The summer after sophomore year of college, I lived with Nisou in an MIT fraternity house. The point was that we could get better jobs in Boston than in Storrs or Old Lyme. Nisou went to a job fair and scored a regular, full-time, temporary job in one of the umpteen local colleges' registrar--a perfect fit, given her school-year job. I did not do this but did the same thing I've been doing all my life: coasting. I earned my keep, kind of: my rent for the two months was $400, and we were allowed to eat out of the pantry, so I subsisted on freezer-burnt minute steaks, bananas, and 35-cent hearth buns from Au Bon Pain. I had a series of job, ranging from door-to-door canvassing for MassPIRG to telesoliciting for the Massachusetts State Republican Party. (That kind of cracks me up, me, that not the jobs but the companies ranged widely.) Mostly I worked in dead-end, extremely temporary jobs. For example, I got fired from a drugstore because my count was more than $2 off my tape.
(If I recall, it was $53.17 off. The manager figured out and reconciled the 3.17 or whatever the spare change was; the more serious was, of course, the fifty. The manager didn't even think I had stolen it but that I had mistakenly given too much change to someone (two 20s and a 10? I certainly could have done so, but with two different denominations?); I have always believed I gave someone too many lottery tickets.)
I worked in retail--I loved my job at the hat store, which was only Sunday afternoons but which I kept through the entire period. I was a receptionist in a SuperCuts sort of hair salon. I worked in food service, as a waitress at a supper club on Comm Ave and as an expeditor at hotspot on Newbury. If I had had any doubts about me in college, that summer erased them.
Tangents as usual. My point is that I did not work hard at finding a job. Story of my life. I sent all my paychecks home, and I did manage to pay my share of my junior year, but only because of my scholarships and my father did that bill get paid. It was my first summer without a beach, in a city--you'd think I'd've kept that in mind seven years later--and working evenings left my days to be spent in air-conditioned libraries and bookstores. In the children's and juveniles' sections, because again, coasting.
All of this is my justification--and what an admirable one!--for how many Sweet Valley High books I can recollect. I found a site of plot summaries.
Thirty-six.
Realistically, this represents about four afternoons tucked into an out-of-the-way corner with my chin on my knees. Maybe six.
Thirty-six.
Next I'm going to see how many Sweet Dreams Teen Romances, with which I wasted many a 12th grade lunch period, seem familiar. You know, aside from all of them, since they were all the same plot.