100 Things I'd Rather Do began innocently enough, back in the days when I worked as a book monkey at City Lights in London for the inimitable Marc Emery. My co-worker Erica and I decided that Marc needed to be told unambigiously that we weren't interested, no matter how hard he tried. We brainstormed a list of "100 Things I'd Rather Do Than Sleep With You" and snuck into the shop one night to glue it to a wall. I like to think he was flattered...
The list has evolved considerably since then, but I think it's just as useful a tool. Feel free to call on it whenever you are faced with something you need to get out of.
1. Have the fleas of a thousand camels infest my armpits
2. Actually eat a horse
3. Perform self-flagellation with an angry tom-cat
4. Hold the board for a blind man's darts competition
5. Tell Li'l Kim I love her wardrobe
6. Do my boyfriend's laundry
7. Inherit the national debt
8. Be a race car hood ornament
9. Attract the attention of a rabid St. Bernard
10. Pour boiling water up my nose
11. Be mistaken for an Olsen twin
12. Work as a phone solicitor
13. Explain to my brother we were eating his pet rabbit for dinner
14. Strip for a frat party
15. Walk to Alaska
16. Run naked through British parliament
17. Take psychology 20
18. Mark essays for psychology 20
19. Be reincarnated as a Canadian battleship
20. Attend a misogynists' convention
21. Read John Locke for fun
22. Eat shit
23. Host a Love Boat theme party
24. Look like Leonard Nimoy
25. Play dodgeball with a shotput
26. Personally tell every child in the world that there is no Santa Claus
27. Shave my pubic region with a straight razor
28. Have a barium enema
29. Forcibly hot-wax Gloria Steinem
30. Admit to loving Barry Manilow on national television
31. Be swarmed in “The Hills”
32. Stay straight at a Grateful Dead concert
33. Watch twenty-four straight hours of Italian opera - without subtitles
34. Listen to my pelvis crack
35. Work with fish
36. Discuss religion with a Republican Creationist
37. Discuss politics with an Irish Nationalist
38. Defend rap to a National Socialist
39. Hitchhike nude in a snowstorm
40. Have my bones scraped
41. Be stapled to a cow
42. Give change in a video arcade
43. Be the brake on a bobsled
44. Have Klaus Kinsky make me beautiful
45. Watch a bunch of earnest well-meaning actor massacre Shakespeare
46. Carpool with the Simpsons
47. Devote my life to collecting the rare recordings of Englebert Humperdink
48. Join the Iraqi Airforce
49. Wear polyester
50. Be arrested for drug possession in Turkey
51. Quote passages from "The Happy Hooker" at family Thanksgiving dinner
52. Climb the CN tower - on the outside
53. Be gang-raped by N’Sync - and live to tell about it
54. Become a career clerk at Tim Horton's
55. Lose my teddy bear
56. Be mistaken for a Nazi war criminal
57. Fall passionately in love with a chair
58. Claim Rush Limbaugh as my biological father
59. Claim Rush Limbaugh as my love child
60. Let my brother cut my hair just before grad photos
61. Do security at a Marilyn Manson concert
62. Yell "down in front" at the Rocky Horror Picture show
63. Go swimming in the Arctic Ocean in March
64. Demonstrate conclusively that the third subway rail is the live one
65. Be buried alive in a crate of maggots
66. Marry Tom Cruise
67. Publicly defend George Bush as America’s greatest philosopher
68. Bathe in sulphuric acid
69. Explicitly follow Dr. Laura's advice on sex
70. Die
71. Mudwrestle Ayn Rand
72. Travel from coast to coast by Greyhound
73. Have a spinal tap
74. Fly extreme budget air
75. Chew steel wool and battery acid
76. Swear to uphold the oath of the International Federation of Home Economists
77. Be burned in effigy
78. Have a grand piano dropped on my head
79. Be sacrificed to a pagan god
80. Rob a convenience store in a bunny suit
81. Get romantic with a bisexual Haitian drug-user
82. Limit my man-hunting to computer dating services and strip clubs
83. Move back in with my parents
84. Be staked spread-eagled in the desert in no man's land during the last Gulf War
85. Be a mail-order bride
86. Get run over by a steamroller
87. Develop syphilis
88. Spell gonorrhea
89. Eat nothing but turkey TV dinners for the rest of my life
90. Inadvertently be the cause of Coca-Cola going out of business
91. Watch "Lord of the Rings" straight through without bathroom breaks
92. Kill my cat
93. Be covered in leeches
94. Tell Mike Tyson he's a hen-pecked momma's boy
95. Wake up after an extended drunk in a jail in a foreign country wearing someone else's clothes
96. Precipitate a global nuclear crisis
97. Grow an acne pimple the size of my nose
98. Start the “I Hate Mother Teresa” Facebook group
99. Bid for Celine Dion tickets on eBay
100. Live my entire life penniless, alone, and unloved
