Exit133

May 15, 2008 · Sassy McButterpants · archive: txp/article

ASK SASSY: Summertime Blues

Dear Sassy,

I’m graduating from high school next month and my parents want me to get a job this summer. I just want to hang out with my friends. I mean, we’re all leaving to go off to college and not see each other forever, so we should spend this summer hanging out. Right?

Pouting Princess

Dear Princess Poutypants,

In order to effectively answer your question, Sassy is going to hop in her Delorian and travel back to a different time, to the time of her youth… the mid nineties. Ahhh the mid nineties. An age of wisdom, and age of foolishness. A time of change. Republicans took back the congress, Kurt Cobain decided he was just too emo for this world, and Agent Moulder was still regularly rocking my alien obsessed world.

Times were different then, there was no Facebook or MySpace (HORRORS!), Teenage Girls were 36% more likely to become teenage mothers, and kids at school didn’t have cell phones. Sassy had a pager though, and she thought she was the SHIT.

Sassy is not of the school of thought that believes that kids these days are going downhill. Some cranky grownups believe things are getting worse. That movies, media, and television are worse today than back then. Let’s face it grownups, “Friends” sucked. Gossip Girl rules. Some adults are going to haterate on you just because you can text faster than they can and kick your dad’s butt on Halo 3. I am not one of them.

Please understand, Pouts, Sassy is not trying to be like your grandpa here. Sassy was always having to hear her granddad whine about having to quit school in the third grade to work in the comb factory and pay for his Mama’s booze. That’s not what I’m going for.

That said, you need to take off those pull-ups, take that pacifier out of your mouth, and start wearing big-girl pants. Obviously, your parents are of the “High School is your Job” school of thought. They probably live in Proctor and drive Volvos and give you lots of personal space. Lucky you. Sassy’s Mammy & Pappy lived in the the East Pierce County ‘Burbs and forced Sassy into prepubescent sharecropping in the Puyallup Valley Berry fields at age 12. Bygones.

You’re not in high school anymore, pumpkin, and while you may have some growing pains as you are slowly birthed into the big bright world of reality, on the other side of that cramped canal of pain and change is the real world. And it rules.

Standing on your own two feet and making your own money is indescribably awesome. Lets say you go to college and realize that you don’t want to be a be a Family Law Attorney like your mother. You want to be a therapist, because your crazy parents messed you up. And you want to help others. But mom and dad say, “No way! You’re gonna be a lawyer!” If you have JOB, you can’t be held hostage by purse string holding parents.

Trust me, you will still be able to spend quality time with your lame high school friends even if you’re working at the Frisco Freeze this summer. You might even be able to make some new friends and get something done instead of skulking around smoking weed and laying in the sun by your parents pool and texting your lame boyfriend about how there’s nothing to do.

Have I been too hard on Princess Pout? I would love to know what the commenters think about this one.

Love,
Sassy

Recommended Reading: You’re Too Smart for This: Beating the 100 Big Lies About Your First Job by Michael Ball

Recommended Listening: Get A Job by the Silhouettes

Got issues? Sassy will set you straight! Send a question to <txp:dtj_obfuscated_email email="asksassy@exit133.com" />

Filed under: Ask-Sassy

21 comments

  • altered chords May 15, 2008

    Sassy – yes, you have come down too hard on princess.

    It’s a darn shame kids today don’t have a full blown recession and rampant unemployment like in my day. Those sure were great times.

  • Patrick the Sales Guy May 16, 2008

    Loathe as I am to correct the Dorothy Kilgallen of Tacoma – it’s spelled Mulder.

  • resortdude May 16, 2008

    Sassy, you are speaking the truth. the thing is we are only talking one summer, a mere three months, then on to the semi reality of college.

    College is far from the real world, it is a sanitized liberal bastion of taxpayer funded make believe filled with a majority of Professors (Not all…) who teach subjects that they would fail miserably at if they had to practiced what they taught in the real world.

    It is also a great place and graduating significantly increases your chances of increasing your income in the future. Just be careful of what they try to put in your head, I suggest filtering it through what your parents taught you as a child. But I digress….

    Princess – I suggest you enjoy the summer but take a part time job. Sassy is right, the days are long and putting in 20 hours a week will give you something to do, put a little jingle in your pocket so you don’t have to stick your hand out to your parents every week, and you will meet some new people.

    It will also be a nice compromise with your parents, and hey, they put some serious time and money into you. Why not throw them a bone?

    Have fun though, there is plenty of time for the real world.

    Good luck to you!

  • Rick May 16, 2008

    “…into prepubescent sharecropping in the Puyallup Valley Berry fields at age 12.”

    Ahhh, yes, the Puyallup berry picking experience. I, too, was among the child laborers earning less, sometimes far less, than a dollar an hour.

    My experience included GETTING to the bus stop by 6am. A bus stop that was populated by a group of older kids who happend to loathe my older brother — thus, me, by association. There were the crap bag lunches my mom made that included “dry” sandwiches (don’t want the mayo to spoil) and an orange soda that would reach 120 o by lunch time. Fights. No shade. Long days. Filth (the dirt). Filth (the people). Thank you, Dad. I learned a lot.

    I learned how to get my ass kicked in the least graceful way possible. I learned that cigarettes, sweltering heat and hot orange soda don’t mix well. I leaned that the retard that was driving the bus would morph into the retard who was my seventh grade math teacher in mere weeks.

    On the upside, I did learn to fashion a pipe, Macgyver-style, out of damn near any three objects. Not a skill I employ too much any more, but it did have it’s uses over the years.

    So, thank you, Sassy, for resurrecting those wonderful shitty memories from the buried recesses of my cranium.

  • altered chords May 16, 2008

    Rick – my parents didn’t care about the mayo going bad. I don’t know if it did or not. I never got sick.

    Let’s sell princess on getting a job.

    Princess. Here’s why you want to get a job. You’ll meet boys there. Everybody knows that summer jobs are a place to find dates. Plus, they work so they’ll have money to spend on you!

    Get the job. You’ll get more dates!

  • Mofo from the Hood May 16, 2008

    Strawberries, raspberries, low growing string beans, high growing string beans, cucumbers…Yeah, me and my fellow Tacoma neighborhood teenage migrant workers did all that work way out yonder in Puyallup.

    Hot and dusty days, no shade, and the crackers lookin’ over us from the back of their flat bed Fords. Nobody leaves until the work is done, and done right. Then we’d all drag our feet back to bus. A whole bunch of dirty faced kids in an old dusty bus. That driver could’ve taken us anywhere. But every night he brought us back to the neighborhood. I’m here to tell you that anyone can enter Tacoma, but try to leave and you’ll start seein’ how things around here just don’t seem right.

    They tried closing the bus station. The train station. Outlawed hitchhiking. Man they’re still closin’ roads all over this town.

    Yes I know…sometimes I wonder what I’m agonna’ do.

  • Resortdude May 17, 2008

    On berry picking…yes the memories come back. You all have shared some fond memories. I did it once. Me and my buddy picked strawberries. The thing that really pissed us off was this supervisor guy with his stick who would check the row and make you go back and re do the areas where you missed berries. After two times of that jerk telling us we missed berries we just started ripping stalks off the plants and throwing them a few rows over…berries and all. Later we stopped working and my friend punched some jerk in the face. They told us not to come back. The end of my berry picking career. Thanks for bringing back a good memory though.

  • jdub May 17, 2008

    Princess,
    Get a job, you’ll feel better, much better, then you’ll ever feel pouting. Self esteem, self worth, you own control over your life will open more doors than you can possibly find on whatever/space/face is connected to your computer. The whole world doesn’t evolve around that connection, nor should you.
    You’re boss will be an ass, you job will make you feel like one, but you’ll learn so much more about how the world works because it isn’t just a freindscape. And from that you will grow far beyond your friends from high school, who, before you know it will learn that quicker then you. If they text you after the first year in college count yourself lucky, or not.

  • Daniel Blue May 17, 2008

    WHOA!

    WTF? Listen princess. This is the last summer in your life. From here on out Summer just means you sweat more at work and you pine to be outside. THE LAST GASP, you hear me…these folks are just too wrapped up in the dream to remember the golden youth they let pass them by.

    you want to get some real world experience? move in with some gloom house kids and scrounge change for frozen pizza at the save-a-lot. Your parents will be worried sick about you and offer you all sorts of treats to come back home and veg, but don’t give in till you are sick and thin and all hooked on rock and roll. You’re going to forget everything you learn this summer the morning after your first frat party anyway. That will teach you to be young and happy. Then when you are older someone asks you for advise you will try to sound all responsible and act like trading time for money is a good idea, but mostly just because you wont remember what it is like to be you. savor the last days of the adolescent trip. the real world isn’t going anywhere.

  • jdub May 18, 2008

    DB,
    I’m with you on that thought and feeling of the shitty cold pizzas, the spilled bongs living with people just like you are who are going the change the world, even if for only a summer.
    But what you proscribed, actually moving out and trashing a place, which I did, with like minded slackers and malcontents, and thinking that my situation mattered, means that you actually have to move out, eat shitty pizzas, and talk about changing the world with like minded people before you spill the bong and realize, well, damn.
    DB, I had that golden summer, for more summers than I can remember, but I didn’t do it pouting on my parent couch, like a princess. So, yes, I agree, don’t waste your youth living up to someone else’s expectations and really fuckin’ enjoy it to the hilt. Its the only one you’ll have.
    Just don’t act like a princess and pout if it doesn’t happen on your parents couch, that’s lame, by any account.

  • Robin May 18, 2008

    Resortdude @3,

    I am totally with you on the whole ‘college being a quasi reality’ concept. I remember those days…

    The impassioned convictions that I harbored until I got into the real world and realized that my cock-eyed-optomist, idealistic ideas were so far off from reality that they might as well have been plucked from Jack’s magic bean stock…

    Those days when I was a professional hung over person by day and a professional cheap-drink-finder by night…
    Good times.

    But Princess Pouty Pants, this is by no means your last or best summer! It only gets better. Just think, next year you will be able to buy cigarettes and three short years after that you will be able to proudly walk into a store to buy your very own booze instead of paying some random homeless person to go buy it for you.

  • southsounder May 19, 2008

    princess shouldn’t get a job this summer. she should kill herself instead and make room for hard working, ambitous, less privilaged young people (probably just about anybody else). Just the fact that you are whining about 3 months of work before you go off to drink & screw around for four years and then somehow as a result end up on the top of america’s cast system makes me hate you like Edward Kennedy hates soberity tests

  • altered chords May 19, 2008

    Wow – Somebody needs a hug.

    Couple problems w/ #12.

    Encourages teen suicide. Not good.

    It’s spelled Caste not cast. A cast system is used when shooting a film.

    Edward Kennedy just had a siezure. Not a good time to bring up his name in a negative light.

    Other than that, great post.

  • Robin May 20, 2008

    Oh come ON! Are we REALLY critizing SPELLING in this column?

    Besides; Southsounder, despite his less than eloquent post, has a damn good point.

  • Alex Thomson May 20, 2008

    I think she should follow in the footsteps of her favorite teen idol. Do some research princess, those people have got it figgured out.

  • southsounder May 20, 2008

    altered chords, your first three points are good ones. first i do need a hug ;-). second suicide is bad. third i am a very, very poor speller (have you read any of my other posts!) but i have to take exception on your fourth point… it is always. repeat always a good time to bust on Eddy K. besides there is no negitive light just the light of truth.
    Kudos to kristen for drawing our attention to a vastly more important topic.

  • altered chords May 20, 2008

    Southsounder. Agreed about Kristin drawing attention to a more important topic.

    I further applaud Kristin’s pro-activity (sp?)

    I further agree that there is no such thing as “negative light”

    Derek – please install spell check, grammar check and logic check.

  • OC Housewife May 20, 2008

    Try babysitting for the summer. People are hard pressed to find sitters these days. I’m willing to pay a lot money mainly so I can get responsible and trustworthy people to believe it’s worth their time, but also to keep them coming back when I need them again. I pay ten dollars an hour for my three kids, however, I rarely even spend that much during the outing I am paying the sitter for. So grab a duffel bag and throw in some of your old toys, books and DVD’s, then take it with you and the kids will be impressed and less likely to misbehave. You can pick your hours and have plenty of cash to spend on fun with your friends. I actually babysat off and on throughout college. it was nice to have the cash and I was lucky that gas was often a buck a gallon back then.

  • Rick Jones May 20, 2008

    OC Housewife @ 19: Brianna Jones, 253-549-6444, running-start student and pre-school/day care worker during the day, babysitter at all other times (or so it seems). She will graduate this year and heads off to California for college and needs as much money as she can get. Give her a call if you need top-drawer childcare. I am her proud father and am indescribably more grateful now that I’ve read the complaints of Pouting Princess.

  • OC Housewife May 21, 2008

    Thanks, Rick @ 20: Your daughter sounds like a compassionate and talented young woman! If we lived in Washington I would definitely give her a call.

  • Kristin May 21, 2008

    Mr. Rick Jones,

    CONGRATULATIONS TO YOUR DAUGHTER and yourself(es) as a proud parent(s)! I may need her as a babysitter and will keep the number. Again, congratulations I know you must be quite proud of your little baby girl – as you know time passes too quickly for our little ones (my daughter is SIX already!). :) Good luck and thanks for your great post and for sharing positive, ambition filled thought. The way it should be with our kids. Also love Sassy’s remark that she believes in kids these days. I do too. We just worry too much (as there is no other option as parents I have come to believe, no matter which era we live in). Anyway Thank you and good luck to your daughter; you should be very proud. :)