[Summer Contest Entry 2012] Leonard267's Summer Vacation

My friends, the last time I have checked, the name of the competition is called the 'Summer Writing Contest'. So I, Leonard267, decided to abuse this contest as a platform to complain about my sorry, unromantic, hot as hell summer vacation, knowing full well that though whatever I write barely qualifies as a story, it is still writing nonetheless.

When the examinations ended at late May and I was made to go through 3 straight months of vacation, all I could fill my mind with was pure resentment. The first year of my studies in univerisity was a baptism of fire. I had only 3 months to go through half a dozen of courses of which I have little to no background knowledge. Compare that with the 6 months of preparation before a major examination at grade school (or whatever you call it).

After some thinking, I realised why I am only given 3 months of time to learn, go for the examination and fail the examination:

The bloody university bloody has a bloody long bloody vacation that bloody gives me a bloody bloodlust that bloody stayed in my bloody mind to the bloody moment I am bloody typing this bloody story.

And it did not help matters that the first thing my mother said to me after the examinations was not about how well I did for the examinations but rather about my non-existent love life. I can't recall much about what she said then, but this was what I heard,

"My son, you should get yourself a girlfriend so that by the end of this decade, your chances of getting married will be higher. You should get yourself a girlfriend who is older than you (because you are an immature wreck and I would like someone else other than myself bear the drudgery of taking care of you for the rest of your life).

I think I may have made up the last part about myself being a wreck; my memory is rather foggy where romance is concerned due to that issue being too depressing for me.

I did not listen to my mother for my thoughts turned from romance and getting a girlfriend, to marriage and exhortations from both government and society to commit myself to marriage, then to misogyny because anyone with common sense and of the opposite sex would not come within a mile near me (and I hate them for not coming near me) and then to misanthropy because I begun hating the people who fall in love with members of the opposite sex and then it extended to any living being that is capable of falling in love!

For goodness sake! If society, the government and my mother want me to get a
girlfriend or to put it in a less roundabout way, get married, they ought to make marriage mandatory! The military for example, practises the buddy system which involves pairing strangers together, who will be very close to each other as the military begins their months-long routine of torture called military training. Why can't we do it for marriages?! It worked well for the military! Life is like military training, except that it is life-long!

I would implore anyone who happens to be powerful, reading this little composition of mine and so happen to be deluded as me to really consider my proposal!

These angry thoughts preoccupied me for much of June until I came upon a website (I think it is called Fakku, I don't remember) and discovered that looking at pictures and cartoons does make me satiated and gratified in the most devious way I can't put into words. It puts me off entertaining angry thoughts about romance even though I had do a lot of washing up. Strange how looking at pictures makes me physically and mentally dirty.

And of course, just as I thought that my problems or at least my feelings of resentment would go away by gawping at pictures, reality came back very slowly but surely. I have nothing to do this stupid vacation and I am not happy about that.

So, in order to kill time, I thought I'd spend the next few weeks thinking about what to do for this vacation and sure enough, I had come to this conclusion that has nothing to do with my plans for the vacation:

I HATE SUMMER!

This is coming from someone who experiences summer 12 months a year. It is hot and humid all year round and this causes a few problems of which I would be more than glad to whine about. I would like to classify the 'summer' climate here into 3 stages.

The first stage would be the hot weather. In fact the weather can be so hot, bushfires erupt all over the country. And considering that more than half the country is covered with vegetation, I'd better prepare to learn how to adapt to life in a flaming country. Of course, this being a hot country, expect sunburns, spending all your time indoors with the air conditioning and fans at full blast, myopia and DNA mutation (Case in point, you come here white, one year later you go
home black)!

The second stage would be the haze. After the bushfires erupt, neighbouring countries think that it is also a good idea to set their forests alight too. Due to our combined efforts in setting things on fire be it intentionally or not, we managed to create a lovely atmosphere. Lovely atmosphere being the prevalent smell of things burning hundreds of miles away, grey, gloomy and depressing
skies, and health-damaging haze that is likely to cause conjunctivitis, breathing problems and cancer.

The third stage would be rain. And when I say 'rain', I mean torrential rain, rain that people with an ounce of sanity would not like, rain that is nearly indistinguishable from hurricanes.

Now, I have mixed feelings about this stage, feelings fleeting between sadomasochism and pure intense rage. After the scorching heat and the choking haze, you would be glad to see a little rain wash it away and cool things down a little. Then as the days pass, the little drizzles mutate into something rather cataclysmic to the extent that you would think that God went back on his
word when he promised Noah never to inundate the world again. Thanks to the rain, I am beginning to develop a love-hate relationship with the rain and signs of schizophrenzia. And I hate that.

To think that I have spent the last week of June and the first week of July coming up with reasons why I abhor the summer.

Now that I am done hating my love life, or lack of it, and my 12 month long summer, I spent the past few days thinking what to do this vacation or the 3 or 4 weeks left of it. I came to yet
another conclusion:

[size=6]I don't want to spend my time on vacation.[/h]

Let me start by first telling you that I can't leave the country because I am too poor and xenophobic, so that leaves holidaying in my country. And the following are excuses why I don't want to vacation in my country.

Land is very scarce from I have come from but my countrymen are not daunted by that. They put in quite a lot of effort to create a thriving economy by attempting to industrialise and militarise the country and turn this country into a holiday resort at the same time! Let me tell you what this results in:

We have very beautiful forests here. It is said that the biological diversity is such that there are more species of flora and fauna than that of the whole of North America. Nature lovers from where I come from would welcome the diversity these forests would have to offer like the deafening chirping of the crickets, the sweatbox of a forest, the abundance of creepy crawlies, the occasional primate sauntering past you with its jewels dangling at its crotch, punctuated with blasts of artillery fire and if you pay attention, people from the military communicating in the only way they could: swearing and cursing.

You see, the military needs to have some training grounds within the country. Since land is so scarce, they have to share their training grounds with our natural reserves. On the bright side, they add to the unique ambience of our reserves. But since I am a philistine, I am unable to appreciate that.

I would also like to add that my seaview is somewhat enhanced by the tankers docking by the horizon. I believe that adds to the maritime scenery, especially if the waste discharged by these tankers float to our shores. But again I am too stupid to appreciate that.

This sums up my vacation. Whining, sitting on my bum doing nothing and feeling very angry for no reasonable reason. Thank you for reading.

________________________________________________________

1497 words in total. I would like to add that the events, people and places portrayed in this rant are quite fictional. Any similarities to existing persons or places are a matter of pure coincidence since I say so.

Martin Freeman's photo is used without permission.

With quality input from judges giving what could only be a logical reaction after setting his eyes on this travesty !

Oh my goodness I laughed a lot while reading this one, I dunno if you write this out for humor but I can't say more about how impressed I am with the sense of humor involved in this one. You seem to be making fun of all this what you called to be 'a hellish summer vacation', laughing at yourself and your 'hellish environment that made you into a shithole predicament' at most times while writing this. I admit this is a truly gutsy feat and hats off to you sir, reading this makes my day =D

You had a great potential for making satirical stories I say, we need moar stories like this on Fakku~

You can also take this chance to guess where I come from. I thank you for your feedback. I have a Screenwipe episode that you may be interested in as a writer. I think any serious writer should view that video. Charlie Brooker is interviewing other writers in that episode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZzOV9MF20

Ah thank you very much for the link, it looks interesting so far =D

I hope you won't mind me quoting you again but I better share with you what was going on my mind while I was writing this. It is plainly out of mischief and humour. When Pacifica announced that the submissions ought to centre around either romance, the summer or vacation, you'd get the expectation that they ought to be positive in nature. So I decided to cheekily go against that expectation.

As for my style of writing, I think it is easy to pick up. A lot of internet shows display this brand of dry humour that self-depreciate themselves and others. The host of the show in the Youtube link I have sent you, Charlie Brooker, is a fine example of that. Just watch a few episodes of Screenwipe, Newswipe, How TV ruined Your Life and apply the vibes in these TV shows to your writing and this is what you get. I wouldn't call it quality writing frankly speaking because it comes off more as a rant.

Another inspiration would be of course my personal experience. Of course, I greatly exaggerated and distorted my experiences during the vacation and the places I know or had visited. In fact, much of my vacation was spent at home in front of the computer screen. Instead of telling everyone how great my vacation is (It is not), humour everyone else by telling how terrible it is (It is not really terrible either).

I like your way of thinking on this trololol...



I think I began to like this kind of humor even more now hahaha, reminds me a lot of the show Dilbert which made me lol really hard xD

You asked me to read this and if High said it was funny i kinda knew what to expect...Not.
Damn, hilariously funny! Did you make this out to be this humorous? because i say, you sure succeeded. I definitely concur with High, this is cool =). Do you REALLY hate summer this much? or was this just your...work of fiction? Sitting on your bum doing no shit all summer is more fun than you think...I have fun doing that, seriously.

I am not in position to say that I hate summer because I live at the Equator. If I hate summer this means I hate where I come from (which cannot be the case) It is 30 degrees Celsius, I think it is around 80 - 90 degrees Fahrenheit, all year round.

The rant I have written is an exaggeration of what I feel, but not what I really feel. But there is always a part in my brain thinking that if I express everything as negatively as possible it would be somehow funny.

Sorry for the long overdue:

I... Cannot review it like the "Good" "OK" and "Bad" simply because it is a personal rant.

That said, good show.

I would rather much, very please, insert any other sign of want/need, that you do an actual story with a massively self-deprecating person. I would enjoy that a lot actually.

Other than that, blah, blah, blah Good Grammar/Spelling. CoffeePrince Spell Check accepts.

Honestly, I would rate this if this were a story, but being a rant, I can only say, "I like how you think."

Don't worry about it. This entry is rather fictional, an exaggeration of personal experiences that I may or I imagine myself to have. So you can think of it as a rant made by a fictional person alike to the entry "An Unphogetable Summer". It may not really be a story but at the very least it is a case of someone relating a series of events.

Hmm... The issue with the other one is that it's less autobiographical and more story-like, making it seem more like a story.

I see what you are getting at. An Unphogetable Summer begins by a self-introduction so I found that an indication of a rant. However, he does try to create a sequence of events leading to him having a bad night with someone older than him. I don't read fiction that much (I prefer non-fiction) so forgive me if I compare it to the narrative used by Meyer's Twilight series in the way that it is told in first person and may be mistaken as a rant.

Allow me to review my own work. I noticed a fragment (sentence) in the first paragraph. Of course, there may be one or two inappropriate used words. This entry comes off as a recounting of events that are categorised into 3 categories.

The reference to Fakku is a splendid example of the author being lazy. In fact the whole piece of work is lazy! I can see that Leonard267 is exhibiting his reowned creativity (or lack of it) being narcissistic and talking about himself instead of coming up with a fictional world in which a sequence of events are told coherently.

You may notice that the rant is indeed constrained by the world limit. I know readers would love to hear Leonard267 moan and groan about the parlous state of his country's waters [size=10](sarcasm)[/h].

That said, thank you for reading through my work. I hoped you enjoyed it.

I actually read this entry before, but forgot its title, since I was reading it on my Droid. Unlike Coffee, I will actually use his format despite this entry not being a total story per se...

Good: I will say that this is one of the more interesting and hilarious rants.
Additionally, I enjoyed the vivid descriptions and the premise itself is a great deconstruction of what was asked of you. Bravo, good sir. Bravo. Also, I can tell that you are familiar with military life, since I've had to personally deal with the battle buddy system. It reminds me of that film Major Payne, when he stated that if the Marines wanted him to have a wife, they would've issued him one. Nice.

Okay: Usual spelling and grammar is all good.

Bad: As much as I do enjoy this rant, and I really do, the fact is that, since this is not a story, this does not seem to have a proper story structure that I'm very critical about. Since this is a stream of consciousness piece, it lacks a climax in my opinion and as such, it also lacks the subsequent falling action. In addition, the resolution seems weak. It felt more like the end to an assignment instead of the resolution to a rant or tale. Actually, come to think of it, due to its fictitious nature, it would qualify as a story in the form of a rant. Interesting idea, for sure, but that does not completely excuse it from lacking the proper elements.

Despite my negativity, I truly did enjoy this rant. I read it right before I watched The Amazing Spider-Man with my dad and sister and was a bit distraught when I could not remember the title.

Thank you for your feedback. I am glad you've enjoyed it.

It is all right if you forget the title. If there is anything I tried to portray in this piece of writing, it would be how lazy I am, and it even extends to its stupid title.

I agree with you. This piece of writing is categorised in the 3 themes Romance, Vacation and Summer and the writer attempted to portray each theme as negatively as possible and conclude that everything is terrible. So I would compare it to a poorly written essay (imagine that you were to submit this in grade school when your teacher gave this as a holiday assignment) rather than an actual story with an introduction, setup, climax, denouement etc. etc.

I do thank you for pointing out about the lack of a resolution. It is putting ideas in my head. Perhaps I will come up with something similar sometime during the Obon Festival?

*I believe the Obon Festival falls on the 31st August. That is the 15th day of the 7th month on the Lunar Calendar used in East Asia.

Hey there, just wanted to pop by and give my regards and to personally thank you for reading my work (honestly did'nt think anyone would bother after reading the first sentence). Also, having read your entry, I am filled with admiration. You have quite successfully captured the essence of what I failed to in my own work. I lol'd pretty hard on this one XD

After reading this again I felt the urge to include more realistic aspects and dry humor on my stories with my usual addition of violent, coarse language, and tons of random, fucked-up stuff =D

I prefer non-fiction which is why I have a little difficulty reading some of the work posted in this forum because there is stupid part in my brain that refuses to to engage in a suspension of disbelief. (Let's hope no one reads this)

The formula for writing this is easy. I look around and notice what people are doing, what trends are in the vogue, leverage on the knowledge that you have (i.e. about economics, current affairs and cultural customs) and portray them as negatively as possible.

My preference for non-fiction influenced how I write. You may recall the part where I talk about the geographic limitations of where I live, the buddy system practiced in the military and the occasional weather problems I have to put up with.

I also have to admit many fiction works are getting too silly it's not even funny anymore =D

I think you got yourself a comrade since I also tend to prefer something simpler, realistic and relate-able =)



Whoa it's kinda similar to what I did too~

And I based many of the ideas from non-fiction too, particularly my IRL experiences, seeing what can I do to make fun of it...blatantly turning it into pure insanity, absurdity, complete utter madness =)

I found this very interesting to read, and it was pretty hillarious too. I myself mainly read fantasy which is dead serious about the plot, but this one had a good plot. It's 4 am, and i've had 3 hours sleep, so at start i thought it was all serious before i realised it and started laughing at myself and read it over again. I got to hand it, good job convincing me for it to be serious at first, and i really think that this story is good as well :)

Thanks for linking me the story mate

Thank you for your feedback. I draw inspiration from a group of Europeans who are living on some islands who do not want to be called Europeans (i.e. the British) who string long sentences to give people the impression that they are being serious when they are not. This makes for very dry humour, very sarcastic humour.

Of course, people who are very much exposed to this can tell that it isn't serious because ironically it is written too seriously.

Frankly, there is no plot, and I hesitate to call it a story. It comes off as a monologue or a rant about how the past few months had been for the narrator. It is also an essay as it is split into the 3 categories of Summer, Vacation and Romance.

If you so happen to be tasked to write an essay about the summer, or you know someone who is doing so, feel free to plagarise. Of course, I would like to know what how the person marking this would react.

Fun fact: 6 years ago as I was taking the Cambridge GCE Ordinary Levels for English, the topic of vacation came up. I wonder if I would be in university if I submitted this for my examination.