After 7 looooong weeks of being an RA at Explo, I’m finally back in Deerfield. There were a lot of aspects of Explo that sucked – the long hours, the annoying kids, the heat and humidity… the list goes on. The weather was so gross that there weren’t 10 consecutive minutes in the day when my body wasn’t covered in sweat. The only real saving grace of the experience was the friends I made, namely Tara, Gardy and Darius – we all rescued each other from mutual boredom and strangling a small handful of fellow staff members. Overall, the staff was amazing – interesting, educated, unique, responsible and intelligent people. Very few of them didn’t stack up, so they were relatively easy to avoid. There was a girl named Becca, my punk rock fairy – she had a sick fauxhawk, made her own clothes (including several kick-ass skirts made out of nothing but ties and shirts made out of 9 other shirts), drove a crappy little car, and had the most genuine lip-ringed smile on her face all the time. A good amount of staff was like that – independently cool people. It was a surprising and refreshing environment to be in, as in other peer groups there are generally a lot more irresponsible idiots. Thank goodness for tough hiring practices. New gallery, and I’ll have a ton more pictures in about 3 weeks.
Anyway, I quickly became close with Tara, Gardy and Darius and our relationship formed into what we called the Adventure Crew. We were off duty every other night and one day out of each weekend. When our off time started, we would somehow find each other and head away from the main quad for the fun to begin. We made fun however we could – rolling down a huge wet grassy hill as a 4-person wheel at 1am, sneaking into the dining halls and snagging late night goodies, driving to Maine for bridge jumping and lobster dinner, breaking into a high school… wait, what? Let me explain.
One night at around 11 we decided we (Jasmin came with us) wanted to go roof climbing, so we drove around in our ride of choice, Tara’s sweet red Cabrio convertible. We got to Wellesley High School and decided it would be our climbing facility for the evening. First we found a really easy way to climb up onto the 30-foot-high roof, so we explored up there a bunch, but then decided we needed to actually get into the school and up to the bell tower. We walked around the perimeter until we found a door that looked like it had no alarm on it. It was one of those “push the bar towards the door to open it” types, but the bar was on the inside only. There was a small space in between the doors, so I suggested to Gardy that we use something to slip it in between them and wrap it around the internal bar to open the door. After a few minutes of a delicate dance with a belt and a 
random piece of scrap metal, we got the door open and no alarm went off. For some reason, Jasmin put a blue binder between the doors as she was the last one to enter. We crept around the school like a team of highly trained spies; giving hand signals, moving in silence… we had no idea if anyone else was in the place. After making our way up to the bell tower and calling our Explo boss from inside, we made our way back out into the hallways. Darius peered outside a big window that was above the parking lot and doors from which we entered and calmly said “Hmm… two cop cars.” A moment after he said that and we realized that he wasn’t kidding (we all looked and the cars were empty, and our entry door was propped wide open), we heard two voices way down at the end of the hallway that we were in, probably in the stairwell. We all silently dashed down the hallway in the opposite direction and into a stairwell. We could hear the voices echoing loudly throughout the hallways. Now in super SWAT team mode, we made our way down to the ground floor and found an exit door that looked safe to leave from. We counted to 3 and all of us FLEW out the door and ran as fast as we could across the street, through a field, over a fence, and appeared in someone’s backyard. We never looked back and didn’t see a single cop on our tail, until a few minutes later when we were walking back to the car (we parked a good half mile away so as not to be apprehended) and saw two squad cars pass us on the sidewalk towards the scene of our crime. We made it safely back to the car and celebrated our victory on the way home. Good clean fun if you ask me.
It’s good to be back in Chicago, but I can hear Colorado calling me.
Listening to: Borialis – Inherited
