I din't know it was summer

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

    - F. Scott Fitzgerald

In May I went to watch my college roommate's little sister graduate from college. It had been two years since my own graduation, and it marked my second summer of adulthood.

The funny thing is that Graduation 2012 didn't flip on the switch that, for as long as I could remember, switches my mind over into summer mode. Unfortunately, I have come to accept that summer will never be the same.

This year, it wasn't until mid June that I realized it was summer. After an email was addressed to a bunch of college students and myself, stating the line, "I hope you guys are having a wonderful summer," it donned on me that students everywhere were engaging in this traditional three-month long break, and I wasn't.

Of course it's been a long time since summer meant the days of eating popsicles and playing outside with my friends until all hours of the night. However, even in high school and college it meant the break from homework and the pool marathon, which was where I was in 3 to 4 different pools a day between swim practice and teaching swim lessons.

It used to be that time went slower during the summer months, and there was time to do anything and everything. Summer used to be the time where I read book after book after book. My freshman year of high school I wrote down all of the books I had read over the summer to turn into my English teacher. The boy sitting next to me asked if I did anything else other than read. I told him that I had also done Jr. Lifeguards gone to seven hours of dance class a week, and took a vacation to France. So far I've finished a book this summer but it was one that I started in April. I don't think it's that I have any less time to read, it's just that summer doesn't feel quite as restful anymore, as the daily grind doesn't stop just because it's July.

This adult summer will be even more disappointing than last because it is an Olympic year. Since I am a poor post-college student who can find plenty of other things to spend money on other than cable, I will have a hard time finding a means to watch the Olympics. I may as well pretend that summer 20112 didn't even happen.

I guess I've done a few things summeresque. I ate two bowls of ice cream last night, but that can be chalked up to the fact that I'm extra hormonal. I went swimming in the ocean for the past few days without a wetsuit; I've been keeping up with baseball scores, and I watched fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Since it's not quite over yet, I don't want to deem this as a bummer of a summer quite yet, but what I also need to realize is that summer will no longer be an automatic period of relaxation. So what I shall do is enjoy the summer and that it has to offer, but learn that it will just become engulfed in everyday life. So, I guess I will need to learn to find bits of summer throughout the year.