Yes, I just quoted a line from a Spice Girls song. I'm pretty sure Nostradamus has a prophecy about how that means the world is going to end soon.

I'm curious. What do you really, really want to do? Restrict it to activities you *could* conceivably do in the real world (i.e. not "flying an X-wing fighter" or "talking to Julius Caesar" etc), but assume you have no restrictions such as money, age limit, the pressure of family or society, or the general difficulty of being in a position to do it. Assume you are allowed to do ANYTHING, short of things which cannot currently be done by *anyone*.

A couple of years ago I made a list of the things I really, really wanted to do, at least once in my life. I immediately lost the list, or threw it away, but I remember most of them. Among other things, I want to:

-- see an erupting volcano
-- see a whale, close up in the wild
-- go to Antarctica
-- get a helicopter pilot's license
-- be fit enough to do the Coast to Coast endurance race. I don't actually want to *do* the Coast to Coast, since I've seen it enough times on TV to think I'd get much the same physical effect by spending two days sitting in the rain in a ditch being beaten with a stick. I just want to be fit enough to know I *could* do it ;-)
-- write a really good novel
-- be completely fluent in a foreign language to native-speaker level
-- live on board a luxury yacht in the Bay of Islands and take tourists out on charters
-- go to the USA and do a motorcycle road trip from one coast to the other. My cousin did it by bicycle, but I'm lazier.
-- be an officer in the armed forces
-- be in a movie (not necessarily a starring role)
-- invent something that will be major and significant to the world
-- go for an aerobatic flight in a WWI-era biplane
-- get another degree, but in a completely different field

Some of these things I can do pretty easily and it's just a question of getting around to it, or saving the money. Two of them, the armed forces one and the chartering a luxury yacht one, are extremely long shots for which I would have to throw over everything in my current life if I wanted to achieve them now, and even then have no guarantee of success. I picked the easier of the two, and I'm working towards that now. The first step was giving up my career and going to work on a ferry until I can get enough sea time for a captain's license. I've been doing it five months now and probably have over a year to go, unless I can find a job on another boat which gives me a higher percentage of time. I hate the job on the ferry but that doesn't matter in the long run.

My point in this post is mostly curiosity about what other people would do, if they could do anything they wanted. And if there's anybody out there who can make such a list, look through it, and say "I've already done most of them." And I'm curious about the reasons people give for not doing something which they really, really want to do, because I think that's the only way you can discover what things are really important to you. Because unless you know that, you just spend all your time doing the things that are important to somebody else, and there's no point in that.

Brunnen-"another point of this post was reminding myself why the hell I'm staying in this job which makes me want to kill people"G