I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty

by Jenna McCarthy

  Whatever the case, the phrase came from somewhere, and now—thanks to the Internet in general and the great time-suck that is Pinterest in particular—everybody knows what a bucket list is. Lots of people I know even have one. I feel like a colossal slacker for saying this, but I do not have a bucket list. Probably because I don’t even like thinking about dying in the peripheral sense, so any such list I had would probably be boringly short: “Don’t kick the bucket, the end.”

  Aside from preferring to remain in denial about my mortality, I also am a prolific list maker. Because of this I have an issue with the part where as soon as you write something down, you’re sort of bound to it. If I made a list of things I wanted to do and then impulsively put, for instance, “run a marathon” on it, I’d be haunted by guilt every single day that I didn’t run, which would be every single day because I hate running and I have really bad feet and an even worse back, and besides I can’t run without music but I can’t find my iPod charger or my earbuds, and who the fuck has time to run dozens of miles a week, and also, did I mention that I hate running?

  Apparently, it’s a midlife rite of passage, though, this crafting of the highly specific inventory of things you want to do before you are permanently out of print. And people post their intentions right on the Internet, where anyone can see them and everyone on the planet can hold them accountable. The Pinterest-style lists are usually short and sweet (visit Mount Rushmore, stand under the Hollywood sign, see a Broadway show), but if you search for bucket list blogs, you will not believe how into this shit people can be. One blogger-guy I found had fifty things on his list. Fifty! Sure, some of them (such as eat caviar and buy a stranger a meal) could be ticked off in a matter of minutes, but at least a third of them (including learn a new language and then speak it fluently, write a screenplay, and design and sell a line of T-shirts) could take months, even years to accomplish. How does this guy even know he has that much time? Does he realize that if he dropped dead tomorrow, he’d be leaving behind an itemized inventory of his failures? As if those things weren’t discouraging enough, that bastard had the huevos to put make a difference on his bucket list! I mean, how exactly is he going to know when that item is ready for a strike-through?

  “Let’s see, last month I flew in a helicopter and learned how to juggle, and today I made a difference. [Draws a fat line through each of these items smugly.] I sure am glad I made this bucket list!”

  The more lists I found, the more daunted I became by the whole prospect. Another guy’s list had one hundred travel-related items alone, an itinerary I couldn’t help mentally calculating the cost of and wondering what the hell this dude does for a living that he could even consider pursuing them all. (Assume he’s forty-five and will be fit and healthy enough for adventure travel until he’s seventy-five. That’s still more than three major vacations every year to such exotic locales as Dubai, Dublin, Antarctica, and the Amazon jungle, to name a few.) The guy dreams of going Zorbing in New Zealand;* I fantasize about getting all-over laser hair removal and having sprinklers installed in my front yard.

  I wondered if not having a bucket list meant I was lazy or uninspired. Although I don’t typically use my husband as a barometer of normalcy, I asked Joe if he had one.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Well, if you had one, what would be on it?” I wanted to know.

  “Lots of stuff,” he replied.

  “Name two things,” I urged.

  “Climb Machu Picchu and circumnavigate the Channel Islands on a kayak,” he articulated easily.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I don’t really want to do either of those things. You know, one guy has ‘make a difference’ on his bucket list.”

  “I make a difference every day,” Joe said. “I break at a yellow light instead of plowing through it and the guy behind me has to stop, too? Bam! I just made a difference.”

  This, of course, is one of the many reasons I love my husband.

  What do I want to do before I die? I don’t have the urge to scale, climb, or cross that many things. I don’t want to be chased by bulls, shake a president’s hand, or have my picture taken with the Pope. I’m not interested in skydiving, bungee jumping, seeing the Jell-O museum,* or riding the subway without pants, which apparently is a dream some people feel compelled to realize before they buy the cardboard condo. My list would be much more amorphous (and if I’m being honest, far less aerobic): Be an honorable wife, mother, friend, and person. Have enough money to pay for my funeral. Top a bestseller list. Be part of a flash mob. Don’t die.

  “Maybe you don’t need a bucket list because you’ve already done so many cool things,” my friend Kim insisted. “You’ve lived in New York, you speak French, you have tattoos, and you’ve flown in a helicopter . . . You never wrote any of that down; it just happened. I’m sure you’ll do plenty more awesome stuff before you d—I mean, you know, whenever.”

  Kim was right. I’m not rich and I’m far from famous,* but I have had some cool jobs and traveled to some amazing places and lived in some badass cities (even though my view in most of them amounted to a Laverne & Shirley–style view of passersby’s feet). The more I thought about what I’d already done and where I’d already been, the clearer my new purpose became: I needed to make a backward bucket list! Sure it’s nice to have hopes and goals and dreams for the future, but it’s also important to take a moment to sit back and reflect on the totally crazy shit the many things you’ve already achieved, experienced, or survived. This is a perfect exercise for someone like me because I really like crossing stuff off of my to-do lists. So whenever I’m feeling like a loser/slacker, I can print a copy of my BBL and systematically scratch through every last item on it. Brilliant, right?

  So far, my BBL has the following fun and occasionally insane accomplishments on it:

  Climb a frozen waterfall*

  Push two basketball-sized babies out of my vagina without requiring follow-up surgery or dying

  Buy a one-way plane ticket and move from one coast to the other all by myself for no other reason than “I’m tired of being cold”

  Swim with dolphins

  Ride in an elevator with uber-scary Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and not shit myself

  Accept a coveted staff writing job at a national New York magazine despite having zero skills or experience and without asking the salary

  Become a popular FM radio DJ despite having zero skills or experience and knowing full well the salary

  Have a huge poster of my DJ face on the back of buses all over town

  Pump breast milk on the air

  Ask Paul Reiser to endorse one of my books*

  Shag golf balls for a summer at Pebble Beach

  Be interviewed by Khloé Kardashian on the TODAY show

  Take surfing lessons

  Interview Dave Barry

  Get a tattoo in Amsterdam

  Skinny-dip in the ocean at night

  Copilot (okay, sit in the copilot seat) of a single engine, two-passenger plane

  Enjoy a famous Mardi Gras Fat Tuesday parade multiple times and remember it

  Pose for a full-size, full-color photo spread in a national magazine alongside the headline “I Was a Slut for a Day”

  Pay for a stranger’s groceries

  Stand in the attic where Anne Frank wrote her legendary diary

  Ice-skate in Rockefeller Center

  Drive from Florida to New York in a rented van with five cats

  Scuba dive with sharks, like, on purpose

  Drive a stick shift

  Lay out on a topless beach

  Make snow angels in Yosemite National Park

  Ride a horse bareback alongside a highway

  Beat someone at Ping-Pong

  Buy a fixer-upper house and renovate it on TV

  Hike through a H
awaiian rain forest

  Convince my husband to take ballroom dancing lessons with me

  Spend a week living like a baroness in a friend’s ridiculously posh Manhattan penthouse

  Make really good homemade gnocchi*

  See a burlesque show—with topless dancers and alligator wrestling and everything—at the Moulin Rouge

  Fly in the same first-class cabin to Europe as Rod Stewart

  Hitchhike in Paris*

  Pitch a TV show, Seinfeld-style, to a room full of network executives

  Watch a NASCAR race from the pit

  Be plucked from the Blue Man Group audience to participate in the show

  Pick up tennis as an adult and become modestly proficient at it

  Drive on the “wrong” side of the road in Ireland

  Have dinner with Miramax co-founder and power producer Harvey Weinstein

  Attend a photo shoot at the famous South Fork Ranch from the TV show Dallas

  Go on a date with a D-list actor (Skippy from Family Ties, in case you’re wondering)

  Debate capital punishment in French

  Practice sunrise yoga on a beach in the West Indies

  Ride in a lawn chair in the back of a pickup truck*

  Appear in a bathtub in a YouTube video promoting one of my books

  Don’t die

  Look at that, would you? That’s fifty mostly awesome things I’ve already accomplished, Mr. Make a Difference Blogger Guy. And I’m only forty-five! Imagine what my BBL is going to look like in another forty-five years. I just hope it has “participate in a flash mob” and “don’t die” on it.

  CHAPTER 15

  Newsflash: Steve Miller Isn’t Cool Anymore

  Bouncers ask for IDs to check to see if someone is old enough to get responsibly hammered inside their places of employment, but I think there’s a way you can undeniably tell someone’s age: Check out their iTunes library.

  (Hint: If yours is overrun with titles by the Carpenters, Cheap Trick, Fleetwood Mac, Simon and Garfunkel, Rush, or the Bee Gees, you should probably consider purchasing long-term health insurance coverage sooner rather than later.)

  When it comes to music, I swear I used to be cool. I was front and center when Madonna’s very first Virgin Tour came to town, dressed of course in piles of neon jewelry layered over the sluttiest, laciest getup I could afford to assemble. (Random but related aside lifted verbatim from funny author Kelly Oxford’s twitter feed recently: “Madonna is older than Blanche was on the first three seasons of The Golden Girls.” Think about that, people.) I paid good money to see the Indigo Girls and Toad the Wet Sprocket before anyone else I knew had even heard of either of them. The problem is, the two CDs I bought at those shows—along with Like a Virgin, of course, because it’s a classic—are still in my regular rotation.

  Yes, I said CDs. I still have hundreds of them, which I listen to inside what was once a badass six-changer Pioneer CD player. It was my high school graduation present—in 1987. I wish I were making this up.

  I realize that the music industry has been revolutionized by nifty inventions like MP3 players (which I am pretty sure are the same thing as iPods, but don’t quote me on that) and satellite radio and something confusing involving pirates, but I find all of these things extremely complicated to navigate. Besides, how does one discover new music anyway? Sure, I have Pandora on my iPad, but all of my “stations” are grouped by the bands I already know. You know, like Steve Miller and CCR and the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince but is apparently back to being just Prince. I like to tell myself that my musical tastes aren’t outdated—they’re timeless. They’re a little black dress versus a fringy draping of raw meat; creamy hand-churned butter and not imitation margarine-flavor spray.

  Fine, my music library is outdated. But ironically, nothing makes me feel younger than stumbling across a beloved tune from my youth. When Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” Free’s “All Right Now,” Boston’s “Rock and Roll Band,” Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” or anything by REO Speedwagon comes on, I am instantly transported to that magical time in my life when I was young and carefree and filled with hopeful optimism about the future and dangerously tan yet somehow still wrinkle free. For a blissful three to five minutes, my greatest care in the world is if I should apply the blue eye shadow or the pink, or whether or not it matters if I wear pajamas to class again. I’m riding in a convertible with a boy I’ve just met and can’t wait to kiss, or I’m dancing on the back of my sofa with a beer in my hand, even though I don’t even like beer and won’t realize this for another ten years. With the flip of a simple, innocent radio dial, I can be cheering for a football team of boys shorter than I am, crying my eyes out in my teenage bedroom over a crush whose name I can’t recall, or having my ass grabbed at my senior prom by a guy who’ll turn out to be gay. And no hallucinogenic drugs are involved! It’s pretty awesome when you think about it.

  It’s been proven that music has transportive powers like nothing else (except maybe odor, but it’s not like you can buy a sawdust-scented CD and pop it in the car whenever you feel like thinking about your beloved late dad who was a builder and always smelled of freshly cut wood, which I would totally do if I could). Scientists like to use complicated explanations involving the prefrontal cortex and “neural correlates of autobiographical memory,” but frankly, I’m not all that interested in why certain songs act like mini blasts-from-the-past; I’m just grateful that they do.

  Because our music was good, right? And not to sound too old lady here,* but back then music used to mean something. We wept when Neil Young sang about the four Kent State University students killed by National Guard Troops for protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia; we fist-pumped when Don McLean crooned about Buddy Holly’s death, serial killer Charles Manson, and the Kennedy assassination (all in the same song!). “And while Lenin read a book on Marx, a quartet practiced in the park, and we sang dirges in the dark the day the music died.” Makes you feel a little weepy just reading that, doesn’t it? Compare those words to, for example, “And I was like baby, baby, baby, oh” or “I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I kinda think I know what it is.” Not quite the same depth of emotion or political awareness, would you agree? Or take my kids’ current favorite song, “Thrift Shop,” which is chock-full of poignant lyrical prose like “I, I’m a huntin’, looking for a come-up, this is fucking awesome.”

  (If you haven’t heard the tune—because you live under a rock—you have to sing that last line all choppy like, as if you were clapping out the syllables. If it were a tweet, you’d type it like this: This. Is. Fuck. Ing. Awe. Some.)

  To be clear, my kids listen to the “clean” version of “Thrift Shop,” which conveniently bleeps out the f-bomb—among countless other sacrileges that would turn the Swear Jar into a full-ride college scholarship fund if you sang it out loud even a handful of times—but they know what that bleeping beat stands for, believe me. We actually had a long debate about the whole popping-tag thing, too. Was the artist, Macklemore, planning to covertly snip the price tags off of these incredibly desirable secondhand wares and steal them, I asked my kids? Or would the alleged tag popping occur after this nice young man had actually purchased these items,* did they suppose? (My pure-hearted children are convinced that Macklemore would never steal.) And what the hell is a “come-up,” anyway? Is it like a comeuppance? Because that’s a punishment, Mack, so I’m not sure why you’d be scouring thrift stores for one of those. Unless you were planning to steal a bunch of shit by popping off the tags!

  [Do it with me: Twist head sadly on neck, and mutter “kids” with despair.]

  “My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”

  When I brought earplugs to a Sting concert.

  —ANNE

  Of course, the musical generation gap is fairly infamous, with each subseq
uent age-group firmly and fully believing that the “best” music was the stuff being written and recorded in their personal youth, and that anything produced after that period is pure garbage. If you could time travel back to my childhood home—yes, the one with orange Formica counters and avocado shag carpeting and depressingly dark wood-paneled walls—you’d hear conversations like this on any given day:

  MY PARENTS: Turn down that lousy, stinking, godforsaken noise!

  ME: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! We are young!!!

  MY PARENTS: TURN DOWN THAT LOUSY, STINKING, GODFORSAKEN NOISE!

  ME: No one can tell us we’re— Wait, WHAT?

  MY PARENTS: TURN. DOWN. THAT. LOUSY. STINKING. GODFORSAKEN. NOISE!!!!!

  ME: What are you talking about? This is Pat Benatar! She’s won like a bazillion Grammys, and she’s practically the most amazing musician ever born.

  MY PARENTS: Amazing? She looks like a man, and she sounds like a feral barn cat getting an enema. You want to hear some real music? Put on that Elvis album over there . . .

  ME: Elvis? That’s your idea of good music. Elvis? He sounds like the teacher in Charlie Brown. Only drunker.

  MY PARENTS: [making the sign of the cross]: Speak that way about the King again and you can find another place to live.

  It turns out, hating your kids’ or parents’ music may be a biological reality we couldn’t escape if we wanted to. Scientists have determined that the years from age ten to twenty-five are our key memory-building years, peaking between sixteen and twenty. Ergo, the songs we hear as teenagers stay at the top of our playlists because they become hardwired into our memory during this critical neurological time. When study subjects are asked to rate their three favorite records, movies, and books, participants overwhelmingly pick music they listened to during that peak period. (Favorite books and movies, on the other hand, are far more likely to have been read or watched recently.)