It’s that time of year. The time when you’re not sure why you’ve come to this flat slab of a school — even though it’s darn pretty in the spring — and the very thought of another 15-page paper sends your fingers into spasms. You want to lie in the grass, drink endless smoothies, pretend you’re cancer-resistant while roasting in the sun, fall in love with the person there next to you. And listen to really good music. Preferably live.

Fortunately, that’s what summer does best. Once you have dragged yourself, now broken and bleeding, though finals, you can recover in the arms of one of the season’s music festivals. Oberlin’s already offered this respite in the form of Folk Fest. And most of you, I’m sure, have rather…psychedelic summer festival stories to tell. I have a few stories, too, but most of them are simply sun-soaked and silly.

In Maine, I fell on my butt. In the mud. I was at the Full Circle Fair in Blue Hill. It had rained all afternoon and the ground liquefied beneath our feet as we danced down in front of the stage, spotlighted by the stage lighting. And then, with a glorified plop, I was no longer standing. The remnants of the crowd cheered from the stands above somewhat drunkenly. I managed to make more of a name for myself than I would have, had I the courage to play at the open mic earlier. Leaving, my family’s old minivan — my transportation for the summer — barely made it through the muddy ruts of a grassy field. A plastic bag crinkled beneath me, slimy with dirt and rainwater. The nice thing? I wasn’t remotely cold. Take that, Oberlin.

At the same fair, earlier, I had attended the open mic. I didn’t play myself, as each time I had walked over to sign up and then frozen a few steps away from the organizer. I think he was using some sort of shielding device. Anyway, I sat and watched all the other brave souls perform. A man with a graying beard sat down with a borrowed guitar to sing his wife a love song. His two children, sitting next to their mother in the audience, were nothing short of mortified. They fiddled with their wristbands and glared.

Back in high school, I went to Hookahville, a central Ohio music festival started by members of the jam band Ekoostik Hookah. I was learning to be social at that point (hell, I’m still learning) and found it funny to see many of my classmates outside of school, camping and basking in the music. In order to get to the main stages, you had to run the gambit through a long line of vendors, who sold mostly tie-dye and world music CDs. Frisbees were like get-out-of-jail-free cards; if you had one, your path would never be blocked. It was like the younger, wilder version of my hometown’s Bluesfest, which the upper middle class adult residents of my town view as a perfect excuse to drink in the street. Lawn chairs fill Broadway for the annual fall festival. We kids, tired from the summer, hang out behind the stage, watching the happenings on the other side like a TV.

Of course, these are all small, mostly local festivals that people hear about on public radio or in the local paper. Bonaroo exists. I’ve never been. One day? But the point is that there are so many options. While I can’t promise that your experience will be as dirty as mine, this is definitely something to look forward to this summer. Whenever my exams tell me that I’m not okay and that I’m going to fail (which they do — crazy loquacious Oberlin exams), I just remember that they will never experience music and community like I can. After all, they’re just pieces of paper. I think.