From the Archive: FUNNY WOMEN #139: Gap Year To-Do List

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This was originally published at The Rumpus on May 21, 2016.

Take undercover footage of animal exploitation on a safari on my smartphone. Reprimand the safari company in a seemingly spontaneous spoken-word art installation, and go motherfucking viral.

Climb Everest in barefoot running shoes, smiling at local Tibetans. Resist the temptation to pay one practically nothing to carry my shit for me. Shake my head in disgust at everyone not carrying their own shit and not wearing footwear that acknowledges the individuality of their toes. They wear gloves on their hands, not mittens. It’s such a fucking double-standard.

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Water is a precious resource; my portable soda stream honors that fact. I’m going to create a pop-for-profit Soda Stream start-up in sub-Saharan Africa, to help create character-building volunteer jobs for the local community.

Book swap like there’s No Tomorrow. Free books shouldn’t mean crap books. I hope to fuck there’s Kafka in Vietnam, or I’ll be morally pissed. If the only novels left are by Dan “Three Adjectives Per Noun ” Brown, then I’ll take the Russian-Spanish dictionary and teach myself both languages.

Teach. I studied Osmosis at Liberaler Arts College, so I can pretty much teach anything I believe in.

Daly1-1Follow the exact itinerary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road road trip, and film myself acting like James Franco acting like Kerouac’s BFF. Then get Charlie Kaufman meta. Make a fully serious mockumentary about the perils of romanticizing drug use that opens with a montage of me tripping on the road, which is paved in skin cells and syringes full of haiku.

Keep income trickling in by writing bitchy-ass food blogs. “The monkfish tasted celibate.” “I’d give it one Michelin black hole.” “Amokery of Cambodian Cuisine.” And suchlike.

For dudes on gap year: Consider the fact that a two-guys, one-girl threesome is a two-birds, one-stone scenario, as you’d tick the threesome checkbox and the open-minded/latitudinarian/free-spirit box in one go. (Try not to think about it as one bird, four stones.)

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Rumpus original art by Annie Daly. Purchase Annie’s art here.

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Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer and assistant prof at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. Her poetry has appeared all over, from POETRY to Best British Poetry to book form. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress is in Tin House (Spring 2016). Find her on Twitter: @caoilinnhughes. More from this author →