Patterns and the Art of Roughing It

I will be the first to admit that I am a creature of habit. I like my routines and my patterns. Not in a serial killer kind of way, and not in the sort of way that I'm unable to function if one little thing is wrong, but I like things done the way that I always do them. Sometimes I wonder if we, as creatures of habit, get trapped in our patterns. The strange thing is, however, that our patterns don't trap us--we trap ourselves in them! We are perfectly capable of breaking our patterns, but we feel like we can't. There are, of course, addictions and other habits that are a little more difficult, but I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the little things, and it's been sort of an epiphany for me. Just because I always sit on the left side of the orange couch doesn't mean I'm not allowed to sit in the blue chair (it's also less awkward than kicking Lindsay out of the left side of the orange couch). My post-gym blueberry bagel with reduced-fat honey walnut cream cheese doesn't taste any better at the corner table by the lamp than it would in a booth by the wall. (It doesn't even have to be a blueberry bagel! I was feeling devil-may-care today and ordered french toast with reduced-fat plain today...of course the girl over-toasted it and put it in a bag when I clearly asked for a tray, but whatever...) That's one of my new goals: to break free of my unnecessary patterns, and start working on ones that will actually make me a better person.

One pattern that I recently broke was my pattern of never sleeping outside ever. I went to our church's campout this past weekend, and actually didn't have a terrible time. I actually would not have gone or even thought about going, had I not heard from Colleen, a friend in the ward, that there was a performance, and that that performance was a competition. I was then inspired to put on my musical-theatre game face (which involves a splendidly whorish amount of stage makeup, I might add), and brave the cold and the spiders and go camp. It was not as horribly wilderness-trek-like as I'm making it out to be; the campsite was like a resort to the people who are actually fond of the outdoors.

I survived the campout. I did not get eaten by bears, and I was not consciously aware of any spiders crawling on my face. The bonfire smell is still not my friend, and I'm still not completely in love with organized group fun, but overall, the pros outweighed the cons. Our performance won "best of show," which I still have trouble believing, but I guess I can take a page from cheesy 80's and 90's sitcoms (which was part of the theme of our show, by the way) and say that the fact that everyone had fun and worked together made us winners already. I just gagged a little bit typing that, but it's more positive than anything else I could honestly say.

Highlights of the rest of the campout: my caramel apple cheese tartlets were robbed at the dessert cook-off, there was a footbridge, several moves were busted during an impromptu dance party, not everyone is what they seem...but more on that later.