Fortunately “enforced merriment” isn’t quite how I remember my own childhood summers. And I might add, my folks were on Welfare.

Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” his widely acclaimed memoir of the Holocaust, is not something I’d recommend to what sounded like an already depressed adolescence. I think you don’t just hate summer – you hate everything including yourself. Admittedly, you can’t even stand your own smell. God gave you the ample breasts some other gals would die for, yet your body repulses you. And if all you derive from living in New York City is the stench of garbage maybe you need to do some self-inquiry. Those who dwell on negativity, who never see anything right with themselves or others, are missing the point of life itself. And I’m sure you’ve pondered that question.

I mean to be helpful not critical. Your mind is far too busy judging everything and everyone. Learn to be quiet. You’re smart enough to know the many ways people are doing that. When you learn to disregard the senseless chatter of your mind, simply be quiet you will know the truth about yourself. You will see the world in a different light and you will see that light in you. Believe me, it’s there. It is the key to your happiness.

At least a dozen posters here have accused Shukert of all sorts of personality deficiencies because she writes an essay about hating summer?

Last I checked, complaining about the weather is a time-honored tradition in most cultures, as she points out in the last sentence of the article when she claims that complaints about winter were right around the corner. That was supposed to be funny people!

Go to Iraq? Get some perspective? No wonder you're not popular?

Projecting much?

You know who seems to really like summer? People with kids. For that crowd, that's when all the happy buzzing really gets going.

If we were going to explore the LOTR loose analogy - we could say that she is trapped by the Shelobs on her chest, and maybe a surgeon named Samwise could slay the beasts, releasing her from her cocoon like bras, and chrysalis-like, and she could emerge light and free, reborn with wings, like on a mini-pad, which gives one greater freedom for the real quest, right? And she could emerge from her dark, humid, musky lair of sullenesss into, uh, Mordor? which is NYC. Maybe I miss the secret message here, distracted by the pelting spew of whiny tears and resentments. I thought she was externalizing her inner existential crisis and feelings of non-conformity into a written vehicle for our amusement and her financial gain? You go girl!! Personally, I go to the gym. And I like chicks with small ta-tas, I think they are hot. But what really matters, is what she likes. And it doesn't seem like she likes much. Which is the problem. Because, the absence of pain doesn't equal pleasure - does it? So the end of the summer relief is simply the upswing of the pendulum, which will soon peak and descend again. Personally, I can't wait for the next one. Because the suffering of others invariably makes me grateful for my own pleasures. So. Thank you. Keep on suffering!

You'll be dead a long time. Hell is hot.

I live in a North American city that can also be very hot and humid in the summer. I choose not to have air conditioning in my house.

Sometimes I have to trim the hedge or turn the compost on a day when the sweat drips off my nose. Sometimes when I vacuum I have to carry a cloth to wipe up the sweat from the hardwood.

I deliberately feel the heat and humidity of the summer. I figure we spend about 10 months of the year here complaining about the cold, the wet, the darkness, the snow, the ice, the storms. So I immerse myself in summer and I don't complain. Then when the fall and winter comes, I know that I just didn't sit through the summer. I was hot and now I'm cold. It's a nice change.

To some people that might sound like beating your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop, but it works for me.

wow, either most people reading this piece are too dumb to get the irony (that means funny to people with brains) or they are posting from the middle of the country, descendants of of the joyless and definitely humorless puritanical set.

aside from the trolls it also seems like there are a few who think if they write long, wordy responses someone will notice and ask them to write their own piece.

The other weirdness to me is the self help coming in. a few are clearly projecting and some have taken elements of the story so literally, they feel compelled to help this poor, poor woman who has managed to get paid for talking about stuff that bugs her. most of us have to pay other people to do that.

what happened to all the ad campaigns that told us we were all creative? that we could all share in the joke and feel like we are part of the cool set. i guess the part about 'creative license' and hyperbole never made it out of the boardroom or the creative department.

while i am sure Mrs. Shukert doesn't read her comments, and for her sake i hope she doesn't, i wonder if any of the enlightened and tough posters have really thought about what they are saying. advice like toughening up and ignoring anything bad, while a good survivalist skill, has hardly been a boon to the country over the past 7.5 years.

it's a pity more people didn't actually whine, in publications, to their senators, to anyone who would listen, because i suspect this country would be a different place. katrina, iraq and on.

but fuck it, we're a tough nation, with no sense of humor, no empathy for others, including our own countrymen so why the hell should a writer in New York get to make light of hating summer?