What To Do When the Sky Gives Up
Cold, gray, wet—not the romantic November gray that makes you want to stay in bed with someone, but the kind that settles into your coat on the subway and refuses to leave. The trains are full. The flu is coming. You can feel it in the hacking cough two rows over, in the collective defeat radiating from every face that chose to be outside this morning.
Bad weather has always felt clarifying to me. Not inspiring—clarifying. When the outside world is this comprehensively hostile, the bar for what counts as a worthwhile Saturday drops to something almost achievable. So here are ten things worth trying before the weekend kills you.
Get your face on the front page of a tabloid—without hurting anyone, sleeping with a celebrity, or poisoning a major ocean current. The obvious routes are taken. Open a gym called Fitness Fitch and let the name carry you somewhere. Unroll the banknotes in your wallet before Sunday lunch with your parents; the tight little cylinders tell a story they’ll finish for you, loudly, and wrong.
If you’re flying anywhere, try the old man mask maneuver—board as an elderly passenger, change back in the airplane toilet somewhere over open water, return to your seat as though human identity were a stable thing. Take a friend to a brothel and let half a month’s income evaporate with whatever dignity that allows.
Patrick Wolf released a track called Time of My Life this week and it’s the kind of song that makes dramatic gestures feel proportionate to November. Stop smoking while you’re at it—not because it changes anything, but because the ritual has run out of new meanings. Spend three years teaching your little sister Shanghainese so you can deploy the joke on your parents on April 1st. Whether that investment pays off is a question only you and three years of your life can answer.
Watch the documentary Influencers. Let it move you to do something that changes the world, so the rest of us don’t have to.