Things I Learned this Summer

Summer is finally winding down. With mere weeks until school’s back in session, it’s time for me to start panicking and finish up all my break-time projects before I’m saddled with classwork again.

At the end of every summer, I like to take stock of all the little things I’ve learned, if only to reassure myself that I haven’t entirely blown my vast expanse of free time.

The (partial) list is as follows:

• If you attempt to make divinity candy on a humid day, even if the weather looks perfectly dry from inside the kitchen, the end product will resemble sugar-encrusted blobs of whipped Super Glue.

• It is possible to miss a few problems on a given section of the SAT and still score an 800. (I learned this from a very handy little test prep booklet I picked up as summer reading material, and I have slept better ever since.)

• If you are attending a meeting for an organization based in Dayton, the meeting is taking place in or near Dayton, and many of the members are DHS students, it’s generally a bad idea to wear your “Who Are We?” T-Shirt to said meeting.

• The word “Ultracrepidarian” means “criticizing or giving an opinion beyond one’s range of expertise” and has many excellent applications in daily life.

• A flat-bottomed kayak is an incredibly stable thing. It won’t tip in the wake of a barge or even if you stick your leg into the water. However, it WILL tip if your little brother decides to swim underneath and push up on one side.

• The best time to buy prom dresses is in late June.

How do I know this? Well, while in California and inside a giant shopping mall, a red dress caught my eye. We passed the shop, but I eventually needled everyone into letting me go back and check it out. It turns out that this store was a

Jessica McClintock outlet and that they sold nothing but prom and wedding dresses. I (along with my cousin and her friend) spent the next hour or so trying likely samples on, and the rest of the group stayed there with us. (The male members of our group were subsequently awarded Purple Hearts for their valor under duress.

Hey, has anybody here ever noticed how similar ‘duress’ and ‘dresses’ sound?) Finally, I came across a blue dress that I loved. It had originally been priced at two hundred and twenty dollars (!), but a series of post-Prom markdowns had lowered that figure to eighty-eight.

And, in addition, all the marked-down dresses were an additional fifty percent off! In the end, I only paid twenty percent of the suggested price.

• Never substitute jump rings for clasp receivers. The resulting necklace looks a little bit sad.

• Logic is only an effective weapon against people who appreciate it, so applying newly cultivated debate skills to redeem a turn on the computer from the sibling hogging it never works out well.

• Where there’s a will, there’s a way, even if that ‘way’ involves waiting 10 to 14 business days for the darn supply catalogue to show up.

Hey, what do you know? Maybe I haven’t been terribly unproductive after all.