I figured this story pretty much describes who I am.

At a recent family get together, my brothers and my mother recounted the story of when I was away at camp when I was 11 years old.

It was a Jewish (non orthodox) sleepaway camp in upstate New York.  My brothers and I went there for several years.  The camp was coed, with the center divided by an open field across a hill... the girls' cabins in a row on one side of the hill... the boys' cabins in a row on the other side.  One week, we were hit with a terrible rainstorm that lasted two days.  All activities were cancelled and the weather was so severe there was concern about getting food to the campers in the cabins.  The walkways on the hill were turned into muddy rivers, areas of the camp were flooded.  Two cabins were so badly damaged by wind and rain they had to be abandoned, moving drenched campers to sleep on the floors in other cabins.  The younger campers were hysterical.  The staff was also terrified.  Lightning and thunder were constant, with several visible lightning strikes in our area.  So where was 11 year old Brendan when the storm was at its worst?  I had taken a lightning rod that fell off one of the cabins and I was standing in the middle of the field, on top of the hill, in the middle of this torrential downpour and lightning, holding the lightning rod straight up screaming and cursing up at the clouds something to the effect of, "get on with it already!" or something like that.  I stood out there for about an hour or so until I got bored and went back to the cabin.  All the counselors could see from the cabin what I was doing, but none of them were brave enough to go out there and stop me.  No one wanted to come near me and that lightning rod.  Sure, I got in trouble for it... but I figured how often would I have the chance to stand with a lightning rod on a hilltop during a lightning storm?

That same Summer, during visiting day, my parents came to visit me and my brothers.  My mother tells this story best and remembers it vividly.  As my mother and father, along with hundreds of other parents, walked into the camp, they had to look through the crowded field of hundreds of children running around and try to pick out their four sons.  My mother sighed and said to my father, "well, I see Brendan."  As my father scanned the crowd, he asked her, "where? Which one is he?"  My mother put her head in her hand and said, "which one do you think?"  My father spotted me immediately, shook his head, and said, "oh... of course." 

At the age of 11, I figured the best thing to do for visitors day at this Jewish camp would be to take a sheet, a towel, some rope, and scissors and create and wear an arab robe and head dress and run around all the visiting parents while screaming and undulating wildly.

Not much has changed.