Hey you punk kids!
Summer is here, we’re ready to have fun and we’re all still broke. Here’s our list of fun, free things you can do throughout the summer that may or may not get you into trouble!
1. Go see your local minor league or pick-up baseball teams and act ferociously competitive. Bonus points for face paint.
2. Leave books you’re finished reading in public places.
3. Tailgate public events you aren’t actually attending.
4. Go find a free outdoor film — camp out with a lawn chair ridiculously early to attract new friends!
5. Go urban foraging! Check out Pioneers Press for some zines that can help you figure out what plants you can eat, or look for your local foraging friends, like the Toronto Wild Foragers Society.
6. Play flashlight tag! Preferably in a really small area like a park or a one block radius.
7. Hold a clothing swap — all you need is a room and a facebook event! And somewhere to donate any leftover clothes.
8. Go ghost hunting, either in unlikely places or notoriously haunted places.
9. Yard sales, yard sales, yard sales! Snap pictures or right down every yard sale flyer you see and show up early to rifle through their weird books and trinkets. Or! Go at the end and see what you can get for free.
10. Make a zine, for pete’s sake.
11. Bonfires! Depending on where you are and what the laws are, you gotta be careful, but building and maintaining a fire can keep you, and your friends, busy and excited all night.
12. If you’re out of the city or near a park, catching frogs with your hands or bats with a net is a whole hoot, though you may anger vegans or generally nice people if you’re not humane about it. Bats come out at sundown!
13. Every weekend brings arts fairs and other fun fair kind of things in different neighbourhoods or nearby towns. Sit down at the kids table with all the construction paper and googly eyes — you’re more talented than little Timmy anyway, but together you can make something even more awesome!
14. Pool hopping. We can’t legally condone it, but if you’ve never scaled a fence to spend all night splashing until somebody claims that the rustling in the bushes is the police, then you haven’t lived. Also, sometimes the police do actually come so don’t be dumb about it.
15. Make up a fad charity challenge like the ice bucket challenge. You can actually attach it to a real charity in the minuscule chance that it actually results in any donations for them.
16. Mow crop circles into the grass of local parks and neighbours’ lawns.
17. It sounds cliché but wandering around your city or town and into new neighbourhoods — or taking the bus to the end of the line, getting off at a mystery station or biking in one direction as long as you can are all good ways of discovering new weird things.
18. Find your local public farm or petting zoo and befriend the animals.
19. Try pickling things! Some jars, some salt, some water and some vinegar is all you need to get started.
20. Find free food! You can make it a mission. Every year you can get guaranteed free food at college and university orientations, just put on your best baby face if college age is more than a decade behind you.
21. Go to parks with a bunch of printed lyrics and try to start sing a longs. Bonus if you have an accordion.
22. Go to fancy art openings. Any given Thursday evening means free wine and possibly actually seeing some interesting work.
23. Leave cryptic post-it notes or partially filled notebooks on public transit, especially if they encourage others to do the same.