Intern
We have an intern at Small Publication for a couple months from Japan. She’s a few years younger than me and her real interest interest is actually to work in television someday. But even though I wonder if she’s learning anything productive from us – other than she doesn’t want to do what we do - she’s amazingly nice and ridiculously accommodating.

She’s come out with me a couple times on stories I’ve gone to cover, and she’s always doing things like trying to carry my gear-bag for me – or I mention I want some coffee and she tries to go get some for me, and I’m just like, “No-neee-no, no!” And then we go out for coffee together.

So anyway, I’m trying to organize taking her out out dancing with some of my friends because she wants to go dancing in a big, bad way. I don’t want to go to Buckhead. I unwant to go to Buckhead.

I’m thinking, instead, of maybe M.J.Q., this club in Midtown that from street-level, looks like a small garage, but when you go in, you go down some steps and it’s actually, well, a club. That's my choice of location more for nostalgia than actual current affection, though.

My friend Sheila and I used to go to MJQ a lot a few years ago when it was always free and never, ever too crowded and you’d go in there and by 2:00, you’d be dancing with this crazy conglomeration of club-kid-sorts, waitresses-from-greasy-spoon-down-the-road-just-off-their-shifts-sorts, hipster-sorts, middle-aged office guys, streetpeople and hippies. Now it’s gotten to be rather the hip place and it costs ten bucks and I haven’t been in over a year.

But I think we could have some fun.

But it’s not because she’s nice; it’s because she’s guilt-ridden.
When I was a teenager, we had an exchange student named Cecelia. She was from Honduras, and I was seventeen. Let me clarify: I was very seventeen. Self-conscious, baggy t-shirted, always-writing “Nobody understands me; I should diiiie!” poetry in a spiral notebook –seventeen. A tad self-obsessed and a tad low on the self-esteem.

Cecelia was a sweetheart. Nineteen years old when she came, but very naïve about a lot of things, in the way of girls who grow up in wealthy Honduran plantations. She laughed at my dad’s corny jokes. We’d all go out for ice-cream at Baskin Robbins. She got married a year after going back home, and now has a mess of kids. God, I’d love to go see her.

I was friends with her at home, but when she sat with me on the school-bus, I smiled politely and then looked out the window. And yes, I had my walkman on. And pretended I didn’t hear the kids at the back of the bus making fund of her, in the way of asshole white kids who grow up in wealthy Midwestern suburbs.

She hated the Pittsburgh winter and slept underneath a mountain of blankets. She spent hours and hours on the phone with friends back home; she cried a lot at night.

And I still feel totally guilty for not going to her, then. For not telling the boys on the bus to go screw themselves. For being such a typically disappointing teenager: a shitty friend.

Which is probably a part of the feelings I have when I see our Japanese intern waiting at her bus-stop in ninety-degree heat. I give her a ride home because I like her and because it’s the decent thing to do. Because I don’t want her to think all Americans are assholes like our political leaders. Because I don’t want her to regret choosing Atlanta as her destination for this internship. Because I like to have some company sometimes, myself, outside of work.

Having written this out, I guess it appears very self-aggrandizing: “Ooh, how nice she is to the poor, poor Japanese girl, and all because she feels sooo guilty for being a snotty teenager. Jesus. What an asshole.”
But whose motives are not at least partially selfish, in one way or another, for almost everything we do? Even wanting company is self-serving.

I like our intern a lot. And if I were her, I imagine it would take some very good times not to regret choosing Atlanta.