2: 104 Days
There's a hundred and four days of summer vacation
Then school comes along just to end it
So the annual problem for our generation
Is finding a good way to spend it.
(Source: Disney’s Phineas and Ferb theme song)
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The most interesting thing that happened to me recently was the announcement that Disney will be making two new seasons of Phineas and Ferb.
Just hear me out for a second.
In case you don’t think about early 2000s media and culture at least once a day (congrats on having a life, by the way), here’s some context. The first time the world meets up with Phineas and Ferb in their backyard was during “Rollercoaster,” a preview of the show that first aired on August 17, 2007.
[And fun fact about August 17, 2007, is that it was also the premiere of High School Musical 2—so it was a big day for annoying people like me in general. Fortunately, that is a conversation for another time.]
The first “official” episode of Phineas and Ferb would not air until February 1, 2008, and would cement the official format of the series as a musical comedy with the instant classic “Gitchee Gitchee Goo.” In addition to the songs, this format essentially boiled down to three major elements:
“Ferb, I know what we’re gonna do today.”
Perry puts on a hat.
Candace.
If you watched the show, hopefully that’s enough information to jog your memory. And if you didn’t, the rest of this post is about why I think you might want to care about its reboot anyway:
I was seven years old when that first episode came out, and I proceeded to watch Phineas and Ferb faithfully until the last episode aired on June 12, 2015. Is that embarrassing to admit? I don’t really care. Between those three elements and eight vital years of my childhood development, Phineas and Ferb gave me some things to think about that have only become more important and more complicated to me as I’ve gotten older. To list just a few:
“A-G-L-E-T, don’t forget it.” Well, I really didn’t.
Candace, the modern-day Cassandra. Her brothers, her Trojan War. Maybe we should believe women sometimes.
This one is arguably a side note, but can we please normalize having longer seasons for TV shows again? A show about a crime-fighting platypus successfully aired 26-episode seasons for years. It cannot be that serious.
And finally, of course, 104 days.
When I first heard the announcement for the 40-episode reboot, the show’s theme song instantly came to my mind, along with a disgustingly earnest reflection on the passage of time. “104 days of summer vacation, and school comes along just to end it,” Bowling for Soup sang. While I don’t think 104 days was the actual number of days I got for my summer vacations growing up, it doesn’t really matter. For many people around my age, including myself, I suspect it’s been a hot minute since we’ve thought of our “104 days” or summer vacations in general quite like how Phineas and Ferb used to talk about them.
No more “104 days”—at least not the way we had them growing up. No more silly little paragraphs due for our english class on the first day of school about what we did with our summer vacations. No more neat piles of the “I guess I need to learn something and be productive now” months, versus the “I get to control my own little schedule and have a little extra fun in the sun” months.
Generally, I think our free time started to feel less “free” as we got older. Sometime during high school and college, summers became a time to try to get ahead in some small way, where many of us did internships, took extra classes, tried to earn some extra money, updated resumes and cover letters and LinkedIn profiles (which is an invention more evil than anything Dr. Doofenshmirtz ever came up with), and/or other “professional” responsibilities.
Now that college is over for many of us, or will be sooner rather than later, the elusive 104 days have become even more difficult to conceptualize. The academic calendar that subconsciously directed our lives for almost two decades governs very little now: no semesters mean no breaks. We are expected to figure out how to learn a little something new everyday, be a little productive everyday, control our own little schedules everyday, try to have a little extra fun in the sun everyday, and more.
And unlike Phineas and Ferb, a lot of us have to balance the extra baggage of Playing Young Adult on top of those general expectations—figuring things out like fair rent prices (a trick question in the California housing market), student loans, budgeting groceries, and trying not to scream while driving when you see today’s gas prices and notice your tank is almost empty. Famously, Ferb never had to say, “Hey, Phineas, great idea, but I can’t today because I have to do laundry.”
I think acknowledging the shift that has occurred in the ways we conceptualize our 104 days and our time in general as we all get older is very important, especially because of what the Phineas and Ferb theme song rightfully points out in the lyrics that come right after those initial lines about summer vacation—namely, that “the annual problem for our generation is finding a good way to spend it.”
If we recognize that many of us have grown out of our childhood definitions of our “104 days” and that the concept has become too nebulous to truly wrap our heads around, then the annual problem for our generation has actually become the following question:
What is a good way to spend a life?
Horrifying. Thrilling. Debilitating.
I admit that figuring out what to do with my own time during summer vacations was intimidating enough before I got into my twenties. Regardless of exactly where you might be in your life timeline, I think we can agree that picturing an entire lifetime’s worth of days is more difficult to do than picturing only summer vacations. I have no idea how everyone else is coping with their version of that question, but I am personally having a bit of a “Rollercoaster” episode myself about it.
What is a good way to spend a life? I’m pretty sure I’m too young to actually know, but I guess I am starting to get old enough that people (including myself) are starting to expect a real answer out of me.
I guess that’s why I felt so genuinely grateful to hear about Disney’s announcement of the Phineas and Ferb reboot.
The world’s turning out to be quite a bit more difficult to navigate and survive than Phineas and Ferb’s backyard, to put it incredibly mildly. Between trying to be a Real Person and figuring out how to make a meaningful difference in the big, big neighborhood we all share when we’re brave enough to admit it, it is easy to forget that life ultimately can be an invitation to radical joy, laughter, a real sense of fulfillment, and having both big and small adventures with the people you love.
Even though I’m sure the show’s reboot will come out a while from now—or worse, if it will ever actually come out, at the rate streaming services are going with show cancellations—I think that even this small reminder that Phineas and Ferb are still somewhere out there celebrating the sheer potential and possibility of more summer days ahead has helped me find some peace (at least for today) with the overwhelming question of a well-spent life.
And whether this question is about a mere summer’s worth of time or an entire pending adulthood, perhaps we can also remember to take a couple cues from the Phineas and Ferb characters and the kids we ourselves were once and still so often are. Like Candace, we can continue to believe in our own stories, even on the days no one else does. Like Dr. Doofenshmirtz, we can truly, borderline delusionally, refuse to let our perceived failures stop us from doing the things we love to do best. And like Phineas and Ferb, we can accept that there’s truly nothing wrong with figuring out a good way to spend a life by answering the question one day at a time.
Have a great day.
