1

The highlight of your day is being reminded that one time, Shaquille O’Neal was in a movie called Shazaam where he played a genie who, you are pretty sure, came out of a boombox to grant the wishes of a small, sassy African-American boy. This reaffirms your longstanding conviction that the oft-maligned nineties truly were a golden age.

2

The pure, heady, righteous joy you felt at #1 is crushed to a fine fine dust when you wikipedia it and find out that it was actually Kazaam, not Shazaam. SO not as cool.

3

A friend tells you that Anna Nicole Smith just died and you hear yourself ask, without skipping a beat, “What’s going to happen to the baby? Will the lawyer-turned-pseudo-father get her or will she go to the paparazzo-claiming-biological-paternity?” (In the hours that follow, other people you know text/IM you with the news, assuming, correctly, that you will be interested. You are forced to once again reevaluate your life.)

4

Instead of just going to the grocery store, you order enough sushi for five grown men and gradually graze your way through it over the course of the day. You tell yourself this is okay, because it’s winter and you never did turn on the heat in your room, so the fish will stay fresh. You gleefully congratulate yourself on taking care of all three meals in one fell swoop.

5

It is 4 a.m. You are drunk. It starts to snow. You go upstairs and wake up your flatmate to ask if you can borrow her keys, because you lost your keys ten months ago and never replaced them, and hey, it’s snowing, and you feel like going out. Even though/Because it is 4 a.m. and you are drunk. Your flatmate does not find this to be strange/out of character.

She gives you her keys and you get on a night bus to the city center to wander around aimlessly. You get home three hours later, traveling alongside morning commuters, wet, cold, and fairly sobered up. You go to bed. When your other flatmate brings this up to you later that day, after you wake up in the afternoon, you intelligently reply: “Huh? I went out?”

6

Something is wrong with your “L” key, and for the last two weeks you’ve been thinking about maybe prying it up and investigating the situation. You have yet to act. This is mostly because in your head, you have developed an incredibly complex fantasy scenario where a community of microscopic keyboard gnomes are actually living under your “L,” and you don’t want to face the fact that this is, most likely, not true, that it is actually probably something depressingly mundane like a bit of cigarette ash.

7

As you are lying in bed, about to fall asleep, it suddenly occurs to you that you might never wake up, because that happens sometimes, right? People in their twenties have freak heart attacks and strokes, and it’s not like you live a healthy lifestyle. You actually start to have a mild panic attack and seriously consider getting up and cleaning your room and taking a shower, so that when people discover your corpse they won’t have to deal with anything extra gross. You don’t. You go to sleep. But in the weeks that follow, this thought returns to you with alarming regularity at bedtimes.

8

Your flatmate tells you that it is your turn to buy toilet paper and dishwashing liquid and even though she is right, you are filled with the rage of a thousand fiery suns.

9

You really really really have to pee, and there is absolutely no reason on God’s green earth why you can’t just get up and go pee, in fact, you tell yourself you should, that you should just go and pee, goddammit, this is ridiculous, but instead you hold it, even though you’re at home alone and vaguely worried about urinary tract infections and not actually doing anything time-sensitive. You are that lazy.

10

You spend a lot of time worrying that your newfound attraction to John Krasinski is somehow a betrayal of your fierce, long-standing loyalty to Clive Owen. You go through an intense bargaining period, only to ultimately be overcome by helpless remorse. You consider writing to Clive to make amends, to explain the whole situation, to point out how it would never have worked — the age gap is really too big and you are just at such different points in your lives. Happily, you don’t actually do this, because you are not that far gone yet. Yet.

10.1

The more you stare at the word “yet,” the more absolutely ridiculous it looks. In what is undoubtedly a new low, you come very VERY close to double checking the spelling on dictionary.com.

As of 2:50 a.m., January the first, year two thousand and seven, these are the things I would like to do before I die.


1) Master a deadly martial art (until able to pass, at will, as mysterious hooded ninja type figure).

2) Become a (part-time?) drummer for an eighties-style synth-oriented band, the lead singer of which must have large, feathered hair.

3) Raise a fiercely loyal, highly dangerous, ridiculously large dog, possibly named something  overtly biblical/apocalyptic.

4) Become one of those people who is effortlessly neat and tidy, but not in an assholeish manner.

5) Go back to that Hungarian restaurant I went to that time, the one with the amazing dumplings.

6) Track down Clive Owen and make him understand that no one, No One, will ever love him the way I do, never ever ever ever.

7) Own some sort of property that includes a siege-worthy moat. And a maze. Like in the Shining.  (The maze in the Shining, not the moat. There is no moat in the Shining. Fool.)

Move to Barcelona for a while and live an aggressively stylish, continental existence involving  lots of attractive casual nudity and ironic disenchantment with the world at large.

9) Come up with an honest, year-by-year soundtrack for my life, starting with that first 1989  purchase of WHAM!’s greatest hits and pushing right on through to All 4 One and Boyz II Men.

10) Live in a turret of some sort, or at least a room with charmingly irregular ceilings. And a  window seat. Like in Anne of Windy Poplars, or whichever the one was where she went away to teach and lived in that house with the trees and the pushy cleaning lady and wrote Gilbert Blythe all those letters.

11) Survive a large-scale zombie uprising, during which I prove my mettle and save an innocent  baby or a bus full of kindergarten children. Or Clive Owen. Yeah. Maybe just Clive.