Holidays are here

We are in the midst of the best time of the year. In case you didn’t know, I am referring to that period of six weeks that precedes the four tedious school terms each year, the time of year for endless days of sleeping in, chowing down on summer fruit and leftover Christmas food, giving your bedroom a much-needed makeover, watching repeats of Degrassi and Friends that you didn’t get to see during the year and getting away with days spent doing nothing. Yes, the summer holidays are indeed the most enjoyable, more so than the two week breaks between school terms. They last long enough for you to rest rejuvenate, but they simply don’t allow you to get all those things that need doing, done. What frustrates me about the two week break is that, lasting only a fortnight, you have enough time to relax and complete all of the holiday homework you were given in preparation for the coming term, but by the time you have recuperated, the holidays are over and you miss the chance to fix your broken earring and knit that stuffed animal you planned on making to liven up your bookshelf. The benefits of the summer holidays is that you get what I refer to as “The four stages” – to veg out, clean out, fly out and accomplish inner peace.

The first stage describes the first two weeks that mark the beginning of the best time of the year, where you get to sit in your pyjamas on the couch all day reading, sleep all afternoon, post blogs complaining about lack of motivation, or waste time watching daytime shows like The Doctors at lunchtime, munching on chocolates with high sugar content that weren’t consumed during the Christmas festivities. In the second stage, or the weeks following expansive episodes of inactivity, your body feels the need to move, and your motivation returns. You actually manage to use a sweltering night unable to sleep to sort through your school papers that have occupied a corner of your room since exams, coated in a nice layer of dust and resembling a “before” shot of a bedroom makeover. Naturally being quite an organised person, I have a tendency to enter a frenzy of sorting, where I lose all sense of time, preoccupied with the nature of my untidy room, the grotty garage shelf, the cupboard that won’t close.
By the time all of the cleaning has been completed, with outings among friends and days of shopping in between those of tidying, the time has come for the much anticipated family holiday overseas. What can I say? Two weeks in New Zealand takes oneself away from the troubling realities of home life in Australia (what I mean is the knowledge that the days of freedom are limited from here on in), and the sights, sounds and tastes of a foreign country make for a memorable adventure. Upon return from the land of the kiwis, your to-do list has halved in size, with the burden of returning to headache-inducing homework and hot afternoons of long car trips looming like an image that won’t leave you, it hits home that only a week remains to finish the bedroom art you started and to label all of your school books for the year.
At this current point in time, I am in the final days of stage two, preparing for the trip of the year, having completed the majority of cleanouts that need to be done, but suffering from holiday burnout, which is ironic since breaks are supposed to relieve you of the stress a full-on schedule brings. Even so, it is the kind of self-satisfaction-sense-of-accomplishment burnout that makes me feel okay about slaving away late at night, designing the layout of art for my bedroom, because hey, this opportunity only comes around once a year.