Ah, summer. The three months out of the year where you can relax, tan, watch Scandal for 12 hours straight and have a hormonal cry over not having Olivia Pope’s wardrobe, and sleep to your heart’s content. The stress of finals week is over, and so is the heartbreak of leaving school/seeing people you love graduate. Although you swore that you’d make this the “best summer ever,” you find yourself weeks into it having gone no farther than your backyard pool, and your mother is beginning to seriously question both your work ethic and your life aspirations. Your dog is starting to feel like the only being on earth that understands you, and you realize that it’s time to take the plunge — if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to visit your hometown bar.
The First Few Nights
This is actually the most fun time to go to the bar. You WILL see most, if not all, of the people you graduated high school with, so be prepared for this mini-reunion. Luckily for you, you’re showing up looking hot as ever with a much better tolerance, so you should be fairly impressive. Connect with old friends, take some cute pictures and tell enough stories to make sure that everyone knows you’re having the best college experience out of anyone from your group. The only way to truly mess this up is to be the girl that won’t shut up about her sorority. Don’t be that chick.
Pros: Ohmigod high school friends! You’ve missed these girls!
Cons: These drinks are not college-budget friendly — at least not with your tolerance.
A Few Weeks Into Summer
The bar scene in your hometown is starting to look very familiar. You have to drive to every bar, which means that finding DD’s is getting harder. At this point, you and your friends have probably developed a pattern of which bars you hit first, second, etc., and there’s definitely a bartender or two who has seen you do something fairly embarrassing. It isn’t so bad when everyone’s doing something embarrassing, but no, that night it was just you. That week, actually. You’ve also started to notice an increasingly irritating trend of having to drink elbow-to-elbow with people of your parents and grandparents’ generations, which just gets weird when you get asked to dance by a guy who was clearly at least 15 at the year of your birth.
Pros: The bartenders know your name/drink order. (Being popular in any context as a good thing.)
Cons: The free drink gets a lot creepier when the guy buying it for you is 60+.
Mid July and Beyond
The monotony you tried to escape from in the beginning of a summer is back with a vengeance in the form of your local bar. Sure, you have some good nights, and maybe get a couple of halfway decent stories out of it, but the lack of drunk food options, the need for sober drivers and the depressing realization of stumbling into your childhood home drunk keeps you from having a good time. Never one to turn down an opportunity to drink, however, you keep at it, because what else are you going to do, stay sober? You have a reputation to maintain after all, as being a “fun person.” Enjoy your time spent living rent and grocery bill free at home, tip your local bartenders (the best way to keep your embarrassing stories from reaching your parents’ ears) and try to relax for the few weeks of summer you have left. Soon enough you’ll be back at your beloved college, tan, skinny, and ready as ever to rage like you did before.
Pros: You have your own barstool. At all three bars in town.
Cons: You miss your little. And your big. And your sisters. And your college. Is it fall yet? .
Nice Move158
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