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supporting characters, no matter how colorful
Wednesday, August 23 2017
location: Bunk 2, Cabin 12, Camp Hollywoodland, Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California
I didn't sleep well in bunk two of Cabin 12. I'd been on the top bunk on a bare mattress, the plasticized unbreathing kind designed to be bedwetter-proof. All I'd had to cover it was the towel I would later need for showering, and my only blanket was that little one I'd cleverly stolen from the long leg of my United Airlines flight (fortunately, on some flights, there are still occasionally blankets even in coach). But there was nobody in the restroom building at around 5:30am when I stumbled through the lingering darkness from my bed. It's easy to feel exposed while taking care of eliminatory functions in that building, though it's clean and not so bad when nobody is around. And the showers are surprisingly good.
Down at the main hall, I quickly availed myself of coffee and took a seat at one of the centrally-located tables (all of which are circular in shape). Initially I was with a rather random group of people, so I had an opportunity to meet new colleagues, some of whom showed up just before breakfast, having gone to a daybreak "dance party" (some people really are morning people).
After breakfast, the first activity of the retreat was a team-building exercise in which we broke into teams of about eight people each and then worked to solve a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, some of whose pieces belonged to another team. (This was a more elaborate version of the same activity that we did last year.) I didn't really know anyone in my group, though it ended up being surprisingly fun. This was mostly due to the constant barage of queeny language from the two dominant personalities in our group. All the pronouns were "she" and "her" and everyone was talked about in the third person. As for the puzzle, it was a custom one featuring top brass in The Organization and, most annoyingly, repeated textures in the background that complicate puzzle assemblage. Our team did not win the competition, though I did remarkably well once I focused on pieces that followed the edges of arms.
From there, the retreat followed a fairly normal trajectory, with updates from various departments, most of which had some comic hook. The education department, for example, had someone else stand behind whoever was talking to be a pair of expressive arms, a surprisingly hilarious gag, particularly when those arms did things like peel a banana and feed it to the speaker.
Lunch was fajitas, something I remember them serving something like four times last year. The kitchen crew isn't too familiar with vegan food, but they have experience from last year and they've evidently been well-briefed.
Though there was less mindfulness at this retreat than at the one last year, this afternoon a mindfulness hour was faciliated by a Buddhist monk with a deep radio-friendly voice who asked us to concentrate on the term "mercy," even as applied to our enemies (and at this point he alluded to Donald Trump, whom he termed "the orange one").
Everybody else at the retreat seemed to be wearing animal rights message shirts, but I was wearing my MoveOn.org OBAMA 2008 teeshirt, which felt a little out of place. It was also sort of cold in the main hall, so I went up to the cabin to get myself a button-up shirt and long pants. But soon thereafter, as the founder had an "ask me anything" session, my enormous caffeine consumption caught up with me and I began sweating profusely.
At the end of the day came the "love bubble," wherein we sat in a (now-enormous) circle outside and volunteered good things about colleagues. Then the official program for the day ended and we could do whatever we wanted.
I was wandering around in a daze wondering what to do next when Erin, the global campaigns manager, asked me if I wanted to play "a really fun game." My inclination was to say no (as others did) but I said okay, and soon ten of us were at a picnic table outback with a stack of ten blank sheets of paper in front of each of us. We were asked to write some expression on the top sheet and pass it to the person to our right. That person would then take the sheet off the top, put it on the bottom, and draw a representation of that expression on the newly-exposed sheet. Then they would be passed right again. And again. Until all the sheets contained an interleaving of texts and representations. When it was all done, we got to see how this "game of telephone" had played out. It was incredibly fun, more fun than I've had sober in a very long time. It was also exhausting; drawing all those pictures under such time pressure was hard work, and, though I pride myself as having artistic skills, my drawings were about average for the group. [The game, I later discovered, is called "telephone pictionary."]
Later Developer Luke and I caught a ride with fellow-developer Dan and his wife to Allison's place somewhere in the rolling hills between Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. Her birthday was coming in the next few days, and other colleagues would also soon be celebrating birthdays, so she'd organized an event called "There Will Be Cake." On the way, we stopped at a no-nonsense vegan junkfood café called Doomies to get cupcakes and such, and then at a beer/wine place for several different grades of beer. Lucas, being from Portland, likes the IPAs, though he prefers the ones with more of a simple bitter taste, whereas I like those with more citrusy qualities.
We had trouble finding Allison's place because it was in a remodeled garage behind an actual house, Kato Kaelin stylee. (I soon cracked a Kato Kaelin joke, and only Robin, who is about my age, found it hilarous; millennials are too young to have much memory of the supporting characters, no matter how colorful, of the O.J. Simpson saga.) Allison's space was small and dominated by large pieces of furniture, so it was a little hard to move around and people (we never had more than about 15 of them there at once) segregated into two or three totally separate socializing zones: the dining area, the kitchen (which was small) and the living room (where a pair of fat rabbits occasionally hopped about listlessly). I spent some time in each of these, drinking first IPAs and then the peatiest scotch Allison kept in her vast collection of liquor (which had the jarring unfamiliarity of the CD rack of someone much cooler than you'll ever be). Interestingly, though, Allison played no music at all. She looks like an anorexic member of a straight-edge east-coast hardcore scene, but obviously that's not right because there's that eight-foot-long shelf of obscure liquor. (I should mention, by the way, that I've been Allison's boss for about two weeks now.)
I felt comfortable with these people, particularly after the drinks kicked in, and I felt like I was doing a good job socially without spilling too many of the beans a sober version of myself would not spill.
Originally the plan was for me to work with Dan and Nicole (the senior frontend developer) on a presentation that IT would need to be doing tomorrow. But by the time Nicole showed up (with her husband Billy; both are staying at an AirBnB), Dan had a good handle on what our comic hook needed to be, and I didn't feel like I needed to do anything but exude charisma.
After a Lyft (or was it Uber) back to Camp Hollywoodland, some colleagues tipped me off to beer being drunk in a back room in the main hall, so I joined them for some bullshitting, most of which consisted of me holding forth with various crazy stories from my life (an emphasis being on my brownhouse) while the men asked me questions and the women kept mostly silent (gender roles being what they are even in a progressive coastal organization).
One Miller High Life later, up at my cabin, I hurried my sleep along with a dose of ambien and some liquor I'd smuggled from home.
At Allison's tonight hamming it up for the camera. From left: Dan, Nicole, Cameron, me, Allison, and Luke.
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