Your Actual Summer Plans: A Quick Guide

Summer—a six-letter word that means freedom. Used by the Departments of Education (DOE) in just about every part of the world, it is actually just a really long period of time for DOE overlords to rest. Knowing that their subjects would cause untamed pandemonium, the overlords decided to give everyone else working in the education field a break. And thus, order would be guaranteed year-round.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Giving over a million kids a knock-off version of free reign over their lives for two months is a terrible decision on the NYC DOE’s part. Even the most intelligent, mature, and accomplished of the bunch (the students of Stuyvesant High School) lose the last bits of however many brain cells they have left.

As you keep telling yourself to continue the grind during the summer ‘cause it never stops, you tell your parents and your friends that you’ll travel, volunteer, win a Nobel Peace Prize, invent the cure to cancer, whatever. Having hopes and dreams is perfectly fine, and of course I could write up this super optimistic list of productive stuff for the summer, but that is delusional because none of that’s gonna happen. Instead, here’s a list of stuff you WILL be doing this summer. What can I say, reality is often disappointing.

- Making plans that get cancelled because your only two friends dipped

- Getting sunburned after going outside for 30 seconds because you haven’t seen the sun since last summer

- Suffering because the AC unit broke and you’re too poor to really do anything about it, or because your dad won’t let you turn on the AC

- Waking up with 50 bug bites that only multiply day by day

- Getting anxiety from seeing everyone else actually do things on Instagram

- Buying a bunch of books to use as decor only

- At least one terrible family excursion

- I know you’re just going to end up eating chips in your room while you scroll through Reddit.

- Forming a negative amount of coherent thoughts a day. How you manage to do that is well beyond me.

- Remembering that you were supposed to do something this summer

- Spending a whole four hours trapped in a social media black hole until your phone finally runs out of battery

- Buying way too many things online

- Downloading 50 random games to cure your boredom and becoming addicted to them for about seven days before deleting them all

- Increasing dread as you think about colleges (fun fact: your college dread increases exponentially based on how close you are to senior year!)