My summer break

Well, such as it is, this is my summer break.

I do have to admit, as an adult, that working summers rather than being completely idle is preferable. (The stereotype of college professors, and also schoolteachers, is that we take June, July, and August off. Some do, probably most don't. (There was a funny one-off joke on the Simpsons once about "Starving Teachers' Moving Company"....lots of teachers DO moonlight during the summer to make ends meet).

I wasn't even that idle as a teenager. A couple of years I took summer college classes, either to try to stay caught up (I took college-level precalc in a desperate bit to try to prep myself for calc, after my high school precalc not going that well. Oh, I passed pre-calc, I just didn't feel like I KNEW it) or to get ahead (while in college, I took Physics and a couple of my "cognate" sciences in the summer). Or I worked, either as a volunteer or for pay.

I didn't have a lot of the "typical" (or perhaps, stereotypical) experiences of the mid-to-late 20th century American teenager - I didn't really go to the beach (we didn't really have one - we had a swimming area called Silver Spring and I guess I went there a few times with friends, but it wasn't like the "gonna go down to the beach, gonna do some beachy things" type beach). I didn't go to sleep-away camp (I did go to day camp, for a few years, and that was fun). I didn't go to the movies much - we didn't have a theater in my town and unless someone older was willing to drive my friends and me to the mall 20 minutes away, we didn't really go to the movies.

And I didn't have those puppy-love summer romances. Well, I did kind of have one but that wasn't until grad school. (I was and remain a late bloomer in many social respects).

But the funny thing is, for as unlike the idea presented in this song that my summers actually were, I still love this song and think about it as the "quintessential" summer song. Perhaps it's partly the chord progression, partly it's the slightly ethereal male vocals - I don't know. It's actually a few years before my time, but one of the few radio stations I liked and listened to (other than good old WCLV, and yes, my fondness for classical music was another way I was unlike the typical American teen) was an "oldies" station - back when "oldies" were actually songs that were new to me, and not just recycled things that I disliked during their prior run when I was in junior high....

I STILL like this song. I still think it's a good pop song.



(And now I GET why when they did "Chad and Jeremy" as potential replacements for Mordecai and Rigby on Regular Show, Jeremy (the ostrich character) had those heavy glasses on....heh.)