Give yourself three points each if you’ve ever:
- Shot out a streetlight with a homemade potato cannon while standing directly under the streetlight and then danced to Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll” while the shards and streetlight innards cascaded around you.
- Eaten an Oreo without twisting it open and gnawing out the cream; just bit right into that motherfucker. (Three extra points if you did not have a glass of milk nearby.)
- Slept over at the house of a friend who lived with their grandfather, a mysterious clockmaker.
- Went to live with a rasta community for five weeks at the foot of Tanzania’s Mt. Meru.
- Sideswiped an armored car so that it went out of control, flipped over, and spilled sacks of money.
- Written a memo to an executive at your company in iambic pentameter.
- Got punched in the face by a woman named Savannah in the back of some dude’s van.
- Hitchhiked to Chicago to see Savage Garden at the Vic.
- Stolen the money from your cousin’s kid’s piggy bank to buy beer and smokes.
- Punched a hole in your parents’ garage because you didn’t do as well on your AP exams as you had hoped; then covered it up by moving an old “Protected by ADT” in front of it.
- Kicked over your brother’s ant farm while playing basketball, releasing all the ants into your neighborhood, and not telling the authorities that they were FIRE ANTS.
- Peed next to House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri at a urinal; or peed in a restroom stall adjacent to where United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala was peeing.
- Received a TI-89 calculator for your birthday and spent the entire day reading the manual.
- Participated (wittingly or unwittingly) in your local pool’s 4th of July belly flop contest and BBQ.
- Run a daycare center for ten-plus years and drank three gin and tonics every single day while the kids watched a spate of game shows and soaps.
- Used your casino winnings to buy a tattoo in Las Vegas.
- Snuck into an advanced screening of Gloria Bell starring Julianne Moore and John Turturro.
- Driven a truck from Austin to Fort Worth on I-35 while pulling a single cow in a trailer and then, somewhere just outside of Waco, noticed that the single cow you were hauling was no longer in the trailer.
- Received hash browns with your breakfast platter in lieu of the fried potatoes you know you ordered while eating in a shitty diner in the Hamptons, and when refused replacement potatoes, walked out to your truck, grabbed a chainsaw, walked back into the diner, and chainsawed the table in half. (Three extra points if it was a booth.)
- Peed next to Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont at a pee trough; peed in a restroom stall adjacent to where Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was peeing; or peed in a restroom stall two stalls down from where Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert was peeing.
- Brought a taco salad shaped like an American flag to your local pool’s 4th of July belly flop contest and BBQ.
- Learned how to play the Undertaker’s entrance on the piano.
- Been attacked by a swarm of bees while strolling along a nude beach in the Netherlands.
- Driven to whatever small rural New York town in which your brother was getting married and, just outside of Utica, stopped to pick up a hitchhiker wearing a suit but while the hitchhiker was running to your car, a black Grand Marquis stopped and someone threw that hitchhiker in the back seat. (Three bonus points if you were driving a Nissan Xterra.)
- Eaten a Twinkie out of the Hootie & the Blowfish drummer’s ass—while he was drumming!
- Assisted a great white shark in giving birth.
- Worked at a luxury hotel and broke up a fight between the hotel’s Director of Security and someone from the paparazzi who was chasing Oprah Winfrey.
- Used your casino losses as an excuse to start a new life under the identity “Indigo Schmit.”
- Kicked a basketball that had rolled off the court while you were walking dejectedly back to your dormitory and then watched as that basketball soared into the hoop, giving you new enthusiasm for your course of study.
- Ridden in an elevator with award-winning chef, cookbook author, and television personality Giada DiLaurentiis.
- Carved “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can —Frida Kahlo” into a restroom stall.
SCORES
0 – 10: What are you, a child? Actually, don’t answer that. Most children from New York or even Delaware score higher than this. Please, for the love of God, go out there and start a riot.
10 – 20: We’re not crazy about the idea of bucket lists, but we believe you should probably start writing one. We get how hard it can be to leave the couch given that we live in the golden era of prestige TV, but you gotta try something.
20 – 30: You’re having fun, but you’re also maxing out your 401(k), which will allow you to have more fun in the future. Carry on.
30 – 40: You enjoy the game “Never Have I Ever” a bit too much. And while all your siblings are slightly concerned about you, their kids think you’re the coolest one in the family, which means a lot. Even if your parents disagree.
50 – 60: Now we’re talking! We’d shake your hand, but we’re also afraid of where it’s been lately. Next time you go on vacation, will you take us with you?
70 – 80: You don’t even want to know the reputation you’ve developed over the years. Which is good because we’d have a hard time determining whether it’s good or bad. To put it into perspective, your photo is currently framed at the United Nations but also pinned to a corkboard at the FBI.
80 – 90: Congrats, you make The Most Interesting Man in the World look like a Boy Scout. Have you considered writing a memoir? What’s that, you already did and it’s a NYT bestseller? Of course it is.
90 – 100: You are a direct descendent of Dionysus. You possess a wisdom so profound it’s actually a curse. If there’s a heaven, you won’t be going there. But you aren’t necessarily welcome in Hell either. We’re not sure whether to be sick or inspired, but we do know that we want your number.