Lazy Hazy

Not much to report, really.  I went to the lake for a few days, which was nice, and then I came home.

We’ve been working on the room; today we primed, and tomorrow we’ll do the top color on three walls, and if I can convince Dave, the bottom color, and the big wall which will be the same as the bottom color.  Now that we’ve prepped, it really takes no time at all to paint.  We’re big fans of the disposable tray and pail liners, which makes it very easy.

Anyway.

I also had a great lunch today, with Andy and Josh.  We picked up sushi and sat by the pool at Andy’s folks’ house, as he was puppysitting for a few nights.  I was there for a few hours, and hanging out with them is always fun.  I did some errands after that, picked up the mats for my photos, looked for curtains, and found none, and came home to prime.  Dave came in shortly after I started, and he did the cutting in and I rolled, and it took less than an hour, and already looks better.  I am sooooo excited to see the final colors. it will just look so. . . . clean!

So, yeah. Not much going on.  While I haven’t watched tv as much since being on vacation, I DID see a really great show last night that I’m excited to see again.  It has the most unfortunate name, but really, it’s more documentary than reality show, truly, and even DAVE liked it.  Brat Camp is on ABC on Wednesdays at 9 (I haven’t looked for listing times for a show in AGES), and it is really, really great. It’s not a boot camp place, but it’s troubled kids in the wilderness learning self reliance and such — just. wow.  Really cool show.

Edit:  One of my readers pointed me to 63days.com, which is a blog from a girl who went through a boot camp/prison camp experience.  The SageWalk camp seems to be much more like a hippie-fueled Outward Bound with bonus intense therapy for troubled kids.  Their site even specifies that they won’t take kids who are too fucked up, basically, and kids need to be physically fit and healthy to attend.  If a kid is too heavy or thin, they can’t go.

Honestly, I am a big ol’ earth mother in waiting.  I am also very familiar with adolescents and the problems they have, and the kids on this show seem to be from very privileged homes (tuition is more than 22k for the program, and ABC didn’t recruit — Sagewalk wouldn’t let them, so these kids were signed up to go before ABC was part of it, which nixes the famewhore thing) and have problems of privilege.  Like, one dad was interviewed about how his daughter was spoiled, and always asking for money, and then she’d buy drugs with it. (Which makes me think, um, don’t give her money?)  The most distasteful thing on the show was that two parents were identified as "Kid’s Adoptive Mother" which was really unnecessary.  If it were a foster situation, that might take clarification. But Adoptive Mothers are Mothers, too.

My interest in Sagewalk is because I think that so many kids get sucked away from their own humanity by all the excess around them.  In the high desert, they are forced to learn who they are, and forced to learn some self sufficiency.  They aren’t forced through weird mind-games or war prisoner torture tactics, but by given time to actually THINK without ringtones and iPods and tv and movies ALWAYS ON.  Really, it’s more documentary than reality tv.  So many kids don’t know who they ARE, or how to function as part of the general community, and the sagewalk approach is a really refreshing and simple program — that costs a small fortune to attend.

One more edit:  This program, New Horizons, is located in Springfield, not far from where I grew up.  Incidentally, it’s founder is the daughter of Barbara Walters, and she went to a similar program when she was a teen, and obviously, she thought it was okay.  There is a difference between boot camp and therapy intervention programs are really, really vast.  Like talk therapy, or group therapy, compared to electroshock, or rebirth therapy.

4 thoughts on “Lazy Hazy

  1. If the kids were adopted at birth then, you’re right it doesn’t make such a difference, and adoptive mothers are mothers too, but if they were adopted later in life for whatever reason, well, then it could be different. Meaning, who knows what an 8-year-old kid goes through until he is adopted. Or what happened to the parents beforehand… Just a thought.

  2. Thanks for the added info, Gretchen. I appreciate you taking the time to provide more details. Like I said, I don’t watch TV, so I didn’t have the complete information.
    I still worry, however, that “Brat Camp” is lending credibility to all of the outdoor “therapy” programs. Certainly there are vast differences, but from what I have read, many parents feel that they were misled by the advertising materials they received from these boot camp places. They thought that they were getting Brat Camp, but instead their children were abused for six weeks. I also don’t agree that sending your children away is a good way to solve the problems in their lives…families need to confront these issues together.

  3. The High Desert certanly seems like a great place to set a program like this… If you ever get a chance to visit the West Coast, try to explore Oregon a bit. I feel like it gets roundly ignored because people think Seattle-Portland (only now beginning to get attention-San Fran and ignore the fact that Oregon has some amazing wilderness. With an hour or two between each, you’re on the coast, then in a temperate rainforest, then a super fertile valley, then a volcanic mountain range, then the High Desert. We used to vacation at Black Butte Ranch and it’s a really neat area. You’d go crazy for the High Desert Museum in Bend.
    http://www.highdesertmuseum.org/

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