Ah, Bucket

I don’t read Maggie Mason. Do you hear that, Universe? Here is a crafty, educated, independent, liberal woman who DOESN’T READ MIGHTY GIRL. I have nothing against Maggie, it’s just that, in an ever-increasing world of Well-Written Blogs, I can’t read everyone. And, since I don’t have a 2-year-old or live in San Francisco, Mighty Girl is not always relevant to my life.

Why the preamble? Because I only stumbled upon Maggie’s list of 100 Things To Do a freaking year after she’d written it. And I thought about making a list for myself, but Item Number One would have to be “Make list of 100 things to do before I die” and I’d probably never get around to crossing that one off. Besides, I’ve already been feeling a bit “what’s my point” lately, so I’ve decided to come about this from the opposite direction:

25 Things I Would Already Have Crossed Off My List If I’d Bothered With A List In The First Place (in no particular order, other than the order I remembered them in, and some of them happened more by chance than desire, but we can’t always pick our good fortune.)

1. Live in NYC
2. Get tattooed
3. Visit Europe (I can now cross through that three times, and I promise I’m not done)
4. Pick up and move halfway (actually, more) across the country with no friends, family, or job waiting for me
5. Buy a new car, like NEW new, not new-to-me new
6a. Go to art school
6b. Actually make my living at it
7. Own a computer, and a COLOR monitor (I am old enough for this to have been, at one time, pure science fiction)
8. Fly in a Cessna
9. Eat a crêpe in Paris
10. Watch the sun set at Cape May
11. Visit the Statue of Liberty
12. Go to the observation deck at the World Trade Center
13. Learn to play an instrument (I never claimed to play it well)
14. Stand underneath the Eiffel Tower
15. Drink a beer at a sidewalk cafe in Amsterdam
16. Take a Duck tour through Boston
17. Buy Sky Sox season tickets
18. Make a decent pie crust from scratch
19. Watch the vintage car races at Lime Rock
20. Zoom through Harriman State Park in a Mercedes 190SL with the top down (bonus points to the cop who pulled us over for NOT ticketing us, although we were very much speeding, and the FAIRLY EXPENSIVE car was not registered in either of our names)
21. Dip my toes in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
22. Shop at Harrod’s
23. Tour a real castle (I’ve done this a few times, actually)
24. Eat a slice of Black Forest cake IN the Black Forest
25. Watch a ballgame at Fenway Park

In keeping with the theme of the anti-meme, you are hereby not allowed to post your own list. Ha! But I encourage everyone to think about all the things you’ve accomplished that other people may only dream of.