Ten Little Missions

Last one of these for the year, so here’s the full collection. A hundred-song playlist you’re supposed to listen to straight through—your computer will definitely die in the attempt. Weird anonymous sex with internet strangers, the kind where you might accidentally send your intimate confessions to a family member or that teacher you hated. Only throwing trash in containers where it explicitly says you can’t. Letting someone teach you how to dance to electronic music and then spending the whole night falling for them.

Someone gave me this whole lecture about how consumer capitalism is designed to hollow you out, so I’m only buying green packaging for a while, which lasted about ninety minutes. Holding your friend’s newborn and saying something deeply inappropriate about what she’ll become, and actually meaning it. Listening to an Adele cover by some Korean artist until it stops being emotionally devastating and just becomes sound. Ending the year with Nyan Cat because it’s the only appropriate note to finish on.

These things don’t cohere into meaning. They don’t add up to anything. They’re just the small, stupid tasks you collect because otherwise the weekend is just hours you’re awake for, and you need them to be about something, even if that something is completely absurd.