My petition for summer to remain a noun: the pressure to be anywhere but home during summer as a university student
By Ellen Lundy
The sun bakes my skin as I place mojito no.1 in my left hand and leave mojito no.2 on the side table of my lounge chair. I close my eyes, the hush of the waves rolling onto the sandy beach a calming soundtrack. A slurping sound alerts me, I am now holding all but an empty glass. I allow my hand to reach aimlessly for the spare. My hand meets only the shake of a warm breeze. I reluctantly roll over.
However, a strong headache meets me halfway, like a banging drum in an echo chamber, and as I reach out, my hand glides through to meet the soft embrace of cotton. At the foreign feeling, panic arrests my heart and jolts of electricity bring me back to life; on cotton sheets, with an iPhone alarm bleating at 7am, on the 23rd of July, and I have work in half an hour.
For I will not be ‘summering’ on a beach. Or by a pool. Or with Italians. Unless, you catch me dreaming. But that would require sleep. And I haven’t seen that on the work rota.
I warn you, I am intensely dramatic. What I have neglected to inform you is that I have spent the last year of my life living abroad and travelling. So, spending the summer at home, working, is neither a prison sentence nor purgatory. It is simply the reality of treating my savings account as Hermione’s bag from the Deathly Hallows. As it turns out, my bag of tricks was quite shallow indeed.
If you’re like me, you may ask yourself what there is to do to occupy these long summer holidays. Well, let me share with you my internal monologue on the subject, just to get the ideas flowing.
So, Ellen, there is an entire three month summer with no university; what shall we do?
Get a job.
But, we already have a job.
Get another job, I mean.
Understood. But wouldn’t that make it harder to book off holidays? Having to book it off two jobs?
You have no money to book any holidays. That will not be a problem.
Silly me. Okay, second job secured. That fills up at least 40 hours of the week. What shall we do with the other 128?
Well, we have to sleep for 8 hours a night. That is 56 hours a week. So that leaves us with 72 hours.
Amazing! We have 72 hours where I am not sleeping or working to do something fun and productive! I could… write a book!
You have neither the organisational skills nor talent required for that.
But how would I know until I…
Next suggestion.
Well, I could finally learn how to do a backflip!
Your back hurts sitting down. Maybe it’s best to leave flipping to people who aren’t one 12-minute mile away from an inflamed disc. Or Mormon musicians.
Well, I could always-
I don’t know why we are even discussing this. You have these great big ideas about how you are going to utilise your free time. But in reality, any days off that you have will be consumed by TikTok until the doom scroll sends you into a spiral so violent and all-consuming that it evicts you from your bed and forces you to find some semblance of peace and grounding in nature up a big hill.
And this is how my daily internal monologue performs. Every. Single. Day.
Honestly, the only piece of advice that I have over this summer is this; try and find a balance between rest and productivity. Because too much of either isn’t good for the brain.
And if you need to do something, just do it. You will feel so much better. Like this article that I procrastinated doing for weeks. Now that I have done it, I feel good in myself. Even if it has just become an introspective piece with a narcissistic tone.
So, whether you have a thousand mojitos in Marbella this summer or you’re waitressing in Waterford, try to remember that summer is not defined by hours of sunshine had or air miles. And there is no pressure to do anything spectacular. Try not to stress about a life that you have yet to truly live.
So, if asked where you are ‘summering’ this year, just remind them that summer is a noun. Not a verb. And while they’re flying to the Maldives, you can ride your high horse of grammatical superiority all the way to your minimum-wage barista job. Until you google that ‘to summer’ is actually a legitimate verb. So, maybe call a taxi before relying on that high horse to arrive.
