Is it really August already?

When I was younger, August was always a bittersweet month. It was the home stretch of summer vacation, the last three or four weeks before school was going to start again. In Ohio and Virginia, where I lived for all of my School Days, the air used to get cooler at night late in the month, a sign that fall was coming and everything was returning to the normality of the school year.

Summer vacation was ending.

Of course, once you're out of school and working, the summer vacation that seems to stretch on forever no longer really exists. You get your week or two off from work, but the rest of the summer is pretty much like the rest of the year only hotter. Instead of being a special season, summer actually takes on sort of an annoying quality because heat and humidity aren't as much fun when you're wearing a tie, battling rush hour and stressing out over a job.

I always thought Europeans had it a lot better than we did when it came to summer. In France, for example, the country pretty much shuts down in August and everyone goes on holiday for a month. The reasoning is that four weeks or so off in summertime makes people more efficient the rest of the year, and I think there's a lot to be said for that sort of thinking.

[caption id="attachment_559" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The French on holiday"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/the-french-on-holiday-1.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-559" title="the-french-on-holiday-1" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/the-french-on-holiday-1-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

Yes, the beaches get awfully crowded.

Certainly, some cities are almost deserted.

Some Americans are appalled by the thought that folks pretty much have to take their vacations at the same time, that there's a loss of freedom in being told that August is the month of vacation. But I'm pretty sure there's also at least a certain amount of envy to think that people can take an entire month off from work. In this country you pretty much have to work someplace for at least 10 or 15 years before you get that much vacation time, and even then, it's tough to get away from the job for three or four weeks at a time.

As I've been getting older, I find myself wondering what it's all about anyway. If we're working harder to make more money so that we can buy more <em>things</em>, it all seems pretty misguided to me. I don't know if having a 50-inch television screen makes you that much happier than having a 37-inch screen once you get past the original excitement of it.

It's still the same crap on television, no matter how big your screen is.

We spent $25,000 -- the most we've ever spent -- to buy a car last year. Would we have have been twice as happy with a $50,000 car (or half as happy with a $12,500 car)?

I kind of doubt it.

Would we be happier if we could take the entire month of August off every year?

That's an entirely different question. When you have even a month of vacation, it stretches out ahead of you as if it will go on forever. And when it gets near the end, you're ready to go back to school ... or to work.

Actually, there are millions of Americans who don't really get any vacation at all. They're working in menial McJobs, and either they're not accumulating any vacation time or they're not staying at any one job long enough to qualify.

They're not working to live, they're just living to work.

To them, August is just hot.