Famous Last Words

Hello!

Thank you all for being so patient with me as I finished exams, came home for winter break, and caught up on about 2 weeks of lost sleep. I hope the holiday season is treating you and yours well and you're taking time to relax and reflect on the year gone by. It seems fitting this time of year to think about conclusions and beginnings, stops and starts. Thus, it is a happy coincidence that one of my favorite YouTube vloggers, John Green of the vlogbrothers, just posted a really funny and interesting video featuring the famous last words of 50 historical figures. Take a look below:

This may seem morbid/twisted/inappropriate, especially at this time of year when we are supposed to be celebrating life and joy and all those wonderful things we take for granted, but this video really got me motivated to come up with some really great last words. I've been mulling over it for quite some time, and have struggled to come up with anything profound, funny, incisive or timeless in any way. Here are some of my ideas:

1. "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

This is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and just about the only thing I've ever considered getting tattooed on my body. Granted, these would be seriously bad ass last words, but I can't help but feel that they're a cop out. They are brilliant, but they aren't mine, and should I ever become some sort of canonical figure, people in the future would always read "TM, quoting Kurt Vonnegut, said on his deathbed..." If I can, I'd like to get rid of that qualifier "quoting Kurt Vonnegut" and make it my own.

2. "What a terribly predictable ending."

I'm kind of partial to this one. This is something that I'm prone to say frequently regarding movies with people like Kate Hudson and Reese Witherspoon in them. It often results in me getting called a snob by my mother and sister and hearing once again that I "just need to learn to have fun at the movies!" So not only would it be a hilarious way to go, it would be just poignant enough to be quoted in the future.

3. "Tell Jill Barber I love her."

This is just true. No explanation needed.

4. "My only regret is that I didn't live to see cyborgs rule the Earth."

Also true.

5. "At my funeral, make sure there's an open bar."

True, and profoundly functional. I don't want a funeral where people sit around and cry and wave incense about and talk about how I'm in a better place now (cause I'm not). I want people listening to great music, dancing, drinking many different kids of rum cocktails and doing things they'll regret in the morning. It'll be great, you'll always remember it, and I won't have to clean up the mess- perfect plan!

6. "I'm just going to say it, Vampire Weekend makes me sick."

This is inspired by one of the quotes from the video above, only with Vampire Weekend in place of Dante. Vampire Weekend doesn't genuinely make me sick, but if I read any more articles on Pitchfork or Rolling Stone about how Vampire Weekend is so overrated that they have, in fact, become underrated once again, I will put a bullet through my skull. This phrase suffers the same curse as the first one though, it isn't really mine.

7. "The Egyptians buried their dead with cats and gold, the Greeks buried theirs with coins over their eyes. Bury me with wine, cheese and music, and you will have gotten it right."

I like this one quite a bit, mostly because it has just enough Oscar Wilde-esque arrogance about it to make it hilarious and endlessly quotable. This is much more suitable to a life of historical significance than Vonnegut's words coming out of my mouth.

8. "I give this life an 8.9 out of 10"

This would be my final "suck it" to Pitchfork Media, an obnoxious-as-fuck website that rates music on a scale from 1-10, but allows decimal points, so it is effectively a scale of 1-100. They often wait until after all other major reviews have been published, THEN publish theirs, which is often self-consciously against the grain. So annoying. Also, they don't edit their pieces before they are posted, so you often end up in a nightmarish world of semicolons, obscure references, and appositive phrases galore. I'm not so sure I want to devote my final breath to something so appallingly stupid, though.

9. "If they ever find a cure for whatever it is that has put me on my deathbed, make sure you give it to sick people, not pharmaceutical companies."

Medicine should be used to make sick people better, not to make insurance and pharmaceutical companies more impervious to recession. I'll be spreading that word until I'm dead. People seem to listen to someone when they know that someone is dying, so maybe the message will finally get through. Cold, boney, lifeless fingers crossed!

10. "People are people. Make the most of it"