BUMMER SUMMER (or NOT! in which we learn the importance of work as well as play)

As a homeschooler, summer has never meant that much to me – it gets hotter, days get longer, and yes, I suppose my workload gets a little lighter, but not significantly enough to make much of a difference. This summer, though, was going to be different. I was getting two months entirely free of school, so I made a 6-page-long bucket list, filled with everything from “learn a new language!” to “eat an entire batch of raw cookie dough.”

One week into summer break, though – I was bored. Hopelessly, helplessly, horribly bored. I spent hours sitting on the computer aimlessly clicking refresh and looking outside at the low, humid clouds. I found myself sinking into a danisnotonfire-esque existential crisis. “What am I doing with my life?” I wondered, hitting my head repeatedly on the wall. “What is the meaning of this empty struggle?”

When I was about 8, my mom read Little Women aloud to me and my brother. In one chapter, Jo and her sisters convince Marmie to give them a week with no responsibilities, no assignments, and complete freedom. Of course, they learn an important lesson about the value of hard work and at the end of the week they are changed girls, learning new skills and accepting Marmie's superior wisdom with humble gratitude.

When I heard this, I guffawed. “What idiots,” I thought. “First, the most important rule of being a teenager is that you never tell your mother when she is right. Second – who on this sweet earth would ever, ever, ever willingly accept responsibility for anything? Sure, they say there's no such thing as a free lunch – but why should that stop us from trying?”

Last week, though, I was almost at the breaking point. I had never thought, in this wonderful time of the internet and Youtube and Pinterest and unlimited knowledge just a Google search away, that it was even possible to be as bored as I was. I was spending days looking at pictures of happy people online (“look! They're at the beach and they're playing games and all their dreams are coming true!” *proceeds to eat an entire box of wheat thins while staring at the screen*). All my great plans for the summer (run twenty miles! Bake a crème brulee!) had somehow morphed into “doodle life is an empty void of emptiness on the back of a cereal box for 17 hours and then take a nap.” I was terrified. Was this what my life was becoming? Was I destined to be a bored and boring person for the rest of my days??

Finally, I shook myself out of it. I'd like to say that I had an epiphany – “I was outside, watering the begonias, when everything became perfectly clear (and that's when I cured cancer)” – but the truth is, I watched eight and a half consecutive hours of a terrible, horrible, unfathomably stupid TV show, fell asleep, woke up and decided never to do that again. So I didn't. And my summer has been lovely so far.

~Maya