When I was in elementary school, I remember one thought crossing my mind on the first day of school.  Every year, I was struck by this crazy, wistful notion: “I wish summer could be longer.”

Oh God, if only I knew.

If my entry this week seems shorter, it’s for one very obvious reason: Not all that much is going on.  Seriously.  It’s hard for me to imagine leaving in two weeks, if only because things right now seem so uneventful.

It must be a dirty secret of Northwestern. The extended summer vacation is meant to break us, to drag us to the limits of our sanity before we can be remolded into productive, well-adjusted members of society.

That’s the only explanation I can offer, at least.  It’s the only possible reason Northwestern would so clearly try to prolong my suffering.  I’ll be fine once I get to school, but right now that’s still two weeks out.  I’ve got friends who are already taking classes.  They’re at school, doing school things, in a school environment.  And they’re all living it up while I’m in Eden Prairie, doing nothing at home.

This all seems like a bad Carson routine. 

“I’m so bored.”

“How bored are you?”

So bored I tried to read Hot, Flat and Crowded!

Ey-oh!  Rimshot, laughter, drop curtains, cut to commercial.  I actually did give Hot, Flat and Crowded the old college try, but I gave that up somewhere around the second chapter.  I am bored, yes, but I am not One Book, One Northwestern-bored.  Maybe there’s something to be said about that.

Interestingly enough, I think Eden Prairie’s summer break is actually a week longer than usual.  School doesn’t start here until after Labor Day this year, so there’s still a week left of that break.

Maybe I should just go back to high school for a week.  It’s not like they’d card me at the door.  I’d put the “super” back in super-senior, roaming the halls with a gusto and confidence unheard of at Eden Prairie High School.

“Look at you pathetic seniors,” I’d say to anyone who’d listen.  “You haven’t even been accepted to college yet.  You have to be here, and I’m just here because I don’t have anything better to do.”

If they haven’t changed my combination, I could even break into some poor freshman’s locker.  Maybe I’d walk back and forth outside the newspaper room, doing it just frequently enough that they’d know I was in the building — large and in charge, as it were.

This is how dire things are.  High school is now preferable to this hellishly, torturously long summer.  This is the pit I have dug for myself — that Northwestern has dug for me.  I would rather be in a high school class than where I am right now, and that should speak volumes as to how overwhelming my ennui has become.

I guess there’s not much else for me to do at home.  I’ll start picking through my personal belongings, making the tough calls about what stays and what comes with.   Maybe I’ll work on my summer homework for Medill or work my way through my Netflix Watch Instantly queue.

With all that said, I’ll admit that there’s one thing keeping me going through all this: In two weeks, for better or worse, boredom won’t be an option.