This is my gazillionth attempt at blogging. I confess I'm not very good at it, and I'm not very persistent either. My last attempt was a couple of months ago, fueled by the beginning of the NHL Playoffs and unemployment. But that enthusiasm and free time has given way to watching episodes of Bones on Netflix. It didn't help that I felt myself unable to come up with "new angles" and was hopelessly regurgitate things I've read from others. Basically, for me blogging is like dieting. I start but I never finish, but that wouldn't stop me from trying again.
This time, my blogging is being inspired by life-changing events. Not the kind that introduces romantic partners or takes away a parent. The kind of life-changing event that happens when, like me, you're 23 years old, and you've quit your first job. You quit during a terrible employment market, from a job that even during the best of times, would be considered fabulously well-paying by the rest of society. You've only worked for a bit more than a year and what you saved isn't enough to hold you over for another. You bum around for a few months not really putting in any serious attempt at finding a new job. Instead, you immerse yourself in what used to simply be a hobby. In my case, that's hockey fandom. The advantages of social media means that you can follow all the interesting people in the business (and also all the uninteresting ones). One day, a funny, redheaded professional hockey player retweets an internship position available at his charitable foundation. Next thing you know, you've booked a plane ticket for small town Minnesota, and you're spending 10 unpaid weeks doing...well you're not really sure what you're doing...at a summer hockey camp. But whatever it is, your mother is speechless because you're flushing that $40,000 a year, top-tier private school education down the drain. And your father is worried that you'll get pissed drunk, like your generation is wont to do, and end up in a gang-bang video on youtube and TMZ. Family friends think you've gone nuts because you're a nice, typical Asian girl, and nice, typical Asian girls get stable white-collar salaries and then settle down with nice, typical Asian boys, or sometimes a Yellow-Fever inflicted American, where American always means a white man of WASPish background. Your friends, the ones who are traders, brokers, bankers, consultants, developers, engineers, and grad students, they envy you just a little, but they also worry about you too. They would probably envy more and worry less if they cared anything about hockey. But they don't, because they're also American, and usually of the California variety.
So my life-changing event is nothing crazy or poignant or tragic. It's simply that I have tossed away 2 months of being a couch potato pretending to do something productive in exchange for 2 months of putting my obsessive fandom to use at something sillier than saving the world, or in the case of my old job in the financial sector, stripping the world away from their money because we're smarter than you stupid dumbasses.
But it will be something new and surreal. Truth be told, I've never gone to summer camp. I've gone to summer programs, but I don't think taking science and writing classes held by grad volunteers at community colleges is quite the same thing as looking out into a lake from a cabin and sweating exhaustion. And being from the Southwest, and not even from a city that inexplicably has an NHL team, I've definitely never just chilled with OMG hockey players before. Now I will be meeting and working with them, not only of the 8-yr-old-please-tie-my-skate-laces-for-me variety, but of the honest-to-god I-see-you-on-TV-and-that's-exciting-because-I'm-a-superficial-celebrity-chaser variety.
My point in all this is that I will have plenty to blog about in the following two months that's not regurgitated material. Since I can no longer use that as an excuse, hopefully this blog will last longer than previous incarnations.
As part of my job, I will be keeping a blog for the camp, which will be focused on camp events, campers, official business, etc. This blog here will be more about my personal experiences, not necessarily related to camp. Hopefully it will be full of insightful things rather than a page spam of OMG-look-who-I-met-and-took-a-picture-with!!!!!! Also hopefully, I won't break any media rules like tweet "hey everyone! so-and-so is eating dinner with a pretty lady at blah-blah restaurant. Go surround him with cameras and autograph requests!" Good luck to me, and good luck to us all.
This time, my blogging is being inspired by life-changing events. Not the kind that introduces romantic partners or takes away a parent. The kind of life-changing event that happens when, like me, you're 23 years old, and you've quit your first job. You quit during a terrible employment market, from a job that even during the best of times, would be considered fabulously well-paying by the rest of society. You've only worked for a bit more than a year and what you saved isn't enough to hold you over for another. You bum around for a few months not really putting in any serious attempt at finding a new job. Instead, you immerse yourself in what used to simply be a hobby. In my case, that's hockey fandom. The advantages of social media means that you can follow all the interesting people in the business (and also all the uninteresting ones). One day, a funny, redheaded professional hockey player retweets an internship position available at his charitable foundation. Next thing you know, you've booked a plane ticket for small town Minnesota, and you're spending 10 unpaid weeks doing...well you're not really sure what you're doing...at a summer hockey camp. But whatever it is, your mother is speechless because you're flushing that $40,000 a year, top-tier private school education down the drain. And your father is worried that you'll get pissed drunk, like your generation is wont to do, and end up in a gang-bang video on youtube and TMZ. Family friends think you've gone nuts because you're a nice, typical Asian girl, and nice, typical Asian girls get stable white-collar salaries and then settle down with nice, typical Asian boys, or sometimes a Yellow-Fever inflicted American, where American always means a white man of WASPish background. Your friends, the ones who are traders, brokers, bankers, consultants, developers, engineers, and grad students, they envy you just a little, but they also worry about you too. They would probably envy more and worry less if they cared anything about hockey. But they don't, because they're also American, and usually of the California variety.
So my life-changing event is nothing crazy or poignant or tragic. It's simply that I have tossed away 2 months of being a couch potato pretending to do something productive in exchange for 2 months of putting my obsessive fandom to use at something sillier than saving the world, or in the case of my old job in the financial sector, stripping the world away from their money because we're smarter than you stupid dumbasses.
But it will be something new and surreal. Truth be told, I've never gone to summer camp. I've gone to summer programs, but I don't think taking science and writing classes held by grad volunteers at community colleges is quite the same thing as looking out into a lake from a cabin and sweating exhaustion. And being from the Southwest, and not even from a city that inexplicably has an NHL team, I've definitely never just chilled with OMG hockey players before. Now I will be meeting and working with them, not only of the 8-yr-old-please-tie-my-skate-laces-for-me variety, but of the honest-to-god I-see-you-on-TV-and-that's-exciting-because-I'm-a-superficial-celebrity-chaser variety.
My point in all this is that I will have plenty to blog about in the following two months that's not regurgitated material. Since I can no longer use that as an excuse, hopefully this blog will last longer than previous incarnations.
As part of my job, I will be keeping a blog for the camp, which will be focused on camp events, campers, official business, etc. This blog here will be more about my personal experiences, not necessarily related to camp. Hopefully it will be full of insightful things rather than a page spam of OMG-look-who-I-met-and-took-a-picture-with!!!!!! Also hopefully, I won't break any media rules like tweet "hey everyone! so-and-so is eating dinner with a pretty lady at blah-blah restaurant. Go surround him with cameras and autograph requests!" Good luck to me, and good luck to us all.
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