Column: The Geek Beat; Get through the summer without a criminal record

I can hardly believe it, but today is the last day of regular classes for the semester. Do you realize if this were junior high we’d be running around signing yearbooks with phrases so dirty they have to be hidden from parents for years to come?

So there are just a few horribly important tests between us and a summer of freedom and I, for one, can’t wait.

Really, I can’t. I have a doctor’s note.

Summer is the perfect time to catch up on your hobbies, enjoy nature or – in my case – spend your days indoors hiding from the powerful rays of the sun.

Still, there’s plenty for people like me to do over the next few months, so I’m pretty sure I won’t go crazy and we’ll all be back here filling our brain balls with all sorts of stuff.

So if the lack of a college-level reading program that rewards you with personal-pan pizzas has got you down, try some of the following activities before school starts up again.

Go to 16 weddings: I’ve heard of wedding crashing, but around here, I don’t see the point. I get so many invitations in the mail that I could easily be at an average of a wedding a week if the weather is good.

Surprisingly, I enjoy weddings. All you have to do is buy a card, stick on a present from someone else, stand in line for 20 minutes, make small talk for two minutes and tell the person you know that they did pretty good for themselves and then you’ve got yourself a night of dinner, dancing and – most importantly – free cake.

Get a sunburn: Have you ever spent a long summer night alone, longing for human contact? I know I have.

The best way to overcome this problem is to spend all day outside in a swimsuit until you’re as burnt as my cooking. There’s nothing like being red as a lobster to get other people to touch your skin.

Sure, it sends shots of chilling pain down your back, but my motto’s always been “action’s action.”

Watch movies and don’t think about the plot: for some reason during the summer, it is perfectly OK to watch a movie that has more explosions than words.

Summer entertainment standards are always lower. During the summer months, people are also allowed to read “ripped shirt” books. You know the kind of books I’m talking about. They’re usually romance or fantasy novels and always feature a character of either of the two more popular genders wearing a shirt with a tear down the front.

Night Games: Remember night games? Those games that you have to play at night because proper visibility is an unfair advantage (although I’m to the point I could play at noon if I took my glasses off).

These games always had names that doubled as explanations of how to play. They were always of the verb-the-noun construct, such as kick-the-can, capture-the-flag or wake-the-neighbors.

I used to take these games really seriously.

I’ve mentioned before that I am the last great Idaho ninja, but I never told you guys that I received most of my ninja training as a child playing night games.

I would prepare for such events by donning traditional Idaho ninja apparel, consisting of black sweats and my shoes.

Then I would get into what I like to call “stealth mode.” I was like a cougar or a snake or a really sneaky bear. There was no chance that anyone knew where I was.

I was mentally tough, too. No matter how dirty I got, no matter how many cuts and scrapes, no matter how close someone came to peeing on my head, I would not leave my hiding place.

Sometimes I would hide so well for so long the noun would be verbed before I was within 100 feet of it. I’d usually just stay hidden until the next game started even if it wasn’t for a few days.

If that’s not enough for you to do this summer, you can always take a trip to somewhere exotic, like Narnia.

I’ll see you next year.

Until then, have a good summer. Don’t ever change.

Geek out.

Steve Shinney is a junior in computer science who over the summer will pretend to be a shark whenever

he swims underwater. Comments can be sent

to steveshinney@cc.usu.edu.