The Bucket List

At the risk of bringing up an uncomfortable topic, it’s a good time to talk about mortality. Given my own personal health issues, the spread of Ebola, and terror threats from misogynist video gamers, it’s hard to avoid contemplating the endgame, the meaning of life. I don’t mean the big meaning … What is the purpose? Is there a creator? Is there an afterlife and does it have Wi-Fi? … I’m talking about the more practical questions, like how to spend whatever time remains, and what to try to accomplish.

Obviously the top of my priority list is my family. I would always choose spending time with them over anything else (apart from a few bathroom breaks.) But beyond that, though I never explicitly wrote it down, I’ve had certain ideas about what I hoped to do in life. The vogue term for this is bucket list.

So maybe it’s time to rethink that bucket list. Let go of the pipe dreams that will never actually happen, and focus on the most important things. So, it’s looking like this:

1. Give up on learning emacs inside and out. I seriously wanted to customize gnus and org-mode, but what the hell.
2. Forget writing that open source social network to obliterate Facebook. It needs to be done, but hey, I reserved opensocial.net. Someone else do the rest.
3. Digitizing all my old photos, irreplaceable albums, etc.? Not going to happen.
4. Bag learning to cook English cuisine. I mean steak and kidney pie? Really?
5. Forget about reading Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. I’ll probably settle for Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe.
6. Drop biking across England (What can I say? I’m an Anglophile.)
7. Let go of cleaning up my home office/studio. Likewise the garage, I guess. My survivors will know about 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
8. Skip watching all the episodes of Doctor Who in chronological order. Just watch the good ones.
9. Setting the clock on the @#$%&*! VCR? Forget it! (Yes, I still have a VCR.)
10. And shedding those last few unsightly pounds? What’s the point?

Luckily, that still leaves all the important stuff, like finding a cure for ice cream brain freeze, hitting Mute on the State Farm commercials before they get to the “Like a good neighbor …” song, and discovering KFC’s secret recipe.