Was your summer less than exciting? Maybe you sat on your fine ass watching three straight months of All My Children. If a first-year, perhaps you allowed your parents to convince you that college would entail a full summer of preparation and spent the entire time searching for the perfect shade of blue extra-long twin sheets. Or, more likely you just participated in an internship that left you facedown, drooling on your desktop.
Either way, if you got a banana for every time a well-wishing student asks how your summer was during the first week of school, you’d be able to feed the monkeys in the National Zoo for a year. How to answer each interrogation is a conundrum indeed. Either you tell the truth, boring yourself and the inevitably attractive person who started the conversation, or nonchalantly lie about your exhilarating summer.
What to do? When pondered, the choice isn’t as tough as it seems. A nicely exaggerated fib will serve as a conversation starter that can always evolve into a joke, while the truth will predictably evoke a smile and nod leading nowhere.
For the beginning liar, here are a few options: feel free to personalize as you see fit. “So, ___, what did you do this summer?”
A: You know how (insert band) toured all summer? Well, this summer I did too. My cousin knows this guy whose sister’s boyfriend manages the hiring for the company that… well, basically, I loaded buses for (band)’s summer concert series. It was hot.
B: My friends and I rented a beach house in (insert nearby beach town), just a block away from the water. All summer long, we surfed and swam, camped, rode ATVs on the dunes and played football. That is, when we weren’t busy finishing kegs on the sand. Yeah, it was dope.
C: I got my motorcycle license and blew every penny I’d saved since eighth grade renting a (insert motorcycle brand) for a month and a half. I cris-crossed the entire country. Skydiving in Cali, line dancing in Kansas, bungee jumping in Michigan and one not quite memorable night in Atlantic City … it left me broke, but it was quite a summer.
D: I spent the summer on a cliff top in (African nation). We did yoga and meditated every day at sunrise. All afternoon we fed the orphans in nearby villages with the Fufu we made by mashing Cassava in giant mortars. All in all, I found my inner peace.
So what if your summer was less than exciting? No one has to know what really happened but you. Exaggerate. Embellish to your heart’s content, because you control your destiny, both future and past.
