Docket of Shit to Do, Revisited (Docket of Shit I Did)

The sun sets on a blistering Nashville summer

Now that the season of Autumn has descended upon us like an unseasonably warm and insipid gourd-flavored coffee drink, let us revisit the esteemed Summer 2019 Docket of Shit to Do.

Below is a representation of my fulfilled and unfulfilled intentions and desires for Summer 2019. 

So how did we do? 

I'd rate it an A-.  I dropped the ball on one chore, and I didn't make time for Drag Brunch, and I failed to get around to visiting the zoo or going on a photo walk day, but only because it was so goddamn hot.  I don't know about you, but the prospect of paying $20 to mill around outside in the mingled aroma of animal feces and my own sweat is underwhelming.  I can do that for free if I just take the litter box out onto the balcony.  Hard pass.

My plan for a photo walk day was to load up a backpack with camera, water, snack, and book, then leave the apartment on foot right after breakfast and return before dinner.  Just walk in the direction of downtown and notice things on the way.  Scenic vistas, ruin porn, weird people doing weird things, zoom in real good on some shit (to Andy's chagrin - he is not a fan of macro photography).  But that's a little hard to do when your hands are too sweaty to even grip your camera.  Also, my hands smell like pennies when I sweat.  Should I see a doctor?  Is that normal?  Maybe my photo walk and my zoo trip will have to wait until Fall Break, unless I'm dying and the metallic odor is a harbinger of my impending mortality.

In other areas of the docket, I took my intentions and blew them right out of the damn water.  I volunteered not once but thrice, but maybe I only did that because I realized that I am so self-indulgent that I spent actual money to pet cats even though I have two perfectly pet-able cats in my apartment, one of whom is glued to my leg at this very moment.  But you know what, the cat cafe is a type of animal welfare charity, so maybe I'm just genetically predisposed to altruism.  Does altruism smell like pennies when you sweat it out?  I'm very concerned about this.

Best cat

I also went to 10 comedy open mics, which means that I did in fact also "write stuff" which was a goal I purposely kept vague because I didn't want to box myself in creatively or set myself up for failure.  I wrote numerous blog essays and five different stand up sets.  One of those sets was a full length parody of Goodnight Moon entitled Goodnight Poon (that scratching sound you hear is Margaret Wise Brown trying to break out of her coffin and gouge my eyes out with her skeleton fingers), and honey there's more where that came from.  ALSO, let us not forget that I pissed off 80% of the city of Nashville by winning the Nashville Scene's 2019 You Are So Nashville If contest with this zinger:  "You are So Nashville If...you think 'light rail' means doing just a little bit of coke."

What other trivial things can I brag about so I can pretend I have self esteem?  Are you ready to be impressed by the power of setting low expectations and then wildly exceeding them?  I set out to read just 5 books this summer.  I love reading obviously, but I had a lot of other shit on that docket and I didn't want to fall short of a lofty goal and feel like a failure.  But I read like, 18 books, dudes.  Once I hit double digits I started to lose track of which ones I read during my actual summer vacation and which ones bled into the school year, but that's also the magic of the docket.  It didn't have any hard date criteria.  It was a Summer docket, not a Summer Vacation docket, and by my count, summer technically ended yesterday.  Now my new goal is to read 52 books in 2019.  I'm hovering around 40 at the moment so I think it's totally achievable. 

Last but not least, we can't forget the painting.  Ajax asked me to paint him like one of my French girls, but I don't have any French girls and also I didn't think a painting of him, spread eagle and licking his balloon knot, would be a very tasteful thing to display in my home.  This portrait does solidly capture his essence, though:

I embarked on this Docket of Shit to Do journey because 2019 was the first summer of my education career that I didn't have a litany of professional obligations/trainings/required coursework nor was I packing up all my earthly possessions and schlepping them from one dwelling to another.  I knew I could squander my free time if I didn't set priorities, and I was determined to maximize my enjoyment without being a complete and utter hedonist about it.  Overall, I'm pleased with the outcome.  It was a casual outline of desires, so I didn't feel intense pressure to cross everything off, but I did feel a perverse sense of accomplishment with each item I completed. 

I rate this experiment 5 out of 5 stars, will definitely Docket again.