Some summer-vacation related goodness, today on the Friday Five:

1. How are you planning to spend the summer?

Working. I have reconciled myself to this.

I remember being in high school and feeling such surpassing pity for all of those people who had to get up at ungodly single-digit hours of the day and toil when there was sunshine and beauty outdoors. One time I had to get up at eight in the morning to follow my Dad while he returned a car to the rental agency, and I was struck by how torurous it would be to have to do that every single day: To crawl out of bed and look presentable while the sun was still rising; to sit in a car on the way somewhere when I could be sleeping; to sit in an office for hours at a time, smell stale coffee and listen to people talking in low voices.

In the winter, none of these things seemed especially appalling to me, and in the autumn they seem downright appropriate — but in the summertime, they looked and felt so very, very wrong.

2. What was your first summer job?

My first summer job was stocking fridges at a local convenience store. I think the guy there hired me as a favor to my mother, who worked at a second-hand clothing store in the same plaza, to get me out of the house and learning what pain was like at an early age.

I was paid $5 an hour, except that it was expected that I would never have to work more than a half an hour on any given day. If it took me forty-five minutes or more to lug the soft drinks from the stockroom and into the fridge, I would be questioned on my work ethic and what the hell I was doing all that time back there in the fridge, and then I’d be paid two-fifty anyway.

Because I had to haul the garbage out to the dumpster as well, I was allowed access to the back room, where all of the magazines — including the filthy pornographic ones — were stored. The upside to this happy fringe benefit was that I could take a few casual moments to research sex and all the ways that people would like you to believe they have it; the downside was that the filthy porn was limited to Playboy and Penthouse, so my impressions were that sex was accomplished by standing very close to a woman and cupping her breasts statuesquely.

3. If you could go anywhere this summer, where would you go?

Summer is actually pretty beautiful in Canada, so I’d probably just like to see somewhere especially green and forested, but civilized enough that when the nighttime comes, I can huddle in a well-powered, comfortably furnished, bug-proof shelter.

4. What was your worst vacation ever?

Austin.

A crack team of assassins from the Pro-Austin Journalling community has already been dispatched to destroy me because of this, but as blandly pleasant as I found the city, the week I spent there was kind of like spending an evening in a beautifully well-furnished basement — it’s nice compared to other basements, but it’s still a hole in the ground with no windows.

5. What was your best vacation ever?

About four years ago I took a trip to Montreal for a weekend with a group of my friends from high school and from Blockbuster. One of us had a hookup for serious discounts on a kind of swank hotel called La Richebourg — which is now a very ugly Hilton, I think — and we packed into a suite of two rooms, a fold-out couch, and a surprisingly large walk-in closet.

I haven’t laughed so much in a weekend as I did on that trip. I spent an hour one night theorizing about Dutch Ovens (the fine art of farting within bedcovers and then containing the stench thereunder) with Tim, before putting it into practice and giggling uselessly. I walked through downtown Montreal in the middle of a warm night to buy ice cream. I drank beer in a rowdy drinking hall with a bunch of University jokers who were watching an Ultimate Fighting Challenge and hooting senselessly.

I drove up in a cramped Toyota with my buddy’s (now ex-)girlfriend on one side of me, and Sham on the other. She nuzzled under my arm and fell asleep there.

Best vacation ever.