Long version: For the last three (!) weeks of camp, all 40 of us Yokosuka Camp A staff are engaged in SOCK WARS. At our last staff meeting, we picked our targets from a bag of names, and our PCs gave us the following guidelines: To kill your target, you must thow a sock at them. For this “kill” to be valid, you and your target must be alone, and not at work. Once you have assassinated your target, you aquire their target, and so on, down to the last two remaining counselors.
As I unfolded my piece of paper, I smiled, seeing the name of my gym buddy, the one friend I was alone with the most often. However, getting the opportunity to throw a sock at her turned out to be harder than I thought. The gym is full of people, we work all day together, and, conviniently, everyone hangs out in her room after work. Since the game started, I’ve carried around a bundled up sock in my backpack/purse, waiting for an opportune moment that never seemed to come. But one night, after a Sandlot movie night in the lifeguard lounge, we walked back to the TPU to find her room empty. Adreneline started pumping through my body. Now was my chance! But I had to be schneeky. So I walked down the hall a bit, towards my room. Then I stuck my head back in her door. “Oh, what time did you want to go workout tomorrow?” She opened her mouth to answer, I reached into my bag, and threw the sock at her face! Except I didn’t realize it was attached to my phone. So I threw my phone at her face too. “IT WAS YOU!” Her eyes widened, not even noticing the phone, just the fact that I had eliminated her from the game. “Who’s your target? Who’s your target?” She nodded toward the laundry room across the hall. During my glorious kill, my target’s target had walked into the empty laundry room. “In there? Hold on a second.”
Second target, destroyed.
As repentance for my murderous ways, I took part in a memorial service for beetles. Yes, beetles. One of my friends had purchased a pair of beetles from a vendor in Tokyo, who warned her that if they were left together, their desire to make beetle babies would be so great that they would die from the increased heart rate involved in such activities. As it turns out, a piece of cardboard was not strong enough to stop the love of these two magnificant creatures, and they died mere days after their purchase. A group of us gathered outside our housing at night to celebrate their short lives together, saying a few well-chosen words for the beetles we barely even knew, all while a navy man looked on in utter bewilderment.
Just a day in the life of 40 camp counselors living together for 10 weeks.
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