Sean Glover, The Scroll's satire specialist, slides into May with a metaphorically empty calendar, deprived of any upcoming holidays. This loser will take you through the activities you can comfort yourself with when nothing else is going on around you.
Picture this: it’s a few days after Easter, and all of the events that transpired before and after that holiday have dwindled down. You’re enjoying your candy, gifts, or your vacation to the Bahamas-- if you really chose to do that in the middle of the school year. Maybe you don’t even celebrate that holiday and haven’t had anything exciting happen in your life since New Year's. Now that I think about it, if you’re not the type of person to celebrate Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, or Easter, you probably weren’t much fun at New Year's either. Now, let's pretend you actually are a fun person and you always have a huge party or some thought-out plan of what to do on the holidays. They are your favorite time of year. Halloween? Group costumes. Thanksgiving? Potlucks. Christmas? Secret Santa or White Elephant. But after your Cinco De Mayo Taco Tuesday Party, you don’t have anything else planned until July, or even October (if you hate America, that is). What do you do with yourself? The weather is getting warmer, but the amount of fun, international holidays are becoming slim. How do you cope with that? Well, I’ve got news for you: summertime hobbies exist. And I’ll gladly tell you all about them.
Of course, with COVID-19 restrictions, not everything that was within your “summertime activity” radar from the past few years is available to you anymore. However, as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t stop you from stepping into nature for a moment and taking in the beauty of everything blossoming and living its best life. As seasons change, nature grows and develops, and having time off of school or work can give you the opportunity to take time to yourself and grow and develop, too. Some activities in the upcoming list might just be the remedy for the perpetuating cycle of school, work, practice, or watching anime in the middle of the night and never getting enough sleep because blue light is causing your eyes to melt inside your skull. Others might just be everyday routines that you’re accustomed to already. Whatever it may be, there’s some consideration to be taken into any of them, because we’ll never learn and grow if we don’t try new things (except trying Rocky Mountian oysters-- that’ll be a hard pass for me any day).
One thing that I’ve found that always improves my mood is reading or writing. And no, I don’t mean reading an e-book or typing up an essay on Google Docs (special thanks to Google for letting me use their resources). Having a pen and paper in hand with a cute little notebook and writing some poetry or drawing a picture is quite therapeutic, especially if you actually have the attention span for it. If you feel you’re not inclined in the field of writing or drawing, even opening up a book and skimming through some pages of a story can calm your nerves and ease your mind. Believe me, you don’t need to be artistically inclined to do that. However, as soothing as reading and writing may be, it’s sometimes hard to get lost in your head with these things when the environment around you is noisy or distracting. Believe me, I get it, I have a cat who’s more talkative than I am. This being said, nature is the best place to enjoy time to yourself. Everything within it goes about its own business while still providing beautiful scenery for you to take in and enjoy. Sometimes, it might be hard to access a spot in nature where you alone can enjoy it, but I believe climbing up a tree or even hanging out in a nearby park can still be an ideal way to escape.
From Lisa Ripperton's How To Be a Better Writer? Read. on acultureofreading.com
Stream sampling at BES LTER, June 2002 in a series of images called "Baltimore Ecosystem Study Image Gallery."
On the subject of nature, something to study closely, besides Advanced American Literature homework (shoutout to Mr. Wilson), is the behavioral patterns that many species exhibit, life zones in which plants and animals thrive, and the habitats that they call home. Let’s face it: people are confusing. They say something, then mean something else. They do something, then turn around and do the exact opposite. I held the door open for someone the other day and they stood next to me and held it open, as well, like I was just going to give up holding the door for them unless I stood my ground. It’s odd, and it’s what indefinitely separates us from any other species. However, even though this keen sense of awareness may be a positive thing for our species, there’s always a sense of peace when observing something, arguably, more simple-minded and minuscule compared to us. Besides that, it also just provides you with the opportunity to educate yourself on why some organisms live closer to the water than others, or why a specific species lives in a pack instead of traveling on its own. Even if I don’t know why fish travel in schools, at least I know that white, frat boys stick together in packs because they boost each other’s egos, and when they are by themselves, they can’t help but reflect on their fragile masculinity or the fact that they’ll be in crippling debt to their college, even after they get married and have kids.
Studying these kinds of habitats can also have a lasting emotional impact on you, especially when realizing how many ecosystems suffer great losses from pollution. Tons on top of tons of waste go into the ocean every year, to the point where there is an island-sized mass of plastic that just floats in the Pacific Ocean. Knowing this may make you feel hopeless, like nothing you do will reverse the insane, negative changes that people have inflicted on the environment, but even the smallest amount of help counts. Believe me, people lose their wallets at the movie theatre all the time, and as tempted as I am to just shove it in my pocket and feed into my Pokemon plushie addiction, I return the wallet to the front counter and wait for someone to claim it. It makes an enormous difference to one person, and so does cleaning the environment. Even if you walk along a public trail and pick up bits and pieces of loose trash for a few hours, you’re still directly saving plenty of animals from ending up with a tragic fate. This also just gives you a sense of fulfillment, because there’s no way you can walk back down that trail and not help but feel great about what you did.
Image: Caiaimage / Trevor Adeiline / Getty Images
Image: E+ / Adventure_Photo
Whether it’s with friends, family, or a significant other, something that’s also guaranteed to make you feel great is simply spending the night with nature. Yeah, sure, a bear could easily sniff around my tent, identify the cheese and crackers laying right next to my sleeping bag, claw through my tent, and eat me alive, but at least the sky will look really beautiful when that happens. Besides that insane, fabricated reality, camping is a really therapeutic experience in order to reconnect with nature after living in the midst of a very stimulating time. With TV, movies, video games, phones, laptops, and gaming PCs with 43.5 GB worth of Genshin Impact content on them, our brains have literally been rewired to draw our attention to flashing screens and conditioning noises and never to give ourselves a moment to rewind and take in the sweet serenity of lakes, rivers, forests, meadows, and fields. With this in mind, camping allows you to live simply-- to experience different ways of cooking, cleaning, sleeping, and entertaining yourself. Your worries seem to wash away underneath the canopy of trees: your job, your car, your home, your classes, your family. All of these structures that format our lives are rendered useless when we take even the slightest step away from them.
Something I find very calming and that hits much closer to home than camping is riding bikes. Now, it doesn’t have to be just bikes, as some people prefer roller skating, skateboarding, or even riding scooters (and if you enjoy riding scooters, unironically, what are you doing with yourself?) Either way, these things help the blood pump through your body and keep you moving, while not having to focus on your steps, breathe, or complete goals. Doing these activities for fun helps you focus your mind on the environment around you and allows you to take a breath from anything else. Now, I would recommend taking nice drives on top of the hills to get extraordinary views of the city, but driving requires quite a bit of focus, especially on the people around you. You may be spacing off while you drive, but other people aren’t aware of that, so it’ll ultimately be your fault if you swerve out of your lane and cause some mentally deranged person to floor the gas and run straight into a convenience store. (if I had a nickel for every time someone drove straight through the Highland Market, I’d have two nickels, which is not a lot, but it’s strange that it happened twice.) Instead of driving, I’d recommend investing your time and energy into something more eco-friendly, that gives you the relaxation and exercise you need while still being affordable and low-risk.
Cougar Hall (foreground) and Ben Crookston ride e-bikes in Eagle Mountain, Utah. (Nate Edwards/BYU Photo)
Taken by Justin Britton
From Biking vs Skateboarding: Which Sport is Better? on eliteskater.com
Ladies, ladies, please. I know I’m the most hilarious person on The Scroll, but you don’t have to be all over me because of it. Thank you all for reading through the summertime activities I recommend for anyone who’s sick and tired of the holiday gap between April and October, and I hope you’re able to get around to a few of these. In the long run, I think they’ll really improve your mood and make you see the world from a different perspective-- one full of beautiful sights, sounds, colors, and Scroll satire articles.
