My very own bucket list...

I made my own graduation announcements on a very early version of QuarkXpress upon graduating from the University of Iowa in the 1990s.  The front cover is a picture of myself as toddler (above).  On the back is a list of ambitious goals that go like this:

On my way to an undergraduate playwright's meeting, a friend asked me what I was going to do now that I was graduating.  I wrote this:
Because I am greedy and because I am graduating, I'm going to tell you what I want:
I want to learn Portuguese.  I want to live in Brazil and master the cello.  I want a masters in Arabic and Senegalese culture and be able to do the Samba in my sleep and hit that center beat in Salsa that I always seem to miss.
I wanted to be married someday - honestly, I do.
I want to climb Mt. St. Helens again. I want to become a master chef.  I want to have my own arts center for you.  I want to give youth a voice.  I want to be forever young at heart.  I want to play the piano. I want to have a friend teach me to dance in a tight circle like the do in Zaire.  I want to visit Paris in the summer and Moscow too.
I want to teach French on Native American Reservations - there was a need a few years ago.  I want to play soccer again - every day.  I want to learn Hindi.  (I wanted to be Gandhi - but that was when I was young and didn't know anything.)
I want to meet Marisa Monte and maybe Nick Caves and visit Haiti and go to Trinidad during festival and learn Spanish.  I want to make an award-winning documentary and be a one hit filmmaker  I want to work for PBS and NPR and BBC.
I want to live with the gypsies of North Africa for a while.  I want to name the new color of a Crayola crayon.  I want to be someone's fairy godmother.
I want to be an art therapist.  I want to spend 20 years observing a primate we know nothing about.  I want to increase consciousness about malnutrition, disease, social injustice, justice, joy and hope.
I want to sleep on a firm mattress with a feather pillow under five quilts.  I want to drink lemon tea in the mornings and stay up every night engrossed in conversation about God and love and literature and dance and faint from exhaustion.  I want to live every second and not let it kill me.  I want to be able to live by the principle Voltaire once stated and that is "Change your small corner of the world and be content."  I want ethnic cleansing to stop.  I want Muslims to be respected and blacked and Latinos and the people who try every day.
I want every single person to respect at least one other single person.
I want to visit Nepal.  I want to stop the Chinese from destroying Tibet.  I want Tibetans to reclaim with culture. I want to live by the Buddhist saying "We call all choose to be awake."
And I want you to, too.

My only remaining copy is stored in a resume paper box - back in the day when you actually needed resume paper. Sometimes I'm embarrassed by its naivety and romanticism and also its greed. All the things I want and not a conversation about how I am going to interact in this world.  What am I going to contribute?  How am I going to contribute?  And I'm assuming that I would somehow be just and invited into any of these circles or any of these lives. 

But there is something kind of magical about it. I am so in love with the world.  I appreciate that none of the things on this list are easy tasks and take time and dedication, patience and understanding.  Many of them are not even things I could possibly influence or even be a part of but are ideals and desires for the world.

It is a bucket list long before there were "bucket lists".  Some of them have been checked off.  Some of them are impossible dreams.  Some of them are still ambitions and some of them are not my dreams to have.