Go to a festival or fair. Stand in the longest line you can find. Buy something you don’t want.
Wake up at dawn on a Saturday morning. Make pancakes. Peel an orange. Fill two bottles of water. Sing the ABC’s twenty times. Do all of this before you have coffee. Bonus points if you do it before you pee.
Pick a random Nickelodeon show aimed at seven-year-olds. Make sure it sucks. Watch it repeatedly until you start to develop a Stockholm syndrome affection for it.
Sit down. Get back up. Sit down again. Get back up. Walk two miles around the kitchen. Go up and down the stairs three times. Sit down. Get back up. Repeat until you want to cry.
Get ready two hours early. Wait until it’s time to leave and then decide it is imperative to count every piece of silverware you have. Do not leave your house until you’re a half hour late.
Insist visitors arrive with a new rock or stick. Instruct them to place them in new and interesting places.
Go to a bar. Find an angry drunk. Attempt to convince them they need to calm down and go to bed. Do not react when they swing at you. Continue to be gentle but firm.
Wake up at 3 a.m. and change the sheets. Start a load of laundry. Rug Doctor the couch. Spend the next two hours holding a hot, damp, fifty-pound bag of rice while trying to sleep sitting up. Get up at your regular time and carry on with your day.
Toss an open bag of Goldfish and a yogurt tube into the back seat of your car. Add a bowling ball. Wait two weeks.
Invite a bunch of people from Nextdoor to meet you at a field. Sit in a camping chair for a few hours a few days a week from April to July or August to December. Or both. Make small talk and try not to look at your phone.
Every time your coworker returns from the bathroom, give them an M&M.
Give a teenager a hundred dollars and a pizza every time you need to attend an evening event.
Take a quarter to half of your paycheck and set it on fire. Do this approximately sixty months in a row—seventy-two months if you had the unfortunate luck to start in October.
Once a month, go out to a restaurant and order a six-dollar macaroni and cheese. Allow it to congeal on the table, untouched.
Vacuum your floors, and then immediately throw a handful of confetti to celebrate.
Carry a kayak a half mile in 90 percent humidity. Just because.
Insist on holding everyone’s trash.
Lie on the floor in the dark at 7:30 p.m. Set a timer for forty-five minutes. Try not to fall asleep. If you succeed, attempt to get off the floor in complete silence. If you make any sounds wrestling your old creaky body into an upright position, reset the timer.
Refuse to leave the house until the garbage truck leaves your street.