OK, I haven't posted in awhile (work.. arg) but I see there is some hostility going up. I will try to break up the tension with another section of my cedu story.
Section 2: BCA
Well after I got done with the oh so theraputic ascent I got sent back to BCA. I was disappointed, was hopin I could go home after ascent, but I guess every kid does. But here goes my second introduction to BCA. There was a farm there and a lot of kids worked on various things at the farm. Some took care of animals, some built stuff, some were chopping wood or turning the manure pile on work assignments. There were so many things to do for a work assignment. The main house at the time was what is now the dining hall at bca. There were various portable buildings that were team rooms as well. There were only two dorms 1 guys and 1 girls dorm. I think they had upper school dorms in sleepy hollow but i am not entirely sure. What was later the garden was at first a pig pen with 2 hogs in it. Kind of shocked me because I have never seen a pig in my life as big as those two were. And as we all know now from previous posts someone later had sexual relations with jazzy the female pig. BCA was way different when I first got there than what it became. The attendance there was not very high, I want to say 40 kids. It was still relatively new at the time too, I dont remember exactly what number student i was to attend but I was in peer group 7, I know it was less than the 100th student by a decent bit. Things seemed to be stricter at those times as well, but if you ask me the kids had a lot more problems at that time of the school. Hell, it could also be that the staff at the time made them that way.
I remember there was this staff guy named Doug there, he was working on his psychology phd or something like that, I know he was writing a dissertaion. Thinking back on it, I think he saw kids in a psycologist role as well as a staff role in the school. Sounds kinda fishy to me. He used to be in raps all the times and ran propheets. This guys behavior was terrible though, he had a very loud voice that scared the hell out of a lot of kids. He would always yell at ya, say just some terrible things to you (especially girls) and be so routine with it. He used to tighten the watch on his wrist so tight for raps so that when he is yelling and pointing at a kid he would flex his arm muscle and the watch would pop off. Didnt too much care for his tactics. He shortly left afterward, I think it was degree related or something.
Like I said in previous posts, I was on the wolf team. It was headed up by Mike Bonner which was a great guy. We were a bunch of knuckleheads at the time and I think that was his specialty. I think shortly later I did the truth propheet in peer group seven. I think peer group A (it went A,1,2,3,4, ... 7, etc, dont ask me) graduated about that same time too. That was a kind of odd bunch. I remember after they left they were doin dorm cleanup in their upper school dorms, found like girls panties and all kinds of crap up there. I don't want to go to much into a lot of their characters so I will end it there. Kids used to run away a lot more in that time it seems, it seems a lot more kids got permanently moved to the mental hospital (N.I.Be.High).
Leading into my next part I will begin with introducing the concept of "cleaning up attractions". When you cleaned up your attraction you would confront someone you were attracted to in a rap and tell them how you thought. Typically afterward the two people were usually put on bans and the girl would do a fulltime to deal with the issues of a) why she is a slut or b) her pattern of going back to guys. Was almost formulaic. Girls got put on all-guy bans alot. I remember there was this one guy that would always be the all-guy ban girl's only exception. Staff I guess had the impression that he was this little angel. Don't get me wrong, I am not knockin the guy, I liked him a lot, he was definatly a good guy. But like any guy our age he was kinda a horn dog. How out of touch staff were with that fact used to always crack me up. Couselors seemed to be a little more intense in the early days of the school. the kids really feared em. As time went on more confident and outspoken kids came along and the staff didnt always such an easy time controlling them and forcing their rule.
I did a couple more propheets I guess I would be up to my brothers by now. Funny story from that time is when we had health inspectors show up to check out the kitchen. Evidently they were in all kinds of violations and they knew they were. Before the inspectors came they kid all the chipped plates under a chusion (yes under a fucking cushion) in the staff fishbowl. They also didnt serve food and store plates on the little table outside the sneeze guard (on any other night they would put food out on tables with no sneeze guards, which is a health code violation). I saw them do this with the plates and staff over heard me tellin some other kids about this. When the health inspectors came they made sure all kids were out of their way. What is the best way to do this? All day raps, ding ding! But as soon as the inspectors were gone everything went back to how it usually was. Plates removed from the cushions and put back to use, etc. A couple months later they got a lot more new plates. They also later turned the entire lodge to a dining hall and got a decent setup for both cooking, serving, and cleaning up dishes. The Don Quixote lodge was done being built at this time. The first months of that building were hilarious. OK, its first winter. Evidently they did something terrible wring with the roof and its drainage system because the first big snow and freeze months ice built up on the roofs of the front patios and caused them to separate from the building and begin to collapse. The freezing made this a slow progress so it was entertaining every day to see how far the roof was to ripping off every morning. They repaired it when it thawed out, oh did I say thaw? Apparently someone thought it good to build the place on a natural spring, and when it thawed the water started seeping into various parts of the building. The HVAC ducting in the floors were filled with water and you could sail little paper boats from vent to vent. When it started to get hot again the wood started to dry out, mind you they let this wood sit outside in rain, snow, sleet, etc when they were building it, so when they slapped it up it was very moist wood. As you all know when would dries it shrinks a bit, you could see through the cracks in the walls at some place. Was kinda entertaining. They also had a decent computer lab in the new building, me being the computer dork I quickly moved myself into the position of being in charge of the computer lab.
Speak of the devil, another story. One of the best times I remember having there was when we used to sneak back games from home visits and such and since I was in charge I could install them on all the pc's and setup a routing for allowing kids to play them. We would have 10 player quake death matches, oh man it rocked. We got caught in the end, a staff sneaked in quietly while I wasnt paying attention and give everyone the command to swap out of the game real quick to a word document they had running in the background. We got busted, I didn't really get in trouble at all, I think computers intimidated a lot of staff there. This was though one of the reasons I ended up getting transfered to RMA. It was still a good time and I wouldnt take it back.
Another tale of the times. One winter we lost power for like a week and a half. Guys slept in the quixote lodge and girls in the dining hall. We had to do this cuz there was no heat and those were the only two buildings with fireplaces. I remember going back to the dorms and cups of water were frozen in some of them. Damn cold if you ask me. But another construction flaw of quixote lodge reared its head. They built the bow on the fireplace to high and when the fans werent running the fly was basically useless so the lodge filled with smoke, was terrific. They later built smaller fires and smoke was a minimum. We got our water from a well so the electric pump wasnt working and water was limited. Could only shower every other day or something like that, and couldnt flush. Which after awhile was nasty when ya only had 3 toilets in the dorms. I was surprised they never got generators, you would think an institution like this would require them. I don't know for sure tho.
I have written quite a bit. I will finish up the BCA stories later.
Hope ya enjoyed the reading.
