My Year Long Summer Vacation

Alex Paulenoff

As summer roars to a screeching halt and the bury-my-face-in-the-books routine crawls back out of the desolate hole its been living in for the past four months, you cannot help but wonder whether what you've been doing all summer serves any purpose beyond having a story to tell when you get back to school. Inevitably, some of your classmates (and I use that term very broadly) will ask you what you did for your summer vacation. This enticing rouse appears initially as an attempt at polite interaction to fulfill some sort of inherent curiosity about you and your life. After all, it quite clearly it gives you an opportunity, nay, a forum for you to recount how exciting your life has been since the last time they saw you. However, behind this shroud of seemingly genuine interest in your cashier job at Wal-Mart, your tour as a roadie with Korn, or your crocodile wrestling in Timbuktu, your classmate (notice the term) is really doing precisely what our multi-cultural, do-gooder, IDS riddled university was designed to discourage. He's sizing you up.
  
If this wanton activity is done by each and every one of the 20,000 plus students in SSMU, we could conceivably reach a threshold of both time and information that will bleed the entire student body dry of any academic competence for well over the fall term. Think about it. Five classes in the term; say, 200 students in a class.

If you were interested, you could easily waste your whole year asking nearly a thousand of your classmates what they did for their summer vacation. And that's just the people you see during lectures. Forget about people you knew from last year's lectures - you've no time for them. And friends, well, friends can wait. You need to hear more about Freddy's kickboxing lessons / lemur breeding / bong.

Now, of course I hear you already retorting at the screen, "No, I've had three classes with him since freshman year, and he's asked me what I've done for my vacation every time and I've always told him that my government internship / Greek island paradise / recovery from bulimia was great and he listened to me and blah, blah, blah." And while I'm sure that's true, I have to ask, would you be interested in hearing the details of your own summer?

I want you to read these next few sentences very carefully. When you tell your classmate (there it is again) about your summer vacation, he hears one of two things coming out of your mouth. Either a) "Here's how you can save money and do what I did this summer" or b) "Stay out of [insert summer destination] , and here's why."

Since either a) or b) is the only significance he receives from your day-long rant about sitting for seven hours in the rain on the southern Patagonian shore hoping to photograph an Albatross that happens to fly by but your friend fell in the ocean so you had to fish him out but the life preserver you were using to save him broke and so you had to dive in but you can't swim so you stole the native children's balloons and used them as water wings and managed to save your friend but you had to give him CPR and just as he was coming to an Albatross flew over head and shat on your camera, you should really try your best to shorten your response. After all, he's a busy guy and has 999 other classmates to interview this year.

Ideally, he'd say "Summer vacation?" and you'd reply either, "a) Patagonia - book early," or "b) Patagonia - Albatross shit," and he'd know what you mean.

I propose, for the first three to four weeks of class (leaving time for those wacky add/drop folks), everyone walks around with large bilingual nametags, like at some sort of UN conference, that feature your summer in simple a) or b) terms. This way, we can all find out what you did this summer with just a glance, and get on with our lives.

Now, I'm not prejudiced against your summer and I'm sure YOU had a blast kicking around the 'ol hackeysack with Jimbo, but quite frankly, some of us are here to learn , OK? And we can't do that with people like you running around excited about La-de-da last July. Just wear the tag and shut up. See you in class.