58 Ways You Beautiful Lunatics Described Yourselves When Signing Up for A-Camp X

Another year, another giant stack of humans to place into smaller stacks correlated to cabin assignments for A-Camp X, which is AAAAHHHHHHH merely three weeks away! The highlight of this entire magical process that I do every year (this year I had a MAGICAL HELPER for the first time ever and boi y’all — help helps!) is, of course, reading the personality descriptions y’all wrote for yourselves. I feel very privileged to know your Hogwarts house, Enneagram type, and Scorpio Venus Moonsun Twilight Eclipse Rising or whatever. Also — one very helpful witchy camper, in their personality description box, took a moment to inform me that Ojai is “an incredibly powerful and haunted place.” So that’s something to look forward to, ghost-hunters!

So here, pulled mercilessly out of context, with punctuation/point-of-view adjusted for impact or consistency (I consider my listlings to be tiny poems, I truly do), I present excerpts from the personality descriptions of over 350 (!!!) campers, all of whom I cannot wait to meet or see again on May 16th!


1. In Portland, I am rarely the only blue-haired person riding the bus

2. Basically an 80 year old in a 26 year old’s body

3. Basically the perfect combo of toddler, millennial, and grandma

4. I am basically a 40 year old father at heart

5. I am the QWOC Pippi Longstocking who grew up to realize that loving all of my peculiarities is the true source of my superhuman strength. You can find me up in a hot air balloon as I enjoy an Orphan Black marathon while listening to the saddest Julien Baker song imaginable with books on queers & women in music history scattered around as I indulge in the joy of eating so many Hello Panda cookies.

6. My favorite Day of Carol is #19 for the screenshot of Therese’s jeans circa 2009.

7. I once slept with my brother’s ex-girlfriend, she lives in Germany now

8. I’ve been in a long term relationship with my Masters Degree, we are experiencing lesbian bed death, and my eyes are wandering

9. A Slytherin in the streets AND the sheets

10. Gryffindor Head Girl!

11. Early life Ravenclaw, current life Hufflepuff

12. My purse is always full of sewing supplies and cheese snacks

13. I’ve been told that my celebrity doppelganger is Prince George

14. I would like everything in Dean Winchester’s wardrobe, but in my size.

15. I’ve got an old printer with a little screen that says “processing” when it has a print job in the queue, but recently it froze on the “processing” screen even though it’s got nothing to print and I can’t throw it out because that printer is me.

16. Nature is beautiful and so are women!?

17. I would describe myself as a geek. But I’m like a cool geek who drinks kombucha, listens to rock music, and has several tattoos.

18. I’m a tight-skirts, no-bra, how-do-you-makeup femme/militant bisexual who likes dragons and the circus and burlesque and talking about my feelings.

19. I swing wildly between DIY punk and high femme goth

20. Aesthetic goals this year are to look more like a twink and to pat more cats.

21. My next cats will be named Ruth and Gloria after Bader Ginsburg and Stienem.

22. My cat is named Spencer Hastings.

23. My interests include overly specific pop culture trivia, listening to music, and femme tops.

24. I like yoga, reading, puzzles, live comedy, podcasts, storytelling, rambling conversations, being outside, memes, shitty beer, Campari, my dog, lists, making fun of myself, and anytime a group of people all start loudly singing along to a song together.

25. I’m obsessed with all things pop culture, specially if it includes badass women who might murder me in my sleep. I would let them.

26. Born Canadian / raised in the South / now a Midwesterner / always a librarian => very polite, pretty introverted, SO HAPPY to support everyone else’s hopes and dreams.

27. I did parkour in an elevator once and it broke

28. I’ve eaten the Obamas’ leftovers

29. I hate the 20 minutes of anger/miscommunication in a rom-com before it all works out in the end

30. Smol, bi, and ready to cry

31. Bi problems, who’s got ’em? I’ve got ’em too. Bi trouble, we’ve got double, don’t know what to do.

32. I want to make a difference in the medical field for queer people because when you google ‘lesbian doctor’ porn should not be the first thing that shows up.

33. I’ve been described as having the patience of a saint and the determination and drive of a bulldog

34. I’m a floral femme who loves gettin’ dancey and challenging people to pizza eating contests that I definitely will not win.

35. Queer Vietnamese femme who’s eternally internally screaming.

36. ~former baby, future corpse~

37. former feral child, current genderqueer badass.

38. I love Alison Bechdel so much I may cry.

39. When I grow up, I want to be Keladry of Mindelan, but in a courtroom.

40. I have a lot of feelings about Tonya Harding.

41. My sexual orientation is Faith Lehane.

42. When asked in elementary who my favorite N’Sync-er was, I proudly said it was Lance.

43. I’m evangelical about Carly Rae Jepsen

44. I will happily tell anyone in proximity all about Celine Dion’s infinite charm.

45. I’m struggling to get through season 2 of The L Word but omg Dana is me

46. “What a good lesbian!” – An acquaintance who saw me dancing drunk in a raglan and snapback

47. I’m a bouncy, giggly boi who loves mornings and has loads of hugs and energy. Did I mention I love mornings? Don’t worry, I’m super respectful of other people’s morning hatred.

48. I’m currently living in a remote Mayan village on a lake surrounded by volcanoes

49. I’m an androgynous toasted marshmallow: brown and kind of hard on the outside, soft on the inside.

50. Maybe like a mango…nice and sweet once you get in there?

51. Much like a grapefruit: beautiful and polarizing.

52. I’m late to stuff if there’s a lot of cute dogs on the way there

53. I haven’t worn a dress since I was 18, but I would be delighted to wear a kilt!

54. I’m the boi you could bring home to your parents

55. My favorite activity is doing very detailed research and/or math to answer very unimportant questions; the more ridiculous the ratio of the importance of the question to the effort required to answer it the better.

56. I have a jumpsuit that fits perfectly; that’s an achievement, right?

57. I eat tomatoes whole

58. I will fill this out later and when that day comes everyone will be astonished by how well I described myself here. I will definitely come back and edit this and not eat my words later

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3251 articles for us.

77 Comments

    • I read this and started snort/giggling so much my husband gave me a very strange look so I read it to him and said “It’s me and my doctorate!” Between this and #55 I’m like, wait, I don’t _remember_ filling out an application to go to A-Camp (sigh), have I been doing things in my sleep? Whoever you are who wrote those, I love you. (Also whoever broke an elevator with your mad parkour, I have never done this but it still made me laugh.)

    • Oh pretty please can we have a disenfranchised ex-academics support group? Laughing cause I’ll cry if I don’t.

  1. AHH, these are all so great ❤️?

    I’m reluctant to single out any specific one, but I feel very seen by the ‘processing’ printer comment!

  2. @11 let’s talk, because my description included “Ravenclaw spending a lot of effort to nurture Hufflepuff tendencies. ” and also AAHHH so excited to meet you all!!

  3. cannot wait to meet all of you beautiful, incredible weirdos. also i’m #41, come find me buffy fans

    • I’m really hoping for some Buffy flagging at camp because I need to find y’all in my real life, STAT.

  4. I never know what to put in that damn box, so this year, I just threw 400 darts at a keyboard(most of them missed)

  5. I love all of you wonderful, weird ladies. Question: Is there an Old Crone section of A-Camp, or is it all about queermos below the half century mark? Asking for a friend…

    • Hello I am part of the Old Crone section. There aren’t that many of us but we do exist

  6. these are all some highly relatable feelings. if i were to describe myself for A-Camp i’d say “once two of my professors got into an argument about the gayest outfit i’ve worn to class and started referencing specific shirt/snapback combos i frequent”

    • I didn’t anticipate anyone liking my comment that much but…hi! Also working on a PhD and feeling very seen by #8 as well.

  7. 55 is the most perfect description I have seen. I mean, I’ve made powerpoint presentations to better explain my useless research!

    A couple of those were for a then-friend, now-girlfriend, and I like to think that’s why she fell for me. I might be wrong, though.

    • Hi! I wrote 55 and I’m glad so many people seem to also understand the function of my strange brain!

  8. Feeling very seen by 55 and 8, as I’m desperately trying to finish my final papers fast so I can start really focusing on camp!!!! Just have to get through these next like 8000 words…. woo :(

    • OK Jay & Nora & GM, apparently we need to start a club. Plus whoever actually wrote 55.

      Last week I was finally sorting and organizing stacks of notes from ten years’ worth of PhD and I found slide handouts from an image analysis course from nine years ago so of course I had to read them (I HAD TO DON’T JUDGE ME) and there was a graph about determining the distance from one peak to the next in a rotated coordinate system and I thought the formula on the slides looked wrong so I flipped the page over, redrew the graph, and proceeded to high-school-algebra the bejeebers out of it until I was satisfied that it was actually right and I understood why.

      I should not be the president of this club, because I will be too busy with the coding for a Theiler surrogation data analysis I could maybe get by without doing…but of course that would be silly.

      • I wrote 55 and I’m loving the amount of people who evidently feel the same way…spending this afternoon analyzing data for my PhD but feeling very seen by all of you!

        • Go baby go! (I know it is not silly to post so many hours later, because let’s face it, it might be late but we all know you are still analyzing data. We know. Did you…did you make any graphs yet? Have they got _error bars_? Ooooh I’m making myself shiver. :P )

  9. I’m the witch with knowledge about Ojai’s magical/haunted properties and oooooh boi are we in for a treat, HMU fellow creepy queers going to camp

    (I’m also #51 AND #57, I am the best bio writer)

  10. I hereby respectfully request to bunk with #39, because that’s basically my job description and also my favorite author.

    • *Waves*
      That’s me!!

      In high school my younger brother dated this girl for like a year. She was the first girl he ever slept with. She and I didn’t really know each other at that point because I’d already left for college. And then, about 4 years later, we were both back in our hometown for a while and we became REALLY good friends… who did totally normal things that definitely heterosexual girls did. Like staying up all night talking about our feelings. And taking long walks together arm in arm through the misty rain. And having long conversations in her hot tub about how, hypothetically, if the right woman came along, we weren’t… like… opposed to being with a girl. “Hypothetically.” IN HER HOT TUB.
      And then she was the first girl I ever slept with.
      Then it ended badly — bc of course it ended badly — and she moved to Germany to be an opera singer.

      I waited a few years to tell my brother and ended up blurting it out when we were drunk on the phone one night. I was worried he’d be pissed, but he laughed so hard I thought he was going to pass out. Now he tells everyone he meets how his big sister and him have the exact same taste in girls.

      *shrugs*

  11. Shout out to everyone who made this list! Could any one of/all of you be in my cabin?!? You all sound awesome.

    (Cue “The Final Countdown”)

  12. I am #24 and I just wanna say that if we all loudly burst out singing the newest Janelle Monáe and/or Hayley Kiyoko together (maybe with hairbrush microphones, is that too much?) all my A-camp dreams will have come true.

    • I might have also mentioned something about group singing in my blurb, so we may be cabin mates. , If so, I will make this wish come true!

      Now, how do we get an all-singing, all-dancing version going on? I’m picturing flashmob “Curious” complete with jumping from bed to bed, hairbrushes and limbs akimbo.

    • I might break my personal no-karaoke rule for this! And by might I mean definitely would.

      • Kalasin, Abbie YakYak—this is going to be epic.

        Now, the real question is, what are the cabin floors made of, and can we get some Risky Business sliding happening up in there?

        • hahaha. YAY! kalasin- definitely break all your rules. Letitia- please, please, please slide across the floors.

      • Haha I am not single bc girlfriends are incredible! Also, IMHO, “girlfriends are incredible” is a good idea for a tee shirt that I would like to wear everywhere. I am available as a wing-person and friend tho.

  13. #12 PURSE SNACKS ARE THE BEST KIND OF SNACKS.

    #15 AWW

    #16 GREAT POINT RE:NATURE AND WOMEN BOTH BEING BEAUTIFUL

    #22 That’s an excellent cat name bc I don’t trust spencer hastings and I definitely don’t trust cats.

    #23 / everyone- does anyone else google “femme tops” every so often, forgetting each time you’re just gonna get results for a bunch of shirts?

    #29 YEAH THATS SO STRESSFUL

    #30 I’m also bi and ready 2 cry

    #31 “BI TROUBLE WE’VE GOT DOUBLE” this is a very good song parody

    #36 “FORMER BABY FUTURE CORPSE” hahaha

    #50 “once you get in there” lolol i’m dying

    I CANT WAIT TO MEET EVERYONE!!!!

  14. I relate to #8 SO hard. Literally just turned in my last assignment today. The last 8 years of my life have been about school (Undergrad and then Grad), and I’m SO ready for that to change. I relate to a few of the others, but that’s the one that smacked me in the face. Lol.

  15. I’m missing A-Camp this year but dear #18: can we be friends please

    also #19 please give me style advice my desired aesthetic is pretty close to yours

  16. I’m #7.
    It’s a really good story.

    Can’t wait to see all you wonderful, beautiful nerds at Camp!!!!

  17. i get more excited about a camp every day i cant wait to meet you all my goodness

  18. Very late replying, I don’t know if anyone is even checking this anymore! BUT.

    Anyone be in town the Tuesday night before camp that wants to go to put your hands together with cameron esposito and rhea butcher with me?

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