The List

Thirty-five things I hope I will be the better for doing:

1. Learn to ride a bike. (Yes, that’s right. I don’t know how to ride a bike. Don’t worry; incredulous reactions to this statement are not new to me.)

2. Buy roller blades and skate around campus in the dark. (Safely, with others.)

3. Learn to cook something (other than grilled cheese or scrambled eggs), and serve it to my friends.

4. Go camping. Real camping, not set-up-a-tent-in-the-back-yard camping.

5. Do one kind thing every day.

6. Do one responsible thing every day.

7. Learn to drive a stick shift.

8. Visit at least five other states.

9. Go hiking.

10. Improve credit rating. (Yikes.)

11. Write a short story.

12. Play tennis.

13. Play basketball.

14. Read “Mere Christianity” and at least one Shakespeare play I haven’t read before.

15. Watch the Godfather movies. And Indiana Jones.

16. Send a message in a bottle.

17. Stay out all night dancing. (Alexis and Christian have promised to join in this one. Girls, I am holding you to it!)

18. Relive the joys and wonders of putt-putt golf.

19. Try coffee from seven different countries.

20. Eat pie in a restaurant that only takes cash.

21. Visit the birthplace or gravestone of someone who has inspired me.

22. Invent a cocktail, complete with an awesome name.

23. Watch an independent movie in a theater. (This cannot be done in southern Illinois.)

24. Try painting.

25. Perfect my résumé.

26. See a play.

27. Send a PostSecret.

28. Visit the Science Center. (Bonus: Go play at the St. Louis City Museum. I have never been.)

29. Leave myself a letter in a library book. Look for it 20 years later. (I stole this one from Esquire.)

30. Dance in a very strange and inappropriate place, like in the pouring rain on the side of the road in the middle of the night.

31. Feel like this song sounds.

32. Watch “Twilight” and mock the hell out of it … possibly with a drinking game. (Sorry, Cullen fans.)

33. Do something that will hurt at the time, but feel good in the long run.

34. Watch cartoons on Saturday morning. Bonus points if they are classics like “Darkwing Duck.”

35. Come up with 35 more.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

Waiting. Why do we do it?

We wait because we’re tired. We wait because it’s not our turn yet, or because it doesn’t feel like the right time. We wait because we’re lazy, or we wait because we’re scared. We wait because we think we have the time. We think tomorrow is a promise.

It’s not. It’s not and we know better, but we still treat the future as a certainty — that the people in our lives will always be there, that our hearts will never harden and our calendars will always brim with opportunities. We do this, usually, until something unpleasant happens to make us remember why we can’t afford to wait another minute.

I am 22 and have spent much of my life waiting. Waiting for the love of my life and then waiting to get over it (several times). Waiting to move and then waiting to settle in. Waiting until I’m done with school. Waiting until I have more money, more energy, more time. Waiting until I know more.

But there might not be more time, and I’ll never know more if I don’t start to take action and quit standing on the sidelines of my own damn life.
So, this is the summer I am going to stop waiting. I am going to make a list of all the things I’ve put off, all the things I thought in the back of my mind I’d be able to do some other day, and I am going to do them. To hold myself to this commitment, I will blog about it.

To be sure, it might not be riveting reading material and I might not make it to all of them. But I’m not going to let the fear of that — or anything else — stop me.