Ten Urgent Missions for the Dullest Month

The Christmas carnage is over. The birthdays too. What opens up now is eleven largely unobstructed months of work, routine, and muted highlights that sound better in retrospect, and the first free weekend of the year is already threatening to evaporate without incident. So: ten small missions as a preventive measure, offered with no guarantee of karma but some reasonable expectation of a better story.

Build a time machine and go back to 1937. Sit Uncle Adolf down and make him watch a full episode of "We Are Family." He will reconsider the whole war thing. Then steal a thousand in cash and use it to show up unannounced in Australia at the precise moment a friend is having sex—the expression alone justifies the travel. At the earliest opportunity, stand in the most crowded public space available and smell a whole grain rice cake slowly, loudly, with real devotion, breathing out like you’ve found evidence of God. Follow that by throwing a handful of Chicken McNuggets onto the main road and dropping to your knees: when does this mass slaughter end. Hold the pose. Buy the Juli album In Love. I know how that sounds. I still like Juli.

Take high-resolution nude photographs of your current partner while the window is still open—it closes without warning and documentation matters. Beat up some Nazis; January is miserable for everyone and the symmetry feels right. Do a quick inventory of your secondary sexual characteristics, because theft is indiscriminate these days and you should know what you have. Then finish the weekend by watching whichever reality competition show most accurately represents your culture’s spiritual nadir—with the recaps, the interviews, the weeping, all of it—and feel your life become, somehow, so much better.