June 7th, 2010

How to have an awesome weekend

Step 1: Accept your limits: come home from work and lie around on Friday night. Talk on the phone with amusing people, maybe read a little bit of the Lists issue of The New Quarterly. Go to bed when you are tired and try not to look at the clock if you are prone to feeling guilty for going to be before 11. Or 10.

Step 2: Get up (reasonably) early without the alarm and read more TNQ over breakfast. Then check Facebook and finally figure out that The National is a band–before when Amy posted about them, you had thought they were a hockey team.

Step 3: Realize The National is your new favourite band. Dance!

Step 4: Finish a bunch of submissions, a grant application, and some emails. Feel really productive and totally justified in going to bed at the unnamed hour you did last night.

Step 5: Think long and hard about which post office you find less annoying. Go to that post office, even if it is a longer walk. It’s sunny out.

Step 6: Buy some pop and sit on a bench in the sunshine and read more TNQ.

Step 7: Go back home and do even more work, because you are such a superstar.

Step 8: Go find a a nice person and some high-quality take-out sushi.

Step 9: Eat the sushi beside the pretty fountain in the College Park courtyard while waiting for the Urban Bard production of Twelth Night to start.

Step 10: Watch the play. Do not get annoyed that you have to stand for pretty much the entire performance and oftentimes the enormous metal pillar/twinkle lights construction (signal to the mother ship of College Park?) obscures the show. The actors are still excellent and the red-headed twins are cute. And it is cool to see people wandering out of the mall and into Illyria carrying bags from Metro and Winners.

Step 11: Tough it out when it rains. It’s only a sprinkle.

Step 12: Win the after-play raffle (illustrated copy of Hamlet).

Step 13: Run away with your booty before it starts to really pour.

Step 14: Go to a party. Hug your friends. Make charming conversation, or have it made with you.

Step 15: Eat some ice-cream cake.

Step 16: Go to bed.

Step 17: Spend almost entire Sunday lying on couch. Go outside only to go somewhere called The Ice Cream Outlet, which is apparently ungooglable but VERY VERY GOOD (and cheap!)

Step 18: Feel happy.

Step 19: Get back to work.