1. Learn to barbecue.

2. Not freelance.

3. Sell original paintings for extra money.

4. Finish my graphic novel.

5. Become fabulously well-nourished.

6. Not touch a single glass of bad wine, no matter what kind of day I’ve had.

7. Learn as much as possible about Margaret Mead.

8. Give Henry Miller another chance.

9. Study Susan Orlean.

10. Remove every bit of ticky-tack from my home.

11. Properly meditate.

12. Learn to play tangos on the piano.

13. Serve as an angel webmaster for a low-level political candidate.

14. Touch Plymouth Rock.

15. Fix the ugly crack in the ceiling that laughs at me every day.

16. Hold a workshop for young geek girls on how to get ahead in the workplace.

17. Hike somewhere amazing once a month.

18. Keep the dogs beautifully groomed and feed them better food.

19. Save $10,000.

20. Design a tattoo I’ll never get.

Hey, I have an idea… why not make a women-only Twitter? We’ll make it boring and lilac! Warning: If you don’t use it, people will leave your Meetup!

Reminds me of the time AzCentral made MySpace for Arizonans. (From the Shout Box: “I miss this site. It seems empty and dead now. Is anyone else out there?”)

Look, dammit. I’m only going to say this once, all right? “A social media platform for X” is a bad business model when the current social media platforms already serve X just fine. If you must develop a new social media platform, make it do something that the Twitter or the Facebook just can’t do. (I know, haaaard! Frowny face!)

Broad-brush demographics are so 1990s.

Today I parted with one of my favorite possessions in the whole entire world, my purple backpack.

It was a piece.

I got it at some warehouse out in the middle of the desert that sold past-their-prime Revlon cosmetics, sometime in the early nineties. It was $15.

It became my ASU backpack. It went to Australia, England, Sweden, Peru, Japan, Greece, China and Washington D.C. with me. It came to my wedding. It handled god knows how many ski trips and weekend getaways. It’s what I used to stash my lunch and my Ladyshoes when I started taking public transportation to work.

It was badly made. It was shredding, and the shreds would stick in the zipper. It was hard to open and close.

My husband surprised me with a very fancy REI backpack for my birthday. It is brown. It has padding. It has fancy pockets and netty nooks to stick stuff.

So I hauled my purple backpack to Goodwill today.

Good-bye, backpack. Hope you continue to see the world, or end up on a little girl.

Havi made a Dammit List (read the incomplete version here). I love this. Love love love. I want a manifesto, too. Here it is, proclaimed on this cool gray December afternoon:

• I want to be Gilda Radner when I grow up, dammit
• I’m not going to live in a country that champions freedom of speech only to sharply curtail it in the name of Acting Like a Grown-Up, dammit
• My art will match my soul and not my couch, dammit
• My hair color is subject to not be blonde or brown, dammit
• I don’t need to sell anything to be an artist, dammit
• I don’t need a political party, dammit
• I am allowed to spend a lot of time online reading and interacting and learning, dammit
• I’m not on LinkedIn, dammit
• I’m proud that Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at ASU, dammit
• I don’t go to malls and nobody can make me, dammit
• I believe that communities are built by similarish people having a good time together, dammit
• When I’m finished living here I’m going to live out in the middle of nowhere, dammit
• Dogs are hairy and needy and expensive and the best thing on Earth, dammit

What’s yours?