When my dear friend, Lauren, asked to write my summer reading list, you can imagine that my mind went blank. Wait, what did I actually do? I thought. Am I going to talk about all those YA vampire novels I read? How I watched Frasier for hours each day? The amount of cheese I consumed? It’s not like I wanted the world AKA the Internet AKA people-who-read-The-Journal’s-blog to know just how lowbrow my real life was between the months of May and August. In fact, revealing my true, unproductive self was such a source of concern for me that I thought about writing this blog post in the guise of a short story, or just straight-up lying, but then I decided that maybe I needed to create a list of all the things I’ve done so that I might feel better about the summer overall. When finished, it wasn’t a satisfactory one. Therefore, in order to illustrate just how much I’ve actually completed these three months, I’d like to compare what I have done with what my cat, har, has accomplished:

READING:

Me: The Vampire Academy (I liked these better than I thought. The protagonist was a badass woman doing all the saving.), The Hunger Games (This was a reread, but, wow, the second time around really blew my mind—the social issues at stake here are fascinatingly drawn and Katniss Everdeen will forever be one of my favorite characters), Delirium (God, this sucked so bad I only read the first one), and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Eh).

I justified reading so much YA because I was starting to work on my own YA novel, and some of these books weren’t badly written and some, in fact, were really quite good (like The Hunger Games). So what if they aren’t classic literature? I love plot, and I think YA gets a bad rap in academia, much worse than it sometimes deserves. For the rest of the summer, I’m going to reread Harry Potter and ignore rewriting my syllabus until right before school starts. #sorrynotsorrybutkindasorry

har: Crime and Punishment, Ulysses, Gender Trouble, Hamlet, Orlando, War and Peace, Les Miserables (in the original, of course), Love in the Time of Cholera, Siddhartha, A Tale of Two Cities, The Bluest Eye, and Pilgrim’s Progress.

When asked why he read these, har—who was reclining in his Scratch Lounge and puffing a Gurkha Black Dragon—quoted Oscar Wilde: “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”

I asked him if he was judging me, and he flicked his tail.

MUSIC:

Me: “Concrete Wall” by Zee Avi (This is essentially what I smashed up against every time I sat down to write); “All Comes Down” by Kodaline (Basically, my life); “Never Gonna Change” by Broods (My laziness); “Obedear” by Purity Ring (Oh be dear, what am I doing with my life?); “Fuck Was I” by Jenny Owens Young (What I wonder after pausing to try to take a picture of har sitting like a human); “Setting Sun” by This, the Silent War (It’s 9 o’clock. Time to go to bed and watch The Nanny! I’ll do better in the morning! (Read: NOPE)).

This is some of my writing list. I like to have a variety of songs on it—soft ones that function as story themselves, which allows me to think, and quick, loud ones that insert urgency into my process. Sadly, this playlist has seen little use this summer other than as background noise to all of my Buzzfeed reading and quiz taking. The good news: I got Pikachu, Comic Sans, and Spyro .

har: “Ave María” by Luciano Pavarotti; “Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1” by Yo-Yo Ma; “Con te partiro” by Andrea Bocelli; “Kiss” by Prince & The Revolution.

After interviewing har about his musical selection this summer, I pointed out that one of the songs he had listed didn’t seem to go along with the others. He was incredulous and halted the discussion right then and there, marching off, tail swinging, to sit on the printer in the other room and watch squirrels. When he returned later, and I was able to finally convince him to speak to me again, he said that it wasn’t the fact that I should suggest his list had a flaw, though that did gall him. It was more so that he was offended by the fact that I should think to question him while he was mid-cleaning. Hadn’t I seen his leg in the air?

TELEVISION:

Me: The Nanny, Frasier, Golden Girls, The Mindy Project, Teen Wolf, True Blood

You guys, THESE SHOWS ARE CLASSICS.

har: Do you think he actually deigns to watch TV? I mean, are you actually being serious right now?

Every year, I tell myself not to get my hopes up for summer break. I think, don’t fall into the trap of expecting too much of yourself. Every year, I make a list of things I’m going to accomplish (almost always the same as the one listed above), and every year I accomplish some of the things and fail to do the others. I was going to say this was The Summer of Failure. I was going to say that, in my usual summer despair, I achieved little. But tomorrow I will get up and I will tell myself that I am going to do better, I am going to go for a run, eat a salad, write a couple of pages, read Journal submissions, plan for school, and it will be good.

Final writing count, May to August: about fifteen pages of novel planning, twenty pages of a novel’s first draft, a paragraph of a short story, and this long-ass blog post.