1. The beach. You know the drill: put on sunblock, feel your face sting as it melts all around your eyes, miss a spot, discover said spot hours later on the unreachable part of your back, get sand in and around car, shoes, hair, toes, eyelashes and penis hole, lose limbs to mechanical shark.*
2. Bathing suits. No, thank you. Especially with the advent of square-cut trunks—designed to make every man look homosexual—walking around in one’s undernothings has never been less appealing. These days, you can’t help but feel “all in” without even looking at your cards just by agreeing to go for a swim. Perhaps back in the 1920s, when people practically bathed in tuxedos, taking a dip didn’t involve so much self-deprecation, but the more fashion progresses, the more swimming in public gets reserved for supermodels and those without the shame to shave their back hair.
3. Reruns. Sure, Americans are too hooked on TV as it is, but for those of us who can keep our regular viewing to a few programs a week, reruns are an undeserved punishment. Thankfully more networks are capitalizing on our addictions and rolling out new series in the summer, but for fans of Saturday Night Live and other shows that comment on the now, the space between spring and fall can feel like nothin’ but static on Channel Z.
4. Back-to-school ads. While these have a perfectly innocent purpose, they have a deadly side effect. Back-to-school campaigns succeed in selling jeans and crayons and reminding everyone that their few enjoyable weeks of the year are almost at an end. (See also end-of-summer clearances.) Worse, they practically start airing in June! You can barely swallow your Memorial Day hot dog before being frightened by the radio that summer is nearly gone and now’s your time to save, save, save before the little ones return to school. And if you don’t have kids, you can enjoy feeling sad about that, too.
5. Christmas in July. What group of rejects from the Key Club came up with this one? Christmas is the most stressful and expensive time of year. Who needs to go through it twice? I’d rather nibble apple pie ’neath the mistletoe celebrating Fourth of July in December.
6. Teenagers. We were all there once. Maybe you’re even there right now (if so, please skip this and go on to #7 [your eyes have probably already spotted it, hornball]). If I had a pimple for every embarrassing, jackass blunder I made in public as a teenager I could cover the faces of everyone who was ever in Menudo. That’s a lot. And where do teenagers go between final exams and Labor Day? Nowhere! To the mall. To the movies. To the beach at night. All perfectly excited to see if a fight starts, or if someone looks at them funny, or if you’ll buy them cigarettes—an activity that can keep droves of them amused for the duration of an entire evening. And they drive! In cars! That’s legal!
7. Sex. Hey, nothing’s wrong with the old rock and roll, but something about summer sex is supposed to be superior, and I don’t know that is. There’s that pressure to take advantage of the sweat you’re already covered in just from breathing the night air. Isn’t sex really better in the spring, when you’re surrounded by bunnies, the spirit of fertility, and things are sprouting up from the ground as if the Earth itself has a boner? Sure beats sand in the penis hole.
8. Post-solstice day-shrinking. Every day after June 21, night gets a little bit longer. Just when you start to get great weather for daytime sports, Mother Nature intervenes and takes your sunshine away. Unless, that is, you live in Scandinavia and enjoy several weeks of uninterrupted daylight, but then you also have the opposite effect in the winter, and that escalates your suicide rates. (So take that, Viking.)
9. Air conditioning. Is this not the ice Prometheus meant to steal from the gods when he grabbed the fire? I sure hope their cooling system was better on Mt. Olympus. Our common method of lowering the heat indoors feels about as natural as a spray-on tan. Granted, it is artificial, but so is Splenda and I swear that stuff tastes just like sugar. Real coolness is relaxing, like an autumn breeze, not stale, dry, recycled and questionably safe for the environment. In the summertime, there’s no escaping it. 
10. Flip-flops. They’re shoes named after the sound they make! And we trust them with our feet! WTF?

*Reserved for characters in Jaws films.

This article reprinted with permission of Envy Man magazine.