Nate Knows Nada

…And, yes, I have returned from methods camp.

On some level, it really was like summer camp — the intense experience
that forges apparently meaningful friendships.  Only time will
tell how many of these people will end up being actual friends (as
opposed to conference drinking buddies — which are valuable, too,
don’t get me wrong).  But the re-entry to the real world is
disorienting.  As one friend (I’m pretty sure about that) put it:

so, I can’t help thinking that it’s incredibly irresponsible of
[the organizers] to let all of as leave Arizona without some sort of
real world reentry program. I’ve spent the weekend in seclusion in my
apartment; there are so many bloody PEOPLE all over the place and I’m
getting tired of continually thinking I see someone from IQRM and then
having them turn around and feeling disappointed and disoriented
(again). I figure, though, if IQRM was a temporary retreat to
adolescence, then each day I can regain a year and within a couple
weeks be back to my normal, somewhat jaded, less drama-prone self.

Yes.  Drama.  That’s another element of summer camp.

Here’s to re-integration with our fellow jaded day-to-day life people….

UPDATE: Andrew puts it thus:

I got an email today from someone I was out there with… and talk about
warmth. I fear that I may have made lifelong friends in two short
weeks. It, of course, remains to be seen if the two weeks out west was
really a Breakfast Club type of thing. But here’s to hoping that it
isn’t. I’m too old for those kind of things anymore, and besides, these
people wear well.

Precisely.

AKMA ponders the idea of marriage-as-licit-zone-of-sex. 
(There’s more than that, but you’ll have to read it.) If you remove the
sex from a relationship and leave only the “other stuff”–“shared
lives, mutual care, [and] lifelong exclusive spiritual intimacy”–it’d
amount to a relationship that people wouldn’t have much of a problem
with.