Summer in Dunedin has well and truly arrived, and along with it the familiar eerie silence.
Students have trotted off to the muggier northern climes to scrounge home-cooked meals off mum and dad.
Well, most of them.
I count myself among the poor unfortunates who hail from Dunedin.
We suffer the yearly summertime malaise often common in teenagers and displaced youths.
Dunedin is boring in the summer because everyone goes away and all of the activities you might want to occupy yourself with come to a grinding halt.
Suddenly, you have all the free time in the world and nothing to fill it with.
And usually the weather is terrible.
Usually, this general melancholy is buffered by independence.
Due to a lack of organisation on my part, however, I've been waiting some time to move into a new flat and have spent altogether too long hanging around home making a mess and annoying my younger brother.
Without a home to call our own, my flatmates and I have found ourselves plunged back into adolescence.
We have discovered that even the failsafe time occupier otherwise known as lounging around in a herd doing nothing and drinking alcohol has become exponentially more complicated.
With no collective space we have to work around whose parents are going to be home, and even when there is no-one to inconvenience, there's that little nagging worry that you might spill something on a carpet that's worth more than the interior of your entire flat.
For a time I had thought there was something quite special about being a teenager during the summer.
There's never any real reason why you can't have a sleepover, and aimlessly wandering around suburban streets becomes so engaging because it's better than sweating all day alone in your room.
I think, deep down, I probably quite enjoyed summer holidays while I was a teenager.
Probably, it felt significant.
But now I feel differently.
Sleepovers are not really fun but rather a simple convenience.
I hate sharing an undersized bed but it's a total pain trying to get home past 11pm when you don't have a driver's licence or a regular income and everyone you know is staying in the suburbs.
I don't think I really need to go into how utterly tedious walking around without a specific purpose is.
I'm too old for boredom roaming and too young for leisurely strolling.
What am I supposed to do with my time?
Sensibly and rationally, I know I could take up a new hobby or just devote some serious time to the hobbies I already have and neglect during the year.
This is the one time of year I am not eaten alive by study-related guilt, but because I'm not motivated by the need to procrastinate, I find myself stewing in my own useless juices.
I could be a responsible adult and help out around the house.
The highlight of my weekend was buying new towels and coat hangers, and these seem to me to be very adult purchases, so perhaps my adulthood could extend to cleaning the bath and compulsively dusting.
Instead, it seems altogether more likely that I will work myself up into a lather about home life being boring until I move out again next week.
Then, I will be excited for a few days until I remember that everything is still shut down for the summer and I actually have to think about what I need to get from the supermarket to keep myself alive.
-Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
