Wow, what a week it has been at Camp. Everything is going okay, but this stress of keeping everything upbeat is taking its toll. The campers are all engrossed in their creative activities, and Martha and i seem to have gotten a few of the lagging students up to speed. We are seeing the beginnings of a lot of creative output, some starting simply. A number of them are not getting the stuff about embedding media and a few others could be writing more stories.

But everything is going to plan.

Yet I worry. I hear whispering in groups of people that go silent as I walk by, and the nasty anonymous notes appear under my door on a regular basis.  I think they dont like me; and IO hate that cause I am giving my all to this camp, working 20 hours a day, commenting to everyone, spending a ton of time in the control room tweaking the pipes and feeds. Stuff no one sees. I’ve been also banging the pipes on the Assignments collection making some functional improvements (has anyone evne noticed the random generators we added? Do they know all the cleanup I am doing each week to prep the new assignments?)

Mostly I am getting worried because Martha appears so paranoid, and more and more she acts like she does not trust me. I have gone to every effort to calm the worries of the CVI staff; they do not know how things get tricky when they put me in a position of looking like I am being secretive.

And how can Martha think I am not even in camp? I wave at her all the time, yell out her name in the mess hall. I was sitting there right opposite her at the last campfire, she was looking my way, but her eyes kept unfocussing like she did not even see me. I’ve knocked on her door a few times the chat after the last rounds, but she never answers; I can only hear the low tones of that old Morrisey LP “Maladjusted”.

Why does she think I am keeping shed 4 a mystery? I know no more than her- I’ve not gone in, and now she is expcting me to show it to her tomorrow. She seems really creeped out by Marco, and I suggested he pick some flowers for her tomorrow.

I saw her this afternoon walking down to the lake, and I ran to catch her, but she ducked inside the library. I was going to follow her in, but found this curious sheet of paper that had slipped out of her backpack:

On the back it was scribbled “be #4life”. I did not know what to make of it until I saw that one of our students had done the blackout poetry assignment. With some guesswork, I laid the found paper over a print out of Martha’s recent camp post Embedding is #4life- on its surface, this was a very important message for our students, and Martha writes them so well.

But see why I am worried now? I get this message by combining what I found with her blog post:

I get:

I see ways I could share ways I want to link what I did there, a poopy way, I have to look at a prettier way to get to a bunch of other stuff

Its cryptic, but she seems stuck on the things that happened last year. What is a “prettier way” – is it being nice to me? And what is this other stuff she wants to get to?

I really do not want to alarm the home office, and honestly, it feeds into the paranoia I already feel, and the lack of trust. So I am sitting on this and looking for more clues. It might backfire to not report to CVI, but they just take my stuff in and never give me much feedback. They just give orders.