Snowed In, Slightly Unhinged
It snowed overnight—the wet, heavy kind that turns everything briefly photogenic before the cars get to it. With snow comes the familiar pressure to be outdoors doing winter things: skiing, sledding, writing your name in the white expanse via the time-honored method. You know that urge. The problem is that all of it requires leaving the apartment, and the apartment is warm and contains a laptop and the internet and all the other reasons civilization went soft. So here instead: ten alternative activities. Some barely legal.
Start by creating yourself an island in The Settlers Online and do not stop until someone physically removes you from the premises. This will make you more dependent than heroin and crack combined, and has the advantage of never requiring outdoor shoes. Then go to every store—physical, digital, doesn’t matter—and buy every available copy of Last Christmas you can find. Every version: the original, the covers, the covers of covers. Take them to a nearby park and burn them in the snow. Cry, genuinely, the moment you remember iTunes exists and always will. The futility is part of the ritual.
While you’re outside anyway, bring a ruler. Radiation levels have been climbing for decades. Growth remains technically possible. It’s been a while since you checked.
Sign up for Diaspora—the decentralized social network that was going to replace Facebook—and use it with sincere idealism for approximately four hours. Then open Facebook, close your arms around it, and whisper into its ear: I was a fool. You were right about everything. Because Facebook was right about everything, which is one of the great quiet tragedies of the early internet age.
Go visit a grave. A friend, a relative, someone you’ve been meaning to get back to. You haven’t been since whenever and you know it. Snow makes it better, actually—everything looks more considered in snow, more intentional, as if the world is trying to show you it takes death seriously even when you don’t. While you’re in that frame of mind: save a few horses. However that looks in your specific situation.
Back home, put on Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows at full volume and jump around the living room like an idiot. This is not ironic. The track is genuinely indestructible and will outlive all of us and deserve to. Call your ex afterward, once the euphoria has worn off and you’re feeling appropriately vulnerable. Sleep with them if possible. Sex with an ex is better than no sex—this is a mathematical truth that no one has successfully argued against.
Tell your father, with maximum sincerity, that what you want for Christmas this year is a little brother or sister. Hold the pause. Shout "Fooled!" Give him a high-five. These are the moments that keep a family coherent.
Finally: retrieve the Playboy from wherever you’ve kept it. Sit down. Try. Give it a genuine fifteen minutes. When it becomes clear that it isn’t going to work—and it isn’t, and the Playboy industry is aware of this, which is why they tried the lifestyle rebrand—close it quietly and visit Motherless instead, which actually works, and is why it still exists.