Summer?

First days of school have come. TV ads joyfully celebrate this dreaded occasion. Newspaper ad inserts go crazy over what they think is a big opportunity for them, touting such mad phrases as "Mattress World: your back to school headquarters!" and "go back to school on an egg!". Such joyfulness is expected to be passed on to the consumers, which actually consist of highly-annoyed-at-stupid-back-to-school-ads moms who are in any mood other than those happy-go-lucky moody mothers depicted in cheesy advertising campaigns. And I doubt that the child is half as excited as the mother, unless you're a total school freak, aka "show-off" aka "one-upper", and pretty much aka "loser".

Nonetheless, though our desire to avoid school at all costs is more rampant than ever, it is practically stuffed down our throats. Many people go into the school year saying "well, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade". But by the end of the semester they end up saying "and then the lemonade becomes bitter and hard and turns to pigswill". This however, is only the first semester. The terrible feeling that accompanies the second semester is likened to one who has drunk this terrible disaster of a drink called "lemonade" that they first concocted when the school year started, after the lemons were thrown at them.

Surprised and completely unprepared teachers come, seemingly in a daze. This is apparent by some of the assignments given at the beginning of the semester, including writing essays on "what I didn't do over the summer". Wow. What a question. For the overachievers, the answer would be "I didn't sit around all summer watching TV, posting facebook updates, playing video games, and drinking something that gave me tongue hives". For the lazy, the answer could be "I didn't become a teacher suck-up by overachieving my tush all summer with no time for fun." And for the adventurous, the answer could be "I didn't discover that if you mix clorox and brake fluid it will make a lot of smoke. At the same time, I didn't discover that it takes the local fire department four minutes and thirty-nine seconds to get to our house. But don't take my word for it."

Which brings me to an interesting question: what didn't you do this summer? Whether it's not getting to go to the beach, or not testing what appeared to be fuzzy chocolate cheesecake on steroids, I still want to know. Leave a comment, and describe in as many as three sentences what you didn't do this summer. And if you happen to be an overachiever, then don't let what I said earlier get to you, us normal people are probably just jealous.

Maybe.