I Got Here The Old-Fashioned Way: I Urned it.

I have a little plot of land in tony Lake Oswego. It's up in the hills, very pretty, in a nice neighborhood within walking distance to Starbucks and Bellagio's pizza. Which will be very convenient when I move there, since I won't have a car as I will be dead.

I own a cemetery plot. Well, I'm one in a communal plot for eight. I will finally have the commune I've longed for all these years. It's a small commune - roughly the size of a nice orchestra box at the Hollywood Bowl. Which is what I imagine the Afterlife will be like. A pleasant summer evening at the Bowl. Swan Lake. Or Theodore Bikel. Maybe Mozart. Hopefully not Kenny G or some shit like that. Oh God, what if the Afterlife has a Kenny G soundtrack? Fuck.

Five of us are already signed up for the plot: Robin, my sister, my BIL, me, and a very nice woman from my congregation who sings alto in the choir. I think the four of us lucked out with this woman - she seems to be our kind of people; she wears colorful jewelry and enjoys bad language. She calls me "Roomie" when she sees me at temple, which warms me to her every time.

I hope she likes to stay up late. Our cemetery plot is going to be the party plot. But not the obnoxious kind of party plot. We'll be the insufferably erudite kind of party people, you know, we'll laugh uproariously but it will be at, say, a clever bon mot in Aramaic or a reading of Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano" or something. All the other ghosts will roll their eyes at us but secretly they will wish we had invited them. Which we will not, because if you start inviting all the hoi polloi in the whole cemetery, you're gonna lose your cache. Well, perhaps we'll invite Linus Pauling, who's buried there. He's defo only a third tier celebrity, but he created decent buzz in his time. Plus, we could score some good Vitamin C from him.

I'll finally get to spend more time with my sister once we are dead and sharing a cemetery plot. That'll be sweet. We used to share a bedroom when we were kids and that was a shitload of fun. Karen is the one who taught me to put books in my underpants so our parents would hurt their hands when they spanked our butts. Which they never did (spank us), but still. I was a nervous child and I wanted to be prepared, in case. I used to walk around with books in my underpants whenever I did something wrong, just in case. I still do.

I'm not in a hurry to get there, however. I still have shit to do here. I need to get a freestanding toilet paper holder for the new bathroom because the contractor forgot to make space on the wall for one. And I need to return the six bathing suits I bought for water aerobics last June, each in descending size, because I was certain the inches would be falling off of me after every 55 -minute class this summer. As it is, the first bathing suit still fits fine, but whatev.

I'm almost 60 years old. My body is what it is. I am going to focus on getting my personality into shape now. I let my personality kinda go to hell when I had my boobs as my calling card. And, frankly, flashing my cleavage when it's down at my waist isn't gonna get me the swag anymore. I say if a woman has to pull down her pants to flash her cleavage, it's time to work on her personality.

I just hope I fit into my size XL urn.