The Summer Episode

You just got back from an awesome weekend at an awesome beach/lake/ranch house of a close or not-so close friend. You come home to the apartment you'll be living in for the next two months (until July 31st, at which point you'll have that awkward span of 7 to 15 days in which you have nowhere to live until your new lease starts. Hello U-haul, lets move home for a week.) Your roommates all just moved back, and all the little future frat stars are pouring into campus for orientation. That's right. It's summer in Austin.

We like to think of summer as a time to start over. Didn't like the grades you got spring semester? Make it up to yourself in summer school. Tired of your roommates? Yay, you get new ones! Burned out on school? You have two months to catch your breath. Need to lose that 10 lbs you gained in the past year? Well...good luck. Let us know how that goes. Make new friends, work on your tan, try new things. Summer is the time when you've got nothing to lose. We have found that having nothing to lose is often strangely liberating. Summer is almost like the time of year that doesn't count, isn't it? "Yea...I made out with that guy in [insert fraternity here]. But it was summer, doesn't count!"

When we hear summer, we think freedom. We think sun, coconut scented lotion, and remembering how hot the pavement actually gets. During the summer we let go, decompress, let our hair down and soak up life. Summers are for refreshing.

We have developed a solemn resolution to make this summer the best of our lives (for the record, so far so good :-)

So far, we haven't developed firm plans as to how we're going to accomplish that. We've watched a lot of Gray's Anatomy, eaten a lot of late-night honey butter chicken biscuits, and donned some serious summer frat gear (we love seersucker season!). The point is, that we're here in Austin, living the dream. The other day, an incoming freshman said to us, "It still hasn't hit me that I'm coming here, that this is my life." My first thought was, "Girl, it still hasn't hit me yet either." Sure, we've taken a year's worth of classes, been to formals, taken finals, consumed more KA punch than we care to admit, made friends and missed our families (but not enough to actually go home), and come to the close of our pledge year, but we still can't believe that we have it so good. We would ask you to pinch us, but we'll just go ahead and pinch each other in the name of expediency.

We think the theme of our summer should be simply this: to soak it up. With another year under our belt, we have decided that this is going to be the summer that counts. So here's to the impending margaritas, man-tank (otherwise known as manks) and Chaco's sunburns, and straight A's (thank you summer school classes for fitting so well into our partying schedule). We'll be carrying around Smirnoff ice in our innocent-looking Tory Burch summer satchels...you've been warned. ;)

Top Ten Tips for Having a Summer as Awesome as ours:

Step 1: Move to Austin. Duh.

Step 2: Ingest large gusts of air for lunch.

Step 3: Break out the LFO. New kids on the block had lots of hits, chinese food makes me sick. Yea, we're summer girls. (but there will be NO abercrombie and fitch. We'll forgive LFO...it was 1999)

Step 4: Frat hard, frat often.

Step 5: Rinse and repeat Step 4.

Step 6: When your liver can't handle any more fratting, warm up your blockbuster card with seasons of Entourage and Gray's. Duh.

"There's no half-singing in the shower. You're either a rock star or an opera diva."-Josh Groban. We think this pretty much sums up what we're trying to say. Thanks Josh.