Ten Missions Before Sunday Finishes You Off

The weekend arrives whether you’re ready or not—another increment toward something you’d rather not name directly. To forestall the inevitable, here are ten missions. Complete them by Sunday evening or face consequences too specific to detail here.

Travel somewhere. A country of your choice. Make the playlist first—something fresh, something you’d actually want to hear through a window at speed—then go. While you’re reconsidering your life choices anyway, take a month off the internet entirely; your family will appreciate the company, your nervous system will recover, and you’ll stop refreshing things that don’t change. If neither option feels achievable this weekend, become president of Haiti. Destroy a flower pot and leverage the resulting chaos into brief notoriety—it’s worked for lesser people. Write the number five on your palm in permanent marker and spend the day giving high fives to everyone you encounter; this is either the funniest thing you’ve ever done or a profound cry for help, and the distance between those two interpretations is narrower than you’d prefer.

Clean the apartment—something has moved in, possibly a Swedish family that’s been reported missing. Stock up on Coca-Cola exclusively in the two-liter family size, the kind that enrages anti-globalization protesters and nutritionists in a single purchase. Order a pizza and insist, with mounting urgency, that the kitchen must be completely bee-free due to a severe bee allergy—not a dietary preference, a medical condition, you cannot stress this enough, please confirm there are no bees. Invest in a DIY prostate exam kit and the appropriate lubricant and eliminate the middleman entirely; the healthcare system is not your friend and you have capable hands.

The tenth mission is the one you already know about.