April 21, 2006

How to gear up for summer

By Arianna Trujillo-Robnett
Times intern

As the school year comes to a close, the oasis that is six weeks of freedom becomes more and more real.

And as this dream becomes more tangible, one should start planning – either for the end of the world or the start of summer break. Let’s work with the latter for now.

Try to find the perfect job
Now it might seem cliché, but the most practical respite from the insanity of having to deal with younger siblings, boring neighbors and door-to-door salespeople, is a job. Although being a teen might not get you anything higher then minimum wage, it’s more than worth it. You get work experience, an excuse to get out of the house, and of course, money! So get off your butt, and hit the malls. There’s always some random excuse for a gig waiting for teenage applicants.

One-up the job with an internship
While they probably won’t pay you a red cent, internships are like the jobs you actually want, but can’t get yet. For example, if you want to become a nurse, or a lawyer, but obviously can’t fulfill your dream just yet, you can apply for an internship at a law firm or health rights organization. And while the hours may be long, and the work difficult (not that I’m complaining), it will actually be real work, and give you an idea of what you’ll be doing when you get your BA. You get to hang out with knowledgeable professionals, see what they do hands-on, and complete mountains of meaningless paperwork until kingdom come. So get out there, and start looking around. www.idealist.com is a good place to start.

Waste as much time as humanly possible
If you have determined that you will waste every single second of your summer vacation doing absolutely nothing, then good for you! Here are the top five suggestions:

Try to reach the moon using a stepladder. (Give it about three weeks)

Watch “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Matrix,” “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” “Alien,” the “Star Trek” movies, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” and every single Adam Sandler movie ever made, in one sitting (including bathroom breaks and trips for McDonalds breakfast).

Play the Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion five times, try to get a perfect score on PacMan, reach level 42 on Tetris, and draw a happy face on your graphing calculator.

Go to Santa Cruz and try to surf on every single beach a hundred times, eat at every single vegetarian restaurant, and find out how 13 times 4 is 42.

Watch every movie that has the word “America” in the Title or the main theme (“American Psycho,” “American Beauty,” “American History X,” “American Pie”) and find the common metaphorical thread of them all. Or you could just sleep and watch TV, it’s up to you.

Actually try to be productive (after wasting as much time as humanely possible)
Complete everything that you were actually supposed to do during the school year. Like feeding your neglected Neopets, checking your gmail, updating your MySpace, doing your laundry, downloading all the episodes of South Park you missed, learn how to play guitar, go skateboarding in Golden Gate Park, kill the mold monster underneath your bed, and build a time machine, so you can actually do all that stuff your were supposed to do when you were actually supposed to do them.

Find the meaning of life
We know that the answer is 42, but beyond that we actually do have a great deal of work to do, so this is your mission, if you choose to accept it: go to the Dr. Martin Luther King library downtown, in San Jose, and pull out every single philosophical text by Nietzeche, Kant, Aristotle, and the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” stories and transcripts from 1978-2004. Lock yourself in a basement with said literature for three weeks with a bucket of apple cider and some cheese doodles, and when you return, we expect the answer. And for you to share the cheese doodles.

Do your summer homework early
Oh that’s cute. Please note, that you should have fun during your vacation. That’s all that’s important.