Life Plan #289

Ways You Totally Could Have Gotten Your Own Reality Show If You Had Just Gotten Off the Couch and Tried For Once in Your Life

having more than five children in one batch
opening yourself up to bisexuality
becoming addicted to drugs and then getting sort-of better
being a celebrity who is about to become a former celebrity
having a dysfunctional relationship with another celebrity
competing for the affection of a current/former celebrity
going to high school in a wealthy, white area of California
owning a rough tattoo/motorcycle shop
being a hip and trendy gay man who dispenses practical advice

Life Plan #288

The worst part about being a world-renown expert Freudian psychoanalyst is that your twelve-year-old niece decides to make you a Facebook page one day while you are unloading the groceries from the car and when she hits “invite entire address book” it sends a mass email to every single one of your clients asking if they would like to be your personal friend on the social networking site; most of them are pleased by the opportunity to inspect your profile, on which your niece has posted a meaningful Fall Out Boy lyric and listed Bride Wars as your favorite movie.

Life Plan #287

Being named the beneficiary of a wealthy artist is basically just fodder for dinner-party talk until the guy actually dies. Then comes the hard part: weeding through paintings, slides, broken harpsichords, rolled up drawings covered in mold, empty jars, tires, apple crates full of broken glass, stretchers, top hats, birdcages made from petrified canary bones, a bin of dusty canary seed, paintbrushes, pencils, ribbons, leather chaps, and twelve nonfunctional pianos.

At night you come home exhausted, with just enough energy left to haul 156 back issues of The New Yorker to the dumpster. Some things, you realize, are just junk.

Life Plan #286

You keep forgetting basic chunks of your childhood. First grade, second grade—where did they go?

The doctor explains it like this: you have a protein called kinase Mζ (PKMζ or PKMzeta for short) that fuses postsynaptically onto neurons, causing synaptic potentiation, which is awesome, except the selective inhibitors of PKMζ become involved in an erasure of long-term memory associations in the brain. Basically there’s no solution for boosting your PKMζ, he says, except maybe taking up a new language or doing the morning crossword puzzle.

The doctor has a booger hanging from his nose. You are mesmerized by the thing.

Life Plan #285

Bicknell, Utah is the smallest town in the U.S. with a movie theatre. As the manager, you have some pretty sweet perks—the back office has a couch and you get free popcorn during non-peak hours.

Bicknell’s population is somewhere between 325–245 in any given year. It all depends on who gets pregnant, who gets cancer, or who packs up and leaves for more urban pastures.

But the movie theatre never closes. There are 50 seats in each of the three screening rooms, and you swear last year you saw half of Bicknell all at once, when that tornado movie opened.

Life Plan #284

The overworked estimator seems to get bronchitis at the same time every year for his entire young adulthood, until suddenly he has bronchitis every day. People at work stop inviting him to Outback for the Bloomin’ Onion at lunch. He spends his afternoons alone in the office, estimating and erasing.
Finally he travels to Salsomaggiore Terme to give the healing Italian waters a shot. Within a week the coughing stops and he breathes easily. He is about to buy a ticket home when he hears that the Miss Italia contest is next week. The overworked estimator puts his feet up.

Life Plan #283

Jobs that Do Not Get Memorial Day Off:

phlebotomist at local Blood Center
tour guide at Museum of Life and Sciences
deputy assistant coroner
express courier deliveryman
state park employee
Jamba Juicer in the county mall food court
Panda Expresser in the county mall food court
Subway sandwich artiste at the county mall food court
movie theatre ticket ripper
grocery store bagger
housewife
househusband
personal assistant to Rob Lowe
Wal-Mart manager, Plants & Housewares Division
police officer
emergency room surgeon
7-11 clerk
bus driver
subway engineer
sanitation officer
auto service technician
radio deejay
Memorial Day parade emcee
news anchorwoman
Shriner

Life Plan #282

The shaky home video your mom shot of you

1) smiling and dancing next to the family horse,
2) petting the family horse, and
3) getting bucked across the lawn by the family horse

wins your family $50,000 in a funny video contest. And how the audience laughs! Your mom and dad use the money to

1) pay off the mortgage
2) fly to Madrid for a week of sunburned flamenco nights
3) upgrade to a stackable washer and dryer

though, looking back, what you really could have used was

1) professional therapy
2) a hug
3) maybe a hamster.

Life Plan #281

The last thing that flashes through your mind when you die (62, complications of pancreatic cancer, not as painful as you’d feared) is the memory of the year when your family owned a liquor store in Queens; you remember your brothers arguing over the arrangement of cases in the storeroom, the stacks of red and gold cardboard boxes of beer, your mother twisting a brown paper sack around a bottle for a customer, the pleasant thunk of the cash register drawer, and your father hunched over a scrambled black-and-white television in the corner, shoveling cold thai food in his mouth.

Life Plan #280

When you are twelve, you win a scholarship to an elite summer art program. You spend your time sucking yolk out of eggshells and painting the fragile shells with glittered landscapes and galloping horses. Your teacher says you could possibly be smarter than Picasso.

Forty-some years later you call the school on a whim to see if they remember you, if there’s a paper with your name on it anywhere, if maybe they still have an eggshell painting somewhere, maybe in their museum or in a display case. The receptionist puts you on hold to check. You wait for hours.