One of my roommates works at a receiving home in the city, and she mentioned that they were badly in need of assistance in the form of male staffers. I called them up to see what the deal was, but nobody picked up and I haven't had a response to my message yet. The work sounds interesting, so I figured I'd give it a shot, just to see what it's like. I imagine I'd be working mostly with inner-city, disadvantaged kids... and since I've mostly lived a fairly sheltered, white-washed existence, the culture gap will be interesting to experience.

I wonder if it will be any tougher to deal with than the summers I worked as a day camp counselor for Arabic kids.

On one hand, the culture gap was probably wider, but on the other hand, I had a 350-pound Jordanian with a drill sergeant's attitude as my colleague, so I was pretty much able to just sit back and watch him intimidate the kids into submision.

My hard work and steady uncovering of Arabic cultural nuances during those summers is demonstrated by my command of the Arabic language. I learned how to say:

"What's that?"
"Come here"
"Go away"
"Shut up"
"Sit down"
"Thank God" (literally, "Praise be to Allah")

Occasionally, I was able to combine these phrases (or parts thereof) to open up new, exciting dimensions of cross-cultural understanding. For example:

"Shut up and sit down"
"What is that... a Pepsi?"
"Come here... WITH a Pepsi"
"Praise be to Allah for this Pepsi. Now go away, shut up, and sit down."

The kids loved me. "Jihad" is an expression of mutual respect and friendship, right?

I am also concerned about the state of reality television. With the advent of MTV's new show, "The Reality Show," it seems that producers think reality television is now too real for us to enjoy it. Thus, "The Reality Show," being a reality show about a series of reality show hopefuls, becomes the first true meta-reality show. I think that this could lead to even more layers of complexity in reality TV.

I predict that eventually, we'll be watching a show where former reality stars use sock puppets to impersonate A-list stars performing dramatic re-enactments of highlights from behind-the-scenes documentaries of old reality shows.

Hot damn, I would totally watch that.

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/u/urinal.htm

http://www.safetycenter.navy.mil/photo/images/photo130.jpg#caption

I recently called up a local hospital and asked them if I could shadow some nurses around, to see how a typical day for them went, and hopefully get a clue as to whether I might like a career in the field.

The (very nice) lady I spoke with told me I had a couple options:

1) I could go through the whole shebang of a background check, TB testing, etc, and then I could do some intensive shadowing across multiple departments.

2) She could try and set me up for a 2-hour session in one specific unit/department.

I asked if maybe I could get a couple experiences in a few different units, perhaps, and she told me a bunch of reasons why that couldn't happen... basically because I'd be a pain in the real nurses' asses, and then she said this, which nearly made me crack up:

"And, we couldn't, for example, just let you loose in the pediatrics unit, because we don't know whether you're into kids or something, you know?"

With a lovely little stress on the word "into."

It was just fun for me, knowing that -- for a moment, at least -- it was someone's actual job to worry about whether or not I was a pedophile.

For the record, I'm not.

Ah-hoo hoo! Jam on! Oh don't be ignorant, it's not secksyool!