Missions for the Survivors
Nobody told me the apocalypse was optional. The Mayans, the internet, the guy at work carrying his low-grade air of told-you-so for six months—all of them wrong. We’re alive. Christmas is in three days. Get your head out of the cookie tin.
One: order a pizza on Christmas Eve and cut it wrong. Not in wedges—geometrically wrong. Squares, rectangles, some kind of diagonal grid. The normal way is for people who didn’t survive the apocalypse. Two: give everyone you care about a puppy for Christmas. Live, small, unreturnable. Anyone who tries to exchange it answers to you personally. Three: Facebook briefly floated the idea of charging a dollar per message received in your inbox. Honor that vision. Pay it into the void if necessary. The principle matters. Four: if a coworker has a birthday, decorate their entire desk in aggressive, elaborate splendor—balloons, streamers, full ceremony—then inform them they still have to finish their reports. That’s the gift.
Five: I’ve been reading that marijuana has essentially zero long-term effect on brain tissue while alcohol actively converts teenagers into cognitive zombies. This Christmas, smoke yourself into the furniture and let other people handle the Glühwein. You’re the responsible one now. Six: go outside with your younger siblings and build a snowman. I don’t want to hear about the cold. Build the snowman. Seven: the Pokémon Rusty series on YouTube—episode six in particular, which involves a child deploying HM moves in ways that constitute several distinct forms of animal cruelty, and I mean that entirely as praise.
Eight: attend Christmas mass, walk the pews slowly, kiss each congregant gently on the forehead, and inform them their sins have been forgiven. Either they’ll weep with gratitude or they’ll flee the building into the night. Both outcomes are fine. Nine: you know which cousin. You’ve known since you were five. It’s been nearly two decades. Do something about it. Ten: find someone who has constructed an extraordinary LEGO structure—the kind that took weeks, the kind with its own internal geography—steal their entire collection and send it to me. I’ve been without LEGO for too long and I intend to reclaim what the universe owes me.