You know what’s really depressing? To Do Lists. Every time I make a To Do List, I think to myself why? Why am I making this list with all of these items, all of these tedious little tasks I’ve deemed important when I know inevitably I’m just setting myself up for failure?

I don’t actually know the answer to this but I do know I have about as much interest in cleaning out the linen closet or hosing down my produce drawers as I do having my fingernails surgically removed.

But my house (and my life) are kind of a mess, (as usual) and while writing everything down doesn’t actually equal accomplishing it, like pining for Milo doesn’t actually make him my man toy, it’s definitely liberating to get it all down on paper, provided I can find the paper that I wrote the list on in the first place which, (re: most disorganized mother of the decade) I can’t.

So the cat ate my To Do List, things could always be worse, right? And who knows? Maybe she did me a big favor, ingesting another inedible, freeing me from another afternoon of letting my two year old open an industrial sized box of Always to collage the wall with just so I could load the dishwasher without having thirty-five matchbox cars of varying makes and models join us mid-rinse cycle.

I don’t know how other women accomplish anything. Nevermind. Yes, I do. “An au pair,” Brinna offered offhandedly when I called later in a state of hysteria and Hefty bags. “I wouldn’t survive otherwise…and a good cleaning person, preferably two. How am I going to work in a massage otherwise or get my mani/pedi? How could I manage getting to the gym eight days a week? I wasn’t born with this ass, you know.”

And while I would never begrudge any woman of that magnificent thing they call “me time”, I really just want to make a phone call without someone screaming for a bar of soap in the background or (it’s a unicorn) urinate sans surveillance. Sometimes it really does feel like prison over here. I mean minus the jumpsuits and bunk beds and barbed wire and okay, so maybe it’s not like prison. Maybe it’s more like the most thankless job in the world but I love it anyway. What can I say, except, “you’re welcome” or write, except a list of soul sucking activities I was likely never going to do anyway so I wrote this instead …(you can thank me later. Or never, never’s fine, too)

Lesley Kirschner’s List of

Things She’d Rather be Doing

In no particular order and set to

We Gotta Get out of This Place by The Animals

or

Sign of the Times by Harry Styles

• You know those little cocktail umbrellas? Drinking anything that comes with one on a beach somewhere where no one can find me and where I may or may not bear a striking resemblance to Sofia Vergara.
• Catching up on Good Girls, eating my way through an entire case of girl scout cookies and coming to the realization I really did miss my calling as a criminal.
• Peeing in private
• Becoming the official taste tester for Ancona’s, retiring with a pension worth of Prosecco.
• Having people bring things to me when I require them. Ex: Milo.
• Soaking in a hot tub. Helsinki sounds nice. Hibachi on the side. Hold the
• Going to the gym, doing absolutely nothing, coming out with Brinna’s ass.
• You can’t put a price on this.
• Eating an entire bag of Reese’s Thins, letting the irony be lost on me
• Staying at a Spa, conveniently acquiring amnesia mid-massage, having no way to return to my life
• Picking up a hitchhiker, realizing it’s Hugh Jackman. Insert: wild imagination running here
• Drinking from a fountain of daiquiri, in my dining room, staying forever inebriated.
• Having someone put hot stones and do not disturb on my back, waking up hours later in Havana (with Hugh)
• Watching someone else hose down my produce drawers. Brinna comes to mind.
• Hitting a pinata, having a cleaning person and au pair fall out, (a manicurist might be nice, too.)
• Writing a list of all the things I’d rather be doing, then feeling satisfied yet somewhat sad that the odds of Milo being Fedexed to me are about as high as my son coming to terms with the fact that feminine hygiene products aren’t really an art form.

Maybe next time I’ll make a To Don’t List or not. Between you, me and that wall covered in Always, I guess I’m feeling pretty listless.

Columnist Lesley Kirschner grew up quiet, in the woods, and devoid of siblings so her hobbies quickly became reading, writing, and talking to inanimate objects. She also spent a considerable amount of time doing voice-overs for her dolls and watching too much daytime television–channel 3, sometimes channel 8, if the weather was good and the antenna wasn’t acting up. She was in attendance at school, graduated from a very much not notable college not worth mentioning, and was transplanted to Wilton with her husband, Ambler Farm‘s Farmer Jonathan and their (baby makes) three children almost a decade ago. Although she never quite found her calling in life, other than perhaps the doll voice-overs, which in hindsight were eerily convincing, she’s happy to try her hand at writing and is thankful for the support and community she found on Facebook’s Buy Nothing Wilton. Lesley realizes while this is all very exciting, she’s not winning a Pulitzer so she’ll wrap it up and be quiet. She’s had a lot of practice.