GO TIME: things to do while alive
when I was waaay younger, I made a 5-item "to do" list for my lifetime,
and it's still hanging up in my childhood bedroom. I'll keep track on here as I lock them up!
the original list included:
1. explore the pyramids of giza
2. ride in a hot air balloon
3. appear on SNL
4. swim with dolphins (orca will suffice)
5. climb mount saint helens (completed 8/2004) and done AGAIN (on 8/5/09)
then I hit puberty and have been adding to it ever since. here are the updates:
6. attend a real rodeo (completed summer of '05. yeah St. Paul and Ellensburg!)
7. take a ferry to alaska
8. hike the pacific crest trail
9. hand-feed a wild deer
10. buy my parents a cabin
11. spend a weekend in a convent (completed 2.27.07 in venice, italy)
12. attend a real pow-wow
13. paint something famous
14. have a star named after me
15. drive the length of Route 66 with my sister
16. pay homage at Chris Farley's gravesite in Madison, WI
17. domesticate a seagull (the pretty kind, not the mangey ones)
18. live in pasadena, california
19. go on a whale watching trip
20. see the real Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris (completed 1.19.06)
21. see a live boxing match
22. see Wimbledon live in England
23. go on an African safari
24. hitch-hike (completed 8/17/08 in the adirondack mountains with my cousin katie. that was nuts.)
25. Get “read” by a psychic/tarot-card/palm-reader
26. Pull a progressive Starbucks all-nighter to all 5 of the 24-hour locations along Broadway
27. Audition for a play, for a part I am not qualified for
28. Convince a stranger to let me walk their dog, and take it around the park
29. Attend a stranger’s funeral
30. Naked yoga – at a rooftop studio
31. Be hired as an extra in a movie
32. Go to Maryland and eat crabcakes
33. Sit on a bench in Central Park with a box of donuts/muffins for strangers
34. Contact all the Bristers in the New York City white pages & meet them (1/2009. hi Judith!)
35. Ride-along with the NYPD
36. Get an Italian godfather
37. be fluent in italian
38. Go to a real rave
39. watch a battle at the Shelter on 8 mile road
#24: hitch-hiked our way through the adirondack mountains
this is me and my precious cousin katie, hiking last summer in the adirondack mountains. this was taken merely hours before we were stranded on the side of the road in the middle of NOWHERE, NY, on the way for me to catch a train. i flagged down grandma audrey, who was totally sassy and went about 90 miles per hour because she didn't want me to miss my train and "have to stay in a town where people are having their heads cut off" (her exact words). it was a very chill hitchiking experience. she told us about bear attacks, both past and present, and showed us pictures of her grandchildren.
i love you, katie. i will never forget the look on your face when we had to leave you at that gas station.
#11. stayed in a convent in venice, italy.
being covered by pigeons in venice's san marco piazza is my personal heaven.
i left my didge-cam at the convent when i stayed there, which is sad because i lost all the croatia/venice footage, but good because now the nuns can have photo workshops and learn to shoot small videos of them gardening and maybe make music videos with the hymns. heaven's the limit!
the convent was amazing, had huge courtyards and was right on the canal in the northern part by the university. there were 2 Argentinian girls in the room also, and we stayed up all night speaking spanish (i was able to speak only italian with the locals, but magically spoke fluent spanish all night).
this pic was from a few years ago when i studied abroad and first discovered the gazillions of pigeons lurking around san marco piazza. i can see why they call them "feathered rats" (okay so i made that up, but its true). open up a pouch of corn kernels, and these guys SWARM. the one just to the left of my face wanted to peck my eyeball out, prooobably thinking its a green grape.
just before this picture one of them dug its talons into my scalp and was just cruising around on my head for a long time.
#6. weekend of country-western insanity at the Ellensburg Rodeo!
special k, carothers, me and rodeo queen kelsey spent our days and nights at the enormous rodeo corral, doing the friendship dance with actual native americans, surviving post-bull-riding bar fights, wearing chaps, sneaking into the stables and getting trapped in a ring with ALL of the cattle by those cowboys with handle-bar mustaches.
how to talk to the sundance kid:
me: wow, it's crazy in here! that guy just broke a bottle on someone's head.
sundance: *blank stare from behind aviators*
me: but it's probably not as crazy as it is in the ring... riding a bull.
and that's how it's done.
#20. see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris (and solve the davinci code)
this is what a Parisian sunrise looks like, which you would only know if you had only 24 hours in the city of lights and were determined to see everything you circled in sharpie on the map.
the louvre is amazing and huge, and after a terrifying few hours on the Horrors of the DaVinci Code Tour, i went and stared at the mona lisa for a long time, trying to burn her face into my retinas (so i'd never forget what she looked like).
the mona lisa was tiny and behind a glass case with several guards lurking around next to her.
this is the morning after one of the most beautiful nights of my life, when i was alone in downtown paris at 2am and impulse-bought a tiny room at a hitchcock-fabulous hotel. my room had a peter pan balcony that looked out over the city and at the Eiffel Tower, with white drapes blowing around. it was the first time in my life that i was overwhelmed with the feeling that absolutely nobody knew where i was.
#5. climbed mount saint helens, 22 years after this jacked up explosion!
<---- this is what it looked like in 1980, when seismic activity got REAL in southwest Washington.
i hiked it with my blood relatives (my dad, uncle char-broiled, brother joey, and cousins katie and kenz.) it was intense, but the view from up top was lord of the rings fabulous.
a month after we hiked it, st. helens erupted again for the first time since the fiasco pictured to the left, and they put a cease fire on all the hiking. THEN, this past winter, 2 dudes got wasted and drunk-snowmobiled to the top of the mountain and one of them FELL IN, which is the first human being to fall into the crater in it's 28-year existence. he somehow lived, and now has ultimate street cred since he's been in the mouth of a volcano.