What to Do Before the Year Dies

The year 2011 is crawling its last meters on bare gums, wheezing toward the exit. One of its final weekends deserves proper use—indoors with films and bad cheese pizza, or out on a dance floor until your legs remember they have bones. Either way. What matters is the commitment.

Tattoo standard business hours on your forehead and enforce them without mercy. Anyone who approaches outside those hours gets nothing—no eye contact, no words, not even the acknowledgment that they occupy the same physical space as you. Order dead beetles dressed as characters from Jurassic Park—they exist, someone made them—then get yourself admitted somewhere afterward. Watch the trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator without choking on your own laughter. Ask your religion teacher whether the Holy Ghost is a heavyset programmer.

Meet Barack Obama. Deliver the full account: the dreams, the accumulated disappointments, the unlikely path back through God and drugs and reliable people. Prepare for his security detail to shove you into a wall without warning or apology. Watch the documentary series on jj—the Swedish duo—and feel the immediate and overwhelming urge to emigrate to Scandinavia. Record a YouTube video and sing something. Make it good.

Take your ex’s unhappy mother out twice a week. Cinema groping, restaurant laughter, romantic walks by whatever river you have access to. In war and spectacularly sweet revenge, everything is permitted. Works with fathers too. Better, actually. Eat significantly more Rice Krispies.