On lifeguarding

I recently got a job as a lifeguard. I never thought I would ever do a job like this and if you found me 10 years ago and told me I would be doing that in the future I would have told you to,"Go fuck off". But here I am watching little kids play in a pool and making sure no old guys have a heart attack in the hot tub and die while I'm polishing the chrome ladders. This state of being I find myself in is very much related to my last "Year of the Fonz" which started last November. To declare a"Year of the Fonz" means to make a deliberate action towards detached coolness and allowing life to come to you on your terms. It also means defining success or "adult coolness" as a confident simplicity unrelated to the rest of the society. No more listening to the static of others or our cultural dogmas. The Fonz fits the bill for this kind of Zen approach to life. I don't think I need to compare fictional Fonz characteristics to what I'm talking about. I think you get the jist. And if you don't get it watch some episodes of Happy Days and realize that the most respected character on the show is at least 10 years older than his friends and lives above the garage at one of his friends parents' house.

Previous to my first "Year of the Fonz" I guess you could say I was a bit neurotic to the point where I had hypochondria so bad that I thought I was really dying. Like really. As a 25 year old who knew he had only  2-5 more years to live I remember thinking of the regrets or missed opportunities of my life and one of them strangely enough was, " I never got to be a lifeguard". I was unaware that I had any inkling to be a lifeguard. It was probably too many reruns of Baywatch getting stirred into my unconscious thought patterns but there it was. In retrospect I think it had more to do with the idea that you had to be in good health and happy with your body to be a lifeguard and sadly I was an overweight 25 year old that thought he had a deadly contagious disease.

So as I declared "Year of the Fonz" last November I found that I had a reason to do daring things that made no sense. I had to, that's part of what Year of the Fonz meant. Around this time or soon after I also saw the Steve Jobs commencement speech to Stanford on Ted.com and it inspired me. When I thought I was a person that was dying, swimming was a horrible thing I could never do because I had to show my body and people would be able to see that I was physically dying. So as part of the Year of the Fonzie I started taking swimming classes. I started in January of 2011. When I had completed all the courses for my Bachelors degree in Winter quarter of 2011 I decided to keep going to school for Spring quarter and only take whatever the hell I felt like. I took weight training, more swimming classes, a triathalon course, improv acting, and the lifeguarding CPR certification class. It was one of the best quarters of school I ever had and I really loved the lifeguarding class. It was strange to discover something new to love because I thought I had already found everything that I had liked about this world. I couldn't wait to get there everyday for the class and it was awesome to learn skills I felt were useful and important to others around me.

The job is a bit boring and I hope I can really help someone if they get in trouble but overall it has been pretty cool. The greatest gift to me is to watch the kids play in the kiddie pool. The kids take a shallow square of 3' water and turn it into a festival of aquatic life. They invent games, pretend their dolphins, pretend their searching for treasure, and most of all laugh and smile the whole time (mostly). I can see why they don't have time to get out of the pool and use the restroom, would you if you were having that much fun? Well, this job came at a good time for me because I needed to learn the lesson that life can be a fantastic festival of aquatic life if you pretend it is one.