I think I just said goodbye to my last summer vacation ever. Since I’ve graduated from college, I no longer have an excuse for working a mindless job and spending the rest of my time on my best friend’s porch drinking boxed wine. Now I have to spend summers like every other adult: eyeing happy hour nervously and planning weekend trips to the beach.

In my ideal world, every summer would be spent like the ones on Beverly Hills, 90210: We’d hang out at the beach, help the occasional war veteran and be sent to France to get over a bad break-up. But this world is not ideal and those kinds of summers are unrealistic for anyone who is not named Donna Martin.

To quell my sadness over my impending adulthood, I’ve decided to create a timeline that details the past six summers of my life.  Buckle up. It’s going to be one narcissistic ride.

Summer of 2005

According to old entries on my Livejournal, this summer totally sucked. I had graduated high-school and was in the throes of teenage boredom, spending most of my time taking sad webcam pictures like the one above and being bummed about my ex-boyfriend, who at this point, had started seeing a boy who was a lot cuter than me despite an addiction to crystal meth.

Bored and struggling with our teenage hormones, my best friend Becky and I both started to hook-up with this genius hippie freak we knew from school. Initially, it felt weird sharing a boy, especially not knowing if he was gay, straight or just suffering from the same feelings of boredom as us, but it seemed like a fun sexual experiment that we could write about when we were older. Plus, it made us feel really evolved and French to say that we were hooking up with the same dude and it didn’t matter because sexuality is a grey area, okay?!

When I wasn’t busy exploring the fluid world of sexuality, I was starting to experiment with drugs. A friend of mine had gone to Mexico and brought back these muscle relaxers called Soma, which my friends and I took for a week two days straight. We would rail them on old issues of Rolling Stone at Mom & Dad’s house and then literally go shopping at the mall.They made you feel like jelly and if you took too much of them, your muscles would go into weird spasms but they were fun, I guess. The last time I did them was during my sophomore year of college and I ended up in the fetal position watching Titanic. Weird.

Summer of 2006

The summer after my freshman year of college, I moved into an apartment complex that was populated by drug addicts and weirdos. I was even convinced that my landlady, Barb, was addicted to drugs because she would act paranoid if I asked her simple questions like, “Where do I send the rent check?’ Once I came to her apartment when she had a full-on nosebleed and when I inquired about the blood that was dripping down her nose, she immediately got defensive, blaming the poor air quality and shut the door in my face. To top it off, she owned pet Iguanas which is something a cokehead would own.

Around this time, I became super into The Cobrasnake and subsequently started dressing like a complete and utter asshole. One night, my friends and I bribed a bouncer to let us into Cinespace Tuesdays which, in the summer of 2006, was totally hot and DJed by Steve Aoki and DJ A.M. It was also the place where The Cobrasnake took photos of Cory Kennedy and was at the height of his hipster powers. He could even get laid, if only by 16 year-old girls in gold lamé bodysuits.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t get laid this summer. In fact, I didn’t kiss a single boy. I’d like to think that dressing exclusively in jogging shorts was the reason behind my summer of celibacy but I don’t think that was it. It had more to do with the fact that I was too busy being surrounded by bros and beer cans to even have a chance with a gay. Since my apartment acted as the unofficial party place for my friends, it became a magnet for beefy straight boys who wanted to mack on all my girlfriends. Everyone had sex in my apartment except for me- including my best friend who had anal sex on my couch shortly before it was given away to my grandmother.

Summer of 2007

Summer in a nutshell: I moved to Los Angeles and was hit by a car (not in that order). I had to go to physical therapy every day because I couldn’t move my left hand, write or walk properly but I still managed to have fun. I listened to a lot of good radio, took my painkillers and chilled out. Sometimes, it got really boring though, as this old entry describes:  ”(My best friend and I ) established a routine of waking up late, driving aimlessly around L.A., eating lunch, getting coffee and then waiting till we were hungry again so we could go out to dinner. If we were feeling particularly adventurous, we would take some of the painkillers I received from my accident and go swimming. It’s like we were on The Hills but without the cute boys and spectacular lighting.”

Summer of 2008

Summer of 2008 had a major split-personality disorder. It began with me having surgery on my hand (a procedure that stemmed from my accident the summer before) and living in Los Angeles with a girl from Oklahoma that liked to refer to herself in the third-person. Luckily, my doctor prescribed me 8,000 Percocet and my apartment had a Jacuzzi bathtub so I was able to handle everything with a false sense of euphoria.  Halfway through the summer though, I moved to an apartment that was located next to a prostitution ring in an extra-gay part of West Hollywood to begin work on a spec script for Gossip Girl with my writing partner. The process was arduous and by the time we were done with our script, we wanted to burn it along with our friendship.

Summer of 2009

This summer was equally schizophrenic, having been spent half in New York and half in L.A. In New York, I started an at-home internship for a pop-culture website called, Popsense, which, although funny, was run by NYU students who were a year younger than me. When I wasn’t pondering the cultural value of Heidi Montag, I was busy making out with a boy who made no sense but was perfect for right then. (Perfect for right then turned into perfect for three months in the fall and not-so perfect for a month in the winter).

I went to Los Angeles to have my last surgery (getting hit by a car fucks your shit up) and spent the remaining month and a half of summer in an arm cast, sun-fried and stoned. All the while, I lived with my ex-boyfriend from high school in West Hollywood which was as bad of an idea as it sounds. At this point, my decision-making skills had become compromised by a diet of Vicodin and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf mochas.

Summer of 2010

With my summer fling and summer “job” both kaput, it’s safe to say that my final summer is over. This is what happened: I embarked on an internship with Interview magazine which turned out to be interesting, tedious, life-affirming and demoralizing.  When I wasn’t getting an inside-look into the magazine world and questioning my career path, I was enjoying a risky summer fling with my best friend’s other best friend/roommate. Our romance included lots of discussions of “Should we or shouldn’t we?’ and fantastic blowjobs, the latter of which I will miss dearly.

So there you have it. That’s a wrap on Careless Youthful Summers. Join me next year for the sequel which will be called, Young Professional Having a Midtown Meltdown.