Moshpits, Sweat, and Music

Four years ago today at Warped Tour, I was having the time of my life and sweating profusely in a giant circular moshpit at a Reel Big Fish show (I was able to see them again earlier this summer and had a remarkably similar experience.) I'm going to my second Warped Tour, this time in Virginia, tomorrow.

Certainly some of my fondest memories are at concerts. Cool people call them shows, but I really believe the distinction is made in the venue. The first time I ever saw a band live was seeing Paramore at "The Living Room," an old Providence venue that was essentially a warehouse with a bar. I would call that a show. Since then, I saw AC/DC at Gilette Stadium, where the stage had cannons, a giant bell, and a freaking train on it.

That's no show, that's a concert.

Reel Big Fish played in the House of Blues, which has become maybe my favorite venue. If you enjoy concerts, you should go see one there -- I went to the one in Boston, but I'm sure they're all excellent. The free water alone would earn a hearty recommendation-- they charged three bucks a pop at Dropkick Murphys-- but apart from that it's the only venue that I've been to that's a spectacle in itself. It looks like it belongs in a Guitar Hero game.

I've noticed that there's a pretty standard set of characters at these shows/concerts. The guy who brought a girl and is taking up three people worth of space in his aggressive defense of her. The girl who's on her own and super okay with it. The guy who's on his own and very much not okay with it. The guy who crowd surfs all night. The giant security guard at the front of the stage with a ZZ Top beard and an intense enmity for the crowd surfer. This time, I met a severely inebriated woman when she accidentally punched me in the neck. There was an old lady on the green line who seemed right horrified at the menagerie of people on the subway. I think if she had asked if I just jumped in a pool I would have just said yes.

There will come a time when I'm sure I won't appreciate this delicate combination of sweating, people, and absurdly loud music, but it is not this day. Even now, though, there are aspects of concerts like that that I don't appreciate, crowd surfing being the main one. In movies, crowd surfing is usually when someone in the band jumps off the stage and is carried on a perfect bed of hands for a few seconds. In reality, crowd surfing is crowd throwing; it starts in the back of the crowd, not the front, so after the initial lift, if the "support" doesn't have their heads on a swivel then a man falls on them. It's not a pleasant experience. Even if heads are thoroughly swiveled that just means people are more aware that a man is about to land on them. No one over 150 lbs. should be legally allowed to crowd surf. It's just a life experience that we should miss out on for the greater good.

Conversely, I find moshing, which is stereotypically the less entertaining, by far the best crowd experience. I do have to clarify: most of my moshing experience comes from Ska concerts. I would be concerned about getting into a heavy metal pit, but Ska creates happy moshpits.

If someone falls down, everyone around them makes a circle and they get helped the frick up. That's serious, and no one is so lost in the music that they'll allow someone get trampled. I experienced a similar reaction tonight when someone noticed my glasses got knocked off. This isn't a group of people beating the crap out of each other, it's a people who love the band and want to express that in a physically intense way, and happen to be in a very small square footage. Heads are kicked. Shoes are lost. And necks are punched, apparently. But it's a good time.

You can actually see me in this picture. 10 points if you can find me.

-Will


"It's not so bad being trendy; everyone who looks like me is my friend."

Summer Job (Remix)

This summer, I'm working as a counselor with a leadership camp run by an office I will not name here. The position is "camp counselor," but the class-heavy couple of weeks does not make your typical summer excursion; the role does not match what most people think of when they think "camp counselor." I'm essentially the practical arm of said organization, staying with the kids almost 24/7.

Often this means performing a number of menial tasks that just need to get done; setting up Wi-Fi, making sure the water is stocked, buying shampoo, sometimes helping kids if they're sick or homesick. The issue is this: I answer to the college we're staying at for any mess the kids get in, and I answer to the chaperones for anything that the college screws up (which are many things). My cynical description is that I have all the responsibility and none of the authority. I've described it to a few others (and vehemently to myself, under my breath, with adjectives) as being anywhere on a spectrum from "nuts" to a "nightmare."

The majority of my days are spent moving people to places. I'm in charge of keeping track of the kids in the morning and at night, making sure they are awake and ready to go to breakfast, and getting them on the bus afterwards. In the mornings we go to the Harvard campus to have class. If you ever think to yourself with pride, "yeah, I know stuff," walk through a science building of a prestigious school. Nothing in there makes any sense, and there's an incredible amount of things that don't make any sense. I probably couldn't pass a high school chemistry test at this point, so it's weird that I'm even allowed to be inside a building that has words and phrases like "centrifuge" and "DNA sequencing drop off." For a few days we went to MIT, where the titles made just enough sense to sound even more impressive: "Optimization of Schochastic Strategies for Robot Swarms."

In the afternoon the people moving continues, when I help get them to lunch, bathrooms, the right stores, onto Duck Boats, etc. Imagine herding 32 sheep, who all want to buy something at Starbucks. 

Many problems are no one's fault. In the chain of command, all the people above me are Korean and all the people around and below me are Brazilian, so everyone has their own secret language. I completely understand that it's hard to learn another language-- my French is awful-- so of course I'm not upset at anyone in particular. Everyone's working hard. But not only is it tiring to struggle to be understood, this often causes miscommunication, which is our most rampant problem.

I have to digress here, though. Already I've said "the kids," which is too sweeping a term. That's the issue with talking about a group; the same problem I had when I first went to Africa. It's far too easy to make judgments on a group based on an outspoken minority. In Senegal, one extremely vocal anti-American girl made it look like everyone there hated the US. This assessment might not be completely off-base--no one seemed to care enough to argue with her, after all-- but it was still unfair.

It's a similar situation here; the kids who stand out aren't the one who are respectful and obedient, the ones who are always on time and only have to be told something once-- they were a minority to be sure, but still present. I remember much more clearly the the times when I had to shout to get everyone's attention, when I had to tell the same dude to go to bed three times before he even moved, and when I had to sprint through the halls and unlock doors because people forgot wallets, textbooks, glasses, etc.

Anyway, with one exception, they were all 10-13 years old. And they were all extremely 10-13 years old. It's an age when the consideration lobe is far from developed; very few people at 13 realize that everything they do affects other people. The kids had a propensity for congregating in choke points like stairwells and narrow hallways, and seemed blind to the capacity of trash cans.

Overall, the job is just tough. It's a lot of work. But there are worse jobs. I'd rather work here than at Delta's customer service, for example. And the fact of the matter is: I'm lucky to have a job at all. But man, do I miss three-hour shifts at the coffeehouse.

-Will

"It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am."

Second Edit

A few days after I posted about the job, one of the girls from the camp said she and a few others had found my blog.

Oops.

She said I seemed "angry and tired," which is fair.

I was. I'm still tired.

But she brought up a good point; although it was honest, it was perhaps too harsh. And though I failed to complete the sentence noting this, it was meant to be a very brief, very unedited update to let people know what was going on. A second edit is incoming, maintaining honesty, while hopefully lacking as much suppressed rage. I'll leave these here for posterity.

Summer Job

I've been pretty incredibly busy the past few days, but a lot of people (including my family) Normally I try to do a little more than just journal about what I've been doing, but I haven't been easy to reach and this is my way to giving everyone a little more detail that "I'm at camp, it's been busy."

It is called "I Wonder What Will's Up To," after all.

(This isn't going through even the limited levels of editing another post might, so bear with me.)

I am working as a counselor with a leadership camp run by The Academy at Harvard Square. I wasn't 100 percent sure what my role would be coming into it, and it's still hard to describe, but basically I'm with the campers serving as the functional arm of The Academy. Mostly it means a lot of menial tasks that just need to get done; setting up Wi-Fi, making sure the water is stocked, buying shampoo, sometimes helping kids if they're sick or homesick. I also am in charge of keeping track of the kids in the morning and at night, making sure they are awake and ready to go to breakfast, getting them on the bus, then waiting for them in the afternoon to take them to dinner, shuttle them around to bathrooms, dorms, etc. Imagine herding 32 sheep, who all want to buy something at Starbucks. 

The jobs is pretty stressful, because even though I'm not doing much administration work I have to keep track of 32 Brazilian kids, most of whom are 10-13 years old, and don't listen to me very well. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but I like to think that it's disrespectful to ignore people everywhere. They're good kids--they're wicked young and in another country, living without parents for the first time, so they get some leeway-- just hard to organize.

One of the adult counselors with them is really understanding and appreciative, one has not truly listened to a word I've said since she arrived, and one speaks no English so I don't really know her. Technically my hours are 7-12, 5-11, but because of logistic issues I worked about 16 hours yesterday. I've described it to a few others (and vehemently to myself, under my breath, with adjectives) as being anywhere from "nuts" to a "nightmare."

It's been hard to In the chain of command, all the people above me are Korean and all the people below me are Brazilian, so everyone has their own secret language, and it gets old. I completely understand that it's hard to learn another language-- my French is awful--

In the mornings we go to the Harvard campus to have class. If you ever think to yourself with pride, "yeah, I know stuff," walk through a science building of a prestigious school. Nothing in there makes any sense, and there's an incredible amount of it. I probably couldn't pass a high school chemistry test at this point so it's weird that I'm even allowed to be inside a building that has words and phrases like "centrifuge" and "DNA synchronization drop off point."

Because of reasons (related to parent-chaperone-organizer relations) I won't disclose, I am giving short English lessons before the student lecturers arrive. The lecturers are very qualified to teach English; it's their job. I am not, and it is not mine, but we're making it work. Yesterday I taught them the word "wicked," which so far has been very useful. I feel like not giving this lesson, though, was a serious missed opportunity.

By contrast, the campers, chaperones and I are staying at Pine Manor College. I'm beginning to understand why no one has heard of it.  Never host an event at Pine Manor College. The grounds are nice, but the dorms themselves are not, and the lady in charge of summer housing is doing a pretty horrible job. I've had to call her two or three times before anything we ask gets done--there were kids from another college staying in one of our rooms about 10 hours before the kids arrived, and one of our bathrooms was filled with someone else's toiletries.

In conclusion, I'm going to take a nap now.


-Will


"You're never too old to go to space camp, dude."