The Jezebel Guide to Overcoming Your Growing Sense of Melancholy and Enjoying the Dying Days of Summer 

Summer is dying, but you are very much alive. The afternoon air is still thick and smells like piss, but the nights are slowly cooling. Fall is coming, but it isn’t here yet. How will you spend the next 22 days?

Frida Garza, Senior Writer

The dregs of summer are like the dregs of a fancy, previously ice-cold beer: somehow both a little bit more sour and watered down. My plan of attack to enjoy it involves getting at least one more pedicure, maybe two, because once it’s boot season, I truly will not give a fuck. I will try to go to Coney Island (for the first time), where I hope to eat a hot dog and not immediately regret it. I hope to consume a lot of fun beverages like iced coffees with a splash of oat milk, tequila-based cocktails with a straw (I’m sorry), and anything fizzy. And I will take a lot of photos, because I want to remember myself with a nice tan, for when the winter comes and my vitamin D deficiency returns and I look into the mirror and wonder: Who am I? Those will be nice memories then.

Clover Hope, Culture Editor

My dying summer dream is to find a nice day, any day, to go roller skating—my favorite activity that I never do—either indoors or outdoors. I also plan to take at least one more day to lay out on the glass-specked sands of an NYC beach, which is also something I haven’t done enough. And lastly, I want to walk around more before it gets too cold to do so. Boring I know! But summer is for reveling in the thrill of the simple outdoors.

Kelly Faircloth, Senior Writer

Friday is the rare half-day at work that coincides with a full day of childcare and zero social obligations, so I will be closing the summer out with a rare, glorious afternoon spent doing stuff all by my goddamn self. I will be going swimming ALONE, going to the diner ALONE, and reading one of the historical romance novels I stockpile for when I have several hours ALONE, probably either the new Cat Sebastian, Scarlett Peckham’s The Duke I Tempted, or Meredith Duran’s The Sins of Lord Lockwood. Do not attempt to contact me via email, text message, Twitter, Slack, pony express, or passenger pigeon because I will not answer!

Hazel Cills, Pop Culture Reporter

My summer activity, the one thing I want to do before this blazing hot summer is up, is to go to Coney Island, eat a hot dog, maybe some cheese fries, and ride the Wonder Wheel (NOTHING else, PLEASE don’t suggest anything else) at night. Only at night, proper Beyoncé “XO” video-style, will satisfy me. It also seems like potentially good makeout territory but who knows what will happen!

Harron Walker, Contributing Writer

I’m going to the beach for the first time all summer! Or perhaps I won’t! Who cares!

Ingesting non-psychoactive cannabidiol and floating around in my aunt’s pool in Queens

Ashley Reese, Staff Writer

I just want to go to the beach! It’s been an incredibly rainy summer in New York, and of course all the scorching hot, cloudless days are during the week. I also want to ride my bike around Governor’s Island. My boyfriend bought me a bike for my birthday last November, and I still haven’t used it. I’m starting to feel guilty. But I’m not too bummed just yet. I feel like summer isn’t officially over until late September anyway, so I still have time. If it doesn’t fucking rain.

Esther Wang, Contributing Writer

The dying days of summer are going to be all about prepping for fall and winter for me, like a fictional bear that wants to get its cave nice and cozy for the harsh and bitter months ahead. To that end, I’ve started buying even more plants (my latest addition is a Chinese money plant, a sweet little thing with round leaves which I am very into!), have concocted ambitious plans to repaint my entire apartment and install all new light fixtures, and may even attempt to replace the backsplash in my kitchen. I have no idea what I’m doing!!

Katie McDonough, Senior Editor

As a CBD convert, I will continue to enjoy what has become my preferred summer pastime: ingesting non-psychoactive cannabidiol and floating around in my aunt’s pool in Queens. On my way to my aunt’s place, I will try to finish Speedboat, but will actually read an issue of Shape magazine, which I started receiving in the mail, unprompted and rather mysteriously, earlier this year. I feel like I’m going through a kind of benign period of regression, but I’m trying to roll with it.

Bobby Finger, Contributing Writer

In addition to the obvious necessities, like spending at least one afternoon in a pool (reapplying SPF 50 every 60 minutes) and eating one to three more hot dogs (from anywhere BUT the recently canceled Nathan’s), I would like to take a final summer trip outside the city to a place like Storm King (an outdoor museum where you can stare at large pieces of rusted metal and take very good group selfies while having a picnic) or Long Island (where I have two friends with a comfortable couch and fridge filled with cheese and canned wine). I would also like to eat several pimento cheese sandwiches, which means I’ll probably have to make some pimento cheese. Have you ever made pimento cheese? It’s a disgusting blend of mayonnaise, cream cheese, shredded cheddar, and jarred pimentos. Have you ever tasted pimento cheese? It will make you feel like god.

Maria Sherman, Senior Writer

Because summer actually ends in September and the only thing my cynicism allows me to enjoy is travel, I’m taking one last weekend trip to the only place more humid than NYC—Nashville! While the news is still slow and the days are still long, I’m planning on eating a bunch of heavy shit, recreating A Star Is Born in full and returning to work a cowboy. Yeehaw, yankees!

Gym, not tanning, and laundry

Megan Reynolds, Managing Editor

I have done this a fair amount this summer but in the dying gasps of this sweaty season, I plan on eating an edible, walking to the pool, and wading around in the shallow end reading a book I don’t care about getting wet. Perhaps I’ll treat myself and bring my goggles, so I can swim around the bottom of the pool and actually see where I’m going, like a catfish.

Rich Juzwiak, Senior Writer

I’ll be spending the rest of summer the way I’ll likely be spending the rest of my life: Procrastinating on projects I’ve started, finally putting on that movie I’ve been meaning to watch on Filmstruck and promptly falling asleep, gym, not tanning, and laundry. But also I want to say that summer isn’t officially over until September 22, and I refuse to let Labor Day take this from me. But I do need to make it to a miniature golf course some time before they all closed because my boyfriend and I are tied in our seasonal tournament and the title of champion is another thing I refuse to allow to be taken from me.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Deputy Editor

For the last three weeks, a mosquito (or a few of them) has been living in my apartment, terrorizing me from the moment I return from work, all through the night, and in the hour or so after I wake up. This has required me to take up a nightly ritual of dousing my body in “Deep Woods”-appropriate bug repellant, which smells like orange-flavored slow death and makes my body sticky but does a fantastic job of keeping those little fuckers off me. The worst thing in the world is waking up at 4 a.m. with an unrelenting itch on your butt cheek because a tiny, diseased vampire needed your blood to stay alive. The second worst thing in the world is smelling like a camp counselor all the time. That is why, though summer is my favorite season—the best season—I look forward to a time when it is too cold for these demons to survive in my crib. Until then, I will sit outside as much as possible and eat up all the dregs of summer fruit before we get to the dreaded apple season (the wackest fruit).