November 27, 2009

I'm gonna write me a bucket list!

What's a bucket list? Yet another damn thing I don't have. Pretty much because I haven't sat myself down to write the friggin thing...

For those of you who don't know, rent the movie, google it, ask anyone, anywhere, because everyone but you knows: a bucket list is a list of things you want to do before you kick the bucket.

I first heard the expression in reference to the movie The Bucket List a couple of years ago. It was a cheesy and ultimately touching movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, about embracing life and having big expensive international adventures before you drop dead from some random long drawn out painful disease towards the end of your selfish mercenary life. Of course, I'm paraphrasing.

My hyper-organized partner K has a bucket list. Logical, inspiring, wide-ranging, well thought out, hanging on the side of his fridge. A plan for his life. Crosses things off as he accomplishes them. So organized that it annoys the crap out of me.

Inspired and with a burst of enthusiasm, I started a bucket list earlier this year. Still have it, in its raw format (scrawled on the back of a visa bill), in the box of assorted crap on my desk. I gotta go thru that box and action or file or toss it all. And finish off the bucket list.

Do you ever really finish off the bucket list, or is it ever-changing, do you work through the list and add stuff? I mean what if you are really efficient and get through everything quickly, before some flesh-eating disease or the "V" aliens do away with you? Then you are back where you started, no damn list. Zero sum gain after the whole damn thing. So I guess you never finish a bucket list off, it just keeps going and going and going and going and going.

I think we all have some version of a bucket list in our head, and over the past number of years I have done lots of the stuff I wanted to do - run a marathon, go to Hawaii, get a dog (Alfredo!), see Martina McBride in concert, go to Paris and see the Mona Lisa. Next year I am getting married, and we are building a house (ok the building a house was never on my list).

There's still tons of things I want to do, lots of places I want to go. And somehow it seems different when you go to write it down, more permanent, more official, more substantial. I have gone back to the list a couple of times and it all feels pretty mundane; fun and exciting, though lacking heft - it needs a passion project, and some sort of greater contribution? Not sure.

What's on my list so far? Only a few things, pretty random stuff: swim with dolphins, see the pyramids at Giza, ride the Orient Express, write the book that's always been waiting in my head, visit The Hermitage in St Petersburg, see Trisha Yearwood in concert, see all one hundred of the AFI's best films of all time.

Ok, so off to a half-decent start. Still gotta work on it, and still feels self-indulgent. Which I guess most bucket lists are, as it is stuff you want to do before you die. Hmmm... what to do?

3 comments:

Aunt Becky said...

I think I am in love with you because I totally started a bucket list somewhere, I think. Maybe. At least, I thought I did. I should, if I didn't.

I just don't really know what to, uh, put ON it. Probably should start developing goals besides "eat sandwich" huh?

Kevin said...

We can swim with the dolphins in Western Australia; I will go back to the pyramids at Giza (so I can visit Alexandria this trip); the Orient Express would be cool; and St Petersburg (along with other parts of Russia) is a definite. Get the 'bucket list' on paper and post it; that is the only way it will become reality.

Meliha said...

My "bucket list" mostly has to do with travel:
- Explore Petra in Jordan
- Stay in an island bungalow in Maldives (or Tahiti, I'm not picky!)
- Hike Machu Picchu
- Go to Bora Bora
- See animals up close in an African safari
- Backpack through Croatia and Slovenia
- Go to the Galapagos Islands
- See Blue Mosque (among others) in Turkey
Anything else that happens along the way to doing all of these things is mostly ok by me... :)

--Meliha
http://straddling-continents-cultures.blogspot.com/

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