I Had Birthday Cake Ice Cream for Dinner

Yesterday I finished the first of my two summer jobs. I have mixed emotions about this. Truthfully, it hasn't really hit me yet that the job is over. I think once it hits me fully I'm going to feel much more sad about the fact that I don't get to see all of the people I was working with anymore. At our end-of-project party yesterday we all made the usual promises about getting together in the future, but I've heard and made those promises in enough of these situations to know that it rarely happens. Intentions are good, but life just gets busy and maybe if you get lucky your paths cross again someday but mostly your co-workers just become nice people that you knew once. So in that sense finishing this job is sad. On the bright side, it's going to be very nice to have just one job for a change. For the past couple of months it has been this job plus school, or this job plus housesitting, or this job plus the camp that I'm teaching now. Now for the next few weeks I get to just teach the camp. I'm so excited about having free nights and weekends like a normal person. Oh, and it's going to be nice not to have to spend 10-12 hours a week commuting anymore. There are a lot of things I can do with an extra 10-12 hours a week. Things like sleeping.

As for the camp job, the kids I'm working with right now are fun but they're wearing me out. I have nothing but admiration for people that deal with middle schoolers day in and day out. They're doing well with the activities and projects and I think (I hope) they're having a good time, but I'd forgotten how much drama eleven and twelve year-olds can scheme up on a daily basis. For instance, on Friday I had a girl come into the break room at lunch time. She could barely talk because she was sobbing so hard and when I finally got her to calm down enough to tell me what had happened I discovered that all the tears were because another girl had told her that her bagel was moldy and that she was moldy like her bagel and that she was telling all the other kids about the moldy bagel that wasn't even really moldy in the first place, it just had cinnamon on it. I really just wanted to give her a big hug and tell her that in many ways life is going to get a lot more complicated as you get older but in some ways it gets so, so, SO much easier. Life is definitely better once you get to the point where you realize it's fine to feel like, "Fuck you, I'm eating my cinnamon bagel and you know what? I'm perfectly okay doing it without the approval of you or anyone else. Or maybe I'll find an entire group of other people that LOVE cinnamon bagels just like I do! Enjoy the bad karma you'll have from mocking me!" But middle schoolers aren't big believers in karma because they haven't been alive long enough to see it at work. Instead she'll probably just never bring a cinnamon bagel to camp again. Poor kid.

Alright, enough work talk. Help me figure something out. The other night Penn said he has a surprise for me. Of course I badgered him for a while when he first mentioned it a few days ago, but he wouldn't give me any hints. Then tonight we were talking about this weekend and first he told me to bring clothes for going out on Friday night because we're going to go out with all of his friends. I've met a couple of his friends briefly but haven't really hung out with any of them yet, so apparently now I get to meet the entire family and then a bunch of his friends on Friday. The pressure! Anyway, then he said, "Oh, and bring clothes and shoes that you don't mind getting messed up." After he clarified that the clothes and shoes that can get messed up are not for going out on Friday night but for a separate event (I was like, "Wow, what kind of heavy drinking do you and your friends do?!") I asked him if the clothes that can get messed up are for the surprise, and he said yes. And now he won't tell me anything else about it at all. The only other thing I know is that it's okay if the shoes are flip flops, which I'm assuming means that it's not going to be something really physical like hiking or running or something like that. So what could this possibly be? What might he be planning that would involve wearing stuff that can be messed up? Mud wrestling? Something that involves paint? Oh, and he also told me to bring anything that I have that could be useful for deflecting bullets and I told him, "I'm going to deflect bullets with YOU," and then he admitted that part was just a joke. Seriously, what could this be? I really like surprises, but the suspense is killing me!