suppressed desires

THE Bread Loaf Vermont event that everyone talks about is the suppressed desires dance. It is a costume party where you dress up as your suppressed desire. Said dance was last night. As you can guess, this kind of thing is not really up my alley, but being THE event, I figured I should go.

My costume?
I am suppressing my desire to quit teaching to become a river rat, aka a whitewater raft guide. Basically I wore my tomboy-ish outdoorsy clothes, put on my Forest Service volunteer hat, and borrowed a lifejacket from a classmate. People went all out, and given this is Englishland, many were characters from books and plays. When you don't know what someone's desire is, you might get the condescending, incredulous, "You haven't read that? It's in the Canon." Sweet.

The theme was Gatsby, which is confusing, but basically they just decorated the place with that in mind. There were quotes from the book all over, which I should have taken pictures of for my Gatsby-loving students back home. I forgot though. On a mirror in the bathroom it said "Gatsby! What Gatsby?" Love it. While hard to decipher, one guy was dressed as the green light on the end of Gatsby's dock. Not sure how that correlates to his desire...  Bryan dressed up as a Bread Loaf student, which is definitely not his suppressed desire, by wearing his normal clothes and carrying around my books. It made for a confusing conversation piece because the running joke this summer is that everyone thinks Bry is a student. How confusing when they find that the books he is steadfastly leaning over in the library have math in them and are incomprehensible to everyone enrolled here. I think my favorite costume of the night was Minno's, a student from France whose boyfriend is from Montana. She is moving here and is starting the stressful process of trying to get her green card. Bry and I chatted with her for a long time about the process the other night, so when she came dressed as an American, complete with a cowboy hat, flannel shirt, and her best attempt at cowboy boots, it was perfect. Hilarious. After we had our fill of that debauchery we went up to Josh and Kate's to enjoy the most beautiful fire ever. Marty, the owner of the cabins they're staying at, is the man.

In other news, we have a visitor in the form of a falcon that might be nesting on the road in to the campground! We've seen it in the same place on the road three times.

The campground is packed for the first time. It's weird. The dogs do not like it and have proceeded to tell everyone in the campground by barking whenever anyone walks by. Evidently they did this Friday night when we went to see The Shining on campus. More on that in a minute. A woman stopped by on Saturday morning, before I had had any coffee to tell  me that I cannot leave my dogs unattended. Great way to let me know that they had been a nuisance by opening up with that. Since I live here, I will be leaving my dogs unattended, but I let her know I'd be happy to put their bark zapper on. She didn't like that either, but we took them with us everywhere yesterday so as not to upset more people.

Anyway, every week they show a movie on campus, typically a horror movie because there is a horror class (I was too afraid to take it when I saw the Japanese version of The Ring on it. Remember when Katie had that long black hair, people? I'm still sort of afraid she might pretend to be that girl again). This week was The Shining which is the single greatest horror movie of all time and one that my parents let me watch when I was way too young. No wonder I thought my room was haunted for awhile growing up. They show the movies in the barn, projecting the films onto the wall and everyone sits around drinking beers and looking afraid. It's great. Evidently last week a bat was flying around in there during the film.

Yesterday Bryguy and I went to Burlington to see what that's about. It's the biggest city in Vermont and is on Lake Champlain. We walked Church Street, window shopped, and showed off the poodles. We sat in a park for a while and then went to Magic Hat Brewery which I have decided is overrated. On the way out, a guy pulled up in a convertible and a dog hopped out that had a Magic Hat Brewery bandana on. He came out a half hour later, chugged the remnants of a Heady Topper (which is that AMAZING beer from The Alchemist, where we went but they were out, remember?) and took off. It is   a better beer, but isn't that sleeping with the enemy if his dog is repping Magic Hat?


After that we headed to Shelburne and went to Folsino's Pizza which shares a building with Fiddlehead Brewery. We got a strange pizza with sweet potatoes on it that didn't work for us and got a growler of Fiddlehead's IPA. The pizza place doesn't sell alcohol, but they have chilled glasses so you can buy Fiddleheads growlers or bring your own drinks in and use their glasses.

And if you think I've forsaken my schoolwork for all these shenanigans, you'd be wrong. Friday Bryan wasn't feeling well so after loads of Pepto Bismol, he just laid in bed all day and I did this:
This equals finally starting to write my final paper for Male, Female, Other. It's about Deliverance which should already freak you out, but it's specifically about the way the men's bodies change as they embody masculinity, seek out bonds with one another, and perpetrate violence. I sat there and wrote my way through 9 pages, so I definitely earned my time away from it. Now, here at work in the computer lab, is where the hard part comes. I've got to turn these papers, pretty much word vomit at this stage, into graduate school appropriate papers.

In other important news, I've got to wish my pops a happy, happy birthday! Hope today is great!!!