"It is wayyyy to early to be that crazy."

I have been doing a lot of adventuring in nature lately with large groups of people. I have learned two important lessons from these outings.

1. I hate big groups of people, because in every group, a horribly inconsiderate person (usually drunk) lays in wait to douche all over most other folks' decent time. Coupled with the fact that I have low patience and little tolerance of buffoonery, I get filled with a hulk-like rage about these episodes pretty easily.

2. These people in turn, make me into an unhappy crab - thereby further ruining the group experience.

Adventure 1, River Tubing: Some friends invited me to their lake house for the weekend. Once there, we met up with other friends, along with plenty o' siblings and siblings' boyfriends and girlfriends. We decided to tube down the local river on Saturday. I am a little on-guard against these types of outings - as I sunburn pretty easily. Thankfully so do many of my friends - so we completely lubed ourselves up with SPF 70 before hitting the water and faithfully reapplied thereafter. The issue came when we hit portions of the river where the water just wasn't moving. In spite of the ice cold water - the sun turns your innertube into a special kind of torture device - where you need to splash water over every surface lest you singe your skin. Also, after applying copious amounts of sunscreen and sweating a lot, the rubber started rubbing off on us - leaving big rubbery black streaks that smelled like the kid in school with greasy hair and terrible body odor. There were only so many distractions before we were just like "Get us the hell out of here."

Those of us sober enough to care started paddling. Amazingly enough, the drunk people, who couldn't stand or move their limbs, had enough wits about them to attach to our rafts via a well placed foot or arm. 12 people attached to 2 people paddling pretty much equals 14 people sitting in one spot. Only after we managed to detach ourselves (and the cooler of beer) from the drunk people did they find the motivation to paddle their own asses down the river and reattach themselves to us (and stop paddling). Have you ever seen those fish with the little parasite things that attach themselves to the fish's mouth, but the fish can't get rid of them, because....well, no hands? It felt a lot like that. This trip was supposed to last 4 hours. After 6 hours, three of us had had seen enough dirty band-aids and people puking to last us a lifetime and started a non-stop paddle towards the take-out point. We figured that anybody who didn't make it back we could chalk up to survival of the fittest or divine judgement concerning those who can't hold their drink, so if they drowned or got sunstroke - so be it. We reached the shore in 15 minutes. The rest of the group took another hour to drift back. We wanted to race back home to help with the grilling, but we had to wait for the slowest part of the group and all ended up reaching home base at 9:15 - which put a big damper on the 4th of July cookout - especially for the folks who did not go tubing that day.

Adventure 2, White Water Rafting: Two of my good friends and I had agreed to join a whitewater rafting trip. We had previously tried to plan a trip earlier in the summer, but that didn't pan out. So when my friend's brother invited us on a white water rafting trip - we jumped at the chance. We got a few forwarded emails a few weeks ahead of time with directions and the instructions to show up at the rafting joint at 1:00 pm sharp. We calculated out the travel time and decided that we needed to leave the homebase before 10:30. We met at my place at 8:30 to go grab a leisurely brunch. We had a great brunch sitting at the outside patio at Murphy's, which was punctuated by a crazy person who felt the need to rant and sing his craziness at the world while we were enjoying our Eggs hollandaise. Then Mel finally broke the "we're ignoring him" rule and said "It is wayyy too early to be that crazy", which I am nominating for best quote of the week. We swung back to my place to change and then head out. One friend was kind of antsy to get there on time or early - so we left a little after 10 a.m.

We arrived at the place at 12:40 and then we waited for the rest of the group to show up, and waited, and waited. The woman (let's call her Suzie) who organized the trip didn't show up until 1:30, and then proceeded to drink in the parking lot while screaming "It's my birthday!!!!!! I'm 30!!!!!" We found out that the tour wasn't supposed to start until an hour later - but the time in the email was listed as such to prevent the truely truant amongst the group from showing up late. The start time proceeded to get pushed further and further back as the organizer and her group drank beers and threw a frisbee in the parking lot. I know we could have joined in the festivities, but we got up at 8:30, goshdamnit! We were tired, and we didn't want to throw a frisbee or trade love beads or sing kumbaya while hanging out in the parking lot with a bunch of hippies for a few hours - that was not what we signed up for. We were goal oriented and we wanted to white water raft. We finally lined up for the safety demonstration at 2:45.

During the safety demonstration, while the rest of us were trying to pay attention to how we should avoid falling out of the boat and dying, Suzie and her overly energetic friend proceeded to pose girlishly and dramatically on the demonstration boat - in a way that only looks acceptable (but annoying) for a child participating in a beauty pageant. Nobody really understood what was going on, particularly the people that were not a part of our group. People were looking around like "I don't get it. What's the joke? This is wierd." The best explanation I can think for this phenomenon is that some women pull stunts like this with the underlying thought (conscious or unconscious): "Everybody thinks I'm cute." It is this thought that absolves them, in their own minds, of all their crimes - that turns their every annoying, cloying, petulant, desparate action into an adorably eccentric show. I'm not a fan of hitting children but people like these would have benefitted a lot from a good childhood belting. Every time I think I would like to live the life of an artist - I am reminded that it would be filled with these people, and then I stab that dream until it's bled clean out and doesn't rear its ugly anymore.

We grabbed our gear and proceeded to board a school bus, where the fun continued. Drunk girl and friends proceeded to sit at the sound bearing focus at underneath one side of the elliptical ceiling of the bus and started screaming to each other over the 4 feet of space that sat betwixt them. My throbbin' temples were located directly under the other eliiptical focus. We were treated to shitty, screaming renditions of "My heart will go on." and then some wise-ass decided that they needed to sing a song "in-the-round", and they pillaged forth an unholy and unending version of "Row, row, row yer boat", which made most of us want to row it off a cliff. I am only glad we didn't have to suffer through "Boom-chicka-boom". My prayers for a grisly crash were not answered, and 15 minutes later we were at the drop-off point. Things after that got considerably better, as the sane people all took to one boat, but we were hopelessly tainted by the morning debacle. Driving home that night, we were exhausted and tired, and probably totally grumpy with each other. It was a race to get the car back home before we passed out, which could have been avoided had we gotten an extra 2.5 hours of sleep.

So the question becomes - should I just chill out or is my anger reasonable? I'm not the only one on these trips who gets uppity about this behavior, so I know that I am not alone. And why should the most inconsiderate part of the group dictate what the rest of the group will do or put up with? If I am being reasonable, is there any way to combat this without becoming the a-hole who is trying to "ruin everybody's good time, man". Is there a slick way to tell people to knock it off?

It's this kind of behavior that makes me wish I was partying with more Mormons.