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Your Ultimate Summer Bucket List And Why It’s Bullshit

Summer Bucket List

HALLELUJAH, IT’S SUMMER! Finally, you can spend your days hanging out by the pool, shopping at your favorite boutiques, and going on daily ice cream runs. You don’t have any professors to answer to, any tests to study for, or any grades to sweat over. All is right in the world, and you finally have time to do whatever you want–or at least it seems so. As Olaf would put it, bees will buzz, kids will blow dandelion fuzz, and you’ll be doing whatever college girls do in summerrrrr. Except most of the things we plan to do never actually happen. Oh.

Here are the things you’ll plan for Summer 2014 and what will probably play out in reality:

  1. Go on a family vacation and spend some quality time with your family.
  2. Ditch the family after five minutes, find some cute surfer boy, and spend the next five days canoodling on the beach.
  3. Get really fucking tan, but only after getting so severely sunburned that you debate ever going outdoors again.
  4. Take a road trip to see your sisters–until you realize road trips are way too long and gas is way too expensive. You end up searching for the next flight out to whichever sister is closest to a beach.
  5. Save up extra money to craft for your future little, and then spend it all on Luke Bryan concert tickets.
  6. Unpack from school right away, and by “right away” I mean “not at all.”
  7. Make plans to really relax and forget about school. Then, freak out when you realize you’re a few credits behind and you have to register for summer classes. #summerbummer
  8. Land a really cool internship at a super forward-thinking startup company. Then, spend the entire summer being a copy machine slave to your hot new boss. Call me?
  9. Fall in love. #jokes
  10. Get in super awesome shape, eat super healthy, and give up toxic substances (i.e. alcohol). Well, maybe not that last part. Or that first thing. Or any of that.
  11. Get a really cute pair of brand spankin’ new designer sunglasses, and then drop them in the ocean after excitedly spotting dolphins.
  12. Buy a TON of crafting materials for your little, but actually just make a princess-worthy, bedazzled cooler for yourself. Oops.
  13. Host a “Project X”-style pool party when your parents go out of town, but make sure you actually have a “guy” to fix everything before they come back home.
  14. Start a blog to write about all your summertime adventures. After a week of writing, you realize you have a pretty lame life so you give up.
  15. Try a juice cleanse–AKA a wine binge.
  16. Design your own line of summer dresses to sell on Etsy, realize how much work that would actually take, and just make one of each for yourself.
  17. Vow to take art lessons. However, the only real art you’ll have time for is finger-painting while babysitting the kids next door.
  18. Catch up on all your shows on Netflix. Within the first week. Now what?
  19. Start training for a 5K that you’ll never actually run and supplement your “training” with a high-carb, ice cream-packed diet. After all, you can’t afford to eat light with such a strenuous exercise plan.
  20. Take golf lessons from the preppy, blond boy at the country club. After nine holes of chipping out large chunks of grass, never actually hitting a ball, and getting sand in your eyes, you’ll eventually realize that relationship was never going to happen anyway.
  21. Go through all your old clothes and donate things you never wear–except that dress, and maybe that skirt, and those pants.
  22. Learn every dance in all your favorite music videos. After what might have been your least typical white girl attempt, you will succumb to the fact that there is a very real reason why only Beyoncé can be Beyoncé.
  23. Have a picnic date–with the bees. Then run like a heinous idiot into the nearest creek. Maybe you can write a country song about it?
  24. Attempt to build a sandcastle, but end up burying your little sister into some form of a poorly outlined mermaid. You were always more of a Walt Disney than a Frank Lloyd Wright.
  25. Plant a garden, and then never pick anything because you’re too afraid of the bugs.
  26. Make microwave s’mores when you don’t feel like making a campfire and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. Ten times less the hassle, 100 percent the same, great taste.
  27. Use the first two pages of a vintage, leather notebook as your summer journal, and then forget it under a lounge chair after an afternoon of sunbathing by the pool.
  28. Host a “Christmas in July” get together, which obviously means a “Frozen” party. “The hot and the cold are both so intense! Put them together–it just makes sense!”
  29. Start a “college years” scrapbook. But, seriously, do it. You will thank me for this later.
  30. Stay up until the sun rises, sleep all day, repeat as needed.
  31. Counsel a kids’ summer camp. In turn, it will require you to be counseled by your therapist, and also for you to double up on birth control.
  32. Go to the drive-in. Wait. Do these even exist anymore?
  33. Make a totally original, Southern, preppy, sorority girl, anonymous account on Twitter, but gain all of five followers, because all you do is beg for followers.
  34. Study for the GRE, MCAT, PCAT, LSAT, blah, blah, blah. Those tests don’t even matter anyway. “50 Shades of Grey” and the entirety of TSM articles are much more interesting to read.
  35. Plan to spend every day at the pool. This is the only one that you will definitely actually do. Live it up, ladies. You only get four years.

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premed donna

Who said you can't be smart and funny? When I'm not writing for TSM, you can find me studying into oblivion, downing a bottle of chardonnay, and/or sobbing for reasons I have yet to understand. All hate fan mail can be sent to [email protected].

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