Weekend Missions

Finally, the holidays are over. Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays—all those celebration days that pile up at once and devour your calendar. Gone. Now it’s just work, routine, the long stretch of nothing until summer. You’re stuck in it for months.

There was this list of ridiculous weekend missions I used to make. Not goals or self-improvement nonsense, just absurd things to do. Complete enough of them and you’d earn karma, you’d earn sex, you’d earn proof that the weekend meant something.

Like: build a time machine, go back to 1937, show Hitler an episode of modern reality TV. Convince him that humanity’s future is bleak enough that maybe the whole genocide thing isn’t worth the effort. Or steal a thousand euros and surprise your girlfriend mid-sex by flying her to Australia—I wanted to see what expression her face would make. There was one about eating a whole grain rice cake in public, just breathing loud and gross while you did it. Throw Chicken McNuggets onto a busy street and scream about mass animal slaughter while you’re on your knees, really commit to the drama of it.

Some were just straight-up cruel. Beat up some Nazis. Check that your genitals are still there (apparently they were stealing everything back then). Buy the new Juli album. I actually like Juli. And then watch reality TV. All of it. Every repeat, every interview, every follow-up report. Sit there and let your intelligence drain away on live television.

Whether you actually did any of it didn’t matter. The point was having something stupid to want, something that proved the weekend wasn’t just empty time leaking away. The shape might have been completely fucked, but at least it had a shape.