Deconstructing my platonic ideal of a summer and pretending I'm 90 years old

Silver Lake Reservoir //

I had to send my friend a movie trailer this morning, which I watched back fully, and at the end of the video came a recommendation for one I'd seen before: How to Have a Summer Before It's Over by Caroline Winkler, YouTube's good chaotic Millennial design aunt. Design in the literal sense, yes — she's an interior designer — but I see her as essentially having dedicated her media career to helping people understand the design of a good life, both in the meta and mundane.

(It delights me that Blogger hasn't updated the aspect ratio of its video previews from 5:4 to match 16:9) 

The framing of the video is kind of funny to me; I never romanticized summer as a kid, because I hated being alone. I didn't live near my school friends for any summer of my life — I was a private school scholarship kid whose parents usually drove them in from afar. When I finally made it to public high school, I made friends in the farthest parts of the district from me, and none of us had cars. And then I transferred to boarding school, which was easily the worst arrangement. 

The idea of having a summer didn't resonate with me until college, when I started taking summer internships in cities away from where I grew up. I spent a summer in San Francisco, a summer in LA, a summer in New York City. I fell in love in one of those summers. I started to associate the warm weather with good things, with freedom.

After I left college and worked at a small, somewhat disastrous job, I quit and I flew to Europe for the first time. I met up with one of my dear friends in Oslo, from which we flew to Vienna, then took the train to Geneva. I spent over a week in Switzerland, living at her apartment while she traveled elsewhere, and another friend came and joined me in Geneva. We took the train to the alps and hiked; we got lost and ended up in Zurich; and we took the train to Lyon and Paris, where we met up with my then boyfriend. After we flew home to LA, and the first thing I remember doing was play catch at the Silver Lake reservoir at dusk. I was having a summer. I finally got it. 

Now, summer consists of absorbing the sun, accepting the rain, listening to music, drinking coffee slowly, little raspberry tarts, and laying in the grass with people you love. Feeling unabated adoration. Adventuring, roving, shiny tan shoulders, making art, stone fruit.

Caroline said three things that stuck with me: 

1. Play back the movie of an idealized summer in your head. Then break it down into its constituent parts — what are the things you look forward to on your dream vacation? Waking up early, having a special coffee, eating good fruit, yadda yadda. You can pick those out and just do them at home for a lot less effort and cost. Just do them for yourself now. Give yourself as much many pieces of summer as you can manage to design into your day without disrupting it. 
2. A lot of people feel like they can't grant ourselves a summer because of the things in our lives we haven't yet figured out. I've been telling myself that now is the time to grind, to catch the wave before it leaves me behind. But one day we're going to look back on this period of our lives — all the uncertainty, all the solo adventuring — and yearn to be in it again. Close your eyes and pretend you're your 90 year old self (advice I've heard in a lot of places recently), and imagine someone comes by and asks if you want to be teleported back to the time when you were young and curious and facing uncertainty. You say yes and open your eyes and you're here. You can live it with so much more romance, so much more love toward yourself. 
3. Stretch every day, at least once. For your later self.

I took this at dinner on one of the last nights in Paris. These two men came to dinner separately and ate quietly by themselves, observing the rain. 70 and 20, perhaps.