Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Men with mehndi

From Sep 12, 2010
This weekend, I camped at a totally awesome music festival, Wheatland, up north with my family, friends, and various combinations of our/their friends/family. It's a pretty crazy, fun event with folk music and debauchery, but is still mostly family-friendly despite this. As long as you're not hurting/bothering someone else, it seems as if almost anything goes.

I worked a volunteer shift and afterward my brother asked me what I was up to. Since my friends I hadn't seen in ages in were there and I was still feeling way under the weather, I decided to have a more mellow night with them at their camp. He decided to strike out with his friend N and meet new people. He cracks me up; he just wanders around, carries his fiddle with him, and will pull up a chair wherever people seem interested in hanging out or playing music, whether or not he knows them. By the end of the night they'll be like old friends anyway.

We parted ways and I sat with my friends and their family and of course we ended up laughing like fiends. I determined that at Wheatland, the seal breaks you and other such things, and that I did not have a collapsed lung, thanks to my friend's brother, who's a nurse and took the place of Google for me that night.

Around 4 a.m. I returned to my family's camp and ran into my brother, freshly returned from his adventures. He had me in stitches because he found an old friend and he had the inside line on some henna tattoos. He was very, very excited about getting the tattoos, which may or may not have been influenced by the adult beverages he had consumed. In between fits of giggles and coughing fits, I told him that normally when guys get drunk they get real tattoos, not finding excitement in the possibility of henna tattoos.

The next morning he elaborated and I laughed even more. This festival is run primarily through volunteer labor, so this friend was asked to help with the henna tattoos. He has no tattoo, art, or henna experience, but a good attitude, so he said sure, I can draw swirls on people. Well, in a sad turn of events, people were disappointed with his tattoos. They were expecting the beautiful mehndi designs associated with henna tattoos; instead they were given scraggly swirls or happy faces. However, sobriety and this fact still did not dampen my brother's enthusiasm.

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