How to avoid the usual start of the year questions

On a rousing FDOC, awkward, insubstantial and boring conversations were commonplace with second-tier friends. Many students will ask the question “How was your summer?” or other recurring favorites such as “Where are you living?,” “How is your significant other?” or “Have you beaten Starcraft II yet?” I’ve devised multiple methods over the years to avoid these pointless questions and conversations so we can all delve back into our conversations lamenting the fall of Ruckus Player, Juicy Campus and the New York Knicks.

The first method to starting a good conversation is being around your friends over the summer so you don’t need to rehash the obvious; although, admittedly, it’s probably too late to implement this plan. I saw many of my friends in “The Dirty D” over the summer, although I mostly served as an extra nerd person for LAN parties. A second part of this plan is to continually tweet what you’re doing, so hopefully everybody will already know the narrative arc of your summer when you return to school.

Of course, the lazy alternative is to simply walk around with a sandwich board explaining what you did; I pioneered this strategy after breaking my arm. On the outside of my sling, I wrote “Freak Knitting Accident” to explain how I injured myself. Aside from being kicked out of the extreme knitting club, this idea had few ramifications while eliminating useless babble. If you advertise what you did this summer, perhaps explaining to people that you built homes for underprivileged barnacles will make you seem a little less bizarre.

If you want to take laziness to the extreme, there is the Office Space strategy: don’t actually do anything. Last summer one of my friends made a blog, in which he tried to tell us how boring doing nothing was. Nobody really asked him about his summer because, well, he didn’t do anything. How can you make that interesting? Also, juxtapose the amount of time it takes to say “nothing” versus even giving a vaguely descriptive job title such as “metabolic research assistant”.

Speaking of blog making, you should make a blog to write out what you did. People will either a) know what you are doing by reading your blog or b) disassociate from you because your entertainment involves writing a blog. Blogging is OK for comedic purposes or if you are in a foreign country and want to share all the “weird stuff” you do like eat healthily and use well-designed public transportation.

You could also go one step further and just don’t come back until classes actually are starting. Everyone knows we all go to the first day of class even though it likely involves absorbing useless information. How many classes have you had in which they actually do stuff on the first day? (Pratt students: 5 this semester) I mean, I’d love to play name games and read the syllabus out loud in class, but I have better things to do like write columns.

Of course, you could go the normal route and simply come back and have to explain what you did at least once per hour. Just know that means you also have to listen to other people’s stories at least four times as much. In spite of everything I just said, it’s nice to have a built-in conversation starter at the beginning of the semester with everyone.

But imagine: if you never had to talk about your summer, you could quickly move on to more intelligent conversation starters like “I love Writing 20 because I don’t have to choose between awesome classes!” and “The freshman meal plan is nice because you don’t have to choose where to eat!”