Summer vacation has always been a hotbed topic for me (pun intended). As a little kid I hated summer, I thought it was awful because of how much I loved school and, summer is, well, the opposite of school. I was actually jealous of the kids who had to go to summer school. I think everyone pretty much thought I was a dweeb-loser-nerd.
Either way as I got older, summer wasn’t that looming three month gap of nothing but rather a much needed relief: my driver’s license, car and expendable income from my job also added to my change of heart.
I like being involved with something and being bored makes me physically ill even now. I’m not joking, I feel sick when I have nothing to do--or maybe just anxious, I’ve never really looked into it. Back to the point! Imagine a bone skinny, 5’5, 10 year old walking around her backyard trying to figure out how to read most comfortably in a tree. Now imagine that same dweeb-loser-nerd inside with a school size whiteboard writing and solving the longest long division problem possible just for fun because she finished all of her workbooks. That was me and it wasn’t a good look. I did everything in my free time: I wrote a blog, I rode my bike, I watched copious amounts of Doctor Who, I read Wikipedia articles for fun, I finished every workbook my parents bought me, I read every Abby Hayes book published to 2010 (and racked up a huge library fine because of it). I even learned how to make my own powerpoint transitions just to know that I could.
Last summer was similar but different. I’m a bit taller now and I don’t weigh 92 pounds anymore. I spent my summer months volunteering all over town, babysitting, making fries at Wendy’s and pre-studying (pre-studying is when you read the AP textbooks over the summer so when the school year starts you already have an idea of what’s going on). I was never bored last summer, because there was never time to be bored--but there was no pressure and I didn’t have to use my brain. That’s where the break part comes into play: there’s no pressure to get an A on a Calc test or be awake by 6:30.
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Here's a picture of me in July '10, wasting away at a movie.
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Summer '14 was a lot different in the way that it was the first summer that my sister was gone. I mean, don’t get me wrong she’s been to camps I didn’t go to and she got to tour the East Coast when she was 12 but I always knew that she’d be back for the school year and summer of 2014 was the first year when I knew definitively that she would not be returning. She didn’t die or anything, she just went off to college early to get some credits out of the way but still. That’s why I’m really glad I was so busy. There wasn’t enough time to sulk around feeling sad because there was a hospital patient who needed to find the Family Health Center or a Calc book that needed highlighting--I appreciated that.
I think my point is that I’m kind of like squirrel, I need something to do at all times because my mind moves so much and I’m interested in so many things. I have no idea what I’ll do this coming summer--I have some camps lined up and volunteering in place but it’s worrisome. This is potentially my last summer at home because I don’t know what summer college I could go to or if I’ll take a senior trip. It’s my last summer to make count, college wise. I think I’m a little crazy about looking as good as possible to colleges, but I’m not going into the college process blindly. Summer is a time where I need a ton of things to do for my crazy brain to flourish so that it stops being so crazy.
With my final AP test finishing today at noon, I can see summer in the horizon: summer looks beautiful and bright and happy, but a little bitter sweet. I have one more year of high school and then I've done it, I will have graduated. I'm ready for the age of the free--I'm ready for summer.
