Ten Small Disasters, Starting Friday
It’s Friday, finally. The weekend smells like permission. Here, then, is a program of action: ten small missions to carry you through to Monday morning with maximum damage and minimum regret.
One: convince every group you belong to—the office, the gym class, whoever is answering your texts—that they need to make a Harlem Shake video and post it online. The world in early 2013 was already drowning in Harlem Shake videos and required precisely none more, which is exactly the point. Two: spend $1,500 on a pair of Google Glass, that monument to the belief that what people really want is to look like a malfunctioning cyborg while checking their email. Full retail only—suckers wait for tech to become affordable. Three: drink twelve Red Bulls and watch the Oscars on Sunday night, then immediately watch every winning film back to back without sleeping. If you survive, you will have earned the right to cinema opinions for the rest of the calendar year.
Four: at four in the morning, drunk, call every ex you can remember and ask directly if they want to come over. The probability that at least one says yes is technically above zero. Five: eat more lasagna. In February 2013, following the discovery that supermarket ready-meal lasagna across Europe contained varying quantities of horse meat depending on which factory assembled it, this felt like a dare. I choose to read it as a shrug. Six: find the meme that made you laugh hardest this year and have it tattooed somewhere visible. Grumpy Cat. Forever Alone. Something from 9GAG you’ll be explaining at dinner parties for the next decade. Commit.
Seven, and the most important: forget how to read. Just fully unlearn it. No more billboard copy, no more banner ads, no more passive absorption of text assembled by other people to move something through you—a product, a feeling, a click. You’d be free in the way that kindergarten was briefly free, before language became a delivery mechanism for everyone else’s agenda. God, doesn’t that sound nice.