I was beginning to look forward to this summertime’s recreational goodness. Of course, looking forward to things is one way of ignoring the fact that I’m ridiculously bored right now. In August, as is tradition, my family will be renting a house on the beach at the New Jersey shore. For a week, various permutations of the five of us and our myriad cousins and aunts and second-cousins and pets will be there, a few steps from the beach in a bliss revolving mostly around the consumption of pina coladas, the ability to remove sand from crevices previously unknown in the ourdoor shower before entering the house, and the functioning efficiency of the central air. Last year, during this week of holiday lightheartedness, we were without air conditioning or an outdoor shower. Sand dusted the tiles in the hallway kitchen. Ants marched in tiny black regiments across the walls and over the fiberglass tub in the downstairs bathroom. Upstairs, the decor spun on a dizzying axis of poop brown and mauve. There was a giant wooden ship’s steering wheel hung in the living room. In my room, the sun beamed in past the Mickey Mouse curtains with such intensity that I awoke every morning before seven thinking I’d be greeted by the onset of nuclear winter. Of course, by noon I wanted to drown myself in the Atlantic, after several hours of contemplating the size and blinding whiteness of my stomach. Two days into our stay, I had read each of the five books I’d brought with me and the New Yorker, and was considering purchasing a copy of Bop! along with my flip-flops at the Five and Dime.

So when I read Will Leitch’s Life as a Loser column today, I felt that I had come to a stunning realization right along with him. He says:

I posit that the beach is boring. If the sun wasn’t shining on us, going to the beach would be the exact same thing as the rest of our tedious, pointless lives: just sitting around, wondering when’s something’s going to happen. The only way anyone ever puts up with going to the beach is by bringing something else to do – reading something, listening to headphones, or finding someone to talk to. Going to the beach is like riding the subway, except it gives you skin cancer.

Still, I can’t wait to get out of this place.