Another list of incohesive and blunt points

1. Nobody 'fessed up to sending the CDs. It's driving me nuts! But it also gives me something to fantasize about. My imagination has had time to wander and I have since made up my mind that I do, indeed, have a secret admirer. Now, I'm debating as to whether said secret admirer is Jake Gyllenhaal or Chris Brown... or Jesse McCartney?
   
2. I've got so many stories I don't even know where to begin. Last week alone, I had one suicidal girl go "out of bounds" for 3 hours past our bedtime, and I broke apart a total of 3 fights-- one of which occurred during showers just after I asked my girls Chief Mandy really has to use the bathroom, can you handle yourselves? And just as my pants are down and I'm getting to business, I hear blood-curdling screams. I ran out just in time to catch two half-naked girls in an all-out cat-fight-- just in time to pry ones hair from anothers' claws and separate the two altogether.
3. Every time I come out of the woods, I'm always shocked to see my appearance. I used to take great pride in my hands, but now they're calloused and cracked from cutting wood/tending fires/restraining the youth . It's especially entertaining to look at my body in the mirror and try to recall where all the bruises and cuts could have come from.
4. Hurrah economic stimulus package!!! I'm not so concerned with staying on top of the world as an economic superpower, but just the fact that we're finally cleaning up some of our domestic crap (putting more money into under-funded alternative/experiential education programs like the one where I work!)
5. To anyone who has ever raised a teenage girl- God bless you. They're at the age where they're old enough to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation/forge the appearance of being emotionally mature... but young enough to have the impulses of a child/lack of a filter. I've heard some of the meanest things out of these girls mouths. I can usually brush it off, but after 5 days in the woods by myself with them, sometimes I forget that they're just kids and I take their disrespectful words/gestures seriously. This old Animaniacs clip is even funnier to me now:
   

6. Wanna know what I do on my time off?

And here's where I get lazy and let others articulate all the things I'm feeling/all the thoughts that are tossing 'round my head. Or maybe I'm just giving myself a pep-talk before I go back to the woods tomorrow...

Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
- Walt Whitman

On experiential education (and how I want to live my life, in general)...

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life; living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.
- Henry David Thoreau

On helping my kids...
The experience of helping a fellow man in danger, or even of training in a realistic manner to be ready to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth's inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive.
- Kurt Hahn

On dealing with hard times...
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
- Bruce Lee