Summer Jobs

My first week of  blog posts will be introductory, I’ve decided. I’m not sure if it’s because I still have a foot firmly planted in the education system, or just because I’ve no idea what else to write about as I devote most of my time to designing this website. Whatever the case may be, I hope you bear with me – it’ll be worth the while.

I was always an opinionated person, and a characteristic of most strong-headed people like me is that we do not like being told what to do. I remember once in senior kindergarten, or maybe it was junior I don’t know but the point is that I was just a lil chitlin, I refused my teacher’s pleading with me to fall in line and get ready for recess like all the other kids in the class.

“You aren’t the boss of me” I boomed at her.

After this display though, I did lace up my shoes and walk into the line. I was so satisfied at her not liking me that it didn’t matter she had won, or at least that I’d acquiesced. I mean I had really wanted to go play, dislike for my teacher or not.

Now that I am in the twilight of my education, I think of this story more than I want to. I won’t spell it out for you, I need a job to survive but I’ve only had summer jobs before, and they’re all horrendously boring.

It’s not so much that I don’t want to work, it’s that I don’t want to have no choice in the matter. The older I get, the more I realize how few people actually, in some meaningful way, care about me and my well-being. I’m not being depressing or whatever it’s just a fact of living I think. Everyone helps out everyone else enough, but never to their own disadvantage.

So, I find myself in the same situation as many other millennials. We are all in line, shoes on waiting to go into the real world, and yet we know that it is not recess that awaits. I’ve seen lives lost to other peoples’ point of view ‘because it’s what you do’. I’ve also seen these lost souls at a loss for what to do with their own lives.

It’s like people live their childhood doing what they want and then come adulthood they must pick some meager facsimile of that pleasure once it dawns on them that you can’t be endlessly happy and have people support you. My way or the highway has never rung so true for me.

Clay