The Decision-Making Ventures

of a Magical Thinker

            by Rachel Hamburg

 

The last time I went to Safeway, I literally stood between the cereal aisle and the assorted snack foods aisle for six and a half minutes while trying to decide which route to take on the way to the milk refrigerator at the back of the store.  The cereal aisle has long been my favorite locale, and because of this, I have been known to dwell within it’s refined sugar infused confines for weeks (in dog years), salivating over the newest Raisin Bran hybrid or the Shrek-O’s available for a limited time only.  The assorted snack food aisle can be an equally dangerous terrain at times too, as I have been known to read every tortilla chip label to determine whether they were made in the El Paso factory where my second cousin Jimmy works as the assistant accountant. 

So there I stood, at this fork in the road, feeling very in touch with my inner Robert Frost, and wondering which aisle would most efficiently get me to the low fat organic Lucerne I can spy in the back.  And after six and a half minutes it occurred to me to take the cleaning product aisle because I was convinced that the chemical smell would permeate through my skin and give me some sort of rare blood poisoning, and therefore I would hustle through as quickly as possible.  So I tossed that idea around for another minute and a half, deciding whether or not to risk birthing a child with four arms later in life, and then I took the plunge.

The point is, I’m not the best at making decisions.

When I was nine, I happened upon a copy of the children’s story Madeline, a tale that I had forced my parents to read me at least twice a day as a toddler until I had it essentially memorized and no longer needed their services.  Shortly before my ninth birthday I had also developed a knack for what the therapist that my parents shipped me off to called “magical thinking.” That is to say, I believed that if I thought something, I could make it happen.  So when I rediscovered my childhood heroine, instead of flipping through the book for old times sake and then dropping it back behind the bookshelf, I became obsessed with the fact that Madeline had gotten appendicitis and that my appendix would be therefore be bursting at any moment.  Nights were spent awake crying.  Days were spent hysterically calling my mommy at the slightest gas pain in the appendicular region.  If it had happened to Madeline, it could happen to me, and if I so much as touched the region in which my suspected vestigial organ resides, I was sure the appendix gods would make me pay.

After appendicitis it was a brain aneurysm, then a fear of midnight robbers, followed by a brief stint in which I feared a sudden rush of blood would suddenly begin to spurt from my temples.  I have managed over the years (thanks to the help of several licensed professionals) to appease a great deal of my “magical” thoughts, however, to this day, if I get a chest pain, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing, beat my chest a couple of times to unclog that pesky artery, and move toward the closest phone in case I need to summon the paramedics.  And it would be lying to say that I don’t make the occasional sacrifice to the appendix realm of the heavens.

Basically, if it’s a fatality that has ever happened to any mammal, or in accordance with the laws of physics could potentially happen, a part of me thinks that it will jump out and claim me at any minute.   

So with the decision making skills of a thrice concussioned footballer and the magical powers of a moderate paranoid-schizophrenic, you can imagine that making decisions concerning activities that the surgeon general might warn pregnant women and people with heart problems about is not easy for me.  Thus, having recently come upon one such dilemma, I have found myself in a state of obsession, trying to decide how I would prefer to die.

Would I rather be devoured by a bear or stuck vomiting on a boat full of geology geeks?  Or crushed by a massive boulder? 

This decision, I am afraid, will determine whether or not I get to live the rest of my life. 

            Perhaps I should explain: next year, I will be attending Pomona College.  Before they will simply let me further my intellectual superiority to the rest of the world, they want me to bond with nature.  Or at least spend time in it.  And by that I mean sleep in it, which anyone who has ever seen The Blair Witch Project or an episode of Rescue 911 knows is practically an automatic death sentence.

            Now, of course, the point of the trip is neither to force me to hug a tree or to have a voracious river rapid consume any last remnants of my fragile carcass, but to allow me to get to know a handful of my future classmates in a more intimate, non academic, dirtier setting.  When it comes to choosing between a meaningless, lonely college existence or highly probable nature death, I have to admit that I’m a little inclined to go ahead and reserve my spot at the lone table in the corner of the dining hall.  In my humble opinion, having to make a good first impression on a bunch of fellow college freshmen while not showering for days and having to poop in a communal can is a pretty bizarre concept.    Not to mention, I’d say it’s risky business sticking us in the middle of the forest, where predators and potential death traps threaten to steal our parent’s tuition down payments at every instance. 

            There are several orientation “adventure” trips from which I may choose.  All have one thing in common: four days and three nights in a location that the paramedics would have a hard time reaching on a moments notice.  I must rank the selection in order of personal preference.  That is to say, I must decide whether or not I would rather meet god with my head severed off by a fallen redwood tree or by the wrath of a potato chip-deprived raccoon.  It’s like the time my grandma made me choose whether I’d rather listen to Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits in a locked room with no windows or apply lotion to her swollen feet and ankles.

A part of me is envious of some of my future classmates, who may not mind being assigned to any of the adventures and just prefer to “go with the flow.”  But, unfortunately, the only time I am able to go with the flow is when I am responding to the yearnings of my bladder. 

           

There is one trip that actually sounds appealing to me.  You get to stay in this cabin in the mountains that says a lot about what Pomona is doing with their one billion dollar endowment.  This means that I can get down and dirty with Mother Nature during the day, then go back to the Ritz, shower, and convince myself that it never happened. 

But won’t everyone sign up for the rich people cabin?  I’ve posed this question to some friends and family, all of whom, apparently oblivious to my rhetorical intent, informed me that some people actually enjoy “roughing it.”  I think my third grade teacher was one of these people; on our class trip to Muir Woods he made us line up one by one and kiss an unsuspecting banana slug.  I spent the next three weeks convinced that I had contracted lip fungus.  The fact that I may be cohabitating with people like this for the next four years frightens me a little. 

            The cabin adventure includes a day at a ropes course, which could be a problem.  At sleep away camp the year after fifth grade, I peed on myself while atop a certain course.  There I was, atop a small platform 30 feet above the unforgiving dirt, with the instructions to jump freely into the air and to (hopefully) catch a hanging trapeze three feet away.  This task sounds rather easy to anyone with all ten toes on solid ground, however once you get up into the air, the tears—and at times another substance—begin to flow. The thought of being known at Pomona as “the girl who pees on herself…watch out” for the next four years of my life is unappealing to say the least. 

            Because I cannot fathom anyone choosing to bushcrap for a week when they could have a roof made of something other than polyester over their head, I am preparing for the worst and oh so very carefully evaluating my other “adventure” options.  Naturally, because my decision-making skills are, shall we say, below average, I have enlisted the help of a couple of seasoned experts.

            “Moooooommy!  Daaaaaaaaaad! Pomonaistryingtomakemegocamping-andI’mscaredandIneedyourhelpand...” 

 

Here are my other options:

I can go to Yosemite and stay in a cabin at Curry Village.  The upside is that there is electricity, and a real door to keep the bears and raccoons at a distance (and all of the camping trips, if you read between the lines, pretty much spell out “vicious bear”).  But, when my seventh grade class went to Yosemite we stayed in the same cabins, and I remember that the nature guide told us there was a possibility that a giant boulder from one of the crags above the cabins could fall and crush an entire cabin and that there is no way of predicting when this might happen or preventing it.

I can just see a couple of CNN anchors trudging through the Yosemite hills to do a sob-segment about our tragic tale, pulling my tweezers or my bunk mate’s left shoe out of our pancaked remnants as hardcore proof of our valiant struggle to stay alive.  “And to think,” the botoxed bouffant will say, eyes boring into the camera, “she was only a few days away from Geology 101.”

At least the boulder would be quick and painless, whereas being bear food, I would assume, is more akin to being fed slowly through a paper shredder. 

Another option would be canoeing down the Colorado River.  This may have appealed to me—like the way a big cave might appeal to a little fishy, who then discovers that the cave is actually the massive jaw of a great white shark—had my friend’s sister not just returned from a similar trip, where she had to poo in a can all week.  And on top of that, everyone had to poo in that same can. 

“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Rachel.”

“Hi, I’m Joe.”

“You’re on my hall, right?”

“Third-floor, Mudd?  Yeah.”

“Great, want to poop together now?”

And, not only do you poop in the can, but you have to take turns carrying it down the river. A portable Porto-potty.  Isn’t that some sort of biohazard?  Like if you capsize and you’re on poo can duty and it gets all in the water.  It just screams parasite.  I don’t want to have to deal with that.

There’s also a ‘strenuous backpacking excursion,’ which is definitely out of the question.  I never understood backpacking.  Maybe I’m just a little nature-dense, but why would anyone want to carry two-thirds of their body weight in canned beans in a backpack while meandering rattle snake infested trails, trying to avoid getting lost or hacked up by a mountain-dwelling axe murderer?  At least have the decency to leave your change of underwear and crock-pot at a campsite while you explore the great outdoors.  Or hire a burro to do the grunt work like they do in the Andes. 

At sleep away camp the same fateful ropes course year, we also went on a two-day backpacking trip.  We spent the night on the top of a mountain and it was so cold that I just lay awake shaking all night until I think I must have fallen into some sort of frozen blood coma.  About half way through the night, out of sheer desperation and a hope that I wouldn’t lose my big toe, I actually tried knocking my heels together three times and saying, “there’s no place like home.”  Although to tell you the truth, what I really wanted right then was to be a fetus again. 

When we finally got down to the bottom of the mountain the next evening, I turned around, looked back at the mountain, and basked in the great feat I had accomplished.  I then gave a flip of a certain finger to the backpacking trail and vowed never to set foot on it again.  My counselors, who were the kind of people who believe that those who like wearing shoes are fascists, took my emotional goodbye to be a display of unhealthy anger.  And so, a few days after our arrival back at camp, I was introduced to an uncharacteristically hairy woman, Ms. Shirley, the camp therapist.  She asked if we could eat breakfast together the next day and I, a little creeped out by how close to me she was standing, said I guessed so.  The next day, however, neither Ms. Shirley nor her hair anywhere to be found.  She flat out stood me up. 

So, you can see why I can’t go on the backpacking adventure.

 

Basically, I’m in a Catch-22 million.  How can I rank this group of trips when I need to breath through a paper bag to even get through their brochure descriptions?  Why can’t Pomona be more like one of those Ivy League schools, where making friends is only for the kids who didn’t have any in high school?  

Perhaps I should just leave my assignment up to the orientation adventure trip gods.  While this approach may go against every snack vs. cereal aisle experience I’ve ever had, I am afraid that if I want to move on with the more everyday functions of my life, it may be the only way. 

And besides, I can probably enjoy any of the trips when under the influence of a hardy dose of anti-anxiety medication.