Going off with a Hitch (intentionally)

Okay, finally jumping into "the list." A brief disclaimer:

*Life is not a well-edited television series. As such, adventures in the list will not be delivered a la slick montages with a "Billboard's Top 100 Songs for Humans With Vaginas" soundtrack. The list is subject to a learning curve, is revised whenever needed and does not assume to be the most profound itemization of shit since the ten commandments (really, it's just a list). The list caters to MY particular brand of crazy (your particular brand of crazy sold separately).*

Another thing: the list was created to minimize my brand of crazy while raising the value of my Life Experiences 401K, and thus almost every item has a specific reason applicable to my life for going down on paper; anyone else's list would/could/should look totally different.

And always remember: What is insipid, boring or slutty to some is cathartic to others.

Good. Glad we're all clear on that. Honestly, I feel so close to you right now...

Since no one wants to read a 100-item+ post I'll put the list, as it stands, up in sections. The checking off of items goes up in individual posts.

As of today, numbers 1 through 25, in no specific order:

Things To Do Before You Marry, or The Hitch List:

(last updated on September 18, 2009)

1. Learn to comfortably fly solo.

2. Conquer lingering, irrational childhood fears (dark, fucking scary spiders, etc.).

3. Go on week long "Help Me" Detox--no asking for help from anyone, for anything. (This pertains to help carrying laundry from the laundromat, reaching items at the grocery store, holding subway doors, killing fucking scary spiders, etc., as well as to the obvious areas of financial, emotional and social assistance.)

4. Get lost in a major city alone. Find your way home.

5. Do something that scares the shit out of you.

6. Do something that scares the shit out of someone else.

7. Sleep in the WHOLE bed.

8. Go on an epic road trip. Must visit minimum of three places you've never heard of before Google mapping.

9. Start selfish, indulgent lifelong habit.

10. Get involved in doing ongoing good deeds for others.

11. Have wild night at the strip club.

12. Break one personal beauty law (i.e. no short hair, no red lipstick, no Lindsay Lohan leggings, etc).

13. Break up with the television, phone, Facebook and g-chat and live like an urban Emerson...temporarily.

14. Do post-mortem on past relationships for evidence of YOUR insanity at work (no blaming the ex).

15. Go on a date with someone who is not your "type."

16. Tattoo.

17. Restock your entire underwear drawer with new inventory.

18. Revisit an old fling.

19. Wingman your BFF a piece of ass.  

20. Have your BFF wingman you a piece of ass.  

21. Go on a 100% lesbian date.

22. Skydive.

23. Get in a fight.

24. Learn a new language. Must be able to order food, ask for directions, give a compliment and give instructions on how to make you orgasm in chosen language within 6 weeks of starting.

25. Learn from the "other woman."

26. Relocate somewhere you've never lived and don't know anyone.

27. Create "Ethnic Sexcapades" Bingo Card (Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, African American, Japanese, etc.). Compete with friends for first "Bingo." (Winner gets bragging rights and a free trip to the STD clinic.)

28. Take a midnight train going anywhere.

29. Someone older.

30. Someone younger.

31. Break a Guinness World Record.

32. Get wasted and party with someone famous.

33. Smash out with someone famous (see 32 for assistance).

34. Play a player.

35. Threesum?

36. Visit the birthplace of your personal hero.

37. Read/view/listen to at least three of the books/films/albums your obnoxious ex recommended but you never touched (who knows, they may have been right aboutsomething).

38. Spend a day in someone elses' shoes...literally, swap locations, jobs, friends and lifestyles for a day and see what you learn.

39. Build something from scratch utilizing three tools you have no idea how to use.

40. Try something you would "never" do in bed.

41. Be the star of your own nude photo shoot and learn to love your naked self. (Pictures are for your eyes only.)

42. Start mixed martial arts and/or self defense classes.

43. Go on a vision quest with an experienced guide.

44. Travel somewhere exclusively for a famous local food item (must cross state lines). Philly cheese steaks, media noches in Cuba, Pad Thai in Thailand, etc.

45. Get arrested.

46. Experience a torrid, infatuated, complete relationship in one weekend (meet, flirt, fall in lust, screw, spend too much time together and breakup all over the course of a single weekend. Hard to do in small towns; happens all the time in NYC).

47. Read at least two books on the world history of marriage (better the devil that you know).

48. Experience parenthood temporarily with the assistance of friends/siblings/relatives who have small children.

49. Have a raucous ladies'/guys' night in a famous non-native party city.

50. Write own eulogy.

That's all for now. I'm pretty sure people some reading this (all three of you) will bristle at a few. But then again, if you're really looking for a guide to morality, perhaps you should try spending time with the upstanding compasses at Protectmarriage.com instead of on my blog of sin. Oh, and while you're there, be sure to visit their "Have You Thought About It" section for some of the best filmmaking judgementalism has to offer. Big laughs.

For the rest of you: what would go on your Hitch List? Over time, I'll be posting interesting list items from friends, lovers, strangers and readers, as well as their accompanying stories, so send all adventures and/or epic fails my way. If you're not quite ready to share with the world, please feel free to email me personally. I solemnly swear your experiences won't become public blog-fodder.

The Origin of The List

"The Hitch List"

That was the drunken, half-joking title I started writing on a bar napkin shortly after the exodus to Brooklyn. I was scrawling it at a dive in Bushwick while explaining to one of the few friends who even knew I was IN Brooklyn (I just kind of picked up and left) why I’d left the solid boy (and dog) behind.

A combination of things I wanted to experience and outright confessions of shit I needed to fix before I could become a good life-partner-in-crime, the list was meant as a visual aid. But an aid turned out to be unnecessary, since my friend "got it" -- the leaving, why it NEEDED to be done -- almost immediately. As did the wasted dude next to us, who quickly joined the conversation.

"Itsss...Itsss cool, man, you know, that, like, you were honest, maaan. And that, liiike, you, yourfuckedup." Not the most articulate statement ever, but sentiment appreciated.

Turns out listing things we wanted to experience was fun and kind of revealing, and the bar scroll got wilder and wilder as we went along. Wasted Dude added a few of his own too.

There were kernels of wisdom in the list, even if there was a cigarette burn on it. It basically showed I’d never be a decent, happy partner to anyone if I didn’t:

A) Stop being an occasionally clingy bitch

B) Get the debauchery my peers had been exorcising the 5 years I was in a relationship out of MY system

C) Sincerely encourage Alex to try the same experiment, since we weren't entirely through and he deserved to go, guilt-free, into that dark night. (He had miraculously accepted exactly where I was coming from when I left and went so far as to help me move...even gave me our bed.)

More interesting than MY list, however, was how easily my friend and Wasted Guy assembled their own. And how motivated both were to start checking items off.

We all started asking whether significant milestones were more about personal growth or the sewing of wild oats...or were the two directly related? And would reaching those checkpoints do anything at all, besides potentially fuck up your life? We wanted to know. (Wasted Guy later puked on the curb outside the bar and then stumbled, almost mythically, into the night, never to be heard from again. We wish you, and your list, well, W.G.)

And so this blog is where the experiment is being documented. Each week since the transplant, I have been chipping away at the list. (So has Alex, though he calls his "The Ditch List." More on that in later posts.)

This is a place for full disclosure: each blindingly humiliating failure, each sexual indiscretion, each triumph over engrained "girl-bullshit" habits, and as little as possible of the nauseating Carrie-Bradshaw-style self reflection (there will be some, because any girl with a laptop writing about her heart and vagina is bound to self-reflect. But I promise less Bradshawness, both because I'm not that sentimental and because no real writer can afford $600 shoes. PS: Fuck you Sarah Jessica Parker).

It's also the place to share and examine the lists of my friends and those strangers I coerce into writing their own (I encourage YOU to share YOURS, either via comment or anonymous mailings to thehitchlist@gmail.com. Don't be shy.)

I’m assuming no one but the two of us cares whether Alex and I make it out of psuedo-relationship-purgatory and marry each other.

But there are certain things a woman needs to do before she settles down...and I intended on keeping track of mine.

I DO(n't know)

Six months ago, I was the cover of the "liberal-arts-educated-chick-from-the-burbs" textbook: 25 (not 26), gainfully employed and living a blissful routine of guaranteed sex and companionship with my attractive, supportive and employed boyfriend of five years. (And our dog. White with black spots.) I cooked, he cleaned. Sunday nights we watched reality TV in our underwear. On special occasions, he could have it anally.

Then, as the 6 year mark approached, I began doing what generations of women have made a fine art: dropping hints about marriage.

But I am not an artist. "Hints" devolved into billboards with the words “ARE YOU EVER GOING TO FUCKING MARRY ME, DUDE?” scrawled in 50-foot Helvetica font on the sides of buildings. (That's an exaggeration. But I did get wasted off Stoli and bitch in a cab from the Upper East Side aaaallllllll the way to Astoria--in front of my boyfriend, our friends and a Pakistani cabbie--about how he hadn't proposed. NOTE: This is one of the three instances in which a man is actually allowed to murder a woman in the back of a cab. We'll talk about the other two another time.)

It became an obsession. Would he? When? Where? How would he do it? What if he picked out an ugly-as-sin ring? I’d say yes, but was it appropriate to melt it down...? GOD, what if it was pear-cut?

Then, the bomb dropped: Alex, as we’ll call him, WAS going to propose. According to the mole who leaked the news, soon.

I freaked the fuck out.

Not in a jumping up and down with your sorority sisters kind of way. More a I-packed-my-shit-up-emptied-my-bank-account-and-subletted-a-room-from-a-gay-man-in-Brooklyn kind of freak out.

Well, not “kind of.” That’s actually what I did. Literally.

"This girl’s a fucking nutjob.” “Bipolar." "That dude’s better off.” Yes, I can hear your interior monologue from Brooklyn (the acoustics off the bridge are ah-mazing). I get it. Respectable, sympathetic girls don't do things like that to hot, supportive, amazing guys who love their crazy asses.

But staring down the barrel of marriage, it clicked: I’ve never been on my own. I always came home to parents or the live-in boyfriend, never walked into a party or social event without the bullet-proof vest of my partner layered over my party-gear and never learned to be the confident, self-reliant, worldly woman with cool stories to tell.

Worse, I’d become the sort of grating, obnoxious, smothering girlfriend who guys and girls alike wish to kill with their bare hands...one that turns into the sort of grating, obnoxious, smothering wife some guys DO kill with their bare hands. Lump in the fact I suddenly questioned whether this guy was THE ONE, since I’d never really taken the time to talk to anyone else, and the whole humiliating hot-mess puzzle should assemble itself pretty easily. (Alex had his own issues to deal with as well.)

Which brings us to THE LIST:

Ammendment: The Hitch List fully recognizes that marriage does not equate death. If you're with the right person, most of your life adventures should continue, only with double the cost of airfare. But if you've a history of codependency (check) and/or limited experience with personal independence (double check), Hitch Listing might be one way to reboot....and make sure you're not a clingy nightmare when you find your soul mate.

Things To Do Before You Marry, or The Hitch List:

(last updated on September 18, 2009)

1. Learn to comfortably fly solo.

2. Conquer lingering, irrational childhood fears (dark, fucking scary spiders, etc.).

3. Go on week long "Help Me" Detox--no asking for help from anyone, for anything. (This pertains to help carrying laundry from the laundromat, reaching items at the grocery store, holding subway doors, killing fucking scary spiders, etc., as well as to the obvious areas of financial, emotional and social assistance.)

4. Get lost in a major city alone. Find your way home.

5. Do something that scares the shit out of you.

6. Do something that scares the shit out of someone else.

7. Sleep in the WHOLE bed.

8. Go on an epic road trip. Must visit minimum of three places you've never heard of before Google mapping.

9. Start selfish, indulgent lifelong habit.

10. Get involved in doing ongoing good deeds for others.

11. Have wild night at the strip club.

12. Break one personal beauty law (i.e. no short hair, no red lipstick, no Lindsay Lohan leggings, etc).

13. Break up with the television, phone, Facebook and g-chat and live like an urban Emerson...temporarily, at least.

14. Do post-mortem on past relationships for evidence of YOUR insanity at work (no blaming the ex).

15. Go on a date with someone who is not your "type."

16. Tattoo.

17. Restock your entire underwear drawer with new inventory.

18. Revisit an old fling.

19. Wingman your BFF a piece of ass.  

20. Have your BFF wingman you a piece of ass.  

21. Go on a 100% lesbian date.

22. Skydive.

23. Get in a fight.

24. Learn a new language. Must be able to order food, ask for directions, give a compliment and give instructions on how to make you orgasm in chosen language within 6 weeks of starting.

25. Learn from the "other woman."

26. Relocate somewhere you've never lived and don't know anyone.

27. Create "Ethnic Sexcapades" Bingo Card (Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, African American, Japanese, etc.). Compete with friends for first "Bingo." (Winner gets bragging rights and a free trip to the STD clinic.)

28. Take a midnight train going anywhere.

29. Be with someone older.

30. Be with someone younger.

31. Break a Guinness World Record.

32. Party with someone famous.

33. Smash out with someone famous (see 32 for assistance).

34. Play a player.

35. Threesum?

36. Visit the birthplace of your personal hero.

37. Read/view/listen to at least three of the books/films/albums an ex recommended but you never touched (who knows, they may have been right aboutsomething).

38. Spend a day in someone elses' shoes...literally, swap locations, jobs, friends and lifestyles for a day. See what you learn.

39. Build something from scratch utilizing three tools you have no idea how to use.

40. Try something you would "never" do in bed.

41. Be the star of your own nude photo shoot and learn to love your naked self. (Pictures for your eyes only.)

42. Start mixed martial arts and/or self defense classes.

43. Go on a vision quest with an experienced guide.

44. Travel somewhere exclusively for a famous local food item (must cross state lines). Philly cheese steaks, media noches in Cuba, Pad Thai in Thailand, etc.

45. Get arrested.

46. Experience a complete relationship in one weekend (meet, flirt, fall in lust, spend too much time together and breakup all over the course of a single weekend. Hard to do in small towns, but it happens all the time in NYC).

47. Read at least two books on the world history of marriage (better the devil that you know).

48. Experience parenthood temporarily with the assistance of friends/siblings/relatives who have small children.

49. Have a raucous ladies'/guys' night in a famous non-native party city.

50. Write your own eulogy.

51. Curb cursing habit.

52. Answer Haddaway's age-old question: "What is love?"

53. Advocate and march for equal marriage rights. (Just because I'm not ready to marry doesn't mean EVERYONE else on the planet shouldn't be allowed to.)