What the Hell Happened to My Summer? Oh, Right...

The last couple days, I've been snapping awake in the morning - well, early afternoon- with the realization that, oh shit, it's August. It's a similar sensation to those end-of-semester days when I wake up with the realization that, oh shit, I have to write twelve pages of my term paper today. In both instances, I get a bizarre shot of adrenaline that completely rockets me over the usual morning grogginess. More often than not, however, it lasts until just a little past breakfast and my morning shower, at which point I fall into the typical Facebook-Rotten Tomatoes-E-mail slump.

But seeing as how I haven't posted anything all summer, it seems fitting to offer up a brief retrospective account of the summer that has blasted by me in a travel- and booze-addled haze.

Phase One: Why Kevin Sucks at Life; Or, Parents, Ahoy!

So, here's something you probably already know about me: so far in graduate school, I have managed to turn in about 22% of my term papers on time. Most get finished a day or two past the due date but one (on average) lingers for a long time. This year, that paper was my spring semester paper for my Pope & Swift class. I made the awesome choice of writing on a topic which, A) I knew nothing about, B) we never discussed during the whole course of the semester, and C) attracts a particularly dry and cumbersome brand of criticism. So, I took an extra six weeks or so to trudge through a paralyzing morass of painful - excruciating! - work on Jonathan Swift's perception of economic affairs in the early 1720's. And this happened in June, ostensibly the best month in Madison, the pay-off for the purgatorial winters and ball-sweatingly hot late summer months. Yes, I'm that smart.

During that same period, both Jessie's mom and my own parents came to visit for several days each. While both visits were enjoyable in their own right, they were notably diminished for me by that Swift-shaped sword of Damocles lingering over my head. And, it also turns out, it's a huge, huge mistake to have one's parents stay in their apartment for six straight days. Much as I love them, my relationships with my folks has about a four-and-a-half day shelf, after which I slowly regress into a surly, despondent fifteen-year-old. Those first four days, though, were quite enjoyable - my parents had never been to Madison before - and we did all the stuff in the city that I'd been putting off for god knows how long. We toured the Capitol. We went on a tour of the campus. We went to the Farmer's Market. We got my mom addicted to 99. Fun.


Phase Two: Gypsy Life

Once I finally finished the paper - a glorified book report by the time it was done - and got rid of my parents, I spent the requisite week drunk. And then began Jessie's and my July gypsy life. We camped in a state park up by Chippewa Falls with Matt, KJ, Lee, and Jeff, drank a lot of Leinie's (the brewery was a stone's throw away), and played a lot of corn hole. It was awesome. We got drunk in canoes, we toured a brewery, we lit things on fire...a true Wisconsin holiday. I particularly enjoyed watching our friends bound for tenure-track jobs at Cornell enjoy their last days of pseudo-college glory. They really went out in style.

We spent the following weekend in a tent as well, this time with Ben and Renee at a musical festival in western Michigan. The festival, Rothbury, billed itself as an eco-friendly hippie-fest that was all about community and environmental awareness and blah blah blah. In reality, no, no it was not, it was fucking nothing of the sort. Our campsite was in the gulag of the festival grounds, a hastily-shorn hayfield nowhere near bathrooms and about 3/4 of a mile from the nearest potable water (which smelled like eggs). The organizers charged $3 for a pound of ice and $10 for showers and, on top of that, prohibited any food from being taken into the music area (so you'd have to buy an $8 hamburger). To boot, there was no shade, which made it impossible to sleep past 8:00 a.m., at which point you were woken up by either the suffocating heat in the tent or the douchebag across the field who was blasting Biggie AT EIGHT IN THE FUCKING MORNING.

All that being said - and those demons being exorcised - we had an awesome time. We saw some great music, including Modest Mouse (my #1 band to see), Of Montreal, and, in a throwback to our high school days, 311, DMB, and Snoop Dogg. All the shows were pretty awesome, which may or may not have something to do with the two handles of liquor and case of beer we polished off in the three days we spent there. However, the highlight was probably going to the on-site water park: eschewing the overpriced and generally shitty showers, we opted to pay the $20 per person to go to the site's indoor water park, which was actually pretty amazing. After not showering for two days (and spending most of those days in the sun), we got up early and made it to the park before the rest of the hippies filthed it up. God, it was so. Fucking. Good.

Overall, though, it was well worth it. Getting drunk in the middle of field with Renee and Ben, rocking out to a live version of "Down" by 311, shooting down a water-slide in a giant inner tube with three other people - all of it seemed like a page out of my late-teens playbook. And that's a good thing. I had some doubts about having outgrown the whole music festival thing before we went, but those doubts were quickly allayed by the combination of booze, dancing, and good company (that being our friends, not the obnoxious, self-entitled neo-hippies who made up the other 98% of the festival attendees).

Finally, Jessie and I went to visit her mom in West Virginia, by way of Raleigh, NC. It was, all in all, a spectacularly relaxing trip. We flew into Raleigh, visited her aunt's family for a little while, and then drove her grandmother's car through the Appalachian mountains to Jumping Branch, WV. Because I have paralyzing pet allergies - and because Jessie's mom is the most generous person on the face of the earth - she put us up in a resort/state park hotel near her called Pipestem. Our room overlooked the New River Gorge and a swath of mist-shrouded green mountains, the combination of which offered up some stunning sunsets. So, for a week, we just visited with Jessie's mom, sat by the hotel pool, went hiking in the mountains, and sat around our hotel room watching hours and hours of cable TV. God, I missed cable.


Well, I'm getting lazy now, so I'll leave off the rest for the next post. Which I'll write. Soon. Ish. ,