The Bucket List

Since it is New Year, and all kinds of realistic and fantastic resolutions are flying out the window as we speak, I want to take a moment to really ponder on the idea of resolutions, of making up one’s mind on a thing and then trying to overcome oneself in actually making it happen.

I was, in an unnamed way, disappointed up to my ears after seeing the movie in question, especially because it is an important subject. I felt like Rob Reiner should have given an apology at the beginning of the film in the same way that Stephen King lamented Doctor Sleep, how it just wasn’t all that he had set it out to be. Especially because Reiner has given the world such beauties like When Harry Met Sally…, Stand by Me, and Misery, The Bucket List just felt somehow – forced. A worthy subject, yet lukewarm execution.

When I quit smoking ten years ago, it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution, but more like a “We’ll see how it goes if I don’t smoke today and maybe tomorrow” –kind of thing. My mother has told me grandfather quit much in the same manner, and was able to hold on to it the rest of his life. As with all substance dependencies; alcoholism, sugar-hook, caffeine addiction, to name a few, it is a work in progress, and from where I stand, it is inter-changeable with all of the above. Falling off the wagon doesn’t mean the whole enterprise was or is worthless, the important thing is to keep trying. Whenever I feel the lure of a smoke coming on, I only have to bring back the painful memory of my time right after I had quit, when I went almost an entire month without a bowel movement, and I sober up real quickly from my cigarette-haze. It is a somewhat hushed side-effect of quitting, and for me at least it became the trump card for never again having to be in that position, never ever, because it was BRUTAL, let me tell you.

I have never been too friendly with alcohol, so that resolution is still forthcoming some year, should I ever develop the extremely well-known occupational hazard writers suffer from. Coffee is my life-line in the mornings, yet come afternoon I don’t feel like coffee at all. It’s like My Morning, My Coffee –sort of thing, and whenever I’m not working at my bread-and-bacon quote-unquote day job, I can go days with just the three cups in the morning.

Many people resolve to start living their lives more, if not to the fullest, I think only people with limitless credit cards can really do that, and it is something I, too, think about from time to time. The Bucket List exists inside each and every one of us, whether it be those skinny jeans one still one day wants to fit in, or bungee jumping, or learning a new language or how to fly a plane, or seeing the pyramids, or whatever one thinks would improve one’s experience of the one and only go-round in this world. The Bucket List is where we dip in to produce the resolution.

On Friends there is a hilarious episode concerning New Year’s resolutions, the one with Ross’ leather pants and Chandler’s failed attempt to go a week without making fun of the others, and while I never fail to laugh at the scene where Ross cannot pull his pants back up in his date’s bathroom and has to call Joey for advice, I also think that that is an episode everybody should watch once a year, just to remember the important stuff. It is also an important reminder of how hard it can be, to keep the promise for even a brief period.

My mother once told me at a painful time in my life, that she considered me the most resolved person she had ever met, and it is a precious memory for me. I guess I possess some resolve. I did quit smoking without any nicotine aids and without weight gain – that came years later, and what I gained, I managed to lose later on. I guess I take care of myself and keep fit, and try to live my life ecologically and in harmony with my surroundings. I don’t take stuff for granted anymore, which I think just comes with maturing.

But here’s the thing. My Pet Peeve. The one thing I have never been able to kick. Clothes conservation for future generations. The preservation of newly acquired clothes in naphthalene and canning them into the far reaches of my wardrobe, sometimes all the way to Narnia. Sometimes I find a stunning top years after having purchased it and having gained just enough weight so that it looks awful on. There is no way I am letting go of that top, Marie Kondo. I have been able to lose weight before, and I’ll lose it again, you just mark my words. Remember the almost ten kilos I gained when I started at my current post eight years ago? I was able to lose that, wasn’t I?

And it runs in the family, too. My father tells me about the time when he, as a young man, once bought a yellow jacket for a special occasion, and stashed it in the attic to wait for such a moment to come. There was a window with no drapes there, and father’s yellow jacket hung at the end of the rack, so when the moment came, more than a year later, his jacket had lost all its color from the window side.

Even with this well distributed and often told story, my father is a man who neatly folds new shirts in a new shirt pile, only to be touched after the old shirt pile has become extinct, i.e. the old ones have either evaporated into mere threads, or exploded on him, like one time last year, when he sent me a picture of him with a shirt on that had ripped by itself all the way from the armpit to the hem, where there was no seam, either, just fabric. He is also a man who has new socks by the dozen still intact, with their original paper bands around them, bound together by the plastic bind, just sitting there, waiting for the old ones to die first.

I happened to open the door to one of my wardrobes late last year, looking for some hidden Christmas presents in need of wrapping, and to my horror, realized I had turned into my father. For there they were, eight or so packs of new socks in assorted colors, still in their original packages.

I believe that was the break-through moment for me.

I remembered another film that starred Jack Nicholson, where the man he portrays takes out a fresh bar of soap from the bathroom cupboard every time he washes his hands and has a wardrobe full of fresh shirts and pants and anything at all he might need, so that he can live forever in a cocoon of bacteria-free existence. This man is a writer, too, and apart from the socks and underpants, I also identify with this character because of the OCD factor. Thank the lord Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear appear to disturb his mausoleum of a condo and his suspended animation ways, and whenever I am about to lose it to my man for his jungle of a walk-in closet, where one can’t actually walk in because of the impenetrable wall of books, fresh laundry, pants, suits, sports gear, tools, photo paraphernalia and whatever else he keeps inside it, I take a moment, usually come to my senses and secretly thank him for being the Helen Hunt to my Jack Nicholson. I never tell this to his face, though, because I am sure any attempt from him to ever tidy up the closet would from that moment on be forever doomed.

But back to me finding the cruel exhibits of how much I take after my father, and Jack Nicholson apparently, in the closet. I yanked the entire load out and undid the packages, every single one of them. “If I can kick cigarettes, if I can lose weight in my thirties, if I can work fifty hours a week and still find time to write my stories, I’ll be damned if I let this lunacy go on any longer!” I exclaimed out loud to the bed and À bout de souffle –poster and necklaces hanging by their respective hooks, and to the young men downstairs in case they were home – the soundproofing in my building is worth shit - and shoved the new pairs without any mercy among the older ones. I even shuffled them inside the drawer so that I couldn’t immediately be able to tell which ones were the new ones so that I wouldn't be able to continue ducking them in the future.

“As god is my witness”, I continued, “I shall not become one of those people who leave behind them yards upon yards of unused underwear and socks still in their boxes and never used dresses and nightgowns when they die! As of now, I’m wearing everything I own. From this moment on, I’m wearing my nightgowns!”

Of course, there is some difficulty in deciding such matters in the heart of winter in Finland, where it kind of has to be PJs all winter long, unless one desires to contract all the colds of the season, so that, unfortunately, was that, concerning the nightgowns, which I collect from vintage stores from travels and from vintage showrooms, and therefore have plenty of. I did, however, make a mental note to start wearing them to bed the second the thermometer turns red again. My man would appreciate the change as well, although I think he likes these pajamas, too, I thought as I pulled the bottoms on.

The fact that I work at a place where one has to wear a uniform sort of further complicated my grand declaration. I took a moment to contemplate on my huge wardrobe and the irony of owning tons of beautiful clothes only to be looked at while coming and going from work, and decided to quit bitching about it and just get with it from now on. My friend J., who owns a boutique selling exquisite clothes for women, always tells me, and every one, to just take every piece to use. It is like the fine china: it is kind of depressing to only use it once a year and leave it crying in the cupboard while every day using the same old plates and mugs or, horror of horrors, eating right out of the kettle, like P., another friend of mine, admitted to doing sometimes if she was especially beat after a long shift at work.

So as I am writing this text, I am drinking my coffee from my finest china, wearing my new sweater, and the brand new wool socks mother made, and I can honestly say there are no boxes of new socks or underpants or anything on my shelves. We are all different, and someone else might find my good feeling about this sort of crazy, but to each his or her own, and for me, if you add pasta, Art Tatum on piano, an excellent glass of white wine, and my man reading a book in the background, this really is as good as it gets.

In The Bucket List the movie, there is one line that, despite the fact that I don’t consider the film among Reiner’s finest, has stuck with me ever since that one and only time I saw it, and here it is, from Morgan Freeman to Jack Nicholson:

Find the joy in your life.

This is for my mother and father. I love you.