The funny thing is that summer is here and I don’t know what to do at all. After a year of cramming and reading, suddenly pointless things seem frivolous. As the clock’s needle flicks on, each wasted minute itself feels like a prick of a needle to me. So, certainly, I should be fully able to abandon myself to summertime bliss, but instead I feel like this is time I should be investing in more purposeful things.

Ugh. I blame the eyes-on-college mentality so strongly inculcated in me from the beginning of high school. It makes me feel as though I should pack activities like sardines into the neat little boxes of my agenda and then transfer them triumphantly into my application. What’s more, it puts me in an irritating position now, sandwiched between something and nothing, feeling lethargic and itchy. And the three months of summer vacation stretch before me like a never-ending expanse of time that I feel worried will be frittered away as I fade into my couch watching bad T.V. show after bad T.V. show. Relaxing wastes time if it’s only partial relaxing. And I can’t relax without assuring myself that I’m not wasting time. And making an effort to assure always leads to partial relaxation.

Or maybe what I ought to blame is the lack of inspiration around me. I know, I know, this sounds very drudging and bitter, but there’s some truth to it. After all, smack-dab in the middle of suburbia, I find myself surrounded by the same manufactured modes of fun. Like the mall, at which shopping means purchasing and wearing something at least five people you know already have. Or the movie theater, which is playing its usual summer features of Mediocrity I, II, and III. Taking a saunter to the well-sauntered Town Square would be similarly unenlightening. Everyone is a drone, wearing the same clothes, making the same remarks, and brandishing the same hairdo, perfected by the same hair straightener.

And every time someone laughs at these complaints and pats me absently, counseling me to “take it easy,” I end up stiffening even more.