“Boy,” we all think as we look back on yet another winter break, “was that ever relaxing!” We use the word “relaxing” here in place of “boring” because it makes us feel better about having just spent five relatively immobile weeks on our parents’ couch watching Sabrina, the Teenage Witch marathons and winning World War II again with our Xbox on the off chance that it turns out we actually lost on a technicality back in the 40s.
So let’s face it: winter break was probably not the most exciting time in your life. I would guess that, overall, it ranks somewhere alongside the first time you tried corn.
The most obvious way to fix this problem would be to spend the massive amounts of free time you have over winter break doing something productive, such as learning to play an instrument or studying Japanese. However, as long as YouTube still exists, that will never happen. Besides, at this point you’re entitled to some time off. I mean, come on, you just spent an entire semester being productive! Or, at least, you meant to, except you and Trent hit such a hot streak on the pong table you just never got around to reading about the Treaty of Adrianople (which I hear is quite fascinating).
Regardless, you aren’t going to be spending your break doing anything like that. Another option, then, is to think back to all the things you used to do to pass the time in high school. After all, if you were able to keep busy in your hometown for four years, you should be able to keep busy for five weeks pretty easily. Unfortunately, if your high school years were anything like mine, you spent them hanging out with people you are now only marginally certain haven’t died yet complaining about how there was nothing to do in your town. So that might not be the best option either.
So with your high school friends now virtually nonexistent, your high school parking lots now too cold to hang out in and your high school family still insistent on doing nothing but telling you the same surprisingly racist story about the time grandpa saw a deer in the backyard that was slightly larger than a normal sized deer, it does appear that your best friends for the duration of break are going to be the television and the Internet. What makes the most sense to do, then, is to complain to the television companies about how they need to come up with more interesting shows or, at the very least, stop giving so much airtime to Jay Leno. I would suggest you do the same thing to the Internet, but I’m not really sure who’s in charge over there. I would assume either Star Wars Kid, or one of his friends.
You know what? Forget all those plans. What you should really do to combat the boredom of winter break is just embrace it. The only other time in your life you’ll ever have to have such a small amount of responsibilities happened when you were a baby, and at that point you were far too busy urinating with wild abandon and not remembering things to enjoy it. So instead of spending all of winter break complaining about not having anything to do, why not enjoy not having anything to do before spending the next 50 years of your life trying to transform your cubicle into a youbicle?
But maybe write a letter to the television network executives anyway. In our nation’s fragile state, we really can’t afford another Jay Leno Show.
