Every year when finals week rolls around in May, I usually switch into summer mode and stay up late at night finishing papers that I didn’t write on time. It’s something that happens every year, usually involving sitting outside in my pajamas on my porch, writing about Shakespeare or some other long dead author. When classes are finally done, I start feeling guilty for not having any plans for the summer. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do something productive like get a better job or an internship or something that will help me in the future (all this pressure we live under) but I usually don’t and instead sit around reading and drinking beer when I’m not at work. The summer flies by in about seven minutes, I think and then, when the end of August is upon me, I wake up on the first day of class wondering why it’s so early and why I can’t go back to sleep and what kind of a society have we created that makes us do things we don’t want to do when we’re all basically good people who don’t deserve to be forced into things.

The fact of the matter is that I didn’t do much this summer. I worked a lot, I guess, and avoided bars because I don’t have enough money to finance any kind of drinking habit. I probably was a bit anti-social, but all in all it worked out to my financial gain. I had a lot of big plans just like I usually do for the summer but only a few of them were actually accomplished. I wanted to go on a road trip to see the Civil War battlefields of the Northeast but when my car needed major surgery, I decided that anything involving driving was a bad idea. So I got a bike and rode around late at night when there were no cars on the roads and the city smelled fresh and looked clean. I saw a lot of places in Buffalo I’d never seen before, including an incredible ride down by the river that took us all the way out into the harbor. It looked like another city down there, and gave me a new respect for the things you can find here if you look hard enough.

I made myself a reading list and actually got to about half of it. It’s pretty easy to find a lot of interesting things at the public library. I went down to the Central Library in Lafayette Square, the one that looks like a shopping mall. I read an original manuscript that Mark Twain wrote and I also found some old books that were pretty boring but looked important because they were old and were probably really meaningful to someone. The library is great. You can even put books you want on hold and then pick them up later, which is basically what Amazon.com does for a lot more money. When I was on break at work, I sat outside by the back of the building with my ham and cheese sandwich and read whatever book I was on at the time. It made things seem to slow down a bit.

Seeing as I work at a movie theatre, I saw a few movies for free but not three a week or anything. I’d come close to living there if I did that. The best part about work is people watching, actually, and we get all kinds. Everyone loves movies. And they love yelling about the prices, for which I can’t really blame them. Every so often I’d get to talking to a customer about the movies, but not really because there isn’t much to say about Rush Hour 3. The sad part was that I started living my life around what movies were coming out on certain weeks, and the days seemed to blend together into a big giant mess of early opening shifts and late nights after midnight shows. I worked a few mornings at 6 a.m. to open the building for a church group that used the theatre as a home base for their Sunday services. I’d forgotten how different everything looks on the waking up end of 5 a.m. Sometimes I was up before the sun.

Now that the semester is starting again, I’m still in summer mode. That doesn’t seem as if it’s going to change, at least not until the leaves start to change colors. Then maybe I’ll realize this is serious fucking business. Until then, it’s pretty nice to sit on a bench outside Clemens and watch people go by.