I h8 teenagers

After last night, I think I'm officially tired of this job.

I had my 2nd of 3 days off on Wednesday and the lovely Samantha came to visit. I worked with Sam first session at Oxford and she was gracious enough to ride 3 hours to come see me and Kim (and then ride 3 hours to get back). Although I had fun on my first day off (last Friday), I can truly say it was a candidate for one of the more ridiculous nights of my life. I think I was slightly insane that day, which the other RAs that saw and hung out with me can attest to. Anyway, this 2nd day off went much better. We decided to shake things up and go play BINGO. Never in my life have I experienced anything so hopelessly depressing yet riotously amusing at the same time. Thank god they served beer. Sam and I were the youngest ones there, although, somewhat surprisingly, not by much. Then again, the only other people there that may have been in or near their 20s were with elderly parents. Whatever. The people there were friendly and taught us how to play (there is a learning curve) as British bingo is, in fact, different than American bingo. Afterwards, we drank more at a pub and talked about life, love, and all that junk, or whatever it is you banter about when you're drinking. It was all great fun, but sucked pretty hard when we had to wake up at 5am so Sam could hop a bus back to Oxford so she could be in time for her staff meeting.

I was afforded the luxury of sleeping for another 5 hours before I needed to wake up for a (yipee) mid-week excursion. We took the kiddies to Warwick Castle, which from personal experience along with my powers of deduction, was probably the biggest castle-related tourist trap in all of the United Kingdom. The castle seemed to have been renovated in the 19th century so it just looked like a mansion on the inside, despite being a 12th century castle on the outside. They also had a fake jousting performance, a trebuchet demonstration (which I unfortunately missed), archery, plenty of ice cream, and tons of other stuff to keep your snot-nosed 8 year old cackling maniacally for the afternoon. Not really the greatest for a group of 30 American teenagers. Maybe the 1 or 2 history buffs in the group enjoyed it, who knows.

After that, we hopped back on the bus and moved along to Stratford upon Avon, the birthplace of Billy Shakespeare. We walked by his supposed house, although it was too late to take a tour (not that I would have). You can imagine the anti-climactiveness of it all. It's a cute town that contains practically nothing. I don't understand how there are so many of those in England. After dinner, we caught a performance of The Tempest put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Patrick Stewart was the leading role, Prospero, which was sorta cool, but the play was hopelessly weird and hard to follow. My general deal with Shakespeare is if I haven't read it, I probably can't follow a performance of it, which proved once again to be true.

I got into this quiet murderous rage on the 1.5 hour bus ride home as the kids were being impossibly loud and abominable. I've never been so inexplicably angry at everyone and everything around me in my entire life. I tried to put on my headphones and just close my eyes, but there always seemed to be something to distract me and remind me of how much I hated the world at that moment (hence the title of this post). When we FINALLY got home, I just went straight up to my room and crashed out, but I'm now quite afraid of what'll happen on the last 4 excursions we have in the next 8 days (!!!). I might actually hurt someone if I manage to get into one of those funks again.

There's maybe 4 or 5 kids I genuinely like talking to in the program at this point, 2 or 3 that I can't stand to even look at, and the rest which seem to be alright when on their own, but manage to be odious little hellspawn when in groups of 4 or more. The program director is getting on my nerves in a big way, at this point, and really makes me miss the way the Oxford program was run so smoothly. There's so little professionalism going on here. Staff will talk about other staff and students behind their backs in front of other students, there's lots of open criticism about every aspect of ASA, and rules are enforced so rarely, I think some of the students don't remember there are any. Earlier last week, the program director was teaching kids the "real way" to roll cigarettes. wtf?

I was thinking at first that all of these ill-feelings were stemming from my innate readiness to return home, but sentiments are pretty much uniform across the board with the entire staff. The kids mostly seem to be having a good time, at least.

So it's a comedy show tonight and a trip to Norwich and Yarmouth (the beach) tomorrow. It'll probably be too cold to go in the water, but the way excursions are run here, they aren't generally high stress when we're not on the bus. Too bad there's lots of bus time tomorrow.

Gotta get to that show. I'll try to be more positive next post.