I've Inadvertently Discovered How to Practice Dying

If conventional wisdom is correct, the main problem with dying is that no matter how old you are you feel like your life is being cut short. Today I've discovered what I think must be a pretty good approximation for what that must feel like. So on the off hand chance that someone might want to get in a practice round for themselves, I thought I'd share the steps I took so that they can be reproduced.

Step 1 -- Makes hazy plans to go somewhere cool* with someone else sometime off in the future.**

Step 2 -- Put the hazy dates on your calendar.

Step 3 -- Let the other person make all the travel plans.

Step 4 -- The key step: Don't bother to update your calendar with the new, firm dates when they give them to you. Instead, just leave the hazy dates in place assuming that they're close enough to correct that you don't need to worry about it.  

Step 5 -- Live your life, focusing on your immediate day to day tasks and generally ignoring the upcoming trip.

Step 6 -- The week before you think the trip is to take place, check those definitive travel plans you've had sitting on your desk for months and find out that the flight you thought was on Saturday actually requires you to be at the airport on Thursday.

Voila! You instantly feel like your life has been cut short by two days. 

Step 7 -- Once the feeling (and corresponding panic) passes, start contacting all the people who are going to be impacted by your premature departure to try to sort out how to minimize the problems that your bad planning skills have created. In my case, this means moving the lab draw, oncology consult and infusions I'd scheduled for Thursday afternoon, and trying to figure out how to make the go/no-go software deployment decision I was supposed to make on Friday when I'm either 30,000 miles in the air and/or on the other side of the planet.

All of which illustrates a fundamental way in which my practice run differs from actually dying. If you die, you get to skip Step 7. The mess you've created just becomes someone else's problem. 

* It helps to pick someplace far enough away that you'll have to a) change planes, and b) cross the international date line, thus making the scheduling even more complicated.

** For best results, far enough into the future that you'll have other events taking place before it that will require most of your attention.