Eight Degrees in the Shade

The Totally Dublin guide to frittering away the rest of your summer.

Winter is easy. You got Christmas and New Years and all that cold to contend with that you're too busy dealing with misery and party fatigue to get bored. Summer, on the other hand, is an open book. Excuses you might have applied in the other three quarters don't hold the same amount of water and so you find yourself waking up every day with the weight of expectation that you must do something epic. It's hard. We understand. So we've come up with a list of clever ways to make summer's end come mercifully quicker.

Start a band

This is the grand puba of time-wasting. Not only will the band consume your summer, it'll also strip the few dangling remains of your youth. Watch out. The band you start today might be the same band that turns you into a fat, leather-wearing dipso in twenty years time. If you start a band you need to make sure that its shelf life will not outlast August. Call yourself the Summers or the Heatwaves and try and emulate the Thrills' late July, beach-bound sound. No one will remember you after two months and you will have your life back again. Just ask the Thrills.

Date foreign

Dating someone who doesn't speak your own language is like dating someone who does speak your own language in slow-motion. The amount of information you'll pass in a three-day fling with the girl you went to school with is about the equivalent of a month with someone from foreign soil. Dating foreign will eat your time like a jail sentence, but that doesn't mean it's going to be dull. Complete opposite. You can just play with them by teaching them the wrong names for things - ‘Is that your hand on my salt shaker?' etc, etc.

Fight for a hopeless cause

Cold perhaps - realism generally is - but it stands that most causes don't conclude, they just splinter or drag on for ever. Justice is a French electro band and animals, the environment and women will always come second to the whims of most men. But no reason to get excited, as sad as this is, fighting for a cause will soak up your summer like a towel shirt. There are the meetings to attend, the posters to make and the endless posts to the only people who'll care: Indymedia. Ireland is a particularly good spot for fighting a cause as our politicians are never happier than when they're out in the countryside, wearing a bright red hard hat, about to throw a shovel into 5,000 years of heritage.

Smoke weed everyday

Pretty straight-forward this one, but surprisingly effective. Weed makes pain go away, meaning it can also make your summer hurry the hell up and scoot. In enlightened places like California they give you the stuff on your medical card. It's no coincidence that it's always summer in Cali so they know pain like no other. The beauty about this method is that it can be coupled with and enhance a few of the other methods in the list. Micro grooming, especially, was almost definitely conceived entirely on the back of it.

Micro Grooming

Living on a windy island in the shadow of Britain, it's easy for people in Ireland to grow lazy when it comes to personal decoration. The small dating pool, coupled with that water barrier on all four sides, means that a little effort can bring a big reward. And that just leads to malaise. Instead you could spend a little extra time on the details. Like shave with a tweezers, or comb with an eyebrush. And if you really want to be the ‘f' in effort, you could clip your pubes to resemble Twentieth Century North American skylines. Is that the Golden Gate Bridge in your pocket or are you just a natural redhead?

Time Zone Bingo

This is good. And it's even better if you can get a trusted friend to help out with the logistics thereby keeping you guessing. So, there are 24 time zones in the world. Some, like the one that Greenland has all to itself, are less important than others. Every night for the rest of summer you get this trusted friend of yours to select another time zone and then creep into your home to change your alarm clock, phone clock and every other clock. Some mornings you'll be waking up before you've even slept and eating lunch at 6am. The next day you'll be staying in bed a solid twenty hours because everyone else on the Pacific coast is sleeping too. You'll be so busy coming to terms with jetlag that the leaves will be dropping in no time.

Colour Chart

This is so good it might be art. And if this does end up as a to-scale reproduction in the Turbine Room of the Tate Modern some time next spring, I'll be cursing you so hard your mama's ears will turn blue. How about redistributing the items in your home based on a colour chart? So starting at the door, you'd go from white, through to beige, tangerine, butter, dark ivy and eventually matte black. If might not make getting dressed any quicker, even making a sandwich will probably be a pain in the salt-shaker, but you're not doing this to be time-efficient, are you?

Fall Ill

Yes and no. This is dangerous and might actually make your summer drag on for a lifetime. You don't want to pick up just any old sickness. Some of them kill and others just don't want to have fun. Meningitis for example will make the clocks go slow as traffic and won't even leave you with good stories to tell. If you can, go tropical. Malaria isn't so bad and the recovery time is quick but taken in the wrong dosage you might fall into a coma - good; or die - not good. Dengue Fever is the Silk Cut Blue of tropical diseases. It doesn't last very long and won't kill you, but it does make you hallucinate and, if taken as part of a controlled diet can actually help you lose weight.

Teach yourself to talk backwards

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Words: Conor Creighton