What's So Hot About Summer?

If you live in the real world and work full-time -- which is to say you're neither a student nor an academic -- summer is just another season, the one in which you see more of your colleagues' body parts than you might care to. Sure, the weather shifts, the outdoors beckon, and the combination can feel liberating. But you still have to get up in the morning and go to work. You still have to stock the fridge which means going to the supermarket and unpacking the groceries. Bills still need to get paid and laundry and dry cleaning done. Despite months of longing and anticipation, summer is in fact hotter, harder and more stressful than any other time of the year. Just keeping up the appearance of being relaxed, sun-kissed and carefree can be stress enough for at least two seasons. Hello leg waxes and regular crunches.

The word summer conjures up pictures of flapping sails, white linen blazers and lawn bowling. But most of us have not yet made the Fortune 500 list and still have to work for a living. And, last I checked, most people are entitled to only 2 weeks of vacation a year. Even the most short-sighted, those who greedily gobble whole their allotted vacation during the summer months, still enjoy only 14 out of 60 summer days sunning, surfing and sipping cool cocktails. And if your job happens to entail being a full-time parent, what could be more demanding than summer? You are granted no time off at all. Instead of a house filled half-time with screaming toddlers or pukey pubescent naysayers, you now have a full house of same with no light at the end of the battlefield -- and no reason to enforce bedtime -- until September, when school resumes. In your case "summer vacation" is a misnomer.

So what is it about summer? The pressure and desire to get anything done seems to evaporate in the heat. A missed appointment is just that -- not a scheduling crisis; "whenever" seems as good an answer as any to a timely question. My friends -- whom I speak to hourly during the winter months -- are still an email or a phone call away and yet we fall out of touch. I'm content to digest their news in weekly installments rather than daily doses. I fall behind in reading magazines and newspapers; the novels I tackle are written by authors with 3 or 4 last names -- most of whom are decades younger than me and have never left the continental United States. There is no homework to be done, there are no tutors to be paid, the camp bus can wait, and arriving 15 minutes late to work is either overlooked or not a big deal. I am happy to get things done in twice the amount of time normally needed, rather than in half. It's the decaffeinated season.