5 Reasons Summer Vacation is Terrible (That I Think We Can All Agree On)
I wish I could be the kind of person who loves summer with her whole heart. I really do. But there is a dark, jaded part of me who cannot think of summer without also thinking “Ugh.” I believe, if you look deep inside yourself, you’ll find that this feeling exists in all of us. We are all summer-haters, to a certain extent, and here is why.
1. You are trapped in the sweaty flesh prison that is your body.
There are lots of things I hate being. Hot, cold, tired, and wrong, to name a few. But most of all, I hate being sweaty. And come summertime, the sunshine and humidity that people claim to love so much will make swamp devils of us all.
You may be thinking, “Elodie, I know you’re a fan of hyperbole, but come on; being sweaty isn’t that terrible.” I think maybe you have forgotten. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to walk around outside whilst constantly glistening. You’ve forgotten what it is to leave the house and have the stifling, ninety-degree heat foisted upon your sweat-prone person. You see, soon we will all look back fondly at a time when we didn’t have to choose between a) wearing jeans and dying, or b) wearing shorts and BLINDING people because our pale, vampiric skin hasn’t seen the sun in eons. I miss that time already.
Also good luck slumbering through the inevitable night sweats. I like to have five fans pointed at me at any given time, and it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Speaking of which…
2. You will lose control of your sleep schedule.
I’m sure there are people out there who can just wake up at 8:30 AM on a weekend and make with the doing things, but I am not one of them. And summer is like a three month-long weekend. You have no schedule and no real reason to get out of bed. By mid-June, you will be changing out of your pajamas into different pajamas. By July, you will be going to bed at 4 AM and waking up surrounded by your laptop and various snack wrappers. By August, you will remember, vaguely, a time when days of the week mattered, but the thought will fade away into the nebulous wasteland of memory just as quickly as it appeared.
3. You just forget how to write.
Do kids even need to know how to write legibly by hand these days anyway? I’m not sure, but it still feels like a personal defeat, going back to school and realizing you’ve forgotten how to do the one thing you can do but monkeys can’t.
4. You’ll lose touch with people.
I mean, sure, you’ve got real, tangible friendships with people you’ll see constantly over the summer. But there are also people who you only see in the context of school. Project partners, fellow band nerds, that one person in AP chem who you actually like. Nonetheless, you have no clue where they live or what they do with their time and no real desire to find out. The tenuous social bonds you’ve formed over the course of the school year won’t stand up to space and time.
5. There’s too much pressure to have fun.
Everyone always wants to know what you did over the summer. Look, if I had attended Bonnaroo or gone swimming with dolphins in Bali, I would have mentioned it right out of the gate. As it stands, I can’t very well tell people I spent three months playing online Solitaire and listening to podcasts about unsolved murders, can I? That’s pathetic, and alarming. No one wants to hear it. People want a story! They want drama! Intrigue! Romance!
As with most things, I blame Grease for this. Sandy and Danny had to go off and fall in love on a beach, and now the rest of us are expected to live up to that. Thanks, Grease. Thanks a bunch.
