Do you read Maggie Mason’s blog? You should. I’m always happy when I see a new post in my reader. Anyway, Maggie has a “mighty life list” – 100 things that she wants to do before she dies. After months of reading about her crossing items of her list, I thought it might be interesting to see what I came up with if I thought about all those things that I want to do “some day”. So here is my Mighty Life List. It’s only 50 items. I got pretty close to 50 before I started counting, so that seemed like a good goal. And it gives me lots of room to add, as I discover new and exciting things that I want to do before I go.
1. Learn to bake bread.
2. Read Ulysses.
3. Eat sushi in Japan.
4. Learn Spanish.
5. Visit all 50 states (Layovers in the airport/driving straight through doesn’t count): Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
6. Eat a lobster roll in Maine.
7. Marry Jami.
8. Become knowledgeable about wine.
9. Make mayonnaise from scratch.
10. Buy a new sewing machine and learn to machine quilt.
11. Write a snail mail letter once a week for a year.
12. Go hiking in Acadia National Park.
13. Have dinner at Chez Panisse.
14. Learn how to make 5 different cocktails.
15. Go for a carriage ride through Charleston.
16. Eat beignets and muffeletta in New Orleans.
17. Go to Opening Day at Nationals Park.
18. Can pickles.
19. Go skiing.
20. Visit every library in the DC system, take a picture, and check out a book.
21. Be completely debt free (including the mortgage).
22. Learn to knit socks.
23. Host a crab boil.
24. Have a book review published.
25. See a movie at Screen on the Green.
26. Take a walk in the National Arboretum.
27. Go to the Kite Festival.
28. Tour Lincoln’s Cottage at the Old Soldier’s Home.
29. Go ice skating in the Sculpture Garden.
30. Attend a DC United game.
31. Make truffles.
32. Make homemade ice cream.
33. Donate 10% of my income for one year to charity.
34. Take my sweetie on a weeklong trip to Italy.
35. Sell a quilt.
36. Catch a fish.
37. Visit Fallingwater.
38. Hire a (well paid, very appreciated) biweekly cleaning service.
39. Host an exchange student.
40. Do the 365 day photo project.
41. Eat at Nora.
42. Fly first class on a cross-country or international flight.
43. Find someplace to volunteer regularly.
44. Read at least one book by every winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature:
Tomas Tranströmer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk, Harold Pinter, Elfriede Jelinek, John M. Coetzee, Imre Kertész, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, Günter Grass, José Saramago, Dario Fo, Wislawa Szymborska, Seamus Heaney, Kenzaburo Oe, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Octavio Paz, Camilo José Cela, Naguib Mahfouz, Joseph Brodsky, Wole Soyinka, Claude Simon, Jaroslav Seifert, William Golding, Gabriel García Márquez, Elias Canetti, Czeslaw Milosz, Odysseus Elytis, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vicente Aleixandre, Saul Bellow, Eugenio Montale, Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson, Patrick White, Heinrich Böll, Pablo Neruda, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Samuel Beckett, Yasunari Kawabata, Miguel Angel Asturias, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giorgos Seferis, John Steinbeck, Ivo Andric, Saint-John Perse, Salvatore Quasimodo, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Albert Camus, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Halldór Kiljan Laxness, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, François Mauriac, Pär Fabian Lagerkvist, Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell, William Faulkner, Thomas Stearns Eliot, André Paul Guillaume Gide, Hermann Hesse, Gabriela Mistral, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Pearl Buck, Roger Martin du Gard, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin, John Galsworthy, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, Sigrid Undset, Henri Bergson, Grazia Deledda, George Bernard Shaw, Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, William Butler Yeats, Jacinto Benavente, Anatole France, Knut Pedersen Hamsun, Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan, Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam, Romain Rolland, Rabindranath Tagore, Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann, Count Maurice (Mooris) Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck, Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse, Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Rudyard Kipling, Giosuè Carducci, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray y Eizaguirre, Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson, Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen, Sully Prudhomme
45. Stay at the Library Hotel.
46. Listen to live music in Austin.
47. Go to a comedy club.
48. Learn how to identify 10 birds found in DC.
49. Visit Barcelona and photograph 5 buildings designed by Gaudi.
50. Go to a professional conference, not held in the city in which I live.
51. Ride the Wuppertal Schwebebahn.
52. Tour the Pope-Leighey House.
53. Visit the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.
54. Have dinner at Palena.
55. Have dinner at Komi.
56. Pop Popcorn on the Stove Top.
57. Make Homemade Peanut Butter.
58. Go to a performance of the Washington National Opera.
59. Visit all the Presidents’ Homes/Libraries: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, James Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama.
60. See a show at the Woolly Mammoth Theater Co.
