Ten Little Missions

Winter weekends are dangerous. You get drunk somewhere alone, pass out in the cold, maybe don’t wake up. So we invented missions—little absurdities to justify the two days, to give some shape to the blank space.

I wasted years watching this show on Bavarian TV, Space Night, just planets spinning and synthesizer drones starting at midnight. I’d sit there at four in the morning unable to move, transfixed by literally nothing happening. It became my entire ritual—an excuse to stay awake and alone when I should have been sleeping. That’s the first mission right there: find the one dumb thing that will colonize your entire existence and commit to it fully.

The others follow naturally. You pick a face—shock that you’re still alive, permanent disgust, whatever armor works—and you wear it the whole weekend. You fuck someone you normally wouldn’t look at twice, tell yourself it’s good for their ego or your karma or that it doesn’t matter which. You eat peanut butter straight from the jar. You go into your roommate’s room while he’s out, clean it perfectly, and leave him an invoice on his desk. You buy a kids’ prank book and execute every single thing—flour in the salt shaker, water bucket balanced on the door, toothpaste under the door handle. They all work. They’re mean and they work.

You forget your alarm. You say shit at parties you shouldn’t say. You pass around information about friends that they’d paid money to keep private—their insecurities, their measurements, the fact that they’re texting at three in the morning from a bad place. Drunk girls with father issues will call. They’re looking for an excuse and you gave them specifics. It’s callous. It works.

The weekend isn’t about improvement or growth. It’s about permission. Once you give yourself that, everything else cascades—the small cruelties, the bad sex, the pranks, the hours burned on nothing. The missions aren’t a plan. They’re just what actually happens.