Camp Happy

It's been a really long time since I've had a sleep-over. But today my best friend Tina is coming for a visit and she's spending the night. We did this a few years ago at her place when we went to see TMBG together, but that was a while ago and all of our visits lately have been a couple hours over coffee or in a grocery store or getting my iPod replaced. Always awesome, but regrettably short. So time to hang out, go to the midnight premier of the Hunger Games, and just catch up in person instead of over the phone is something that I'm deeply looking forward to.

But sleep-overs also remind me of Camp Happy.

I can't remember who was Gilligan

Camp Happy was pretty much the pinnacle of awesomeness when I was in high school. There were six of us that were close, so a couple times a year, we would pile into our friend Cece's gigantic Suburban (this was in the days before SUV's owned the roads, so it seemed positively enormous) and drive the hour or so out to her family's get-away in the country. I honestly don't remember what it was called for real, but we called it Camp Happy, and that's certainly good enough for me.

I have so many great memories from then. Trying to get through every card, and every column on the card, in Scattergories. Recreating an episode of Gilligan's Island and filming it. Filling out Cosmo quizzes. Dyeing my hair black for the first time. Trying to figure out if we could smuggle some alcohol there, not to drink, but so we could make a flambe.

I remember these things, not because they had any real bearing on the rest of my life, but simply because they were fun.

We forget about having fun too much when we're adults. We have more important things to do. Business to attend to. Work that clamors for our attention. Difficult decisions to make

It's true. As grown-ups, we have legitimately important things that we need to address. There are people who depend on us being responsible, and I'm not advocating that we neglect those tasks.

But we need to inject fun into our lives. We need to find time to do things that energize us. We need to look for ways to let our hair down and relax. We need to accept that we have a responsibility to carve out space in our lives for joy.

We need to find our Camp Happy.

++++++++

What fun things have you done lately? Do you have any Camp Happy-type memories to share? Let me know in the comments!