2 blog days in a row...

I was talking to my brother the other day about the anti-bucket list. It’s the list of things that you never did and you’re glad that you didn’t do them. I encourage you to write in to me with your anti-bucket list things and I discourage you from arguing with me about mine. Here are a few:

1) Tyler Perry movies. I’m sorry Tyler Perry had a bad childhood, but that doesn’t give him the right to make bad movies. He’s the Chevy Chase of black people and I can’t include Chevy Chase on my list because, sadly, I’ve endured one of his films.

2) Okay, don’t get all huffy on me, but Cirque Du Soleil. I’ve only seen youtube clips and the pretentiousness of even the clowns made me want to run over them with a tiny clown car.

3) I’m really glad I never had the “full enchilada” waxed. I think that would hurt. A lot.

4) White jeans.

5) I’m really glad that I haven’t been to the Middle East, the Midwest (does Ann Arbor count?), or most of Canada, which is uninhabitable beyond a certain point north.

6) I’m happy I will die without ever eating blowfish.

7) I have never been to a frat party, a sorority party, a scrapbooking party, or a Tupperware party.

8) I am perfectly fine with the fact that I have never tried cocaine, although I did mention to my brother that if I were a heterosexual man, I could see how it might be fun to sniff it off of a prostitute’s belly, since it has a certain iconic resonance. But I imagine even that experience would be highly disappointing.

9) I’m glad I’ve never been saved… I mean, spiritually. I’d love to be saved from ALS.

10) I have no regrets about never having discharged a firearm.

11) There are literally hundreds of men that I’m glad I never went out with and at least 20 that I’m glad that I’ve never went on a second date with.

12) I have never been to a Country Western concert although I would like to go to a Country Western Bar and I would have liked to have fucked a cowboy… Though I haven’t met very many straight ones.

13) To my knowledge, I have never worn a sweatshirt or T-shirt with an adorable puppy or kitten on them. If I can no longer speak or move and Edith puts one on me just to be mean, take it off, then shoot me.

14) I’ve never played stupid online games and posted my results on facebook.

15) I’ve never sent a text, except by proxy.

16) I’ve never used an internet acronym in a non-ironic context.

17) I’ve never told anyone I hated them, except this one guy and I really hate him. In fact, I would like to tell him I hate him again before I die… so we could put that one on the bucket list.

18) I’ve never gotten “Girls Gone Wild” level drunk. Although I was drunk enough to have a fierce battle involving rolling down a flight of pub stairs wrestling a life-size and real-looking Batman. I won.

19) I’ve never shoplifted. Or engaged in any kind of petty theft.

20) I never took a college-level math or science class. This makes me unspeakably happy.


Now don’t get me wrong, I would rather have done some of the things on this list than sit around and not trying new things. Some of the things I’m most proud of are my colossal failures and the moments where I made a complete and utter ass of myself because I had a profound sense of how much I never wanted to do that thing again. Some of the things that I have done that I shouldn’t have done or maybe shouldn’t have done are probably more valuable than the anti-bucket list and as valuable as the bucket list. A lot of them, I can’t repeat. Not because I’m ashamed, but because they involved other people who maybe don’t want to relive a time when I was a complete bitch-slag. I will admit that I have been fired, I have been involved in reckless driving activities, I have broken someone’s heart, I have said really bad things that I regret, I have had falling outs with good people, I’ve dated stupid guys because they were cute, I have committed unforgivable fashion crimes, and I’ve let my friends do the same without intervening, which is tantamount to handing them the keys when they’re drunk off their ass because you know a fashion crime doesn’t just harm the wearer.

Did any one see the movie, Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow? The premise is there are different roads in life that we can take with different possibilities along the way. If I’m not mistaken though, she ends up with the same guy at the end of the movie regardless of which path she takes. Maybe each choice we make doesn’t have the butterfly effect with the vast consequences that we think it does. Maybe if we retraced our steps, and scrutinized the forks in the road, we would find that ultimately, they led us back to the same spot… Providing, of course, that one of our choices didn’t get us killed or convicted of a crime. Maybe life is just a balancing act where we alternate between taking great care that our emotional footprint doesn’t crush someone else and throwing caution to the wind and boldly daring to make mistakes and bravely learning from them.

Having said that though, I would only want to see Cirque Du Soleil the way Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd saw it in Knocked Up – wasted on magic mushrooms on a weekend getaway to Vegas.