A Message to My Former Self, to be Sent a Week Ago

Self, I dearly hope that I have read this message as soon as you will have received it, exactly one week before I sent it at 3:41 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9. Trust me, that will have been making sense in due time.

In exactly 7 minutes until then, you will be brushing your teeth as I was, and will devise a plan to save time by replenishing the cat food with your free hand. Do not do this. Exactly 1 minute later I will cup water up to my mouth with my hands to rinse, and even though I will have anticipated the potential for disaster and will have preemptively rinsed off my cat-food soiled hand, the rinse water will still taste like Purina Pro Plan turkey and rice, which will not taste anything like turkey or rice.

Whether your knowledge will save me from this terrible fate or merely catalyze the formation of an alternate universe, you and I can never know, but I urge you not to make the same mistake I most certainly potentially have.

I will have been sending you this message a week before now because I will fear you have otherwise arbitrarily put off reading it for several days. If by some miracle you read this fully a week ago, I was on the verge of including this message as well: do not mention UFOs in your interview. You are not going to care how relevant it will have been. Do not mention UFOs.