Well, a few more days and this school year is history, going-going-gone, never more, finito, and crossed out on the calendar. No more exams, no more studying, no more late nights reading something that should have been read weeks ago. No more getting up for that 7:30 a.m. class and trying my hardest to pretend I really enjoy Shakespeare in the early morning.
I'm excited, right?Not so.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm no sadist. I won't shed any tears when I sell back my books (except for when I'm given $5 on a book I spent $60 on three months earlier), nor will I get depressed when I circle that last multiple-choice question on my final exam.
I'm actually looking forward to having some free time, being able to watch TV again and not having that awful sinking feeling that I should be doing something instead of playing video games.
But while I'm not a sadist, I am a realist. I know none of that is going to happen when I hand in my last paper. The sun isn't going to shine any brighter, and I'm not going to skip home on a wave of school-less joy felt by elementary-age children every May and June.
I know better. In about a week, I'll still be trying to get over guilt as I sleep in until noon. In two weeks, I'm going to be face-first in my pillow, pondering if it's worth putting myself in a self-induced coma to avoid going to my summer job.
In about three weeks, I'll be wishing I had registered for summer courses because my atrophied brain will have started its early stages of mental rigor mortis and it will give me a really bad headache. In four weeks, I'll be watching MTV in my swimming trunks 18 hours every day (following my termination from my summer job), trying to get as close to the televised action in Cancun as possible, all the while wondering if it would be a good idea to fill up the kiddie pool and put it in the living room.
In five weeks, I'll stop showering.
In six weeks, I'll have to get a job because I'll be sick of all my PlayStation games and will need another one, but all the money I earned earlier in the summer will have been spent on potato chips, Twinkies and an assortment of Little Debbie snacks that will kill me before I hit 40.
This cycle will repeat until August, when the fall semester begins.
I know my father is going to read this and shake his head. He'll remind me that in a year or two I won't have a summer break. My summer break will consist of a three-day weekend for Memorial Day and a three-day bash when Labor Day rolls around. He'll tell me to stop whining and stop complaining and above all else, stop wasting time on those video games.
He's right, of course. I should do something productive, like read some books and do some housework and get a good job.
Of course, I could always counter that this is my last hurrah, my swan dive into summer oblivion, my final salvo across the bow of responsibility and productivity.
Or maybe I should do something truly grand, immortalizing these next three or four months and giving me plenty of experiences I can share with my grandkids ("Wow, back in the summer of 2000, well, you should've been there") -- should the Little Debbies somehow pass through my arteries without incident.
I could go to Cancun. I could go on a cross-country road trip in a VW bus painted in psychedelic colors, seeing places like Live Oak, Fla., and Newberry Springs, Calif., along the way. Or I could get wild and go on a Disney cruise.
Nah, that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as stuffing my face into my pillow, my complaints muffled by the down feathers, my wishes for the fall semester to come quickly droned out by the 11 a.m. episode of SportsCenter.