Dumb Sh*t Summer
Fortune cookie wisdom from a summer past, which seemed relevant to this post. In case you guys haven’t realized yet, I am a weird person.
I’m guessing, by now, you’ve seen the memes. Summer is right around the corner, and the Internet has told us to brace ourselves for it. Hot Girl Summer, Shot Girl Summer, Nap Dress Summer, Hot Boy Summer (is that a thing or did I make it up?), White Boy Summer (lord help us), and so on. And already the memes have spawned takes! Just the other day I was reading this piece in the New York Times about how teenagers are daydreaming about their #summer2021 highlight reels, and therefore setting themselves up for inevitable disappointment. So many memes, so many takes. I can’t keep up! I need to take a nap in my nap dress (and yes, I am predictable, I love that dress).
But this kind of feverish, hashtaggable discourse of expectation makes sense to me. We’ve all spent such a long time anticipating this season of sunshine and vaccines and gatherings. At least, I know I have. I probably started daydreaming about summer in earnest back in November 2020, when we were living through that fraught mixture of hope and fear: the election, the next case wave spiking, good news about vaccines, bad news about variants, winter bearing down on us all the while. Even by November I was missing the summer that had just ended. I dreaded the loss of those little sources of pleasure—outdoor dining, walks with friends—which would get harder as winter truly arrived. Next summer is going to feel so good, I told myself. I can’t wait to be warm again.
Those daydreams didn’t take any particular shape. When I thought about summer, I didn’t have any grand plans or bucket lists. The anticipation was both omnipresent and diffuse. Mostly Andrew and I repeated it to one another like a mantra in those frigid February days. Summer is going to be so great. Summer is going to be so great.
And now that summer is almost upon us: what do I actually hope it will give me? I think I was finally able to pinpoint it last month, in late April, when we were out on the North Fork. It was our first proper vacation (staying in a hotel, eating at restaurants, and most importantly, very much Not Working) in a long time. In Greenport we stayed at the Menhaden, a small and stylish hotel that I would return to in a heartbeat. Our room at the Menhaden faced Third Street, directly across from Goldberg’s Bagels. After a few days in Greenport, we realized that Goldberg’s seemed to be the hangout for the seniors from the local high school. Every morning, around 10:30 or 11, this sprawling group of friends would descend on the porch outside Goldberg’s and spend the next hour hanging out, laughing, just generally bullshitting. I’m making an educated guess about them being seniors, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. The high school is just down the street, and the kids had that vibe. That classes-winding-down, free-period, let’s-go-get-a-bagel-and-kill-some-time vibe. I kept catching glimpses of them through our hotel window, and it made me smile every time.
One nice thing about vacation, about stepping away from your usual obligations, is that it gives your mind the time and space to wander. And as the vacation went on, and my mind gradually went slack, I realized that the sight of those high school seniors across the street was speaking to something in me. This desire to have fun, but especially to have fun in a doing nothing kind of way. This—I realized—is the vibe I want to channel for summer 2021. I want to have fun, but I don’t want to overthink that fun. I don’t want to make elaborate plans. I don’t want to rush back to any level of pre-pandemic busy-ness. It was while watching those slightly bored teenagers across the street, making slightly too much noise, living out that actual literal version of pandemic senioritis, that the phrase popped into my head. My own private motto for this season. Forget Shot Girl Summer. I’m talking about Dumb Shit Summer.
Yeah, I thought. I like how that sounds. Dumb Shit Summer. What did it actually mean? Who knows. Where did it actually come from? No clue. (You expect me to understand the things that pop into my head?) This, I realized, is how I want to spend the summer months, with an excess of Dumb Shit. Like a slightly bored teenager, inventing stupid amusements to pass the time, feeling a little bit aimless and occasionally acting a little bit dumb. By dumb, I don’t mean seeking to endanger myself or others. I don’t mean being rude, or obnoxious, or thoughtless toward others. I guess what I mean by acting a little bit dumb (this is going to sound obvious, but bear with me) is not necessarily having to be smart.
We’ve spent the past sixteen months taxing our brains in very specific ways. It’s been a time of hyper-vigilance, of having to constantly assess our risk and adjust our plans accordingly. Is it worth the risk to go visit your family member? Is it worth the risk to get your haircut, or ride the subway? Have I planned out our meals so that I only have to go to the grocery store once this week? Or are we cool with eating in a restaurant? And if we are, do we want to sit inside-inside, outside-inside, or outside-outside? I feel a particular kind of decision fatigue after these past sixteen months. (Strange, isn’t it, that a person can have decision fatigue while living within the tight constraints of a pandemic, but there we are.) While it was always possible to find bright patches amid the pandemic, those bright patches were rife with contingencies: would the weather cooperate? Would everyone get tested? Would the tests come back negative? Would the various comfort levels cohere? Planning an al fresco dinner with friends felt more like planning a military operation. At the end of the day, you couldn’t be spontaneous. You had to be smart about it.
The older you get, the busier you get. What follows is an increase in the value of your time. On this mortal coil, it often seems like a sin to waste any of it. So many different philosophies tend to converge on that same message. There’s the Puritanical redeem-thyself-through-work mindset. But there’s also the hedonistic YOLO mindset, which also says that you ought to seize every moment, carpe that fucking diem, etcetera. Life is short and precious! Are you putting it to good use? Because, after all, it’s disrespectful, it’s wrong-headed, it’s foolish to squander any of it.
But I think back on some of the stuff I did with my friends, back in those earlier teenage years, back before drinking and parties became a thing; our own version of hanging out on the Goldberg’s porch, just because. There was often a feeling of boredom and restlessness, of yearning to break free from repetition, a feeling probably shared by anyone growing up in a small town. We had a lot of time on our hands, and we truly did the most random shit to fill that time. We made up crazy elaborate stories about fake boyfriends who lived in Seattle because … did we really think people would believe us? We had a whole night dedicated to an Elijah Woods movie marathon because … does anyone remember why? We spent hours and hours on Funny Junk Dot Com (RIP), laughing at that race car insanity test until it was hard to breathe. There was never any sense that this time was being wasted, because, I mean, really, what else were we going to do with ourselves? Here, in this town, you have somewhere better to be? Really? Don’t act like you’re too cool for it. You’re not too cool for anything!
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If I am tired of pandemic-decision-fatigue, I am also slightly dreading the return of non-pandemic-decision-fatigue. You remember what that felt like. Are you doing cool things? Are you traveling to cool places, eating in cool restaurants? Better think carefully about how you’re spending your leisure time, your leisure dollars. There are so many options! How do you know which is the right option?
But during Dumb Shit Summer, there is no right option. This summer isn’t the summer to be Cool, or Stylish, or Beautiful, or Smart, or Optimized, or Efficient. Are you kidding me? We just lived through a pandemic. We just lived through a pandemic! Of course I understand the desire to get back to normal, to make up for lost time, but there is no way to actually do that. I’m sixteen months older than when I first heard of Covid-19. No amount of Puritanical work ethic or hedonistic YOLO-ing can rewind that clock. Right now we’re in that liminal space where we’re only just starting to process everything we’ve been through. Liminal spaces can be uncomfortable, but they can also be magical. I would like to embrace this liminal space.
A fragment of poetry came to mind just now. I wasn’t expecting to invoke T. S. Eliot while writing a blog post titled Dumb Shit Summer, but, you know, once an English major, always an English major. I’m thinking of these lines from “The Hollow Men”:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
The shadow—the scolding voice in our head that tells us not to do a thing, that it’s stupid, that it’s a waste of time, that it might make us look foolish—is something I would rather live without this summer. Embrace the act. Let go of the over-thinking. Be a little bit dumb. Let the world catch me. If the time is squandered, let it be squandered.
And will I succeed in this? Probably not. This notion is easier said than done. Even while writing this post, I could feel the shadow creeping in, the inner voice saying: Come on, Anna, is this really a good use of your time? I mean, good grief! Here I am, trying to explain this completely made-up notion of Dumb Shit Summer, having spent a lot of words and a lot of hours on it, and I’m still not sure it makes any sense. Why do this?
But this summer is the summer to flip that question on its head. Why not do this?