Life Plan #138

Every year, you make the same New Years resolution: Stop Chewing Your Nails. It is really gross. When you were little, your fussier aunt dipped your fingers in pepper juice. All that happened was that you began to develop a taste for the stuff. It reminded you of long afternoons on her couch, glazed, watching Power Rangers and gnawing at your thumb.

You become a famous chef, New York restaurant—30 Zagat points—but despite these accolades, nothing ever tastes complete. You call your aunt.

Her voice wrinkles like tissue paper: it wasn’t pepper juice at all, but vinegar and crushed-up Benadryl.

Life Plan #137

Canadian folksinger/songwriter! Blue eyes, split between your two front teeth! Tangled brown hair gathered upon your hair like a bird’s nest! Embroidered sleeves! Chipped guitar, chipped nails, sentimental.

Fourteen albums, eleven top-ten singles, six Grammys, three tattoos, one CMT Music Award (1984), three semesters of college, four marriages, two estranged children, one child who keeps writing for money, two hundred and sixty-four marijuana hits (also 1984), six stitches from a car wreck (1989, your fourth), seventy-two ceramic kittens (you like collecting ceramic kittens).

One memoir, unfinished, college-ruled, found in a linen closet two months after your death (46, colon cancer).

Life Plan #136

The Burgers & Gyros Place opens at 10:00 a.m. and closes at 2:00 a.m., except on Christmas (closed) and your birthday (open 24 hours). Every day you do this: flip the sign, open the door, turn on the fuzzy yellow lights, wipe the red plastic tables, fire up the grill, fry, sizzle, munch, broil, squeeze, salt, melt, sauté, serve, scrape, scrub, stretch, turn off the fuzzy yellow lights, close the door, flip the sign.

Everyone thought the clogged arteries would nab you by your forties, but you make it all the way until 98, just shy of your birthday (closed).

Life Plan #135

You can’t have children of your own. In your twenties you found this inconsequential, laughable even, but now that you are thirty-four a great question mark has formed inside your chest. It burns when you see squealing babies gum pages of the hymnal at church, and it nags you with the question: “Why else, then?”

So you become the Lice Checker Lady at the local elementary school. Every two months they line up outside the cafeteria—ponytails, banana curls, floppy mops—and sit quietly as you run your sticks gently through their hair, uncovering strawberry-scented scalps and clumps of wiggling white flecks.

Life Plan #134

Taphonomy is the study of decaying organisms and the fossilization process. It’s hard for you to explain this during speed dating, so you just say “scientist.” But they find out eventually—usually by date three, when you can’t hide your enthusiasm any more and you begin to describe the process of biostratinomy, when the bacteria aiding in digestion complete the feast inside the intestines and begin on the body itself. You twirl your linguine pesto around your fork and ask: “Isn’t the vesuvio any good?” You never hear from her again, or any of the others. But you have your work.

Life Plan #133

What your knees can do for you:

walking dancing crouching jogging skipping leap frogging polkaing pogo sticking pole vaulting long jumping rock climbing waltzing pirouetting stomping ice skating trampolining bungee jumping kickboxing trapezing backflipping horseback riding bicycling roller skating racing stair climbing somersaulting cartwheeling ladder climbing tap dancing high diving swing dancing balance beaming jazzercising jumping jacking water skiing snow skiing skateboarding rollerblading dirt biking tennis playing galloping pas de bourreing grand jeteing stairmastering treadmilling ellipticaling rowboating standing

What you can do for your knees:

rest
stretch
warm up
cool down
take vitamins
wear nice shoes
don’t get so fat

Life Plan #132

Did you know that Robert May created the character of Rudoph as a way to comfort his young daughter after the death of her mother? Just as Robert May honored his dying wife by creating a classic character to be loved by children for centuries, so can you honor the legend of May by sending an elaborate email forward to all of your grandchildren telling this story every year on December 25. An embedded mp3 playing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and a 3.5 MB glittering GIF of Santa’s sleigh will add just the right amount of sentiment to the prose.

Life Plan #131

When you are mad at someone, the best way you can make your point is to hold a grudge. A long grudge, old as the wallpaper in your first home. The grudge is with your brother, over something you can’t quite remember, something that had to do with either property taxes or your mother’s old wedding ring.

When your brother turns sixty-five, he will get sick. It will happen quickly, this sickness, so you must immediately buy a plane ticket. Hurry. Show up at the hospital with flowers. Lean quietly over the bed and whisper it to him: “I win.”

Life Plan #130

You became a podiatrist because you have a soft spot in your heart for the foot. A foot’s job is grueling and unrewarding: it is never hugged, and it is always achingly tired. You sort of identify with feet. You keep things moving along, most of the time without a thank you from anyone. There is always a weight upon you, which you hold up with dignity. You even let your little sister move in with you when she lost her job at Arby’s, even though she never chips in for rent and she’s always eating your chewable estrogen supplements.

Life Plan #129

Housekeeping jobs at Maid in America, Inc. pay about $8.50 an hour after a 90-day trial period. If you maintain a consistent 40-hour workweek throughout the year (even when you have food poisoning for three straight days from that potato salad Great-Aunt Helena brought to Uncle Joe’s wake), you will only make $17,680 before taxes. After taxes you are left with about $12,367.

OMFG! Twelve grand! You can finally buy that sailboat!*

*Because you live with your big sister, the unmarried podiatrist. She pays the rent and shops and keeps the cabinets stocked with those gummy fruit things you like.