Everything Wrong with Today's Youth

I’m in the mood to write right now. Accordingly, I’m going to try to assemble a readable description of my summer so far. I’ll start from the beginning, right around the time I stopped posting on this blog.

The feasibility of acquiring an internship being ambiguous, I accepted the job offered to me by my previous summer employer, whom I worked for the two consecutive summers prior. It’s a solid job at a small summer day-camp where I lifeguard and teach swim lessons to varying-aged groups of children throughout the day; I was to be hired as the “manager” (I put manager in quotes because there’s three guards other than myself). It involves working Monday through Friday from 9:30am to 3:00pm.

Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge the fear present in the hearts of my readers with children. You can rest easy knowing that I genuinely love the children very much and am extremely responsible when it comes to them.

And by “love”, I mean “fear”; and by “children” I mean “parent’s lawyers”, but the effect is the same.

So after committing to this job, I learned of an internship opportunity at a local radio station in my home town. Actually, it’s a company which owns a couple radio stations.

I really wanted to do an internship this summer as the only other alternatives were to do one during either Fall or Spring Semester, which I definitely didn’t wanna do. So about a week before my Summer job started, I began interning for them.

And so hence the position I find myself in now. The lifeguarding job, while stressful, is wholly uninteresting. There’s not really a whole lot going on during it for me to come home and want to write about it.

It’s just boring.

I come in, wait for screaming children to arrive, teach the younger ones how to swim, teach the older ones how to swim better, make sure none of them drown, go home. The other lifeguards are cool, but they’re just as bored as I am. The worst part is that, while boring, it can still be rather exhausting. It’s not construction work, but it’s not the same as most lifeguard jobs, which involve a lot of sitting around in the sun.

Oh yeah, and that’s the other thing. It’s an indoor pool. Do you know how much it sucks to work at an indoor pool during the summer? Let’s just say you can breath easier in a storm cloud. At least storm clouds don’t include noxious pool chemical particulates.

It’s not good for the “creative process” so to speak.

Working at the radio station is mostly pretty cool, except I’m usually so drained by the humid monotony of the lifeguarding job to fully enjoy it and be at my best.

The best slash worst slash best again part of working in radio are the people you meet when one or both of the stations goes out to events.

First and foremost, one of the stations is a contemporary country music station; the listener-base is “redneck” with a side of “southern redneck” and little bits and pieces of “racist redneck” sprinkled on top. So when we sponsor an event or do a broadcast remote, only the most dedicated of the station’s redneck constituency are in attendance.

So out of that sub-constituency of listeners who actually show up, the ones charismatic enough to come up and talk to us are the ones I get to interact with.

Often throughout life, when I’ve seen a person doing a typical redneck impersonation, I’ve thought to myself “Ahhh, they’re not really that bad…”

They’re worse.

It’s as if they’re making fun of the way they talk and act simply by talking and acting. If, within the crowd of rednecks at these events, there were five comedians doing blatantly cliche and offensive impersonations of rednecks, the rednecks and I would be none the wiser.

So that’s what I’ve been up to.