The purpose of today’s blog post is to explain to you all my hopes and dreams. I will literally be exposing my insides to you — the things that make me tick, the things that make me angry, the things that make me smile — in an attempt to show you where I think I stand on the road to a achieving a certain set of goals, and why I want to achieve these particular goals in the first place (Note: I will be figuratively exposing myself to you).
Lately I have still been interning at L’Etranger, but my internship is quickly coming to an end. Which of course raises the question: What will happen when it’s over? Will they offer me a high-paying job, say, as Editor in Chief of Making Sure All Content is Rad? Probably not. Will they ask me to start writing articles that actually get printed in the paper? Maybe, but probably not. Will they ask me to extend my internship and keep coming into the office and keep doing the awesome stuff that I have been doing over the past three months? It’s very possible, but I sort of doubt it. Will they ask me to keep submitting stuff to the online blog and then “take it from there”? This is more on the right track. I have no idea what will happen when this internship is over, but I suspect it will be something along those lines.
However, not to disappoint you, faithful readers, I already have several plans. But before I tell you my plans let me quickly outline some of my life goals for you so you can start to get an idea of where this whole writing thing might one day (hopefully) lead.
Basically (and this is where I get really hesitant because I hate talking about shit that I actually care about on this website) I would like to one day write books. Or a book. One day I would like to write a book, and I want it to be hardcover, and I want it to have a cool cover, and I want it to somewhere say something from The New York Times book review like, “Wetzler’s musings on the world of femme rock often border on trenchant, but never stray from delightful.” Something like that. Someone who worked for The New York Times would obviously come up with something less awkward, but you get the idea.
In addition to writing books (or A book) I would like to write for a magazine. Which brings me back to what I am going to do after this internship is over. Should I not be offered a job here is Dictator at Large or Resident Madman, I will be forced to look for employment or internship opportunities elsewhere. It has recently come to my attention that Spin Magazine offers three-month internships, one of which will be starting June of this year. So I’m going to apply for that. Look out NYC! What up Brooklyn? What up — um — Yonkers? Wetzler is on the way. I just wish Chipotle in New York didn’t cost 13 dollars a burrito. Maybe I’ll have to get a job there.
If I don’t get the internship at Spin and L’Etranger doesn’t ask me continue on, I have several back up plans. One is to work at a summer camp in the San Juans on Lopez Island. This would be great because it would give me a chance to exercise some of the authority I never had growing up as a youngest child. I would be doing things like organizing canoe trips or teaching young campers how to dive. When the campers didn’t dive properly I would scream at them and tell them they’re parents would never love them until they learned how to dive right. Or I would swim up from underneath them and pull on their ankles and pretend I was a giant sea monster. When they laughed upon seeing that it was just me I would splash water in their open mouths and yell, “Stay alert!
The backup plan for Fall of the year of our Lord two thousand and nine is graduate school at the University of Washington, in the Department of Hispanic Studies. This is where you go to study Hispanics. Or it might just be where you go to study Spanish. As in the summer camp scenario I would have an opportunity to mess around a bit with those ensnared in the confines of my strict but beneficent authority: Multiple choice tests where each question has several pages of choices; Pop quizzes during which I dance flamenco shirtless in front of the students to test their concentration; Extra credit to kids who bring me Pagliacci before or after class, and even more extra credit for kids who lightly dust the slices with Parmesan cheese and red pepper. The possibilities are endless.
These are the options, and to tell you the truth, I’m optimistic about all of them. Spring is just around the corner so naturally optimism is in the air. My friend Lee is flying in from London on the 16th and we are going to party our eyes out. We are going to go camping and watch Sounders’ games and touch Lady Gaga’s inner thigh. I am going to introduce him to tall cans of Pabst and six-dollar pitchers of Rainier. Maybe we’ll even jump in Lake Washington.
So I will keep all of you posted and strive towards the realization of these goals (particularly those described in the paragraph concerning summer camp) and I will also let you know if all of these options fall through horribly and I am forced to exercise option “F,” an option that involves hiking in Burma (now Myanmar, I suppose), learning to cultivate opium, and losing my mind.
Talk to you soon!
-Wetzler
This entry was written by , posted on March 9, 2009 at 5:02 pm, filed under Writingz, the intern files and tagged brazil, brazilian girls, homme, huskies, opium, san juans, summer camp, uw. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
It’s 4:29 p.m. on Tuesday and someone is coming towards my desk. It’s
Richardson. He’s laughing his ass off.
“Oh my God,” he says. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“OK. Can you do me a huge favor?”
“What?”
“OK, OK. You know how everyone in the office has been kind of bummed lately? Well, I need you to—” he cracks up again. He’s literally doubled over my desk laughing. What the hell is going on. “I need you to do something to cheer everyone up.”
“OK.”
“Are you wearing an undershirt under that fleece?”
“Yes.”
“OK. What I need you to do is take that fleece off, and go upstairs and see Sarah because she is going to give you something, and then come back down and see me.”
I go upstairs. Sarah is sitting at her desk. I think she might be playing solitaire.
“Hey,” she says. “What was your name again?”
“Mark,” I say.
She gives me what appears to be a tube of red lipstick, and upon further inspection it is indeed a tube of red lipstick. “What is this for?” I ask.
“Just go see John.”
So I go back downstairs. Fucking Richardson. What does he want me to do?
When I get back to his office he’s still laughing, though it’s kind of petered off into a chuckle now.
“Sweet,” he says, “Did you get it?”
“Yes.”
“OK, now here’s what you need to do. It’s real easy. Go in the bathroom and put on some of that red lipstick.”
“But—.”
“And when you’re in there I want you to tie the bottom part of your undershirt into a knot, so that it exposes your midriff. You know like how you see girls in Texas do or cheerleaders or people like that?”
“Yeah…”
“Yeah, so do that, and then what I want you to do—when you’re all ready to go—is go up to all the writers and stand in front of them and pretend like you’re kind of shaking your boobs and wiggling your ass. You know, distract them. Cheer them up. Take their mind off all the shit that’s been happening. Maybe sing a bit, too.”
“John, with all due resp—.”
“Please! Come on, just do it. It’ll be hilarious. And do Meyers first, OK? He’s been listening to Elliott Smith all afternoon and I’m afraid he might try to hang himself in the bathroom.”
This is not happening, right? Richardson is joking? He senses my reticence.
“Dude, please just do this. If you do, I promise that by the end of your internship we’ll put something you’ve written in print.”
Fuck. He’s got me. I go to the bathroom and then head over to Meyers’s desk at the end of a row of cubicles. He’s sitting there with his face in his hands. It looks like he might’ve recently been crying.
“Hey-yo, one day sale—o—” I have no idea what I’m singing, but it was the first thing that popped into my head. The Bon Marché song?
“Hey-yo, one day sale—o, one day only at the Bon Marché.”
He looks up at me. I have my arms out at my sides and I’m shaking what would be my boobs if I had boobs. My lipstick is smeared everywhere. I look like a homeless guy dressed up for Cirque du Soleil.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks.
This is not going well. I switch to humming and do a little sashay.
“Please leave,” he says.
I leave and start walking back towards my desk, hoping Richardson will be satisfied. On my way back I see his head peeking out of the door of his office but when he sees me he pulls it back. I decide to stop by Carter’s desk, who’s staring directly at his computer screen. This time I do not do the Bon Marché song. I just do a little Cha Cha and shake it back and forth and swivel my hips a bit, leaning in as if to say, “Hey, big boy.” He flicks me off. He does not even look up from his computer screen.
“Arlight, that’s it,” I say to myself. “Richardson better be fucking happy.”
And he is. I pass by his office and he’s laughing his ass off. He’s literally on the ground crying, holding his stomach and gasping for air.
Anyway, that was one of the “highlights” from my first week at work. I guess some people would call it “hazing,” but I don’t know, it’s not always bad. And usually there’s something in it for me. The other day, for instance, Colby told me he’d give me a copy of the new Blitzen Trapper demo if I ate a bowl of dog food in front of him. I did it. I don’t care. I’m the unpaid intern. Fuck it. That’s what interns do, I guess. Just because there’s no money doesn’t mean I don’t have to pay my dues.
-Wetzler
Note: The Intern Files are a FICTIONALIZED account of my experiences at The Stranger. Some names have been changed.
This entry was written by , posted on January 12, 2009 at 11:05 pm, filed under the intern files and tagged blitzen trapper, dog food, hazing, internship. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.