Ten Missions. Paraguay Optional.
Friday has always felt like a threat dressed up as a reward. The week’s over, congratulations, now go have the correct amount of fun—drink the right amount, dance at the right places, fuck the right people, wake up Sunday with just enough regret to feel alive but not enough to actually learn anything. Smile at Monday like a trained animal. Repeat.
I’ve been thinking about better alternatives. Ten of them.
Find some friends and spend the afternoon learning a dead language together—something extinct enough that no living person can correct your pronunciation—specifically so you can spend the evening insulting everyone you know in it. Their faces, their exes, their life choices. Right to their faces. Smiling the whole time. Then write the post you’ve always been too afraid to write: the one with names and photos, the affairs and betrayals and petty accumulated grievances of a decade. Post it. Book a one-way flight to Paraguay. There’s no other logical next step.
Quit social media for the weekend—not by deleting the apps, but by replacing them entirely with a fax machine. If someone wants to reach you, they fax. You fax back. It’s both more intimate and more annoying, which is roughly what all communication should be. And pick up a box of those phallic ice lollies on the way home. Bring them to your next date. Don’t explain. Just wait.
Travel back to 1997 and sleep with one of the Spice Girls before Geri went off the boil. Alternatively, organize an orgy with S Club 7. Both count. Then find the nearest politician who’s been publicly opining about internet regulation despite clearly not knowing what the internet is—every country has at least one—and mail them a tube of hair-regrowth cream with a polite note suggesting they focus on problems they can actually see. After that: breed moose in trees. I don’t know how. That’s what makes it a mission.
Host a movie night and splice subliminal frames into the film at random intervals: "Give me money." "Bring me beer." "Take your clothes off." See how long it takes anyone to notice. See what happens when they do. Ask strangers on the street if they want to sleep with you—statistically, one in a hundred will say yes, assuming you don’t currently look like a man in active withdrawal. The no’s are their own kind of data.
Finally: build an app called "Your Mama…" that auto-completes the insult and fires it at a random contact. Then spend the rest of the day watching your phone and sweating through your shirt. The thrill isn’t the message—it’s not knowing whether it landed with your best friend, your boss, or your mother. Paraguay remains an option.