What am I supposed to do for the rest of the summer? The Fourth of July is long gone. There aren’t really any holidays to look forward to until Labor Day, which in my line of employment, it’s more of a joke than an actual holiday, because I always work Mondays at the restaurant, and especially on holidays, especially on holidays that don’t really have anything to do with anything real, it’s like people go out to eat in droves. Personally, I’d never wait on line for more than ten minutes to sit down and eat, but I’m clearly in the minority here, because on any sort of a day off, it’s like, let’s go out to a restaurant everybody.

Labor Day, it’s an actual day of labor for me. So I’m not counting that as a holiday. And then Columbus Day? Again, it’s the same. Most jobs still make you come in anyway. I think it’s just banks that take the day off. But that’s not until fall. I’m losing track of where I was going with this. It’s still technically summer, and I can’t think of anything special to do.

And I don’t know what the problem is, really, because when you think about it, there’s nothing really at all different about July or August than there is February or March. They’re all just regular months, go to your regular job, wait for the next holiday, which is always way too far away. It’s just the weather that changes. I’m freezing, and then the next thing I know I’m way too hot.

It just sucks because we spend the first twenty-two years of our lives having summer as a vacation. Even if you had a job growing up, which I always did, you still got two months where you didn’t have to go to school. When I was in high school, and then during those summers in between college, I’d love to work some crappy job. One, regardless of how pointless the work might have been, it was all very temporary. And two, it was a break from the normal routine. No school, no classes, something different.

And then you’re an adult and the weather starts getting warmer and there’s still that expectation that something different is going to happen, that for two months anyway, even if I’m not going to be able to sit around and do nothing, I’ll at least get a well needed change of scenery.

Now I’m twenty-nine, so I’m still at this point where the majority of my life experience is telling me something different than what I’m actually experiencing: a life of going to work over and over again, maybe I don’t hate it, maybe sometimes I do hate it, but it’s something that I have to deal with, because it’s never going away, there’s no rest at all. Once in a while maybe I’ll take a day off or a couple of days, a week or two once a year, but that’s it.

It’s just so soul crushing. And I hate sounding like such a whiney little brat, I totally realize how entitled this all sounds. But I just hate the fact that we have this warm weather, that all I really want to do is just go outside and run around and relax and play with my dog and cook a nice meal. I’d get my writing done when I felt like it, I’d have plenty of time to read the newspaper or some books, all of the stuff that I never get to do.

Because my real life is just waking up, struggling to get a run in, making myself sit down to write all of this stuff out, why? Because I want to be a writer. Why? So that way I could do all of this fun stuff that I’m talking about without having to sacrifice seven hours a day at a restaurant. And again, I don’t hate it. I definitely don’t love it, but in terms of a job that I have to do to pay my bills, whatever, I could have it a lot worse.

But all of that stuff, the reading, the cooking, more exercise, more time to just take a walk with my dog, maybe do a little gardening, there’s never enough time. I always go to bed at the end of the day thinking that there was so much more that I wanted to do that I wasn’t able to because I had to go to the restaurant and run around like a crazy person getting this, doing that, and by the time I get home, I always tell myself, you can do it Rob, you can stay up a little bit longer and get some more work done. But then I’m asleep. And then I’m waking up again. And it’s the same old, same old, every day, winter or summer. I just want to go outside. Just give me two months to go outside and hang out. That’s not so bad. We’re a pretty rich country. This is a pretty advanced society. Can’t we make it so we take turns working? Right? Wouldn’t that be nice?