A Totally Normal Summer Bucket List
🪣⛱😎
Happy May long weekend — aka the unofficial kick-off to Canadian summer.
For the first time in four years, I’m not moving, changing jobs, or social distancing for the season.
I’m as free as a drug testing kit at an EDM festival.
Since this is also the last summer before I turn thirty (woah), it’s the perfect time to honour the teenage tradition of creating a Summer Bucket List.
Caveats: I have no gel pens. I have no stickers. I didn’t even use lined paper.
Below is an ultra-specific, bordering on too personal, list of 51 things I want to do before September.
What else would you expect from me?
My 2024 Summer Bucket List
Jump into Lake Ontario without saying “ew”
Get under :30s in the New York Times Mini
Make at-home iced coffee (that’s that me espresso)
Make more frozen treats in general
Dance in the rain like I’m in Step Up 2: The Streets
Bake scones
Dessimate my asshole neighbour with the perfectly timed passive-aggressive comment
Find the perfect little black skort
Do yoga outside
Fight the urge to go for a “quick jog” in the middle of July when I know I hate running. It’s always discouraging. I don’t know why I do it every year. You will not wake up and suddenly become a runner. Stop pretending.
Say “no” to an invitation without feeling guilty about it
Host an outdoor movie night
Don’t get a single sunburn that peels
Watch Olympic breakdancing and commit to understanding the scoring
Check-in on the eel pit (that’s that eel espresso)
Ignore the Instagram ads about that face-sculpting laser thing. You know it’s a scam. It’s always a scam
Take myself on a writing retreat
Try pickleball and don’t cry if/when I’m bad at it
Go bird-watching just to see what all the fuss is about
Avoid the resurgence of boat shoes
Log all my outfits for 3 weeks (inspired by Downtime, inspired by The Wardrobe Edit)
Go to a tarot card reading and try not to be a total cynic about it
Always have enough change in my wallet in case I see an ice cream truck (if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready, ya feel?)
Plan a road trip
Dust the baseboards
Wear shorts without being self-conscious about my legs (just once!)
Have a digital detox weekend: No phone. No laptop. No tv
Go to the drop-in still-life drawing class down the street
Wake up early to see a sunrise
Stay up late to see a sunrise (this is a stretch goal)
Make a s’more on our teeny tiny little propane fire bowl
Re-read The Hunger Games (tween girl summer round two)
Run through a sprinkler
Take mushrooms and roll around in our backyard (to be combined with #27)
Avoid learning how to use the lawnmower so Mark always has to cut the grass
Go to the zoo
Throw out all the socks and underwear that I don’t wear. Why is this so hard? They are uncomfortable. I should do this right now.
Successfully grow 2-3 vegetables in our garden
Successfully keep raccoons away from said garden
Have a picnic
Sit on the grass in shorts and don’t get stressed that ants might be trying to crawl in my underwear. That doesn’t happen. You are just crazy.
Make a plan to use all my health benefits before the end of the year
Plan a date night at a Toronto speakeasy
Don’t chicken out from getting a photo at said speakeasy
Have fun nails all summer
Go to a museum
Submit an article for our very local, very wholesome, neighbourhood newspaper
Buy cute pyjamas so I can sit on the porch with my coffee like the lead of a made-for-tv movie about a coastal mystery
Make Koolaid (when was the last time you had Koolaid?!)
Stop being a little bitch and actually try to promote this blog instead of brushing it off and being weird about it
Hit 50,000 words of my novel draft so I can edit this fall (gah!)
If you got this far, you are now my accountability buddy. Surprise!
Let me know what’s on your list, and we can keep each other honest.
If you’re not trying to help me have the best summer ever, why are you even here? What else are free Substack subscriptions for?!?!
Help! There’s So Much Pop! Vulture. This article dissects all the pop vibes you can groove to this summer. More importantly, it perfectly nailed the description of Chappel Roan’s new single, “Here for a good time, not a long time. And kinda hating it.” Word.
From doomscrolling to sex: being a boy in 2024, The Guardian. We are living in a hellscape. This article proves it but also somehow gives hope for the future.
He said it was “quite common” among his friends to record their partners on their phones giving verbal consent before having sex. Sometimes, he said, they recorded again midway through – this time to make sure that the girl was happy to “do something different or something” – and sometimes the phone was left recording the whole event … “to make sure”.
Gilding The Cage, The Review of Beauty. I wasn’t kidding about the hellscape.
“It’s an art form,” Kim Kardashian said of breathing in the corseted gown she wore to the Met Gala last week. From Rollo May’s The Courage To Create: “In [Plato’s] later, beautiful dialogue, the Symposium, he described what he called the true artists — namely, those who give birth to some new reality … As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness.” The ability to inhale in spite of squeezing your internal organs is not art, of course. It doesn’t break from the given, or bring anything new into being. This is the “crucial distinction,” May writes, “between art as artificiality (as in ‘artifice’ or ‘artful’) and genuine art.”
🎙 Hunter Harris is starting a podcast for “connoisseurs of mess.” Is this play about us?
🤝 I have two personalities: One is watching The Jinx Part Two, the other is bingeing Bridgerton
🎧 The bop of the summer: Looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. 6’5". Blue eyes. Finance,
All hail Short King Summer
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