Summer Adventures

Eight days.

That’s what remains of the 2016-2017 school year. Technically it’s nine days because the teachers work one day longer than the students have to be there, but not many teachers I know really count that; a day at school without students around can be a little piece of vacation all on its own. Going by either count you subscribe to, we’re down to single digits now. Summer is so close I can taste it.

However, I find I’m not exactly chomping at the proverbial bit for it to arrive. Yes, I’m certainly plenty ready to put what remains of the school year behind me and move on into non-educational nothingness for a few months. But other than the multiple hours of daily freedom and the nicer weather (at least when there aren’t any life-threatening storms going on), I don’t have a long list of things about summer I’m specifically excited about. For the last few summers, my time off has been broken down into a small number of predictable categories, the short list of which is so mundane and middle-aged I won’t bore you with here. I guess when this happens a certain number of years it becomes routine, and routine can become predictable and too comfortable and, to an extent, mildly dull.

I want my summer to have a narrative. I want more than just a small handful of my days to start with the energy of anticipation, and maybe even have some carry slight harmless anxiety about the unknown and promise of the unexpected. I want some adventures.

Having stated this, let’s take a moment to back up and slap down some definitions on exactly what I mean by “adventures.” I’m not looking to skydive or rock climb or wander into the woods for three days with nothing but the clothes on my back and a makeshift toothbrush in my pocket to challenge my survival aptitude. I’m thinking more about new things to do to break up the routine. For me, my list of low-grade summer adventures could include things such as watching some more of Nephew #2’s baseball games, since this will likely be the last summer he plays. It could mean going to a midnight showing of a new movie and seeing it with an excited crowd instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour and seeing it early Friday afternoon in a mostly-empty theater. It could mean driving to some small town in the middle of the most rural part of the state just because a newspaper article or a television story said they had the best ham and cheese sandwich in the five-state area, and I wanted to experience it for myself. It could mean going to see some band play at a casino even if I’m only mildly interested in seeing them, just because I’ve never seen a concert at a casino before. It could even just mean putting together an epic ten-hour playlist and using that time to clean out my garage like it’s never been cleaned out before, or making up some reason to have people over to my house. 

I wouldn’t say I’m exactly looking for suggestions of what kind of adventures I could find to fill my summer. Given enough time, ideas will always present themselves. I just either need the time or the motivation to follow through on them. Also it’s been my experience that if I were to solicit recommendations, I would end up getting a list of other people’s favorite things to do. That wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but I'm really looking more for some interesting experiences and distractions than the beginnings of a new hobby. I wouldn’t say no to suggestions, nor would I necessarily say no to co-adventurers; being introverted doesn’t mean that you hate being around people, after all. It just means you don’t rely on it the same way most other people do. 

So if I’m hoping for a summer of as-of-yet undefined adventures, but I’m not exactly looking to collect ideas of things to try, where exactly am I going with this post? 

I guess I don’t really know. I don’t really know where I’m going with my summer yet either, though. Right now, with a few weeks to go before it all becomes official, that seems like part of the fun.