It is August, and as usual my plan for the summer has evolved. If by “evolved” I mean “degenerated.” If by “degenerated” I mean “never existed at all and I am finally admitting it.”

I am one of those people who thought at the beginning of the summer that three months was enough time to change my whole life. I planned to come back in the fall newly fit, organized, energized, having filled out any graduate school applications (having figured out, of course, what I plan to do with my life). I planned to get up when the alarm went off and finish a draft of my thesis by the end of the summer (because of course I have also figured out what my thesis is really about, and not only that, I have found where I saved it on my computer).

Now I think: Oops. As usual, the summer has slipped away, unraveled. The season is like a bad MTV video montage, composed mainly of Metro and cubicle shots. No shots of thesis writing, but that's not what this is about: this is about how summer drifts away.

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan ’02, an English and American literatures and languages concentrator in Lowell House, is associate managing editor of The Crimson. This summer, she is a reporter for the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal.