The hipster summer bucket list

The scent of sunscreen fills the air. The neighborhood kids are trying to pass off lemonade they made with Kool-Aid powder as homemade in their first business endeavor.

You are avoiding laying out in the sun with your friends at the beach to tan because it’s too bourgeois — pale skin is edgier.

This must mean summer is upon us — and you must be a hipster.

As a hipster, you’re not going to have things like “road trip with my besties” or “get infinity sign tattoo on wrist” on your bucket list. In fact, calling it a bucket list may even be too mainstream.

Whatever you decide to call your summer list of things to do as the angsty, counter-culture adolescent you are, here are a few ideas to spark some inspiration.

1. Start a garden: Grocery shopping is expensive, especially at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, where you insist on shopping for your gluten-free, meat-free and kale-rich diet. Fortunately, not only are seeds inexpensive and easy to grow, but starting a garden gives you yet another topic to discuss with the cashier at your favorite Urban Outfitters.

2. Kale juice stand: Those pesky kids down the street won’t win you over with their sly sales strategies in the lemonade stand business. Use all that kale you grew in your garden and start your own stand. After all, didn’t someone from that film class you took — because it only used VHS tapes — say citrus causes intestinal irritation?

3. Sell wardrobe to one thrift shop, restock entire wardrobe from another thrift shop: There is no way you’ll survive summer with your vintage denim mom jeans and the Bill Cosby-esque sweater you fished out of your grandpa’s closet. It’s time to revamp your wardrobe for the hot summer weather, and this method kills two birds with one stone. Donate the clothes you — and probably your grandpa or mom from the ‘80s — wore out to one thrift shop, and then go to another thrift shop and buy what someone else’s parents and grandparents used to wear out.

4. Collect seashells, but return them to the water: You’re on the beach and by now everyone knows you’re a hipster because you’re wearing swim bottoms that reach as high as a diaper on a baby. Use this opportunity to spread a positive message about nature to the others on the beach. Collect all the seashells you can and return them to the water so no one can pick them up. You read in an obscure, underground study that collecting seashells damages the ocean ecosystem and the prospect of not having raw trout ice cream as readily available is frightening.

5. Win a hacky sack tournament: You’ve been training. You’re close to nailing that flick of the ankle and your dexterity has improved ever since you started playing tetherball — after all, kickball is for the conventional-mindedconformists.

6. Take a knitting class: Your local nursing home is hosting knitting classes, and buying your own scarves and beanies is really downing your anti-consumerism vibes.

7. Start your own Etsy store: All this talk about kale and hacky sack tournaments is really inspiring your inner artist. Those cigarette boxes you collected and made a collage out of and sold really took off. Your part-time job at that artisan herb shop isn’t going to fund your pricey, all-organic diet. Start an Etsy store, and in no time someone will come across the art you made from empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans — your favorite — and hopefully think it’s profound enough to buy.

8. Host a back-porch poetry slam: You have your garden in full bloom, kale juice and PBR in the mason jars you got from the thrift shop where you bought your summer wardrobe, and your friends are back from their road trip following that post-current experimental tribal funk band no one has really heard of. Invite them over for a poetry slam on your back porch and read them that poem you wrote about how big corporations are blood sucking leeches. But, make sure to read it off your iPhone so you can show off the case you knit for it.

Your summer doesn’t have to be as bland and practical as everyone else’s, and now you have a list that encompasses all the fun summer things you can do when you’re not listening to your vinyls and working at the artisan herb shop.

Marlo Safi primarily writes about politics and public policy for The Pitt News.

Write to Marlo at mes260@pitt.edu.