
The pious among my readers will no doubt be aware that Lent will soon be upon us. Here are 100 ideas for how to have a successful and most fruitful season of penance.
- Give up meat
- Give up chocolate
- Give up alcohol
- Give up social media
- Give up being a social media influencer
- Give up films
- Give up naughty films
- Give up films that are very naughty but not the ones that are naughty while also being either smart or funny or historically dramatic in a passingly educational sort of way
- Give up comic books
- Give up music
- Give up secular music
- Give up Christian praise and worship music (for the love of God and all that is holy)
- Give up lobster, though not on Fridays
- Give up dairy
- Give up various soft cheeses
- Give up all cheeses from Poitou-Charente but not anywhere else in France
- Give up Netflix
- Give up “Netflix”
- Give up petting zoos
- Give up marsupials
- Give up giraffes of any kind
- Give up your ignorance of the various kinds of giraffe
- Give up spy novels
- Give up surprising all of your friends by suddenly screaming at them, apropos of nothing, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”
- Give up your longstanding telenovela addiction
- Give up trying to learn Portuguese in favor of Esperanto
- Give up learning Esperanto
- Give up reading the poetry of William McGonagall, the Apollo of Dundee
- Give up the various birds, stuffed and otherwise, that you are hoarding in your attic and basement
- Give up your deeply-rooted habit of eating little fragments of ceramic statues
- Give up your swimming lessons
- Give up your avoidance of Luton, Slough, and Swindon
- Give up the American news cycle
- Give up the Busby Berkeley marathons you play in your living room every Friday evening
- Give up pretending you are, in fact, the reincarnation of Senhor Doutor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
- Give up whining
- Give up long walks in the park
- Give up spitting in public
- Give up gossip
- Give up gossip about me, please
- Give up your general wanton demeanor and frowsy mien
- Give up the chips
- Give up all professional sports
- Give up your various simultaneous affairs with the members of the Swazi National Curling Team
- Give up the ghost
- Give up your collection of Rococo snuff boxes depicting various prince-bishops in ermine
- Give up practicing the kazoo at inappropriate hours of the night
- Give up Morris dancing
- Give up peanut butter and eel jelly sandwiches
- Give up your place in line
- Give up the furious Mah-Jong tournaments you regularly host for gangs of aged nuns
- Give up reciting the poetry of William McGonagall, Bard of Dundee
- Give up your participation in the capitalist system enslaving us all
- Give up toast
- Give up the secret alien knowledge you acquired through highly illegal methods of infiltrating government files
- Give up felonies in general
- Give up all the Skittles you have hoarded in your closet
- Give up the various coffee table books of early brutalist architecture that you have received from work colleagues, many of whom have since passed on
- Give up on modern architecture in toto
- Give up writing emoji haikus
- Give up your shoegaze band, Emoji Haiku
- Give up on romance
- Give up on romantic comedies
- Give up those trashy bodice-rippers they sell in the supermarket book aisle (you know the ones)
- Give up your seat in the Académie française
- Give up your seat on the train to Timbuktu
- Give up your seat on the Parish Council (here’s looking at you, Susan)
- Give up your operatic emotional troubles
- Give up addressing everyone in song
- Give up asserting that you are, in fact, Madama Butterfly
- Give up counting time in anything but the Mayan calendar
- Give up your general estrangement from Mesoamerican culture
- Give up your allergies
- Give up your obstinate refusal to learn the Sasquatch language
- Give up your unreliable narration
- Give up your postmodern metairony
- Give up your Twitter account
- Give up treating your dogs like children
- Give up treating your children like dogs
- Give up treating your children better than your cats
- Give up your claim to the long-defunct throne of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
- Give up your alarming habit of musical flatulence
- Give up your covert addiction to locomotive erotica
- Give up your understated unibrow
- Give up your long-awaited nose job
- Give up your embittered attempt to remain Dean of a prominent English Cathedral
- Give up memorizing the poetry of William McGonagall, the Orpheus of Dundee
- Give up any expectations of amusement
- Give up the pipe dream of tenure
- Give up your position to the various paramilitary forces that are hunting you through the tundra
- Give up break-dancing in public parks
- Give up attending Hare Krishna services
- Give up any association with the Libertarian Party
- Give up all hope, ye who enter here.
- Give up the secret recipe
- Give up the art your late uncle Oswald took from various museums over the course of his long and chequered career as a forger and art thief
- Give up approximately 1/4 of your bone marrow
- Give up being lame
- Give up all the excuses you always make for not keeping your Lenten penance
- Just give up