The Sirens of Summer

As summer draws closer, the distractions men face are multiplying. The mind of Joe math major contemplates a triple integral, but suddenly goes blank. A staring engineer mistakenly draws a squiggly line and dribbles saliva on his signature green pad. A gape-mouthed English student’s copy of Beowulf slips from his hands and bounces in the warm sun-baked earth.  A frat boy cracks his knuckles, dusts off his miscellaneous Greek event T-shirt and prepares to score digits.

The invasion of the immeasurably sexy summer-strutting, sex-charged babe-licious California babes is in full effect on campus. They are turning noticeably bronzer. They are showing more skin. They are abandoning baggy Cal Poly sweatshirts in favor of articles of clothing that function with thin strings and no backs. They are wearing tiny skirt-shaped pieces of fabric that flutter tantalizingly in the summer breeze. You, ladies, are undoing the very fabric of men’s minds with your inadvertent seductions. If not for sunglasses, I would surely be called out on my public gawking problem. The shorts with university or sorority letters on them, which give every man a legitimate excuse to stare at your buttocks, are a personal favorite of mine. CSPU? Come Stare, Pink Underwear; Covet Sexy Posterior Underneath; or Contours Suggest Perky Understuffs, maybe.

You may call us weak, but we are only men. To further challenge us, the other forces of summer ally with the estrogenic ones to make responsibilities seem like tiny satellites thousands of miles away.

We know we should be writing papers, but instead we flock to the Cliffs in Pismo Beach for happy hour margaritas strong enough to remove paint, an ineffably never-ending deposit of free tacos to the stomach and ambient scenery teeming with sun-tan-oiled beauties and azure waves lapping at golden sands. We know we should be laboring on final projects, but instead we are surfing on the beaches where the bikini-clad play, golfing in the sun where beer-cart driving maidens smilingly offer us cool beers, and barbecuing in our front yards.  We know we should be going to class, but instead we bask by the Cal Poly pool as sun goddesses undo their bikini strings and flip themselves in 15-minute increments; we savor the feeling of hot sand between our toes and the smack of a volleyball against our forearms.

We know we should be concentrating on final exams in a week, but our tunnel vision blocks out anything earlier than two weeks into the future.

We loathe the incandescent light and the stuffy ventilation of our coffinsque classrooms. Our mantra becomes “Vacation” uttered under our breath hundreds of times each day. The buttons on our blenders grow rapidly more appealing than the ones on our calculators, and little unfolding umbrellas replace No. 2 pencils as our timber of choice.

And the Sirens, the Sirens of Summer sing their melodies that fill our ears like goblets with wine, cacophonous to our GPAs yet mellifluous to our libidos and our souls, and, for the next two weeks, our youthful hearts that long singularly for freedom shall beat for June 9.

 

For questions, comments or to decry the fact that Daniel’s last final is on June 5, write to dgingras@calpoly.edu.