I can't say that I'm on top of things this semester, considering that my desk chair, purchased in late August, remains unassembled in its box. It's actually the ideal decor piece to complement the shambled mounds of running shorts and airing out fleeces that reek of others' smoke, which always accent my bedroom floor.
Yet, despite my lackadaisical tendencies, I already have begun the summer job hunt, as visions of bronze skin can help cut a February malaise. If there is one thing I regret from first year (oh, how I wish it was only one) it was sending in my applications too late, and not hurdling picket fences in May, out of sunny suburbia.
Another summer in suburbia: A tale of woe
Last June, I hated running into a friend's mother in Highland Park, the town grocery, when I was just trying to quietly slip in and grab an iced tea. We'd chew the fat about how I liked my first year, how my family was, and all that sort of junk you say when you're trying to pick out a few good lemons. But never was I able to escape the moment when she put down her produce, looked me straight in the eye and asked that dreaded question, "So, what have you been doing since you've been home?"
What had I been doing?
Well, it'd been a month since I'd returned to Connecticut. Oh sure, I'd occasionally do some things, like go smack around the tennis ball, or go to the driving range - anything to reduce my "facial swelling" as my mom so eloquently referred to my first-year cheek chub.
But mostly I'd just relax and enjoy the sun, and considered it a very admirable pastime.
"Nothing," I'd reply to Mrs. so and so, taking a sip of my iced tea, hoping to end the conversation. "I've been doing absolutely nothing."
Then she'd almost knock over a display of vine-ripened tomatoes and gape at me, dumbfounded and purely shocked. You'd think I'd just told her she looked really fat. Or better yet, that every Friday afternoon, when her husband left the firm early to play golf, he was actually meeting his secretary at some love shack, and that their affair was getting quite hot and heavy.
Week after week, every time I just wanted to run quickly into Highland Park, the same scene occurred. It was as if I had signed a pact with the devil, and was falling apart before the town's very eyes. The community probably gossiped about what had happened to me, the girl who used to work at the Field Club, the one who had taught their little Johnny how to hit a backhand and do fantastic cannonballs off the diving board.
I mulled over the idea of telling these Diet Coke-hyped mothers that I had mono. It honestly wouldn't be that bad of a lie. After all, on many occasion during last year's second semester, I repeatedly had refused when those nurse practitioners wanted to give me a blood test. There was really no need since my glands were more the size of walnuts, not golf balls. When I went out, I just told my friends to give a holler if my spleen started to look enlarged. (Though I wasn't too sure exactly what or where the spleen was).
But it was too late for fabricated stories, and I loathed the way the town gossips eyed me like I was a lazy, pseudo Daisy Buchanan from "The Great Gatsby." I might as well just have fluttered down the bread aisle in a billowy sundress, double-fisting English muffins and shouting that, "I indeed am a fool, a careless little fool!"
Hey, there are worse things you can be. Yet I managed to be cordial and shoot the grocery store mothers this nauseating phony grin, when they started rambling about how their daughter was just so busy with her important summer job. (Other parents just love to try to make you feel inferior to their children).
Finally, out of guilt, I took a job at a doctor's office, one day a week, since that was about my speed. I wore this hot shot white lab coat, and got to say, "The doctor will see you now." I felt so powerful, so very pre-med. But this motivation was fleeting, and after just working one day, I got the pink slip, the big ax, the ol' heave ho. Obviously the nurses were jealous that I was earning $10 an hour to catch up on People magazine articles.
I guess you could say that a tennis pro at my club saved my soul from whatever dark abyss the town mothers thought it was heading toward. He wanted me to be a tennis assistant again, despite the fact I had quit early the previous summer.
So, for the fourth year in a row, I watched fuzzy yellow balls bounce off the foreheads of kids whose poor souls were not blessed with coordination. I dangled them over the pool by their ankles, hoping that their swimming skills were a bit keener.
Yet, I can't return this summer, for fear that the second-graders would think I was a tan 20-something washout, when I hog the diving board and still want to be captain of water basketball.
This summer though, I'm setting my sights high, and I've got big plans, huge dreams. I hope to work far from home, and horse around with a new group of kids who are half my age.
Hold on to your seats, because here's the enlightening moral of my not so sad story.
Despite your visions heading out west, or kicking back and studying on the coast of Spain, second semester can get a bit discombobulated. Do not discover until it's too late (like I did last spring) that your resume and summer job application is not in the mail, but still is buried under a gargantuan heap of unfolded laundry.
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