Everything You Need to Survive Summer — Badly
Adventure race: A Guantánamo-inspired torture device designed for people who can’t sit still even on vacation.
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After-sun lotion: Beach-scented lotion used to pick up dates when you’re alone. Unless you’re Inspector Gadget, there’s no way to rub it onto your own back without ending up in the ER.
AI: Technology that lets you record yourself on a boat surrounded by bikini-clad supermodels while singing “La Barbacoa” with Georgie Dann, under the watchful and bewildered gaze of Elvis Presley, who is in turn holding a tiny Nicolás Maduro playing the maracas.
Yoga: A practice consisting of imitating the recumbent posture of certain shorebirds at siesta time and believing you’re spiritually connecting with the Taj Mahal.
Air conditioner: Device commonly used to argue with the rest of the family about the ideal temperature inside the house or the car. Not quite as effective outdoors.
Beach bar: The heart and soul of summer vacation. Temple. Sanctuary. Beginning and end.
Barbecue: Incandescent contraption used to char meat in the backyard moments before ordering three family-size pizzas for delivery.
Beach umbrella: A device designed to protect you from the very thing you came looking for: the sun.
Beer: Man’s best friend.
Bug spray: Perfume for those vacationers who have somehow grasped the great philosophical truth of summer vacation: nature does not love you.
Camping: A place to share your filth with other grime enthusiasts and pretend you’re having a wonderful time.
Dehydration: A sharp drop in the amount of beer in your bloodstream.
Disconnection: When you drop your phone overboard in the middle of a boat trip through the estuary.
Daiquiri: A highly dangerous substance with a very easy way in and a very difficult way out.
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Fan: A device designed to keep you awake at night, whether it’s on or off.
Float: A bathing accessory that floats perfectly well as long as you’re not sitting on it.
Free Wi-Fi: A connection slower than the one a standard modem provided in 1997.
Gazpacho: A typically Spanish dish consisting of pureed rabbit food that is strangely delicious on hot days.
Hangover: The usual state of a vacationer from dawn until the day declines.
Heat wave: The trailer for Hell.
Ice cream: A summer dessert invented by paper-napkin manufacturers.
Jet lag: A great Beatles song. I think.
Jellyfish: The main predator of surfers. They don’t sting overweight people for fear of angering the sharks.
Operation Bikini: In February, too early. In August, too late.
Operation Burkini: A definition censored by the Ministry Against Hate Crimes of whichever European country you happen to be in.
Sand: Everything you take home from the beach that isn’t your towel, your umbrella, your family, or your sunburn.
Seaweed: Eukaryotic organisms that involuntarily chase, trap, and gag you at the water’s edge.
Sunglasses: Where did I leave them again?
Swimming pool: A large and inviting bathtub, but shared with other animals.
Tan: An intermediate skin tone, extremely difficult to achieve, somewhere between albino white and peach-red.
Towel: A magic carpet that, on windy beaches, requires six or more people to set up properly.
Tourism: What tourists come to hate after spending two days at their destination and already considering themselves locals.
Vacation rental: A place where you bury three months’ salary in a single week.
Yoga: A practice consisting of imitating the recumbent posture of certain shorebirds at siesta time and believing you’re spiritually connecting with the Taj Mahal.
Zone of swimming: Delimited by lifeguards, it is a strip approximately three millimeters wide on beaches more than six miles long, containing three to four million bathers packed together in overlapping layers.
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