The Fourth sneaks up on you. One minute you are swimming, the next Labor Day is staring you down and you realized you did nothing. It’s the standard arc. The promise of long days, of outdoor noise, of a life suddenly unhinged from routine. Then summer is gone. Again.
I decided to cheat.
Why wait until the heat makes you lazy to plan? I handed my calendar to an AI assistant. Let it fill the void before I could procrastinate my way into August. Here is the damage report.
Making it count
Summer ends fast. The hot nights are fleeting. You want to squeeze the barbecue, the boat rides, the sheer frivolity out of three months. I used Claude to build a regime that maximized every second.
The goal wasn’t just fun. It was a glow-up. Physically and mentally. Claude spat out an interactive calendar. Precise. Hour-by-hour tracking of my life. It scheduled runs, bike rides, weight training. HIIT sessions because suffering builds character. But also beach days. And a “Taco Tuesday” that was scheduled on a Wednesday because AI has no soul for tradition. It even forced in time for museums. And reading. Just reading. Sitting down and looking at paper.
An interactive calendar packed with accurate dates, designed to track every sunset and squat.
Reading, supposedly
Summer reading is either a luxury or a prison sentence. If your teacher picked the book, it’s the latter. AI can fix that, or try to. I asked ChatGPT to map out a LA high school’s summer reading list. Eagle Rock High. Show some respect.
I wanted a schedule. And good places to sit.
ChatGPT tried. Oh, it really tried. It offered to make a “beautiful printable summer reading map.” I let it. The result was something I’d hide from my ancestors. I complained. The model gave me an uglier map and an ad for VistaPrint. That was the best it had to offer. A marketing pitch instead of a fix.
Claude played a different game. It built an interactive map. Specific locations tied to specific books. Deep notes on why reading Hemingway by the ocean changes the flavor of the text. Actually useful. Actually clever.
A song you’ll hate
Will we get a good summer anthem this year? Maybe. The pop gods are fickle. TikTok mashups are everywhere, and the Ying Yang Twins are mostly retired.
Enter Suno. It calls itself a generative audio workstation. Fancy words for a bot that makes beats. I wanted a summer jam. Something with me and my spouse in the lyrics. A love song, sort of.
It was terrible. Hilariously, painfully bad.
I prompted it to include “Rachel, Robert.” It literally sang those words. Then it dissolved into two minutes of gobbledygook. Nonsense sounds. The beat? The beat was nice. That’s something, right? We dance to the rhythm of failure.
Maybe the AI knows something we don’t. Maybe we don’t want the plan. Maybe the mess is the point. But I still have that calendar. It’s waiting for me.
