I tend to be a minimum of 15 years late to all parties, and so it was with this one. TIME Magazine compiled their list of Top Characters of All Time, and as it goes with Lists That Proclaim the Top Anything, I hated it and questioned the intelligence of its creator and looked up his address so I might set his house on fire. Then I decided to create one of my own.

The following is the start of my List of Top Characters of All Time, just over 50 to start with here. They’re from both television and film. I’ll say right off the bat that you won’t find Lucy Ricardo or any of the characters from Seinfeld here, because I’d like to set myself on fire rather than watch either. You’ll also not find characters that I really felt were better housed on a List of Best Ensembles or some such thing (see the Bluths, the women of Sex and the City and Steel Magnolias). Also missing are those characters I’ve never seen or simply don’t remember due to not being born or extreme intoxication.

I found it difficult at times to separate character from the actor’s performance, but I’d guess in many cases we just don’t need to. I was going to think about it further so as to include only those characters that would have been rich independent of performance, but then I realized that no one was paying me to do this.

THE WINO’S LIST OF THE TOP 51 FILM AND TELEVISION CHARACTERS THAT SHE HOPES WON’T MAKE YOU WANT TO SET HER HOUSE ON FIRE

Alex P. Keaton, Family Ties
Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men
Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird
Aurora Greenway, Terms of Endearment
Babe, Babe
Benjamin Linus, Lost
Blanche Devereaux, the Golden Girls
Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones Series
Brooks Hatlen, The Shawshank Redemption
Celie Johnson, The Color Purple
Chuck Nolan, Cast Away
Clair Huxtable, The Cosby Show
Clarice Starling, Silence of the Lambs
Clark Griswold, National Lampoon’s Vacation
Constance, American Horror Story
Dan Fielding, Night Court
David Addison, Moonlighting
David Brent, The Office (UK)
Dexter Morgan, Dexter
Dick Loudon, Newhart
Don Draper, Mad Men
Dorothy Michaels, Tootsie
Doug Ross, ER
E.T., E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
Eve Harrington, All About Eve
Gregory House, House
J.R. Ewing, Dallas
Jack Butler, Mr. Mom
Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock
Judy Benjamin, Private Benjamin
Julia Sugarbaker, Designing Women
Julian Wells, Less Than Zero
Kenny, South Park
Keyser Söze, The Usual Suspects
Maria von Trapp, The Sound of Music
Martha, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Marty McFly, Back to the Future
Marty, Beautiful Girls
Mona Robinson, Who’s the Boss?
Nellie Oleson, Little House on the Prairie
Niles Crane, Frasier
Patrick Bateman, American Psycho
Phoebe Buffay, Friends
Rudy Ruettiger, Rudy
The Grinch, How the Grinch Stole Christmas
WALL-E, WALL-E
Wicked Witch of the West, The Wizard of Oz
Will Freeman, About a Boy
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus
Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman (TV)

So here’s what’s happened. I spent 35 years or so celebrating my single or partially attached lifestyle, dabbling in relationships both long and short term. The world was my oyster, after all. I missed a flight to Venice, roofied myself on the way to Munich and went cave tubing in Belize. I lost and gained 40 pounds thanks to Weight Watchers and lots of aerobics done in my underwear. I celebrated one new year at home with cheddar biscuits and dressed in something little and black at Union Station. Wore a dirndl for first grade Halloween in London. I went to graduate school and got myself a degree to get a job, another job, multiple jobs, a career. I’ve raised animals, taken one to leave this world and another to lose a leg. I’ve judged screenplays, managed a softball team, spoken at BlogHer, lived through my father dying. I’ve bought two cars, become for most months a vegetarian, posed in full Dorothy Gale regalia for Georgetown tourists. Kissed a man I wouldn’t recognize again against a wall in Dupont. Went to the opening game at Nationals Park. Those are the things I can think of this minute. A rich, wonderful life, to be sure.

At 37 it’s as if I’m some sort of lifestyle Rip Van Winkle. I woke up this year and looked around, and most everyone else my age was somehow different. Anchored, seemingly content. Better. Dare I say in some cases, where I wish I now was. Most are married, college and high school acquaintances alike, with a drooling brood under six years old and some sort of extended length car in which to cart them around. They have nondescript plans with larger groups on the weekend, plans with like-lifestyled folk that take them to parades and football games. They host dinner parties, know how to cook a chicken and have enough people in the house to eat it before it spoils. More days than not, they leave work on time. They have automatic plans upon waking. They make breakfast on the weekend and have the smell of coffee in the house even though not everyone drinks it. At the very least, I picture that they do. I know they have someone who hugs them before sleeping at night.

If they aren’t married they’re partnered. They use iPhones to capture their most fun moments, run them through a filter to make it look like they were taken with a Kodak disk camera, and then post them to Facebook for friends to Like. When you ask them for plans two Saturdays from now they go through the routine of checking in with another. They don’t need to scour their contacts list for a date to the company holiday party; even if they stay home for New Years they’ve a built-in partner in crime. Partners who pick up dry cleaning when they’re closer to the store, open a jar of maple syrup so you don’t have to take a paring knife to the lid, who reconnect the dryer vent because you’re too damn short to reach it.

I’m really tired of doing this alone.

I can read through my own archives to see my proclamations of years ago. Yes, there are so many people left in the world. Yes, I may still meet my life mate at 67 and we may spend many fulfilling years together. I understand that. too. But somehow — and somehow remarkably suddenly — the numbers seem fewer, the landscape of painful dating and eventual, hopeful pairing somehow darker.

I know I don’t need someone. I know I am capable and with every bit of my being that I’m okay, my body, myself, that I can live forever with the blood and urban family I’ve been granted. The difference remains. I just don’t want to.