A couple of weeks ago, I was self-diagnosed with a seriously bad case of second semester senioritis. Too bad I’m only a second semester sophomore. But lately, I just want to scream. Growing up in high school, I was always the girl who woke up every morning, freakin’ giddy with the idea of going to class. I never skipped one day of class — except during senior year which, to me, doesn’t really count as a legit academic year — and I rarely forgot to do my homework. I was the teacher’s pet: dependable, predictable and boring.
My, how the times have changed.
Now it’s a good week if I go to every scheduled class without skipping one. And I don’t know about all of you, but I find myself paying little to no attention to whatever the teacher is talking about. Seriously, they are all starting to remind me of that character from The Peanuts. Wah, wah, waaahhhhh.
Daydreaming has taken precedence. And with one week of classes left, you can only imagine how horrible it has been for me.
But just imagine three whole months with no talk of algorithms, the structure of a perfect nutgraf or the Lacanian Theory in an artistic context. No more memorizing the subjunctive tense, incessant repeating of the masses of the planets and staying up for ungodly hours re-reading essays that were probably fine to begin with.
Because, my friends, summer is just around the corner. Which, to me, means
doing a whole lot of nothing.
Lately, my dreams have been filled with all of the wonderful things that will make up my summer 2012: Bucket-sized cups of mocha and caramel iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts, digging my toes in the warm sands covering the beaches of Rhode Island, aimless highway drives in my car with the top down, sipping coke and rum while listening to reggae concerts in Connecticut, fireworks and barbecues on the Fourth of July, shopping at the overpriced boutiques on Block Island, clam cakes and chowder at Iggy’s, making terrible decisions and laughing about it the morning after with my best friends, keg parties on the beach until the sun rises, lemon poppy seed muffins from Felicia’s Coffee, pretending to know how to surf and completely wiping out in front of the hot lifeguard, burning my skin to a crisp because I am pretending I’m not albino, relaxing in the hot tub after a long day of nothing, racing to finish a black-raspberry ice cream cone before it melts all over my hands, going to Waterfire in Providence every month where I can meditate about the meaning of life and of course, heat yoga every Saturday morning to cure my overwhelming hangover.
Yeah, that sounds like the life. Too bad it’s a complete lie.
We are all broke college students now, so it’s time to be real with ourselves. Our summers will consist of working horrendous hours for minimum wage and then getting off that job just to go to another. Summer for me means waking up at four in the morning to put on my Dunkin Donuts visor and serve donuts and coffee to cranky businessmen, after which they so generously drop a quarter in my tip jar. It means getting off work at 6 p.m. to go waitress at Chelo’s Bar & Grille and get hit on by drunk old guys. It means passing out in my bed by 11 p.m. because of exhaustion, not vodka overdose.
But I can still dream, right?