23 Ways To Let Your Inner Basic Bitch Out This Summer

1. Gchat your girlfriends on a Thursday afternoon with two words: “Beach. Weekend.” Spend approximately 20 minutes discussing how much you need to lay on the sand and drink a caiprinha, followed by 20 minutes of logistical planning. Leave at 4:00 Friday afternoon and spend 5 hours driving 30 miles, while listening to things like Soul Decision’s “Faded.”

2. Use the words “lay out” often, and with vigor.

3. Pack a bag of “summer essentials” that can be pulled out at a moment’s notice for impromptu park sessions. This includes a bikini top to wear with your cutoff jorts, a couple of magazines to make you feel bad about yourself, and some kind of lotion that smells like coconuts.

4. Stock up on Fiji water, and make sure to never be seen in public without one of those adorable square bottles not in-hand.

5. Send frequent text messages that just contain the word “FROYO” and 10 ice cream-themed emojis.

6. Have at least one of those days where you spend 10 consecutive hours in the sun, followed by several strong, summery cocktails, the combination of which sends your body spiraling into “emergency shutdown mode.” Covered with sunburn, dehydrated, and full of booze, you’ll spend the whole night shivering in your bed, rubbing aloe on yourself while everyone else bangs on your door and tells you to come do a shot.

7. Propose a brunch with the one stipulation that you must sit outside somewhere, which automatically means you’re paying twice as much for food of half the quality, and have to wait at least an hour to get a nice table on the terrace.

8. Go on a “cleanse” which involves two days of drinking a bunch of gross juices, followed by two days of overeating greasy foods to make up for lost time.

9. Order something curaçao in it, and spend the first 30 minutes of your drink experience forcing everyone to look at how blue your drink is, and posting Instagrams of your blue drink.

10. Instagram a picture of your legs looking like hot dogs, and tag it #ThighGapOrHotDogs.

11. Practice your thigh gap a few times in the mirror, and realize that literally anyone can have a thigh gap if they just thrust their hips far back enough. Feel thoroughly ridiculous that you are practicing a thigh gap in your bathroom mirror.

12. Listen to “Problem,” “Fancy,” and “Talk Dirty” so many times that your ears begin to bleed when you hear the opening notes to any of these songs.

13. Spend two hours debating the merits of both crop tops and rompers with a girlfriend, and come to the conclusion that you are a crop top-with-high-waisted-bottoms kinda gal, but not a romper gal, though you can appreciate a good romper on the right girl (though you’re not able to reach an agreement on maxi dresses).

14. Go to a music festival, and discover that you have an intense love/hate relationship with the girl wearing a flower crown. You resent her, but partially because you want to be her.

15. Fill your freezer with so many freeze pops that you have no room for anything else. Subsist on upwards of 50 freeze pops a day, until you feel like your kidneys are going to give out.

16. Drink coconut water straight out of a coconut whilst walking around a place that is not a beach. Just chilling at the urban park, sunglasses on, drinking out of a coconut.

17. Look on Tumblr/Pinterest for the perfect summer tone-up routine that you only need a chair to be able to do, and spend approximately 12 minutes doing chair-based exercises before deciding that you’re just going to walk around some more to get back into shape.

18. Ask yourself, in a highly serious way, “Should I dye my hair a pastel color for the summer? This might be the last year I can really do it.”

19. Wear a strapless dress to go out dancing, which means closing your eyes and doing the #FullSummerMode duck face while pulling up your dress every two minutes.

20. Declare “I’m just trying to make out tonight” before some sort of rooftop-based party.

21. Throw a gendered party that mostly serves to let people wear no clothes, such as “Cougars and Cabana Boys” (that one’s mine but y’all can have it for free because I live an open source lifestyle).

22. Debate buying a bike for all of 10 minutes before realizing that bikes are expensive as shit, and you are not trying to navigate city streets while wearing a sundress, only to arrive at work all sweaty and disoriented.

23. Start talking about how much you can’t wait for fall (and adorable fall fashions) the first time your thighs stick to an outdoor plastic chair and you have to peel them off without anyone hearing that gross, band-aid ripping sound.