"what i did on my summer vacation"
HOW DO YOU know the summer is really and truly over? My dad says it’s truly over precisely one second after midnight on September twenty-first. My friend Ellen says it’s over the moment you start thinking about whether to buy a three ring binder or a spiral notebook for school. But for me, the way I know the summer is a gonner is when my brother Pete and Artie the Strongest Man in the World go to the beach and try to beat up the ocean. They’re not crazy…just angry. Angry that the summer has to end. I know exactly how they feel. Every year it seems like the summer is over about 10 seconds after it started. Especially this summer.
The words of Big Pete aside, it really has been a spectacular summer.
So what, pray tell, did I do on my summer vacation?
I spent the first part of it at war, and heavily beseiged. Beseiged by the exams, assignments, minor disasters at home, extracurricular dalliances, and the war soundtrack conveniently provided, at all hours of dawn and day, by the hammering and drilling of the fellows remodeling the flats directly above and below my room. Stress from the exams kept me up at night, and the construction work kept me up during the day, and so, long story short, I spent the very first breaths of the summer without sleep, having an extended migraine / nervous breakdown. Remarkably, while this should have foretold wretched grades on my finals, my best score was actually achieved during an exam sitting that followed 3 entire days without even so much as a nap (though I did sleep through two days immediately following the conclusion of said examination).
Wretched as that sounds, there were actually some pretty awesome moments interspersed; for one thing, the city was ablaze under an epic heat wave, which made the streets boil in the most delicious way possible, and compelled one to stick to the shade with as little clothing as possible and try to render oneself indifferent to the weather by way of ice cold drinks, preferably with heavy doses of alcohol. And that, coupled with frozen pears and nights at the 24-hour library, was all quite smashing.
And then war ended, suddenly, summarily, with a curious, apparently indefinite ceasefire. And rather than wait about to see what was left, we picked up and got moving, and had a series of delightful social engagements followed by an escape to the edge of civilization, where we lay upon a completely abandoned beach for several days on end, and that, too, was glorious.
And then, ambassador's sash firmly tied about us with diplomatic glee, we came back to Miami. And that was rather epic as well. And though it was mildly disconcerting to be the only one who could actually see the enormous, gracefully swirling black hole that had opened up in the middle of the sky, it was really quite great because, once you get used to the fact that this stitch in dimensions is going to distort everything you could possibly predict, you grow far more comfortable about the fact that everything you could have possibly imagined would happen will subsequently not. And much as nice is different than good, not is different than bad, and things that don't happen can often times be quite excellent as well.
And it was cool to spend most of the summer studying the random phenomena and trying to decipher a greater meaning to all of it, and concluding that, ultimately, the entire universe was simply completely upside down for the summer, in a way we shall never completely understand, and that it gradually began to readjust itself back to less-outrageous patterns as the summer concluded (even though things are by no means back to "normal").
Twas the summer of nights on the great lawn, nights on the beach, weekly dates with Strongbow, drunken excursions, automotive adventures, the taking of Manhattan, and a million other things.
And I hung out, alot, with these people...
...and these kids...
...and very often in this place...
...and with this girl in particular...
...and this one as well...
And it started out less-than-spectacularly, and we were seriously concerned that perhaps our seemingly epic lucky streak, which started (now) well over a year ago, had summarily ended, and that 21, in contrast to the annus mirabilis of 20, would be a year marred with defeat. This was, however, most fortuitously not the case, and some time after the beginning, rather than having to declare anything much more dire, we found ourselves muttering "this affair was but my franco-prussian war" - serious enough to bring down a misthought empire, and followed by a chaotic revolutionary period, but eventually leading to the establishment of an even firmer Republic which, should precedent be noted, can stand tall even in the face of a Great War. In short, it has turned out to be, methinks, if not our best, than certainly a healthy rival to our best (which, to date, probably stands as the glorious summer of 2003, and while sorry to see it go, we are ready to face the true sign of the end of summer and the start of fall - the blind jump the accompanies our return to the university year, with no lodging yet secured and school starting on Monday, added to the usual perils of going abroad and taking on a city and so forth.
And we've a flight to catch, so we gather up our umbrella, grab hold of our monocle, and
leap
and
we are gone
(again).