The Weekend Brief

May in Germany and the weather has gone November again. I’ve stopped being surprised by this. The sun appears, retreats, sends a note apologizing, then doesn’t answer for two weeks. Fine. We work with what we have.

Here is what I think should happen this weekend. Not a plan—more of an orientation. A brief for surviving the gap between seasons with something resembling dignity and at least one story worth telling later.

Lena Meyer-Landrut just released her debut, My Cassette Player. She won Eurovision for Germany—the first time in twenty-eight years the country had pulled that off—which means the record exists at the strange intersection of genuine pop craft and national sporting achievement. Buy it. Have an opinion. Participation is mandatory.

Take a real sunbath. Full commitment, outdoors, regardless of temperature. Lie in whatever weak northern European light exists and refuse to acknowledge the absurdity of the enterprise. Get the frostbite seen to afterward.

Throw a party ambitious enough to become family mythology. The kind that requires some explanation when you’re older. Something has to get on the wallpaper. Someone needs to be telling this story forty years from now.

Spend one conscious hour saying absolutely nothing. Not meditation. Not mindfulness. Just the discipline of silence as its own experiment.

Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday. Go to a comic shop and take everything they’ll give you without guilt. This is one of the few remaining opportunities for pure, unironic acquisition.

Buy the good granola—the kind with actual chocolate in it, not the version that contains primarily disappointment and something vaguely grain-shaped. Some weekends are rescued by small, correct choices.

Accept only redheads on social media for the next forty-eight hours. Aesthetic commitment. Costs nothing.

Find a tree. Put on the costume. Climb. Throw the barrels. The plumbers have been waiting long enough.