Summertime; Living Easy

On account of the General Fiscal Freakout Aught-Nine the office interns this summer aren't being paid; first thoughts were about whether this would affect the quality of summer intern, but the more notable shift is in the economic background of summer intern, not particularly relevant unless you're playing chess on the patio on Monday and a bunch of summer interns are also out there at the same table gabbing away. If you are a summer intern, and the conversation turns to, say, cars, here are some suggested anecdotes to share:

1. What you named your jeep; what you named your boyfriend’s jeep
2. How you had an Audi but you wrecked it, so then you had a jeep but you wrecked that too, so now you have something else
3. How your boyfriend’s dad is an auto dealer and so your boyfriend always shows up at parties with amazing cars and says you can drive them even though you’ve all been drinking
4. How your boyfriend actually knows about the stuff inside cars but you're mostly like “ooh, convertible!”
5. How your boyfriend’s frat parking lot is funny, because half of them have like new cars and the other half have really amazing old cars their parents stopped using
6. How Volvos are really safe but if you’re going to have a great car you should have one that’s not like the one your parents have
7. How your parents said you could have any car you wanted, but not the one they had, because they’re the type of parents who want to have the best car in the family
8. Did you know Jay Leno has like a huge garage full of cars, and there are people whose whole job is to take care of Jay Leno’s cars? How funny would that look on your resume?
9. How you'd rather own a bunch of houses than a bunch of cars

That conversation should last you twenty or thirty minutes, but if you have extra time you can talk about clothes or how much you hate Blair on Gossip Girls or how Daniel Craig is too old to be hot or how you retook the SATs because you told yourself you were going to get a 1570. This has the look of a lo-o-ong summer on the patio.

Fortunately it was cloudy and about 60 degrees today, conditions for an intern-free chess game.

Also, think about the construction of this sentence:

“So my friend and I lived in this big place with six roommates. She and I are normal people, but everyone else was from various Spanish countries.”

Don't think about it too hard, though.

I should mention that the two interns in my department are perfectly fine. I think our particular area of work tends to draw out modest, nerdy types.