us in the center room spent most of our free time conserving our energy and talking about the sorts of things overly intellectual eighth-graders talk about, when we weren't talking about how much we hated the goons.
Eventually we decided, for reasons that show a certain lack of logic but an admirable sense of solidarity, that the only thing to do was to charter an organization to combat the moronic excesses of the pseudo-jocks. For some reason, the urge to create mock organizations and "official documents" has historically been strong in both John and me, so perhaps it was only natural. With the kind of zeal we imagined had possessed the framers of the Constitution, we drew up the charter for The Federation of Lawful Humanoids, instantly identifying ourselves as both Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons geeks and generally making our overall situation much worse. Not that we recognized that at the time.
The residence counselors didn't get it, that was for sure. Immediately after the announcement that the Federation wasn't going to put up with the goon patrol hassling its members any more, the patrol gang-rushed our room. We literally had to barricade ourselves in with the furniture, just like in the movies, to keep them from coming in and doing God knows what. There was a lot of shouting along the general theme of "You're dead," along with loud speculation as to what we were doing in there we didn't want anyone to come in and see. Eventually, after what in my memory stands out as far too long a time, Landphil and Eddie came along and broke up the mob, then asked if they could come in.
Once we'd dismantled the barricade and let them into the nerve center, both of them came to the room to explain how we were responsible for the whole situation. Rather than take the possibly-valid tack that the whole Federation thing was kind of ridiculous and really wasn't a good way for us to try and be taken seriously by these idiots, they took the line that the whole problem the Federation was supposed to address was our fault in the first place - that by banding together we were being "elitists" and "excluding" our poor, misunderstood fellow students. Apparently Landphil and Eddie - especially Eddie, who was kind of a fratboy himself - figured we had the goons pegged all wrong, that they wanted to be our pals and we just weren't letting them. That was hurting their feelings, he reasoned, and so they lashed out. It was all perfectly understandable.
I'm a pretty mild-mannered guy. I don't get in authority figures' faces much, and I certainly didn't at the age of thirteen. That day, though, after that week and a half, I'd had enough. My head hurt, I hadn't had a decent meal in ten days, and I'd just spent an hour trying to keep a bunch of knuckle-dragging cretins from busting into my room and beating up me and my only two friends on Earth, as it felt at the time. I wasn't going to have any of Eddie's fratboy pop psychology on top of all that.
"We're being elitists?!" I demanded, almost at the top of my lungs. "They're a clique!"
It fell to someone else to attempt a more coherent explanation of what we felt the problem was. In any event, it didn't really make much of an impression. The counselors left convinced that we were the root of the problem - which I still dispute - and that by resisting the way we did, we were making it worse on ourselves - which in retrospect was probably true. Still, it's not as though we had a wide range of alternatives.
If things petered out after that point, and it seems to me they did, it had more to do with the impending end of the program than anything we or the counselors did to defuse the situation. For all that I remember them as cruel cave-dwellers, the kids who made up the goon patrol were still high-level students, they still had classes to attend, and those classes ramped up in intensity as the end of the program neared. Eventually they just got too busy to do anything more than sporadic token harassment, just to show everyone they were still in charge. There was no rapprochement that I recall, but there were also no further sieges of our room.
Next week: Was it all worth it?
