Sleeping Outside the Box

My brother posted his bucket list on Facebook, so I here’s mine. It’s a list of the top 10 things you would like to accomplish in your life before you “kick the bucket”.

01. Become financially independent (meaning I don’t have to work at all if I don’t want to because I have enough passive income to just play music, travel the world, write and spend time with my family and friends) before I turn 31. Last year, my goal was before I turn 30, but I think I’m going to be 6 months late of that mark.

02. Do a free standing back-flip. I wish I had done this a few years ago when I got health insurance for the first time in 8 years. Now I’m without coverage again and I just don’t want to risk it. I fell on my head without insurance a few years ago and they charged me $4K to tell me I was OK. I guess I’ll have to wait for completion of #01.

03. Write a novel. I haven’t even gotten to the first draft phase but I do have 6 Word documents with crappy titles, meager plot summaries, a few brainstorm snippets and two character outlines. I’m half way there, right? o_0

04. Speak at a TED conference. http://www.TED.com. On what? Whatever it is that I give to the world before #10 happens.

05. Master the Accordion. I’ve had an accordion for 8 years. I love it. It’s awesome. Every time I pick it up and play it, I get hypnotized by how awesome it sounds. If I were stuck on a desert island and I could take only one thing with me, I would still choose to take a boat but if loopholes like that weren’t allowed and I was forced to choose something that couldn’t get me off the island, I would probably take an accordion.

06. Produce a musical album. I love to sing but I know I’m not that good at it. After mastering the accordion, I’ll probably move onto that part, but I love music of all kinds, so I might pick up another instrument.

07. Travel the world with my daughter. My little girl is teh awesome!!!!11!!!one! I want to show her all the places I haven’t seen yet.

08. Learn to speak, read and write Mandarin Chinese fluently. And German, Russian, Arabic, Zulu, Hindi… I would also like to learn just enough of every language that I could pick out a strangers dialect and say a few simple phrases with confidence. Just a “Hey, you speak {language name}? Cool. I’m just learning.” It’s surprising what kind of connections come out of just knowing that.

09. Create a game or some other meme that will withstand the test of time, passing from generation to generation.

10. Become a singularity. Hey, screw this whole ‘before death’ thing. I plan to bypass that part.

Previous buckets kicked:

* Master riding the unicycle
* Learn a foreign language…not necessarily fluently ;)
* Buy a house
* Visit any part of Europe (went to London)
* Visit any part of Asia (went to Thailand)
* Have a child
* Start a business

Apparently, Gmail thinks I like SPAM:

I would expect Gmail to know enough to filter out its own words from Gmail adsense inclusion–or at the very least, filtering out the word ’spam’ but maybe people really do visit their spam box, simultaneously thinking to themselves, I’d love some spam!

My friendships have been relegated to my dreams. I worked late last night, sleeping only to see my friends.

“Thanks for the book.”
“oh, yeah, glad you like it.”

Then we have a discussion on personal education philosophy and practices.
Sometimes, lately, I’m not sure if I had a conversation with a friend or if all happened in a dream.

“Didn’t we go to their house last week and play cards or something…?”
“No, it’s been a while.”

Optimistically, at least I remember having good times.

I used to lie awake, in bed, thinking about time travel, cause and effect, logical fallacies, the history of the universe, the microcosmic dust and the macrocosmic crust–anything unknown that needed a good hypothesis.

Now, I lie there thinking about innanities, filling out forms, paying bills, the state of the economy, work, work and more work. All these worries and obsessions, so human, are so restrictive.

I just can’t find it in me at the moment to become creative about beurocracy. This makes it difficult to sleep.

I used to start dreaming to fall asleep, starting with something abstract and twisting it until it was even more difficult to articulate. Soon, all would be a haze of dream and random thought stream.

I need this again.