Tuesday, January 13, 2009

life lessons learned during the summers of y2k- 2k4

Years ago, (like every summer in college), tara and i devoted our summers to doing two things:

1. watching blockbusters entire selection of Sundance movies
2. temping

the other night i watched Go and it made me remember those summers and wish tara and i could quit reality, temp like there is an end in sight, and watch movies in her parents basement like 21 year olds with no interest in Dempsters. then maybe i wouldn't be so depressed about keeping temping and i wouldn't be bothered by and the fact that i live a million miles from t-dog, who would have watched Go and felt the same weird way about it in the end.

We learned a lot about life during our summers of office work and cinema, ( as did her brother, who declared us "sick" and had "something wrong with us" when walking out of the room 15 minutes into Gummo), and, mostly, those lessons where not lost on our grown up selves. The following is two lists of lessons we learned about movies and temping. (Maybe this will give some back story on my strong aversion to temping. It isn't that i hate temping, i just mildly hate my history of temping.)

Lessons about movies:
lesson 1. having other friends is over rated
lesson 2. gummo has the potential to inspire you to watch movies for an entire summer
lesson 3. never live in a small town
lesson 4. picking movies based on their cover is way more fun in the end
lesson 5. the anniversary party is two or more hours of my life i will never get back
lesson6. when renting a movie tara's brother has recommended, remember that the movie will be about the dangers of drugs or british, sometimes both (i.e. trainspotting, requiem for a dream, fear and loathing in las vegas, the big lebowski, ect.)
lesson 7. doing drugs is bad
lesson 8. watching movies was a better education than our first two years in college
lesson 9. John Cusack will always be our favorite.
lesson 10. we will always talk about that movie where the guy ran bare foot through the corn field in the end, and kick ourselves for not remembering the title, not because we thought the movie was good but because it was just to weird to forget and would have been good to recommend to her brother based on his recommendations to us.

Lessons about temping:
lesson 1. temp agencies have the worst jobs
lesson 2. only the temp agency we worked for had the worst jobs
lesson 3. we were god's chosen children of temping
lesson 4. haiku tunnel
lesson 5. temping is only tolerable because you are going back to college in august
lesson 6. if you have to temp, make sure it's for a man with one arm and his handsome sidekick.
lesson 7. if you don't know anything about overseas shipping and the measurements of shipping containers than tell your temp service to go fuck itself
lesson 8. sometimes a temp agency can turn you into a Carney
lesson 9. being the temp makes you better than the rest of the employees cause you can voluntarily leave and get another job within a week if you hate your assignment
lesson 10. avoid being a temp in real life at all cost (apparently this hasn't worked out for me yet.)

3 comments:

Tbutter said...

don't walk alone in burlington city on your lunch break...or you will get asked out by a homeless man

sarah said...

i really like this. it reminds me of summer pre philly [2004?] when sue and i lived with brian in the suburbs, the army paid our share of the rent, i quit my job because they told me to wash garbage cans, we had spontaneous birthday parties for people whose birthdays weren't near, sue let me count her tips from waiting tables, and we checked out about 10-15 movies a week from the library [free]. What did i learn? Unfortunately, 10-15 movies a week is enough to not remember any of them.

Deb said...

Temp #8 is my favorite because we went to visit Tara the carney. And I think my brother worked there too... or something. And you were going commando and it weirded me out.