Ten Little Missions

Friday hits and your brain just stops. The machinery shuts down—school, work, all of it. For the next couple of days, if you’re lucky, you stop being the version of yourself that thinks before acting. The ideas start coming: write down something brilliant for a new social network, the one that’ll change everything, and then tear the paper to pieces and flush it down the toilet, because we’re drowning in those already. Go back and finally finish those Zelda dungeons that took something from you just to beat them. Buy a princess while you’re at it. Eat enough pizza to justify calling it a vegetable—it’s official somewhere in America now. Watch Tim Burton for six hours straight and let it dissolve into your skin.

The weirder stuff comes next. You think about how God apparently liked your sister more than you, gave her an easier face, easier luck, easier everything, and nobody says that out loud but you know it’s true. You joke about naming a kid Dovahkiin just so Bethesda legally owes you free games forever. You print a life-size photo of someone beautiful and try to find a priest deranged enough to actually marry you to it. You get a pet and name it something stupid like Schnuffel and somehow that becomes the most honest thing you do all weekend.

Then Twitter a photo. Something you made or someone you care about. Spend the rest of the day panicking about whether you opened a door you can’t close, whether you said something you shouldn’t have. The real one, the one that actually matters: get into places you’re not supposed to be, do something that would make a therapist uncomfortable. Have sex on a bridge or do something equally reckless, live like you’re not checking your phone for permission. Just make sure you don’t end up next week in the tabloid headlines under a photo that makes your family stop returning calls.