Ten Little Missions

The first week of the new year walked in quietly and left without incident. Respectable, but now it’s the weekend and quiet isn’t enough. Ten missions. All optional. None of them sensible.

One: in Catholic Europe, January 6th means children dressed as the Three Wise Men knocking on your door to sing Epiphany carols. Answer it wearing nothing but a supermarket bag on your head and give them your best Michael Jackson medley, genitals involved. They won’t be back. Two: listen to Genesis by Grimes and feel glad she exists in the world. No further instruction required. Three: move to Sweden and convert to the Church of Kopimism, the only state-recognized religion whose sacrament is file sharing. You’ve been an observant practitioner for years without knowing it. Four: upload a genuinely unretouched photograph of yourself to social media—bad light, actual face, no filter—and call it what it is: a small, specific act of defiance against the prevailing aesthetic of everyone looking identically smoothed out.

Five: breathe more quietly. Six: buy the Futurama Monopoly set and clear the coffee table. Seven: start using your middle finger more. There are people who have been getting away with things and you have been far too polite about it. Eight: look up Una’s Tits. It’s a real place. It’s in Antarctica. Sometimes that’s genuinely all you need from a Friday evening.

Nine: accept, finally, that you’re not indie. You’re just a slut in a grandma sweater, and that’s fine—some of the best people I know are exactly that, fully committed to it. Ten: find a body of black and white photography and sit with it longer than you think you need to. Something about the absence of color forces you to look at the thing itself rather than the surface. Works every time, costs nothing.