The Formal Terms of a Casual Friday
Some weekends demand a formal agenda. Last Friday I drew one up—ten missions to complete before Sunday, consequences for failure left vague but implied to involve marriage to a first love, which struck me as both specific and appropriately terrible as threats go.
The lighter items: the café at Betahaus, Berlin’s co-working institution, which enough people had mentioned that I had to go just to form an opinion. Turned out to be cozy in a way that caught me off guard—the kind of place that hasn’t decided to be austere yet and still has comfortable chairs. Also on the list was a website that tells you what to do with your life when you’re lost enough to ask an algorithm. The answer it gave was unhelpful and probably correct. As existential guidance goes, no worse than the alternatives.
The Pizza Hut mission was always philosophical rather than practical. My position, sincerely held: if you’re going into a Pizza Hut, go all the way in—face-first into the liquid cheese, no survivors, beautiful and grotesque in equal measure. There is no dignified middle ground. This is a principle, not a plan.
Somewhere in the middle of the list: the Sneaker Girls blog, which had recently cut ties with this journal in a way I resented mildly and respected immediately. I visited it again anyway. They were still doing interesting work. Also on the agenda: kissing someone with significant internet presence, with tongue, because that specific category of person is reliably more interesting than whatever you’d meet at a club on a Friday night. Less a mission than an aspiration, but the aspiration stood.
The Game Boy mission had exact terms: grey original hardware, blue Pokémon cartridge, Charmander at the starter selection screen. Non-negotiable. Anyone who picked Squirtle in 1999 has been quietly wrong ever since and at some level knows it. The sushi mission was competitive—how many rolls into your best friend’s mouth before someone yells "First!"—which exists somewhere between sport and performance art, and I endorse it without qualification.
Mission ten was the simplest. The ginger ex’s birthday came and went without a text from me. She didn’t deserve one and I’d forgotten anyway—both facts true at once, aligned too neatly to question. Sometimes the universe is briefly on your side.