Aimster and Her Boyfriend Go Camping

Over the weekend I went camping with my boyfriend in Joshua Tree National Park. [Note: My boyfriend doesn’t like his life to be documented on the World Wide Web, so from here on out, he will be referred to as Orangejello, which is to be pronounced like Or-an-gel-o.] For those of you who aren’t experts on America the Beautiful, probably the most important thing you should know going into this story is that Joshua Tree is in the middle of the desert. But more on that later.

We had a goal to get up at 9:00 am on Saturday so we could pack up, get groceries for cooking out, drive, and have some time to spend in the park before nightfall. We didn’t actually get up until 9:40, and we didn’t manage to pull ourselves out of bed until sometime after 10:00. I am not going to bore you with the rest of the preparatory events, but basically by the time we ate, packed my things, packed Orangejello’s things, got firewood, got gas, ate again (because cereal just doesn’t cut it), and got groceries, we ended up leaving around 1:30. Major fail.

Yet the first tragedy didn’t strike until we were off in the car and picking music, when we realized that we had forgotten the Most Spectacular CD of All Time (and yes, I do believe that deserves to be a capitalized title). I know what artists must fly through your head when you hear that: The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber. Those are some of the best sellers ever, after all. But you would be wrong. The Most Spectacular CD of All Time was purchased by Orangejello and me at a gas station. It’s called Circus Disco and it’s music played at an LA club of the same name (although Orangejello and I didn’t know that at the time). The CD features such amazing tracks as “You’re My Magician” and the destined to be a classic “Push, Push in the Bush”. And guess what, you’re in luck, because you can listen to samples of these spellbinding songs right here: http://www.amazon.com/Circus-Disco-Non-Stop-Mixed/dp/B00006399W/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1276029207&sr=1-5.

We faced this disappointment together, which is probably a testament to our strength as a couple. The rest of the car journey proceeded without any hitches. When we got to the camp we decided the first thing to do was set up the tent. We retrieved all the supplies from the car and began laying everything out. We put the poles through the top and Orangejello started hammering the stakes in with a rock that I found, which means we are resourceful and could probably kick ass on The Amazing Race (if that is indeed the type of thing people do on that show. I’ve never actually seen it). This is when I noticed something was a little off about Orangejello’s tent, namely that it had a giant hole in it. This seemed unlikely so I thought maybe I was misconceptualizing the functions of the tent. Upon 10 seconds of closer inspection, I concluded that the tent actually had 2 giant holes. Upon another minute of inspection, Orangejello and I discovered that the seams on the tent were all glued together instead of sewn.

You’d think that maybe Orangejello had just gotten the bad tent in the manufactured batch, but you would once again be wrong. The tent actually came with seam glue, which indicated that the company anticipated such things happening. Seriously suck it, Mountain Hardware.

We set about putting the glue on the seams, and even though it came with a little application brush, it nonetheless ended up all over our hands. At this point, Orangejello remarked, “I bet you’re not supposed to get this stuff on your skin.” I checked the packaging, which read, “WARNING: REFRAIN FROM CONTACT WITH SKIN OR EYES”. At least our visual orbs were safe.

After a semi-successful attempt at making our tent into a solid entity, we went to the bathroom to scrub the glue off our hands. Initially it seemed to be coming off easily. Our hands didn’t feel the least bit sticky when under the water. But when we tried to dry them, the paper towels were clinging to us. We continued to scrub away to no avail. Finally, I had to scrape each individual finger with a fingernail from the opposite hand, and then proceeded to scrape the glue off Orangejello’s hands because his fingernails, thankfully, were not long enough to do this. However, because Orangejello is wonderful and had done most of the sticky part of the seam sealing operation, there was still a lot of glue on his hands that I didn’t get. But Orangejello isn’t one to let adhesive slathered fingers get in the way of a good time, so he decided the hand washing excursion should come to an end and we should go enjoy the outdoors.

That lasted as long as it took me to tell Orangejello that I didn’t like having to resist the impulse to hold his hand, which prompted him to immediately pick up a rock off the ground and begin scraping his fingers with it. I chose to interpret that gesture as romantic. After he was done with that, Orangejello came up with the snazzy idea that we should wallpaper the glued seams with paper towels so that the glue could not cling to anything we put inside the tent. If nothing else, he has a future as a practical interior decorator.

The rest of the afternoon was grand, so I won’t write about that because this blog is generally not about the things that go right in life. Things going wrong is much more entertaining.

In the evening a giant group of males arrived for a bachelor party and began boozing it up. There’s nothing like the sounds of drunken men to permeate the music of nature in the crisp night air. Luckily, Orangejello is very distracting, so romantic s’more making under the stars (which are probably the main reason to go to Joshua Tree, b. t. dubs) was only intermittently punctuated by sentences like, “You know what really pisses me off? That the Bat Signal wouldn’t work in real life,” and, “So you’re saying that you would fucking lick her clit until it exploded all over your face?” (The answer was, “Yes,” in case you were wondering.)

Orangejello kindly slept on the side of the tent where the seam glue hadn’t been up to snuff and I stupidly slept on some sort of rock, which I didn’t realize until morning when I woke up with a bruise on my back. I was still half asleep when I emerged from the tent to find Orangejello already cleaning things up and cooking food. I changed into my hiking clothes and, knowing how badly I sunburn, decided the first order of business must be to put on sunscreen. I haphazardly sprayed myself and went about my morning. We packed everything up and put most things in the car. Orangejello said we could leave out our bag of food, our jug of water, and our cooler because they would be hotter in my trunk than under the shaded picnic tables. I was afraid someone might steal them, but Orangejello assured me that people in National Parks don’t do that sort of thing. Even in National Parks close to Los Angeles.

We set about hiking and it was lovely. Orangejello took lots of pictures of the wildflowers, lizards, and the most beautiful thing to ever grace the desert, me. Just kidding. I was climbing a rock and probably looked like the klutz that I am. There were some snippity-snappity-cool animals though, like desert chipmunks and crows so giant they would have tackled Tippi Hedren like linebackers had they been cast in The Birds.

Midway through the hike Orangejello informed me that my shoulders were looking burnt. I figured they couldn’t be burning too badly because I’d put sunscreen on. Orangejello wasn’t so sure but I confidently stated, “I know the way I burn.”

What I’ve decided now is that I know the way I burn when I properly cover myself in sunscreen, which is 99% of the time. But because the world just isn’t on my side sometimes, 1% of the time came when I was hiking in an utterly unshaded desert, in the afternoon when the sun is highest, with 100+ degree temperatures. Now I understand why Joshua Tree’s least busy season is summer. You see, when I am tired, I am lazy. When I am lazy, I do not perform tasks to my highest ability. In this case, I had done a horrific job applying my sunscreen evenly. It all started coming back to me: the way I saw the mist from the sunscreen bottle blowing away in the wind, the way I didn’t smell like I’d overdosed on sunscreen perfume like I normally do. The more I thought about it, the more my body made it clear that I had inadequately applied sunscreen to about 70% of my exposed skin. Now my epidermis features streaks of bright red next to white stripes of my pale normalness. If you colored my face blue and drew stars on it I could probably pass for an American flag. Aloe Vera is suddenly my crack cocaine. Orangejello is not fairing much better.

But back to my tale. Orangejello and I had drunk all the water that we took on the hike and were looking forward to getting back to that jug of water we’d left in the shade. But the man upstairs apparently thought we hadn’t learned enough lessons on the trip, because we arrived to find that those enormous crows we’d seen on our hike had staged a full-scale invasion in our absence. They knocked our bag of food to the ground, thereby shattering Orangejello’s plates, and they polished off all our nourishment. To make matters worse, they had violently torn a hole in our water jug and their excrement had made its way inside. Now the only water we had was the product of some melted ice in the cooler. Not a good thing when you’ve been hiking in the hot sun for 4.5 hours.

It was obviously time to leave and get some sustenance. I lathered myself in sunscreen so that I wouldn’t burn even more on the drive, and we began the ride home.

Call me crazy, but I would still rate this trip as a total success.

**Correction** Orangejello has informed me that he prefers his name to be spelled phonetically, as Orongejello.