50 Ways I'd Spend My Summer Vacation....

I woke up this afternoon at 3:30pm, the distant and persistent sound ringing in my ears of someone mowing their lawn a few houses down the street. I step into the bathroom and am immediately encased in its icy cool refrigerator stasis, air conditioning pumping more each moment. This is the first idyllic Summer day of 2013, at least atmospherically (technically it's not Summer yet...) And while Summer is far from the most tragic teenage missed connection which occasionally haunts my possible pasts, it'd certainly be one of the easiest to make use of.

See, the thing is, I was depressed for most of my life. No lust for life means no taste for trying things, no interests to tap, and no pleasure even when I tried. Luckily those days are long, long gone, but I ran out of summers long before I learned how to have fun. I can't help imagining all the great things I could have done with a solid season of free time, if just one.

I know how to have fun, now. My real life summers were more about trying to keep my head from falling off, than necessarily having fun. I languished in confusion. I made plans but never had the drive to follow through with them. But today I'm the opposite. I make plans habitually, plan out practically every weekend with special events and unique chances. Now that it's about the destination rather than the mere idea of it, I do exactly the kind of things that would have made a summer really successful and fun. So if I could have one more summer vacation, one more mammoth block of free time, hot sun, and endless possibility, what would I do?

Here are 50 of the things I'd do. In no particular order. Chronologically let's assume I'm still 25 year old me, I just happen to have a few months of guilt-free leisure time for no good reason.

1. Follow Neil Young & Crazy Horse on tour, just for a few shows.
2. Finally learn my way around this neighborhood, completely.
3. Become a regular at the local gay bars.
4. Become a regular at the local library.
5. Read every Julie Anne Peters novel.
6. Buy a region free DVD player, plus Noroi: The Curse and the Sugar Rush TV series.
7. Host an Atmosfear party with my high school friends.
8. Learn how to play the A Song of Ice and Fire themed board game and card game.
9. Write a properly sourced, academic paper about lesbian subtext in iCarly and/or Victorious.
10. Marathon Neon Genesis Evangelion.
11. Reconnect with the people I've lost touch with, from school, from work, from everywhere.
12. Make an effort to meet the people in this area who like good music, TV, movies, and books. Never met 'em but I know they must be out there somewhere.
13. Get completely drunk and regret it immediately.
14. Get a part-time job at a coffee shop.
15. In order to triumph over my general anxiety in this area, force myself to ask out 50 people before the end of summer.
16. Take a walk to somewhere that'll take me all day to walk there.
17. Stay up for a week straight, against all sound judgement.
18. Go see a concert by an artist I don't like, and see if my opinion changes any.
19. Try to find a drama or acting  class to take.
20. At least seriously consider attempting to film a found footage horror movie.
21. Write several strongly worded letters to the School Board encouraging them to put Annie On My Mind in the cirriculum.
22. Greyhound to NYC for a concert.
23. Take photos of the streets at night, it's always so atmospheric and beautfiul with the deserted landscape and the glimmering array of streetlights.
24. Start a podcast.
25. Submit amateur movie reviews to... oh, I don't know, wherever you submit amateur movie reviews to. Probably a lesbian lifestyle magazine.
26. Write a short story and submit it to aforementioned hypothetical lesbian lifestyle magazine.
27. Have an all-night horror marathon once a week, find some people who would be into this (already have a couple in mind)
28. Try to strike up a friendship with someone I meet while walking.
29. Try to strike up a friendship with a customer at work (in this case, at the coffee shop).
30. Try to strike up a friendship with someone at least 30 years older than me, and someone 8 to 10 years younger than me. Apply for Big Brothers/Big Sisters?
31. Watch every single movie in the "Gay & Lesbian Movies" category on Netflix.
32. Start playing guitar again, and learn songs by Ani Difranco and Taylor Swift.
33. Beat Prince of Persia on the Super Nintendo (so hard!)
34. Attend a Libertarian event, it's my political party after all (in name, anyway).
35. Babysit for friend(s) who have kids so that I'll have experience when I eventually have kids.
36. Regularly lift weights (like I used to).
37. Visit the Museum of Natural History, haven't been there since I was a kid.
38. Watch the old Disney Channel shows, see if they stand up to time.
39. See a movie at the theater dressed in an octopus costume. Just to mess with people.
40. Meet one of my favorite authors in person
41. Get a cellphone.
42. Invent a slang word.
43. Go back to ENP and work off the clock for as long as possible until someone kicks me out. 
44. Finish Switched at Birth, Life Unexpected, The Vampire Diaries, and Season 4 of The West Wing. 
45. Start Anyone But Me, Make it or Break it, Enlightened, Lip Service, H20 Just Add Water, Dance Academy, and Teen Wolf.
46. Watch Game of Thrones with someone who hasn't read the books. 
47. Sit out on a candle-lit porch all night just talking and discussing things.
48. Discover a good TV show through pure channel surfing.
49. Toss a Fox Tail around a park somewhere.
50. Admit something really embarassing to someone I think is uber cool.

You may ask.... hey doofus, how come you can't do all these things anyway? What kind of warped little stunted mind would only be capable of doing general leisure activities under the comforting cover of a summer vacation? Well, you could be right. I could be hiding behind a myth in order to alleviate the pressure of having to accomplish such a myriad of things.

But I don't think so. This isn't a bucket list, these aren't things I feel a need to accomplish before I die. These are just ways in which I would have made summer fun. Summer was always so existential for me because I never knew what to do with myself. These are agreeable, exciting activities that would have made for a perfect Summer. The point isn't that these are all things I desperately want to do, the point is how much better equipped to deal with free time I am today than I was back then.  While I still have my job to occupy most of time, it's simply not an issue. But still, maybe there are a few I ought to incorporate to my daily life. ;)

Ani Difranco

Time to tell you a little bit about my latest interest in music...

I've been familiar with Ani since I was a teenager but I never delved all that deeply into her catalogue because, to be perfectly honest, I was afraid of being perceived as a poseur. It was great music but it was tapped into some seriously haunted stuff, I felt like I had no right to empathize with what Ani had apparently been going through. Sure, I had struggled with intense suicidal depression since about the age of 7, but that's grunge pain, Nirvana pain, melancholy, imbalanced chemicals. Ani Difranco's music is like, god... abuse, persecution, what it feels like to be a pariah, the experience of living on your own.

To put it bluntly, I have trouble imagining that Kurt Cobain was ever actually 27 years old. Everything about him makes him seem like a teenager. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Ani feels like she was born 35, her music reeks of experience and the complex maturities inherent to dealing with the adult world. As a naive teenager I felt like listening to Ani might expose me for the mental infant I was, wholly unaware of what the real world was or how to form coherent, consequential responses to it.

Those days now long since obscured by the years, I've been lucky enough to grow up. I'm not that infant anymore, and now I can resonate sincerely and unashamedly with Ani's music. And while it's surely no surprise, I'm pleased to find her legendary status is most assuredly deserved.

Since we've already hit on the conceptual side, we can start into Ani's music from a musical standpoint. First, I want to say, I love acoustic music. But I'm not always fond of stereotypical acoustic music, that lite-rock, crooning stuff. Having a few ballads is bloody fantastic, but I would never listen extensively to an artist like James Taylor, where it's pretty much all ballads. It's just overkill, you need a balance for those things.

Ani's music is almost all acoustic, but it's not at all in the lite-rock crooning category. You can see in her the very best part of Neil Young's acoustic side. Not the "Heart of Gold," Harvest Moon, Comes a Time, Prairie Wind side, no. It's the "Will to Love," "Ambulance Blues," "Broken Arrow," "Last Trip To Tulsa" side, unhinged and biting, personal to an almost embarrassing extent. This is the incredibly unique wavelength Ani surfs on.

Ballads account for less than half of Ani's output, and even when she does ballads, they're not gooey romance tales, they're brooding 8 minute ruminations, psychotic and poignant. Hell, even her hit single, "32 Flavors," is lyrically abstract and 6 minutes long.

And then we get to the other side of the coin, the bulk of what she does, these acoustic songs that don't really fit any mold. First of all, she's a fucking amazing guitarist. The things she plays sound complex as living Hell, like that "Knock on Wood" song by Justin King. All kinds of harmonics flying everywhere and sliding hands and it just sounds like she's a virtuoso without even trying.

And then there's the incredible soulfulness of the grooves. Technical guitar playing tends to lack soul and groove, but Ani has mastered that as well. She controls her melodies almost like a talented metal band does, pulling down the tempo and fleshing out the nuances until it becomes a new melody. Some of her breakdowns would make Pantera jealous.

Basically Ani Difranco is unprecedentedly amazing. It's hard to imagine someone like her could exist all in one, with the acute emotional depth, the virtuosic playing, and even the good sense to control her own career two decades before that mode would become fashionable in the internet age.